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

And then there’s no more time to ponder the parameters of her proxy, the boundary of its strength and propulsion.

Ouru’s fortress slams into Recadat’s. The building under me shakes. What remains of Libretto shudders in architectural death throes. Dust chokes the sky; even from this height there’s next to no visibility. I activate another Seer override. Not like there’s any point hoarding them now.

A feed that triangulates signal emissions and heat distribution, translating them into a clear visual. It comes online in time for me to see the façade of Recadat’s fortress give under another ramming blow. The material shatters into black rubble, inlaid with stardust.

Chun Hyang bursts through this fortress-wound like a nova.

Houyi meets Chun Hyang midair, blue-black void against golden star. They entangle, the outlines of them charring and overlapping. Warship ferocity. It peels back the illusion that my anti-machine ammunition could ever have had real effect when their proxies are engaged in true battle—at this range, with this speed, I could never have hit any of them. No lone human could. They fight with ruthless alacrity, two minds of perfect calculation competing for speed, seeking an advantage of bare margins, of a remote decimal point.

Chun Hyang’s kite-wings blaze with serrated brilliance, brighter and brighter, the glare of it like a miniature sun’s.

“It’s going to self-destruct,” Daji tells me. “We should be outside the blast range, but—”

Houyi is already pulling back from Chun Hyang, gaining distance, their oil-slick outline darkening and deepening into an aegis fog.

What happens next transpires so fast that at first I cannot comprehend it at all.

Chun Hyang’s wings dim—the self-destruct sequence put in reverse—and it hefts its glaive. I imagine that it smiles. I’m too far and the Seer override only grants me so much, a view that tracks the arc of the glaive as it flies, an uninterrupted line of kinetic perfection. Houyi’s Chariot dives toward the glaive, to deflect or take it, but not in time.

The weapon penetrates the façade of Ouru’s fortress as though it is made of paper. I’ll never know how the targeting can be so surgical. I catch a glimpse of those beautiful chandeliers, those granite stairways, the opulence that Ouru and Houyi constructed together—the symbol of their partnership. And then the glaive goes through Ouru. Lilies of blood erupt.

Houyi hurls themself at Chun Hyang.

Well before they can reach it, Houyi’s proxy disintegrates. Simply it comes apart, imploding from the center, the solid mass turning to blue-black dust. A regalia without a duelist may not engage in combat. Wonsul’s Exegesis dispensing the Court of Divide’s penalty, as easily as that, tripping the kill switch that must be attached to every participating proxy.

Chun Hyang drifts low. Close enough I can see its smirk, wide and triumphant. Daji is already rising to intercept it.

I don’t quite think. I pull up one of my last overrides and activate Bulwark. Instantly it authenticates.

From its body, Chun Hyang draws a glistening javelin and throws.

There’s no time for me to move aside. You’d think a javelin or spear would be much slower than a bullet, but the truth is that the human physique has a finite limit. The machine weapon carries with it a vast momentum, propelled by preternatural strength. I would never dodge it.

An aegis blooms before me, layered like an enormous magnolia, in gold and red and sunset. The javelin falls. Daji’s second proxy shivers like a mirage with dissipated force, holding its shield-shape for a few more seconds before it reflows. First back into the fox, and then again into a nanite whirlpool. It rises and flows over me, coating my chest, my limbs, my face. Ablative plating and fox-bright weave spread, ink in water, until I’m entirely enfolded. My receptor feeds reorient as this armor establishes its module, flowing seamlessly into my overlays as though it has always been a part of me.

I stand sheathed in Daji’s body, clad in the sublime weight of her. When I stride toward the fortress-wound my steps are light, and I know that as long as I’m armored in her I will be proof against nearly anything.

Above me, she and Chun Hyang exchange blows, sword against glaive. They clash fast, striking as though they mean to rip out each other’s intestines and arteries, pulverize each other’s spine to thin dust. Almost as if they’re not AIs at all, and they fight not by impossibly precise vector calculus but by feral instinct. Sheer bestial longing, reenacted by machines.

I’ll deal with Chun Hyang. Daji’s voice in my ear is rich, sultry. But understand that Bulwark is the expression of ultimate trust between duelist and regalia—the act of fighting as one. You belong to me. I belong to you. Do what you have to do, Detective, and end this. I’ll be with you the entire time, and within me you will be unstoppable.

Recadat sits in a throne shaped like two hearts facing one another, cupping her between their fists. She can feel their pulses, calibrated so that they’re perpetually a few beats off, never in harmony. Chun Hyang’s work, determined to discomfit her to the last. A commentary on her relations with Thannarat—two clocks always out of sync. Two lines that never intersected. Territories with hard demarcation lines, when all she ever wanted was to be annexed. Once she believed herself hyper-independent, a creature of hermetic seals and impenetrable integument. For Thannarat she’d have discarded it all; she would have spread herself wide, sublimated herself to Thannarat’s preferences and purposes.

The tigers at her feet purr and rub their heads against her ankles. It is such a little gesture but she’s oddly comforted. Something cares, after a fashion. Maybe it is a remnant of older companion algorithms. She thinks back to her house on Ayothaya and how empty it is.

Chun Hyang has handled most of the fortress’ operations, leaving her to manage the Assembly overrides and not much else. In a way she is perfunctory, an