The scrabbling of feet on stone was barely audible over the high pitched screeching. his heavy breathing was only just noticeably louder.
Just when the heavily armored figure that ran from the three green apex predators seemed to be out of energy, he put on a final burst of speed that just barely pushed him into the crack in the wall he had crawled from just minutes ago.
As he breathed a sigh of relief at the respite, he stole a glance at the rations his mad gambit had managed to net.
He let out another sigh but not out of relief, this sigh was borne of frustration. Seeing as the crate full of rations he had grown accustomed to making mad dashes for was rapidly depleting.
And even with only one mouth to feed, which struck a saddening chord in his chest, the thought of his companions corpses left to rot as if merely canon fodder. He would not last a week with what he had.
This man was the final survivor of the search and rescue team sent for the team of scientists on SR-388 and while he knew he could not survive long on this much rationing, he also knew that at the very least the teams short range comm's unit was functional and regularly sending out a distress signal.
All he had to do now was wait... and wait.
The emaciated corpse was still warm when the Hunter found him.
It seemed that he had been raiding his own food stock in dire hopes that he would be alive when someone came.
She found the short range communication set up seemed to have been brutally mauled by the tusks of alpha metroids.
The Hunter set his body on a funeral pyre surrounded by his teammates and said the proper rites.
She carried on almost without change to her demeanor, but to the few who knew her it was not hard to tell
The Hunter was slightly more tense, and sometimes she would find herself thinking about them and had to shake herself out of it.
She never forgot them, nor did she ever lose the dog tags she pulled from his cooling body
Samus Aran never forgot the reason she fought, for people less fortunate than her, for those who fell in battle.
And for those who only wished for a simple life like her parents had.
Story end