Shall Machines Divide the Earth by Benjanun Sriduangkaew (list of e readers txt) 📕

or even greed for resources. Why do you think the Hellenes attacked Ayothaya? War is as natural as eating. It is pure.”

“What is the Armada of Amaryllis like?” I say casually, now a few meters closer to Balaskas. The conversation is nonsense but I’ve already established that Balaskas is not entirely sane. “Their commander is said to be a most unique creature, larger than life and vicious, a sadist through and through. Did you ever meet her personally?”

“A few times. She exemplifies force. Extinction events for the sake of it. Genocide that is almost incidental. War that means nothing except as a means to refine further combat. That’s the ideal way of being. Don’t you see?”

“I don’t see.” By now I’m barely five paces away. There are two guns on me, one in its belt holster, the other attached to an embed in my wrist.

She is still seated, barely looking at me, attention fixed on the thing that looks like my wife. “Empress Daji Scatters Roses Before Her Throne. I’ll offer you this only once. Forfeit the game and I’ll spare your duelist. Fight me and you’ll lose, and she will be at the mercy of me and mine. A piece of her brain gouged out and replaced with cerebral controls. She’ll never be herself again. Exit the game and it’ll be between me and Houyi’s Chariot, and I reckon you don’t care what happens to Ouru.”

Daji does not respond with either proxy. I flick my hand and the pistol emerges. No need to aim at this range—I fire point-blank into the face of Ensine Balaskas.

She reels. I reach for Eurydice.

Balaskas snaps back up and, in one fluid motion, slashes across Eurydice’s neck. It is too fast. It is impossible. Blood courses down from Balaskas’ face, from Eurydice’s throat: the peristaltic flows run concurrent, nearly in perfect sync. All I can see is the blankness of my wife’s gaze, vacant to the end, untethered even now from the final act of her own body: the arterial venting, the severing of cerebral matter from the rest of the mortal apparatus as it scrabbles for and fails to find oxygen. It should not matter. I’ve already been told this is a marionette with none of the memory that makes my wife who she was; that everything Eurydice ever was is guarded within Daji’s treasure-vault. And yet all of me seizes. All of me judders and creaks.

My wife drops without a sound, as though she’s merely paper effigy. Ensine Balaskas holds her hand against the bullet hole in her forehead. “This was utterly rude, Thannarat Vutirangsee.” Her voice is smooth, untouched by pain, as if I hadn’t just pierced her cerebrum with brute velocity. “But all is fair in love and the Divide, as they say.”

Daji falls down like a killing comet. Ensine Balaskas is not there when Daji’s blade strikes the ground. Instead she’s pirouetted away, impossibly mobile when I must have destroyed every possible piece in her cortex that grants motor control. It was not a low-caliber bullet.

The ground quakes. Ensine dodges Daji again—improbable for a human—and then I see. The regulations have been fluid all along, meant to be bent, meant to be refitted to each round of the game. Each regalia-duelist pair creates their own rules of engagement. What is not expressly prohibited is implicitly permitted.

I switch guns. Both of them are moving as though they’re bound by no gravity, a choreography of perfect propulsion and ceaseless efficiency. But I’ve aimed through much worse conditions. The shot connects cleanly, hitting Ensine in the flank. The location doesn’t matter—the entire body is the target.

Ensine seizes up. Her head—its head—whips around and fixes its gaze on me. It tries to move but its limbs convulse the way they might in cardiac arrest. This does not last: already I can see the mind behind Ensine’s body reestablishing control, links being remade at AI speed, the spine straightening and the limbs returning to order.

Daji cleaves the proxy from shoulder to hip.

She is at my side almost before her opponent hits the ground, taking my hand. The ecodome’s floor is roiling as though it’s about to split. “We’re getting out of here, Detective.”

By the time we’re two blocks away, the ecodome is gone entirely.

What replaces it is a cylindrical structure, half as tall as the Vimana and so broad that it interrupts the skyline. The façade of it is black, robed in thick golden thorns, crowned by a nine-rayed sun.

“A fortress,” Daji says. “That’s why only a few of them can be deployed in a single round. Houyi would have the other one, I suspect. It’s going to be . . . challenging. Do you have all your weapons with you, all your necessities?”

“Not all,” I say slowly. “You didn’t tell me that Ensine—”

“I couldn’t have. That’d have violated the Divide’s rules, disqualified me, and left you without proper defense.” She makes a frustrated hiss. “That fortress is in its initiating phase and will take a while before it’s armed. We get back to the Vimana, you get what you need, and make Houyi deploy their fortress.”

“Who is Chun Hyang’s duelist?” But I already know. There’s only one candidate when Ensine Balaskas was a mask all along.

“There’s a reason I never liked her.” Daji makes a face. “And I couldn’t tell you that either. I’m sorry. We’re supposed to trust each other without limit or condition, but there are laws I can’t defy so brazenly.”

“Yes. I know.”

For a time we walk in silence, the night peculiarly still around us when it should be fractured with terror. The residents must be used to this, have likely received instructions to evacuate: Libretto will soon turn into a battlefield. When we return to the Vimana, the lobby is eerily empty. All staff have gone. It seems almost unnatural how quick this mass egress must have been, when I know from experience that such things are inefficient and near-impossible to control. Panicking civilians fleeing in every direction, sometimes toward the source