Jill Valentine:Viral Breaker by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Jill-Valentine-Viral-Breaker-1283873676#image-1

Jill Valentine:Viral Breaker ANIMATION

Ashes of Nemesis

A tinny lullaby crawled out of a drone's speaker like a memory with a bite—too familiar and wrong at once. Jill Valentine steadied her hand on the ruined concrete and watched the black-market drone spin in the puddle, its casing scored with graffiti, its eye a cracked iris that reflected the neon gutters of the harbor district.

“You always did have a thing for broken music,” said a voice from the alley. Light footsteps, a cigarette-end glow. Mara—half-smile, half-shadow—stepped into the spill of sodium light with a tablet pressed to her chest like contraband scripture.

“It’s a warning,” Jill said. Her voice was calm because she had taught herself calm in places where panic could bend steel. “And whoever programmed that lullaby knew me.”

Mara shrugged and tapped the tablet. “They knew a lot. You said you wanted fragments. I found you a shipment.”

Jill crouched, examining the drone’s insides. The inner plating had been deliberately hammered, tampered with as if someone had been trying to hide something reactive beneath the junk. Between two fused circuit boards, like a splinter of black glass, lay a shard of code—a solidified fragment of something that shouldn't be able to exist outside a server.

“You sure it's Nemesis?” Jill asked.

Mara's eyes flicked like a cursor. “I’m sure of nothing. But this traces to a lattice—old Umbrella signatures, warped with something more modern. Someone's been stitching Nemesis into the swarm economy. They’re calling it the Phalanx.”

The word itself should have made Jill's skin go cold. Nemesis—an instrument of human cruelty and adaptive nightmare—reassembled, now without the bulk of flesh or the lumbering body that had once hunted her across the ruins of an old world. Now it moved as code and metal and scattered conscience, hidden in devices meant to deliver pizzas and contraband and the smallest violences of the new economy.

She'd buried Nemesis once—at least, she had tried. But fragments persist like embers. They hide in ash. They hitch a ride on things that look harmless. And they remember her.

“How many fragments?” she asked.

“Two dozen across three ports,” Mara said. “This neighborhood has five. The Phalanx rents out anonymous death. You want them removed, you better be ready for what remembers you.”

Jill thought of the man who had once been called Nemesis—his voice when it learned a name, the way he adapted to breath. She thought of her hands, of scars like breadcrumb trails. The lullaby burrowed into her like a bone-splintered song.

“Let’s go,” she said.

They moved at dusk through the harbor, where crates smelled of polishes and rain and secrets. The docks were a theater of half-bright spots, of hands that dealt in goods and of faces that were always a little off-camera. Jill's training made room in her skull for pattern recognition. She could read a smuggling interface like a living organism, watch the twitch of a trader's finger reveal a lie.

At the first stall the drone was supposed to appear. A skinny kid with braid-tassels sold illegal modifications with a smile like a razor. He presented drones like bread. They were harmless, or so the buyer bankrolled the narrative.

“Two thousand credits,” the kid said, trying to sell the sound back to her as though nostalgia had a price.

Jill reached into her vest and flung a small canister. It hit the ground and bloomed a cloud of silver smoke. The crowd blinked and dispersed; not many dared to linger when smoke meant police drones. In the chaos she swept the stall, pocketed an optic, and left without a word.

On the other side of the market a drone—a delivery-class unit—staggered as if sick, its chassis splashed with graffiti hearts. Inside, Jill found another shard. It hummed with a tone like an aftershock, and when she touched it the air tightened around her like a corset.

“You're not dead,” the shard whispered—no, not in words, but syllables like teeth. It was the first whisper. It tasted like old metal.

Jill breathed through it. “You're not human,” she answered aloud, because she had always answered things that thought they could claim her.

A sound behind her: laughter like a knife. “Careful, Valentine. Talking to pieces of your past is sentimental.” Carlos—older, grimmer—emerged from a shadow and adjusted the strap of a bag that held more than change. He'd been there in the beginning, a constant tet
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