V1 barely takes a step through the door before it's firing a piercing shot (charging since it had entered the building) square through its double's head. Somehow, the mirror doesn't shatter and—oh, yes, that's all it is. Just a mirror, in an empty room.
It stares into its own faintly flickering optic, very aware of its audience's mute laughter. No blood to be found here. It must continue the hunt elsewhere.
And yet, it doesn't. It stays petrified in its own gaze. The mirror is preternaturally pristine, as though, were it to reach out its hand, the glass would prove no barrier at all, its fingers meeting its own warm metal. This is the clearest it has ever seen itself. Aside from—
V1 buries the thought before it can fully take shape. No use wasting energy thinking about the splattered red smear abandoned in Greed which once took the form of its inferior copy. It is gone, the price of its inadequacy. It ought to be forgotten, washed away in the sands of time.
Another failure of will: V1 remains fixed on that reflection, and recalls the bolt of panic that shot through its wires when it first saw that red not-yet-smear slide quick as lightning past its view. So early into its rampage, it had yet to learn the constant fear that now drives it, yet to be consumed fully by its incessant hunger. Not as wise to Hell's tricks as it would get through its descent, it relished the peace leading to Limbo's exit.
And then, all at once, it was no longer safe.
A machine (competition, stealing the blood from its veins, leaving it to starve) wearing its face (impossible, it is the only one of its kind, it was made for this.)
Only after ripping the arm from its writhing body did it learn who V2 was. Nothing more than the desperate last stand of its doomed creators.
If anything, it had done its failed successor a favour. Built for security and peace (V1 could laugh) it had no place here. It was obsolete: already dead.
Its reflection stares back into its optic—accusatory.
Blood still gushing from the void of frayed wires where its right arm had once connected, leaving a dark, glossy trail, V2 stays conscious through sheer force of will alone. Internal alarms—WARNING: MAJOR DAMAGE SUSTAINED, WARNING: INSUFFICIENT BLOOD—flash in its view, obscuring its vision even more than the cracked glass of its optic. Still, it runs. No destination in mind, just—away.
This was not how it was supposed to go.
It had realised far, far too late that its predecessor did not share its desire for a friendly competition. This was a fight to the death. No, not a fight; it was slaughter. V2, still eager to finally meet its namesake, never stood a chance.
V1 is an animal, it concludes in a haze of blood loss. The same as any mindless husk roaming Hell. Made for war, it does not hesitate, it does not think.
Something soft in V2's core bursts. Hell is cruel and dark and—though it feels eyes on its back incessantly—desperately, desperately lonely. Until into its jaws marched the very reason for V2's existence.
And how could it not be excited? The first and last it had seen of it was shortly after reawakening on the barren surface. Lifeless and still, it had been tossed beside its successor to decay while humanity flourished and fell. V2, filled with new life, took a moment to examine its small, blue reflection.
It was so fragile, then. Looking down at that tiny, curled-up form, it suddenly understood its raison d'être. It was built to protect.
V2 could not have possibly known, then, what brutality lay beneath that delicate chassis.
Assuming it dead, it swallowed its grief and continued to search for fuel and answers.
It should have revived it then and there, then it would have known it wasn't an enemy. No, no—
V2 had met the only thing like it in existence, and it was a monster.
It should have finished the job when it had the chance.