Samus walked along the corridor ill at ease. She didn't see anything, even when she scanned the corridor. But she felt that something was there, waiting for the right moment to attack. She kept her gun ready as she walked
along.

Most of the time she was on this mission she was just midlessly killing metroids. Freezing them and then firing a missile and watching them shatter. Samus didn't know that there could be such a plentiful amount of metroids on one planet. She didn't even know that there were any metroids left until she had come here. She thought that she had killed all of them back on Zebes. Another metroid suddenly popped down from a vent above. Samus was a bit startled by this because all of the previous metroids she had killed has just been in the corridor waiting to be wasted. She quickly killed the metroid.

"This just isn't fun anymore" she thought to herself, "Why can't there be some kind of challenge, not just a bunch of metroids that I can just mindlessly breeze through." When she had first come here it had been kind of fun to watch the metroids shatter all over the place. But that feeling had long since passed. She had expected much more resistance from an abandoned Space Pirate base. Samus kept walking ahead, a bit more relaxed now. She didn't feel like anything was stalking her anymore.As she walked ahead, she could see of the in the distance that there was a rather large jumper. She could see that it was alive and thought that was strange. Nothing she knew could survive being around metroids. This one looked
particularly tough and large. It's legs were bristling 2 inch long iron-hard spikes that looked like they could tear through Titanium like tissue paper. While she was still approaching the jumper, it suddenly jumped and tore through the ceiling with it's legs. It then dissapeared through the hole.

She had almost reached the spot where it was before when suddenly it burst through the ceiling right behind her. Startled, Samus ran forward a few steps and turned around. To late she realized the floor was crumbling underneath her feet. The jumper just stared at her as she fell down through the new hole she had just made in the
weak floor. She smoothly landed on the dark floor and took a look around. It was pitch black and there was no sound.

Then, she heard the all to familiar chirping of a metroid all around her in a very loud cacophany of noise. They knew she was there and were about to go into a feeding frenzy. Samus immediately started panicking. She knew that she couldn't fend off this many metroids at one time. She figured that there were at least thirty or fourty
metroids all waiting to start sucking the energy out of her suit, and then her. She quickly started scanning the ground and prayed that some of it wasn't solid and she could shoot a hole into the ground and escape. She started panicking even more when she saw that the floor was solid ruck under her.

Suddenly the chirping stopped. Then she realized all of the metroids had surrounded her and she could faintly see they're green bodies. She could see they're fangs twitching, waiting to tear into her suit and flesh.

Samus suddenly remembered something. The chozo once told her that power bombs, to release the amount of energy they do, had to draw power from the air around it. She was told that if there was anything other than air around the power bomb when it was drawing energy, it would absorb that type of energy into it and release a different type of explosion. So if she shot the power bomb with the ice beam while it was charging, then it would release a large explosion of ice energy.

She quickly took out a small handful of power bombs and charged up her ice beam. She activated the power bombs and shot them with the charged ice beam. She then quickly protected herself from the explosion and watched as all the metroids froze. Quickly she released a regular power bomb and watched them all shatter. She hoped that she had gotten all of them in both explosions.

When she heard no more chirping sounds she quickly jumped back up through the hole. The jumper had dissapeared. She wondered where it had gone off to, then she noticed the rather large claw-shaped holes in the
ground where it had jumped off. She decided to follow those tracks and see if she could find it.

Nothing happened while she tracked the jumper. Although at one point, the tracks just, dissapeared. She decided then that she would just leave it alone for the time being and resumed her original course.

She finally made it to the end of the corridor and a locked, gray door was barring her way. The only way to open these doors was to do some special thing. Most of the time she had to kill a certain enemy which would trigger the door to unlock itself. Most of the time the enemy was rather tough and took a lot of work to kill. Her thoughts wandered back to the jumper she had encountered earlier.

"Dait." she swore out loud. She backtracked to where the tracks from the jumper dissapeared. She looked around but couldn't find any reason for the tracks to have dissapeared. There weren't any holes in
the wall or ceiling that it could have opened and gone through. It seemed like the jumper had just, dissapeared. Samus found this rather unnerving.

Samus continued to backtrack for a while and eventually she found the tracks of the jumper again. She followed these tracks and they eventually led her to a small hole into hot lava. She put her hand into
the lava for a second and saw her energy drain. That told her that it was to hot for her suit to handle for more than about a minute.

"How could that jumper possibly survive in this lava." she wondered. Then she realized something. She realized that there were light tracks on the wall in front of the pit. She then knew how the jumper had 'dissapeared'. It hadn't been jumping and had been walking along normally to avoid putting marks into the floor. She quickly turned around to late, the jumper was already in the air and was about to try and put the spikes on it's legs through Samus.

Quickly she morphed into a little ball and went under the jumper, the spikes missing her by only a little bit. She went back into her normal mode and saw the jumper charging at her. She quickly charged up
her power beam and sent a shot at it's head. The charged beam hit dead on, but the jumper didn't even get scratched and it didn't slow. Samus jumped over the charging jumper and heard it hit metal. She turned around and realized that a metal door
had sealed her in with the jumper. It turned back around and charged at her again. She tried shooting it with a charged plasma beam shot but nothing happened. She tried hitting it with everything she had but
nothing even scratched the jumper. She couldn't even freeze it with her ice beam, it would just shrug off the ice around it like there wasn't even anything there.

Samus realized that the only way to escape from the jumper was through the lava. But she didn't know how far it went, she might end up as a burnt pile of ash, no better than if she were to stay in here with
the jumper and get gored by those huge spikes on it's legs.

She jumped over the jumper again and morphed into the little ball again. While it was still recuperating from hitting the metal door again, she slipped into the lava. She instantly saw her energy start to drain, and quickly.

She went out of her ball form and looked around. She panicked when she didn't see anyt other exits to the lava other than the one she came in from. Activating her speed booster she ran around as fast as she could. She found nothing fast.

Samus realized she was trapped in a corner when she heard the thud of a jumper hitting the ground. She looked behind her and saw the jumper looking at her. The power suits energy was almost gone, the jumper was ready to charge her, and she was trapped.

Desperately she set off a power bomb hoping that it might open up a passageway somewhere so that she could escape. She heard something behind her crumble after the power bomb had exploded. She saw a small opening that would only allow her through in her ball mode. She was about to jump up the hole when the jumper hit her from behind. Her suit's shield energy jumped down to empty just as she cleared the hole. When the jumper had hit her, it had been kind of like it was kicking a metallic soccer ball and had sent her through the hole that she had
been about to go through.

Although her shields had taken most of the punishment, her suit had not gotten off unscathed. There were some small fractures in her suits armor and hot air had begun to leak in. Her suit had also been heated up a lot from the lava so that it was rather uncomftorably hot, and growing hotter.

She suddenly felt the strong urge to lie down and go to sleep. She knew that was a very bad idea in her current situation. She had to get somewhere cool and fast, otherwise she would fall unconcious and
roast to death in her suit in the middle of the underground caverns on Dremmin.

She could hear some cracking above her. She assumed that her power bomb blast had weakened the cavern she was in. When the small drop of lava fell right next to her hissing and bubbling, she knew that
it would not be a good idea to stick around any longer.

She started sprinting as fast as she could, her speed booster wasn't working. She assumed that was because of the damage she took and also because the energy cells powering her shields were down. If she
didn't have those working then the force from running so fast would tear her apart. Plus, the speed booster leached a bit of power off of the shields to power the booster.

She could hear the cracking from the ceiling collapsing behind her. She looked behind her and saw that the ceiling wasn't just cracking where she had set off the power bomb, the entire ceiling was
collapsing. Luckily the entire ceiling wasn't collapsing at once, it was slowly making it's way down the corridor she was in.

She quickly started sprinting as she saw the ceiling where the power bomb went off totally collapse and lava start pouring into the corridor. Up ahead she saw a green door. This wasn't good, she had to fire a super missile to break those open, and her shields dampened the force of the super missile being fired. If she fired a super missile in her present condition, it might destroy her gun, or at least damage it. She had no choice though so she got one ready and fired.

The pain stunned her for a moment. She saw the door open when the missile hit the door through the white dancing spots in her vision. She sprinted as soon as she recovered and somersaulted through the door. A few seconds after the door closed she heard the lava slam into the door, making it shudder a little.

She thought about what had happened when she fired the missile. It had badly burned her hand from the gases propelling itself forward and had nearly blown her gun to shrapnel. She quickly removed the red hot gun and let it cool on the ground. She inspected the gun closely and found that it had cracks all over it. It wouldn't be firing missiles anytime soon. She highly doubted she could do much more than fire a few shots of her power beam without it exploding.

As she laid down in the coolness of the higher caverns she thought about her mission. It had all seemed so simple when she first took the job.

"All I want you to do is to go into the abandoned space pirate base on Dremmin and bring back a guy named Drak. He's one of my employees trying to run away from me. You will be well paid if you bring
this guy back. I'll give you 5,000 credits for your effort. It should be relatively simple for one of your caliber." She knew that her employer had been lying about a few things. She wondered who this "Drak" really was and why her employer was willing to pay 5,000 credits for him to bring him back. She kept wondering this as she fell asleep.

To Be Continued...