DYNAMOTALE
An Undertale / Megaman X crossover by LazerTH
For Hannah
888
Author's note: This crossover is all Hannah's fault (of course, I share the blame because Dynamo is my favourite Maverick).
888
The man with silver hair walked alone under a purple sky. The dusty wind pushing against him was a constant, hot and inexorable as the blazing sun above, casting its burning rays through sickly clouds of ash. The man felt nothing, his sensors registered them as negligible environmental hazards. In the distance, Mount Ebott loomed above the wasteland that had once been the Earth.
"There is my treasure trove," the man said. His silver hair whipped and flashed in the wailing wind. "No-one will take it from me this time."
He was not in a hurry. This place was far removed from the pitiful surface reclamation projects headed by the Maverick Hunters. They'd taken on the job of making the surface habitable for humans. There were no more human governments. No more human nations.
At last, reploids had inherited the Earth.
"Stupid Hunters," the man muttered to the mountain. "Stupid Sigma, stupid X, stupid Zero..."
He walked onward, leaning into the dust plumes, his huge boots finding easy purchase in the desiccated soil. Mount Ebott cast its shadow over him. This land was cursed. It was wrapped in legends the humans spun millennia ago, a place where monsters were buried. The man did not care. There was nothing worse than the surface world. He could handle whatever horrors lay waiting underground.
"Dungeons always have treasure, right?" he said as he began climbing. It was a silly notion, born from glittering treasure hoards buried in the pyramid tombs of Egyptian pharaohs and propagated over the ages by silly humans. He chuckled at their folly, his powerful legs leaping with dancelike precision from one rock to another.
Higher, higher still. The cruel winds swept down the mountainside, trying to push him away, trying to make him slip, but he was stronger and faster. Real treasure lay in personal power, not gold.
The mountain trail ended at a cave. At the mouth of the cave was a grisly sight: a human skeleton. A quick scan reported that it used to be a human child. His database analysed some of the charred bones to identify the murder weapon: an old, clumsy napalm emitter that was popular during the 2000's before it was replaced by modern fusion technology.
"A victim of the robot wars," the man muttered. His curiosity piqued, he stepped back outside to perform a wide scan of the mountain's base. There used to be a human village there, but it was destroyed by the same weapon used to kill the child. Sand, ash and dust had buried all visible traces of buildings and bones long ago. Satisfied that he had solved the mystery, he stepped over the bones to enter the cave.
His eyes saw through the darkness. Incredibly, plants grew here, brown roots and green vines emerging from a huge hole in the centre of the cave. There must be water below, protected from the nightmares outside. The man stood at the edge of the abyss. This was what the legends spoke of: the Barrier. His eyes could not see past it.
A thorough scan could not classify its energy signal. But it was very real.
This reminded him of the Nightmare Virus... a plague no conventional technology could scan or analyse. It took physical form, killing humans and reploids alike. The Maverick Hunters claimed to have eradicated the Nightmare during the sixth Maverick war.
The man contemplated the Barrier. It was strange that its power source had lasted this long. What had the ancient humans used? They could not possibly have developed something as advanced as the Nightmare Virus! The man didn't believe in magic.
"This is in my way."
The man with silver hair held out one large hand, his long white fingers dematerialising with a flash of blue light into the open mouth of his buster cannon. Energy gathered in the mouth, the bright blue plasma shot firing downward at the Barrier with a pew!
The shot passed through with no resistance, but no light shone out to show where it hit.
"Oh, it's one-way, then?" he said. Without a second thought, he hopped down.
