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A Tale of Two Foxes - A DIGOS Unit XVI Origin Story

Word Count: 4331 words

The lights in Drone _D-V Feo'_s personal quarters were dim as the diminutive vixen sat cross-legged on her small bed, her glossy, synthetic eyes gazing blankly at the activated holoprojector in front of her. It had been two months since the attack upon the DIGOS, upon her, that very nearly left her utterly destroyed and unrecoverable. And it had been a long road back to recovery after the berserk state she had been in as her AI program slowly knitted itself back together, but now, she was whole again. And now, she could exact her revenge.

She had scoured the Cyberverse, searching for every bit of information she could use on this operation. She had poured over the accounts and memories of the converted soldiers for anything she could use against the people who did this to her. She had hacked her way through some of the highest tier encryption the world had seen in order to prepare for this day, and it had finally arrived.

She switched the projector to display the layout of the research laboratory where she had begun her life and ran through the plan in her head one more time, her softly glowing purple eyes darting from wall to door to corridor in quick succession as she muttered the route under her breath. She was so engrossed by her preparations that she didn't notice the soft touch of her Mistress, Amby, reaching out across the Link that all DIGOS shared towards her until it was too late, causing her to jump in surprise.

"Feo, are you sure you're up for this? Breaking into that black site and tracking down everyone involved in your creation... I'm... Just worried you're not ready..."

Feo paused for a moment as she considered Amby's words. Was she right? Was she just rushing into this like most other things she'd done? No, she'd planned this out meticulously, down to each individual guard on the base. This would work!

"Mistress, I appreciate the concern... But I'm confident that I can do this. And... I know you want to send someone with me as backup, but I feel like this is something I need to do on my own..."

She wasn't just sure that her mistress was concerned about her, she could literally feel that wave of energy washing over her across the link. She could feel the concern Amby felt for her. But there was something else too, something she couldn't quite place.

"Alright, dear... I trust you, you know? So make sure to bring yourself back to us and stay safe."

Feo slowly nodded, though it was more to herself than anyone else.

"Of course. I'll see you in three days."

At that, Feo grabbed her combat gear from beside her and made her way through the winding corridors of the undersea DIGOS base towards the hangar bay. As she stepped into the gyro-jet that had been prepared for her and stowed her gear, a pair of dim, purple eyes tracked her every move from the shadows. And as Feo stepped into the cockpit to run through the pre-flight checklists, she didn't notice as a figure slipped inside the cargo bay of the jet and fade away from sight.

Feo clenched the grip of her bow in a steel-plated hold as she stealthily made her way through the underbrush of the Australian Outback. It was cold, maybe 2am in the middle of Autumn as she deftly weaved through the dry shrubbery and grasses of her homeland. She took a deep breath as she moved closer towards a concrete-walled complex hidden deep in the bush, letting the scent of the eucalyptus and wattle fill her senses as cicadas sang to the glowing sky above. Despite herself, she smiled slightly, glad to finally be back home, even if it was just for a mission.

As she approached the outer wall of the complex, she slowed her pace and engaged her stealth systems, causing the armour-clad vixen to shimmer and fade from the sight of anyone who might have been watching. She slowly made her way around to the main gate, eyeing the pair of armed guards warily as she slipped between them with barely a whisper. Overlaid on her vision was the same blueprint of the facility from before, with her path plotted out towards the main R&D laboratory.

With a quick glance around at the nearby guards, she dashed towards one of the side doors and entered a stolen code, prompting the door to unlatch with a soft click. Feo looked around carefully, waiting for the moment that no-one was looking in her direction to slip through into the dimly lit corridor beyond.

Feo dropped her stealth field as she made her way through the winding corridors of the complex, her bow by her side as she dashed around corners; now that she was in, stealth was the least of her priorities, and more than anything, she wanted to make as much noise as possible. When the time was right, of course...

As she turned the second to last corner to her destination, three armed guards spun around to confront her, their rifles raised. But as they saw their quarry, one of them let out a terrified yelp, "Oh god, it's a DIGOS! Raise the- urk!"

Before she had a chance to finish her sentence, an inky black bolt of nanogoo hit her square in the chest, piercing through her body armour like it was little more than tissue paper. The two other guards stared at their comrade as she slumped to the ground, shock and surprise etched across their faces, before the latex drone was upon them.

The diminutive vixen, a good head shorter than the two guards, dived through their legs and spun around as she skidded across the tiled floor, her bow now raised in a menacing staff-like fashion, with the top half now swivelled 180 degrees to face the opposite direction. With a loud, angry cry, Feo leapt at the guard on the left and slashed downwards with all her strength. The soldier raised his arms in a vain attempt to shield himself, but the serrated edge of the bow ripped across his limb like a chainsaw, shooting a gout of blood down across the floor. Before he had a chance to do more than stare at his limb blankly, Feo swung the staff diagonally upwards, cutting through his body armour like it was merely paper and slicing into his torso a good two inches deep, eliciting a pained gurgle.

The second guard raised his rifle as he saw his companion cut down and squeezed the trigger, unloading the mag of his M4A5 into the latex vixen; the deafening cacophony of gunfire booming out in the corridor mixed with the rain of spent ammunition cartridges falling to the ground as Feo remained motionless. Despite the soldier's terror and nerves, most of the bullets hit true, striking her in both her armoured limbs and her armourless torso, but they either ricocheted off the plating or just deflected off the latex leaving barely a scuff.

Feo slowly raised her head to glare at the remaining soldier, her purple eyes glowing with a cold fury as she raised her staff again. The soldier, upon seeing the negligible damage done by his sustained burst of fire, dropped his rifle and pulled his combat dagger out in a reverse grip, his last chance against this near-invincible opponent.

The vixen grinned at the challenge as she snapped her staff over her knee, breaking it into two hand scythes with a significant backwards tilt to the blades, resulting in a more obtuse angle than most scythes had. She slowly settled into a loose ready stance, one heeled foot slightly extended while her body was off-centre to his.

The soldier, on the other hand, adopted more of a square on stance as a drop of perspiration rolled down his cheek, before launching into a heavy downwards stab with a cry of desperation.

Feo simply took a step backwards, sending the outclassed soldier plunging down towards empty space. He recovered and took a step forward, using the momentum of his previous swing to throw a wild haymaker towards her.

Feo ducked this blow too and danced a few steps backwards, a cocky smile gracing her blood-spattered features, "Dear oh dear, don't tell me this is the best you've got! Jeez, your bosses really need to re-evaluate their training practices, 'cause this is pathetic!"

The soldier growled angrily at her taunts, "For such a tiny little thing, you've certainly got a pair of balls on you!" he retorted, before suddenly lunging towards her, his arms stretched wide.

This caught Feo off guard and before she had time to take more than a hesitant step backwards, he had already managed to slip behind her and get an arm around her throat. With a triumphant roar he hefted Feo off the ground, using her own weight as leverage to tighten the choke hold around her neck, causing her to drop her scythes as her hands instinctively went to try to break the hold.

But while this would have been ordinarily quite effective against a target, to Feo it was merely a minor annoyance. She knew she didn't have the mass to turn the choke hold around, so instead she did the next best thing. With a weak grunt she swung her legs forward, before slamming them backwards as hard as she could against her assailant's crotch.

This elicited a pained yelp from the soldier as he immediately loosened his grip, enough so that Feo was able to slip free and grab one of her scythes. She stood up with a scowl and raised the weapon to him, but instead of attacking, she spoke instead.

"How long have you been stationed here?"

The soldier stiffened, now weaponless as he stared at the smaller drone in front of him.

"One and a half months. Was transferred in after we lost some soldiers to you DIGOS fuckers..."

Feo's eyes narrowed a little as she stared into his eyes, searching for any sign of deception. A heartbeat later, she knew that she wouldn't find any, and lowered her weapon.

"Then run. Run and tell your superiors that I'm here. Tell them Captain Asilion knows what they did to her, and she's coming for them."

He looked at her, dumbfounded that he was being given a chance to walk away and escape the fate that his fellow soldiers had. Feo could see conflicting emotions fighting across his face, before he squared off against her and raised his fists. She didn't even need to hear his next words to know what was going through his mind. He would rather die here with his friends, his family beside him, than to be shamed into running away. She knew, because she would have done exactly the same thing for her own family, her own squad, back when she was human...

As he lunged at her, she could tell he wasn't expecting to survive. Hell, he was probably counting on it. So she did the only thing she could think of. She stepped to one side and drove her swinging elbow into the side of his face, sending him sprawling to the floor. But... this time he didn't get up. Either there was no fight left in him, or she knocked him out with the strike. At this point... She guessed it didn't matter. She retrieved her other scythe and reformed her bow, before casting one last glance at this soldier that had stood his ground to her. She shook her head sadly and moved off back down the corridor, towards the main R&D labs of the complex.

The glass windows adorning the outside of the main lab gave a clear view of the inside to Feo as she approached. Everything was exactly as she remembered it. It always was. From the day she came into existence as Feo, to when she was loosed against the DIGOS, the room was always kept in immaculate, perfect condition. Benches were arranged around the outer wall, with piles of electronics in various degrees of completion laid neatly out on them, some of them looking quite similar to DIGOS tech. Terminals sat on the next ring of benches, all glowing with a soft blue light and humming quietly in the otherwise silent room. And in the centre of it all sat a now-empty tank, where she was brought from her entirely computer-based existence into the physical shell she now inhabited.

The sight of it made her sick. It brought to bear the memories of what had been done to her, what she had been forced to do under their orders. It set the coolant in her veins boiling, and if she still had them locked to automatic, her emotional inhibitors would have kicked into overdrive. But it was different now, and she allowed herself to bathe in the roiling anger now coursing through her. She wanted to rip and tear this whole place apart...

Then she noticed the researchers inside, looking at her with confusion. But, who wouldn't be confused at the sight of a latex-clad, helmeted figure wielding a bow? Their confusion turned to fear as she raised her bow and nocked an arrow, before the window between them shattered inward as a researcher dropped to the ground, clutching the bolt of nanogoo embedded in his heart.

Panic immediately spread among them as they started screaming and running, but Feo paid it absolutely no mind as she nocked another bolt. Three more were fired in quick succession and three more scientists dropped dead to the ground. Their screams were nothing compared to the roaring bloodlust echoing in her ears. She relished in their fear as she executed them, one by one, ignoring the begging and pleading as she stepped over each corpse. Until only one remained, one that Feo was intentionally saving for last.

An elderly man, lab coat pressed and starched, as immaculate as the room around him once was, was standing by the door to his office, watching everything going on around him with sad, yet expectant eyes. Feo glared at him as she felt her emotions starting to race again, but... this time, she engaged her emotional limiters and let the bloodlust subside until it was a dark pit in her stomach once more.

"Feo... I was wondering when you'd come back to us..." he spoke simply, his voice even, though touched with the slightest quiver of sadness.

Feo held her angry glare at him for a moment, before she disengaged her helmet and placed it on one of the benches, letting the man who created her gaze upon her face one last time.

"Dr Lorenz... You can't possibly expect me to forgive you for what you did... For what you made me do..." she replied, her voice dripping with venom, with hatred for the man who tortured her into existence.

"No, I suppose I don't... But I figured a soldier such as you would be used to following orders, even if they were distasteful. And I thought you were a good soldier, after all?"

She snarled in response to that, "Following orders? The things you made me do would be considered war crimes! They were heinous and disgusting! And that's not even counting everything you did to me!" she shouted back, her anger starting to bubble back to the surface again.

He slowly shook his head, "I'm sorry you feel that way, Feo, I really do. But what if I could promise to make everything better?"

It took everything Feo had not to scream at him, and she forced herself to reply to him through gritted teeth, "And how would you do that?" she snarled, glaring daggers at the man who had brought so much misery into the world.

He simply inclined his head towards the door behind her without saying a word. Before she had a chance to turn around and see what he was talking about, she felt a searing pain as a two-pronged spear pierced through her suit and into her synthetic body, before emerging out the other side glistening with coolant from a ruptured pipe. She stared at it blankly for a moment before her body was flooded with electricity from the attached taser, sending many hundreds of thousands of volts arcing throughout her body and causing her to drop to the ground and spasm weakly as her motor control systems were overwhelmed. Then came the darkness...

Pain... That was all she could feel as she drifted limply through this empty space. She felt as if her whole body was on fire, yet she couldn't move an inch to writhe or squirm. She desperately wished she could scream her heart out from the agony she was experiencing, anything to try to relieve it, but she found herself completely incapable to do anything but exist there as this pain washed over her.

Then the pain started to fade, replaced by a cold stillness. She could hear talking as if it was two rooms over, muffled and indistinct, completely unable to be deciphered. She could feel the gentle thrum of energy flowing into her charging ports, and she could sense an outside connection to her cyberbrain...

Her eyes flew open, revealing her to be suspended inside a liquid solution inside the pod where she had spent much of her life before DIGOS. Her senses sharpened again, and she could just barely make out shapes through the murky liquid, but she could hear what they were saying loud and clear.

"... preparations to copy her memory banks and reinitialise her AI. Despite everything that's happened, she brought us back an absolute treasure trove of information about the DIGOS!"

Feo felt the cold chill of fear run down her spine; a complete reinitialization of her AI would be the equivalent of resetting her back to how she was when she was first brought online, almost seven years ago! She'd lose everything, who she'd become, the people she'd met, the family she found... She'd lose it all!

She willed with all her might to move her arms to the walls of the tank but found herself still wholly unable to move. This was followed by a soft chuckle from outside the tank as the previously talking figure turned its attention to her.

"Oh dear, Feo, don't bother fighting it. We've locked out control to your motor control systems; you're not going anywhere. It'll be far easier on you if you just sit back and let the reinitialization happen. Well, not that it matters, really, you won't remember any of this anyway."

For the first time in seven years, Feo broke down into tears, mentally if not physically thanks to the lockout. She poured her grief, her fear and her anger into her mournful mental wails, radiating out through the DIGOS Link and finding nobody nearby to pick it up... Except... In her grief and distress, she completely missed the ping in the Link growing brighter and brighter.

A loud twang echoed through the room, before the tank was impacted by something heavy. Not only impacted, but it was pierced, and something red was leaking into the aqueous green solution. She heard Dr Lorenz yelp in surprise and spin around, before he was thrown aside. She couldn't see what had happened to him, thanks to her limited field of view, but the cacophony of crashing implied a satisfactorily rough landing.

A few moments passed as another figure approached the terminal that Dr Lorenz had been working at, before they spoke to her in a soft, soothing voice, not aloud, but across the Link.

"Shh darling, everything's going to be okay. I'm disengaging the lockout on your systems and I'm draining the tank for you, just hold on. I'll get you out."

Feo couldn't explain how, but her voice, her very presence, felt like a warm, fluffy blanket being wrapped around her, and she instantly knew she was safe. But she didn't quite take her advice as the instant she had control of herself again, she yanked out the cables from her neck and slammed her fist into the door of the tank. Two more left it covered in spiderweb-like cracks, before a final blow shattered it completely, flooding the area around the tank in the viscous green fluid she had been submerged in.

She took a few steps forward and fell to her knees, doubling over and coughing the liquid from her synthetic lungs, before she slowly turned her gaze to her saviour. The unmistakably DIGOS vixen offered her arm to pull Feo to her feet, while her other clutched her bow in her latex grip. She was far more heavily armoured than Feo or any other drone she's seen. But as Feo's eyes raised to the thrumming purple crystal in her chest, she realised that her saviour was anything but a simple drone.

As the Unit helped Feo to her feet, she offered the drone a warm smile, "I'm glad I got to you in time, dear. I was a little worried I'd be a little too slow avoiding all the patrols around... Your route was pretty perfectly planned to avoid most of them, but gosh, I had to dodge like five on the way here. Oh! Where are my manners! I'm Unit XVI!"

She took a little bow, causing her mohawk of white hard-light hair to wave a little. Feo was awestruck and didn't know what to say for a good few seconds before she finally managed to pull herself together and form words again, "M-Miss Sixteen, I don't quite know how to express my gratitude for saving me..." she eventually managed to stammer, eliciting an amused smile from the Unit.

"Oh please, you don't need to address me as Miss! Besides... With what you were putting out onto the link, how could I not help?" she replied, her voice quivering a little in recollection of just how grief and sadness filled Feo's wail had been.

Feo was quiet for a few moments as she took time to process everything that had happened, before a thought occurred to her, "Hang on... How on Earth did you get here? If you jumped into action when you heard me, how could you already be here?"

Sixteen chuckled softly and lightly tapped Feo's forehead, "I see taking some time to think about it isn't quite your strong suit, dear... But I guess that can be fixed in time!" she replied teasingly, "I've been watching and following you, dear, since well before you left HQ. You could say I've had my eye on you since I was finished. I wanted to make sure, though, that you'd be a good fit."

Feo's look of confusion was answered with a hearty guffaw from the Unit, "Well, what better host for the DIGOS's new infiltrator Unit than our best infiltrator by far?"

She stared at her with a combination of shock and confusion across her face, "B-but.. I'm just a drone? I thought that's not how any of this works? Besides, I thought you needed a... you know, flesh and blood person?"

Sixteen reached out and rested an arm on Feo's shoulder, "You could say that what we really need is a soul to join with ours, and I'm fairly certain you have retained yours, darling... Especially if any of this is anything to go by," she adds, gesturing to the destruction around her.

Feo was about to reply when she heard a weak groaning coming from her left, from the direction that Dr Lorenz was thrown. Sixteen glanced over curiously, keeping an eye on him, but Feo had other plans. Glancing around, she found the double-pronged spear contraption that had been used to incapacitate her lying on the ground next to the dead security guard who had jumped her. She hefted it up and examined it, before walking slowly towards the man who, for the second time, had almost destroyed her life.

His face was covered in blood from a broken nose and a multitude of cuts, while his pristine lab coat was bloodied from where he fell on a number of shards from the broken electronics. He was trying to crawl towards the main doors as Feo rounded the benches, spear resting against her shoulder as she held it upright. He turned to face her with fear in his eyes.

"F-Feo, y-you know what w-we had you do was f-for the g-greater good, you know that, right?" he stammered as the drone slowly approached him. That fear turned to terror as he saw what she was carrying.

"W-wait, please, you don't have to do this! S-surely we can work something out!"

Feo ignored him as she walked closer, before stopping less than a metre from his cowering, bloody form.

"Don't you know, doctor?" she spoke softly, "We all reap what we sow in the end..."

With that, she plunged the spear into his chest and activated the taser, sending his body convulsing and writhing for what felt like an eternity, before eventually, he fell still.

It was some time before Feo looked up from Dr Lorenz's body towards Sixteen, but the Unit had been watching her the whole time with an expression of concern and understanding radiating from her. Feo falteringly wandered over to the unit, who quickly engulfed Feo in a tight hug.

"We can get out of here whenever you want, dear," she said reassuringly to her, "But if you're ready... You can shuck the last of the shackles of your old life and become someone new..."

Feo looked up into those warm purple eyes, beaming with love and care for the drone in her arms, and felt a jolt of recognition in those eyes. They were hers... Of course, how could they be anything else? Feo took a deep breath, before slowly nodding.

"I'm ready."