NieR Chronicles 24 — The Infected Offensive and the Fall of the Bunker

The Offensive After Victory: The Bunker They Return to Becomes Hostile

Spoiler notice: this chapter covers the all-out offensive that newly unfolds after Endings A and B, infection of surface units, emergency return, and the Bunker’s destruction. Unlike a change of perspective revisiting earlier events, Route C’s opening is the actual continuation after the battle with Eve.

1. The Hope of Finally Ending the War

After Adam and Eve fall and major changes affect the machine network, YoRHa prepares an all-out offensive. The two soldiers’ missions, previously small-scale investigations, join a larger military operation. Multiple combat units deploy to the surface, supported by operators and headquarters. To the soldiers, this is presented as an opportunity to turn earlier victories into the collapse of the enemy as a whole.

While the Commander’s orders and encouragement are transmitted, 9S holds different information. He knows humanity is already gone and the account of lunar survivors was fabricated. Yet the operation begins before he decides how to tell 2B. They undertake missions together again without having fully discussed the same understanding of the future toward which they are moving.

Initially, 9S weakens the machines’ anti-aircraft defenses by hacking. He examines enemies and equipment at multiple points and disables functions, creating conditions in which friendly surface units can fight. The ability that remotely opened 2B’s route during the factory escape now serves the preparations for a major offensive. More friendly movement and combat depend on that support than the single enemy he removes before him.

21O explains more thoroughly than usual, praises 9S, and sometimes speaks as though addressing a child. After being told to avoid unnecessary battles, he asks whether she is worried about him; she redirects the matter toward interference with the mission. Choosing to block the anti-aircraft signals completely also brings word that she left a gift in his Bunker room. Even immediately before the offensive, their work communication contains small personal changes like these.

2B fights alongside other YoRHa combatants. Unlike her earlier investigations with only 9S, soldiers wearing the same uniform cross the battlefield toward a shared objective. Having fellow units nearby reinforces numbers and firepower. When that entire force comes under attack, however, it becomes a greater danger. The enemy’s crucial weapon in this fight is not merely armor around a huge body.

2. An Immobile Comrade and Approaching Enemies

Machines bring down the YoRHa force through an electromagnetic attack and the logic virus. Soldiers struggle to control their own bodies and come under assault. 2B is unable to move properly too. When a body that was swinging a sword moments ago loses function, enemies once easily avoided can immediately threaten its life as they approach.

Noticing the abnormality, 9S goes to 2B. He holds off attacking machines, reaches her, and hacks her. Instead of severing an enemy barrier, his expertise removes contamination that has entered a comrade. The player must resolve from his side a situation that cannot be solved merely by continuing to fight in 2B’s body. Previously infected while connecting to Eve, he now takes the role of stopping another’s infection.

One reason 9S does not initially collapse in the same way as other soldiers is that he had observed irregularities in the Bunker server and stopped synchronization. He also blocked 2B’s synchronization. Those measures do not create complete immunity permanently preventing every subsequent contact and infection. Even if they successfully deal with the immediate contamination and escape it, they remain in a reality connected to a dangerous system.

After 2B recovers, the YoRHa soldiers around them have already become hostile. Those who initially received the same orders and fought alongside them now attack the pair. Swords and gunfire designed against machines turn on fellow androids. Their bodies have not suddenly become enemy components. They lose control while retaining the familiar appearance and combat abilities of comrades.

Communications between the surface and Bunker are also disrupted. 9S moves toward the City Ruins cave and deals with machines jamming the signal. Destroying the equipment blocking contact does not restore the infected force to normal. Between communications regained and comrades still hostile, the two must withstand attacks that keep coming.

3. Opening Their Black Boxes Once Again

They judge that simply continuing normal combat is unlikely to restore the situation. The threat persists while they hold out against machines and infected soldiers around them. They need a way to send data to the Bunker, revive, and warn others even if their present bodies are lost. The black-box reaction they chose together at the end of the coastal factory operation appears again as a path to survival.

9S uploads his and 2B’s data through an emergency route, and they detonate their black boxes. Instead of enduring in infected bodies until control is taken, they choose to transmit themselves and return in other bodies. They also need to warn headquarters about the crisis they experienced. The power that destroys their current bodies is used as a condition for continuing their next actions.

They awaken in the Bunker, the same facility to which they returned after their first shared destruction at the factory. With the Commander, operators, maintenance, and deployment systems there, returning seems to offer a chance to inform the larger organization and receive help. Their restored bodies and the state of the organization receiving them do not, however, mean the same safety.

When they report the surface infection, the Commander does not immediately believe them. She has received no such report and instead suspects their condition, trying to subdue them. The reality 9S experienced does not match the facility’s official information. When soldiers who came to give a warning are themselves treated as suspected infection cases, their return does not end as a safe reporting procedure.

4. Eyes Turn Red from Within

While the Commander suspects them, other Bunker soldiers and staff become hostile. The attack is already inside the facility. Closing the station to block an external problem discovered on the surface is no longer sufficient. Bodies of those who lived and provided support alongside them become enemies within. The Commander can no longer dismiss the pair’s warning as a mere mistake.

2B and 9S attempt to escape with her. They head for the hangar, avoiding and blocking comrades’ attacks in familiar corridors. The personal words and small ordinary lives encountered during their first Bunker tour are becoming impossible to continue. For someone this was a workplace where they performed their tasks without ever seeing Earth’s flowers; for another, a home welcoming damaged soldiers back. Relationships that protected them there turn into attacks.

6O is in that danger too. If the earlier present quest was completed, her wish to visit the surface and see flowers can be heard again in her final communication. There is no following scene of that voice actually reaching Earth and walking through a flower field with 2B. Nor can the anime’s scene of 2B personally ending the infected 6O’s body be added to the game. The game leaves her wish within her voice and the collapsing Bunker.

2B and 9S are losing the ability to keep fighting simply as soldiers with safe backups. Until now, even severe bodily damage could be followed by this facility connecting new bodies and data. If its communications, data, restoration, and command systems collapse together, their previous means of survival disappears as well. Protecting each other’s present bodies takes on greater weight.

5. Why the Commander Does Not Leave the Hangar

Near the hangar, the Commander reveals she is infected too. She has synchronized with the server and is no exception free of contamination. This does not lead to an ending where she orders retreat, boards a flight unit, and commands the next operation from elsewhere. 2B tries to bring her, but the Commander decides not to escape with them.

That decision includes the wish to let at least the two remaining soldiers leave alive. Losing control herself could endanger their escape. The officer who first suspected those returning from the surface now acknowledges the danger in her own body and stays. Her position of command and knowledge of secrets did not grant omnipotent control until the end, and that becomes visible here.

2B and 9S escape in flight units. After they depart, the Bunker explodes. White corridors, the command room, and places of maintenance and deployment vanish. The distant explosion is more than damage to one building. A base they believed would hold comrades and new bodies upon return, a safety net preserving their records, and familiar faces behind the orders from above collapse together.

9S already knew humanity was gone. Even so, the Bunker still held 2B and the operators, an organization and comrades he could meet on returning. Now he loses that concrete home as well. Discovering a fabricated purpose and seeing a place shared with real companions destroyed cannot be counted as one single identical shock. Knowing the lie does not make every memory of the facility false.

6. The Pursuit That Separates the Remaining Two

Leaving the Bunker does not end the pursuit. Infected YoRHa flight units attack them. 2B and 9S must again face weapons similar to those made for themselves. They do not get time to land together at a safe new base and calmly plan. The aerial fight also becomes difficult to endure under infection and numerical pressure.

2B takes control of 9S’s flight unit and sends him far from danger. The pair escaping together are separated again. She does not do this because she wants to part from her comrade, but to make him survive the immediate danger. Fighting the pursuers herself, she is damaged and falls to the surface. The conditions differ from earlier separations when a Bunker backup could enable their reunion.

This catastrophe does not mean every android on Earth dies at the same instant. The Resistance and other survivors remain. Yet YoRHa’s central system and the force the pair relied on have suffered a fatal blow. The hidden disposal plan and meaning of its backdoor will be revealed more fully in later records. For the two left in the field, the immediate problem is to survive and find each other.

Another abnormality progresses within 2B’s fallen body. Infection that 9S once helped remove by hacking now grows within her again. There is no Bunker to return to for treatment, and the comrade who could work on her systems is far away. In her hardest condition, her next choice is to move her own body so others will not be harmed. At the end of that road, A2 and 9S will see different scenes.

Sources and Scope of Verification

This commentary follows the game’s later anti-aircraft support, surface infection and black-box return, internal Bunker collapse, and flight-unit escape in order. It does not claim the Commander controlled everything from the outset or import 6O’s added scenes from outside the game. The Bunker’s destruction is not expanded into instantaneous extinction of all androids on Earth. This is AI-assisted editorial material and does not reproduce original dialogue, lyrics, or novel text. Sources checked: 2026-10-18.

NieR:Automata — Steam

Logic Virus — NieR Wiki

Commander White — NieR Wiki

Bunker — NieR Wiki

YoRHa No.9 Type S — NieR Wiki

Operator 21O — NieR Wiki