NieR:Remnant

VII - Memories of Pitch Darkness

"Is this...death?"

The breath passed her lips, a chilling, frozen mist.

"So cold. So dark."

"Unit 2B. 2B!"

She gasped, conscious.

The wall of blackness seemed to shift with the echoing voice.

"R-recommendation: Stay awake-"

There was a flash backed by something resembling a roar, and then the nothing reclaimed her to plummet into infinity.

"Huh?" 2B cried out, conscious. "Wh-what?"

No answer.

She tried to move her intact arm, straining hard against an invisible force holding it up and to the left.

Something chuckled in response. Other voices soon joined in the expression, different but...also the same?

She tried closing her fingers into a fist, managing to move them but an inch before the force won out, painfully snapping them back to their straightened positions.

"Fighter."

The words came from everywhere around her, and reverberated away in sequence from countless entities in a spherical distance. It was like an echo, but spoken by a different mass of voices with each wave.

"What...is this?" asked 2B weakly. "Pod?" She turned her head to the right. At least she could move something. "Pod? N-Nines?"

No response.

2B felt her fingers start to move, but not of her volition. Snapping and twitching here and there in no particular pattern, they soon closed into that fist she'd intended earlier.

"See?" It was that chorus again, but more gentle and welcoming. "There's no need to resist. You're hurt. Let us help."

2B held as tense as her waned strength could manage, but the damage she'd sustained, it was too much. Her eyes once again grew heavy, head slumping forward.

"That's it. Allow us to guide you."

Darkness flowed over darkness like a curtain. Blinking, a slight tremble in her form, 2B could feel a numbness start to manifest, the shade of the entity drifting around the edges of her fading consciousness. As she teetered on the brink, her entire individual existence fading apart bit by bit like crumbling sand, somehow, in the midst of it all, a figure persisted.

Against all, at the center of all things, she saw him.

2B released that artificial fist with a sudden spark of fury, opening her hand against the countless tiny grabbers that bound her. She pulled and swayed her form against them, a sudden sheet of violet covering her vision.

"HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" 2B felt herself start to move fast, spinning, whirling, twisting and turning. The cackling mass of pods were grabbing at her outfit, her stump of an arm, her scalp, her hair; what seemed like thousands of small appendages were grasping whatever they could hold across the lone android's entire shell, contorting around her as need be.

"Ngh!" Teeth clenched, eyes shut tight and spinning in the whirlpool of a sea gained consciousness, 2B didn't let up. She tried kicking, crushing, even biting, unsure which way was up or down. The networked strength of her captor was too strong. She wouldn't get anywhere like this. It was too much.