She had come here expecting to find monsters. She had found a mirror instead. The next morning, Sena Ayanami walked into the Academy’s main hall five minutes before the first bell. Her uniform was immaculate. Her hair was pinned. Her face was a doll’s face—still, perfect, unreadable.
The Academy had a basement, technically. A sub-level labeled “Maintenance” on every map. But Sena had never seen a janitor descend those stairs. She had never seen anyone enter at all. Three nights later, dressed in dark gym clothes with her hair pinned tight, Sena picked the lock on the basement door. It took her twelve seconds. The stairs went down farther than they should have—four flights, then five, the air growing cold and metallic. At the bottom, a single reinforced door with a retinal scanner.
She had Sena’s face.
Hoshino’s smile returned, smaller and colder. “For now.” sena ayanami
The servers screamed. Lights flickered. Unit 07 went still.
Sena let her next block be sloppy. Invited the follow-up strike. And instead of countering with the technique she’d drilled a thousand times, she did something stupid. Something clumsy. She threw a handful of broken glass from the tank directly into Unit 07’s face.
Sena’s own proposal—on predictive pattern recognition in asymmetric combat scenarios—had been submitted the previous week. She was still waiting for a response. She had come here expecting to find monsters
And somewhere in the basement, in a cracked tank now drained of fluid, Unit 07 opened her eyes for the second time. This time, no one was controlling her. This time, she had a choice.
The girl in the tank opened her eyes. Sena had exactly 1.4 seconds to react before the tank shattered. Unit 07 exploded outward in a spray of amber fluid and glass, landing in a crouch that mirrored Sena’s own combat stance. They circled each other, two reflections in a broken mirror.
Her classmates called her the Ice Princess. Not because she was cruel, but because she never flinched. Not when the combat drones shorted out during live drills. Not when the headmistress announced that three girls had gone missing from the east dormitory in the past month. Her uniform was immaculate
The second note came taped to the underside of her desk.
“You’re earlier than I expected, Miss Ayanami.”
Sena looked at the row of tanks. Then at Unit 07, unconscious but breathing. Then at her own hands, still wet with amber fluid.
