A hero is a savior.
A hero is a hope-bringer.
But sometimes, to some...
A hero is a demon.
Burning corpses lay everywhere on the floor. Shattered glass and broken machinery created a layer of debris. A true battlefield.
A foot crushed one of the dead soldier's head.
"So you have found me again. Chasing me across the whole ship. You must be a bit angry."
A sigh.
"You know, Vor was once my brother." Boril stood away from the monster Warframe and the group of carcasses, looking out a large window and straight into outer space. "We were not born when we were cloned. Instead, we were only truly born when we met in war. There is nothing that unites like the threat of death." He sighed. "He was different than the Vor you met. His wisdom surprised even the Queens. His courage inspired legions. And I? I was the young, naive child." The lightly armored man seemed to be a lost in memories for a second, before shaking his head. "But I was brave when he was cautious. I was a demon in battle where he was an angel of death. I was strong where he was weak. And he was strong where I was weak."
There seemed to be pain in his eyes. "And then, came the day he received the Janus Key." He closed his eyes. "All his work, just like many of our scientists, was for a way to stop the Winter that was foretold. Having hit a dead end, he turned to the only path left available to him that had a shred of possibility to succeed. But he couldn't have know the danger of that Orokin Artifact. Who would have known that it had the ability to corrupt?" He finally turned around to face the Tenno.
"I blame your kind, Tenno. While he was descending into insanity and even tried... tried..." He paused as he grimaced. "...tried to kill me, but he didn't die from that. He died by your hands." The man's fists scrunched up. "Why did HE have to die... WHEN I LIVED?" He breathed to calm down. "He could have saved the Grineer..."
"What is this 'Winter' that you speak of, Boril?" The Lotus' voice sounded in the room.
"That is for you to wonder and a secret for me to die with. Hopefully with you, Tenno!" The soldier put on a helmet, before suddenly turning back towards the window and smashing the reinforced glass with his augmented fists. Everything started getting sucked straight into space, but Boril grabbed onto a metal bar and sealed his suit with a click.
"Warning! Decompression detected in sector A4!" Red sirens blared.
The lone Tenno, luckily, crashed into a navigation console and was pressed against it by the pressure of the rushing air. But it had another problem. The lack of oxygen will kill it sooner or later.
"Tenno! That console is the bridge controls! Maybe you can do something with it!" The Lotus advised.
Loving its luck at the moment, the mutant Warframe painfully reoriented itself so that it could see the screen better. It then changed its mind and cursed its luck silently. Unknown letters flashed across the screen. The being waited a moment for a response from the Lotus.
A second of silence. "...you may have bigger problems than you thought. This ship is on a course towards a Grineer outpost. Infiltrators that I have sent before have already wiped most of the Boril's research, but there is another copy on this ship. If the rest of his kind receives this copy, the Tenno might possibly be in big trouble." The Warframe shivered as it could still feel the wound on the back of its neck. "You have to find a way to destroy the data."
The Tenno looked around and spotted Boril using random hanging pipes to slowly crawl towards the doorway. He had already made decent progress and was now closer to the exit than it. The Warframe looked at its own health status located floating in his field of vision. It was slowly decreasing, much slower than one would expect from been in a vacuum. Though, that was probably because there was more air coming from holes in the room's walls, sustaining both the force trying to push the only two people left into space and the small amount of oxygen in the room.
Frantically, the fusion of three Warframes looked around for a handhold. Around him was just the flat floor, as if Boril had planned this (which he did).
The Lotus' disembodied voice gave advice again. "Try to use your Warframe powers and melt holes into the ground." The Tenno tried. Finding that Boril was out of range, it absorbed the limited amount of heat from the lamps on the ceiling. A few seconds later, there was just one hole for it to grab on to. "Quick! He's almost there!"
By the time the Warframe entered the pressurized hallway after making many holes and shut the door behind it, its target was long gone.
The Lotus spoke up again. "I have bad news and worst news. He has taken the rescue team you heavily wounded and must be running towards the smaller cargo ships on this carrier-class spaceship." The Tenno was still happily surprised that his fellow man and woman lived. "The worst news? I don't know if you can destroy the data and save them at the same time."
Suddenly, for the Tenno, the situation felt all too familiar. But it just couldn't remember how and when.
"...if you would like, I could make the decision for you. You are running out of time. Soon, you won't be able to do either of them. It pains me to leave such an unfair choice to you. Here, I have decided. You m-"
But the Warframe was already running down the hallway.
"I'm sorry you have to be in this situation, if only things were different." The Lotus apologized again. "...where are you going? This is the path to the reactor. Are you saying..."
Kill one to save two.
There was no way the lone remaining Tenno was going to let his rescuers get tortured.
Murder one hundred to save two hundred.
There was also no way it was going to endanger its own race.
Massacre ten thousand to save twenty thousand.
Having seen no way to do both...
Commit genocide on a million to save two million.
It all just comes down to numbers.
The monster's memory was hazy, but there was at least one million Tenno. On this ship, there was two Tenno, it, and Boril.
Kill four to save a million.
It readied a stolen rocket launcher and aimed it at the spaceship's reactor. This way, maybe it'll be able to destroy the ship before Boril could leave with his comrades, saving them from torture by sending them to the afterlife.
The monster's finger-
Static filled its vision.
It fell to its knees.
"Is this how you repay our kindness?"
"Murderer!"
"Oath-breaker!"
"You are no savior, just-"
...God's creation fallen from heaven.
The monster struggled to raise his weapon.
You are just... a false prophet. A fire thief. A murderer.
It was finally able to line up the shot. Its trigger finger twitched.
A fallen angel.
