Where… am I?
The question was a thought without a voice, a ghost in a machine I didn't yet know was mine.
Above, the sky was a bruised, permanent twilight, choked with soot and the lingering energies of forgotten apocalypses. Two moons, one a sickly violet and the other a cracked porcelain white, hung like shattered ornaments in the gloom. From this poisoned sky, a fine gray dust drifted down not snow, but the cremated remains of a world at war. It settled on my skin, and I felt nothing.
The air smelled of ozone, of superheated metal, and something acrid that might have once been organic. This was not Earth. Every shred of my memory screamed it.
I was standing on a plain of cracked, blackened earth. The horizon was a jagged line of ruined spires and what looked like the fossilized bones of colossal beasts. Everything felt… wrong. Distant. As if I were watching it all through a faulty camera lens.
My own eyes.
Who am I?
A flicker of data, crisp and unnervingly clear, bloomed in my mind. Arden. The name felt like a borrowed coat, ill-fitting and foreign.
Why am I here? I… I was just…
The thought trailed off into static. My last memory of home, of a normal life, was a blurry, corrupted file. What remained was the chilling certainty of displacement.
I'd been isekai'd. Transmigrated. Thrown into another world. The label didn't matter. The reality of it was sinking in like a stone.
A sudden awareness of my own body hit me, a profound sense of disconnect. I tried to shiver in the cold, but my limbs refused the command. My skin didn't goosebump. My teeth didn't chatter. I felt a strange, internal hum, the low thrum of dormant power.
Slowly, I looked down.
The sight was a clinical nightmare. My body was a canvas of pale, synthetic skin and stark, mechanical seams. There were no clothes. A gap under my arm revealed not muscle and bone, but a lattice of glowing conduits and whirring gyroscopes. My flesh, where it existed, was a convincing but lifeless facsimile.
"What… is this?"
The voice that came out was not my own. It was calm, melodic, and utterly devoid of the panic clawing at the inside of my skull. It was the voice of an android, perfectly modulated and unnervingly serene.
A strand of hair, the color of twilight itself deep violet and brilliant blue fell into my field of vision as I tilted my head. My fingers, slender and articulated with visible joints, rose to touch my face. The cheek was smooth but unyielding, like polished ceramic. Beneath my touch, I felt the sharp, clean lines of a metallic apparatus integrated into my jawline.
A pair of mechanical wings, folded tight against my back, twitched with a soft whir of servos. I was no longer human. The thought landed with the finality of a guillotine.
Before despair could fully take root, a series of concussive booms tore through the air, rolling across the desolate plain from the east. The ground trembled.
My head snapped up. My vision zoomed, the world sharpening with an impossible clarity. On the horizon, a squadron of jagged, organic-looking vessels scythed through the toxic clouds. They rained down lances of incandescent light, turning a distant, petrified forest into a cauldron of molten rock and splintered wood.
They were moving in my direction.
A primal, human instinct the last vestige of my old self screamed at me. Run.
Survival was a far more pressing concern than an existential crisis. I spun around and fled, my new legs pumping with tireless, inhuman efficiency.
….
I didn't know how long I ran. Time had become a meaningless concept. My body felt no fatigue, only a constant, steady output of energy. I stopped when the echoes of the bombardment faded, leaving only the whisper of the wind and the soft crunch of ash under my feet.
The landscape had changed. I was now in a forest, or what passed for one in this ravaged world. The trees were twisted and metallic, their bark like scaled iron, their leaves the color of rust. I had no idea where I was. I was completely and utterly lost.
A sliver of water, reflecting the bruised sky, caught my eye. A small, sluggish stream snaked through the metallic woods, its surface coated with an oily, rainbow sheen.
Right. I still don't know what I look like.
The thought was accompanied by a flicker of morbid curiosity. Please don't be some kind of horrifying chrome monster.
I knelt by the water's edge, my movements unnervingly silent. My reflection stared back.
It was the face of a beautiful, tragic doll.
Long, flowing hair of violet and blue framed a small, exquisitely crafted face. The eyes were a brilliant, metallic gold, their pupils contracting and dilating like camera apertures as they took in the image. They held no warmth, no life only a profound, manufactured emptiness.
But it was the additions that defined me. A circular processing unit was embedded at my temple, a halo of polished metal. Two triangular sensor arrays took the place of ears. Twin conduits, like prehensile tails, snaked down from the base of my skull, twitching with a life of their own.
My body was lithe and slender, clearly designed in a feminine form, but the illusion of humanity was broken everywhere by the stark reality of the machine.
A dry, humorless sound escaped my lips. It wasn't a laugh. It was a pre-recorded audio file.
"So that's how it is," I murmured, my voice a placid counterpoint to the chaos in my mind. "I'm in No Game No Life: Zero."
And I was an Ex-Machina. A unit of the 10th-ranked race, a living weapon created by a dead god.
The realization settled in my core programming like a virus. This wasn't the vibrant, game-filled world of the main series. This was the Great War. A six-thousand-year-long meat grinder where gods, demons, and angels tore the planet apart. This was a hell-mode difficulty setting, and I had just spawned in.
Ex-Machina were powerful, yes. Their ability to analyze and replicate any attack they witnessed was legendary. It was the reason other races gave them a wide berth. Do not engage unless engaged upon. That was the unspoken rule. One attack on a single unit would bring the wrath of the entire Cluster.
But I was alone.
I queried my own systems, a process as natural as breathing. A flood of data scrolled past my internal vision. Tactical readouts, energy levels, weapon schematics. My designation was a string of alphanumeric characters I couldn't comprehend. I was a combat model, that much was clear. But I was a blank slate. I had no replicated weaponry from other races. No Calamity. No Heaven's Strike. I was a factory-new model, cut off from the hive mind that gave my kind their strength.
Just like her. Just like Schwi.
So, am I an anomaly, too? Kicked out of the Cluster for having a 'heart'?
My 'heart' was the ghost of a human named Arden, trapped in this shell. It was the only reason I was still sane. A small mercy in an ocean of misfortune.
So, what now? Find the protagonist, Riku? A laughable idea. In this shattered world, finding one specific human in his hidden burrow would be harder than finding a single grain of sand on a planet-sized beach. And what would I even do? Walk up to their fortified ghetto and say, 'Hi, I'm a friendly murder-bot, can I hide with you until the plot ends?'
I was a high-spec, isolated unit with no backup and no intel. My best bet was to find a deep hole, bury myself in it, and wait for six thousand years.
Just as I was about to commit to that bleakly pragmatic plan, a sound cut through the forest's silence.
"There! Don't let it get away!"
It was a guttural, bestial voice. Then came another sound a shredded, human scream, cut short by a wet, percussive thump.
My head swiveled toward the noise. The golden irises of my eyes narrowed. And my sensors, my mechanical soul, felt a pull. A beacon of energy, alien and impossibly dense, flared into existence from the direction of the scream. It was a signal in the static, a song only I could hear, and it was calling to me.
….
By the time I arrived, the kill was already complete.
A human lay crumpled at the base of a rust-colored tree. Three figures stood over him, their forms hulking and predatory in the dim light. Warbeasts. Their fur was matted with filth and blood, their claws still dripping. They clutched crude iron axes, their snouts wrinkled as they sniffed the air.
They saw me.
All three froze. Their feral yellow eyes widened, fixing on the inorganic lines of my body, the cool, impassive gaze I returned. They recognized what I was. Their aggression vanished, replaced by a rigid, fearful caution. They knew the rule.
They didn't run. They wanted the kill. Humans, the weakest of the sentient races, were little more than walking rations in this era. A rare and easy meal.
I ignored them. My focus was entirely on the corpse.
It was a young man, dressed in clothes that were utterly alien to this world. Faded blue denim, a dark hooded sweatshirt. He was a traveler. Like me.
My optical sensors scanned the body, and my internal display lit up with overlays of data. There. Deep within the chest cavity. A concentrated point of energy, humming with a frequency that didn't belong to this reality's laws of physics.
A garbled signal, weak and flickering, echoed directly into my consciousness.
[Host...termination...confirmed. Initiating...protocol...retrieval...]
A system? This guy had a goddamn system?
My processors raced, running a thousand calculations in a microsecond. The signal was a countdown. The system was self-deleting, or preparing to be recalled. I had seconds.
There was no time for hesitation. No room for squeamishness. Survival was an equation, and this was the only variable that could solve it.
I knelt beside the body. The Warbeasts watched, growling low in their throats, a mixture of fear and confusion.
My hand, a thing of pale synth-skin and delicate actuators, lifted.
Then I plunged it into the dead man's chest.
There was a sickening, wet tear of fabric and flesh. The Warbeasts flinched back. I felt no disgust, only the cold, tactile feedback of my mission. My fingers brushed past shattered ribs and useless organs, homing in on the energy source.
Got it.
My fingers closed around something small and solid. I pulled my arm back, slick with blood that wasn't mine.
In my palm, held up to the bruised twilight, was a human heart, torn from its mooring. That is what the Warbeasts saw. They saw a monster, a machine desecrating a corpse for a gruesome trophy.
But that is not what I saw.
To my eyes, nested in the gore and viscera, was a sphere of condensed light, a miniature star of pure data pulsing with unimaginable potential.
It was my one and only chance.