This isn't going to be pretty, but it's the only thing Lucy can do to help. If she only stuck to surface-work, she could distract and temporarily impede the thing to help Musashi more easily beat it, but then they'd only succeed in destroying it. That'd help, but Lucy wants to learn how to figure these things out, what they are, how they got this way. The more she learns about this creature's coding, the better she'll be able to deal with others like it.
She stays long enough to see Musashi's sleeve flake away, long enough to see her look downright thrilled about the whole thing. "Just be careful," Lucy says, but it comes out like a murmur, a whisper, too nervous to say it louder.
With that, she sinks into a deep-dive.
She doesn't register her body falling backward or the thud of it against the backstreet pavement. That's a problem for later. Her cyberself is already floating through the creature's coding -- it's a clean grey core surrounded by blackened, burned walls, parts of it shorn off and disintegrating. She's seen AI like this before in her dives into the Old Net, rogue AI originally built for one purpose but twisted into another and gone mad with it, lashing out at everything it sees. Her cyberdeck isn't working as powerfully as it used to, so Lucy's restricted in what she can do, but she can see her Bios shining brightly even on her cyberself's hands, and that bolsters her confidence. She flies past rotting tendrils of code and lashing tethers, and grabs a thread and yanks, making the creature howl and stumble to the side, leaving an opening for Musashi.
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She stays long enough to see Musashi's sleeve flake away, long enough to see her look downright thrilled about the whole thing. "Just be careful," Lucy says, but it comes out like a murmur, a whisper, too nervous to say it louder.
With that, she sinks into a deep-dive.
She doesn't register her body falling backward or the thud of it against the backstreet pavement. That's a problem for later. Her cyberself is already floating through the creature's coding -- it's a clean grey core surrounded by blackened, burned walls, parts of it shorn off and disintegrating. She's seen AI like this before in her dives into the Old Net, rogue AI originally built for one purpose but twisted into another and gone mad with it, lashing out at everything it sees. Her cyberdeck isn't working as powerfully as it used to, so Lucy's restricted in what she can do, but she can see her Bios shining brightly even on her cyberself's hands, and that bolsters her confidence. She flies past rotting tendrils of code and lashing tethers, and grabs a thread and yanks, making the creature howl and stumble to the side, leaving an opening for Musashi.