Silver received a telegram from one of his lieutenants with a juicy bit of news inscribed: players who had been killed in the last twenty minutes were no longer respawning as usual, and they couldn’t log back in afterwards. That had to be part of the eschaton planned for the final 24 hours. If that sort of thing had been planned there were probably more surprises in store, along those lines.

Given that Northern Cross had just obliterated half of his attacking force with what amounted to a wave of her hand and then easily put a lid on his subsequent counterattack, he was understandably worried about whether between the two of them they would even be able to scratch her in close-range combat.

He had contemplating saving his planes and leaving her entirely to Prism. But even the idea that Prism could take her on alone was no longer quite the sure thing he wanted it to be. Evidently her Progressive syndrome offered a brief little window between normality and insanity in which she possessed something like an Ultimate-Razor bridge. If NoCro had even a shadow of the bridge, she was very dangerous even to Prism. Fortunately there was a little shortcut, in light of this new information and the girl’s unfortunate decision to fight the battle personally. He depressed a button on the light table from which he was viewing the progression of the air battle to open up a line to his partner, Krieg.

“K,” he said, “Weight your formation attack on NoCro's Ghost. Hundred percent.”

“A hundred percent?!” Krieg shot back, “She’ll exploit the fuck out of that, Sil.”

The more one screwed around with the Swarm razor’s default settings about attack priority, the less optimally it functioned. Weighting a hundred percent essentially amounted to a banzai charge on a single unit. At that point it was nearly one of those old RTS games where you mass selected your forces and told them to focus fire on a single unit.

“No one’s respawning, Krieg. It’s the endgame. We just need to take her out.”

“Huh…” Krieg said, “O… kay.”

It might still be wiser to go for optimum on the Swarm razor and hope to attrite her forces prior to Prism’s engagement.

However, he simply did not want Prism to have that distinction.

—

NoCro was forced to update her estimates of when she would have to fight Prism and found it all a little worrisome. At present speeds she would merge with Silver and Krieg in 20 seconds and Prism would enter long range only 90 seconds afterwards. If she made a complete furball out of the situation then Prism would have no choice but to come into short range to close the deal. That was what had to be done. But even that only bought her a few extra minutes, and at that rate she would be out of fuel for her Ghost by the time she had to face him.

She still had resources though. Most of her refueling drones were still aloft and prepared to shepherd her back. That a few of them had been destroyed by now was of little consequence, since the aircraft she had intended them to refuel had also been destroyed.

Her plan was to flip a coin with her Ghost. Razors were not very good when it came to dealing with situations outside of their training data. They did not understand the concept of risk. A dynamic deceleration involved standing the aircraft on its engines and making a gigantic airbrake out of it. At some velocities, like those she was enjoying presently, the game would perform a calculation every server update to find out whether or not your airframe tore itself apart under the stresses. The greater the speed, the more likely it was. The calculus for this was already done ages ago by anons and she had a little copy of that chart saved in her memory. The target was 51%. 51% chance of destruction.

Razors really weren’t familiar with risks of that order. They were, by and large, computational cowards. One of the benefits of being in the loop was that she could do something suboptimal with one part of her force. Their entire force might respond by becoming slightly suboptimal, while her remaining forces were free to operate entirely optimally. That was what pitting two AIs against each other was like. One had to think of inducing suboptimality whilst retaining ones own optimal behavior. What was about to happen was going to render all of these thoughts irrelevant. That didn’t mean they weren’t worth having.

Her thoughts were interrupted when the entire Titan group dropped every single one of their remaining air to air missiles and they all came screaming directly and only at her.

“Oh man!” she gasped. Hundred percent weight. If she just sat here and sacrificed Ghost she could clean their clocks without lifting a finger, at the simple cost of having to respawn on Cygnus. What actually ended up happening was the self-preservation instinct kicked in and somehow wound up being transmitted to her Swarm razor. It crossed two F35s over in front of her and had them set up an ECM defense. Her Ghost was now hidden in their radio shadow. This had evidently been her decision.

NoCro’s eyes went wide. This was new. The system was responding to her innermost, unconscious mind, before it was even known to her. After her shock wore off she smiled insanely. Her heart rate was 186.

—

From the other end of the battle Silver chewed on the tip of his thumb as he watched his hail of missiles sail off towards NoCro’s formation. It had been flickering here and there because of all the ECM she was throwing up with that damn Ghost. When he managed to get a lock on her at near point blank, the entire formation—his and Krieg’s—swung into action with a massed missile attack. NoCro’s formation, which was in two distinct lobes, flew out to either side like a pair of cavalry charges. A handful of planes remained in the center and formed up a wall of EM noise, shielding NoCro’s ghost to the rear.

The missiles downed two of her defending aircraft, and the rest disappeared into the shadow behind to chase after the contact. He didn't see them again until they fell into the ocean, very similar to his first attack. The two lobes of NoCro’s attack swung out and came around to embrace his monomaniacal attackers. Every single one of these red icons would soon have lead pursuit on all of his planes. That was the price of his hundred percent weighting. It all came down to guns. If they could get in sight of her they would tear a brick like the Ghost to shreds. As his forces descended on NoCro’s last known location, which was surely right behind her defending F35s, they found…

Nothing.

“Dammit! Where is that little cunt?” he wailed. Not even optical tracking was resolving her. She just wasn't there, nor above or below or anywhere else.

It was a pointless question. Mere moments after beginning, the battle was now already decided. Far too late now to matter, one of the optical tracking systems on Krieg’s left flank picked up the Ghost, flicking over from the smaller icon of an F35 to the much larger one of a Ghost. Curious as to how this deception was accomplished he picked one of the nearby cameras and saw her completing her roll around the left flank and leveling her guns on Krieg’s drones.

She had partially transformed the Ghost and swept the wings forwards. The Ghost had a very small RCS, far smaller than an F35 despite its larger size. But if one partially transformed it, opening up a few crevices here and there, then it would read exactly as an F35 to radar and would be identified as such. After setting up her jamming cover she had slipped away with her eastern group with this mimickry.

“Ahh…” he said, more quietly, as he watched the rest of his airgroup get torn to shreds by cannon fire. She didn’t even give him the honor of wasting a single missile. In this utter bloodbath he had lost 175 aircraft and she had lost about 15.

Could Prism defeat this? Probably. But perhaps not. It would be foolish to rely on maybes when he didn't have to. He decided to open up a call.

“Prism, pull back. Disengage.” he said.

“What!?” came the immediate, offended response from the other side, “You have to be joking. I’m in missile range in twenty seconds. She has to have practically zero fuel.”

“We can’t afford to lose another air group.” Silver said, before Prism became impulsive.

“Are you mental? I’m not losing an air group to a human.”

On this point Silver moved quickly to correct him.

“She’s not… human.” he said, to the sound of a confused noise from the other end, “Not anymore, not purely. Pull off.”

Prism made a frustrated noise. Silver watched his planes dutifully roll over and disengage. Good dog. Then he heard Prism make another, separate frustrated growl, which grew in intensity.

“What is it?” Silver said.

“She just flung three dozen torpedoes at one of my battleships!” Prism said, then cut off the call. It was very difficult to sink one of those, but that would probably do the trick.

That was the Wolf part of the operation, getting a bunch of basically silent Taigei AIP boats under Prism’s nose. The other part, Vulcan, was named for the Avro Vulcan bomber and its history of stunt refuelings. Like many complex operations it had gone quite awry, but the fundamentals were all solid and allowed for a great deal of chaos.

—

NoCro herself had been operating on reserve fuel for the entirety of the fight and had been ignoring dire warnings about imminently running out of it the whole time. She’d never actually brought a Ghost down this far since they were expensive and losing one for funsies was not something she could afford to do. She still had some mania-derived intent to turn around and fight Prism like nothing was wrong, but that delusion evaporated the moment the man himself turned tail and ran. She set her Ghost to rendezvous with the nearest refueling drone, perfectly content to take her winnings and leave the table. For now.

“Eh…?” she said to herself, panting wildly, practically wheezing now. Her heart rate had risen at some point to 201, which was concerning. But that wasn’t nearly as concerning as the message that that was now appearing in the center of her vision:

HEART ARRHYTHMIA DETECTED

PROMPTLY SEEK MEDICAL ATTENTION

Yes, come to think of it, she had felt a stab of pain around there, in the chest region. But she also had developed the mother of all headaches, and it had felt like nothing in comparison. She immediately reached up and ripped off her link that tethered her to the tower PC, which was its own special kind of pain, and stumbled sideways out of her swivel chair. The chair toppled over and clattered into the nearest wall, while she herself fell to the ground face first, only weakly managing to pull herself to her hands and knees.

A heart attack. How could she be having a heart attack? Those were supposed to be for old people! Even though she was feeling less lucid by the second, even though she lived alone, all she had to do was reach her phone.

Ah, yes, she remembered vividly now. Her phone was in a trash can outside her workplace. Perhaps she could have fought harder, made it to the door, found someone outside, but—

Honestly, what was the difference?