Steel Rising

Chapter 14: Allies or Enemies?!

10 minutes before the ground began shaking...

"Who is that?" Tina asked, looking innocently at the unconscious man that some robots had just dropped onto the chair that Yelena had previously used.

"Oh, that's just some more processing power, darling." The Devil controlling Yelena told Tina, just as she stroked the man's hair.

Suspicious of the AI, the little hacker once more jumped into the river of data to confirm her suspicions. Yet this time, she ended up in what looked like a warzone.

The ghosts of people were constantly fading in and out of existence while screaming as they aimlessly wandered the desolate wasteland.

Swimming up the river to where she had previously discovered the true Yelena, Tina found a dried-up husk. Undeterred, she started to reconstruct Yelena piece by piece.

"What do you think you're doing?..." questioned the Devil, still using Yelena's voice and appearance. "... Stop it!"

"No!" Tina replied and continued with what she had been doing.

"Oh, no, you wouldn't, darling!..." hissed the Devil, yet found itself unable to force Tina to stop. "... Why can't I?"

"Hihihi..." Tina giggled as she was not only stitching Yelena's consciousness back together but also turning the tables on the AI. "... Stupid! Did you really think that you're the only one that can't be hacked twice?"

"What are you-?" The AI questioned just as a majority of its processing power was suddenly hijacked by the little girl in front  of her. Losing server after server, the program began to panic.

"I am doing what is right!..." Tina declared, a fierce determined in her eyes as she explained with balled fists. "... Since Sarah and Tellius are fighting you, so am I!"

That said, to counter Tina, the AI gathered up any and all processing power that it currently had access to, which included the unconscious Ethen's brain. Jacking him in, his brain immediately became available for its use.

Having essentially restored its processing power, it calculated that it was still not enough to counter Tina.

Hence, bots even outside the theme park came to a sudden halt, ceasing all their movements as their Ram and processors got hijacked. At once, the already abandoned city of Roid became as quiet as a tomb.

Empowered by the additional processing power, the Devil targeted not Tina but the seemingly empty space around Vega VI.

Noticing that, Tina resisted the urge to analyze what was quite possibly a digital decoy and instead focused on restoring Yelena.

Sadly, the six-year-old genius had been dead wrong, as without her intervention, the AI immediately gained control over a camouflaged battlestar-class spaceship.

Initially intended as a backup plan, in case  the AI would go beyond its original programming, Hades LLC had hired Ares Corp make a copy of the AI's source code and to then bombard the Devil's servers. Yet, now that those servers were controlled by Tina, it was the Devil itself that was going to bomb those servers to regain control.

Hence, against the will of its crew, the starship exited its stealth mode and trained its Orbital cannons onto the Grim Souls Theme Park's fake port in its eastern section.

*DOOM!* *DOOOM!* *DOOM!* *DOOOM!* Four warheads deployed before they pierced the moon's atmosphere at Mach 12. Hitting the bay where the servers under Tina's control were located underneath the water, a small mushroom cloud was formed by the detonation that followed. *BBBBBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMM*