Farewell, Sergeant Cheon
Farewell, Sergeant Cheon. …………… The final duel between Sergeant Cheon and Chairman Ma unfolded. The victor was Sergeant Cheon. The chairman's office had become a battlefield ruin. The chandelier from the ceiling had crashed down, shattering across the floor, and the walls bore three or four human-sized holes punched through them. Fragments of the nanomachine suit glittered blue like shards of glass, scattered everywhere.
Chairman Ma lay sprawled in the middle of the office. Half the barrel of a railgun pistol was embedded in his neck. That was the mark of Sergeant Cheon's desperate gambit working—a close-range barrage that must have emptied three magazines just to punch a hole in the nanomachine suit.
And then... Sergeant Cheon. His condition was far more wretched than the office wreckage. Chairman Ma's final spasm of rage—a fist condensed from nanomachines—had torn straight through Sergeant Cheon's torso, sending his lower body tumbling out the broken window to plummet from the skyscraper. All that remained was his upper body, and barely that—only part above the chest. Purple energy I'd infused was barely holding together the severed vessels and organs. A flickering candle on the verge of snuffing out, clinging to a life that was all but gone.
I shifted from slime form back to human shape and stood before him.
Sergeant Cheon. Is this really okay with you? Even if it was dirty, humiliating, pathetic, and infuriating... maybe rolling in the mud was the better life. You could have run, hidden away, and someday met someone new. Maybe even found happiness again.
But you chose to burn your life to ash. And this is the result. Way too hardboiled, seriously. Foolish, yet that foolishness felt like something I could never imitate.
"...Little one. A girl, huh."
Sergeant Cheon looked up at me with unfocused eyes.
"Haha... you followed me in the end."
Blood-flecked coughs erupted, splattering purple droplets onto the marble floor. The corner of his mouth twitched up and down, muscles caught between a sob and a smile, unable to decide.
Emotions surged in. Not hot, not cold, not spicy. A bitter taste, but not the murky kind. Transparent. Pure bitterness left after all impurities evaporated. This was... relief. And at the bottom of that relief, longing settled like sediment.
No regrets right up to the last moment, huh, this guy.
"If there's a heaven or something."
A raspy voice leaked from Sergeant Cheon's lips like escaping air.
"My girl... Siel. Can she make it in? She's an android, so they might cut her at the door."
Such a sad joke even at the end. But I nodded. I don't know about religious afterlives. Don't care. But this much I know: the mind and will of any intelligence born in the universe don't just vanish. Just like the self from my human days survived after being absorbed into the main body.
When a star dies, its elements scatter as cosmic dust, gathering to birth new stars. You're the same. Sergeant Cheon's will, burning his life to stick it to those shitty chaebols. Siel's will, throwing her life to save her beloved master. They'll swirl eternally amid the stardust, forever part of this universe.
I couldn't voice it, but somehow he seemed to understand a bit of my heart. A faint bitter smile crossed Sergeant Cheon's lips.
"Thanks. If you hadn't lent me your power, little miss... I never would've made it this far."
No problem. Climbing to the top of this skyscraper with that battered body? Purely your own will. The energy I gave just kept your candle-like body flickering a little longer.
A pen wiping out a gang. Breaking through countless guards single-handedly. Jamming a gun into the neck of a chaebol in a nanomachine suit. All your own achievements.
Sergeant Cheon's hand fumbled inside his chest pocket. Between fingers stained purple with blood, a small case emerged. Inside, a gold ring embedded with a diamond. The one he never got to slip onto her finger.
"Failing to even give Siel a proper grave... that's my real regret..."
Sergeant Cheon looked up at me.
"Little miss, I know it's shameless to ask."
A cough. Purple blood trickled from his lips.
"Take me to Siel's side. That junkyard."
His bloodied hand, clutching the ring case, wandered the air before gently resting on the back of my hand.
"And toss my body into the incinerator with this ring. I want to become ashes in the same place as her."
At least get incinerated together. I had words for that, but couldn't speak. For now, I nodded.
"...Truly grateful, little miss."
Confirming my assent, all emotion drained from Sergeant Cheon's face at last. The purple glow in his chest faded, dimming slowly. I tucked his upper body and the ring case into my body's subspace.
……………
That aside. Putting together everything I witnessed following Sergeant Cheon around... Among all the spectacles I've seen—comics, anime, movies, dramas—this was hands-down one of the coolest endings ever. A story that really tugs at the heart. Hing hing hing.
I pretended to wipe nonexistent tears with my hand's back. No tears came, sadly. I could order the little thoughts to make 'em gush like in a manga, though.
Anyway, it was tear-worthy. A man who lost everything overnight climbs a skyscraper alone to complete his revenge. Leaving his final words to the girl who helped him: bury me beside my love. More than enough to stir this Outer God girl's sensibilities.
A few little thoughts in the heartscape were sniffling, leaning on each other. One was about to place a broccoli floret by Sergeant Cheon's "head" but stopped midway, hugging it to its chest instead. Only the glasses-wearing thought and the doctor-coated one stood quietly before the blackboard, waiting for me. Those two already guessed what I'd say.
But you know, Sergeant Cheon.
Sorry I can't grant your request to burn you with Siel.
Because I don't want you to die.
For the first time in ages, I voiced it in the heartscape. No human to hear, of course. Sergeant Cheon and Siel were effectively dead, and thoughts aren't human.
My body's subspace. A pocket dimension like a miniature galaxy held Sergeant Cheon's upper body. Right beside it lay Siel's corpse, recovered from the junkyard. If he'd dropped the revenge bit, I was gonna surprise him by fixing her up as a gift. But it ended like this.
Let's check the easy one first. Can the android maid be revived?
The doctor-coated thought scribbled on the blackboard with chalk.
> First, checking the Personality Core's physical state.
A cross-section of an android's head appeared on the blackboard. At the skull's center—brain equivalent—a oval module.
> Personality Core was in the exact center of the cranium. A large-caliber bullet pierced the head, shattering the core too.
Chalk drew a big X over the core.
> Total destruction. Total death. No intact core remains.
Impossible then?
> Hope remains.
The doctor-coated thought sketched a tiny fragment beside the X.
> Core shattered, but traces linger in the fragments. Faint imprints of the crystalline data structure's residual charge patterns on each piece.
> Like extreme data recovery from a destroyed hard drive.
The glasses thought chimed in.
> Scan thousands of shard particles at atomic level, reverse-engineer residual charge patterns.
> Beyond Type 1 civs like humanity on their homeworld, or even Type 2 interstellar civs like Jenica's.
Type 1 is human-level, Type 2 like Jenica's civ?
> Right. But we're different, yeah?
The doctor thought shrugged.
> Mobilize infinite thoughts to read each fragment's residual charge. Reassemble personality data like a shattered puzzle. Time-consuming, but doable.
Good. Revive Siel that way. I'll scrounge silicone parts from the Threat Management Agency. Shin Chang-seok'll hand 'em over gladly for something this nice. Woong hihi.
Siel's sorted. Next issue: my attachment human, Sergeant Cheon?
They met my expectant gaze but the doctor thought shook its head glumly.
> Impossible. Biological regeneration only works from living cells.
The doctor thought dragged over a new blackboard and sketched a diagram. Remaining body of Sergeant Cheon = under 30%.
> Can repair damaged cells or proliferate survivors to fill tissue—but creating from nothing is creation territory.
Hm. But not totally impossible. I melted Yeom Hana by accident and restored her.
> Yeom Hana was fully intact at cellular level, even absorbed.
> Fill Sergeant Cheon's 70% missing parts with your cells? That'd make it an Outer God girl terminal, not him.
> Use another human's cells? It'd become that human, not Cheon.
Ship of Theseus, huh. Replace every plank—is it still the same ship? But the brain's intact, right? Can't we rebuild from that?
> Precisely 0.3% of brain cells barely remain. Your energy delayed their death.
The doctor pointed at the sketched brain on the blackboard.
> That's the limit. If we had an intact body...
Another body. One preserving form intact, able to house Sergeant Cheon's brain and will as a new vessel.
I turned my gaze to the two lying side by side in subspace. Sergeant Cheon's purple-bloodied upper half, and beside it, the maid android Siel. A brilliant idea struck.