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Ryoshu advances into the underground bunker with a snarl painted on her lips, scanning the doors around her with a sharp, careful gaze. Somewhere this fancy—going up against people who have resisted for so long—means she’s about to encounter the rich, who often have weapons that can rip through a chassis like a knife through butter. She squares her shoulders; no matter what, even if she goes down, too, she’ll complete her mission. She blasts the doors off of its hinges with a well-placed kick, and the crunch of warping metal and wood rings in her head.
“Don’t move,” Ryoshu spits, lifting her odachi and scanning the room for her target.
… What is all this?
Stopped in her tracks, Ryoshu stares at the table in front of her; fully set, it’s a polished mahogany underneath the cloth—is that silk? Luxurious food, some of which Ryoshu doesn’t even recognize, decorates various plates, enough to be a five-course meal.
“Oh, hello!” A cheery voice pipes up from the opposite end of the table and Ryoshu jerks her head up to stare at the person—the woman. Her target has long, dark hair put up in a ponytail; light, traditional makeup colors her cheeks. She has one dark eye and one of bright jade. “You can eat, can’t you?”
Ryoshu’s reaction: “What.”
“I’m Hong Lu!” Her target. “Come sit.”
Ryoshu lifts her odachi and points it at the woman in front of her, lips peeling back in a sneer once again. “You think you can manipulate me into not scattering your guts all over this table? F.C.”
Hong Lu tilts her head, then her face lights up in recognition. “Oh! No! I’m not actually asking you not to kill me.”
Humans are so, so strange.
Hong Lu sees the look of annoyed confusion on Ryoshu’s face and smiles, closing both of her eyes—she looks a bit like a puppy like this. “No, you can kill me! I just wanted to talk to you first. That’s all. I mean, you could just kill me anyway, there’s nothing stopping you, but I’d like to talk first! That’s why I had my butler prepare all of this food for us.”
Ryoshu’s expression sours; she bares her teeth at Hong Lu, but sullenly takes a seat in one of the chairs. She chooses a tactical position around the middle of the table, close enough to guarantee that Hong Lu can’t manage a retreat without being slashed to pieces but far enough to assure that the other woman can’t slash her to pieces. Any information from Hong Lu, one of the sole survivors of the uprising, could be invaluable to bring back to her peers, so she narrows her eyes and locks her gaze onto the woman seated halfway down the table.
“Fine. I will kill you when we are done chatting, or if you annoy me too much.”
“Okay,” Hong Lu chirps, just like that. She isn’t bothered at all. “Well, help yourself!”
Ryoshu eyes the food on the table before letting out a soft grunt. “N.I.”
“...No? Alright,” Hong Lu sighs, disappointed, before serving herself a portion of… something. It doesn’t matter to Ryoshu. Ryoshu has never focused on human customs such as food—she could eat, but has never bothered to do so, and she isn’t going to start now.
“How did you stay hidden so long,” Ryoshu doesn’t quite ask, her tone flat and more irritated than anything else.
Hong Lu takes a thoughtful bite of the food on her plate, and swallows. “Um, my parents arranged for it.”
The irritation on Ryoshu’s face grows. “Of course they did.” A pneumatic hiss sounds from her hand as she opens her palm to grab her odachi.
“Wait!” Hong Lu gives her a charming little smile. “That’s so interesting! I had no clue they even made robots with air anymore. How quaint…” Hong Lu politely wipes her mouth with her napkin, folding it over afterward. “You’re an older model, aren’t you?”
“It’s called pneumatics,” Ryoshu growls, keeping her eyes carefully locked onto Hong Lu to examine for movements.
“I don’t have any weapons here, just me,” Hong Lu clarifies, doing that closed-eye smile again. “Is it so wrong to have a bucket list? That odachi… it was one of the first weapons made exclusively by robots, wasn’t it?”
Ryoshu’s eyes narrow, her pupils constricting into slits. “How do you know that? Y.K.T.M.” Even if this hadn’t been an assassination mission, she’d have to kill her simply for information control.
“I was sort of bored in here?” Hong Lu says, her disposition unchanging. “I had nothing to do, really, so learning about robots is what I’ve been doing for quite a while now! I know a lot about the uprising now; what else could I have done?”
“You’re too calm.”
“Why wouldn’t I be? I’m not really scared of dying!” It’s not that Hong Lu sounds quite confident when she says that; instead, she’s strangely cheery, like there’s not even anything to be confident or brave about. “It’s just a new experience to go through, isn’t it? I would have liked to experience a few more things before I kicked the bucket, but oh well, what can I do about it now?”
An imperceptible shiver runs down Ryoshu’s chassis; Hong Lu’s eyes are strangely empty despite the cheer in them. I’ve never met someone so empty before. Perhaps this is a mercy. She draws her odachi once again.
“Ah… is that really all the time I get?” Hong Lu’s smile fades a bit, into something a little more melancholy. “I suppose being killed by a robot is better than simply dying, isn’t it? Ahh, how interesting…”
Ryoshu doesn’t answer.
Hong Lu dies with a smile on her face, body cleanly separated into sections on the floor.