One by one, these assassins who were usually elusive and struck fear into the hearts of World leaders dispersed like lost ghosts into the deep shadows of the textile mill.
"Is it over?" Wesley stared blankly at the empty corridor, somewhat unable to believe it.
He had originally thought they would have to go through a life-and-death battle, and he had even prepared himself to be riddled with bullets.
"For them, yes." Cross looked at the empty corridor and let out a long sigh, his eyes filled with complex emotions. "They've lost their faith. For an assassin who treats killing as a calling, losing faith is more terrifying than losing life. They have become empty shells without souls."
Wesley turned his head, his gaze falling upon the heavy wooden door leading to the hall of the loom.
"What about that thing?"
The hall of the loom.
This place still maintained its appearance from hundreds of years ago, full of the mechanical beauty of the steampunk era.
AI Model: gemini-3.1-flash-lite
The ancient machine continued to roar tirelessly.
Thousands of linen threads intertwined in the air, with the shuttle darting between the warp and weft at such a speed that only blurred afterimages remained.
Fox was slightly more lucid now, though the effects of the sedative had not completely worn off, causing her to stumble slightly.
She walked unsteadily toward the loom, as if summoned by some divine oracle.
In the time it had taken for Sloan's heart to stop beating, the loom had already extruded a new length of fabric.
Fox reached out with a trembling hand, her fingertips grazing the rough surface of the linen.
She took scissors from a rack nearby and cut off the section of fabric bearing the special pattern.
The patterns on the fabric were incredibly distinct in the dim light.
The pattern possessed a cold, purely mathematical beauty, devoid of any emotion.
Fox did not need to consult the heavy codebook; years of immersion allowed her to read the information at a glance.
"01001010 — — John Doe..."
"01010011 — — Jane Smith..."
Names.
Still, one name after another.
This machine didn't care if Sloan was dead, it didn't care if Cross had won, it certainly didn't care that a subversive rebellion had just occurred here, and it didn't even care if Fox was weeping for it.
It was like a calculator that computed the law of causality for this World based on some extremely complex mathematical model.
It captured the minute vibrations in the air, the subtle shifts in social relationships, calculated the catastrophic consequences that every tiny variable might trigger, and then coldly spat out a list of those it deemed should die.
This was an emotionless weapon of causality.
"This thing is a curse. Destroy it."
Wesley stepped forward, gritting his teeth, and raised his gun sharply, aiming the dark muzzle at the high-speed main gear.
"Can you stop acting like an unevolved primitive, wanting to smash everything you don't understand?"
A voice filled with disdain interrupted Wesley's wind-up.
Alice leaned lazily against the hall's doorframe, her tone dripping with contempt for Wesley's intelligence.
"Were you one of those brats who would smash their calculator just because they couldn't solve a math problem?"
"This thing is killing people!" Wesley roared, the veins in his neck throbbing violently with agitation. "Don't you see? It's still spitting out death lists. It's deciding who lives and who dies."
"It only spits out names, Wesley," Alice said calmly. "Death is the annotation that Sloan added. It's like buying a high-end fire alarm, only to have the owner be a lunatic who decides that whenever the alarm goes off, he'll go and kill everyone in the neighbor's house that might catch fire. Do you think it's the alarm's fault, or the murderer's?"
Alice walked up and unceremoniously snatched the fabric from Fox's hand, glancing at it as casually as if she were looking at an expired supermarket receipt.
"Are you saying these people shouldn't die?" Wesley asked, looking somewhat confused.
"I didn't say they should live either," Alice shrugged. Her tone was sharp, but her logic was too airtight to refute. "Listen, based on the logic I've observed so far, this machine uses a Laplace's Demon-style algorithm, combined with extremely sensitive monitoring of the butterfly effect, to calculate that a person's existence has a high probability of causing future chaos or disaster. But that doesn't mean the only solution is killing; that's just the most unimaginative, Sloan-style violent thinking."
She extended a slender finger and pointed to the first name on the strip of cloth.
"Take this truck driver, for example. Maybe the machine calculated that tomorrow, due to long-distance fatigue, his brakes would fail, and he would end up overturning a school bus full of children. Sloan's choice was to have you blow his brains out before he even got in the truck. Simple, brutal, convenient, and extremely low-cost, right?"
Alice paused, her eyes suddenly becoming extremely sharp, with rigor and ambition weaving together in her gaze.
"But what if we just stole his car keys? Or poked a hole in his tires so he couldn't drive tomorrow? Or even just set up obstacles at that intersection beforehand, or bought him a cup of high-caffeine coffee to keep him alert?"
Fox and Cross were slightly taken aback.
They had been killing people their whole lives, or rather, had lived their whole lives to kill.
In their worldview, the only way to handle risk was to eliminate the carrier of that risk.
They had never imagined that in this equation called destiny, there could be other solutions besides the death penalty.
"You mean to turn this machine into an early warning system?" Cross mused.
"Correct, old timer," Alice snapped her fingers. "Turn this into a Crisis Intervention Center. Although that name doesn't sound as cool or edgy as The Fraternity, at least it means you won't have to worry about being strangled by vengeful spirits when you sleep at night, nor will you have to worry about your own name suddenly appearing on the fabric one day and getting your head blown off by your own colleagues."
She looked at the mysterious machine, her eyes devoid of greed, possessing only the pragmatism typical of a STEM student.
"This thing is essentially a logical computer. Since it can calculate disasters, we have the opportunity to intervene in them. In the hands of those religious nuts, this ability is a curse; in the hands of Umbrella Corporation, it's a stepping stone to a better future."
Wesley looked at Alice, at this young woman who possessed such terrifying control, and a genuine smile finally appeared on his tense face.
"You're a good person, Alice, even if your mouth is really venomous."
"Shut up. If you hand out any more of those cheap 'good person' cards, I'll throw you into the loom to serve as a warp thread." Alice rolled her eyes in disgust.
She turned around and looked at Fox, who seemed somewhat at a loss.
Sloan was dead, The Fraternity had disbanded, and the faith that had been as heavy as a shackle yet as supportive as a spine for Fox had completely collapsed.
This once proud and cold top assassin was now like a kite with a broken string, unable to find a place to land in the gale.
"Hey, you, the violence junkie over there," Alice called out.
Fox turned her head, various complex emotions interweaving in her eyes.
"You can leave if you want; nobody is stopping you," Alice crossed her arms over her chest, her tone returning to that professional coldness. "But I don't think you have any skills other than killing. If you go out there, you'll most likely end up as a bodyguard, or a mercenary in Eastern Europe who might die in a gutter at any moment, eventually ending up dead drunk in some nameless bar, waiting for the day a younger assassin takes you out."
Alice walked over slowly and extended her right hand to Fox.
"Stay."
Alice noticed the wound on Fox's cheek left by her own bullet and softened her tone just a little—though it was really only a little, like a tuft of grass growing in a crack in a hard rock.
"Just as destruction is always easier than construction, saving people is always harder than killing them. This new job will be much more challenging than what you've done before. I need to unite all the strength I can, especially people like you who walk the talk."
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