NieR Chronicles 16 — The Copied City and 9S’s Return

The Copied City, Adam’s Search for Death, and 9S’s Return

Spoiler notice: this chapter covers the Adam battle and rescue of 9S in the Copied City, alongside scenes within 9S’s consciousness shown in Route B during the same period. In the game, Adam dies here. The brothers’ different fate in the anime and additional explanations in novels are not combined with this scene’s events.

1. A White City at the End of the Signal

Searching for 9S, 2B descends beneath the city. She returns to the underground cave where they saw the alien bodies, but at the fork previously taken toward the ships, she chooses another path this time. An elevator at its end carries her deeper. The 9S who stood beside her when they investigated the ships is now someone whose position she knows only through a signal. At the end of the route traced through the Pod’s information and the search equipment’s responses, a white space entirely unlike the earlier darkness opens up.

Buildings resembling a city stand there. The forms of structures, pillars, and roads are recognizable, but their texture differs from the surface ruins. Unlike a city mixing soil, plants, aged walls, and everyday tools, this place spreads out in broad, bright, colorless surfaces. The Pod’s analysis identifies crystallized silicon and carbon among the materials forming it. The landscape resembles a human place recalled and rebuilt starting with its shape. The human traces the two soldiers investigated now appear as structures newly made by a machine.

True to the name Copied City, this is a place Adam created to understand humans. But constructing something resembling their city does not produce people’s lives within it. There are no residents showing who lives beside whom, what they eat, or how they spend a day. The bodies 2B first encounters are not living humans passing through the streets, but fallen androids.

The bodies left along the path make the search for 9S more urgent. They prove this is not merely an architectural model or a safe laboratory. 2B cannot proceed believing that a signal alone means her companion is unharmed. Someone has already hurt other androids here, and the person she seeks may face the same danger. Dead bodies lying across the city’s orderly white surfaces make that fear concrete.

2. A Study That Selected Hatred from Humanity

Adam appears before 2B. Unlike the being who displayed his confusion upon birth in the desert, he greets her dressed and accustomed to language and manners. His interest in humans, already apparent in the alien ships, has become an inquiry with a space of its own. 2B has no time to appreciate the results of his change. The reason she came here is 9S.

As Adam learns about humanity, he focuses intensely on conflict and hatred. The knowledge humans left includes many kinds of behavior and relationships, but the answer he holds onto before 2B leads to clashes in which people hurt one another. This conclusion is different from the game objectively declaring the essential nature of all humanity. What becomes visible is what Adam chose to learn and the experiment into which he turned that learning.

His interest invites comparison with the learning in Pascal’s village. Pascal learns things to live with others, and when a resident fails to return, he looks for someone to find them. Adam wants a stronger response by provoking the feeling that someone might be lost. Even within the broad category of imitating humans, those seeking to continue relationships diverge from those testing relationships by wounding them.

3. Cutting Off His Own Way Back

Adam also wants to understand death. For a network-connected machine, the destruction of its current body and death as the complete end of its existence do not always have identical conditions. If data and connections remain, damage to one body may not be the end. But he thinks that in such a state he cannot experience as his own the death humans feared and spoke about.

He therefore disconnects from the network. He does not intend merely to imitate dying while holding onto the possibility of returning after his body is destroyed. He stands before 2B under conditions in which a single defeat could end his existence. For an opponent who changed form even after being wounded in the desert, this battle carries a different danger from earlier tests.

2B did not agree to this choice with him. Adam lured another person into a situation where he could experiment with his death, and hurt 9S in the process. His willingness to risk his life does not remove responsibility for the violence he inflicted. 2B has not come to perform a ritual fulfilling his wish. She is a soldier who must open the rescue route he is blocking.

The battle does not begin by first showing the captive 9S. Adam speaks about his city and interest in humans, and the two start fighting first. He shifts position instantly, gathers cubes into a wall, and sends them toward 2B. He also launches individual blocks and detonates them nearby. Unlike the surface battles that dismantled gigantic weapons section by section, 2B now faces both a human-sized opponent and the space he controls.

During the continuing conversation, Adam reveals his disconnected state. As the battle moves into its next stage, he kneels and sends pillars of light upward, or surrounds himself with spherical energy and spreads a shock outward. This small body has moved beyond the state of learning by receiving attacks just after its desert birth. 2B changes between closing in to swing her sword and withdrawing to wait for attacks to pass.

4. 9S Revealed During the Battle

As the fight continues, Adam floats upward. A white wall behind him breaks, revealing the 9S he has captured. His damaged body hangs fixed to objects embedded in the wall; he cannot move and escape by himself. The companion who separated from her to defeat an enemy in the Flooded City is now placed as a means for an enemy to draw in another soldier. The signal 2B followed has genuinely reached him, but finding him does not finish the rescue.

9S’s presence there shows that Adam’s interest does not remain within abstract human research. He has created his desired meeting by capturing and injuring another being’s body. He wants to obtain from 2B a response unavailable from merely building a city that imitates human architecture. Hurting someone precious to her can create an opponent who genuinely wants to kill him.

2B becomes furious. Her usual habit of cutting questions short and suppressing emotion cannot remain unchanged. To her, Adam is not an intriguing specimen to keep observing; he is the one who hurt her companion. She must defeat him to free 9S and bring him out. The intense emotion Adam expected and 2B’s actions for the rescue meet in the same battle.

For him, injuring 9S and enraging 2B become means of approaching his question. For 2B, those same actions are a close companion’s suffering and a threat that must end at once. Even if one side explains that it is learning human emotions, the other never agreed to willingly pay the price. The gap between the inquiry described in words and the person actually harmed does not close.

2B’s anger could be detached and given a label as learning material, but for her it has a specific cause: the captive 9S right in front of her. Creating the intense clash Adam wants does not make the emotion’s object and reason his own. Her purpose in fighting contains not only the hatred he seeks to recognize, but also the will to bring someone home.

The battle continues after she sees 9S. Welcoming her anger, Adam keeps attacking, including launching larger projectiles. This is not a rescue in which she can simply run to 9S without defeating the enemy. Adam blocks the space between them. To reach the companion she can now see, she must finish the opponent before her. What actually happens inside the city built to understand humans is a fight that uses the wish to protect someone to draw out death.

5. Where 9S Is Confined While 2B Approaches

From 9S’s viewpoint, this disappearance is not solely a blank interval skipped in unconsciousness. Route B shows the information and voices he encounters while moving within a data space. As 2B follows surface traces and signals downward, 9S is in another form of captivity, unable simply to walk a physical path before his eyes and escape.

Within it, Adam’s voice touches 9S’s inner life and his feelings toward 2B. This is not a hack that merely reveals the location of classified documents and ends. Words press him about what emotions he harbors and whether he can fully admit his thoughts. 9S can read enemy systems and retrieve information, yet that ability also places him in a space built by his opponent, where even his mind is threatened.

This scene includes a censored expression concerning desire toward 2B. The asterisks or concealed characters of translated versions are not restored here to one word and rewritten as a definitive line from the game. The expression’s concealed state is itself part of the scene. What is clear is that Adam knows and provokes their relationship, while 9S tries to escape those words. The scene leaves room for interpretation alongside circumstances revealed later, while allowing us to see his immediate reactions and anxiety.

Thus, even while apart, both have their feelings toward one another tested by the same figure. 2B sees 9S’s wounds and takes up her sword; 9S has his own feelings toward 2B attacked through someone else’s voice. Two stretches of time pass between the body being rescued and the body coming to rescue him, impossible to see all at once on the game screen. Both Route A and Route B are needed to connect the two sides of this captivity.

6. Adam Dies, and 2B Turns Back Carrying 9S

At the end of the fight, 2B mortally wounds Adam. Death while disconnected from the network does not lead to repairing his body and returning as in previous battles. Adam reaches the experience he wanted, but loses the body with which he could continue living and make it new knowledge. The attempt begun to understand humans also ends the self that could have returned with that understanding.

2B has little time to organize the meaning of his death. She approaches 9S, rescues him, and holds him in her arms. His body cannot immediately walk out on its own as usual. Instead of the two finishing a battle and returning to camp side by side, what remains is one person supporting and carrying the other out.

2B asks to go home together. It is a short promise of return that does not close merely as the administrative result of recovering a mission target. When 9S sent her memories first instead of his own at the coastal factory, 2B experienced the loss of shared experiences remaining only with her. This time she can bring his living body herself. Still, that body needs the next steps of treatment and recovery.

9S is sent to the Bunker for repairs. While he recovers, 2B’s surface missions continue. A message from Command checked at the camp reports that many machines have become disconnected from the network following Adam’s death. The death of one powerful individual who built a city and studied humans is also linked to changes in other machines’ states. It does not stop every machine on the surface at the same instant or end the entire war.

Afterward, Eve faces Adam’s empty place at the dining table where they used to sit opposite one another. He calls for the brother who was with him, but no answer comes. Another stretch of time begins for the Eve left behind. Before questions of what his brother learned or how far he understood, what remains is that the brother he could be with is gone. For Adam, death was something he chose to experience; for Eve, it is a loss arriving regardless of his choice. The event in which 2B regains 9S also brings catastrophe to another pair of brothers. The next battles show that the consequences of that death have not ended.

Sources and Scope of Verification

This commentary reads the game’s Copied City rescue and battle together with Route B’s consciousness-space scenes. It does not state that Eve takes an attack in Adam’s place in the game, nor import a novel’s additional development in which 2B is explicitly informed of humanity’s extinction here. The censored expression has not been restored with an invented word. This is AI-assisted editorial material and does not reproduce original dialogue, lyrics, or novel text. Sources checked: 2026-10-18.

NieR:Automata — Steam

Copied City — NieR Wiki

Adam — NieR Wiki

YoRHa No.9 Type S — NieR Wiki