The Final Override

Kenjiro took a heavy blow to his knee, dropping him to the floor. Aiko stood over him, raising her mantis-blade for the decapitating blow.

He looked up at the holographic screen. The targeting reticle over Sector 4 locked into place, turning solid red. The countdown timer read forty-five seconds.

Ryu thought he understood Kenjiro. Ryu believed that morality was a binary choice: sacrifice the few for the many, or succumb to selfish sentimentality. But Ryu had forgotten what kind of pilot Kenjiro used to be. He wasn't a hero because he made the logical choice. He was a hero because he changed the parameters of the test.

"I'm sorry, Aiko," Kenjiro whispered, not to the machine standing over him, but to the ghost in his heart.

He didn't draw his sword. Instead, his hands flew to the command console on his chest plate. He bypassed the safety protocols, his fingers dancing across the keys in a blur of muscle memory.

* Warning. Fusion core containment disengaged.* the AI chimed in his ear, sounding almost panicked. *Catastrophic overload imminent.*

"Kenjiro. What are you doing?" Ryu’s voice lost its confident cadence, suddenly sharp with alarm.

"You wanted to see the monster, Ryu," Kenjiro said, his voice eerily calm as the reactor on his back began to emit a blinding, searing white light. The heat inside his suit skyrocketed. "You're looking at him."

He wasn't going to fight Aiko. He wasn't going to let Neo-Edo burn. He was going to blind the beast.

"Suit, override fusion core limiters. Direct all energy outward. Maximum EMP burst," Kenjiro commanded.

* Override accepted. Detonation in three... two...*

Aiko’s blade descended.

* One.*

The MK-IV suit detonated. It wasn't an explosive blast of fire, but a silent, blinding shockwave of raw electromagnetic energy. The pulse expanded outward at the speed of light, an invisible tsunami that washed over Aiko, crashing through the detention center and rippling outward through the entire three-mile length of the *Tengu*.

Instantly, the lights died. The holographic screens vanished. The gravity plating failed.

The kinetic cannons, caught in the middle of their firing sequence without magnetic containment, violently backfired.

Through the deafening silence, Kenjiro felt the dreadnought shudder. A chain reaction of explosions tore through the ship's infrastructure. Bulkheads crumpled. The hull groaned and sheared apart as the *Tengu* began to tear itself to pieces in the cold vacuum of orbit.

The explosive decompression blew the walls of the detention cell outward.

Kenjiro was sucked into the void.

He was spinning wildly, completely untethered. His suit was dead. The HUD was dark, the life support failing. His lungs burned as the oxygen scrubbers shut down. The ambient temperature inside the armor rapidly plummeted toward absolute zero.

Through the cracked visor of his helmet, he watched the *Tengu* die. Massive sections of the black hull drifted apart, engulfed in silent plumes of expanding plasma. The orbital cannons were gone. Neo-Edo was safe. Ryu was dead, trapped in the dark of his own sinking ship.

Kenjiro closed his eyes. The pain in his shoulder faded. The cold seeped into his bones, bringing a strange, peaceful lethargy. He had done it. He had balanced the ledger. The ghost of Olympus could finally rest.

His vision began to narrow, the edges of his consciousness fading to black as the oxygen deprivation took hold. He let himself go, floating adrift in the silent graveyard of Aokigahara.

Suddenly, a hard, metallic impact jerked his arm.

Kenjiro’s heavy eyelids fluttered open.

A hand had grabbed his wrist. Through the frosting glass of his visor, he could barely make out the shape in the darkness. It was a cybernetic hand, covered in sleek white plating, its grip tight and unyielding.

He looked up the arm, past the retracted mantis-blade, toward the figure floating in the debris beside him. The red tactical reticles in the eyes were gone, replaced by dead, dark glass.

Had the EMP wiped Ryu's programming, leaving Aiko's original consciousness buried beneath the code? Was she saving him? Or was it the final, automated reflex of a dying machine, pulling its target in for the fatal strike?

The grip tightened, pulling him closer into the dark, and then Kenjiro’s vision finally surrendered to the void.