Disclaimer: I OWN NOTHING AND DUE TO MY OWN NEGLIGENCE I FAILED TO RECOGNIZE THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR ecyor0 FOR THE FIRST THREE CHAPTERS THANKS TO THE FEW MONTHS IT TOOK FOR HIM TO REPLY I ASSUMED HE DIDN'T CARE AND I APOLOGIZE FOR MY ACTIONS IF I HAD KNOWN HE WANTED RECOGNITION I WOULD'VE RECOGNIZED HIM SOONER THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME
Ep.1 – The Boy From Planet Zi.
The desert wind gave a soft moan as it crested the dunes, the faint sound only accentuating the intense silence of the wasteland. Bare, featureless, almost devoid of life....
But not totally devoid of it.
A peal of laser fire stuttered through the air, smacking into the sand and sending another cloud of dust up in front of the hoverboard. The boy riding the board flung up his hand, swerving to avoid a mouthful of the stuff. The Guysack chasing him let loose with another burst of laser beams – the pilot was still wide of the mark, but his aim was steadily improving. The boy gritted his teeth. At this rate, he'd be a smear on the ground before too long "Hey, what's your problem anyway!?" he yelled back as he zig-zagged back and forth. "What did I ever do to you?"
Inside the Guysack, the pilot grinned. "Oh, nothing at all" he chuckled to himself. "You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, buddy. I've been waiting for a spot of target practice ever since we started this patrol..." he pressed down on the fire button again, sweeping the ground in front of the scorpion zoid. The kid barely managed to kick the hover board into the air before the rounds exploded where he'd just been a split second before. Swerving out wide as he regained his balance, he looked around wildly for something – anything – other than the endless sands. "Of all the days I managed to sneak out, it has to be this day..." he muttered to himself. "But I'm gonna outsmart this loser – or my name's not Raven Storm!"
A few miles out from the chase, a pair of men stood on a sand dune, their desert-yellow command wolves blending into the sand behind them. "Look at that kid" said the one with the vidi-binoculars. "Getting excited over a brat on a hoverboard – it's almost embarrasing."
"Give him a break" said the other. "Scouts almost never get a chance to fight, and that kid hasn't been in a strike force since he joined the unit."
"Still... it's just not professional. The Republican Army is a disciplined fighting force – strength through unity, unity through force and all that. Chasing down a brat in a scout Guysack is hardly going to impress anyone."
"The kid did see us though – he's got no business being this far outside his village's designated zone. For all we know, he's an imperial spy. And as for not impressing anyone... Not having compunctions about chasing down civilians, no matter how innocent they seem? That's sergeant material right there. 10 credits say he's promoted by the end of the tour of duty."
"You're on." said the first soldier.
Raven swerved his hoverboard down into a trough between two dunes in an effort to throw off the Guysack and gain some distance. Banking so sharply the engines bit into the sand, he fishtailed up the dune ridge, launching off the bank and down onto the sand below. He turned to check on the Guysack – and found it had vanished completely. Instinctively, he slowed down as he searched for it. "Where'd it go?" he asked himself as the sands became quiet again. He was caught completely off guard when the Guysack erupted from the sand in front of him – only his lightning sharp reflexes saved him from being crushed in the thing's claws. Jumping up as the claw plunged down, Raven used the sudden upsurge in anti-grav propulsion from the metal claw to boost up and over the Guysack, skipping past the tail and skimming across the sand, gaining a great deal of ground as the zoid turned itself to give chase again. "Dammit, where's a cave when you need one?" Raven did another scan of the desert – and saw what had been obscured by the high dunes. A great, oblong structure, looming out of the desert in front of them; a derelict fortress, looming out of the sand in front of him – a ruin of an old civilization. The Helic Republic wouldn't care about them – the invasion of the Guylos Empire was employing fluid, lightning-raid battle tactics that had little use for permanent, heavily fortified structures, but a lot of them had been left more or less intact, being too remote and dilapidated to be economically viable for reclamation.
"Perfect!" Raven grinned in satisfaction. "There's no way he'll be able to follow me in with a Guysack!" Revving up the engine as far as it would go, Raven leaned down into the wind, rocketing towards the edifice ahead of him. It was a close call – though he could match the speed of the Guysack on the straight, the constant swerving to avoid gunshots was slowly whittling down the distance between them – and the detour he had to take to avoid a derelict zoid didn't help matters. By the time he reached the fortress, the scorpion was snapping at his heels. He shot straight through the entrance, barely keeping his balance as the Guysack slammed into the stone, the pilot having been completely focused on his prey. "Oh, clever, clever..." the Republican scout backed up his zoid, claws snapping. "But you're not getting away that easily – I'll tear you out of there with my bare hands if I have to!" Raising the tail, he let loose a stream of laser fire at the wall above him. A shallow crater was blasted out of the stone surface. Inside the fortress, Raven was thrown off his hoverboard, landing with a solid 'thunk!' on the floor.
"Ouch..." Raven winced as he stood up, rubbing his tailbone. There was another crash of laser striking stone, and Raven stumbled as he picked up his board. "No point staying here" he commented as he ran deeper into the facility.
"Alright, that'll do Private."
The republican scout looked behind him as the two command wolves loped to a stop behind the Guysack. "Stay outta this!" he growled. "I've got things under control."
"Oh really? Looks to me like you're hitting your head against a brick wall. Literally."
The scout fumed as his superior pulled him up. "Okay, okay, I can't get to him, you win, I'll leave him be."
"Hey, I didn't say leave him alone, I just told you to stop. We can't have a kid like that running round – we're just here to give you a little help... Alright Dorelo, fire on my mark; let's bust this place wide open."
Raven peered into the dark room, hesitant to step in – the room seemed much larger than it was in the dim light. The dull thud of the shelling outside goaded him forwards. After all, this was perfect – at the end of a long corridor, no doubt deep inside the fortress, and with an entrance that Raven had only found because a section of wall had fallen off during one of the bombardments, this was the perfect spot to wait for the soldiers outside to give up and go home. They'd lose interest soon enough. Republican soldiers didn't care enough about the outlying villages to take time out of their schedule to play hide and seek. They just sent the collectors round to collect the tariffs and left a few craters in any village that didn't pay up. They always payed up next time. The system kept the fledgling Republic functional quite effectively.
The Guylos Empire had of course tried to quell the rebellion in the far east of the continent, but due to internal politics and the emperor's own indifference to the latent danger, the Helic Republic had gained enough momentum to establish itself as an independent nation. And like so many radical freedom-fighter movements, they had become a dictatorship more tyrannical than the empire ever was they were even now striking back at in retribution for the losses they had suffered during the revolution. Although how they could justify storming their way through clearly civilian towns to "eliminate potential threats to national stability" disgusted Raven. Maybe they didn't even worry about justifying it. With the President's extensive secret service, they certainly didn't need to worry about insurgency – only a fool would try to stand against the twisted wheels of justice that powered the cruel nation.
Glancing around the room, Raven noticed with surprise that there was a dim red light blinking on the wall next to him. "Strange" he murmured. "How does this place still have power?" Reaching over, he pressed the switch. There was a low whirring hum, and beads of light began to run along the ceiling, recessed lights activating as they zig-zagged back and forth along the grooved channels. Raven found himself in some kind of laboratory – unlike the rest of the fortress, the walls here were gleaming, and functional equipment still blinked and chirped as it booted up from decades of inactivity. And there, in the middle of the room, were two structures – one was an oval vessel, clamped at either end by electronic stands that branched out with numerous cables and wires. The other structure had probably been the same thing, once upon a time, but only a few shards of the green glass remained stuck to the supporting structure. Raven came closer to the intact pod, peering inside. Behind the glass, a murky liquid obscured something – a vague shape with a wedge-shaped head and the long, powerful tail of a dinosaur-type zoid. Strange – if it was a zoid, it was incredibly small. Wild zoids were very rare now, and the dinosaur-type zoids especially had been, for all intents and purposes, hunted to extinction. They lived on in zoids like the Godos, but for a natural dinosaur-type zoid to still exist... Raven pressed his hands against the glass, gazing in wonder. It had been a while since he'd looked at a zoid with this much child-like admiration. So focused was he on his find, that when the shape stirred, it's eyes pulsing vibrant blue, he started back, accidentally hitting a switch as he pushed himself away from the pod. The low hum of energy swelled to a resonant throb as the pod began to glow with light. Scrambling back against the wall, Raven looked on in awe as cracks lanced across the glass surface. With a hiss of steam, the pod burst open, and a shape spilled out onto the ground.
Now that it was clearly visible, Raven could see that the zoid couldn't really be called a dinosaur – if anything it was a dragon. Two raised fins, like folded wings, protuded from its back, and fluted spikes radiated back from its face to shield its neck. The long tail twitched as the zoid pulled itself to its feet, looking around to take in its surroundings. Raven didn't see it do so – he was already running down the corridor like he had a ghost after him.
Raven pressed himself against the wall, chest heaving as he risked a stop to catch his breath. He glanced back down the corridor – no sign of it. Of all the things Raven had been expecting, that had been the last. He was lucky he'd got out of there before it gained it's bearings. Raven took a few deep breaths, and then started running again. He needed to get out of here – forget the Republicans, anything was better than being stuck in the same building as that.. thing.
Suddenly an ear-splitting crash pierced the air, and the corridor wall ahead of Raven cracked apart, revealing the Guysack scout. Raven instinctively went to start his hoverboard – and realised that in the panic of seeing the zoid in the pod, he'd left the board behind. Now there was no way he could outrun the Guysack, and nowhere he could hide, not in a corridor this big. "You're mine now, you little brat!" the republican soldier crowed in triumph as he brought the claws down on Raven. The boy flung up his hands, helpless to defend himself – and looked up in surprise as a blazing white bolt of light arced across his head and ricocheted off the Guysack's cockpit, leaving a large crack along its length. The bolt earthed into the ground in front of Raven, coalescing into the hunched shape of the dragon zoid from the lab room. Raven gave a strangled cry of fear, scrambling back from the zoid. For it's part, the black zoid simply looked over its shoulder at him. It gave a contemplative growl, before turning and coming back to him, paying no attention to Raven's attempts to back away.
"Get away!" he yelled, voice cracking as his throat tightened with fear. "Get away from me!" Ignoring Raven's frantic struggling, the zoid clamped its jaws round the scruff of his collar and deposited the boy on its back, between the fins. There was a hiss of pneumatics, and the fins opened, unfolding into a pair of bat-like wings, the membrane between them strangely organic for a zoid. Leaning forward into a sprint, the zoid barreled down the corridor away from the Guysack, forcing Raven to clutch the thing's neck to keep his balance. A single flap of the wings, and the zoid took to the air, skimming down the corridor even as the Guysack sent a spray of lasers after them. The dragon-like creature banked sharply, rounding a corner, then pulled up sharply to navigate a flight of stairs – in all they were probably only in the corridors for half a minute or so, but the trip took an eternity to Raven's panicked mind. Finally, bright daylight stabbed through the dim gloom, and Raven's zoid rocketed out of a window high up on the fortress. Raven risked a look down below – two desert-yellow command wolves were outside the fortress, and the Guysack was just emerging. At that point, the dragon zoid banked sharply again, going into a steep spiral that left Raven convinced they were going to slam into the sand. At the last minute, the zoid flared its wings, pulling out of the dive in a sharp, upside-down loop that threw Raven off its back and deposited him into... a zoid cockpit. Raven looked around in surprise. It was the derelict zoid that he'd passed on the way here – now that he had a chance to look at it properly, he saw that it was a dinosaur zoid he had never seen before, no doubt abandoned during one of the ill fated attempts by the Guylos Empire to take down the Republican defensive line. Not that it was much use to him in this state. Looking up, Raven saw the dark grey zoid standing above him.
"What do you want from me?" Raven demanded. "Why haven't you attacked me yet?" The zoid tilted its head to one side, as if it had understood Raven, but had no idea what he was on about. Finally, it gave a shrug and looked out to the side. Raven followed the direction of its gaze, and saw the Guysack bearing down on him, flanked by two Command Wolves that had started firing long-range shots at the wrecked zoid. "Dammit!" Raven cursed as the shots impacted in the sand around him. "I'm a sitting duck like this! What are you-" he looked up at the zoid, and saw that it was leaping into the air, wings flapping as it gained height, before it sublimed into a bolt of white light which shot high into the air and arced back down, piercing through the back of the zoid. A strong wind kicked up, obscuring the approaching Republicans behind a screen of sand. Raven made to climb out, hoping to hide in the confusion – and found himself stuck as the rotted remains of the cockpit harness re-grew themselves, holding Raven down as, before his eyes, the stoned-over surface of the control console shed its years of decay like a snake shedding its skin. Dead screens gleamed as previously non-existent combat systems came online and it showed Berserk Fury. The dull red of the rusted exterior became a shining silver and the open cockpit closed itself, view screens crytallising into place over the empty eye sockets like ice on a window. Finally, with one last surge of wind, the sand was dispelled and the Berserk Fury raised itself up, letting loose an exultant roar as it tasted life once again.
"What the- how the hell did he do that?!" one of the soldiers exclaimed, faltering in his attack.
"Calm down, Dorelo" said the other. "He's just a brat, he's in an unknown zoid so even if he had some experience with piloting, the control scheme would throw him off. Besides, a dinosaur type like that has to be a high-performance combat machine – I hear it takes a year of full-on training just to qualify for a Red Horn. There's three of us, and we're all trained soldiers. There's no way he can win. Now follow my lead – Private, head right and lay down cover fire, Dorelo, charge straight ahead, all guns – I'll head out the the left and snipe out his control conduit. Okay, go!"
The republicans fanned out, laying down a blanket of fire as the Berserk Fury sprung forwards to meet them. The Berserk Fury was lightning-fast; it gave a jink to the left to dodge the Guysack's fire, followed by a lunge at the first command wolf's jugular, ripping out enough internals to send it into a system freeze. As the Command Wolf crashed to the ground, the berserk Fury had already wheeled around, spitting four bolts of energy from its back-mounted cannons to rip through the Guysack's back. The tail went dead along with half the legs, leaving the barely functional zoid to drag itself forwards as the Berserk Fury turned its attention to the last command wolf.
"Th... that's not possible!" the republican choked in shock. "It was only one zoid – how? How did it beat us?" Too late, he tried to make a run for it – the Berserk Fury was on his hindquarters in an instant, hamstringing the back legs, before jumping over the zoid's crumpled form, kicking off the back with more force than was really needed for the jump. Leaving the crippled republican force behind it, the Berserk Fury took off at speed into the desert, in the direction of Raven's home village.
In the cockpit of the Berserk Fury, Raven sat back, not sure what to make of what had just happened. He'd piloted zoids before, but never one as advanced as this Zoid, and definitely never in a combat situation. The speed with which he'd been able to dispatch three trained soldiers... that couldn't have been all his work.
Almost in response to his thought, the Berserk Fury suddenly came to a stop, cockpit opening as a bolt of light arced out of the zoid and earthed into the ground below Raven's vantage point. Spreading its wings, the dragon zoid took to the air, alighting on the nose of the Fury's. Folding its wings back up, it contemplated the boy in front of it. Raven did the same to the zoid, slightly less panicky than in the ruins.
"Okay" he said finally. "You didn't attack me when you came out of the pod, you helped me escape the Guysack, and then you helped me defeat the republican patrol. And now that we're clear of any danger, you still haven't attacked me." Raven gave a deep sigh, closing his eyes. "I suppose..." he said slowly. "...that you can come with me – [i]for now[/i]." He added emphatically. "But don't pull anything."
The zoid gave an amused, rasping growl. It seemed friendly enough. Maybe it had just been... Raven sighed, closing his eyes again. The zoid gave a qureious purr.
"Nothing" he replied, looking up at the dark grey zoid.
"Shadow" he said finally. "I'll call you Shadow."
Shadow gave a nod of agreement, before fanning his wings out and rising up into the air, circling above the Berserk Fury as Raven started it up again, heading home. He hadn't worked out how he was going to explain either Shadow or the Berserk Fury... he'd think of something.
* * * * *
The sun was setting as the last, mangled frame of a Molga lost its residual energy and slumped into a heap of lifeless metal. A figure stood on a cliff top overlooking the smoking battefield, arms folded as he watched the last death throes of the zoids he'd dealt mortal blows to. The pilot inside the Molga was probably still alive – he'd deal with that when he went down on a final sweep. Right now it was time for a well-earned stretch; imperial grunts were hardly a challenge, but you still got tired from the tedium of crushing Molga after Molga. There was a metallic clunking sound as the figure's companion came up behind him, saurian frame exuding aggression. An annoyed, low growl issued from close to the figure's ear.
"Don't worry, we'll finish them off" he replied, placating the grumbling zoid. "I just like to leave them for a while first – let them build up some hope of survival so I can crush it." Behind him, the sapphire-blue dinosaur with tusks on her jaw-hinges gave an evil chuckle, golden-yellow eyes gleaming. And from behind its tail, a peal of soft, cruel laughter made its way forwards, revealing itself to belong to a blue-haired woman, slight of build, with turquoise eyes.
"Oh, Van..." she purred in a voice like liquid silk, "you've got cruelty down to an artform." Van Flyheight cracked a wicked grin.
"Why thank-you, Reese" he replied. Specula the Organoid gave another evil chuckle, flexing her claws in anticipation.
"Yes, I think it's probably about time we went down and put those soldiers out of their misery." Van turned away from the cliff, making his way to the ocean-blue Shield Liger behind him. Specula let out a savage growl as she activated her boosters and fused to the Liger, lowering the head for Van to climb into. "You want a front-row seat, or would you prefer to watch the whole thing from here?" Van asked Reese as he strapped himself in.
"I'll stay here" she replied, sitting down with her legs dangling off the cliff. "I find the sunset relaxing." She looked off towards the west. "Red sky at night" she commented, observing the colour of the evening sky. "That means blood's been spilled somewhere." Van laughed as he closed the cockpit, powering the Shield Liger through the foliage and off the cliff, taking the short drop to the ground. Letting out a roar, the Liger began to lope at a leisurely pace through the carnage of the battlefield, back-mounted cannons swiveling to acquire their targets. Rese watched Van play for a while, before leaning back and gazing up at the few stars that had begun to show themselves in the dusk. "Not long now..." she murmured to herself. "... and then it'll be red skies every night."
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