And there it sat, pristine and untouched ever since Kya left all those years ago. The village her upbringing was rooted in sprawled before her on the other side of the sliding door she'd just opened. The door blended in via camouflage technology to be a seamless part of the dome that surrounded this place, selling the illusion that this wasn't truly a cage. Back then the kids weren't allowed to cross the picket fences around the village, due to 'roaming monsters', and were dragged back by security every time they tried crossing it so they never learnt of the cramped conditions in here. They'd have really run into the edges of their fabricated world if they weren't stopped so there was constant supervision to prevent this but they all learnt eventually anyway when things went south right at the very end. A mad panic had descended upon this happy little village as those fearful for their lives scrambled in every direction looking for a horizon to escape to, only to realise they were trapped like good little lab rats. In that sense, Kya's nickname, given to her by the researchers here, 'graveyard lab rat', made much sense. The souls of the damned on that day were all funnelled into her and she became a living graveyard holding the memories of those who were sacrificed to grant her immense power.
Kya walked briskly over to the side of a barn, as though she were a kid disobeying the curfew again, and snuck through a small gap that somehow managed to evade the notice of the destruction cult guards back when there were people living here. Pretty much all of the kids' attempts at leaving the village were done through this one hidden exit but not one child ever ratted it out and revealed the secret even after constant interrogation and threats of grounding. To think it lasted this long was honestly a miracle. Really it should have raised questions, as in why the farm's barn of all places was in such disuse that this hole went unnoticed, but kids didn't exactly prioritise questioning why society was functional without the correct building blocks in place because they were too busy just having fun. Where their food came from, when the only source of it wasn't even actively producing anything, would have been a much faster way of realising something was amiss had any of them paid any attention. Instead they just lived inside their cosy houses, pursued their hobbies, and didn't notice the writing on the wall because this was the life they'd always lived and didn't know much better. The lack of any kind of criminality or illegality amongst the residents, how everything they could possibly want just sort of appeared before them without a fuss, no visitors or wandering passer-by to this location whatsoever, etc. The kids were aware of the world beyond this village but never saw hide nor hair of it and they all accepted it and went along with it because they were content with what they had.
Kya moved through an empty street, her hand gliding across the various brick buildings to her left, and peered through windows at the insides of houses she knew all too well. They'd gotten dusty somewhat because not even the robots on patrol across the facility cleaned this place anymore. Granted that was because they'd gone haywire and become infested with leftover souls still clinging to this place but it still left the village feeling rather eery. So many bright colours painted onto various surfaces were marred by cobwebs, rust, mould, and general erosion of time. Jenny, one of the other kids living here, used to be such a clean freak and would faint at the sight of this place now in its current condition. Her room was always the shiniest and nothing was ever out of place, at least not up until the day chaos took their world by storm at which point everything in her room was knocked over as she desperately tried to flee her own home. She'd been feeling sick for the last few days after catching a cold from one of the other children, Max, and even fell down the stairs in a feverish daze and that was as far as she got.
As for Max, he was the quietest kid amongst the group of little rabble rousers and really hated needles so needed a lot of comforting and soft spoken reassurance after his usual check ups. He used to complain about feeling a part of him going missing after every needle was inserted into him and the other kids used to think him paranoid. Turns out, he was right, more so than any of the could have possibly known, and was the only one willing to question whether this was really a tiny paradise or an elaborate cage. The kids here had their souls siphoned bit by bit, and even occasionally merged, until the researchers could figure out who was suitable to act as a conduit and who was suitable to act as the nourishment. Kya could retain other souls quite well so she wasn't present during the massacre of everyone else, she only met them in parting after their souls were shoved into her later as she was strapped to an operating table. She was a more successful soul-hosting candidate than the machinery the researchers also tested compatibility with across other parts of the facility so she bore the duty of containing their souls and shouldering their legacy. In a way, she wished one of the robots had taken her place; they were unthinking and unfeeling machines who could handle close comrades being forced into their brains and conscience as screeching entities. Unfortunately none of them fit the bill and were suitable for containment of souls... At the time anyway.
Kya's current mission, which she'd get to work on after leaving this make-believe village, was to terminate the rampant robots that had managed to absorb lingering souls long after the facility was abandoned. It was as if the souls that were about to fade, due to not fitting within bloated Kya, understood their imminent danger and finally accepted even an iron maiden as metallic and suffocating as a robot as a safe haven. As such, all the machines had deviated from their regular routines, cleaning and guarding, and were now running loose throughout the base and preparing for the advent of their overlord. Back then, one particular experiment had shown decent progress but was halted due to the existence of Kya who was a project that showed even more promise at the time. The robot in question was a monstrously strong relic from eons ago that was no longer possible to resurrect and couldn't be brought back to life no matter how many parts were replaced or renewed. To that end, piloting it via souls was a backup plan for this branch of the destruction cult but not one that paid off, as Kya was the real focus after initial testing, at least not intentionally. Now that remnant souls weren't being picky, they were willingly funneling into this overlord and creating an entity with immense strength and ill will towards its captors and foul experimenters which was a terrible combination for the cult of destruction and one they wanted dealt with.
Kya heard of this during a briefing, or rather overheard it while she was sneaking around, and willingly volunteered to come and rectify the issue personally as it was a chance to revisit this old haunt and sort out her feelings about it. She'd never really processed what transpired here before, not properly. One day she just woke up with floating white skulls hovering around inside her blacked void of a conscience, all laughing in tones that reminded her of people she once knew. Everything before, and even to some extent after, was a blur to her so perhaps coming back here would help formulate an opinion or understanding about what she had every right to, and should, feel. She'd sort of glossed over it, that was what her family encouraged. She was told not to be weak minded and that everyone involved was better off because 'we were all one step closer to destruction'. If Kya had any issues, she could take them up with the fundamental champion of destruction for not destroying this world, and all the pain it could inflict on people, sooner which then meant the cult had to take measures of their own to speed it up. They considered themselves to be reagents, catalysts that sped up the process they assumed the destruction wielder would champion. At this point, however, they'd heard nothing about him due to being born in some quiet corner of the world nobody had as of yet discovered. They gave Ares the benefit of the doubt, assuming he was conserving power and readying himself for an explosive entrance onto the scene once he'd grown sufficiently, but they would have still rather he contacted them and became a core part of their plan directly. Truly, they'd labelled Ares without knowing a single thing about him, and that came back to bite them in the rear after he would go on to later publicly disavow them, but at the time they genuinely believed him to be their saviour. He was the one who could bring about their ideals.
Everyone in the destruction cult had different reasons for wanting the world to burn; some thought a better world without humanity could spring up in the wake of their eradication, some just hated the universe and felt it was irredeemable, some wanted revenge on specific individuals and this was an indirect method of getting it. Those members of this branch, the one Kya was a part of, felt the world brought about more net suffering than joy and had a nihilistic outlook which sort of seeped into Kya who learned, or rather was taught, not to care about anything or grow attached. Her life was fleeting, this world was a temporary journey, the people in it all harboured a deep seated evil no matter how they professed themselves otherwise, and the end result of mass destruction would liberate everyone from waking up every day and having to survive another day in this hell hole. If anything, Kya's friends were all 'lucky' for 'reaching that end' somewhat sooner. Kya spent a large portion of her teen years being told she was the unlucky one for surviving and any anger or injustice she felt was actually directed at that whether she knew it or not. She wasn't upset her friends died, she was upset she hadn't departed with them; that was what had been railroaded into her head like a spike into mud. To some extent, Kya was smart enough to know, or eventually discern as she grew up, that this was all wrong but she'd heard and believed it for long enough that that she didn't really care anymore. Her feelings on the matter were muted. There was not enough hate left in her to be livid about something that happened so many years ago that she never held any dissatisfaction for to begin with after being convinced this was all normal. Plus the souls were still there, of most of the friends she had, so maybe her parents were right and her life wasn't as bad as she made it out to be in her own head. Other people in other branches had it worse, Kya came to that opinion after witness first hand the struggles other kids went through when spectating trials and tribulations cross the various branches. All she had to put up with was an injection of souls which she'd slept through too. 'Can't complain', that was the end conclusion.
And yet, being here now stirred up various memories and recollections that left her with mixed feelings. An uncomfortable swelling of guilt and regret spun in her stomach like a whirlpool but she couldn't quite place why. Would her friends have wanted her to get revenge? It's not like she could just ask the souls or anything, they were unresponsive to anything other than attack orders and battle commands. Not that Kya really liked using them, it sent a chill down her spine every time and if she wasn't careful she could be temporarily taken over. It was rare, and she could control them pretty well, but it was all still rather unpleasant. Kya was talented to begin with and didn't have to rely on this external power at all anyway as her affiliation for daggers, guns, and gadgetry / technology, was phenomenal. Actually, her talent for guns extended to just about any sort of projectile weaponry and she was getting really good at artillery theory style assassination. She was a hybrid technomancer / assassin and had even picked up some decent electric arts to further the former. As far as assassins went she was highly versatile and had a real knack for the job despite not being affiliated with the darkness pillar in any real way. This was highly rare but Kya's mastery over an extremely technical art called 'Bullet Dance' enabled her. Bullet Dance worked almost identically to the Departure art, that Vargaraad used in front of Ares recently, in that the user was thrown backwards from wherever they were pointing with their weapon. If Kya shot forward, she would be pushed backwards a short distance at immense speeds. The difference, though, was that Departure wasn't an attack and couldn't be used multiple times in a row. Departure sent the umbrella wielder much further away, it was a method of surefire retreat and establishing a gap between the aggressor and the aggressee. Bullet Dance was supposedly the opposite, a tool to initiate combat at lightspeed by shooting and blasting oneself forward via the recoil. Beyond that, it enabled swift repositioning and dodging mid combat with sudden movements that were unpredictable. On top of that it was usable with all sorts of bullet-spewing weaponry so, in the case of Kya who had two trusty pistols by her side, the amount of times she could activate this art in a row was plentiful. The mana cost was trivial and it only required ammunition to be fired so, unlike Departure, using it multiple times in a row to dash around faster than the eye could follow was entirely possible...
'Possible'.
In reality, there were many problems with this art and, to many, it didn't even make sense. The current gun exemplar, for instance, refused to touch this art because it was 'counterintuitive and unwieldy'. As a gunman one would surely want to shoot their opponent at some point... But if you did that while Bullet Dance was activated you would send yourself flying away from your target and only end up making follow-up shots harder to land. God forbid you wanted to shoot someone more than once, you would have to change your aim each and every single shot as you wound up in a new position after every bullet fired. Being careless with this art would push the user of cliffs, into obstacles and walls, and maybe even into the direct firing line of arts if you were unskilled enough. To even use this art at a competent, 'I won't kill myself with this thing', level it was wise to spend hundreds of hours training with it in simulations and secluded, harmless environments. And all that was just to understand how movement worked with this art, let alone actual combat. Mastering how far each shot moved you, how to move multiple times in a row correctly, how to keep up with such velocity without getting lost and not knowing where you are, how to adjust angles on the fly, and how to use this art with different guns that all had their own unique challenges due to varying distance and speed imposed on the user... It was nightmarish. Those who specialised in this art rarely had time to specialise in literally anything else and dedicated most of their life to it. Even then whether they could actually fight was another matter entirely. If shooting your opposition removed you from the fight then Bullet Dancers had to learn how to throw hands. Shoot their way in and then beat their opponent up because the gun wouldn't work. Learning Bullet Dance wasn't enough as it was more of a tool for enabling close combat than anything resembling a gun style of combat. Only those at the highest level could incorporate this art AND the act of shooting an opponent at the same time because both parts of this equation actively stifled the progress of the other. It was a balancing act that wasn't seen as worth it. For what it was worth, however, this art did shine when the user was surrounded on all sides. Shooting someone in front of you, and pushing yourself into an advantageous close combat position against the foe behind you simultaneously, was arguably very strong... It was also incredibly rare such a scenario would ever play out in that exact way.
Put simply, using the art was hard and using it well was damn near impossible. Kya though? Kya got it. She understood the intricacies of this art and dedicated most of her life to it and saw results much faster than anyone else. So fast was her learning pace, in fact, she even had time to learn other combat styles on top of Bullet Dance for weapons like the slingshot or the bow and arrow. Triple Down and Double Up, the arts that Phobos displayed back during the international, were considered extraordinarily hard to learn but Kya had already long since mastered those too. She even went a step further and mastered Quadruple Convergence, an art that combined the two and summoned four copy weapons to shoot alongside her with similar firepower. If it was a ranged weapon, or related art, she could pick it up in no time flat. Combine that with her ability to override gadgets and technology with her unique arts, and her respectable level of proficiency with daggers and claws, and she didn't really need the extra souls implanted into her. She could bypass any security, cross any gap and instantly neutralise any threat, and hunt down fleeing foes with one hand behind her back. There wasn't much flashy magic involved in any of this but it was still quite the sight because Bullet Dance was pretty iconic. Those who could use it were revered as showmen for a reason and it was possible to even have a career just displaying talents with Bullet Dance. Tournaments between Bullet Dance users were some of the most watched videos on the internet because it was considered to be the most creative form of combat out there. Those who were good at it were in a league of their own and Kya wasn't much different in that regard. She was incredibly young to have become this good but there was a reason she already had an apotheosis form tucked away, she was a real candidate to become a Godly figure in the future.
So why mention this? Well, though the robots in this facility had no obligation to clean anymore, they did occasionally show up in this village regardless. Whenever they weren't actively preparing for their overlord to be fully revived they would wander aimlessly according to the wills of the souls inside them. Most had attachments to this place still so it wasn't unusual for the robots to congregate at this place when nothing else was going on. Kya had caught sight of these robots and made no effort to hide herself from them so alarms were already blaring and attracting even more security to this place. That was fine, though, she was done with her tour down memory lane and was ready to do her duty. A quick flourish of two silver pistols later and she was looking at the village around her in a new light. Her home was now little more to her than an environment, one suitable for bouncing around on the walls or kicking off small bumps and hills. Bullet Dance had many small interactions with unusual shapes and slopes regarding the accruement of speed. Shooting up a ramp made the wielder double their speed, walls could halt a Bullet Dance early, and even terrains with better grip could complicate usage of the art. All such contrivances needed to be taken into account when using this art but, luckily for Kya, she was damn good at it. Unfortunately for the twenty or so robots that had all arrived at the village with eery red eyes trained on her, she was fully ready for them and in the mood to let loose a few rounds. Some of her old companions' souls were still trapped in these robots and, though they couldn't be saved, they could at least be spared and sent to the afterlife properly. Perhaps if Kya were more assertive she would have said something along the lines of 'let's Dance'. Seeing as how she wasn't, she instead opted to just silently stare down her robotic enemies and wait for the opportunity to strike hard and strike fast. Kya was silent, very silent, but equally lethal and the tin cans who were desecrating this place would soon learn that the hard way.