NieR Chronicles 30 — The Tower’s Red Girls and 2E
Chapters in this story
- The Tower’s Red Girls and 2E: A Design That Made Them Kill One Another
- 1. Soldiers Built with the Enemy’s Core
- 2. The Disposal Route Left Open from the Beginning
- 3. Copies with 2B’s Face
- 4. A2 Arrives in a White Library
- 5. When the Attacks Stop, the Consciousness Begins Fighting Itself
- 6. Ko-Shi and Ro-Shi: Fighting Together Briefly Again
- 7. 2E Beneath the Name 2B
- Sources and Scope of Verification
The Tower’s Red Girls and 2E: A Design That Made Them Kill One Another
Spoiler notice: This chapter covers YoRHa records found in the resource recovery units and Tower, the copies of 2B encountered by 9S, A2’s confrontation with the Red Girls, the Ko-Shi and Ro-Shi battles, and 2B’s true role. The C and D outcomes of the final duel follow in the next chapter as separate branches.
1. Soldiers Built with the Enemy’s Core
Records encountered through 9S’s investigation of the Soul Box and Tower change how YoRHa bodies appear. Black boxes are essential components of soldiers fighting for humanity. They connect with memory, consciousness, and power, and can produce a strong explosion when made to react together. At the coastal factory and during the major offensive, the pair used that force to abandon their current bodies and create a path to return.
Yet those black boxes were made using technology that reuses machine lifeform cores. Inside YoRHa soldiers are technology and materials from the beings they have called enemies and destroyed. The hostile distinction between androids built for humans and machines made by aliens is not neatly separated, at least within YoRHa’s essential components.
This does not mean every android, including the Resistance, was made in the same way. It is a secret about the particular construction of YoRHa units. Nor does a shared origin and similarly composed cores mean 2B is the same person as Pascal, or that 9S’s feelings were fake. What something is made of and whom it knows and what it does through that body are different questions.
But 9S has almost no room left to accept this distinction calmly. He has learned humanity is gone and lost 2B, and now the basis separating his body from the enemy’s is shaken too. The direction in which destroying enemies seemed able to protect the meaning of his lost relationships now points both at what he destroys and at the core within himself. Instead of accepting that shock, he goes deeper into the Tower.
2. The Disposal Route Left Open from the Beginning
Project YoRHa contained a final procedure unknown to its soldiers. YoRHa itself was prepared for disposal in a way that would maintain belief in humanity’s survival on the Moon and erase information showing that belief had been fabricated. The backdoor in the Bunker’s security cannot be explained solely as a gap accidentally found by an outside enemy. A path toward the end existed inside their own side’s system.
When that path opens under the specified conditions, the facility is exposed to machine intrusion and infection. Soldiers who believed their army would protect them fight without knowing the plan to end their organization. Although the force existed for the purpose of living humanity, even their deaths are used to erase traces of that lie. Victory on Earth was not designed to lead to a future of returning home and living long lives.
The Commander is not simply positioned as someone who knew all of this and staged her soldiers’ deaths and her own. There is a difference between the human secret she knew and the disposal procedure held at a higher security classification. Her decision to remain in the Bunker at the end was made on the spot in an infected body. The structure cannot be neatly divided into android perpetrators who know one enormous conspiracy and victims who know nothing.
After the plan concludes, the Pod system is supposed to organize and delete YoRHa-related data. If memories remain after bodies die, there is a possibility of return; deleting even that data closes the path. This final procedure gives weight to the order the Pods will refuse in ending E. For now, the two protagonists move separately inside the Tower within a process heading for that termination.
3. Copies with 2B’s Face
Units that look like 2B appear before 9S. It is the face that once walked beside him and helped him fight. But these units are not the 2B who shared those experiences returning alive to greet him. They are attackers built using her design and appearance. The Tower presents the shape of the person he wants back as new enemy bodies.
9S reaches the room after passing a corridor of infected YoRHa soldiers. When identical faces surround and attack him, he fights them. Unlike his destruction of other machines, his feelings about using weapons against that face and body are shown directly. This also connects to his stabbing of 2B’s image to protect his memories in the Soul Box. Destroying more of the same appearance does not restore the original. It only repeatedly confirms the difference between her absence and replacement bodies.
Near the end of the fight, 9S approaches a copy that is still moving, loses an arm, and falls through the broken floor. After progress on A2’s side, the perspective returns to him taking an arm from a fallen copy and attaching it to his body. The brief motion of pressing its hand to his cheek before attachment also reveals a desire to touch the hand of someone who will not return. To take up a weapon and climb again, he needs a usable component now. But the arm comes from a damaged unit controlled by the enemy. The choice to repair himself hastily and continue also brings the danger of the logic virus inside.
9S hacks his own system to try to remove contamination. Even if he can deal with some of it, he does not return to a completely safe and calm state. He does not set out after resolving every warning from body and mind. He continues carrying danger. His use of his present self as something to consume in reaching a goal deepens.
In the next room, Red Girl figures and new enemies wait. After dealing with them, he obtains records concerning YoRHa’s disposal. The origin of black boxes read earlier in the Soul Box connects to this disposal material found in the Tower, revealing that the destruction of his own force was a procedure prepared from the beginning. Higher up, infected YoRHa attack in flight units. 9S breaks through them and boards one remaining flight unit, gaining the means to face the next enemy in the air.
4. A2 Arrives in a White Library
A2 climbs inside the Tower too. Within are a space recalling Replicant’s library and records concerning humanity. The appearance of a similar location does not establish that the old library was preserved intact in its original form at the same place. Machines have collected and reconstructed human architecture and records. This Tower likewise accumulates such material and imitation within itself.
With her Pod’s help, A2 accesses records on the shelves and investigates documents on both levels. As she opens files on human and YoRHa history, the player’s perspective also switches to 9S repairing himself and fighting in other rooms. A2 then faces Ko-Shi in the library. After the machine retreats, she goes to the exit on the lower floor. Connecting to the central device in the next room takes her into virtual space, where she faces the Red Girls. Those figures briefly glimpsed around the two soldiers are linked to the consciousness of the machine network. Also called N2, they differ from an opponent whose functions all end when one small body is destroyed. Attacking the figures onscreen can still leave data and replication continuing.
They reveal how the war and machines’ changes have served their evolution. If the purpose of eliminating enemies is completely achieved and enemies disappear, the foundation for continuing their own actions becomes unstable too. Rather than moving only toward victory with maximum efficiency, the network has retained failures, differences, and variables such as groups leaving the network to acquire new data. Different lives such as Pascal’s village and the forest kingdom were not solely outside any relation to the system’s observation.
This does not reduce the villagers’ feelings and choices to meaningless fake performances from the beginning. The children truly feared, and Pascal fought to protect them. The fact that the network observed and used those differences coexists with the fact that individual beings within it experienced their own relationships. For A2, the explanation does not make that suffering something that never happened.
5. When the Attacks Stop, the Consciousness Begins Fighting Itself
In the confrontation with the Red Girls, continually eliminating the figures before A2 does not simply reduce the problem. The opponent divides, replicates, and reappears. Faster, stronger elimination, the method a fighter has practiced for so long, does not end the opponent’s multiplication here. Pod 042 observes that attacking makes the opponent learn and increase its responses and replicas, and suggests she stop attacking, evade, and wait.
A2 stops attacking and watches. Meanwhile, differences within the opponent over the direction of response and evolution increase. Voices deciding whether to attack harder or judge differently cannot maintain one conclusion within one consciousness. Replicated selves confront other selves, intensifying internal conflict. Instead of cutting down one enemy from outside, the system’s own contradictions become the cause of destruction.
Even the network that observed humans and androids and used their conflicts as material for evolution cannot stand outside conflict once multiple judgments emerge. The impression that a single perfect intelligence looks down over every relationship and retains one answer forever collapses. This change also connects to the later shift of the Tower’s purpose away from a weapon attacking the Moon.
A2 passes that confrontation and continues. This is not a victory that simultaneously deletes every machine lifeform’s mind on Earth and completes perfect peace. It is the result of overcoming the network consciousness and combat conditions currently blocking her. Above, 9S’s other battle continues as well. They do not clear every Tower room together in the same sequence: different paths intersect.
6. Ko-Shi and Ro-Shi: Fighting Together Briefly Again
Leaving virtual space, A2 continues battling Ko-Shi. On another path, Ro-Shi appears before 9S. The two fights against large machines alternate. A2 deals with close attacks and traverses terrain; in the flight-unit sections, 9S faces another enemy’s firepower. Frequent changes of perspective show both bodies advancing upward at the same time.
Finally, an enemy combining the two machines blocks the way. 9S has not abandoned his desire to kill A2, but they must face a common enemy immediately. Their actions connect in the moment they bring the large opponent down. Even A2, carrying 2B’s last request, and 9S, who does not know it, become two fighters who need each other’s strength within one battle.
But defeating the common enemy does not restore their relationship. 9S reveals his purpose toward A2 again: eliminating all machines and killing her too. Their brief shared fight cannot automatically replace the words needed to explain the death he witnessed. Now they face one another directly without another mission to escape into or a huge enemy interrupting them.
7. 2E Beneath the Name 2B
A2 explains 2B’s true role. She accompanied 9S under the designation of an ordinary combat model, but was actually the execution model 2E. As an exceptionally capable Scanner, 9S risked discovering YoRHa’s secrets, and someone beside him was needed to end him whenever that happened. The position of closest companion and the duty to kill that companion to preserve secrets were entrusted to the same person.
It did not happen only once. If 9S returned in a new body without continuing those memories, they could meet and act together again, while 2B retained the process and pain of killing him. His missing memories at the first coastal factory, her stiff reaction when they met again in the Bunker, and her grief at repeated endings in ending A now fit within a larger repetition. The main game does not, however, establish an exact numerical total for the executions.
What A2 conveys is not a revelation that 2B enjoyed the work without feeling. She suffered over killing 9S and nevertheless remained beside him in that role. The closer they became, the more the next loss could hurt. Her habitual insistence on prohibiting emotions and keeping a distance appears differently in light of that burden.
It is also difficult to describe 9S as having suspected absolutely nothing and hearing every word for the first time here. A2 speaks with the implication that he knew too. The game does not provide a chart of every iteration’s memories identifying exactly what he was certain of, when, and to what extent. What is clear is that even information known or suspected does not immediately resolve the feelings surrounding the loss of that relationship.
9S does not become calm upon hearing the explanation. He cannot erase his relationship with 2B as a lie, nor immediately trust A2 merely because he understands 2B’s suffering. Into a world that seemed solvable by killing revenge’s target comes the repeated execution carried out by the person he loved. The final choice is not a test between someone who did not know the truth and someone who has learned it. It is a crossroads in how two bodies carrying that truth and loss will treat one another.
Sources and Scope of Verification
This account connects the game’s resource recovery documents and Tower scenes, the confrontation with the Red Girls, the Ko-Shi and Ro-Shi battles, and the disclosure of the 2E role. Black-box construction is not expanded into a common origin for every android. No particular execution count or individual incident outside the game is added as a confirmed main-game scene. 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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