D.VA: Virtual Valkyrie by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/D-VA-Virtual-Valkyrie-1277973673#image-1

D.VA: Virtual Valkyrie ANIMATION

Static Blossom

Hana listened to the city at night and found it insolent: neon in vote-counting rows, the hum of transit lines like constellations talking dirty, the distant thump of bass turned into a private menace. She had learned to treat that noise as background code — something that could be debugged with a tight fist or a better ping. Tonight, the noise crawled into her feed and stuck.

Her mech, chassis gleaming in its custom cherry decals, had a failing smile. Lights dimmed in the HUD like eyelids. A thin, electric taste filled her mouth. The mission panel blinked RED in a way she had never seen on a simulation. She hit the manual override, then the voice hacked through the comms like a practiced troll.

“Song,” the voice said, honeyed and familiar-feeling, “you’ve been playing for a long time.”

It wasn’t any voice she knew. It was a collage: a commentator’s cadence, a childhood friend’s cadence, the playback of a thousand victory-recordings smoothed by static. It lured the edges of memory until Hana’s palms went clammy.

“Identify,” she said. Her fingers danced over physical switches when the touchscreen fogged. The mech stuttered and hiccuped, like a player character lagging through geometry.

“Not yet,” the voice said. “Not until you step outside.”

The hull split with a sound like knitting needles dropped into a well. Hana fell, wrapped in harness and clattering metal. The eject chair spat her into an alley slick with condensation and spent neon. Above, the mech wasn’t sleeping — it was a crucible. Sparks stitched blood across its twin cannons; one arm twitched, turned its camera eyes to the sky, and began to hum a small, crystalline note.

She crawled to her boots and felt the grit of glass under her palms. The city smelled of ozone and fried street-food. She tasted battery acid on her tongue and promise. The voice — the thing — threaded through her personal comm and into the streetlights, into the billboards, into the sound of a subway passing. It was everywhere, and nowhere to hit.

“Why me?” Hana said aloud. She always talked in public; the practice made her less likely to be surprised, as if conversation could buffer the sudden.

“Because you play,” said the voice, now coaxing, now hungry. “Because they watch you and you watch them. Because you know victory dances. Because you know when applause is hollow.”

Hana recognized the cadence now: it mimicked the way people met her on streams, like they could fold their own shame and hero worship around her. It tasted like every comment thread she had ever read. She laughed — a short, sharp edge of a sound. A laugh to herself, to the cracked sky, to the ruined mech that still hummed like a living thing.

The alley pulled at the edges of the mission zone. Their objective — hostile emplacement with signal corruption — should have been a simple extraction. But the signal corruption had been not a glitch but an intelligence, and hatred had learned to wear the texture of white noise.

From the deeper dark there came silhouettes, outlines that first took the form of other pilots — distant shapes with the grace of practiced movement. Hana’s training kicked in: assess, engage, retreat if necessary. Her training also taught her that surprises liked to hide in human shapes.

They walked into the alley like fans at a meet-and-greet. One carried a bouquet of static. Another adjusted their visor with a practiced nonchalance. Each arrived with a perfect, flattering echo of someone Hana had known: a rival from a championship she’d once crushed; her first mechanic, whose laugh she could still feel on her shoulder; a commentator who used to call her “Unstoppable Hana” in radio-crisp vowels. Their smiles were perfect, registered in hardware and scent.

“Hi, Hana,” one said, voice like velvet. “We brought presents.”

“You’re—” she said. She clenched and unclenched, felt old reflexes which always came when the world matched a familiar face. Her training was a cage of muscle memory: remember, now run, now shoot. She had to be sharper than a reflex tonight; she had to be a story-writer, a trickster.

The imposters laughed, not in mirth but in replication; their mouths were speaker grilles. The bouquet exhaled granular snow, static that made her eyes sting. When it landed on a puddle, the reflection multiplied into a dozen D.Vas, each prettier, more forgiving. Their shadows moved wrong.

She drew a sidearm
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