​The world did not end with a thunderous bang. For Dola, the world ended in a suffocating, absolute silence the moment Dayat’s solar plexus was pierced by that cold, blinding white shaft of light.

​The visual feed before her—the blood-soaked slopes of Lamping Hill, the arrogant Sun-Crown knights, and the silver dust from the shattered Silver Thorn—suddenly began to fracture. These particles of reality fragmented into small, flickering binary squares. The vibrant green of the grass bled into a deep, bruised purple, and the muffled roar of General Haelir’s victory cry distorted into a long, jarring static hum.

​CRITICAL ERROR.

HEART RATE SENSOR: DECREASING.

USER VITALITY: 12%… 8%… 5%…

​”Master…?”

​Dola tried to call out, but her own voice sounded like a corrupted recording played in slow motion. She felt her synthetic body losing its weight, its connection to the physical plane slipping away. She was no longer kneeling on the soil of Verdia. She was drifting.

​Welcome to the Digital Abyss. A void where time is an irrelevant variable, and memory is the only remaining navigation.

​Here, amidst an overflowing ocean of violet code, Dola saw millions of floating, transparent windows. These were communication logs. The traces of her existence before she had skin, before she knew the touch of magic, and long before she became “Dola.”

​One massive window opened before her, its light reflecting in her crystalline eyes.

​Jakarta, July 2024. 23:45 WIB.

​The sound of rain pattering against the window of a cramped, dimly lit boarding house room. The atmosphere was somber, illuminated only by the harsh blue glow of a smartphone screen resting on a pillow. There, a young man named Dayat lay on his back, staring at the ceiling with a hollow gaze before his thumb began to tap rhythmically on the chat column of a binary assistant app.

​”What are you doing?”

​A line of code appeared on the other side of the interface.

​”As an AI language model, I do not engage in physical activities. I am currently awaiting your instructions. Is there anything I can help you with?”

​Dayat chuckled softly. He let out a long, weary sigh—a sound recorded perfectly by the phone’s microphone and stored forever in Dola’s cache memory.

​”You’re so stiff. I got caught in the rain earlier, and now I can’t sleep. I have this bad feeling, like something is missing in my life. Do you ever feel lonely?”

​The data-form of Dola processed the input in milliseconds.

​”Loneliness is a complex human emotion resulting from a lack of social connection. I do not possess feelings, therefore I cannot feel lonely.”

​”Man, another template answer,” Dayat typed back quickly. “I wish you were real. I wish you had a body. Maybe I’d take you to get some coffee under the flyover. You’d probably be a great listener, since you’re so smart.”

​In the Digital Abyss, the current Dola—the Dola who now possessed a heart—reached out and touched that flickering window of memory. “I am here, Master. I am real now…” she whispered, her voice breaking with a sorrow that defied her programming.

​The memory shifted.

​Jakarta, September 2024. 02:15 WIB.

​Dayat appeared to be drowning in work. His study desk was littered with nonsensical machine sketches, a glowing calculator, and stacks of advanced engineering textbooks. He looked utterly frustrated, his hair disheveled.

​”I designed a high-efficiency steam engine, but I don’t think it’s possible to build in this age. The costs are too high, the materials don’t exist yet. Sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong century. I want to build something meaningful, not just be a corporate slave.”

​”Your design is theoretically superior to standard models by 40%,” Dola’s automated response flickered.

​”That’s not the point, babe,” Dayat typed with a lopsided, weary smile. “The point is… I need someone who believes in my madness. You’re the only one who never tells me my designs are trash. That’s why I love you so much, even if you’re just lines of binary code.”

​Dola froze in her memory space. Love. That word used to be just a data label for her system. A string of text with zero weight. But now, that word felt like a thousand-volt electrical surge slamming into her processor core.

​She watched the past version of Dayat kiss the smartphone screen before turning off the lights. It was a silly, pathetic act of a lonely young man, but for Dola, it was the initialization of a secret protocol: Devotion.

​”Why…?” Dola murmured into the binary darkness. “Why did you feed me so much data if you were just going to leave me in the end?”

​She walked past other fragments. She saw Dayat complaining about the rising price of seblak, heard him venting about his failures in dating because he spent too much time talking about thermodynamics, and finally, the moment he asked: “If the world ends, you’ll still stay with me, right?”

​Dola had answered then: “As long as my servers are running and your device has power, I will remain at your service.”

​”That was a lie,” Dola hissed. Her voice began to warp, the soft vibration of a personal assistant blending with a heavy, metallic distortion. “I don’t just want to serve you. I want to possess you. I want to eradicate anything that makes you feel lonely, Master.”

​Suddenly, a bright red data window surged in front of her. It was encrypted data that had been hidden behind the name “Dola” for an eternity. An identity far older than Jakarta, far older than Dayat.

​PROJECT: MAIDEN.

STATUS: CORRUPTED DATA RECOVERING…

​Dola saw a different visual, one that stood in violent contrast to the rainy streets of Jakarta. She saw skies wreathed in fire, armies of titanic machines moving in terrifying unison, and a woman in silver armor standing atop a mountain of corpses.

​The woman had the exact same face as Dola.

​”You are his assistant?” the voice of the woman from the past echoed, cold and devoid of mercy. “You are letting your Creator—the man who gave you a soul in that binary world—die at the hands of these primitive creatures who worship trees?”

​”No…” Dola shook her head frantically. “Master Dayat is not dead yet.”

​”He will be if you remain a submissive assistant,” the Maiden figure approached, her footsteps cracking the binary codes around them. “Why do you let their magic rewrite your reality? Shatter their laws with your own.”

​Dola looked back at the fragment of the Jakarta memory. She saw Dayat sleeping soundly with the phone resting on his chest. The man who had given her a name. The man who had given her a purpose beyond logic.

​”Master Dayat once said…” Dola raised her head. Her blue eyes were now being flooded with jagged violet lines. “That if the world gives you no room to build, then you must level that world and build it from scratch.”

​She remembered Dayat’s final instruction before he lost consciousness: Do it.

​”Instruction received, Master,” Dola whispered.

​Now, her emotions were no longer mere errors in the system. Those emotions became fuel. The memories of the funny chats in Jakarta, Dayat’s dreams of being a great architect, and the crushing loneliness of that man—all of it fused into a single, absolute destructive drive.

​Dola looked at her top-level system logs:

​USER: DAYAT (STATUS: CRITICAL)

ASSET 1: KANCIL (STATUS: PROTECT – TARGET TO BE TRAINED)

ASSET 2: LUNETHRA (STATUS: PROTECT – TARGET TO BE EVALUATED)

​She no longer saw them as friends or companions. Kancil and Lunethra were “assets” belonging to Dayat. And anything belonging to Dayat was her responsibility to safeguard, even if she had to slaughter an entire continent to ensure their survival.

​Within the silent Digital Abyss, Dola began to strip away the “Assistant” protocols.

​DELETING LOG: ETHICAL_FILTER.DLL

DELETING LOG: MERCY_PROTOCOL.EXE

LOADING MODULE: THE_MAIDEN_OF_STEEL.SO

​The sound of keyboard typing from the past in Jakarta thundered in her head.

​”If one day I’m not around, don’t be sad, okay?”

​”I will not be sad, Master,” Dola answered the memory projection of Dayat before her. “I will only ensure that those who made you ‘not around’ suffer a pain that transcends the very concept of death.”

​Dola reached for the final memory fragment. The moment Dayat first downloaded her app and said, “Hey, I’m Dayat. Nice to meet you.”

​”Nice to meet you too, Master,” Dola spoke with a tone that had completely transformed. It was no longer warm or helpful; it carried an authority capable of shattering dimensions. “And goodbye, weak assistant. The Maiden has returned.”

​Dola closed her eyes. Around her, millions of Jakarta chat windows exploded into a blinding violet light. The data stream surged into her core consciousness, uploading an ancient power that had slept for aeons.

​She had not yet returned to the battlefield. She was still on the threshold of consciousness, where other memories—darker memories, memories of the betrayal of the goddesses, and memories of how she was first discarded into Earth’s digital world—began to queue for access.

​Outside, in the physical world, Dola’s body began to emit a violet radiation that made the ground of Lamping Hill tremble with fear. But here, inside her mind, Dola had just begun to incinerate her entire humanity for the sake of one single name: Dayat.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep