NieR Chronicles 28 — Three Resource Recovery Units and 21O’s End
Chapters in this story
- Boxes of Flesh, Soul, and God: What 9S Is Losing
- 1. One Image Remaining in the Awakened Body
- 2. The Meat Box in the Forest
- 3. The Soul Box in the Flooded City
- 4. The God Box at the Amusement Park, and 21O
- 5. A2 Tries to Explain, and 9S Cannot Listen
- 6. The Brother and the Younger One with the Bucket Return
- 7. The Space Still Empty After Obtaining the Keys
- Sources and Scope of Verification
Boxes of Flesh, Soul, and God: What 9S Is Losing
Spoiler notice: This chapter follows 9S after he awakens following 2B’s death, his investigation of three resource recovery units, the battle with 21O, and A2’s reunion with the machine brothers. The person who ends 21O and the person who faces the brothers are distinguished. The brothers’ outcome can differ according to the player’s actions.
1. One Image Remaining in the Awakened Body
9S awakens after recovering from the bodily damage caused by his fall. Pod 153 reports on his condition and what has happened, while Devola and Popola at the Resistance camp have also helped maintain him. The world has not remained frozen in the state before the battle, when he was waiting for 2B. The Bunker is gone, a new Tower stands in the city’s center, and there is no news of 2B returning.
What remains most forcefully is the sight of A2’s sword piercing 2B. The final conversation he never heard is absent from his judgment. He moves toward eliminating machines and A2. Even after learning there were no humans on the Moon, he had a reason to descend and help 2B. Now revenge fills the space left when that reason disappears.
His Pod continues monitoring the instability of his body and mind. But 9S does not readily accept a path of resting, asking for help, and gradually putting together his next life. Destroying the Tower and machines gives him an immediate direction that prevents the loss of purpose. His exceptional hacking and analytical skills remain, but the feelings with which he uses them and his attitude toward others have changed.
Approaching the Tower in the city brings information delivered like bright, friendly guidance. To enter, he must obtain keys from three resource recovery units. The facility addresses a soldier grieving and raging over a dead companion as if it were explaining procedures to a visitor. Rather than finding comfort in the tone, 9S identifies the requirements and has his Pod mark the locations.
2. The Meat Box in the Forest
The first unit is in the forest. Its name is Meat Box. Entering a space that collects machine bodies and parts as resources, 9S climbs its floors and deals with enemies. In the forest where soldiers outside once fought to protect their king, there now stands a facility where bodies are collected and used. Individual lives overlap once again with the image of parts for an army.
9S takes elevators between floors and defeats the machines that appear. This is not an escort in which he stops enemies to bring someone safely back to a village. He wants the conditions for opening the Tower’s door, and enemy bodies become obstacles to overcome in reaching them. The room to question an opponent’s words, as he did when investigating with 2B, gradually disappears too.
At the core on the upper level, voices express fear and beg to be spared. 9S orders Pod 153 to destroy the core at maximum output. Even when the Pod hesitates and begins to speak, he does not withdraw the order. The Pod’s attack ultimately ends the core. He no longer has enough room to ask whether the other’s words express a real mind and change his actions according to the answer. His resolve to eliminate machines applies unchanged to a frightened being immediately before him. The coldness with which he observed the little machine trying to revive its brother at the beginning of route B returns in a harsher form.
He obtains the forest key. One requirement is now satisfied, but the process does not stabilize him emotionally. The Tower demands continued destruction of enemies to open the path he wants, and he fulfills that demand alongside his actions of revenge. Progress through the facility and recovery as a person do not accumulate in the same direction.
3. The Soul Box in the Flooded City
The second unit is in the Flooded City. Its name is Soul Box. Here, devices and data to hack take on greater importance than enemies to cut down directly. The ability 9S excels at comes to the forefront. He must hack locked chests on each floor to open the route to the next elevator, passing increasingly complex defenses as he climbs. Among chests containing weapons and enhancement parts also lies confidential YoRHa material he should not have found.
One document, the top-secret Black Box file, reveals that YoRHa cores are made by recycling machine lifeform cores. It is classified to be withheld even from the Commander. It also records the judgment that putting ordinary artificial intelligence into units intended for eventual disposal would be inhumane. 9S tries to preserve his belief that he and the enemy are fundamentally different, but the black box inside his own body is precisely what the document concerns. Beyond this structural secret learned here, he will encounter the full disposal procedure separately inside the Tower.
In the final hack, the direction reverses. The memory space of 9S, who thought he was reading the other side, comes under threat instead. Scenes with 2B appear, accompanied by changes that look as though those memories are disappearing or being taken away. If memory is his remaining way of reaching a companion without a body, it must at least remain his own within him. This is not merely the loss of mission material.
9S resists violently. He knocks down the image of 2B that appears there and stabs it repeatedly, trying to prevent his memories from being taken. As the hacking image and the facility’s actual core appear to overlap, his physical self is attacking the unit’s core. His feelings toward the person he loves overlap with the act of stabbing data in her image. The uncomfortable emotions Adam touched within his captive consciousness now erupt alongside fear that his precious records may be stolen.
The sight of memories being disturbed does not justify claiming that he permanently forgets all his time with 2B and remembers nothing afterward. He remembers her and responds to her loss in subsequent events too. What is clear here is the crisis of intrusion, his violent attempt to stop it, and the damage during that process. The account does not determine every image’s exact degree of deletion as though assigning one comprehensive medical diagnosis.
He obtains the second key, but his body once again requires maintenance. Devola and Popola at the camp repair him. The two who provided the scanner used to search for 2B now look after 9S directly after she is gone. His continued movement has not depended on his strength alone: others have maintained his body behind the scenes.
4. The God Box at the Amusement Park, and 21O
The final unit is at the amusement park. Entering the God Box rising near the theater, 9S again climbs floors and breaks through enemies and devices. A new combat facility stands above a play space that imitated human enjoyment. The last opponent he will meet here is not merely a newly appearing machine like Beauvoir.
As he fights small machines and climbs the God Box, interference affects communications and the screen. In the final area, 21O appears before him: the operator who supported him through communications from the Bunker. Before the major offensive, she voluntarily converted to a combat model, becoming 21B and deploying to Earth. Assuming she simply died in the Bunker explosion would make this meeting impossible. The same person changed roles and came to the front, becoming infected with the logic virus in the process.
21O fights 9S. Her voice no longer comes across a terminal to report enemy conditions, but from a body attacking him directly. Amid actions beyond her control, she expresses pain and wishes. Her desire for a family emerges again. If the player completed her request to analyze human objects and family data, they can recognize where that wish began earlier.
9S must stop her attacks. The person asking for help or for an end is simultaneously pointing a weapon at him. As the battle continues, A2 appears, pierces 21O, and ends her. Saying that 9S alone delivers the final blow would miss the conflict renewed in this scene. A2 takes responsibility for ending someone’s suffering, but 9S loses another person close to him beneath her sword.
5. A2 Tries to Explain, and 9S Cannot Listen
A2 tries to speak to 9S. She has the memories received from 2B and the request to protect him. But 9S is not ready to move beyond the two deaths he has witnessed and his anger toward A2 to accept that explanation. A2’s very use of 2B’s name particularly provokes him. It becomes a name he feels she has no right to speak.
Their clash cannot become a complete conversation. As their weapons meet, a large machine appears and the floor collapses. 9S falls below, endangered once more. His Pod must protect and move him, while A2 faces a new enemy. At the scene of 2B’s death, a collapse in the ground also separated them. Again, an enemy’s appearance and bodily danger interrupt any opportunity to hear each other’s circumstances calmly.
A2’s actions in this encounter do not aim to eliminate 9S and put an end to his revenge. She faces the threat while carrying a request to protect him. That behavior does not immediately become trust on 9S’s side. Someone having the intention to help him and his knowing and accepting that intention can occur at different times.
6. The Brother and the Younger One with the Bucket Return
The large enemy before A2 is Auguste. Friedrich, who wants to protect his brother, is beside him. The little machine who carried oil in a bucket at the start of route B and the being he called his brother return to the center of the story. Players who watched 9S refuse the word brothers already know the name of the relationship appearing in this battle.
Auguste attacks with his enormous body, and A2 fends off those attacks. Small Friedrich units move around him. The one who wants to help his brother cannot defeat a powerful android fighter through his own strength alone, but tries to protect that body from beside it. The name brother is not merely a line memorized once; it is used again amid present danger.
As the battle develops, Friedrich begs for his brother’s life. A2 can continue attacking and kill Auguste, or stop attacking and leave. The unit records preserve different results too. One is the outcome in which the younger brother sees the older one die; the other is the outcome in which his plea is accepted. Insisting A2 necessarily kills the brothers in every playthrough erases this choice.
For A2 after Pascal’s village, this plea arrives under different conditions from her killing of the infant king in the forest. She has directly experienced whom small machines care for and what they fear. Even so, an action remains for the player to decide. Instead of declaring that change must lead toward mercy in one fixed direction, the record preserves whether attacks were continued or stopped there.
7. The Space Still Empty After Obtaining the Keys
After the three resource recovery units, the keys to enter the Tower have been gathered. Passing through facilities named for flesh, soul, and god, 9S has encountered machine bodies, his own memories, and the ending of an operator close to him in turn. The requirements for opening the door are being met, but his lost relationships do not return. Completing the announced procedures is not a structure that proportionally reduces his pain.
The same place where A2 and 9S meet also contains machine brothers. The relationship in which one person’s death breaks the one left behind repeats across enemies and allies. Eve after losing Adam, 9S after losing 2B, and Friedrich trying to save his brother do not act identically, but each acts before the danger of losing one being precious to them. A gap remains between the reader who recognizes this and the characters who see one another as enemies.
9S now heads toward the Tower in the city’s center. Even with three keys, its entrance is not a safe door he can open alone at will. Completing the hack while enemies pour in requires help to protect his body. Devola and Popola, who have repaired him twice, will now leave the repair room and buy him that time with their own bodies.
Sources and Scope of Verification
This account distinguishes the locations and order of the game’s resource recovery units, 21O’s conversion to a combat model and A2’s intervention, and the branches of sparing or killing the machine brothers. The Soul Box scene is not expanded into an event in which 9S permanently loses every memory afterward. The Auguste and Friedrich battle belongs to A2’s perspective and is not merged into a solo victory by 9S. This is an AI-assisted editorial account, without reproduction of the original dialogue, lyrics, or novel text. Sources checked: 2026-10-18.
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