E-UNIT: The Blue Angels of Death.

Chapter 154: First Call.

V O L U M E . S I X : C O D E_R E S E T

Chapter 154: First CallNight had settled over Bijou. The streets ran in cold white light, projected from the pavement edges and the tall lamps overhead, each balcony above them lit in warm white to throw detail onto the handcrafted stonework of the buildings. The city was proud of its architecture in a way that showed in every design decision, right down to how it chose to illuminate itself after dark.

That pride was probably part of why Salaska had accepted 02's offer so quickly. The terrorist bombings had been running for months, and the structures they were targeting were already old, each attack weakening buildings that had been standing for generations, pushing people out of homes that couldn't absorb the damage.

02 came back into the hangar after her shift on the streets. The public attention had been constant since the post office, the Altean population arriving from the Western State recognized the E-UNIT immediately, and the Veridian Coast residents were catching up fast. She had stopped counting the phones pointed at her.

The hangar itself was barely the same building she'd first walked into.

The exterior had been wrapped in glass panels, the old concrete structure now presenting itself to the street as a clean rectangular prism of glass. Thin neon letters ran along the front face: E-UNIT: The E-Police Station.

Inside, the exposed wood and dust-stained walls were gone, white plastic cladding covered every surface, separated by thin black dividing lines. The floor was polished white, plants placed at intervals that managed to feel both random and geometric at the same time. The air carried the specific smell of new technology and filtered circulation. It was starting to look like a square version of the Hope Bubble.

Two people in the building. That made the air easier.

02 walked to the development room, Albert's space, built for the work he'd been doing since they arrived. He'd called her in without specifying what for, which she'd come to understand was just how he operated.

The automatic door opened with a cold hiss. Albert was standing at a floating white table, a blue projection spread across its surface and throwing its color across the room. He was leaning on both hands, finally straightening when she came in.

02 placed her hands on the opposite edge. "Multiple blueprints. Are these the team's upcoming upgrades?"

"Yes." He stretched properly, cracking his back. "I know it's hard to believe, but if your father hadn't taken the project twenty-six years ago, these would have been ready at launch. Half of what you're looking at came from Jason, that man loved designing weapons and shields to the point of excess. He managed to fit a full umbrella-deployment red shield into the arm assembly."

02 scanned the projections. "So the vault father left me actually had something in it worth keeping."

"I'm still surprised he preserved everything." Albert smiled. "There are even G-Bot blueprints in there, extensions of the crystal integration we hadn't finished at the time. I've already started running one of them on Delta."

02 looked at Delta's schematic. One of the early proportional sketches had a margin note, a swimmer's resting stroke ratio, annotated in different handwriting. Smaller. Neater. Someone younger had worked on this. "Did he really take the whole project?"

"Yes and no." Albert opened a second screen and slid it across to her. "These are the originals from 2023. Your father spent years after that refining them."

He looked at the engineering on display, at 02's frame in particular. "He was obsessed with completion. I remember him and Jason arguing for an hour because Jason didn't care what the energy blades looked like on the outside. The aesthetics meant nothing to Jason. To Nick, they were inseparable from the function."

He tilted his head toward Delta's floating blueprint. "He had a way of taking an unfinished thing and not stopping until it looked like it had always been complete."

"That's why you were studying us when we first met." 02 held his gaze. "We remind you of his work. The way he left a mark on what he built."

Albert laughed, dry, but genuine. "You do say things plainly. Yes. I always found something in how he brought that white, considered utopian aesthetic into the present. It showed what kind of future he was building toward, even when he was working with what he had at the time."

02 turned back to the projections, eyes moving across them. "What's the white armor? It looks like it was built to take punishment."

Albert spread both hands and zoomed the hologram outward. It expanded to fill most of the room. "The Bulwark Frame. Prototype, I'll have it completed before long. Any unit wearing it becomes effectively immune to heavy physical impact, sonic weapons, and EMP. The tradeoff is speed. To protect the standard E-UNIT frame completely, the plating has to be dense enough that it adds significant mass."

He glanced at her. "The concept came from the information you recovered. Obsidian's heavy armor upgrade gave me the foundation."

"It looks nothing like what father would have designed." 02 studied the headpiece, blunt at the back, coming to a point at the front. "I'd walk past a sister in that and not know it."

"Easy fix." Albert zoomed to the chest section. "A number on each unit. Knowing your ally in a fight matters as much as knowing the enemy."

"And Delta's upgrade?"

"I'll show you." He pulled a slight smile. "But the credit goes to 03. She has some technique, she called it 'secret sauce', that lets her excavate faster than her frame should support. Follow me."

They left the room and walked down through the main hall, past the large crystal floating at the center and powering the building, to the far wall. A staircase had been cut into the floor, rough, still in progress, but functional. Albert went down. 02 followed in silence, taking in what she was seeing.

A corridor stretched underground, long and straight. E-UNITs and workers were moving along its length, some laying plastic wall panels over the bare soil, some running electrical conduit, some placing floor sections at the far end. It had the feel of something that had been started fast and was being finished with care.

Albert stopped at the only door that was fully complete. He held his key card to the panel. The door opened.

Delta was inside, sitting on the floor. Beside her, large white cuboids of aluminum and mixed metal sat in a loose arrangement. A screen in front of her showed the Exo-Armor schematics. She had both arms extended, drawing matter out of the cuboids with one hand and reshaping it as armor plating in the other, working from the blueprint directly.

The room was bare otherwise. White walls and floor, a thin blue light strip running the perimeter at floor level. The lighting was temporary.

"Captain." Delta didn't look up from the forming plate. "How did the interrogation go? You spent most of the day in there."

"Well." 02 sat beside her on the floor. "05's ability to pull information is exceptional. She won't always be available though, Dave has her on the memory wall problem now." She watched the armor take shape. "I see what you're doing."

Delta nodded. "Albert found a new application for the matter control. The red crystal generates matter with energy in it, what I'm doing is different. No energy, just structure. Static armor." She turned the forming plate over. "The material has to come from somewhere, but once it's built it holds."

Albert crouched beside them. "And the armor has a connection point that draws from the unit's existing battery to activate. Delta provides the material and the structure, the unit powers it. She becomes our 3D printer."

Delta raised an eyebrow. "How long have you been waiting to use that line?"

"From the moment the idea worked."

02 looked around the room. "Where is the armor?"

"This is the first piece." Albert touched the edge of the forming plate. "The purple crystal is slow for this kind of output, the red crystal would be significantly faster. But the fact that it works at all is the starting point."

02's HUD flashed red.

"Captain." 03's voice came through the comms, tight and stripped of its usual bravado. "36 and 38 are down. Main street."

"Status?"

"Cut in half. Both of them. The cuts are... they're completely clean. Nobody saw anything."

02 was on her feet before 03 finished speaking. "Hold your position. Throw up energy barriers around the entire block."

She turned to the door, the calculated warmth vanishing from her face entirely, replaced by absolute, freezing dread. She looked back at Delta and Albert. "He's here. And he's started." She stepped into the corridor. "Finish the armor. We are out of time."

She ran.