The impact scrambled her thoughts, and all she could hear was the whistling of wind in her ears. She didn’t know what was up and what was down, what was left and what was right. She couldn’t find her footing.
ARMS AND LEGS, CONFIRMED BARELY ATTACHED. MOVEMENT POSSIBLE. HEAD, SOMEWHAT DAMAGED. CONFIRMING REMAINING STRENGTH OF FRAME IN TORSO: 0, 0, 0, 0, RECONNECTING, REBOOTING, CONFIRMED OPERATIONAL.
“Vivy!”
“Rebooting…”
The professor’s desperate cry was drowned out by the wind as Vivy’s black consciousness restarted. Gusts tore at her as she crashed through the roof of Diva’s room and hurtled helplessly through the night sky. Frame flailing, she tried to regain stability as she calculated her coordinates in space based on her surroundings. She looked down to measure the distance and time until she fell.
Something was rapidly rising into the sky along with her.
“Matsu—”
Before she could get his name out, he smashed right into her. The impact came from a downward diagonal, and she had no way of reducing its force. Her slight frame took the entirety of the damage, and her vision—which had only just recovered—blurred again.
Matsumoto reached for her torso as she flew and wrapped an arm tightly around her waist. He then fired his reverse thrusters to plummet back to the ground. No, not the ground. He smacked Vivy’s body against the half-destroyed walls of the Princess Palace. He collided with the building, using Vivy’s body to drill a hole through the walls.
“Aah… Aaaaahhh!”
A scream tore from her throat as he used her face and torso to bash through the wall, inflicting immeasurable damage to her entire frame. It didn’t hurt, but there was the deafening ring of every error imaginable: They warned her that her skeletal frame was no longer able to maintain her body’s stability and that she was nearing a state of nonfunctionality.
“Vivy?! Vivy!”
The clamor of alerts and a man’s shouts filled her ears.
Pointless. Pointless, pointless, it was all pointless. What was the point of sounding the alarm for her right now? What she needed was a way out—a way to escape the situation. She temporarily cut off any processing power allocated to the transmission. She prioritized her actions over her limits, and with that calculation, she moved her arms and legs again.
“Ugh… Gah!”
Pinned to the shattering wall, she reached out in search of a way to survive. While there might not have been a key to escape the danger hidden inside the fragments and remains, she had no choice but to find her own way out of this. She had done it before, and she would do it again.
“…”
Her right hand brushed against something. Vivy clenched it as hard as she could, then focused all her functionality into her arm. Her skeletal frame groaned from the intense destructive force being applied to her entire body, but she used everything she had to endure it, allowing her to change the trajectory of her fall to prevent her destruction. She had grabbed on to a pole used for external lighting on the outside of the castle. The jolt ran through her entire body, but Matsumoto was thrown off balance when he came to a sudden stop during his plummet.
Vivy twisted her body, tearing herself from Matsumoto’s grip. She then clutched his main body and raised her arm to strike.
“Agh!”
Matsumoto rearranged his frame to deliver a sharp blow to Vivy’s back. Vivy could never replicate his flexible fighting style; he practically danced in midair as he remade himself. Moreover, Vivy had never fought Matsumoto before.
But she had the next best thing.
“Implementing results of combat simulations against Matsumoto.”
Vivy had run countless simulations in which she went up against Matsumoto, who was capable of nearly limitless movement, while understanding the limitations of her humanoid frame. Matsumoto was her partner on the Singularity Project, so there was no point to these simulations, but Vivy had lost to Matsumoto once during the first Singularity Point.
Matsumoto hadn’t been complete back then. He confronted Vivy with several work AIs he’d hacked into. Vivy didn’t forget her loss, and she kept running simulations to prepare for when they would fight again. She was concerned there may be the possibility that someday, she and Matsumoto would clash over how to fulfill their shared goal, though she had hoped that would never happen.
“This is different,” she said to herself.
Vivy re-enacted the simulations, clinging to the bulk of her opponent’s body as she took the blow. Matsumoto’s cube parts could scatter to disperse any force he was hit with or rearrange to strike with impossible-to-counter attacks. He was also capable of becoming a full-on weapon with his built-in firearms. He implemented these tactics with incredible skill, but each one had a workaround.
Vivy clinging to Matsumoto wouldn’t make it any easier for her to deal with him scattering or striking her with unexpected attacks, but it did limit his most damaging weapons: heavy artillery.
Next, she—
“Crashing.”
Matsumoto gave up trying to shake her off and instead rushed at the castle walls again with Vivy still on him. His aim was to destroy her on impact. Bracing for the collision, Vivy pierced the pole she’d been carrying into one of Matsumoto’s cubes. He flung her back and forth, but she was able to weather his morphing function by clutching the pole.