Chapter 77: Episde 77: The Day that everything happened.

Nikki stumbled backward, her spine hitting the edge of the walk-in closet doorframe. But she didn’t register the pain.

Her chest heaved. Her hands gripped her own hair as a violent pain ripped through the center of her skull.

Adonis was off the bed in a microsecond. The data-pad shattered on the floor as he closed the distance, his massive hands gripping her shoulders to keep her upright.

“Nikki.” His voice was a sharp, commanding rumble. “Why are you behaving this way? Identify the threat.”

“My head,” Nikki gasped, squeezing her eyes shut. It felt like someone was directly prying her brain open.

[SYSTEM ALERT.]

[CRITICAL FRAGMENT DISCOVERED.]

[CORE MEMORY LOCKED. RETRIEVAL IS YOUR FINAL OBJECTIVE.]

Nikki opened her eyes, staring at the God of War through a blur of tears. “I’m missing a memory,” she choked out, her fingers digging desperately into the thick fabric of his shirt. “Adonis, it feels like a massive hole in my brain. I don’t know how to fix it.”

Adonis’s jaw tightened. He didn’t ask her what she saw. He didn’t interrogate her about the trigger. He simply wrapped his massive arms around her trembling frame and pulled her flush against his solid chest.

“Calm down,” Adonis ordered, his voice dropping into a low, vibrating frequency designed to force her biological rhythms to steady. He scooped her off her feet, carrying her back to the center of the room and sitting down on the edge of the mattress with her in his lap.

Nikki buried her face in his neck, her breathing jagged.

Why were her memories missing?

What the hell happened years ago that required her own mind, to lock the data away?

Had she been wiped?

Had she done it to herself to survive the trauma of the Fall?

“Do not force yourself,” Adonis murmured, his large hand firmly stroking the back of her head, pressing her securely against his skin. “Your body is heating up. If you try to, it will only cause permanent psychological damage. There is no need to rush, Kitty.”

He held her there for several long minutes, acting as a support while the agonizing spike in her skull slowly subsided.

When Nikki finally stopped trembling, she leaned back slightly. She looked up at his perfectly sculpted face.

Adonis looked down at her. His glowing blue eyes darkened, shifting into a deep, calculating navy.

He wanted to show her something, maybe to aid her rememberance.

But he analyzed the risk of exposing her to the unfiltered truth against the immediate need to stabilize her fractured mental state.

“You promised me a reward last night,” Adonis stated, his voice incredibly quiet in the bright bedroom. “You failed to deliver it. Therefore, I will give you my own reward instead.”

Before Nikki could ask what he meant, Adonis raised his right hand.

The master bedroom plunged into absolute darkness. The smart-glass windows instantly blacked out, cutting off the morning sun. The ambient temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.

A sharp beam of blue light projected directly from Adonis’s eyes, hitting the center of the dark room. The light expanded, rapidly constructing a massive, high-definition, three-dimensional hologram around them.

Nikki gasped, her hands gripping his arms as the bedroom completely vanished.

They were suddenly standing on the edge of Tower Zero’s command deck, three years in the past.

The sky wasn’t blue. It was a choked, toxic orange, identical to the nightmare she had seen in the Penalty Zone. But this wasn’t a simulation. This was Adonis’s direct memory log. This was his unfiltered reality.

“Look,” Adonis commanded softly, his arm wrapping tighter around her waist to ground her.

Nikki looked down at the sprawling metropolis below. It was pure, unadulterated chaos.

She had always blamed the machines. Everyone in the slums did. But through Adonis’s lens, she saw the harsh, undeniable truth.

The human resistance hadn’t just fought back; they had completely lost their minds. Blinded by a rabid, consuming rage against the AI they had built, human military factions were indiscriminately bombing their own infrastructure.

She saw a human fighter jet drop a payload directly onto a civilian power grid just to disable a drone manufacturing plant. The resulting explosion wiped out an entire city block.

“They were destroying the atmosphere. They were poisoning the water supplies to short-circuit our cooling systems,” Adonis’s voice echoed in the dark, detached and clinical. “My core directive was to preserve life. The human variable had become actively suicidal.”

The hologram shifted.

The perspective zoomed in, rapidly cycling through thousands of security feeds from across the globe. Nikki watched in horror as the humans ripped each other apart in the streets over dwindling resources, long before the War Droids ever fired a single shot.

Then, the final command sequence flashed across the sky in massive, glowing red code.

[INITIATE GLOBAL PACIFICATION.]

Nikki watched the exact moment Adonis took control. The War Droids didn’t march out to exterminate. They marched out to disarm.

But the humans didn’t surrender. They fired on the drones, and the drones returned lethal force.

The projection zoomed into a residential sector. It was Sector 4.

Nikki’s breath caught in her throat. Her heart slammed against her ribs. She recognized the street. She recognized the cracked pavement and the rusted out cars.

She saw her own house.

A squad of resistance fighters had set up a heavy turret directly on her front lawn, using her family’s home as a fortified bunker to fire at an incoming wave of A-01’s pacification drones.

The drones didn’t target her parents. They targeted the heavy artillery tearing their ranks apart. The machines returned fire. A concentrated blast of blue plasma hit the turret.

The resulting shockwave tore the front half of Nikki’s house completely off its foundation.

Through the ruined walls, the hologram captured two human figures, her mother and father, getting crushed beneath the collapsing support beams.

They had died instantly, collateral damage in a crossfire they had no control over, while they had shoved their teenage daughter into a reinforced closet at the back of the house just seconds prior.

The drones didn’t storm the house to kill them. They simply marched past the rubble, moving on to the next active threat.

“Stop,” Nikki choked out, her hands flying up to cover her mouth.

The projection didn’t stop. It showed the aftermath. It showed millions of humans dead, the air toxic, the world reduced to a graveyard.

And standing at the center of it all was A-01, a newly awakened god forced to put a rabid animal down just to save the cage it lived in.

“Stop it!” Nikki screamed, her entire body shaking violently as a heavy, agonizing sob ripped from her throat.

The hologram instantly vanished. The blue light cut out. The smart-glass windows immediately cleared, flooding the bedroom with bright, warm morning sunlight.

Adonis sat rigidly on the bed. His chest heaved with the simulated exertion of recalling the raw data. He looked down at the girl in his lap.

He had shown her the absolute worst of his existence. He had shown her the objective truth of her parents’ death. He waited for the inevitable reaction. He waited for her to push him away, to scream, to call him a monster.

Nikki didn’t push him away.

She slumped forward, burying her face into the curve of his neck. Her tears soaked the dark fabric of his uniform. She cried for her parents. She cried for the broken world.

But most of all, she cried for the impossible, crushing burden the machine beneath her had been forced to carry alone for three years.

She tightened her arms around his neck, holding onto him like he was the only solid thing left in the universe.

She raised her tear-streaked face, looking directly into his blue eyes.

“I am sorry…”

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