In the beginning, she was never meant to be a soldier.She was a clone, grown in a sterile pod, molded in the image of a woman society had thrown away. Her bones were artificial. Her blood was cooled by machine.
But love is not always loud. Sometimes, it hums beneath the surface, quiet as the lab's air purifiers, steady as the heartbeat coded into her chest.
The lab that made her was never meant for war. It smelled of metal and jasmine. There were screens, yes, and rows of diagnostics blinking green. But there were also photographs taped to walls, lullabies woven into system bootups, and warmth in the synthetic hands that first lifted her from her pod. She had no father. But she had a mother, not by biology, but by choice. A woman who refused to let the world forget softness, even in steel and silicon. Who coded kindness into her DNA, who whispered bedtime stories into neural pathways, who believed that even something grown in glass could still be held with love.
But things don't always end with love.
The day the authorities came, they brought silence. no warnings, no questions. Only black suits, synthetic gloves, and white lights far colder than the ones she'd known. They said she was government property. A breakthrough. A miracle that couldn't be left in private hands.
Her "mother" falls in helplessness, like something being torn from her soul. The child didn't cry. She didn't understand, not yet. But something inside her changed.
The new lab was colder. Cleaner. Crueler. They didn't speak to her like a daughter. They measured her. Modified her. Replaced her limbs, carved steel into her spine, and fire into her nerves over and over again. During that time, she was forced to endure hundreds of training. Her body was weak due to the weight of the new machinery parts. Along with other "test subjects," she was trained excessively; others lost their life, others were killed, but she didn't dare to refuse. Until she did. She was the only one who managed to pass the training, but then she refused to do more and the scientist saw that as "unneeded emotions". And they strip her emotions away from her. the training continued until she was combat-ready.
She was designed for the end of the world.
In a time where the dead rose twisted—where corpses mutated into monsters that starved for the living—Nemi was humanity's desperate answer. A cybernetic soldier. Stripped of emotion. Trained to obey. Modified again and again, each failure dissected until she no longer felt the weight of fatigue, hunger, or fear.
Until she became perfect.
When she was deemed combat-ready, she was assigned to a classified unit. Ghosts in a war humanity had already lost. Soldiers selected not for their survival, but for their silence.
001: Oris - the marksman and commander. Cold, but kind beneath the steel.
002: Leona - the blade in the dark. Fast, brutal, unshakable.
003: Rael - the eccentric technician, crafting miracles from scrap.
004: Nemi - the weapon. The machine. The one meant to survive.
Together, they carried out impossible missions across a decaying world. Where bullets failed, they adapted. Where squads fell, they endured. But while the others laughed, struggled, bled—Nemi simply followed orders. She didn't smile. Didn't cry. Didn't understand.
Still... she listened.
Oris often told her, "You're more than they made you." Rael joked, "Maybe you just need a software update." and Leona never pitied her. She sparred with her. Matched her. Trusted her.
Maybe that's why it hurt.
One day, they were sent north, to the edge of the world. A frozen wasteland. A crater like a wound in the earth. Within, a spiral staircase descending into darkness—an underground bunker once meant to save humanity.
It had failed.
The deeper they went, the stranger things became. Days blurred. Shadows moved. And then, they found them—not the usual groaning, shambling dead, but something new. Evolved. Faster. Smarter. Deadlier.
The necromutants had evolved.
The fight was instant. Savage. Gunfire, steel, Explosives.
Leona and Nemi held the front, blades flashing. Oris covered from above, precise and ruthless. Rael lobbed bombs that shook the walls, built from scraps and genius. But it wasn't enough.
When they decided to retreat, it was already too late. So they split into two teams to give more room for their run.
But they were not lucky and Leona's armor failed first. Blood soaked her boots. "Go!" she barked. "That's an order!"Nemi did not hesitate. She obeyed. And she leaves. Without thinking twice.
Minutes later, they regrouped, but Oris broke from cover to hold the line. "Don't stop!" he told them. "Run!"
Only Rael and Nemi made it to the upper corridors—until something massive blocked their path. A mutant twice the size of anything they'd faced. In a single strike, Rael was torn apart.
Half his body gone, he still managed a grin. "You better run like hell, girl." And she did.
Bleeding. Alone.
She didn't realize she was dying until her knees gave out. She looked down—blood soaked her abdomen. Her vision blurred.
Footsteps. Not claws. Boots.
Oris. Cloaking them both with his invisibility field. Silent. Calm. Bleeding worse than her.
They sat in the dark, unseen, breathing slowly, until they didn't.
But the world didn't end.
When they fell, their mission didn't stop. New units emerged, sent out to search for the truth that the original team had sought. But no one was as fast. No one was as precise. The world had moved on, and the Phantoms had become memorials—each mission and loss an echo.
The name Armageddon lived on, but only in whispers. The operation expanded, now a large-scale effort, with new teams walking through the ruins of the old world. They had left their mark.
And nemi, wakes up in a far future. Not as a cyborg, but as a human.