"I'd like to see you try," Placido breathed, and raised a leg to kick Dark Glass in the stomach.

...

It was clear from the start that Placido would not go down without a fight. Whether it had been part of Glass' plan all along or perhaps he had genuinely and severely underestimated of just how deeply rooted the determination was in Placido's being—it made no difference; Dark Glass was forced to take the defensive either way.

Before Glass' very eyes, Placido underwent the same transformation he had witnessed back on the highway that one stormy night. But this wasn't one of motorcycles or cybernetic parts. It was a shift of mentality—the single-minded fixation of completely obliterating the enemy alongside everything else in front of him. With Yuusei, it had been personal. With Dark Glass, it went much beyond that.

Placido attacked Dark Glass in a near blind rage with a vicious ferocity akin to that of a lion's, the broken splinters of confidence and repressed anger only fueling his strength. The same prideful anger that caused his downfall in the first place now served to make him a whirlwind of chaos and terror. Bitter that his sword was taken away, Placido resorted to using his bare hands, clawing, tearing at his enemy's throat.

He was dangerous. It had been solely because Dark Glass wasn't fully flesh and blood that he even stood a chance against the Emperor. And Dark Glass was handicapped by his own words.

If Placido had achieved any victory in the first day, it was that he'd forced Dark Glass to go back on his word. Glass had only managed to subdue Placido through exactly what promised he wouldn't use—violence. The taser had emerged from nowhere and was stabbed straight into Placido's solar plexus.

The Emperor fell.

When his systems went back online, Placido found himself tied to the pipe in the wall, thick rope wrapped around his wrists and arms several times over. His feet were bound together too, and the gag was back in his mouth. The lights were shut off and Placido was left alone in the darkness. Despite the ascending frustration of being a stillborn prisoner once more, there was also a small satisfaction of seeing the disgust in Glass' face. Whatever complacency Placido felt from seeing the bruises that littered Glass' chin paled in comparison to the raw, visceral satisfaction that settled in his gut from the D-wheeler's expression—there was raw emotion, ire mixed with a surge of frustration and wariness, with a hint of disgust.

Dark Glass was always so calm, fancying himself to be in the seat of control—

The first night there, Placido learned the extent of the man he was dealing with.

Sleeping wasn't a necessity. His body was built with an internal clock. Not wasting a single precious moment, Placido began fabricating plans for escape.

Within the span of a minute, Placido came to realize that half of the functions were disabled from his body. The transmission signal to T-666 was completely blocked off, and after a mounting frustration, Placido finally attempted communicating with the other two Emperors only to discover that the telepathic link to his counterparts was defunct as well.

A familiar feeling stirred within him. He felt violated. The stranger had done something to him, meddled with his internal circuits.

It had been in the evening when his captor returned. In place of Dark Glass was a young man wearing a jacket.

For a moment, Placido really thought this man was the same amnesiac fool he'd punched out at the factory. The look not-Dark Glass gave him wasn't unfriendly, but it lacked the doe-eyed innocence Placido had been familiar with. There was something underneath that was uncharacteristically sharp as if Bruno was watching, appraising his every move in a way that wasn't characteristic of the meek, gentle-mannered tagalong of Yuusei's group.

Placido glared up at the man. An unidentifiable emotion flashed through Bruno's gray eyes, but no words were spoken. After an eternity of exchanging glares, Bruno left for the kitchen.

Spikes of adrenaline rose when he saw Bruno walking towards him with a bowl in hand; they peaked and died down when Placido saw it was actual food—it was a bowl of porridge.

The gag was loosened from his mouth and a spoonful of porridge held up to his lips.

"What did you do to my body?"

There was a bit of resistance before Bruno was able to weasel the spoon into Placido's mouth—only for Placido to spit it on the floor.

"I asked you a question! Tell me what did you do—!"

Bruno's expression settled into a cold glare before he tried again. This time, Placido spat the food straight in his face.

"Bastard…"

Stiffly, Bruno wiped the gruel off with the back of his sleeve. Anger was visible in his face, yet it expressed itself as more of a hard-set irritation than a dangerous flash. He stood back up, peering down at Placido with a mixture of deliberation and annoyance.

"You don't need to eat, do you?" he asked quietly.

Placido was mutinously silent.

Bruno stared back for several seconds before he finally looked away. Wordlessly, he slipped a spoonful of rice into his mouth, chewed on it, and swallowed.

"I have no idea what you're talking about. I didn't touch any of your functions."

"Lies."

Bruno gave a nonchalant shrug. "Why would I know anything about mechanics in the future?" Then, almost as an afterthought, "Maybe you weren't repaired properly by your creator."

"…trying to confuse me with your mind games again?"

"No. No games tonight. I just came here to check up on you."

The implications were clear. To feed you and attend to the needs most humans have.

"Don't touch my body." There were only a handful of individuals Placido allowed access to his internal infrastructure and he would sooner fork over a screwdriver to that slack-jawed smarmy clown than let this mechanic filth lay a single finger on him.

At that comment, Bruno gave him a look.

Bruno left around midnight, and once again Placido was alone, feeling oddly unsatisfied from their encounter.

To Placido's disappointment, it was 'Bruno' who came to visit him there on out.

Bruno was usually quiet, his normally peaceful features hardened with a somberness. Bruno was mild-mannered compared to his alter ego. He offered no provocation, no goading or cocky smirks to fuel Placido's hatred—and so the android's anger quelled, lying dormant yet wholly unpredictable and ready to erupt at any given instant.

Often Bruno brought with him a laptop which he would then spend hours on at a time. He rarely spoke to Placido, who watched on with a wary glare, untrusting of this mysterious stranger of a thousand masks and unpredictable motives. Long intervals of silence stretched between them filled only with the sound of constantly tapping keys and the occasional sideways glance thrown in his direction whenever Placido made a sound of frustration.

Two days passed before Placido couldn't take being ignored any longer.

"So… do you intend to 'break' me by having me bore into submission?"

No answer, not even a glance of recognition. The tapping of keys continued.

"What the hell are you doing?" he growled.

"I'm rewriting the program you stole from me and Yuusei," Bruno replied without looking away from the screen.

Placido didn't bother responding. Instead, he continued to watch his foe develop the program, line after line of coding appear on the black screen until finally:

"… and you call yourself a mechanic?" the words suddenly escaped his mouth without a filter. It was so unusual that Bruno actually craned over to look at him. "Any simpleton would know that changing the timing of the fuel injection system will only offset the stoichiometric air-fuel ratio in the boosters."

Bruno paused, his eyebrows furrowing in confusion. "But the improved cylinder-to-cylinder fuel distribution would enhance the engine's power output by 150%."

"Resulting in an ineffective exhaust catalysis that ultimately decreases the engine's efficiency," Placido snapped without missing a beat.

"Huh." From Bruno's tone, he sounded disinterested.

Annoyance bubbled within Placido. This idiot was just as bad his counterpart.

The familiar clicking of the key and the doorknob turning roused Placido from his half-sleep.

"What you said yesterday… you were talking about a close-loop transfer function."

"Very good," Placido replied scathingly. "Did you lose sleep all last night trying to figure that one out?"

"Do you think you could implement that for me?"

The shock wore off easily enough and Placido bit back a harsh laugh. "Come again?"

Bruno's expression didn't change. "You heard what I said."

"What makes you think that I'll actually help you of all people?"

"Because you were the one who stole our original program."

"Fuck off." He turned away from Bruno in disgust.

The bomb-chucking anger burnt out quickly enough. Placido soon returned to the icy, cold-set persona, glaring up at his captor with an expression of unbreakable willpower.

His authoritative aura had always been based on intimidation and threats of violence from the sharp tip of his sword, and it hid Placido's natural eloquence. With his physical strength stripped away from him, he resorted to using words as his weapon. He would talk with fervor and passion and rant and rave about justice, about destiny and humanity, about divine providence and the forsaken future. He was unbelievably articulate and the raw emotion in his voice only served to accentuate his beliefs—and had Bruno been weaker, he would have just as easily been swayed by Placido's convictions.

Sometimes Bruno would just listen to him for hours on end, never once interrupting him, never berating him or laughing in his face. He would wait for Placido to burn himself out before quietly picking apart his arguments or just sometimes he would just leave. And there were times, rare as they were, when he would ask for more information.

"You talk so much about fate…" Bruno posed one day, "...so was it fate that brought you here?"

Placido scoffed, and didn't let it show on his face the despair after countless of hours of dwelling on that same thought.

"I bet you think you're doing the right thing. Fudou Yuusei is a hero to you, isn't he. And here I am, filling in the role of the villain. Che. Humans… blind."

Dark Glass... Bruno had chosen the most opportune timing to capture Placido. Placido was vulnerable, emotionally and mentally—he had barely come to terms with his humiliating defeat at Yuusei's hands. He had been snatched away from the stark safety of Iliaster before he could gather his bearings. Even after everything else, Lucciano and Jose provided Placido with a key factor—reassurance. Reassurance that he was doing the right thing.