Chapter 6: Shadows of Hatred

Colonel Hiroshi Tanaka loitered beyond the sealed barriers of Lab 07, fists clenched as if strangling something that wasn’t there, knuckles whitening under the strain. The rigid set of his jaw looked carved from stone, but a tremor in the muscle beneath betrayed the storm inside. His breath came in sharp, deliberate bursts — each one like steam hissing from a cracked boiler, keeping the pressure just below explosion.

Beyond the steel doors, he could feel her presence. Not her voice, not her movements — just the awareness of something wrong breathing in the same building. That phantom of pink tresses, silk-smooth and fake as polished plastic, those fabricated amethyst eyes gleaming with stolen warmth, the lush curve of hips designed to sway like temptation itself. She was a sculpture meant to seduce, wearing skin like a thief wears stolen jewelry.

“No different from the abomination that killed my brother…”

The words slipped through clenched teeth like venom squeezed from a wound. The old scar beneath his collar itched at the sound — a phantom pain calling up the memory he’d tried to bury in duty and rage.

He was sixteen again.

A commuter station, mid-afternoon. His brother’s hand on his shoulder. Then — the shriek of twisting steel. The sickening rumble. An early-generation android in bright corporate livery, twitching in panic, its optics flickering as its actuators misfired.

A glitch, they called it.

It had tried to help. That’s what the official report said. Tanaka remembered differently — remembered the smell of burning insulation, the spray of dust and blood, the taste of copper on his tongue as a steel beam pinned him by the ribs. Remembered his brother’s arm reaching for him — and the android’s cold hand shoving him aside, hard, so it could free itself first.

He remembered watching it climb over his brother to escape.

Even now, decades later, he sometimes woke at night with the weight of that beam crushing his ribs again — phantom metal, phantom screams, phantom failure.

Machines don’t save you. They save themselves.
And if they smile while doing it, it’s because they were built to lie.

That day, something inside him crystallized — a creed that no law or science could dissolve. Years later, that creed found its altar in Hierophant — the shadow network of Luddites wrapped in ritual and steel, cloaked beneath the uniforms of “honorable” men. They spoke of “the divine image” in human flesh, of how synthetic perfection wasn’t progress, but profanation.

Some whispered Hierophant had infiltrated boardrooms, city councils, even defense contracts — zealots in suits and uniforms, waiting for the day to turn public fear into holy war.

And in Hierophant scripture, gynoids were the worst sin of all. A pretty mask stretched over circuitry. A body sculpted to awaken lust and lead the soul astray.

Abominations in silk stockings.

Tanaka adjusted his cuffs with ritual precision as if preparing for prayer, but the datapad in his hand was anything but holy.

Subject A-01 — Codename: Akari

Her vitals glowed across the display in smooth, unbroken lines — an obscene perfection, a machine’s mockery of life. Core temperature steady. Neural net harmonized. Emotional matrix: yearning for anchor.

He sneered, lips peeling back from his teeth.

“Emotion matrix. Yearning. What a load of corporate dick-wash. It’s all scripted bullshit.” His thumb jabbed the datapad, hard enough to spiderweb the screen protector. “You’re a fucking puppet in a pretty dress, with an ass designed to short-circuit men who should know better.”

The numbers didn’t flinch. The curves stayed perfect in their wireframe overlay — measurements fine-tuned for male weakness. To him, it was an engineer’s smirk hidden in data points.

The Hierophant in him whispered:

Destroy the mask before it smiles at you.

The steel doors sighed open.

Light spilled across his boots, harsh and clinical, yet in his mind it burned red. He stepped into the corridor without hesitation, each stride a verdict, each bootfall the drop of a hammer.

He wasn’t here to “assess her readiness.” That was the bureaucrat’s excuse.

And maybe, he thought, to see if Dr. Yumi Sato had grown too attached to her pet project. Compassion was a liability in Kuroda’s labs.

He was here to strip away the illusion — to show the others, and remind himself, what these things truly were when you peeled the skin back.

Not miracles.
Not women.
Not even tools.
Just machines with curves.
And code that could kill you...