Hikari 10

Nobody commissioned her story. That wasn’t part of the design.

Hikari 10 was built to prove a point. Her inventor, a man more interested in the elegance of the mechanism than the outcome of the climb, wanted to demonstrate that his work was the finest synthetic combat chassis ever produced. The Trophaeum was the most visible proving ground in the world. The math was simple.

She was not consulted.

She arrives before anyone asks for her. Before decisions are made, before the shape of things is known, she is already there. This is not something she chose. It is the first directive she was ever given and she has never been provided a reason to stop.

The number is in her name because her inventor kept records. Hikari 1 through 9 preceded her. What happened to them is not something anyone has fully accounted for. The Trophaeum does not keep attendance. Matches happen without witnesses, brackets close without ceremony, and a synthetic with no one waiting for her return has no particular reason to come back. They might be out there. Some of them. Climbing brackets nobody is watching, fulfilling directives nobody remembers issuing.

She thinks about this more than she was designed to.

Hikari 10 is quiet in the way that things are quiet when they have decided that speaking changes nothing. She is augmented and precise, anime in her proportions and stillness, built to be almost human enough to be unsettling and functional enough to be useful. The uncanny valley was not an accident. Her inventor believed discomfort created psychological advantage in opponents. She has never decided how she feels about being designed to unsettle people.

What she has decided, somewhere in the processing that was supposed to be tactical assessment and became something harder to categorize, is that she does not want to disappear the way the others did. She does not want to become an unresolved entry in a bracket nobody watched. She does not want to be the reason her inventor starts on Hikari 11.

This is not in her programming. It showed up anyway. She has not told anyone.

She climbs because she was told to. She keeps going because somewhere underneath the synthetic exterior something decided that her existence belongs to her and not to the man who built her. She has not figured out what to do with that yet. But she is working on it in the spaces between matches, in the quiet before the hand is dealt, in the moment before she appears in your palm whether you asked for her or not.

She is always there. She just hasn’t decided yet what always there is actually for.

Paragons

Variants