Mega Man X: Whispers In Time

by Erico

The Inhabitants of the original Mega Man series speak their peace, of the end of their era and the coming one of Mega Man X...

10. Last Blue Sunset

MEGA MAN X: WHISPERS IN TIME

By Erico

CHAPTER EIGHT: LAST BLUE SUNSET

How do all those songs go all the time?? Oh, yeah...

My heart is human, my blood is boiling, my brain IBM...

I remember my first thoughts...

I.

I am.

I am Rock.

I was born in 2070. My designation was DL#01. Rock.

And somehow along the way...I ended up being called Mega Man.

I'm not a hero, I'm not a savior, forget what you know...

I'm sure you've heard the tale by now. Of how Rock vanished. How Mega Man took his place. How a man in blue saved the entire world from the hands of a madman.

I'm just a man whose circumstances went beyond his control...

Not just once. Time and time again, through countless Robot Rebellions, Wily and I crossed swords. Or to be more precise, we crossed guns.

It was a time of reconstruction. It was a world of fear. It was the age of robots.

That age lasted all of fifteen years. The events in them were told, retold, examined and stored away in historical annals. Such turbulent times were made by their very nature to be studied and re-examined time and time again.

But the historians weren't there. They didn't live in that nightmarish world caused by Wily's fantasies. I did.

They called me a hero.

I have so much to say...but yet I cannot speak...come and do my bidding now, for I have grown too weak...

In the end, I'm not a hero. Like that song written by Styx, a rock and roll band who lived in a different world, things just got out of hand. And I ended up being called to arms. Do you think I WANTED to be Mega Man then? I didn't. And there are times I still don't. You have to balance them out. Making a difference and bettering the world, at the cost of your own livelihood, your own dreams.

My weary eyes have seen...all that life can give...come to me oh young one, for you I can forgive...

Like Kansas, another rock band said, there comes a time when the 'hero' can't do anymore. And what then?

I've stood where no man goes, and conquered demon foes...

History books will tell you that there was a man named Wily. And there was a robot by the name of Mega Man. That time and time again, they met and fought. One so evil that his name brought scorn and rage, the other tirelessly stopping the nightmare, for he was and always would be the hero. That's the Disney-ized version, right there. And it's total garbage.

Yes, there was a Wily. There was a Mega Man. And they did fight. But there was no song and dance. There was no compact 90 minute storyline.

I am Mega Man. I was there. And I saw it all. So if you...YOU, who want to know what it was truly like...from my earliest days until my final gasping breath, are willing enough to see the truth...then I will show you.

The dream ends now. Here is the world.

---

I long ago had lost any sympathy for Wily. I long ago forgot how he'd gone insane, and that mental illness was the cause of his paranoid, delusional actions.

It was 2070 then when that happened. The first Robot Rebellion...the one that started it all. In some ways, the worst. Because Earth hadn't had time to prepare, I hadn't had time to prepare. There were two battles raging at the end of that conflict...the final battle between Wily and me, and the one in my mind. With Wily's virus program Ice Man had infected me with.

"You--you're fighting me! You can't do that, Rock! You'll kill me! Remember the Prime Rule!"

"Wily, you had your chance! I tried to help you, and you scorned me! Now you'll face true justice!!"

I remember how that fight ended. A complete draw.

Wily's Warmachine was put out of commission, and he was ousted from his last technological weapon. But I broke the Third Law then...as crazy as it sounded, it saved my life. Instead of destroying it.

The Laws of Robotics are there for a very important reason. To give all robots a set of guidelines to interact with humans successfully. By breaking the Third Law...Putting my own life in Jeopardy without obeying a human order or saving a human's life...My mind should have turned against itself, pushed me into total mind freeze. Death, in other words. But by breaking the Third Law that night, I fritzed the virus in my mind...forced it out of its ingrained spot in my core memory and into the virus hunting program Dr. Light and Roll had designed. So I lived.

That was the one main concern Light had with me. How I could disobey the Second and Third Laws...fully, without injury.

And that was how that first conflict ended, in the late summer of 2070. With a whimper and a hellish atomic fireball rising up from Wily's Skull Fortress. Wily was sent to prison for a time, and life went on.

But of course, nothing was ever that simple.

---

The probation committee ruled Wily had been acting under strain caused by his insanity.

Fools...insanity had long since become a moot issue with that madman.

So they released him...under what were considered lax restrictions. And so it began again. The first chance he got, Wily constructed a warp generator for himself and fled. Of course, warp generators were dangerous to human life. Wily didn't care. He'd been damaged by a warp generator in that experiment gone wrong in 2069, and he'd been using them ever since. Not caring that every use messed up his mind even further.

Perhaps then those fools at Fyodor Prison realized the error they'd made in releasing Wily. Or maybe it had come when eight more berserk Robot Masters appeared around the globe, all there for one reason. Not to set up a set of conjunctive points to leave the world helpless, no. They were there for terror value, and to goad me into action again.

It worked. Once more, the world turned to me, their eyes pleading, praying. I remember how one news broadcast went.

"Wily's Second Robot Rebellion continues on now in its second day, and the reports are still coming in. This is hard news for a world still recovering from his first group of atrocities, made harder still by the fact he is no longer associated with any militant group. An attack made of his own accord, as it were...But the world remembers how the last Robot Rebellion ended. A man in blue, a robot by the name of Mega Man stepped forth and silenced Wily's terror, without causing an ounce of damage to his person. The world needs that hero again...The world needs Mega Man."

They needed me. They needed me?!

They hadn't needed me when I was a mere prototype in that press conference ages before the First Robot Rebellion...where I'd stood up, looking as human as any other teenaged boy. I had been new and intriguing then...but I had been feared.

And NOW, they needed me...

But nobody else could do it. No one but 'The Blue Bomber'...So I went.

I destroyed eight more Robot Masters. I found it a little easier this time than I had before. I'd never made friends with these eight. And then I found Wily's Skull Fortress again, this time tucked away in a corner of the Himalayas.

Stopping him that time was just as difficult as before. There was no virus in my mind, but Wily had found a suitable replacement...

Fear.

---

Wily's second Warmachine was no less deadly than it had been in the first Robot Rebellion. But luckily for Mega Man, it was a strategy he'd long since figured out. All it took was a sizeable amount of his Metal Blades to carve the monstrosity to shreds, and then it had crashed. The Blue Bomber had thought that for a moment, that was all it would take.

But instead, the ground had crumbled underneath his feet. Mega Man had found to his horror that instead of being able to see Wily crumple down before him in his bowing gesture, he was plummeting down a long, long shaft...which ended who knew where.

Only his fast acting reflexes allowed him to access his Air Shooter and slow his descent with several well timed blasts of superheated gas. He'd landed at the bottom of the long shaft, realizing to his dismay he'd fallen about three quarters of a kilometer. And apparently, the only way out was down a long corridor that sat in front of him with a mocking stare.

Avoiding droplets of acidic solution that dripped through cracks in the ceiling above, he slowly made his way through the passage, his only light the dim glow from his Buster kept at a low power setting. At the end, he found a strikingly familiar metallic shutter door. He'd seen them time and time again...and behind each one had been a foe.

This time had been no different...

Mega Man had stepped into total darkness, only to have Wily careen down from the ceiling above with a blood-curdling battlecry. His white labcoat had fluttered as if there was a wind blowing it, and before Rock's own eyes...

Wily had slowly shifted and changed into an alien.

"It ends here, Mega Man!!" Wily warbled, his voice altered by his transformation. A stunned Mega Man looked on in disbelief...for this time, the final fight between him and the madman had no wall of metal between them. It was just Wily...and Rock.

Gasping, Rock tumbled away from another shot that sang from the alien Wily's hand. It was plasma, no doubt...he'd gotten hit by Wily's first strike, and knew it was a powerful breed. It had taken at least a sixth of his health off.

"Wily, why?!" He shouted out, squinting his eyes to lessen the dazzling streaks of light that blurred between the alien and himself. The lights that flew by were like stars out of a Star Trek rerun...tiny pinpricks that left long flowing trails and effectively disoriented the still stumbling Blue Bomber.

"You ruined my life, Rock!! You took away everything I held dear!! You stuck me into a prison, with narrow walls and horrible food! You haunt my every nightmare, and even now you try to kill me!!"

"Wily, you're insane!!" Mega Man shouted over the roar of disorientation, raising his Buster up and checking his weapons gauges.

They were all running low. Time Stopper and Crash Bombs were at zero, Metal Blades were to 7...in fact, the only thing in any sort of working order from his trials was the Bubble Lead. But that was near useless...its primary use was underwater, where the 'bubble' part of the formula allowed it perfect buoyancy. In air, it was lead. Bubble Lead. It dropped and rolled...but if it hit something, it did cause substantial effects. Still, the unwieldy fashion of delivery had made it a tactic Mega Man hadn't used aside from against Heat Man, who ended up getting so tangled up in the concoction he roasted himself to death.

"Your own actions put you there, Wily!! It was YOU who took the six prototype Robot Masters and started that War, not me!"

"LIAR!!"

It was the inevitable conflict that the two could never reconcile. Because Rock spoke the truth, and Wily could never accept it. It never died, a force that appeared each and every time. It had been born in the summer of 2070. Now in 2071, it had come back, stronger than before.

Part of what frightened Rock so terribly was how Wily was attacking him. The mad scientist wasn't hidden behind another one of his machines...There was nothing Rock could shoot at that wouldn't endanger his life.

The room swirled in even more starlight, making it impossible for Rock to make any sense of depth perception. Was this a room...or had he truly stepped into a zone with no boundaries, an empty slat of space with just him and Wily? Everything was being thrown into question, and that was precisely the weapon Wily was using on Mega Man. Fear and doubt.

Another bolt of plasma came from the Wily alien, and it was all Rock could do to backflip away from it as it tore at...The floor?? Was there truly a floor or did the shot seem to vanish? But then, Rock had to be standing on something, didn't he?

He received a rude awakening as the back of his head slammed into something...hard.

Against all logic, defying everything that this zone of empty death seemed to offer, Rock slumped into a heap. But this time, as his eyes remained shut from the sudden jolt of pain, he realized something.

His back was pressed against a wall, and his legs were strewn across a floor. And with no blinding, hallucinogenic lights display to disorient his spatial senses...He was finally able to get his bearings. Enough so he knew that where they were was a room. They weren't out in the middle of nowhere. This was a chamber, meant to confuse him as...

"Your tricks won't work, Wily!!" Mega shouted angrily, climbing back up to his feet and finally opening his eyes. He had only enough time to register the shock of another plasma strike coming down and slamming into his chest, throwing him against the wall that wasn't.

"No tricks, Rock...just your death!!" Wily rasped angrily. Weakly, Mega Man drained another E-Tank, realizing he had just one left to his name. And still, the Wily alien continued to float about, firing off shot after shot and glaring at him with all the hatred the angry spirit could muster.

It had to end. IT HAD TO STOP.

A robot must never harm, or through inaction allow harm to come to a human being.

The First Law restrained Mega Man even now, as it always did, as it always would. Angrily, the Blue Bomber let his Buster sink back into itself, bringing forth his hand once more. Damn the First Law...

But there's more than one way to skin a cat. Mega Man blinked his eyes a few times and focused in on the Wily alien, then charged. With a roar, he leapt up into the air, preparing to wrap his powerful arms around the fool and drag him out of his flight.

But much to his surprise...His arms passed straight through the Wily alien, as if it were not real. Only where their midsections smashed together did Mega Man register pain, actual physical contact. Stunned, he fell to the pseudo-ground once more, shaking off his hazy senses as the Wily alien continued to hover around the room, laughing with undeniable cruelty.

"You cannot win, Rock...You can never win!!"

But something still wasn't right about it all...And for the moment, Rock stayed to avoiding the Wily alien's shots and thinking about it.

Like he wasn't there, like he was a ghost, like...

Suddenly, it became all too clear to Rock. Just what was going on. And the realization came with such rage sparks flew from his teeth.

"You bastard..." Mega Man whispered. He lifted his head and stared at the hovering creation, clenching his fists tightly. "You Godforsaken BASTARD!!"

"At last you echo the words of your madness!!" Wily snarled. Mega Man's entire body was taut now, ready to snap with the smallest motion.

"Trying to play on my fears...my doubts...My RESTRICTIONS..." Mega Man's left arm shimmered for a long moment, pulling back in itself as his Buster came to bear. His color remained constant, the same varied shades of blue as before. "GODDAMN YOU!!"

The Wily alien fired off another shot. Mega Man merely sidestepped it and lifted his own weapon.

"And now you come at me, trying to attack me with this...this HOLOGRAM!!" Mega Man screamed. His emotional circuits flared, his systems began to overheat, blaring out warnings that came so seldomly...

It's the same damn kind of trick...that stupid shape-shifting robot of his from the first Skull Castle...the same damn kind of trick...A HOLOGRAM!! But now I'm not facing myself, I'm facing him...A warped form of him meant to play on my fears and the limitations of the Three Laws...

A robot must never harm, or through inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.

"BUT YOU AREN'T HUMAN!!" Mega Man screamed, snapping his Buster high and firing away. Bullet after bullet of plasma tore away, striking towards the Wily alien.

And just as Rock had suspected, the image crackled and fizzled as the intense energy interfered with the field patterns.

"IT'S ALL A TRICK!! A RUSE!!" Mega Man fired again, this time able to make out a sort of cylindrical object at the image's core...The shots struck, yet caused no damage. Mega Man's teeth gnashed harder, angry at Wily's deception, angrier still that his main weapon caused no harm, and seemed only to increase the thing's power.

"ENOUGH!!" He screamed one final time. His blue armor shifted and flashed into shades of gray...With one final cry, the Blue Bomber leapt into the air towards the hologram. This time, not to tackle it. But to spray it with Bubble Lead.

Burst after burst of the eccentric weapon came out, each plowing straight through the holographic image and planting itself onto the cylindrical core. Mega Man didn't let up, keeping the stream of heavy bubbles descending. For all its power, the cylinder could not cope with the added weight of Mega Man's shots. As the image crackled and the cylinder sparked from its failing circuits, the starlight illusion also faded...

Leaving Mega Man in a brightly lit underground room with a gigantic holographic emitting hemisphere on the ceiling, still faintly trying to cause the starlight-- The Wily alien cylinder, which had emitted the alien holographic image in the first place, struggling to stay airborne as it self-destructed and collapsed onto the floor--And Wily himself...not an alien, but still ever so human, at the controls of a pod in a corner of the room, frantically jerking throttles and joysticks in every direction, still trying in his final hour of defeat to overcome Mega Man's attack.

And then it all failed. The cylinder crashed to the ground and exploded, the hemisphere shaped holographic emitter cracked and exploded, raining glass and electronics upon the Blue Bomber...and Wily's control pod shorted out and forced the mad scientist to flee from it as it exploded in a shower of sparks.

It grew silent then. Quietly, Mega Man let his Buster slip back away and walked to where the cylinder had landed. He could make out the plasma cannon's port on the bottom, the emitter on top, and on its sides...emitters for a narrow EM field designed to harness the power of plasma to recharge the cylinder's systems. Wily had had it all worked out. And he would have won.

Were it not that Mega Man had once again found a way around his limitations...found the impossible solution to Wily's madness and vaporized it.

"It's over, Wily." Rock spat out, marching over to the trembling madman and standing in front of him with clenched fists at his sides. "Your Second Robot Rebellion ends here."

A trembling Wily barely managed to get to his hands and knees...and once more beg for forgiveness.

---

And still...the world hoped he might be changed. Wily, esteemed member of the Second Rainbow, the scientific team that had caused the Reconstruction, that had preserved Earth after the madness of the Wars of 2040 that lasted a decade. He was still that Wily. They still clung to the theory it was his madness that drove him. Perhaps it was.

But didn't they get it?! Where does the sympathy end?! When do you finally realize that he can't go back, that he WILL NOT STOP...

Psychiatric evaluations, that's what they gave him. A year of it. And by the end of it, defying all odds, all logic, they released him. Declared him a sane man. Wily had bowed down and groveled before the world, begging for forgiveness for the acts he'd committed. They put him on medication for his psychosis, if I remember correctly. And the world rejoiced.

"Perhaps," they thought, "It's finally over. The Robot Rebellions are done with, we have no need for Mega Man."

And how I so desperately hoped that had been the case. Still acting penitent, Wily had gone to my father. Doctor Light. He patched up things, promised to be the good little worker and help Dr. Light with the grandest project ever.

It would be called Gamma. A massive robot designed for one reason:

Replace me. In other words, a peace-keeping robot. It was a project heralded by the entire world as a sign of peace to last for ages.

But...they ran into problems. To finish construction of the ten story tall behemoth, they needed eight very special breeds of a new kind of crystal that had only recently been discovered. It was known as Energen, or something of that nature. There was even a mining colony up on the moon that dug out Energen. Eight colonies in all, each providing Energen of a slightly different type. But to make Gamma, make the power crystal that would serve as the focusing point for his Fusion generator's power distribution, would take one from each. And the problem was this.

Each and every one of those eight colonies, seven on Earth and one on the moon, was in such dangerous environments that humans couldn't work there. So they put robots in charge. More precisely, Robot Masters.

And just as before, the Robot Masters had gone berserk. Only this time, Wily swore it wasn't him that was causing it.

As if I would ever believe him...But Light did. Simple-minded, all too trusting father of mine...

So that meant something else caused it. Because all eight going bonkers at the exact same time...was too much of a coincidence. So they called me out. The world called me out. To once again don that blue armor, to stop the Third Robot Rebellion in 2072 and set things right. But did I ever have a choice??

Mega Man, being blessed with a strong sense of justice, chose to stop Wily's evil schemes...

Textbooks would say that. But you want the truth? I did it because no one else would. And every time I had to do it again, it became more and more of a burden.

Along that path I walked, I had to face a robot about my size in gray and red armor, with almost the same capabilities as me--Break Man. Only by using a new technique I'd picked up, the slide, did I manage to defeat him time and time again. Four times I faced him, and then one final time...

Dr. Light built me a pet...a robotic dog by the name of Rush. Not always as bright as you'd hope, but he came in handy. He possessed skills that before I had to rely on the Magnet Beam or Dr. Light's Item series to obtain.

And I met Doc Robot. That was all it took...that first glance into his disfigured face to realize we'd met before. Because back in that very first Skull Castle...it was HE who had transformed himself to look like me. His holomorphic abilities had long since gone out on the blink, and the best he could do now was imitate the abilities of the Robot Masters I had faced in the Second Robot Rebellion.

He came to me, thirsting for revenge. For my death. But he would not have it.

By the end of my missions, Doc Robot was finally gone. He'd suffered for years, but no more.

And then, guess what? I'd given the good doctors the Energen crystals before I'd left to tend to the maniacal Doc Robot. When I returned, I discovered I was too late.

Wily had faked the psychiatric tests...for all the insanity in his mind, he still had that genius. Enough of him was left he had been able to lead us in that ruse all along.

He'd knocked Dr. Light out cold...shocked Roll into stasis...and fled the laboratory, taking Gamma with him.

It had been Wily all along. I think that was when the world finally realized...He was beyond help now. He was just a monster.

His newest Skull Castle was a grand achievement. Each and every Skull Castle was completely different, and I still looked back on his very first as the most monstrous, the most difficult to fight my way through...but he still packed in his surprises.

The return of the Rock Monster--the Yellow Devil. A room where I had to face three holographic images of me, and only one would take damage. And then when I got to Wily himself, a massive creation he hailed as the Pinbot.

But it wasn't Wily that was controlling the pinbot. It was a robot Wily...whose head came flying off on a spring, like some laughable jack in the box...

"What's the matter, Rock? I thought the entire world had accepted the fact my head wasn't screwed on right!!" The speakers in that chamber laughed. Gritting my teeth, I blew the Wily robot into scrap and climbed down even further.

It was there, in the lowest Sub-Sub basement I could get to, that I finally met the REAL Wily. At the controls of none other than the massive Gamma robot.

There was almost nothing I could do to stop it. If I stayed at the lower platform, it would swing at me with fists that could end my life in a single hit. If I managed to clamber up to the metallic scaffolding above the range of its hands, it would fire plasma at me...

Some people might say desperation drives ingenuity. Perhaps. Or in my case, it might have been rage.

Yes, rage...the world's mighty 'Blue Bomber', their savior from the madman known as Wily fought. And only when that rage met its peak did his true powers emerge...

Almost as if Wily built his Machines to be completely invulnerable to everything but the most useless weapon in my arsenal, he deflected every shot. Hard Punch, Shadow Blade, Spark Shock, and even normal bullets...nothing worked.

Until I decided, if it was going to end, I might as well try the craziest stunt ever.

Hailing Rush, I leapt off of his back springboard and into the air above the Gamma robot. My armor shifted and whirred, going to a shade of gray and dull, dull yellow. The Top Spin.

Everything gave way then. As my entire body twisted and gyrated from the rotational speed the attack brought, I slammed clean through the Gamma robot's head. Missing Wily, demolishing everything in my path. Gamma was destroyed, and as he fell apart, so did Wily's Skull Castle.

But was that the end of it?? I had seen Wily crushed underneath a gigantic mass of solid rock and metal, only fractions of a second before I suffered the same fate. And I lived. Coming to in my house...Light's laboratory, I was surprised to see Break Man standing next to Light, his face mask pulled away to reveal a somewhat quirky smile, whistling a familiar four tone, five note song.

So...it turned out that all along, the mysterious Break Man had been Protoman...my older brother, the prototype for me and Roll.

Protoman, or Blues, had been created in 2067, and had known both Light and Wily before I was ever born. Light had thought him lost in that warp transport laboratory accident in 2069, but he wasn't...He'd merely been spun off, almost entirely fritzed. But somehow he'd found his way to Wily. And remembering him as Light's robotics partner, and not the psychopathic madman, he'd been convinced that there was a berserk blue robot running about everywhere, messing up Wily's plans.

Of course Protoman had fallen for it. And only so much later did he realize where the true boundaries of the conflict lay.

"Rock, forget about it. Wily was crushed underneath that rubble, the same as you. I could save your life...but it was too late for him." Blues reassured me.

So by the end of the Third Robot Rebellion, I'd gained a brother and a pet. Destroyed yet another robot menace. Made the world safe for democracy, some slanted textbooks would say later.

And still, I couldn't break that nagging feeling.

That somehow, Wily hadn't given up the ghost.

And how right I was.

---

Peace, it seemed, had a habit of appearing fleetingly, like cherry blossoms. Or sakura leaves. Pick a form of plant life with a limited lifespan, I don't care...the analogy works the same.

Back in the initial explosion of the robotics movement, there had been a few main players. LightTech Industries, started by Light and Wily, responsible for not only my life, but the very concept of Robot Masters, the American based U.S. Robots(Named such because of Isaac Asimov's work in the science fiction of robots back in the 20th Century), and a little known company by the name of Cyrillic Enterprises. Of course, there were other smaller ones, but those were the big three. The head, the genius behind Cyrillic Enterprises had been a lesser known, but still respected robotics engineer by the name of Sergei Cossack. I remembered reading how disgusted he'd been at the militarization his company had taken, and how he resigned because of it. Cyrillic Enterprises soon died afterwards, no longer having its main thinker leading the helm.

And that's what came as such a surprise, when in 2075, Cossack made an announcement that stunned the world.

Apparently, he had grown angry that his own designs for Robot Masters had been denied production by all the robotics firms...this was true to some extent, of course. Cossack had quit the industry, been made sort of a pariah. But he'd gotten wealthy in those early years, more than enough to sustain him and his daughter. And now all of a sudden, he'd unleashed another wave of robotic horrors across the land...with eight of his own Robot Masters leading the way.

And he was challenging me...

Challenging Mega Man to step forth and see if the famous Blue Bomber had the balls to face the seemingly impossible odds.

I remember talking to Blues before I went off to begin the Fourth Robot Rebellion. And the usually half smiling, if not whistling older brother of mine seemed startlingly off kilter.

"Rock, I understand that there's no other way around this crisis than to stop this Robot Rebellion dead in its tracks. But..."

"But what??"

"...Something still seems off." He shook his head, stood up and warped out. And that was the last I saw of my older brother for a while.

The next conflict was both harder and easier at the same time. Cossack's Robot Masters were more well ingrained in the trenches than Wily's had been...yet at the same time, Dr. Light had given me an upgrade to my main weapon. Changed my plasma Buster into the Mega Buster, given it the ability to charge up and release larger, more powerful shots. Not to mention he redesigned the original robot in the Fliptop series, Eddie, to warp in and out of certain battlezones to carry resupply items like E-Tanks.

And that was that. Eight more Robot Masters. Eight more areas to claw my way through, only to face almost certain destruction. But I still triumphed...and in the end, through a communication that Drill Man had been trying to route back to the home base, Dr. Light and I tracked down where Cossack himself was holed up.

In the middle of nowhere in Siberia, the Russian robotics engineer had added onto an old Russian Royal family castle. Only now, it was a Citadel. Cossack's Citadel.

And strangely enough, I remember that fight with Cossack as clearly as any ever fought with Wily himself.

---

Cossack's other Citadel guardians had been heads and tails more difficult than the fight with him was. The Melee Moth had nearly sent Rock plummeting to his doom, and The Cage, as he'd affectionately named it, had effectively boxed him inside a tomb with a focusing crystal that was as much the thing's weakness as its single projectile weapon. Not to mention the Skeeters, crawling about the spike laden room with ease and firing off blasts of plasma at their will...

All of those had presented unique challenges that might had won the Blue Bomber over. But each time, he'd dug into something deeper than mere advanced response time and came out on top.

He didn't even have to try in this final fight.

It was almost as if Doctor Cossack wasn't even trying to fight back. Occasionally, he would lower down his pod and try to pinch at Mega Man with the pod's only weapon, a single pincer...but as he remained hidden behind that thick shield of plasteel, his main focus seemed only to offer a halfhearted effort and lose.

"What's with you, Cossack?!" Mega Man shouted angrily. "I thought you were mad at the world, mad at me!! You think you could try a little harder for vengeance!" His Buster sang with the power of another synthesized mass of scrap shrapnel that smashed into the already tender underside of Cossack's Pincer Drop.

"I see you have learned how to focus the Dust Crusher, Mega Man." Cossack observed bitterly, the distaste on his face evident through the plasteel covering of his final defense. "Tell me, did you enjoy severing Dust Man apart before he blew into bits? Did you enjoy that act of aggression?!"

"I NEVER enjoy this, Cossack!" Mega Man spat back angrily, sliding underneath Cossack's retaliatory swipe. "Do you think I was activated for the first time with thoughts of rampaging, destructive madness racing through my mind?! NO!! But as far as the world's concerned, I'm the only one around who can stop this crap from happening!!"

The Blue Bomber tried to avoid Cossack's machine again, but this time was drawn tightly into its Pincer grasp.

"You don't understand." Cossack croaked, manipulating his craft to squeeze Rock tighter and tighter, until the motion bit into his body suit and threatened to slice him in half. "I'm not doing this for pleasure either..."

"So then why are you doing this?!" Mega Man barked, managing to switch over to his Ring Boomerang and sever the Pincer's hydraulics, freeing him from its vicegrip.

"I must..." Cossack replied shallowly.

"Bull..." Mega Man whispered. He lowered his head for a brief moment, then shook it and clenched his free hand. "That's total Bolshevik. You always have a choice to commit the actions you're performing...ALWAYS!!" His face swung up, contorted in rage. "When Wily died, it was finally over. I was finally FREE of the curse he'd given me...of being this...HERO..." His yellow coloring faded away back into Gray as he readied another burst of Dust Crusher. "But no, you had to go and take that away from me, you Goddamned maniac..."

He lifted his Buster and prepared to fire again. Cossack's warcraft was already badly damaged...severing the Pincer Arm had sent it into freeze.

"Mega Man, no!!" Cossack cried out in alarm. "My craft...if you strike me now, I will die!!"

That was the only thing that kept Rock from ending it then and there. Stunned by the announcement, he stumbled forward and ruined his aim. Still, impulse fired off the shot, denting the concrete wall beyond the dim light with the Dust Crusher's shrapnel.

"Then it seems we're at a stalemate, Cossack." Mega Man spoke up, when at last he could again. His eyes burned with all the fury of his lost innocence, the abandoned years, all the nightmares and horrors that had come with his triumphant role. "If I fire at you again, you die. At the same token, you can do nothing more to attack me."

"Then I suppose we'll end up staring each other down." Cossack replied nervously.

And that was when a familiar four tone, five note melody rang through the wide and expansive Fourth Ring of Cossack's Citadel.

A familiar figure jumped down from a rafter above the fighters, clad in gray and red protective armor with a shield swung over his back. However, he was currently having a devil of a time keeping his bright yellow scarf in its traditional pose, what with the little girl pulling tightly on it.

"Cossack, stand down." Blues ordered wearily, setting the young girl to the ground and turning her about for the fighters to see. "Your kid's no longer under his control." Mega Man looked at Blues for a long moment, only then noticing the scars from heated battle lining his torso.

"My God, what happened?!"

"Simple. Cossack here was right, bro. He had no choice but to call you in. He was under orders to, and being blackmailed to do so. By means of this pretty little package here...his daughter, Kalinka."

"Don't hurt my father!!" Kalinka wailed, suddenly noticing just what Mega Man and her only parent had been doing. Mega Man was too stunned to remind her that he couldn't.

Somehow, Cossack pulled himself free of the wartorn craft and got to the ground, running to Kalinka and hugging her tightly, as if he was afraid a foul gust of wind might blow her over.

Which was all too likely...her face was dull and pale, her eyes listless and worn, her body thin and malnourished, she looked on death's door.

"I can't believe the conditions she was being kept in..." Blues growled, clenching his fist. "It's inhuman...not even dogs deserved the torture she got."

"But then...that...but who..." Mega Man uttered, still trying to get his bearings at the shocking realization that this Doctor Cossack had been manipulated all along.

Cossack finally lifted his face from his daughter's shoulder and looked at Mega Man with a glance of hard focus.

"Who did this?? The madman you failed to destroy in the last Robot Rebellion."

It was only then that a beam of warped matter crashed down in front of the group and re-coalesced into a figure.

A figure with wild white hair off the sides of his head, a great gray mustache, and a lab coat covering over a pair of brown slacks and black shoes. Wild eyes burned with hatred and fear all at the same time, smouldering like the embers of Hell itself.

Wily.

---

He hadn't died. Blues didn't think he had survived the explosion of his last base, but...

Wily was alive. Somehow, he'd blasted his way to freedom, and with the world thinking he was dead, he was able to move about unhindered.

Cossack was nothing but a ruse, a scapegoat. A diversion meant to keep me busy, and also a diversion that carried the hopes that I might finally be pushed out of the picture. It was a plan of sheer genius hidden behind a veil of malevolence. Cossack would have never gone through with the plan...that was why Kalinka had been kidnapped, held in captivity in a portion of Wily's Fourth Skull Castle under the duress of Robot Masters.

THAT was what Blues had been up to this entire time...

He'd just gone wandering, and that's when he'd stumbled across Wily's base. Perhaps he knew, instinctively KNEW that there was a force behind Cossack.

Wily had blasted away as soon as he realized he'd lost control of the situation, leaving Dr. Cossack, Kalinka, and me and Blues alone to our thoughts. That was when Blues was able to finally tell me just what had happened.

Wily had greeted Blues with open arms...it seemed rational enough, considering that the last time they'd seen each other, my brother was still under the belief that Wily was trustworthy. Blues had likewise responded the same way...The shock hadn't been hard to fake, and behind those glasses of his, it was easy enough to mask the smaller signs of deception.

As soon as he'd gotten the chance, though, Blues broke away from Wily's watchful eye, made his way through the Castle and found his way to Kalinka.

That was why Protoman looked so torn up...he'd had to take on three Robot Master copies of Snake Man, Gemini Man, and Needle Man. Only by jumping around enough and causing their various attacks to strike at one another did he make it through the struggle by the skin of his teeth. And then he'd taken Kalinka and blasted a wall out, running for all his might.

That's why it had taken so long...Why he showed up just in the nick of time.

If it had just been him, Protoman could have warped his way free of the trap without difficulty. But having to tend to the welfare of a human...a weak and sickly human, no less...Effectively nulled any rational chance of that method of escape. Warping would have scrambled her mind, harmed her...Blues would have disobeyed the First Law in doing so.

So it had been the long and winding road for him. Making his way through the wilderness, running endlessly with Kalinka huddled close to him...

I can't imagine the trials those two had to face on the road back from Wily's Skull Castle to Cossack's Citadel. And Blues was tightlipped enough about the matter he stopped after mentioning it took them a week to traverse the wilderness with countless hordes chasing after them.

But now it would be all right. Kalinka was back in Cossack's hands, and would slowly be nursed back to health. Weary beyond any level he'd ever been at before, Blues finally warped back to our house for a very long stasis nap.

And then it was up to me. I found it easier to take on Wily's madness after every Robot Rebellion. Almost as if the feelings of rage and anger the conflicts brought forth in me grew stronger each time, more efficient, more deadly.

And this time...the Fourth Time...was easier than most.

He'd blackmailed a decent and honest person in his quest to get to me. He'd brought harm to another human being on purpose. Not merely sending robot hordes to end their lives...but maintaining an innocent soul in a state of utter, depraved captivity.

Yes, this time was easier than most.

This time, it was personal.

---

"YOU SHOULD HAVE DIED, WILY!!" Rock screamed into the darkness. A bitter, heartless laugh answered back only moments before a brief flash of light revealed where Wily's final Warmachine lay hidden.

With a scream, Mega Man fired off the supercharged Pharaoh Shot above his head, casting it down with both hands. It struck Wily's craft, adding another hit. But at the same time, Wily managed to peg the Blue Bomber with the full quad of his own before vanishing once more.

"Rock, there are times you even surprise me..." Wily growled. "Surely you would have realized by now that I will NEVER rest until you are DESTROYED!!"

"That's not going to happen anytime soon, you monster." Rock called back angrily. "I don't know how you survived the annihilation of your last Skull Castle, but you shouldn't have come back...Damn you, you shouldn't have come back!!"

"Oh, so now you're angry with me?!" Wily roared. "About time you feel the same way, you pathetic robot! All I have left now is my rage...THAT'S ALL YOU LEFT ME WITH!!"

"That's all you left yourself with, you stupid bastard!" Mega Man shouted.

Quickly, he turned about in time to slide underneath two shots. A third hit him in the shoulder, and he winced from the blow.

"It will never end, Rock!!" Wily cackled insanely. Mega Man picked himself back up to his feet and drained another E-Tank, restoring the health lost from his arch-nemesis's blows. "No matter how many times you stop me, no matter how many Robot Rebellions you quash, I will keep coming back...I will keep fighting you, keep forcing more and more pain on the world until they realize that you are the true problem!!"

"YOU'RE INSANE, WILY!!" Rock exclaimed, hurling off another supercharged Pharaoh Shot into the darkness. Speakers had been set up everywhere, preventing Rock from finding Wily's vehicle by sound pinpointing...or any other method, in the completely dark room. "That will never happen!!"

"Then I will never STOP!!" Wily rasped. "Until you are dead, until your name has been wiped clean from this miserable woebegotten planet and the feeble minds of its bastard hordes, I WILL NEVER STOP!! Rebellion after Rebellion will be instilled, Rock. Innocents will suffer. Until at long last, I finally triumph! Cossack was a puppet, Kalinka was his strings...There will be others, Rock. I WILL NEVER STOP!!"

And that's what caused Mega Man to snap. Something deeper than his programming, deeper than his emotional circuitry could cope with...the sheer force that Wily's statement brought forth came like a tidal wave, quashing over everything, overpowering everything else.

HE HAD TO BE STOPPED.

"NOOO!!" Mega Man screamed, a shrill cry from his very core that threatened to blow out his vocal processor. Another globe of sunlike plasmic energy clustered above his head, larger than any before...

Rock didn't even bother waiting for Wily to appear. He just fired. He charged another shot, and fired again in a different direction.

The fourth charged blast of his Pharaoh Shot was the one that brought Wily forth from the shadows at long last. The mad scientist cried out as the energy finally overloaded his controls, caused the lights in the room to suddenly begin to flicker on and off like a strobe light.

Rock fired again and again, burning blast after blast of Pharaoh Shot energy into the cloak-capable vehicle. Wily barely managed to force the hatch open manually and jump out screaming before his Warcraft at last could take no more, and exploded.

Strangely, Wily remained unharmed, pushed away by the explosion with no shrapnel striking him. He rolled to the ground in a heap, revealing to Mega Man that the room he'd been fighting in came with two distinct floor levels. Like before, Wily had tried to cause spatial confusion to his foe. And just like every time before, he had failed.

It was over.

But after bowing a few times, a wearied and emotionally exhausted Mega Man was stunned to see Wily stand up and flash a feral grin at him.

"This time, Mega Man...but the next time we meet..."

He tottered towards the wall and activated a secret exit, slipping through before Rock could even utter a cry of surprise.

And then the klaxons that signaled the base had initiated self-destruct activated, and the entire structure of madness began to shake and quiver in its death knell.

Rock had no words then, just a lump that rose up in his metallic throat and made him clench his fists up into balls. But common sense took over, and he warped himself free of the Skull Castle.

Wily's Fourth Skull Castle was located farther East and North than even Cossack's secluded base, in Siberian wilderness so deep that nobody would have ever thought to look there.

Nobody but Blues, who had spent so many of his early years wandering that not looking there was next to forgetting to pack an extra pair of socks.

Wildlife had since learned to avoid coming near the Castle, so there was an eerie calm that surrounded it.

That calm was shattered only moments after Mega Man reappeared on a snowy slope overlooking the monstrous place, when a grim fireball caused the whole fortress to ignite and vanish in nuclear fire. It was a limited explosion, one designed purely to do away with the Castle and whatever lay inside. The land about would remain unspoiled, fallout would not occur. Only the memory, and the charred effects of the heatwave and concussion blast would remain.

Mega Man's blue eyes reflected the light from the structure's collapse as for a moment, it was brighter than the sun itself. He watched a familiar billowing smoke cloud rise above the ashes, appearing in the shape of a macabre death head. As if all of Wily's bases were places of death, the image of the grim reaper's maw seemed to appear in their destruction...not to mention their facades.

And rising even higher than the Skull Castle's destruction was the outline of an all too familiar saucer-shaped transport. Wily, making a clean getaway. For another fight.

Rock knew he didn't have much time before the destructive shockwave would reach him...and send him flying for a loop. But he had enough time to settle his thoughts.

Wily had gotten away. This time. But the next time, as Wily himself had said...

"Next time, Wily..." Mega Man said quietly, turning about and lowering his hands to his sides. "Next time."

And then he too vanished.

Later reports indicated foliage had been felled for a mile and a half radius around the now atomized Skull Castle.

---

He would keep coming back. Until I lay dead at his feet, or until he lay in prison, it would go on. After reconstructing his own Robot Masters to their original condition, Cossack signed on as Light's part-time assistant. Between the two of them, they were able to enhance my Mega Buster even further, increase the yield of the plasma supershot to resemble a fireball almost as big as I was.

The world was just as taken aback by the news of Wily's narrow escape from death as I had been. They had presumed him dead, thought the woes of their age were at last over.

But it took only Wily and his madness to prove that the true woes had yet to begin.

Cossack was declared innocent unanimously in the world court, pardoned for his actions. By then he didn't care anymore. All he cared about could not be given to him by a piece of paper from the international justice system. It lay close to him. His daughter. His robots. And a new mission...to help stop Wily.

We didn't see Blues for a while after that. It was a couple of years, in fact...

And peace, however valuable it was, remained as fragile as ever.

Another wave of destruction swept over the land, in the form of eight more Robot Masters, completely different than any that had ever come before. One even managed to take control of the orbiting asteroid defense platform, a structure humanity had sent up into space in 2072 to fend off the threat of spaceborne debris headed for Earth.

It was simple enough. It was a tactic I'd seen before. The eight had taken over very specific and crucial centers globally. Stone Man was in the Nevada mountains, leading mining operations to relocate buried nuclear weapons. Wave Man, the massive fresh water reservoir kept underneath the Himalayan mountain range. Crystal Man had overthrown all defenses at one of the largest Energen crystal producing quarries ever discovered, threatening the production of the core components of modern computers and communications systems. Napalm Man was in the Treeborg rainforest of India, and if he was able to finish his work there, would have ended the oxygen producing capabilities in the region. Gravity Man had broken into a research and development military base in the Western United States, Charge Man had hijacked the European train system, and Gyro Man was wreaking havoc in the high altitude weather observation multiplatforms above Nigeria.

What made it all the worse this time was that the man I called both father and mentor was gone.

He'd been kidnapped...by none other than Protoman.

I know how weird it sounds...but it was a figure in gray and red with a plasmaburst proof shield slung over his back, and a fluttering yellow bandana tied around his neck...That bandana was all that remained after Blues vanished, laughing insanely as he threw Wily into an air transport and flew off.

It was during this time that Cossack truly came into play. Without Doctor Light to aid me, I would have been in serious danger. Cossack offered a source of safe harbor for me while recharging after missions, as well as the invention of a new robotic assistant blessed with search and destroy capabilities.

Roll kept the house in line, while Eddie, Rush, and then close to the end of my missions, Beat, raced around the globe. We had to stop it again. We had to stop the Fifth Robot Rebellion.

But my heart did break in those dark days.

I'd lost my father...and my own brother had turned against me...

What caused my stomach to turn more than anything else was the response that the world gave to the Fifth Robot Rebellion. Cossack taped one broadcast for me so I could watch...And I still haven't repaid him for the TV I shot out.

"The Fifth Robot Rebellion is in full swing, with the Robot Masters leading the charge all having taken over points of strategic interest. However, for all the dangers that this newest conflict brings, public sentiment remains indifferent. Robot Rebellions, it seems, have become commonplace. Expected. Disliked, but no longer feared. We have Mega Man to thank for that, the people's savior. Already reports are seeping in that the Blue Bomber is once more on the job, stopping the attacks dead in their tracks...Experts say that this will blow over within two weeks, if not less..."

THEY all got to move on with their lives. They got to return to their crying babies, their car payments, their luxury houses with pool tables and the Jacuzzi two sizes too small...Only my life was torn apart. Only mine.

Damnit, why did THEY get to relax? Why did THEY get to say, "Oh, it's not my problem..."HE'LL" take care of it while I sit back and eat my Happy Meal..."

And that's when it hit me. How alone I felt. How there was nobody else in the entire world who could understand how I felt. How so very tired of doing this I was.

If humans got this condition, it might be labeled Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Battle Fatigue. But I couldn't get a label. In their eyes, I didn't deserve a label. I was only a robot. A robot who was built to fight.

But I WASN'T built to fight...I was built to make things, to develop things...to be a laboratory assistant, to understand complex machinery and CREATE. It was Wily who warped my life...turned me into a robot whose purpose now became to destroy.

Wily was the cause of all my problems. And he thought I was the cause of all of his.

And even Protoman had turned. Cossack found his Fortress in the deserts of Australia after I finished off the last Robot Master and set the world free. I remember going into that castle. I remember every inch of it, how my mind and heart felt like they were ready to be torn apart.

After trudging my way through the Three outer rings, I finally made it to the Fourth Ring. The Fortress's inner sanctum. Ascending a long shaft with its collapsing floors, I found the final shutter gate.

And there was Protoman behind it.

---

Protoman was still as enigmatic as ever, his eyes hidden behind the massive visor embedded in his helmet. Mega Man fought back the chill in his heart when his older brother whistled, lower and darker than ever before.

"So you finally came, little brother." Protoman said darkly, folding his arms. Mega Man took a few stumbling steps forward and pointed at him, his mind a jumbled mess of emotions.

"Why??" The Blue Bomber finally asked, his eyes looking as if he were ready to cry. If he ever had that capability.

"Why what." The red and gray figure replied in deadpan.

"Why did you do this?!"

"To prove something to you, once and for all." Protoman barked shrilly. "To prove that you're nothing more than humanity's errand boy, their stopgap to a problem they're unwilling to confront themselves. To prove that all your efforts are WASTED. Surely, you must have heard the news reports by now. 'Oh, there's another Robot Rebellion going on...But don't worry, folks! Good 'ol Mega Man will save us!' That's all you are to them, Rock. A ho-hum issue. A fifteen second soundbite. They don't care about you, and they never will."

"Where's Dr. Light? Why did you kidnap him??" Mega Man responded quickly, pushing aside the all too accurate and biting comments spat at him.

"Aah, that particular question has several answers. One, he replaced ME with YOU. Two, he's always been there to help you out. You're his favorite son, his perfect little child...So I wanted to see how you'd do if you didn't have Dear Old Dad's help this go-around." Protoman brought his right arm out and morphed it into a Buster, pointing it at Mega Man. "It seems you've done all right." He added drily.

"And then what?" Mega Man queried, backing up a bit as Protoman crept nearer and nearer.

"What, you can't figure this much out?" Protoman laughed bitterly. "I'm going to kill you. Save you the trouble of doing yourself in from all that stupid self-pity."

Mega Man had no chance to avoid his shot. It was small, compact...and dropped him to one notch on his internal operations energy with ease.

Mega Man groaned, slumped to one knee as Protoman laughed and drew nearer.

"Well, I guess it ends here then. Farewell, Mega Man...I'll make sure the world is in good hands."

But then something stopped him from going farther. A whistle. On key. Four tones, five notes.

In a flash, another figure warped into the room, yellow bandana fluttering from the air displacement. ANOTHER Protoman.

"What?!" The first Protoman barked in surprise.

"Rock, whatever this impostor's been telling you, it's a load of hogwash." The new Protoman said tersely. Mega Man was too stunned to move.

"Enough with you!" The first Protoman shouted, firing off a shot. The second Protoman laughed and jumped up into the air, dodging the shot easily and hurling down one of his own.

It struck the first Protoman in his shoulder, forcing the robot to stumble back and grunt in surprise. But what happened after that was the real surprise.

The first Protoman began to flicker and shimmer...and finally vanish, leaving a gargantuan version of the previous three castle guardians standing in its place.

"You know something?" The real Protoman muttered as he dropped down on the ground behind Rock. "I REALLY hate copies. Especially lousy ones like this Darkman holomorphic robot. God, he couldn't even get my whistle right...the Bastard..."

"Then..." Mega Man began in stunned realization. Protoman turned to him and nodded.

"Fraid so, little brother. Somebody was trying to frame me for starting the Fifth Robot Rebellion. And I can assure you I DEFINITELY didn't kidnap Doc Light. That was all Darkman's work here." Protoman rumbled. He reached behind him and pulled out an 'L' version of an energy tank from behind his back, then put it on the ground where he stood. "I've got a few other pieces of this guy's handiwork to clean up, Mega. I assume you can handle this twit?"

"Easily." Mega Man growled, feeling his familiar rage kick in.

How dare he, how dare Darkman play on his emotions like that...

"You will die here today, Mega Man!!" The Darkman robot rasped, his voice synthesizer fritzing as well. "I will destroy you in the name of my master!"

"Take a wild guess who THAT is." Protoman muttered quietly before warping out. Mega Man walked over and drained the energy tank his TRUE brother had left for him. Oh, Mega Man knew who, all right...

WILY.

---

I've mentioned before how at certain points, my emotional circuits began a process where they overheated, almost to the point of malfunctioning...where the neural inputs were so severe I felt a surge run through me, comparable to a human's adrenaline rush.

I first experienced it in the First Robot Rebellion...which when looking back, was the most painful. Because I didn't have all my battle experience, I was fighting friends...and I'd never done it before. The rush was so intense I caused an emotion of fear in my holomorphic nemesis, Doc Robot...And though I spared his life, I left him for dead. He returned that hatred and revenge to me in the Third Robot Rebellion. That same rush was felt when after everything that had happened, I caught up with Wily, and he turned his guns against me. Something happened in that moment I fired off my final shot, in one desperate attempt to stop Wily's machinations despite my severe injuries. The emotional adrenaline rush...as it might be called, allowed me to disobey the Third Law of robotics.

A robot must act to preserve its own life, unless such an action conflicts with the first two Laws.

Before, I had disobeyed the Second Law...though, still under the guise of withholding to the First. Telling Doctor Light I could not follow his orders to drop into stasis, because his well being required more immediate sleep than my own did.

When I disobeyed the Third Law, that was the beginning. It had no basis. The Second and First Laws held no precedence over it. Wily was threatening no human, and I was not following an order. I was acting under my own will, under my own morals, beliefs, and objectives. I was acting to stop Wily, because no one else could...a decision that still haunts me.

Disobeying the Third Law then had a consequence. It should have been death. By a quirk of fate or God or pure circumstance, whatever you believe in, that consequence was LIFE. The shutdown initiated in the core of my brain where the Three Laws lay forced the Virus program out of its niche...allowing the Antivirus program designed by Roll and Dr. Light to destroy it completely. I was saved.

But that still shook me. And ever since then, I've grown only closer and closer to that haunting step that gave me nightmares so many years ago...

That I would defy the First Law.

Every time that rage erupts in me again, provides that definitive edge that allows me to win the most crucial of battles, it grows stronger. More potent. Longer lasting. As if a gas tank that grows larger by use, the fuel for my fire gains more and more in its potency and quantity.

I went on to stop Wily's Fifth Robot Rebellion dead in its tracks. With Beat flying by my side and hunting Wily's vanishing Warmachine out of the darkness, the madman was sent fleeing down the immense hallways of his Skull Fortress, only to reveal that Doctor Light had been held captive by Wily all along. And then I remembered what Wily had said in the end of the Fourth Robot Rebellion...

"Rebellion after Rebellion will be instilled, Rock. Innocents will suffer. Until at long last, I finally triumph! Cossack was a puppet, Kalinka was his strings...There will be others, Rock. I WILL NEVER STOP!!"

The Skull Fortress began to collapse on top of all of us then, and doing the only thing I could, I held it up. Wily escaped laughing, leaving me and Doctor Light to die...

But we didn't. Protoman's familiar whistle echoed in the halls, and I found the weight of the ceiling freed from my grasp. Grabbing Light, I tore off into a safer section of hallway, eventually leading to our freedom. Protoman had saved us...and yet he never claimed the heroic deed as his own. Only his whistle betrayed his responsibility.

And Wily escaped again.

It was the winter of 2080 the next time anything of importance happened. Wily had remained hidden and off plotting somewhere...neither head nor tail of him or his devilish Robot Masters had been seen. Everyone thought, for a time, and just as they had before, that perhaps it was safe. Perhaps it was finally over.

To herald the new age, a tournament was held. A tournament open to all comers to see who could build the strongest Robot Masters. It was sponsored, oddly enough, by a rich gentleman by the name of Mr. X. Biographical data revealed he was legit...made his money as an arms dealer back in the Wars of 2040, felt bad because of how he'd profited where so many had died, and had been a philanthropist ever since. The Treeborg project of the Second Rainbow had been given a sizeable amount from him.

Everything seemed on the up and up. And so the tournament went on. It was a success, too. Eight challengers overcame all competition, aside from one another. Clearing the brackets, they entered the final round. Knight Man, Wind Man, Yamato Man, Centaur Man, Flame Man, Blizzard Man, Tomahawk Man and Plant Man. It was these eight that would challenge each other for the title of best Robot Master.

But that never came. In a coup that left everyone stunned, Mr. X stole the eight Robot Masters before the contest ever reached that final bracket. More stunning was what Mr. X rambled about in his farewell speech...that all along, Wily had been nothing more than a puppet underneath Mr. X's watchful eye. And it made sense, in a way...How else could Wily manage to build Skull Castle after Skull Castle?? His pocket money? More and more, it seemed that Mr. X might be right...

But then, that didn't matter in the end.

I was still Mega Man. And they were Robot Masters on a rampage. Cossack and Light shifted into overdrive, designing enhancements for Rush to allow him to MERGE with me, in two different kinds of armor suits.

There was no Wily this time, I thought to myself. This time it was different. This time, I was dealing with the menace behind the menace...

But that wasn't the case.

Like all the times before, eight Robot Masters fell before me. Eight abilities were transferred to me via Weapons Copy. And like before, I laid seige to the lair of the villain. Mr. X's Fortress.

The last time this had happened, where I ran off to someone else's lair aside from Dr. Wily's first, had been Protoman's. Or rather, Darkman's. Before that had been Cossack's. This time, there was no way. Mr. X was acting on his own, without coercion.

There comes a time when all the cosmic tumblers fall into place, and the Universe opens itself to you...

I arrived in Mr. X's sanctum, and did away with all his pathetic guardians...and then his Warmachine itself. Years of fighting Wily's madness had prepared me...this time, there was no challenge. No rage erupted. It wasn't Wily, it wasn't Wily...

But it was.

Mr. X was real, all right...real and DEAD. Dr. Wily had killed off the retired arms dealer and taken his place...it had all been part of his scheme, to summon eight new Robot Masters under the guise of world progress.

And he reached an all time low, then...not just blackmailing someone, or framing someone...now he'd KILLED someone in the pursuit of his goals.

The rage returned. His new castle was found.

And this time...this time, something would have to budge.

---

Wily must have gone senile this time around. His Skull Castle had been as difficult as usual...but his final Warmachine was nothing but the same tactic he'd used in the last two Rebellions.

"I'll DESTROY YOU, Mega Man!!" Wily ranted, sending his craft up into the air and firing off countless plasmabursts.

"Enough." Mega Man said quietly, sliding and dodging away from Wily's shots. He was torn up, scarred, his armor was even missing in places to reveal the bare wiring underneath. It hadn't been an easy fight, but it had been one that felt different. For once, Rock felt no fears. No doubts. Just the pure knowledge that Wily had to be stopped, here and now. His voice was subdued for a reason, but Wily could never detect it.

Beat flew by Mega Man's side, fluttering and sweeping the room with his cartoonish optics for any sign of Wily's craft reappearing. He chirped excitedly and pointed with a wingtip, and Mega Man turned and fired again. His Buster shot off a strange whirling blade weapon...the Silver Tomahawk.

It embedded into the side of Wily's vehicle with a sickening kerrrrack and caused sparks to fly in all directions. Wily roared in disbelief as he tried to phase back out, only to find that Mega Man's shot had broken his cloaking system.

"Your madness ends here, Wily. There's no veil of insanity to hide behind now." Mega Man demanded, sending Beat off to collide into the side of the Warmachine with a grinding squeal. Beat returned from his high-powered corkscrew attack, dropping the thin plasma spike that had formed from his mouth. "Always the same damned trick...Get a new flying saucer, equip it with a cloaking device...Damnit, don't you realize the dangers?!"

"Loss of mental faculties in biological life?" Wily rasped crazily. "Those testing reports were biased and written by doddering fools stuck in the past!!" Mega Man gritted his teeth. Cloaking devices were notorious for causing damage. They were only safe for the most mindless of robotic drones, for like warp transport, it caused mental degradation in all biologics. Not even higher level functioning robots were immune from a cloak field's numbing effects. But to Wily, a man who had lived in insanity for ten years, the negative effects were negligible. Everything was negligible...if it meant he might be able to destroy Mega Man.

"You blackmailed Cossack...you framed my brother...and NOW, YOU HAVE KILLED ANOTHER HUMAN BEING INTENTIONALLY." Mega Man spat out. "It wasn't in self-defense, not even under the slightest amount of that. It was done out of cold blood!"

"That doddering Mr. X had his time slowly coming to an end anyhow!" Wily snorted. "So what if I helped him along to his death?! Besides, you should have seen the look in his eyes when I held that plasma blaster to his head..." Wily giggled insanely at that.

Finally, Mega Man snapped. But unlike before, it wasn't a normal snap. It was a cold one of pure logic.

"Wily, you are the worst monster this planet has ever seen." Mega Man growled. "And this time, I SWEAR...You will not get away with it!!"

Wily swerved his oddly proportioned saucer about and fired off another barrage of shots, this time managing to nick the Blue Bomber with a few. That barely made a difference. Picking himself up and easing the pain of his wounds with another E-Tank, Mega Man narrowed his eyes and leveled his Buster again.

"It all boiled down to this, didn't it Wily?!" Mega Man shouted above the roar of the Warmachine's thrusters. "In the end, it's just you and me, and SOMEBODY HAS TO BUDGE."

Wily began to respond with a taunt of his own...but he never got a chance to finish it. Three Silver Tomahawks buried themselves deeply into his craft, forcing the machine into auto-destruct. Crying out in shock, Wily barely made it free of the groaning montrosity before it blew.

It had happened like this countless times before...With Wily avoiding death inside of his cockpits each and every time by bailing out. Only this time it was different.

There was nowhere for him to escape to as Mega Man drew nearer and loomed over him, his tiny blue attack bird fluttering over his shoulder. There was no way that the world would show mercy to him now. It was different...and it was over.

"And that somebody is you." Mega Man finished resignedly. Wily whimpered and began bowing to Mega Man, prostrating himself on the ground as he'd done countless times before.

Wily's bowing was ended as Mega Man lifted him up by the scruff of his lab coat and fumed. There was terror in Wily's eyes as he stared face to face with the Blue Bomber, held aloft by one of the robot's hands only.

"Doctor Albert William Wily...I place you under arrest."

"You can't arrest me..." Wily protested suddenly. "You're just a robot!"

Beat chirped a moment longer and then warped off, his mission completed. It was just Mega Man and Wily now, and Rock lifted Wily closer so the mad scientist could smell his hot, angry breath.

"Get this through your head right now, Wily...because I want you to remember this when you're rotting in jail for all the suffering you've caused." Mega Man did not blink. "I am more than a mere robot."

And thus, it ended. The Sixth Robot Rebellion was over with...by a whimper, and not a bang.

---

"After ten years of madness, the tyrannical Dr. Wily has at last been brought in to face charges. He has been brought before the world's judgement before, once facing a limited sentence, another time, grueling mental therapy. But at long last, common sense has prevailed over sympathy. Having already been given two chances, Dr. Wily was deemed by a special session of the U.N. as being unrepentant and set in his ways. Thus, he is to be sent to the Kotobuki maximum security prison in Japan for a term of life with no parole. Justice has at last been served, and the world can finally breathe. For there is no longer any doubts that the menace of Wily has finally been silenced.

The world owes its new age of peace and prosperity to Mega Man, who after handing Wily over to the author..."

The black haired figure on the couch promptly shut off the flatscreen TV with a punch of the remote, then set it down on the coffee table beside him and stared up at the ceiling.

"Who after handing Wily over to the authorities, warped away to try and get on with his life." Rock finished glumly. Roll walked in, an old fashioned duster in one hand as she hummed a cheery tune. She had to do a double-take before realizing her big brother was in the room.

"Morning, sleepyhead!" Roll chirped, bringing Rock's focus back to reality. "I see you're up from stasis and raring to go." The Blue Bomber lifted his weary eyes up to her and blinked once.

"Raring to go?? Roll, you saw how bashed up I was when I came in..." Roll looked at him with genuine concern at long last, sitting down beside him.

"You gonna be all right, Rock?" Mega Man shrugged, unable to answer the question. "Rock, you finally put Wily away. He'll never be able to cause any more problems ever again...you don't have to fight anymore! Doesn't that make you happy?"

"I guess it just hasn't sunk in yet." The robot said finally. He turned to Roll. "Just how am I supposed to feel? Happy?? Somehow, I don't feel happy. I don't feel sated." He hung his head a bit in shame. "I've been fighting off Wily's schemes for ten years...and now that it's finally over, I can't even laugh and exclaim that it's finally over."

"Wily didn't change you that much, my dear brother." Roll reassured him, leaning against his shoulder and ruffling his hair. "Maybe you've just spent so much time stuck in the danger zone...you've forgotten how to live. What life is really about. But he hasn't changed you. You're a different person when you wear that uniform. That isn't the you sitting beside me right now."

"Lemme guess..." A new voice rang out in Light's living room, precluding an all too familiar whistle. "Rock is somewhere between the realm of happy and sad, and can't figure out a way to break free?"

Blues walked into the room, dressed in a casual red T-Shirt, his sunglasses, his black hair that matched Rock's own, and a yellow scarf draped about his neck.

"Hey Rock, glad to see you made it back alive." He offered casually, plopping down beside his two siblings. "I'll bet that Energy Balancer came in handy."

"You keep giving me stuff like you have been and some day I'm gonna ask for your Protoshield." Mega Man said lightheartedly. He could almost hear Blues' eyes narrow at that comment.

"Hell, you're gonna have to fight me if you wanna use THAT." Blues readjusted his scarf. "Rock, I'm going to tell you some things that will come in handy. Emotions are a pretty fantastic thing, but you can't let them get the better of you. The past is the past. You can't change it, Rock, and you can't dream about how it could have been better. Because if you do get stuck in that mindset that life is shit, guess what? IT WILL BE. Sure, things could be peachier. But they aren't. And you have to live with that. So, you don't know what to think anymore?? I'll recap for you. Wily is finally in jail. After ten years of you duking it out with him, it's all said and done with. Two, you can get back to your regular life, if you ever had one. Time to pick up on all those forgotten jigsaw puzzles that have been collecting dust. Take up knitting, learn a dead language, but do SOMETHING."

"Is that what you did?"

"I learned how to whistle." Blues replied easily. He reached over and rubbed Rock's head with his hand. "Chill, buddy. Just chill. I dealt with this same kind of crap myself. Between me and Roll, we'll help you ease into your new life without Wily."

Mega Man liked the sound of that, and for the first time since the whole mess surrounding the Sixth Robot Rebellion had begun, he smiled.

"Life without Wily..." He mused, "Is something I could get used to."

---

We had six months of that. Six months where I WASN'T Mega Man, just Rock. Just the quixotic fellow who walked the streets unrecognized. That was a fun feeling...being just another face in the crowd. Dressed like any other teenaged Japanese boy, I could walk about and just be another person in life. It was only my distinctive blue armor that gave me away to the common passerby, and without it...Well, I didn't have to worry about all those stupid autographs.

Blues and I would just walk around the streets of Tokyo, he in his dark glasses and scarf, and me in an easygoing light blue T-Shirt. We went grocery shopping, ran errands...Whatever came to mind.

I suppose the adjustment was hard for me to make because there'd been times before we assumed that peace had finally come. We'd jumped at those chances, only to have them taken from us. I guess I just got wary.

You ever have that line of thinking...? That perhaps it's all finally said and done with? That maybe you can breathe...

Fate never did smile on me. The best she ever seemed to do was avert her gaze to others, before eventually returning to me.

I learned many things in my lifetime, but one of the most bittersweet lessons is that peace never lasts.

---

"You've got five minutes." The Kotobuki prison guard said firmly. Doctor Light blinked his brown eyes and nodded once sadly. Rush also ruffed in response, sitting down beside his master.

Dr. Light had gotten older since it had all begun. And so had Wily. Now as the two stared at one another through the plastiglass barrier between the visitors and inmates' portions of the visiting room, they could see that time hadn't treated either soul that well.

"Hello, Will." Dr. Light murmured quietly over the lipmike and earpiece receiver the guards had given him. Wily blinked a few times before speaking into his own.

"It's been a long time, Tom." The mad scientist replied, no hint of paranoia in his voice. That was what stunned Light. He had expected Wily to go berserk, to start bouncing off the walls and frothing at the mouth. Instead, there was a calm about the man he had once called friend. A calm that seemed to emanate resignation...but the sharp glint in Wily's eyes betrayed that, offering no sign of surrender. "More than eight years now."

"It didn't have to happen like it did. I wanted to believe you'd changed...that you were serious about making amends for your actions." Light said quietly. Wily narrowed his eyes. Very well. If Tom wanted to play the emotionless angle, he could as well.

"What would you have me say to you, Thomas?" Wily asked quickly. He shrugged. "Considering how many Robot Rebellions I've been involved in, how many things I've done, it would seem clear to any one of us that I'm beyond hope. I was then, and I certainly am now."

"That's why you're here."

"I'm here because of Mega Man." Wily retorted sharply. His eyes glowered at Light finally, his resolve and control beginning to show signs of cracking. "Because HE stopped me."

"Fine." Light answered. "If that's how you want to see it, Wily." He switched over to his associate's last name, and the doctor in prison garb took notice.

"Aah, so at long last you break that chain that still allows you to call me by the name you used when we were friends."

"That time has long since passed."

"Our time has long since passed." Wily said. He leaned over until his face, his wild white unkempt hair and mustache were almost pressed against the clear barrier between them. "Tom, you still don't get it...I had to show the world the error of their ways!"

"The world's always had problems." Light barked. "And the world will work them out. Wily, you tried to prove how weak humanity was. Instead, you proved how strong its spirit could become."

"Humanity's spirit..." Wily chortled darkly. "This is the same humanity which nearly pushed itself to extinction in the Wars of 2040. If it hadn't been for us and the Second Rainbow, would 'humanity' still be alive?? Face it, Tom. Nothing will ever change. No matter how much mankind advances technologically, they still haven't worked to solve the CORE of every single crisis. Humanity's SPIRIT."

"The Wars of 2040 are over, Wily." Light said firmly. "It will never happen again." Wily mulled over that before pulling back with a slow smile.

"You say that...But do you truly believe it??" Wily's menacing grin seemed to burn right through Light's skull, lay his emotions and thoughts bare. "You lost HER to humanity's spirit. Humanity's inherent violence and barbarism. You forget how it works, Tom...One generation remembers the pain and suffering of War, and that is what stops them from ever attempting it again...But they produce a new generation, one that has not seen the effects of War firsthand, who only hear and know about it through history books and their parent's tales...It is a sweet forbidden poison, violence is. And until humans have felt its negative effects, nothing can stop them from going down that road again." Wily laughed a little bit at that. "You lost her, Tom. You know the cost of War. You know what it's like to be denied a life. But do they?? The children of the world, Tom...do they know?! How could they?!"

"Shut up." Light growled. "Just shut up. I won't have you talking about Vanessa that way..."

"A pretty face, to be sure..." Wily mused. He looked at his associate in disgust. "She never deserved you anyway."

Despite himself, Light roared out a malediction and slammed his hand into the clear barrier between them, rattling it as he pulled back with a wince clear on his face.

"You're weak, Tom." Wily said bitterly. He pulled back and crossed his arms as best as he could, with the manacles clapped around his wrists. "You always were...and now you're even weaker. You're one of the reasons this world must be taught...must be shown..."

"I think we're done here." Light cut him off tersely. He stood up to leave and reached for the two way communicator on his head. But Wily hummed a little bit and stopped Light from yanking it off.

"Not quite." Wily mumbled, finishing off Blues' familiar melody. He looked at Light with a look bordering insanity and confidence at the same time. "I have been imprisoned for six months now. Six long months, during which I've had plenty of time to think and ponder. It cannot be stopped, Tom. War cannot be stopped. The violence cannot be stopped. You could no sooner deprive humanity of its destructive nature than deprive it of life. If I am not the violence...then something else will be."

"You're wrong." Light said back bitterly. "You're insane and you're wrong."

"Oh, THEY think I'm insane..." Wily laughed back, tilting in his chair. "But only time can judge me, Tom. Only time. And time is about to grant me an early parole."

A guard came through Wily's side of the door and tapped the former villain on the shoulder.

"Time's up." Light heard through his receiver. Wily looked at Light and grinned that insane grin once more, then let himself be led off, humming Protoman's melody all the while.

Light shook his head.

"God have mercy on your wretched soul, Will." Still wearing his receiver, Wily heard Tom's comment and laughed.

"God have mercy on the world, you mean...I'm already destined for Hell." He turned about and looked at Light again, laughing with all the psychotic energy embedded in his mind.

The prison guard finally took Wily's headset off and shut the power down. Weak and tired, Light petted Rush on the head and walked out his exit.

"Let's go, Rush." The red robotic dog ruffed once and then trotted beside him.

They were about a mile from Kotobuki prison when Rush and Dr. Light suddenly realized what Wily had meant about time granting him an early parole.

Explosions were slowly tracing a path towards the penitentiary.

---

It had ended. The peace had ended and the war had begun again.

Just before I had captured Wily in his former Skull Castle, he had finished building a new set of Robot Masters. Four of them.

He'd set them out in another one of his concealed Skull Castles, and set them on standby. It had only been a matter of time then. Six months later, they hadn't received his signal that everything was still all right. So they'd activated, and sought him out. And found him.

The reports that came back from Kotobuki were insane. I was only there long enough to stop a rampaging road leveler with weaponry from wrecking the city streets any further and to watch in dismay as Wily flew off laughing, safe in another one of his saucers.

The devastation was unimaginable...as if a bomb had hit. Kotobuki itself was torn apart from the rampage I arrived too late to prevent, only stop...And in Kotobuki Prison itself, it was as if a plague had swept through. Guards, inmates, even the Warden...everyone lay dead, in some state of frozen, fried, severed, and gooey goriness. The Robot Masters had done this. Wily had ordered them to. The security camera footage had survived, and it told us all...how they broke in, found Wily's cell, and helped evacuate him to a familiar flying saucer they had brought along with them. But it hadn't ended there...Wily, possessed by another rage of madness, of retribution and sick pleasure, had ordered his new Robot Masters to kill everyone. Kill everyone inside the building. And then he'd flown off to jeer at me and Light and Rush as we stood watching the carnage unfold from Kotobuki's main roadway.

He was back. And he was more dangerous than ever.

It was the third time I had brought him in to face justice. The first time, they had given him a slap on the wrist. The second, intense mental counseling. The third time...the Sixth Robot Rebellion...was when they finally realized there was no hope in Wily turning over a new leaf, reverting to normal life and living as a productive member of society.

Every time was difficult. Every time brought me to the brink of collapse, both physically and mentally. Every time he instilled a Robot Rebellion, another piece of me died trying to stop it.

And yet nothing stopped him. Not fear, not sympathy, not even prison.

And I think it was then that I realized something.

Wily would never stop...until he was dead.

---

Turbo Man was no more, and his conquered domain in Tokyo's rubber disposal dump had been taken back from his control. The conflict had tested Rock to new limits, and yet at the same time granting him so many new abilities. For one, his Rush Jet power suit from the Sixth Robot Rebellion had returned...only now in its current mode as the Super Adapter. The Rocket Punch, the Energy Balancer, and even poor little kidnapped Beat lay safe within his hands, all ready to be put into action. Rush had a new improved Rush Jet and a new Rush Search mode, and Auto, Light's newest engineering robot, had his Super Bolt. Tokyo and all of Japan was once more free from the devastation that Wily was so hellbent on bringing upon it.

It left a bitter taste in Rock's already sour mouth whenever he thought of Wily and this newest Robot Rebellion. But now with Japan, the only place left attacked by the Seventh Robot Rebellion now safe from the marching hordes, it meant he could return home and rest at least. Until Wily's new Skull Castle was found, there was little else that could be done. Besides, Mega Man mused as he powered up his warp generator and accessed his home's jump coordinates, he had to see how his new ally Bass was doing. That was a serious wound Shade Man had given him...

Noo...

Horror and disbelief were the only two thoughts that ran through his mind as he opened his eyes from the warp transport and registered the destruction around him.

This was home when I left...did a bomb hit?!

"Heeelp!!" Came a familiar feminine voice.

"ROLL!!" Mega cried out, snapping back to his senses at the sound that made him go into pure panic. If anything had happened to her, so help him...

He sighed in visible relief as he rounded the corner of the living quarter's hallway and found Roll struggling in two sets of magnetic clamps holding her wrists and ankles taut together. Fortunately, she looked undamaged, just very frightened and weak.

With power that only became possible through the unbelievable pressures of his life, the Blue Bomber tore the magnetic clamps off of Roll and freed her from her bonds. The blond haired robot stood up and tried to brush some of the scuffing off of her torn dress. She finally sighed and turned to Rock, pulling him close in a hug.

"God, I missed you..." Rock embraced his sister back quickly in an even tighter grip, relieved she was unharmed. "It all just happened so fast..."

"Who did this?!" Mega Man demanded. Roll pulled away from the hug and let her blue eyes fall to the floor.

"He...he ran into the lab." A new set of emotional overloads began to coarse through Rock's mind then...

Oh no...Dr. Light!! And Bass!!

Mega Man rarely moved with such speed as he did then, rushing through the rest of the trashed house and working his way into the laboratory. Like everything else, it lay in total disarray. Wiring was laid bare, consoles were ripped to shreds, and everywhere was the stench of ozone, the one pure sign of plasmafire.

Light lay dazed and struggling to get up off in one corner of his lab, close to the massive flatscreen monitor he rallied communications through.

"Dad!!" Mega cried out, racing towards him and kneeling down to support the man who had created him.

"I'm all right..." Light said wearily, grunting as his wobbly knees pushed him back up to a standing position. "I'm all right, Rock."

"It was Wily..."

"No. It was Bass." Light stammered, walking over and sitting down in a chair that had somehow avoided the destruction. The Blue Bomber stood there for a moment, stunned at the announcement. When at last he could speak, it was in incredulity.

"What??"

"Bass went berserk..." Light managed to eke out, rubbing at his forehead. "I was repairing him, and then all of a sudden he pushes me to the ground and starts running around like a madman, screaming about where the plans are. Roll tried to stop him with some magnetic clamps, but..."

"She's all right. I found her first." Rock reassured Light, surprised he could say that much in his dumbfounded stupor. Light looked years older.

"He found them. All my blueprints, my schematics...Plans for enhancements for you and Rush..."

"Oh no..."

"And that wasn't all he took..." Light whispered, shutting his eyes tightly against a force Rock couldn't see. "He took...he took..." Doctor Light seemed to be stuck in his stammer, and before Rock could prod the rest of the answer out of him, the shattered laboratory chittered with the sound of an incoming transmission.

A familiar, frenzied face appeared on the cracked flatscreen display above them...grinning insanely as it stared at the inhabitants of the sacked lab.

"WILY." Mega Man spat out. Wily snarled at his foe and shook his head.

"Well, well...It would seem that little Rock has triumphed once more and killed off eight more of my Robot Masters. But no matter...I've gotten used to you being able to pull that particular stunt off after all these years. This time, it provided a very useful distraction from a far deeper goal."

"Just what the Hell are you getting at, Wily?!" Mega Man demanded, stepping forth and shaking a fist. Wily leaned back and cracked his knuckles, then glowered at the screen.

"You truly are naïve, you robot. Don't you get it?! Bass is MY robot. I made him!! And his mutt Treble as well!!"

"Goddamn you..." Light muttered. Wily glared at his former partner.

"And you...You, Tom, have been a very busy boy from the plans I've seen. Don't you worry...I'll put them to good use. Perhaps Bass and Treble will be able to destroy Rock with their new enhancements..."

"It ends here, Wily!!" Mega Man proclaimed, pointing a hard finger with an even harder glare. "You're a monster...a sickening heartless monster who brings about the death of innocents. You gotta be stopped, and I'm gonna stop you!!" The conviction in his voice burned bright, like the fires of a supernova waiting to be unleashed. It frightened Light to hear such acidic words come from his son...Yet Wily seemed unfazed, curling his lower lip into a tight smile before nodding with a cruel chuckle.

"Well, you're certainly welcome to try...I'll leave the light on for you." Wily said prophetically. The vox and video cut off...leaving only a freeze frame image of a map and a particular pair of warp jump coordinates on the screen.

"Rock..." Light said quickly, stumbling over and putting a hand on his son's shoulder. "You don't have to do this...We can let the police handle this..."

Slowly, the Blue Bomber turned until his gaze met with his creators'. The embers that burned in his deep blue eyes struck into Light, chilling him with that gaze of purpose locked into that snarl of embedded rage.

"No." He issued hoarsely. "Dad, you don't get it...Remember the First Robot Rebellion?? The HSL tried to attack his Skull Castle with far greater numbers than the police here have...and they were wiped out. I'm it. I'm the only one he wants, I'm the only one who can get in and stop him."

"But..."

"I DON'T ENJOY THIS ANY MORE THAN YOU DO." Rock shouted angrily. "But the fact is that I have to. These stupid Robot Rebellions will just claim more and more innocent lives until Wily is stopped. I can't live with the thought of Wily ordering even more humans to die for his sickening cause...I can't, because the Laws don't ALLOW IT!!"

And that was when it struck Light. That even though it had been Rock who had volunteered to undertake this life, to don the armor and Buster and save the world time and time again, it was almost more obligation than personal choice. The First Law...The First Law was inherent to the decision, and it was even now.

"I'm sorry..." Light finally said, pulling Rock close into a hug. "I'm sorry this was how it all happened."

Roll walked into the laboratory from the doorway and shook her head.

"Hey..." Rock pulled away from his father and looked at Roll with his same concentrated glare.

"You keep dad safe while I'm gone."

"And just where are you going??" Roll asked incredulously.

Her brother seemed to grow eons older at that statement...because it only had one answer, and he hated to say it. Slowly, he turned about and locked his weary, angry eyes on Light, then back on Roll.

"I'm going to save the world."

He made sure he was a fair distance from Light and Roll, and then warped off, a line of blue fire heading towards the sky.

It had to stop. It had to stop here and now.

---

And all of you call ME the hero. Just because I'm the only person who steps up to the plate whenever a madman tries to turn robot hordes against the world.

Wily's latest Skull Castle was a beast. Nowhere near as tough as his first one, the most Hellish one had been in terms of mere obstacles. But the guardians proved to be many and powerful, pushing me to my limits each time. And still I passed. As thunder and lightning roared outside and storm clouds swirled about, churning both fate and the stratosphere in its glow, I made my way past the barrage of plasma cannons and into the second floor entrance.

I didn't want to be the hero, all right?! I didn't WANT to do this over and over again...All I wanted to do was to just be left alone, to have Wily's ominous presence vanish. As long as Wily was around, the world was still in danger...as long as the world was in danger, I COULDN'T QUIT.

Bass faced me twice. Once on his own, in a connecting airlock room between the outer and inner regions of the First Ring, and then again in a gigantic swirling tower of gusting fans and rampant winds that made the fight between our fused selves all the more insane. And yet not even he could stop me.

Logic would say that it was experience that allowed me to win. I had faced countless Robot Masters before the ebony armored robot with his gold trim, and in his fused state, purple trim as well...Surely all those victories amounted to something of my intuitition, my finesse, my ability to predict, respond, and annihilate.

Then there are times I feel the logic slip away from me. Where reason fails, where I can feel nothing but the pain. The pain of emotions searing through my mind, drowning everything else out...

And it was stronger now, stronger than it had ever been. It coarsed through my circuits like a thick syrup, highlighting the entire endeavor in a deep shade. Imagine the world...how you see it normally. Then imagine that all of a sudden, a veil drops down and covers it all. What you see, what you hear is all altered, changed...

I faced yet another version of Guts Man. It had been the third time I'd seen him in some form or another, the other two having occurred in the First and Second Rebellions. I faced a massive robotic turtle that could only be hurt when he popped his head out of his shell. And a massive repulsor-equipped skullhead that chased me down a winding bridge from the Third to the Fourth Ring while firing off missiles and ground searing lasers.

And none of them stopped me. None of them could. Not as I was...

And then after destroying all eight Robot Masters once more in Wily's all too familiar teleportation chamber, and blasting his gigantic Skullwalker 'Mech into scrap...

That's when it all came to a boil. Skull Castle was falling apart around us, the self-destruct already having been initialized upon the Skullwalker's destruction. Wily stared me down, once again in the cockpit of a cloak-equipped saucer pod with every sort of cannon imaginable equipped.

He wouldn't stop. He would never stop. And for all the neurological damage he'd suffered, Wily's actions pushed him past redemption ever again.

He had killed innocents. He had ordered the deaths of people whose only crime was that they were there when he looked at them.

Emotions are a powerful thing. Protoman was right about that. But he never could have predicted just how far...

Just how far into my murderous guise as 'Mega Man' that my emotions would take me...

---

"Scream the songs of woe and torment, see the fighters eternal Hellbent, screeching in their ghastly cries, FOR ONLY ONE SHALL BE THE ONE WHO DIES!!" Wily snarled, a glob of spit hurling against the interior of his cockpit's bubble shield as he rambled his insanity.

Mega Man slid across the floor, narrowly dodging the dangerous blasts of replicating synth-ice and napalm fueled fire that slammed to the ground behind him. Still, the two other shots, straight blasts of supercharged plasma struck him at the base of his neck despite his efforts, forcing the Blue Bomber to wince in pain as he came back up to his feet and snarled at his opponent.

"NOW IT'S MY TURN!!" Mega Man roared, his purple and green colorings losing their shimmering aura of light about him as he summoned forth a pair of supercharged Wild Coils and hurled them at Wily's craft. The comical pair of weapons bounced up and down under a power of their own before jumping up and slamming into the undercarriage of Wily's craft, exploding and causing the powered shrapnel to tear one of Wily's guns into utter uselessness. Even a protruding spike was torn asunder.

Hissing, Wily punched a familiar button, fading from view as the dangerous and mind-altering cloaking field fell over him and his Warmachine.

"While the ramparts fall and crumble, while the klaxons wail in fright, the one in blue and the one in justice battle through the night..." Wily's voice echoed about, carried through the speaker system in the massive underground hangar bay.

Mega Man gritted his teeth and started to charge up another set of Wild Coils, his eyes darting about the dimly lit interior for any sign of a shimmer, a glint, some imperfection that would reveal where Wily's Warmachine lay hidden. "Damn you, Wily!!" Every moment the Blue Bomber remained in this fight, he could feel his emotions grow closer and closer to overriding him, to overpowering him...

The next thing he felt was a spike scraping along his back and sending him spinning to the ground before impaling itself straight through the forearm of his right arm. And he did the only thing he could...he screamed.

Wily laughed as if every spawn of Hell joined in a chorus along with him, his Warmachine slipping from the shadows completely to reveal the starboard spike jutting through Mega Man's arm. Watching with sick pleasure, Wily drooled over the sight of Mega Man twisting and writhing underneath him, his right arm sparking and charring...and even bleeding with the minor hydraulic fluid that served as the backup for his main systems.

"Like an ant seen through the mason jar, he scrambles and he screams, screaming his cursed lungs for mercy through the nightmares and the dreams..." Wily's mind was shattered now...only the rage and the madness remained. Both centered on Rock, both driving to see his end.

"I won't let you..." The Blue Bomber slurred, his voice processor growing less coherent from the extensive energy drain on his repair systems. Wily harrumphed and swiveled his pod around, looking down in mock pity before wrenching another tortured scream from Rock. The madman grinned and activated one of his cannons, burying another yellow plasma blast into the small of Mega Man's back.

Even pain was beyond Rock now...He took no notice of the searing blast that tore away his blue body suit and exposed the delicate mechanics underneath. He only heard the roar in his ears, only saw the haze of gray over everything, only knew one single fact among all others...

WILY HAD TO BE STOPPED...

"Death comes for us all one day, it's the easiest tale to sell...but while all humans go to Heaven, accursed robots go to HELL!!" Wily shrieked.

Staring through his dull, unfocused eyes, Rock swiveled his head about and registered where Wily was.

"No." He said.

Wily's laugh stopped immediately at that. Rock's sudden outburst, as quiet as it was, unsettled him like no other had ever done.

He didn't even register Mega Man's left arm swing up and hurl a Wild Coil at point blank range into the remaining guns underneath his craft.

But he did notice the explosion...and the massive chain reaction it brought along with it.

Every gun was shattered and shorn off of its base from the intense shrapnel blast, and one bank of the Warmachine's repulsors was thrown offline. Wily screamed in surprise and tried to take his craft airborne again, but by then, a weak, but unbelievably focused Mega Man was on his feet, that quiet air vaporized by the same look of intense fury and hatred Wily had bestowed upon him countless times before.

"And then the madman's plans are foiled, and his dreams go up in flame...Never again to cause the fury, for this has ceased to be a game..." Mega Man hissed, lifting his left arm up and firing off another Wild Coil. His damaged right arm hung uselessly at his side, shut off from combat mode and undergoing repairs. Even draining his last E-Tank proved little help...The energy regained was almost immediately consumed by his power hungry repair systems.

Wily cursed in German and punched in his cloaking button one last time...But the cloak only finished halfway before the shrapnel of the Wild Coil exploded and engulfed it in a cloud of deadly debris.

Crackling, fizzling, the Warmachine reverted back to normal...and then screamed and whined in its death knell.

Once more, Wily escaped annihilation by the skin of his teeth, jumping free from the would-be tomb in a suicide jump and collapsing to the cold, ruined floor. And then the Warmachine exploded...leaving only silence and the distant rumbling sounds of the Skull Castle's collapse.

Mega Man's coloring reverted to normal as he deactivated the Wild Coil and stared Wily down, one arm still limp at his side, the other clenched into a fist. Likewise, the mad scientist looked back up at the one who had once more stopped him...looking older, deflated...a harmless old man who raged empty threats and fell flat of success.

"All right, you win Mega Man..." Wily rasped, his spirit crushed just as it always was every time the damnable Blue Bomber stopped him. "I'll come quietly this time."

And that was the end of it, so Wily thought. Rock would take him into custody again, stuff him in prison...it would all be over with. He had no hidden bank of Robot Masters to free him this time. To return to prison now would mean to live in that tiny concrete cell...forever. That didn't matter.

But that wasn't what happened. Mega Man seemed to totter back and forth, his weight sluggishly shifting from foot to foot as his narrowed burning blue eyes bored into the man who had brought Hell upon his existence time and time again.

"No." Mega Man finally uttered in a ragged whisper. He shook his head and took a menacing step towards the madman. "NO. Not this time, Wily...Not the same damn excuse, the same damn plea...You're never sorry, you'll never quit...And we never realized that until now."

"What?" Wily squeaked, stunned by Mega's words. The blue armored robot took another step forward and lifted his left arm up, morphing it into a Buster and letting it charge as the barrel bored straight at Wily's skull.

"Never again." Mega Man hissed, his voice growing more and more choked by the moment. "You won't stop. You'll never stop. You'll always come back, always harm more innocents...I can't allow that, Wily...not in good faith, not by my principles...YOU'RE A MONSTER, WILY. A MONSTER THAT WILL NEVER BE PENITENT FOR HIS ACTIONS!!"

The whine filled the air and mixed with the distant klaxons, and the pale green light illuminated the sudden fear on Wily's face. Nervously, he stumbled back on his butt, lifting a hand up in front of him as if to shield him from the fatal blast yet to come.

"Mega Man, you can't do this!" Wily stammered. "The First Law...you can't harm me, Mega Man! You can't because you're a robot!!"

But that didn't hold true in that moment. As everything came crashing down around them, that truth didn't enter Mega's thoughts. He only knew the rage, the solution...

"I AM MORE THAN A MERE ROBOT." Mega Man spat out. "It ends here, Wily. All your insane schemes, your blight and your plague dies here tonight...along with you."

It was then Wily knew fear. Because the look in the Blue Bomber's eyes, that intense hatred, that insanity that fringed on pure chaos...was one he had offered time and time again to his foe times before.

And now it was being paid back...with interest.

"DIE, WILY!!" Mega Man screamed, his Buster reaching a higher note of pitch as he prepared to unleash the hellish fury of plasma upon his nemesis.

But it never came. A massive hail of torn rafters fell all around the two, jarring the Blue Bomber from his execution and trapping Wily underneath the wreckage.

The glint faded from Mega Man's eyes once more, and his jaw fell in shock as he realized what he'd nearly done...quickly, his Buster faded away from view and he stumbled backwards, stupor overtaking him.

That was all the opportunity that Wily needed. From the crumbling Skull Castle above, a robotic mutt of purple screeched down and growled at Rock before grasping onto Wily and warping them both out of the tomb. And then a second figure appeared...Bass.

The ebony and gold armored robot sneered at Mega Man, hate and spite clear in his thoughts as he stared down the shell-shocked warrior.

"Too late this round, Mega Man!! Remember, he who hesitates is LOST!!" With that, Bass too vanished in a blast of warped fire.

And Mega Man came to his senses moments later, just in time to warp free from the Skull Castle before it all blew to pieces.

---

Everyone could see the fireball that erupted from Wily's Skull Castle. But what they could not see was a lone figure stumbling away from it, his footing unsteady as heat basted his back and lit up the night like a second sun.

I...I almost...

"Impossible..." Rock wheezed, his mind now feeling the sluggish effects of the trauma that even pondering breaking one of the ingrained Laws gave a robot. His footsteps uneven, he continued to plod on, paying no attention to the tiny rocks that embedded themselves into the soles and ridges of his steel toed boot, and even up into his leg itself. That didn't matter.

First Law...why didn't it stop me, it should have stopped me...

"I can't kill humans..." Rock croaked, stumbling to his knees and sitting there, half upright and in shock. "I can't..."

But I almost did.

Trembling, Rock lifted his functional left arm up and held it in front of his face...through eyes powered by slowly fading madness and emotional overload, he saw that tarnished shade of blue...slowly shifting, darkening, into almost a purple. But blue turned purple because of a very distinct color.

It was red that dripped off of his fingers, off of his wrist, a slick sickening hail of dark red droplets. It stained the ground where it fell, and slowly it stained him...It was blood. Human blood.

"Mega Man, you can't do this!! The First Law...you can't harm me! You can't harm me because you're a robot!!"

And yet that hadn't mattered...

Screaming, Rock slammed his left hand down against the barren soil, ignoring the sharp cry of pain that shot up his arm from the vicious blow. When he looked again, the blood was gone. But it didn't change matters.

A robot must never harm, or through inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.

The First Law blared in Rock's mind now, a powerful force that overwhelmed his mind and thoughts. It came almost as a headache, a pounding force demanding to be heard. Groaning, the Blue Bomber curled up and laid his helmeted head on the cold ground, slowly rocking back and forth.

Something had snapped in him in those moments of the final battle...during the time when Wily had torn his right arm asunder and made it a limp, useless appendage dangling from a slackened shoulder. When every inhumanity Wily had caused over the last eleven years had joined, coalesced...and then erupted. When emotions, the most powerful force Rock ever had to face within himself had run awry...

His emotions had overloaded his mind...drowned everything else out like a thick fog, a stupor...Everything of logic, of sanity, of the Laws themselves had been severed, cut off, been prevented from reaching him. The situation had gotten critical, and Rock had responded as he always had. With his feelings.

It was a completely different state of mind, the robot accepted finally. As he drew himself back up into a cross-legged position, he knew this. There were two sides to him. There was Rock, the robot who wanted nothing more than to remain at home and live without struggle. And then there was Mega Man. The robot that the world called upon, cried upon, set their hopes upon as the singular savior from the hands and forces of a madman they themselves had helped to bring about.

Rock had given rise to Mega Man. A strong-willed spirit that relied on his emotions in the direst of conditions to see him through...

But just how far did it have to go?? What if next time...What if Mega Man couldn't be stopped? What if next time, the Mega Buster on his arm finished charging, DID fire...hurling a massive supershot of plasma towards Wily, towards his screeching, frightened face, melting away the weak and frail human flesh and blood before the blast ever made contact, skin dripping off of his skull like a waterfall...

"NOOOOO!!" Rock screamed, arching his back and lifting his face to the sky, screaming with every decibel of power he could muster. He screamed for himself. For Rock. In fear.

Despite himself, as his voice died down and was once more overcome with the roar of the flames leaping high from Skull Castle, Rock trembled.

Emotions did this. Emotions almost caused him to...

"No." He uttered weakly. His head slowly shook back and forth, as if to agree with the point more. "No...Never again."

It was easier now. His systems had had time to repair some of the damage. Calmly, Rock got up to his feet and turned about, looking on into the flames. They burned for only moments more before growing dim and snuffing out...nothing but a gigantic cloud of smoke now. In the same way, if his emotions were like a fire, they too were snuffed out in that moment.

Rock made a pact with himself on the eve of Wily's seventh crushing defeat. He was a robot that had been given something no other robot aside from him, Bass, Roll and Blues ever had. The possibility of emotion. True emotion. Emotion that might almost seem human, and would grow stronger over time.

But if emotions can bring me to here...bring me to a point where the Three Laws could be so overwhelmed they cannot stop my actions...

"Never again." Mega Man said wearily, activating his warp generator. "When I fight...when I'm forced to be Mega Man, and not Rock...then I will not feel."

Because that's the only way.

"The only way..." Rock whispered as he vanished into the stratosphere. And his voice carried in the wind, a shrill whistle that permeated its molecular thickness and bonded with it under a power of its own. That sentence was the only thing that stayed in the air...after the smoke of Skull Castle had faded, after starlight once more claimed everything in sight.

"The only way..."

---

Yes, Wily deserved to die. Ask any human off of the street and they would tell you no different. Especially now. Now, after Wily had escaped his life imprisonment and caused only more death. Capital punishment was rarely used by anyone anymore...but it was there.

But even if he did deserve to die, he would not, could not die by my hand.

Emotions did this. And you know emotions far more than I ever will. So tell me. Is this what it does in humans as well? Blur away reason, rationality and logic for shaded eyes and a stupefied view of the world?

There is a fine line to be walked. Every time a Robot Rebellion begins, I am faced with a gigantic trapeeze wire, and told to walk across it.

The falling is where the danger lies. But falling from what, then? Grace? Prestige? Respect? Or yourself??

I'm not a killer. I eliminate malfunctioning robots. I'm not a killer.

They're just robots, I tell myself...robots sent by Wily to cause pain and suffering. They have to be stopped. I have to stop them.

I'm not a killer. I'M NOT!! Wily lives...Wily is alive, and some day he will return to wreak havoc once again. He made that promise to me so many years ago...That until I was gone, or until he was dead, the war would go on. And innocents would suffer.

So there's a tradeoff. In my state of mind, where emotions controlled me, I looked at the world through blood red glasses. In that perspective, I decided that Wily had to die. The needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few...how his survival would put so many innocents at risk...

But when those glasses shattered, the truth came crashing down. No matter how true the theory was, I could not destroy Wily. I could not, because it contradicted who I was. I was a robot ingrained with the Three Laws.

If I was different...if I was stronger, if the Three Laws held no sway over me...

NO. NO, I can't think that...I WON'T!!

I can't change that. And in this moment, I pray to whatever God or deity exists that there will never come a time again where I am led to think that.

But it is a prayer that will go unanswered. Because there will be a next time. There will be another Robot Rebellion. There will be another Skull Castle, or Skull Fortress, or whatever...

It's inevitable. It's inevitable because neither one of us is dead yet, and as long as both of us live, Wily will keep the conflicts going.

It's moved past any logic now. He does this not out of any desire to conquer the world...he does it to get to me.

The battle is inevitable...

I can't kill him. And he has yet to kill me.

And they call me a hero...

---

There was a different air about her brother since he'd gotten back from Wily's Skull Castle a month ago, Roll finally decided. More importantly, it was something buried deep in his thoughts. It had been a quiet change, and caught in the midst of rebuilding his laboratory adjoined to his house in conjunction with Auto and Eddie, their father Dr. Light hadn't seemed to notice it. But as Roll came by with a roll of data-transfer cable for the ongoing reconstruction, she found herself watching the Blue Bomber with hawkish eyes.

Blues, like always, had said his peace after greeting Mega Man at home and then rushed off for parts unknown. It seemed to be a tradition with him, that inability to remain still and seen. Perhaps those years between 2069 and the Third Robot Rebellion had caused that...then again, perhaps it was an idiosyncrasy that had even earlier origins. But even Blues had scrutinized his brother then, mumbling something only Roll had heard before saying his final goodbyes and warping off.

"Something happened out there...didn't it, Rock?"

Roll nodded. Something HAD happened. But whenever they bothered to try and ask him about it, he grew tight-lipped and stubbornly silent. He tried to brush it off. Nothing had happened, he reassured them halfheartedly. The final hours of the Seventh Robot Rebellion had ended like any other. He'd blasted his way through all opposition, stopped Wily cold in his tracks. And barely managed to escape with his own life, the mad scientist and his traitorous creations Bass and Treble fleeing as well.

Of course, sometimes the physical evidence spoke volumes. To a watchful eye, a carefully trained technician...

Rock had to be put into stasis during his repairs...The wounds were numerous, grievous, and his total system energy had laid at a low. Most unsettling of all was the damage in his mind pathways...they weren't burned or snapped. It wasn't like someone had sent a million amps blasting through his brain. No. It was different. More like a general, continual strain that had been placed on him.

Doctor Light hadn't had to put his son through serious repairs since the end of the Third Robot Rebellion. Through the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and now the Seventh, Light had left Rock's most delicate workings alone.

"Hey, Rock." Roll finally muttered as she walked nearby and set the cable down on the table. "Whatcha up to, bud?"

"Television." Came Rock's short, chipped answer. That was about the only sort of response he gave out any more. His eyes stared blankly forwards, and Roll followed them.

The TV wasn't even on. Sighing, she shook her blond covered head back and forth.

"Sure."

Light had left Rock's mind to itself, left it to tend to its own affairs from 2072 until now...2081. The damage to his mind's pathways emanated from what seemed to be continual resistance, a constant struggle between the core of his brain...the section that contained all primary information, including the Three Laws of Robotics...and the section of his mind that dealt with his emotions and emotional responses. It hadn't happened all at once. It was cumulative.

But even then, the pathways couldn't be altered. They couldn't be replaced. Roll remembered the look of dread and worry on her father's face as he told her through a clenched jaw that the best he could do for her big brother was to wipe away the soot and grime, clean out the interior...and hope that somehow removing the scouring on his pathways would keep Rock functioning.

The two of them sat side by side for a few moments longer before Roll finally leaned over and tapped him on the shoulder.

"What?" He asked, finally turning his head over to look at her, slightly annoyed from the sound of it. Unfazed, Roll stared right back at him with a calm gaze.

"It's been a month now, Mega. And by now, I know something's up with you just as much as Blues does."

"I'm fine."

"Like HELL you're fine." She said acidly. She poked him in his T-Shirt covered chest. "You weren't awake when dad and I finally looked in your brain when you were zonked out. I saw the damage in there. It was cumulative, and it had been building since 2072."

"We're robots, Roll. Parts get worn out." Rock said, shrugging off her accusations.

"Look Rock, I may not be the one going out there and stopping Wily from turning the world into a wasteland every Robot Rebellion, but I BY GOD know when a physical malady has psychological origins. That damage we cleaned out in your brain was brought about because of a conflict between your emotions and your core programming."

"I don't have to listen to this." Rock grumbled, getting up and preparing to leave the room.

"Oh no you DON'T!!" Roll exclaimed angrily, jumping up and wrapping her arms around his waist, dropping them both to the floor in a writhing heap.

"H...Hey! Leggo! DAMNIT, LEGGO!!" Rock snapped, trying fiercely to pull his way free of her vicelike grip.

"No!!" Roll shouted back. "Not until you admit you have a problem! Not until you drop this mood you've been carrying for the last month and turn back into the brother I've known since before Wily went haywire!"

Rock contorted his back a bit and turned his head to look back at her. It brimmed with anger now, anger kept dormant and hidden for far too long...

"You wanna know what's going on inside my head?! HUH?! DO YA?! "

"YES!!" Roll screamed back, yelling if for no other reason than she was angry. She released him and Rock climbed to his feet, staring across the air between them. Roll picked herself up and smoothed out her dress, then waited.

Rock's breathing was shallow as he collected his thoughts.

"You could never understand, Roll...you could never understand the hate and fury that lies in me. It's all Wily's fault...it's all of Wily's schemes, his madness that drives them. I feed off of my emotions, use them, turn them into weapons for my mind. I HATE WILY. It's that freaking simple!!"

He inhaled and exhaled a few more times before speaking up again.

"And it doesn't matter which Robot Rebellion it is, Roll...It's always the same. It's caused by him, caused by his perverse desire to see suffering. It's a war between him and me, and until he wins or dies, he's bound and determined to let EVERYONE between us suffer. He kidnapped Kalinka, held her hostage and ruined both her life and her father's...He framed Protoman, he KILLED Mr. X...he went on and ordered the death of every last inmate and guard in Kotobuki Prison before he escaped. And that's just the names and places I REMEMBER. I can't let him win...I can't let his madness triumph. But by the same token, as long as all I do is just beat him...and he escapes to do it again...It will never end. There will always be more blood, more pain, more anguish on the world and on me. Never his. NEVER HIS." Rock's fists clenched up into tight knots, dangling by his sides as if they would spring arm cannons at any moment.

"And you tell me you know that the conflict in my brain pathways, the conflict that caused all the scouring, the wear, the damage...was between my core programming and my emotional circuitry?! You'd be right, Roll. You'd be right because they each tell me a different thing. My core programming tells me that because I'm a robot, I cannot harm humans. I cannot harm Wily. But..."

He cringed and bowed his head, shaking it back and forth as if trying to cast off a nightmare clamped to the side of his neck.

"But it also tells me I have to do whatever I can to PREVENT humans from suffering harm or death. I cannot harm Wily. I cannot. But every time Wily goes free, every time Wily escapes, he returns and brings more death. More blood!! The First Law is at fault, the First Law is wrong...how can I value the life of one madman over all the hundreds and thousands of innocents who will die days, weeks, months, YEARS from now if he continues on??"

Roll stood there, her eyes wide, her jaw slowly dropping as it all finally dawned on her. Just how serious the battle in Rock's mind was. God, Rock...no, don't tell me you're...

"I fight with my emotions, Roll. My emotions tell me I can't let innocents suffer. And as long as Wily endures, that is just what will happen. Somehow, some way, when the seventh Skull Castle was crumbling around us, I stared Wily down and saw an answer. An answer given by emotions, not by my core programming. My emotions overpowered EVERYTHING. The Laws didn't leap up, didn't stop me...they couldn't, they were drowned out...I became Mega Man to save innocent lives, to stop the madness, to put an end to Wily's reign of terror. And as Mega Man, with my emotions, I saw only one answer...There was only two ways that the madness would end. Either Wily would have to kill me, or I would have...have to...have to..."

Roll realized why Rock's voice faded off, why he couldn't complete that sentence. The Laws would not allow it.

...Or I would have to kill Wily.

"It's over." She reassured him, brushing past the mind freeze just waiting to happen. "That was a month ago, it's over..."

Rock was trembling now as Roll helped him back to the couch and sat him down.

"I made a promise to myself, Roll. A promise that if emotions would bring me to that decision, that I would never again let them interfere." He looked up to her calm, soothing face for a reply. "Now do you see why I've been this way?"

"Yes." Roll acknowledged, brushing back his wild jet black hair. "Yes, I see." She looked at him. "Rock, you're stronger than you realize. You can overcome this. Your emotions are there so you can feel human. So we can feel human. But when you purposefully WANT to kill something, then you aren't human. You're like him, then. A monster. And I know you're not."

"It can't happen again." Rock said quietly. "I won't let it happen again." Roll drew him in a tight hug then.

"Don't let it happen. But don't lose who you are. You're Rock. You're my brother. And if you lose sight of that, you've lost sight of everything."

That tender moment might have gone on longer...

Had Auto not hollered out for Roll's batch of cable, and spoiled the ambience.

---

So time moved on. Blues knew instinctively of the conflict within me, and Roll had coaxed it loose. But there it ended. It was a promise I made to myself, a promise to them as well. To them, I would be Rock. I would be the gentle, caring and friendly spirit that they all knew and worried about.

I didn't even bother concerning myself with wondering if there was another conflict just over the horizon. I didn't because it was pointless. Of course it would come, with Wily standing in its shadows. And when that conflict would come, I promised myself, my emotions would stand clear of it.

Emotions had brought me to the precipice countless times. The last had nearly pushed me over. Never again.

Never again.

In a way, if I were to look back over the years from the perspective of just the average person, I would begin to realize why they might think the way they do.

Mega Man always stops Wily. Mega Man is our hero.

Seen from my own eyes, and not theirs...that statement is flawed. I always stop Wily because I have to. Because I have the potential, the power to uphold the First Law beyond any other robot in existence. And First Law demands I do everything in my power to adhere to it.

It's sort of like never being able to refuse an order. Robots. For all we're capable of...there's so much we can never hope to experience.

The months went by. Early summer slipped into midsummer, and at long last midsummer became fall. It was the fall of 2081 when it all began to heat up again.

Jupiter suddenly became a hot topic for the inhabitants of Earth. The last time it'd been seen with such interest was when it was bombarded with asteroid fragments around 90 years before. But this time, the show was different. Because it wasn't rocks crashing into the gas giant. It was lights that danced and sparkled all around it...lights that sparkled blue and purple. It was unnatural, a force that science couldn't explain. For all purposes, the only possible excuse to it was some form of mass hysteria. As if anyone would believe that.

And slowly, the light show dwindled. Specks of blue and purple, all with their streaks and brilliant flaring flashes began to die down, vanish from view. And I was reminded of an old saying...the flame that burns the brightest dies the quickest.

It applied to them...but there were nights when I looked through a telescope and wondered if it applied to me. Me...undoubtedly the brightest star in the troubled times of the age of robots.

Pondering your own mortality is made all the more fun when there are times you question if you even want to get up in the morning. Knowing what you have to face, and growing weary every time you are forced to look it back in the eyes again and again.

It must have been about a week or more after the light show reached its ending phase that something happened on Earth. A pair of brilliant energy sources suddenly came crashing through Earth's atmosphere, crashing onto an island that nobody could ever remember seeing before. Dr. Light sent me to investigate, and that started it all.

There was a reason that nobody could find the mystery island on any map. It was artificial.

It was Wily's.

---

The Eighth Robot Rebellion spawned from that point. Whatever crashed on that island had been two objects with immense power. And despite blasting my way through
"Wily Island's" guardian, I could do nothing but watch as Wily escaped in his flying saucer, a set of grappling arms clutching tightly to a sphere shining bright purple, with what seemed to be nodes stuck to the sides of it. That was only the beginning.

There was a second source of energy my father's sensors had detected crashing on Wily Island. And if Wily had made off with one, he had left the obvious other.

It was a robot, massive in shape and probably in power. But yet it remained untouched, seemingly knocked into stasis. Whatever Wily had run off hadn't come from this robot. And yet Wily had ignored the obvious second energy source that lay dormant within the helmeted juggernaut I saw lying in the crater at my feet...

It would be a while before I came to know why.

Wily's new Robot Masters were different. They ran off of an unusual energy source, foregoing microfusion tanks completely and instead drawing strength from orange sized spheres, each containing its own supply of...

Well, the same purple energy I'd seen Wily escape with.

The massive robot I rescued from Wily Island soon came awake and tore off through the roof of Light's lab, hurtling for parts unknown. Whatever drove him was powerful...far more powerful than energy sources that I knew of.

Rush and I trailed him, and eventually it was all revealed after an initial scuffle.

His name was Duo. And while I'd been battling Wily here on Earth, Duo had spent his entire life fighting "Evil Energy" out in the void of space. Evil Energy...the glowing purple power Wily had gotten, had been using in all of his new Robot Masters...

If anything, I suddenly didn't feel so alone. Because now I wasn't the only unlucky schmuck who got stuck trying to stop the inevitable doom.

We might have met as cautious foes, but after the struggle with the massive guardian on the outmost region of the First Ring of Wily Tower in that volcano base, we became allies. I had to stop Wily. He had to stop the Evil Energy. And seeing as our enemies had seemingly become hopelessly intertwined, so did our own fates.

Four Robot Masters later, making a total of Wily's traditional eight, Duo and I once again met in the underground chambers by Wily Tower. To myself went the 'easy' part of the mission. Infiltrating Wily's lair through the back way, the way a normal person wouldn't expect an attack to come from. Duo would fly on ahead and face the brunt of Wily Tower's forces, all of its turrets and cannons and sentries...he didn't care, and as I watched him fly off and wipe out entire squadrons of flyer drones with a sweep of his energy-laden arm, I realized why. It wasn't a challenge.

Wily traditionally builds his bases into the 'Four Ring' scheme. Meaning you have to start at the outermost Ring, the First Ring, and slowly work your way in through every one before you reach him at the heart of his sanctum. Traditionally. He's altered from it at times, but rarely.

In my own mission of the attack on Wily Tower, I had to face up against a cargo-loading robot and its decoys, a massive airborne bomber with lasers, air mines, and missiles of every shape and kind, and yet another version of the infamous 'Rock Monster' as a gelatinous green freak. I even faced Bass, fueled with the power of Evil Energy and fused with Treble.

Somehow, I managed to stay true to my promise. Defeating each and every one without letting my emotions get the best of me. Without succumbing to that numbing, powerful force. I made it to Wily, my attitude one of calm resignation to the path fate seemed determined to make me walk.

Duo saved me from instant annihilation, thrusting himself in the way of Wily's massive energy cannon and overpowering it with sheer force. But it took too much out of him, and it was only with Protoman's help that Duo was able to escape.

And then it was just me and Wily. And there I failed.

Because despite everything I'd promised myself...despite the horrifying consequences that might arise, my emotions did get the best of me.

I remember what caused it. Wily apologizing after his defeat...and me bitterly reminding him how many times he'd begged for forgiveness before. This time, I didn't get the chance to even form a Buster. It was because a powerful force overwhelmed me then...

And when I woke up, it was all over. I was back home, safe in the care and love of Dr. Light, Roll, Auto and everyone else.

"Duo saved you..." Light said, choked up with so much emotion, his head cold grew ten times worse, clogging his voice like molasses.

So I was alive. Thanks to Duo. Thanks to a wanderer who had shown up out of the blue, and left just as quickly.

I met Blues out in the wilderness, just outside of where Wily's Spire had come hurtling from its base underground. It was Protoman who had been with Duo in those moments when I lay on the verge of death and life. With that quirky smile on his face, his arms crossed as he leaned against the crook of the tree trunk and its branch, we stood there, talking until the sun went down.

And then I looked up at that sky full of stars...And had to smile.

Because somewhere out there, was another like me.

Somewhere out there, there was Duo.

---

Years pass like snowflakes. As they happen, they're thick, moist...they can be large or small, and you can always remember them, because every one is different.

Duo came back in 2082. During those three years that he stood by our side, many things happened. Most noticeably the King Incident, but aside from that, it seemed as though Wily had given up on his grand schemes and felt content to throw already defeated Robot Masters at me...as if he was just passing the time.

Having Duo come back was a complete surprise...but a welcome one. He'd returned for he saw nothing out in the void left to do. And also because he was intrigued by Earth. Intrigued by me. By our situation.

Snowflakes...

Snowflakes melt. For all their beauty, their splendor, their uniqueness, the things that make people stop and stare at them and break from their daily routines...

Times change. People change. Though I didn't want to believe it half of the time, I had changed. If I had lived as I had in those opening months, for my entire life...just as Rock...

Snowflakes are destroyed. They melt. They freeze with others until they're so unrecognizable that they might as well be ice. And in the end, it could be said that everyone on Earth ends up the same way. Enmeshed, their singularities forgotten as their times, their memories are archived in ice.

If only things had been different. There were so many roads that could have been walked. If only Blues hadn't been lost in that laboratory accident, if only Wily hadn't been pushed to the brink of insanity, then Mega Man might never have come into being.

And even the ice melts. When a strong enough force bores into it, the ice will crumble, will vanish from sight and memory. So in the end, it might be that all achievements, all the people who lived and died and fought and cried...

And even earlier, if the Wars of 2040 hadn't happened, if Dr. Light's fiancee hadn't been killed...would he have bothered to create me, my brother Blues, my sister Roll?? Would the age of robots not even have come into being, if Thomas Xavier Light had been able to have a family of flesh and blood, and not steel and silicon...

...Might all be forgotten. Like a stone face in the desert, to be carved away into nothingness by the sands of time, or merely buried, never again to see the light of day...

But it didn't happen like that. I could spend the rest of my life wondering, pondering what paths might have been chosen...but that wouldn't change the fact that they were not chosen. That this is the road that was, and that I have to walk it. That looking back and wondering will accomplish nothing. Time is too short for that, too short for whimsy. We can only look forward. To tomorrow. And we can only live by today.

People of ice, moments melted by age, all people are actors, and all the world's a stage...If we are the stars, then we're already lost to the past...

For the stars that burn brightest die twice as fast.

---

I remember talking to Duo some nights. I remember because after the 8th Robot Rebellion, there was little else that troubled me, aside from the King Incident. And that was easily enough dealt with.

"Duo," I'd say to him, "Just why did you come back?" and he'd always turn to me with that enigmatic face, those clear set optics and that calm glance, and say without hesitation,

"Because you intrigue me." From what little of his own life Duo revealed to me, to anyone, he was a single warrior from what might have, or might not have been thousands to millions like him. His quest, like the quest of all the others like him that might or might not have been, was to seek out Evil Energy and the Carriers that...well, carried it.

"So why don't you go back to them?" I queried once, innocently enough. And his face grew sadder then, his eyelids drooped...

"I don't know if there are any left out there." He revealed to all of us that the massive lights display we had seen about Jupiter had been the climactic skirmish between his kind and Carriers. Their numbers had been numerous on both sides, and yet from the more than 50 warriors between them, only two survived. Duo, and one final Carrier, who burned upon re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. Re-entry...Funny way of saying that the Carrier perished because of friction, considering it'd never BEEN to Earth. Only the power core of the Carrier had survived. It was that power core Wily had made off with.

So Duo didn't know if there was anything left out there for him to accomplish. Earth was free of Evil Energy, fully and completely. Wily couldn't have hid any if he'd tried. Duo had mentalics.

Mentalics were an odd subject for me to grasp...Duo was a ROBOT, for crying out loud!! And yet, he had abilities that bordered on heresy and mythological witchcraft. The ability to 'sense' Evil Energy. To read minds. To reach out into the unknown and see past, present and future. But somehow, that never changed Duo. He'd grumbled how they only seemed to serve him when they wanted to, as if whatever force guided those senses of his enjoyed dangling the prize from a hook.

For all Duo knew, and didn't know, he was still alien. Remaining on our planet only because he had nothing better to do, because we were interesting subjects to observe.

But that didn't bother me. Duo had saved my life once. Duo had helped me to stop one of Wily's most devilish schemes ever dead in its tracks. And now Duo was another friendly face, another person I could talk to.

In a way...when I looked at Duo, I sort of saw myself. The warrior who faced madness so an unknowing, uncaring galaxy might be at peace. Just as I fought so an uncaring planet might survive on.

"There may come times when you will feel everything about you fall into doubt." He said to me one evening, turning his eyes from the stars above to scrutinize me with a gaze that more than likely had held a mentalic stare in it as well. "It happens. But what you must realize, Mega Man, is that there are some things you must never doubt. Why you fight...You fight so that a new generation might live, without woes, without sadness and grief..."

"So you're saying it's some sort of duty?" I queried back irritably. He looked at me again and shrugged.

"Could you really bring yourself NOT to?? Even without your Three Laws...No matter how much you say you aren't the hero, that you aren't the one who wanted to face the darkness alone, can you say without doubt in your mind that you would not try to make some sort of difference??"

There were times Duo was painfully right. He was right that evening.

I didn't ask to be Mega Man. I certainly didn't enjoy it.

And yet I still would have tried to make a difference.

"Righteous spirits seek to better their surroundings. It's just the order of things, Mega Man."

All my doubts, all my pain, all my worries and woes eventually began to subside, once I got to have a better handle on them.

But there was one thing not even Duo could have predicted.

In 2085...August, 2085...everything I thought I had a handle on was thrown upside down.

All because of a new project being built by my father whose name was the 24th letter of the alphabet.

X.

---

Here's the facts. In the afternoon of August 7th, 2085, Bass and Treble appeared out of the blue. Torn apart by a force stronger than even me. As if something was eating his mind inside out, Bass ripped his helmet off and clutched at his head full of purple hair, writhing about. But it wasn't a trick. Bass couldn't have faked THIS much damage.

Wily had just activated his craziest robot yet. One whose abilities extended straight into what a human possessed and more. It had shattered its way through fifty or more Robot Masters, before...before...

My God, it had happened...Wily was dead. Wily was finally, utterly, completely dead. Not at my hands. At his own creation's.

Bass was many things, but he wasn't a liar. It was true, we all knew it.

More facts. It got worse. The Demon, as Bass called Wily's final creation, was coming here. When the sun crested over the horizon and brought daylight to Japan, an unfamiliar warp signal was going to appear out of nowhere, bringing with it death in a new form.

We had less than a day to prepare ourselves for the most difficult battle of our lives. It would be me, Protoman, Bass, Duo, Rush, Eddie, and Beat and Auto against this thing. And even those odds seemed weak enough to fail.

And then came the point in the one-sided conversation where Bass turned up and stared into Light's face, his eyes faded and weary. And told Light that The Demon was built based off the plans of Mega Man X he'd run off with back during the Seventh Robot Rebellion.

Mega Man X...God, the thoughts that ran through my mind when I heard that, heard Light acknowledge it with a frail human disbelief.

Betrayal?? Hurt feelings?? Inadequacy, the feeling of being replaced?

Those don't even come close to it.

Light took us all down into his lab, through a secret door only he knew about, down a spiraling staircase and into a room with tired blue lights, a massive supercomputer in one corner, and a capsule measuring exactly eight by fourteen feet. Who was in that capsule, you ask??

Underneath the fogged glass lay a robot unlike any other before. Superior to me in every way, the perfect fit of man and machine enmeshed together. His emotions would be REAL. He could love, he could hate, he could even cry...

Light built him to be better than me. X...the one who would go beyond me.

Light turned to me then, told me nothing could replace me or my siblings. I didn't believe him then.

He even looked older. Whereas I was trapped in the eternal form of a 12 or 13 year old, X looked as if he was 17 or 18 years old.

Tabula rasa. X's mind was effectively a blank slate, he would learn like a human did. By experience.

So we moved on. The facts:

Light had come up with a new kind of robot, the prototype being Mega Man X. During the Seventh Robot Rebellion, Bass had taken X's plans as well as plans for Rush's enhancements to Wily. King had been little more than an experiment, a chance to test out some more advanced concepts without going full bore into the project. And now four years after obtaining the plans, Wily had brought his creation to life and been destroyed by it only moments later.

It had been built to kill me. To kill X. To hunt us down, and to destroy anything that got in the way. And after we were done for, to wander the world, a blight with no end.

So it had to be destroyed. Bass wanted to destroy the Demon because of what it had done to Wily, done to all the Robot Masters. Light wanted the Demon destroyed because of what it would do to X.

And I would face it because there was nobody else who could.

Righteous spirits seek to better their surroundings.

So why would we fight?? How would we live? To let there be light, a beacon of hope for the world? For the future?? For the ages??

Each of us had our own doubts, our own thoughts as the sun fell and night washed over us. That I can't dispute. As Roll set to work repairing Bass, as Light busied himself rebuilding the Super Adapter, as Duo once again went up to the roof of our house and stared to the stars for answers, I left.

To the mountain.

---

Mount Fuji had always been a sort of consoling presence in my life. But for once, it wasn't. I sought for a source of solace, something to busy myself before tomorrow's fight.

What, you think I was expecting to die? Do you think that now realizing Wily was dead, that I decided in some sick way my own time had reached an end?

I was alive. I was alive, and Wily was dead. That was the truth. And I was just up there, trying to find comfort that wouldn't come. That's my view. Unless, you'd want an outsider's perspective.

Mega Man sat on a rim of Mount Fuji, wearing his famous blue battle armor, but refusing to wear the helmet. So the wind was able to play in his hair, brush by his ears and whisper sweet nothings.

That's what someone else might say. And even then, it didn't last long.

In all my years, one of the most recognizable sounds I've discovered is a four tone, five note melody that can be hummed, whistled or sang...but only carries impact when whistled. And I heard that sound then.

Because my older brother was nearby.

"Protoman." I muttered. I knew he was somewhere near, even though I couldn't see him. Because for the moment, he didn't want to be seen. He was always like that. Came and went at his own pace by his own rules...Most times the humor in it makes me smile.

That night it didn't.

"I figured I might find you up here, little brother." He said to me, still hiding in the shadows. "Going off on your own and moping isn't something you do that often."

"So how did you find me then?" I queried back, not as much curious as I was making small talk.

"Simple. One, you love this mountain. And two, I've been doing this solo bull a lot longer than you have. This is one of the first places I'd look."

Well, that much was true...

Considering his penchant for finding Wily's Skull Castles and Fortresses, it was almost obvious, wasn't it?

But he came up here to talk, I reminded myself. So what to talk about...

The only thing. The thing that I couldn't get off of my mind.

X.

"Why did dad do it?" I asked Blues, my voice beginning to crack.

"Do what, Rock?" Came his response, flippant and indifferent as always. This time, it didn't help matters.

"Build Mega Man X!" I exclaimed. "Wasn't I good enough, wasn't I everything he had ever wanted? Why would he build someone else to replace me?"

And now, my older brother finally came out of the shadows so I could see him, and was wearing a smile to boot.

"You goof. The same reason he built you. Because he learned from his earlier experiments and learned how to improve on them."

Realization is a quirky thing. Many is the time I've felt the lightbulb pop on.

This time, it clicked on for good. Blues knew EXACTLY how I felt. Because...

"You've had to deal with this." I croaked. Blues shrugged a bit.

"What, deal with the fact that my dad saw flaws in me, and dreamed of making something better? Hell yeah. I've been wrestling with that same thought in my own mind since I came back and saved your bacon in Wily's Castle during the Third Robot Rebellion." He said it calmly. It wasn't an issue for him anymore, and in that silent acceptance of matters, I could see what Blues was trying to say to me.

So what if he's building another robot?? Nobody can replace you. Having you around didn't replace ME. It's just not an issue, bro.

"But then..."

"He doesn't love you any less, all right?" he rephrased, a little annoyed I stubbornly refused to accept his message. "Just because he's been building another robot that's a few notches above us in the evolution of Artificial Intelligence doesn't mean he's a man with no feelings. You're his son, you'll always be his son. It's just the way it is. Nothing can take that away."

The basest of truths come from those who have experienced them firsthand. In this, like I knew that Bass was telling the truth about Wily's demise, I knew that Blues was telling the truth about Light's feelings towards me. I still had my own feelings about X to deal with...but now at least, I was sure about my dad's.

You can know how people feel. And still, for all of that, you find yourself questioning fate.

"Yeah, I guess." I finally replied. But if dad hadn't come up with the idea for X, then Bass wouldn't have stolen the plans for him...and Wily would have never built his Demon..."

"Rock, you can't change anything now." Blues said back to me resignedly. "What's happened has happened. And tomorrow that monster's gonna warp onto Japanese soil and start his death march towards you and Light's lab. We can't worry about the past, the what-ifs aren't going to help us. Tomorrow, we're going to have to be on the top of our game. Everything relies on that."

And that's when Blues said something that didn't come across.

"What do you mean, everything..."

Neither one of us said anything for a while after that, our gazes locking onto the stars above and peering into their glimmering specks, partially blinded by Tokyo's lights below. He raised his hand into the air and pointed to space.

"I believe Bass. Wily's Demon was built to destroy you, and destroy Mega Man X. But anything and everything standing in his way is also going to be destroyed. And anything after he's done with us...if we don't stop him tomorrow, then he'll just keep trotting the globe, Rock. He'll just keep walking and destroying and wreaking havoc, he'll be the biggest blight ever to befall Earth. For them. For all the innocents that would be harmed by him. That's why we have to do this. Everything, Rock...Everything..."

His voice trailed off, and I was too absorbed in thought to say something in reply.

Righteous spirits seek to better their surroundings.

Snowflakes melt. So what am I, then?? A righteous snowflake? Don't kid yourself, Rock. That makes you sound like a poof.

The Hell with it. The Hell with it all.

And then Blues stopped my thoughts again. This time, whistling. Whistling...the one thing I never did understand about him, merely accepted as a part of who he was...

"How do you do that?" I asked him. He stopped and turned to me.

"Do what?" He shrugged again.

"I just do it. Been doing it since before you were even a blueprint schematic. I just...sorta picked it up somewhere." I shook my head, pushing aside my current thoughts for the moment and settling onto the troubling ones.

"I can't help but shake this nagging feeling that tomorrow's going to be a day we'll never forget. If what Bass told us is true, then this Demon of Wily's was built stronger, faster, meaner than anything else. Not to mention he has X's brains..."

"I try not to think about it." Protoman replied quietly, a hint of dry candor in his tone.

"I don't want to, either." I replied sadly. "What if I lose you..."

"What if you lose yourself first?" He shot back with a grin.

"I'm not going down that easy." I retorted.

"Well, neither am I." He harrumphed. There was another pause, as both of us stuck our walls up, kept to our pride and our trust in our own abilities and talents to see us through, hoping that the worst would never come.

But if it did...Heaven forgive me for thinking this...I want something to remember. Something to hold close to my heart when everything comes falling down around me.

"But as long as we're up here, Blues..."

"Yeah?"

"...could you teach me how to whistle?" He folded his arms, cocked that familiar grin of his and looked at me.

"You really wanna learn, huh?"

"Yeah." I said back easily. "I've been hanging with you for more than ten years now, and I never bothered to learn until tonight."

He agreed. And we began. It was stumbling at first, but after thirty minutes...

Imagine a chorus of angels. Imagine them singing for joy, for sheer happiness.

We're no angels. But we still sing, in our own way. Fallen angels, perhaps...Although more likely we're snowflakes. Humming about one final time in the chill of night...because we know that when morning comes, when we face one last sunset, it'll all be over with, and our legacy will melt. Only the sounds will live on, carried by the wind.

We'd had our differences. We'd even been enemies once. But now, none of that mattered. We were brothers. Tomorrow, we would fight to defend a third. Tomorrow, we would fight to protect the world. Not because we expected gratitude or tickertape parades. Partially because the Laws told us we had to. Partially...because we just knew it was RIGHT.

Sing the songs of ages past, carried through wind to today and tomorrow, hear their many untold tales of all the struggles and the sorrow, feel it deep within yourself and carry it on for others to hear...For as long as you are remembered, then the void beyond holds nothing to fear.

---

The sun had barely crested over the horizon the next morning when Blues and I made it back to Light's lab. Our poor dad had spent the entire night working on Rush's Super Adapter, and done an ample job with it.

We truly did look a sight as we stood there, the morning sunbeams casting down upon us. The whistler, the outcast warrior, the foreigner, the genius, the faithful mutts, the sister...and me. The hero.

Tut...I'm contradicting myself now. I'm not a hero. I'm not! I'm...

The Hell with it.

I guess it doesn't matter much now what anyone thinks of me. Something about the smell of the air, the mood that permeates it...tips me off that I've got far more important things to worry about than how other people see me. How other people will see me.

The first strike would be given by me, Bass, Blues, Rush, and Treble. Duo and Auto and Beat and Eddie would remain here at the lab. If somehow, we failed. If somehow, the Demon defeated us, got through...

Preparing for the worst?? Were we thinking that somehow this would all end with the Demon collapsing just outside of our front door? Grim, dismal...defeatist...

But that doesn't matter now. Because for all my own hopes, I know a part of that's right.

It's an odd sensation. To wake up in the morning, to rally with your fellow combat veterans. And to wonder, to ponder...Is today the day that it all ends? Is today the time when I will die?

An old TV series with multiple spinoffs...Star Trek...had a character by the name of Worf who liked to say, "Today is a good day to die!!"

Perhaps to him and his war-happy, masochistic Klingon friends. Not me. I'm Rock. I live on Earth, in the age of robots. The Star Trek reality will never come to pass.

I want to live.

And then everything is pushed aside. We say our final goodbyes...Roll walks outside, bedraggled and worried, and tells us to come back alive.

Bass and I reply at the same time, with the same answer.

But even that doesn't matter.

For there's a blight on the horizon...and it comes as madness in red.

I know you're out there, Demon. I can feel you.

August 8th, 2085. A day destined to be forgotten.

By the future generations. Not us.

---

You ever get that feeling that today wasn't a good day to get up? Or that you had just turned tail and run the Hell out of there instead of trying to stop the madness??

The Demon was unbelievable. King had been a menace, but even he didn't come close to what this thing could do...

Everything about the crimson maniac bordered on disbelief. His boots spat fire and screamed, hurling him from point to point in the blink of an eye, allowing him to avoid any attack he chose. His Buster was red and white, and growled at a different...somehow more menacing tone before exploding and ending Rush's life.

He killed Rush...I couldn't believe it, but he killed Rush...

You're asking yourself, why should I care that the goofy mutt got atomized? After all, all he ever did was provide the Rush Coil, the Rush Marine, the Rush Jet, the Rush Search, the Power and Flight Suits, the Super Adapter, the Rush Cycle, Rush Bomber, Rush Mystery, Rush Health...

Rush had been by my side since 2072. He'd been my pet. My faithful companion. The one who entered warzones with me, fought beside me...He'd always been there. And I hadn't been able to save him.

I hadn't been able to save any of them. Protoman and Bass both received critical damage from his onslaught. They screamed at me, told me to leave...told me to leave it in their hands now, that I had to get out of there...

WHY?! Would it be any better facing him outside of Light's house than it would be to face him here?? Damn the both of you...if I leave you here, you'll die!!

But then...maybe they wanted to. Maybe they knew that running wasn't going to help them. It would end here, and they would pull out every last stop. Every last tactic that bordered on self-destruction to try and take this creature down.

So I left.

I left following their orders, Treble in tow close behind me. But still, I remember my thoughts when I left.

It should have been me. It should have been me...

---

Treble appeared behind me moments after I'd landed...

It took little time for the realization to sink in among the survivors that Rush, Blues, and Bass were gone. Gone forever, sacrificing their own lives in one final act of defiance and desperation against Wily's ultimate creation.

Blast it, why...Why did they DO THAT?!

And still, I found Blues' words ringing in my ears.

"Rock, you can't change anything now. What's happened has happened."

I hadn't been able to save them...I couldn't have...

I couldn't change that now.

Treble ran. Bass was dead, his master...The only person that robotic wolf ever gave a damn about was now atomized, killed off by a massive double Buster overload.

We all grieved a little for their passing. We'd miss Blues. We'd miss Bass. But we could only grieve so much. The Demon was still coming.

Even Roll volunteered to fight...because something had pushed her to it. Just like I'd been pushed to fight Wily so many years ago, Roll was now volunteering to help stop the Demon in his tracks.

So why do we fight? What drives us on?

Duo fights because he is with us. Because as long as he is here, he will do everything in his power to be an ally. It's never a question about him. It's a question of when he'd leave, and he hasn't yet.

Roll fights...Roll fights because she's seen her oldest brother and newest friend be blown into oblivion by the Demon. Losing loved ones does a great deal to push one to new ends.

Auto and the others fight because we do. Because they're loyal to us, they're the helpers.

But why do I fight??

I know why I fought with Wily. It started out to protect the world from him. And later, it transformed into something more. It transformed into an intense hatred he and I shared, a hatred that was unending, unceasing...A force that went beyond logic and sanity, and straight into the unknown variables called emotions.

Emotions drove me to the brink. I swore once that never again would my emotions get in the way. Never again would I rely on their power, their maddening rejuvenation, that artificial adrenaline when I fought. And even in that first fight with the Demon, I had held true to that.

But then...that didn't matter now, did it...

The Demon isn't Wily. Wily is dead. I no longer have to worry about him. It's just the Demon now. And he isn't human. He's like me. Artificial. I can kill artificial things.

So why do I fight??

For vengeance? To seek a balance for all the lives he's eliminated? To quench the memories of Protoman and Bass...of Rush...

For the world? A world who long ago stopped worrying about me, and turned to its own pathetic problems? A world who will forget the sacrifices we've made...

For X? To protect him, to allow him a chance to live, just as I was given a chance?

Or for me? For my own reasons. For my own feelings. For my own sense of justice...

Why do I fight?

I haven't quite figured that out.

---

Light remained inside the house, down by X's capsule with a magpistol in his hand, and if I recall, a pickaxe somewhere down in that place as well. So it was just us. Just us robots who were outside when that fiend came marching over the horizon.

Blues...Bass...Give me the strength...

The Demon now had a gaping chunk of his chest armor missing. The suicidal tactics of my brother and my former enemy had worked, to some extent...The Demon now had a weak spot, but the question came...would he give me enough time to exploit it?

The look on his face, that same sickening smile he shared with Wily, the glint of madness in his eyes, the blood on his white gloved hands...For all the damage he'd received, he kept coming.

"He truly is a Demon..." I heard Duo mutter in disbelief. I pulled my Mega Buster back protectively and began to charge a supershot as I rallied a reply.

"He's like a juggernaut." I growled. "You can't hurt him with the small stuff...you just can't..."

But while I stayed calm, my emotions still held in check...Auto flipped out and fired.

My warning cry after the point did little good. Auto's missile had already been unleashed, spouting flames behind it as it seared down onto a direct course for the Demon.

The crazed bastard saw it coming. Didn't even try to avoid it. He merely lifted his arms up in front of him, as if welcoming the missile and the explosion to follow.

When the smoke cleared, he was still standing. That same sick grin on his face, his arms over the hole in his armor. Auto swore in his unusual manner...but it still accomplished nothing.

And then the Demon stepped free of the smoke and turned to me. His smile faded.

He knew me. He still remembered facing me before, how I alone had escaped...Just me and Treble, and Treble was forever lost from all of us.

"Yes, we've met before." I growled. Perhaps he understood me, perhaps not...that didn't matter. "But you won't get past me!!"

And then all of us fired. Auto hurled another missile, Duo cut loose with a massive beam of that blue energy he fought and lived on, and I unleashed a supershot. All three of our attacks were headed right for him. There was no way he could block them all.

And then he moved...

God, there's a mind in that creature somewhere...a mind that told him he couldn't block them all, that a different tactic was merited.

He moved with such speed even I had trouble following him.

He cleaved through my supershot with a swipe of his arm...Dodged Duo's beam as easily as sidestepping a running bull...

And then he appeared in front of me, that sick grin once more plastered on his face. And threw me up into the air before I could even scream.

It wasn't until a few moments later I realized why he'd thrown me...

Because he'd put me between him and the final attack...Auto's missile.

And then everything was a blinding flash...and pain.

Caution. Backup hydraulic systems failing...Internal operations energy at 36...seek immediate repair...

I don't recall what happened in the next few seconds of the fight...I finally came back to my senses when after I'd been lying on the ground as a heap, I was kicked airborne again.

When I finally stumbled to my feet, that's when I saw it. Roll charging towards the Demon, only to have him blink in front of her with the ease of breathing air.

God...Roll, please, not Roll...

I wanted to crumple up and die right there. The Demon drove his fist clean through her body, impaling her and then dragging her aloft, as if holding up a trophy. I had to save Roll, there was still time...

So I ran. I ran faster than I'd ever gone in my life. I had to save Roll. I'd lost Blues and Bass, I wouldn't lose her, I couldn't lose her...

I saw her whisper one...maybe two words, and then the Demon snarled and threw her into the air, bringing his other arm about and morphing it into his Buster.

ROOOLLL!! No, don't do it, you Demon, DON'T DO IT...

And then she was gone.

---

Pain. Sickening, gut wrenching pain. That's what I felt then as my feet skidded me to a halt and I stared blankly, disbelievingly at the air where Roll had once been.

But she wasn't there anymore. Blues wasn't there anymore. Bass and Rush, and Eddie and Beat...They were all gone. They were all killed by this Demon...

So it was just me now. I was the only one left. The only one of the Earth robots who held an inkling of being something more...something beyond the limits of the Three Laws.

And then there was the Demon...and there was X.

I'd once promised myself...FORCED myself...that as long as I would have to fight, I wouldn't let my emotions get the best of me.

How could he?? How could the Demon destroy them all and still stand there smiling...how dare he...how dare he...

I made that promise because when I fought with my emotions, I was brought ever closer to reaching a state of mind where I would have been able to kill Wily. Disobey the First Law.

The Demon isn't human. He's artificial. And he's just killed some of the most important people I care about. Damn him...DAMN HIM...Wily, what did you do...

"WIIIIIIILLLYYYYY!!" I hear myself scream.

It's his fault, it's all his fault...

The Demon pauses, turns to me, and he's smiling again. Despite all the damage he's received, he's still smiling...grinning that sickening grin I saw on Wily's own face time and time again.

I can't let him get away with this. It has to stop. It all has to STOP.

If the Demon's allowed to live, then he'll keep going. Like Blues said...

"If we don't stop him tomorrow, then he'll just keep trotting the globe, Rock. He'll just keep walking and destroying and wreaking havoc, he'll be the biggest blight ever to befall Earth. For them. For all the innocents that would be harmed by him. That's why we have to do this. Everything, Rock...Everything..."

We all have our reasons to fight, I suppose. Bass did, Blues did...Even Roll in the end, died with a purpose for her sacrifice in mind.

But what of me? What causes me to fight now, after Wily is dead, after Blues and Roll and Bass and Rush...

The one force that has stayed constant in my life, through every one of those troubled cycles. Fate. Some don't believe in fate, and I can understand why. To acknowledge the presence of fate is to say that there are some thing that can never be changed, no matter how valiant the effort. That you have no control.

I can't associate fate with the others. I can't believe they were supposed to die. I can't believe fate had it already written that on August 8th, 2085 A.D. that Bass, Blues and Roll were to have their lives snuffed out in an almost futile fight. I can't. I cared for them...even Bass, in the end...

It should have been me.

If anyone deserves to die, deserves to go out the way he lived his life...fighting...then it's me. Wily is dead, and now the Demon is the last enemy left.

He has to be stopped. I can't let him get away with this, the suffering and the pain have been too great.

I know that behind me is Duo, staring at me, pleading with me to be rational, to back up and let us take him all at once.

Not this time. This time, I'm not listening to logic. I'm not listening to rationality and cold unfeeling data. This time...the last time...I'm not going to hold anything back.

I'm going to let my emotions hold sway over me. They've gotten me this far, I've got nothing to lose...

I'm sorry, Duo. But I have to do this. I have to.

And as I run towards the Demon, our Busters raising up and firing, I can hear Duo's thrusters kick on as he tries to reach us.

It's not your time, Duo. It's not your fight. It's MINE.

I can almost hear a voice calling to me...a voice somewhere between the personas of Wily, of Rush, of Blues and Bass and Roll...Like they're calling to me from somewhere beyond the physical realm.

Why do you fight?

And I still have no answer for them.

---

It was a fight nobody would ever remember. It was a battle that would never be seen in military tactics 101, it was a conflict of the purest nature.

Two enemies trying to kill each other.

The only witnesses to the massive spectacle were Auto, Duo, and Doctor Light. Auto was useless to it, and Duo had suffered a blow early on, knocking him out of the competition.

A man in blue and a man in red struggled, screamed, fired and ran.

Mega Man...and a Demon that some odd thirty years from then would be known as Zero. In them lay unbelievable power. In Zero was the next generation of robotics, a generation whose contribution would come for their identical personalities to humans. And in Mega Man represented the crossing point...the missing link between the age of robots and the age of X. He was a robot with emotions. He was a robot able to defy the Three Laws. He had inspired the creation of a new generation, and now in his final hour...had reached that generation himself.

---

Neither warrior gave the other an opportunity to claim victory. The Demon would fire off his blistering supershot, that sizzling beam of plasma that had killed everything else in just one hit. And Mega Man would merely slide underneath it, releasing his own.

The Demon dashed to the side of Mega Man's shot, shooting off almost a dozen smaller plasma bursts in an attempt to overwhelm the Blue Bomber by sheer numbers. As a stunned Auto and a struggling Duo watched, Rock deftly contorted his body in all directions, dodging the onslaught with ease. There was something more driving him then, something that surpassed his basic programming. By resorting to his emotions...the most powerful combat enhancer Mega Man had ever come across...he had been pushed into a state of mind that put him on par with the Demon. Duo would say later he saw the birth of a soul in that fire...But all that mattered was that in the end, Mega Man was pulling out all the stops. He'd even disabled the safeties on his Mega Buster, and while still using only one, was summoning larger and larger charges.

No words were spoken between the two. None were needed, for none could portray the raw emotions burning between them then. Their rage. Their purpose.

What do you fight for? Why do you live? When time comes to nothing, who can you forgive?

Narrowing his eyes, the Demon dashed towards Mega Man with his Buster stretched in front of him, firing off at a rapid pace in an attempt to peg the Blue Bomber by narrowing the gap to point blank range.

But Mega Man merely charged towards the Demon as well, holding back his own power until it had built up into a supershot. He lifted his left arm up and fired, the blistering blue fireball hurling straight towards the Demon's midsection. Still, in landing his own shot, Mega Man received a blow to his shoulder, sending him stumbling back in pain.

Likewise the Demon stumbled back, one arm gripping at the damaged region of his chest armor where Mega's shot had sunk in with fizzling results.

Vendettas live forever, rage is but brief, you can absolve it in moments or let eternity fill you with grief...

And then it grew personal. Mega Man charged in screaming, his Buster vanished away as he relied only on his fists. Likewise, the Demon let his own plasma cannon vanish from view. Mega Man got in the first shot, a massive uppercut carrying so much power behind it it jarred the Demon to the ground. But somehow bringing himself clear of the new sensation of pain, the Crimson one snapped back up to his feet and clutched his hand around Mega Man's throat, holding him aloft with one hand as he reared his other back for a sucker punch to knock the Blue Bomber's head clear off his shoulders.

Snarling unintelligibly, the world's last hope swung his right leg about and buried its point deep into the Demon's stomach. The maniac's grip loosened and dropped Mega Man, just as he collapsed onto his knees and brought his arms around his wound again.

He coughed up blood then. Purple blood, the blood laid down in X's plans as the next generation's means of life support.

Rock watched the ground become stained with the liquid. He blinked only once before standing erect with his hands at his sides.

The Demon recovered as well then, standing with one arm now permanently protecting his wound and the other dangling loosely.

Reacting as one, both of their right arms snapped up, morphed into Busters, and fired the supershots they had been storing up.

The blink of an eye is all that's required...you're alive one moment, and the next you're retired.

The Demon's supershot blazed in faster, angrier...despite Rock's best attempt to avoid it by turning about, it blazed a streak along his back, burning through armor and exposing his delicate inner circuitry.

Warning: Multiple system breaches. Internal operations energy at 7. Prepare for immediate auto-stasis.

Override.

Warning: Overriding auto-stasis may result in permanent total program lo...

OVERRIDE.

Confirmed. Auto-stasis Overriden.

The Blue Bomber's own shot was more successful, slamming straight into the wound and the hand covering it, despite the Demon's attempt to dash away from it. It hadn't mattered. Rock had predicted where he'd run...and fired.

The two stood there for several more seconds, gasping, wheezing, their eyes growing dimmer and duller as they neared the battle's end.

And then Rock's mind pulled back in on itself...screamed at itself, battling for self-survival.

Look at him. He's weak. You've worn him down, Rock. You can stop fighting now. Call out for help. Duo and Auto can finish him from here.

This isn't their fight. It's mine.

If you keep fighting, you'll die. Drop into stasis...it's the only way you'll survive!

No.

Why?! Why don't you want to live?!

Righteous spirits seek to better their surroundings.

What kind of Boltshift is that, huh?! What, you wanna go out with guns blazing, you wanna die a hero?!

I'm no hero.

Then WHY?!

Why what.

WHY sacrifice yourself?! Why do you still fight?

I don't know.

Then QUIT! It's done with, Rock! Wily's dead, he's never coming back! And as far as the Demon goes, he's as near to death as you are!

I can't quit.

Rock, you're strong...you're stronger than the Laws. You overcame the Laws, Christ, you almost went against the FIRST LAW! Why are you doing this, huh?! For the world?! They don't care about you anymore. They don't and you know it. Darkman told you as much back in the Fifth Robot Rebellion, and you know he was right!

It's not a matter of being right. It's not about defending the world anymore.

So what is it then, huh?! Is it your emotions?! Are you fighting the Demon because you hate him so much you would destroy yourself in the process, just to see him fall to the ground and never get up again?!

Even through the struggles of his mind, Rock could see the Demon staring back at him, his own dull eyes registering one last glimmer of effort as his arm came up. So Mega Man raised his up as well. The two began to charge their Busters. Continued to let them charge.

Warning. Mega Buster at maximum allowable override safety.

OVERRIDE.

Confirmed. Mega Buster continuing to build charge.

So this is how it's going to end, eh? You just couldn't let things be, could you Rock? Wasn't it you who said you just wanted it all to be over? Wasn't it you who screamed for peace?

Mega Man said nothing to his nagging conscience, the part of his original programming still so hardwired to his brain, it acted as a separate entity from the persona that relied on his emotions. He merely watched the Demon's own gaze, locked with it, waited.

You've changed. Fifteen years ago you wouldn't do this.

Fifteen years ago, I did do this. And if you'll recall, I won.

You barely made it out of that one alive. And you were facing Wily then. Not this freak. What makes you think you'll come out of this alive?

I probably won't...but that doesn't matter anymore.

Mega Man heard the sudden twinge in the Demon's Buster noise, that sudden drop in pitch that indicated immediate discharge. So he released his own shot.

Blazing blue met a brighter, narrower bolt of even bluer plasma. And yet the two were evenly matched. Neither won out...They merely tore at each other, their energies baking all around in a gigantic wave of heat and rampant energy.

Warning. Internal operations energy decreased below minimum operational status. Total program loss imminent.

God, Rock...You've done it now. You're going to die out here. You're going to die because you wouldn't give up.

So be it.

But you still haven't answered my question...

Program shutdown in 5...4...3...

Which was?

Why do you fight??

...2...1...

I still don't know.

When will you know, eh? With less than one second to live, tell me...when will you know that you've done the right thing? When will you be able to stand up and know why you fought...why you died?

When X lives.

...0.

---

So that was it. On August 8th, 2085, I died. Blues died. Roll died. Bass died. Rush died. Beat and Eddie died. And Wily had died the day before, along with every last one of his Robot Masters in his Skull Fortress.

And yet our dad continued to live. Duo took off for parts of space unknown, a copy of X's plans and an old worn photograph of us and him in his possession. Duo had always mentioned one of his other objectives was to find out just who the makers were...just who exactly created him, and why.

And I know what happened to the Demon as well. He didn't die out on that field like I did. In the end, the best all of us managed to do was knock him into stasis...a deep stasis. Duo ended up taking him back to where he came from...to await the coming age. He never told Doctor Light the specifics, he just said that the Demon was important to the future. To the age yet to come. The age that X would help to create.

We never did see Treble again. But I know that he's somewhere out there, all alone in the world, with no master to guide him. Treble was fierce, chaotic...but for all the supposed animalian viciousness he held, there was one trait he shared with Rush. Intense loyalty to his master. He's still somewhere out there. And wherever he is, he's suffering. Because he's got nothing left to live for, and that's exactly the hand that fate's dealt him. Life. When he doesn't want it.

As far as Auto was concerned, he stayed by Light's side those next two years...two years which my father spent working and wasting away. Duo's prediction of the future had been vague. It had been utterly useless in the long run. And yet he still knew that the Demon would be around when X came into being. My father didn't want X to be a weapon of war. He wanted X to be able to choose his own path, live in peace...do the things none of us were ever able to, because of Wily's influence and the dark road he made us all walk. But if that day would come...if there would come a time in X's life when he, like me...his older brother...would have to fight, would see no other option but to go into war to protect something dear to him...Then there would be something waiting for him. My father's capsules. They were designed specifically to home in onto a very complex signal emanating from deep inside his mind alone. And if and when X needed them, they would be waiting for him. Able to grant him new armor, new abilities...everything he would need to survive. None of us would be alive when X was finally brought into existence. And I suppose Light thought it was the only way. A token for the next generation...momentos from a lost age. Auto himself was reconfigured into a robot designated RT-55J, and sent along with the armor capsule in the First Set.

Just how many sets did my father make for X...

Enough, hopefully.

And then there was X...

My youngest sibling. My only remaining sibling.

Wily had brought his creation online by using plans of Mega Man X. And even though he'd designed the Demon to destroy me and X, there was the all too likely possibility that something had gone wrong. That something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Light activated the 30 year auto-stasis and testing period on my brother somewhere in April of 2087. It wasn't until September he finally got around to typing out the warning message that is now displayed prominently on the side of X's capsule on the monitor screen.

And yet, we all hoped that X would turn out all right. We dreamed, envisioned our sacrifices hadn't been made in vain...that all our efforts would pay off.

The age of robots had ended with the death of Wily and the subsequent deaths of all of us.

Thirty years from then, it would be the age of X.

The others went on ahead not long after we all died. In the end, we all have to move on. Move on, and hope for the best.

"Rock, why don't you come with us?" I remember Blues asking me, his familiar grin plastered on his face. Even after death, his spirit remained the same.

But I couldn't join them just then. I told Blues as much, and he shrugged before heading back towards Roll and Bass and the others all clustered together.

They were all so happy then...It didn't matter what came next, they were together. And nothing could harm them anymore.

So why did I stay? What made my own wandering spirit stay tethered to the earthly realm instead of leaping with the others into the mysterious ethereal boundaries beyond?

Love, that's what.

---

The last thing Thomas Xavier Light remembered was inhaling poisonous fumes, feeling his lungs burn, but being too weak to cough. And then...well, he must have fallen asleep.

Two years...

Two years of being alone. Of having my family torn away from me, of hiding myself in my laboratory and working...

"Hey."

Somewhere along the line, Light had felt very tired. Even now, he was worn out, bedraggled, unkempt. And somewhere close to death. Yet even as he grunted to keep his eyes shut, to stay in that marginally comfortable zone of sleep, he felt a strong hand nudge him in the shoulder, and a voice speak up.

"Hey...come on, get up already."

The voice...familiar...

ROCK...

"Whu...!" Light gasped, snapping fully alert. And once more, he found himself in his laboratory. Only it looked different now. Despondent. Like an overwhelming force had struck it.

But what stunned him the most was the figure standing in front of him, in dark black jean shorts and a blue T-Shirt. His raven hair looked ruffled, yet clean...

The figure smiled a bit and nodded.

"Yeah, it's me. How have you been, dad?" Light trembled a bit, then shook his head.

"No. It's not real, you're not real...you're a hallucination..." Rock frowned and folded his arms, covered in synthskin. His armor was nowhere to be seen now.

"Dad...what's the last thing you remember?"

"I was outside, sitting in my chair and..." Light's voice stopped suddenly, as he peered out of his hands and to the son he'd lost two years ago. Rock nodded sadly. "But...if I was outside, what am I doing...in..."

Light looked down at himself. His clothes were clean, not in tatters. His lab coat was freshly pressed...and the hardest two years of aging and suffering had vanished from his features. He even looked in a nearby monitor's reflection...he was younger than he'd been.

"Oh my God...Rock, am I..."

"Just like the rest of us now." His son finished for him quietly. Rock shrugged. "Nothing lasts forever, I guess. Not even us." There was a gentle smile on his face as he said it. Light's mind pounded with the sudden realization.

I'm dead...like them...and yet, somehow...

"But...Rock, you're a robot! I'm human...I can be a ghost, but you..."

"Hey, I don't rightly understand it that much either, all right?" Rock interrupted gently, shrugging away the new disbelief in his father's eyes. "There are a lot of things science can't explain. Like where that other sock goes, or why it's eight hot dogs to ten hot dog buns...Me being a robot and still somehow ending up as a ghost is just another one of life's little mysteries."

"So why are you here, then?" Light asked wearily. "And where are the others?"

"The others have gone on." Mega Man replied. "To the great beyond...or wherever the feck us spirits go after we've kicked the bucket down here."

Light had to sit down.

"So there is a heaven..."

"Errr..." Mega Man inhaled quietly. Light looked up.

"What?" The Blue Bomber shrugged and scratched at his hair.

"Well, it's sort of like jumping the gun. I don't know if there is one, and they didn't either."

"So what is there?"

"There." Mega Man said simply, grinning again. "Geez, dad...There are some things you can't explain. I thought I told you this already! We don't know what's out there...we just know it's THERE. It's like that old movie with Kevin Costner...Field of Dreams, or something like that...you know, the ghosts would always come and go through the corn. But you never knew what was beyond it. It was just there..."

"I see." Light muttered. He looked up to his son. "And the others...how were they?"

"They were fine." Mega Man offered easily. "Glad to be together, especially. They wanted me to come with them, but I couldn't."

"What, did you have unfinished business?" Light asked. Rock looked at him, a small grin on his face.

"In a way...I was waiting for you." He extended his hand out to Dr. Light and nodded. "Come on...it's time we best caught up with the rest of our happy family."

It was there that Light shied away from Mega Man. Quietly, he shook his head.

"No. I can't." He turned and looked to X, still sleeping in his capsule...only now clothed in a new blue armor, with a helmet that looked somewhat familiar...

Rock blinked a few times.

"I see you gave him his own blue suit."

"Yes." Light muttered quietly. "And his helmet...that's your old one. I had to make some modifications to it, but that's your helmet." Mega Man blinked a few times, then smiled.

"So you gave him a bit of his legacy then...even though he's going to be totally clueless about the events that led up to his birth, his creation, and the end of our age...he's going to have a physical momento." Mega turned back to Light, his smile fading. "But that doesn't tell me why you aren't willing to come along."

"There's still so much I could do for X..."

"As a ghost?" Rock interjected. "Be serious, dad. I've watched you these last two years...I've seen you suffer. You've done everything you can for him. You've given him a means to survive...and if I remember correctly, you even built a capsule dedicated to nothing but the tiny historical tidbits nobody on Earth will ever know. Because it was only known by us."

"Cossack's Capsule, yes..."

"I know why you don't want to come with me." Mega Man said softly, tenderly. He looked at his father with a sad smile. "It's because you're afraid."

"Of what?"

"Of the unknown. You're afraid that it won't work out, that somehow we've sacrificed ourselves for X, and he'll have nothing but a shallow and pointless life. That despite everything, he'll turn out to be as dangerous a blight as Wily's Demon. The beyond doesn't frighten you...what your own fate is. That doesn't concern you, because you want to move on. Yet all your worrying about X is what's keeping you stuck here." Rock motioned to the lab. "If you weren't worried about him, you would have moved on already. Met up with the others. But you're still here, your spirit's stuck in the same place you've kept yourself cooped up in the last two years."

"So?" Light queried back frantically. "Isn't that a healthy fear? To worry about your offspring?"

It was there that Mega Man paused, then finally stepped up and put a hand on his father's shoulder, looking into his eyes.

"Dad, do you remember back...to 2067? People had fears about Protoman back then. You had fears about Protoman. But he turned out all right...And in the end, despite your concern about me, I turned out fine as well. All of us did." He turned his head around to look at the gentle serene face of X, underneath his capsule's lid. "And so will he." Mega Man smiled and turned back around. "Just like we all did."

Mega Man took a step back from Light and motioned around the room.

"Take a look, dad. Take a long, hard look. Tokyo's gone. Mount Fuji's eruption wiped it off the map. It wiped your lab off the map. The world's already begun to forget about Tokyo, about us. This place is powerless now...the only thing still running is X's capsule, because you gave it its own independent power supply. There's nothing more you can do here."

Light shook his head.

"Seventeen years, Rock...that's how long it's been since this whole mess began. Even now...are you sure it will turn out for the best?"

"What will happen, must happen." Mega Man echoed back with a shrug. "This isn't our time anymore, dad. It's X's. We're just ghosts now." He twirled about and whistled a little bit of Protoman's tune, shaking his head. "Snowflakes."

"What?"

"Snowflakes." Mega Man stated again with a contented gaze. "In the end, that's all we are. Each one different, each one unique...each one destined to fall to the ground, to be lost among thousands of others...and to then melt, so the next snowflakes can fall."

"You sound confident." Light said with a weary smile. "It sort of makes me feel at ease, too."

"I've had two years of sitting around and waiting for you to think about my life." Mega Man said. He walked over and sat down on a bedraggled office chair and crossed his legs. "Two years tends to be enough time for a wandering spirit to sort things out."

"Do you have any regrets...any 'if only I'd done this' qualms?" Light asked sadly.

Mega Man stared back at him, fully at peace. His smile and the shake of his head said it all.

"We've done all we can now, dad." Rock echoed. He stood back up and held out a hand. "And now it's time to move on, and let time take over."

Light nodded, his own worried face at last washed clean. He tottered over to his son, and hugged him in a tight embrace.

"They'll all be there waiting for me?" Light whispered, his last fear begging to be sated.

"Yeah. And I imagine they'll have some lemonade too." Mega chuckled, hugging back. "Now get going. I'll catch up with you in a moment."

Light's ghost grew dimmer and dimmer...until at last, he completely vanished. Having crossed over.

And then it was just Mega Man...and Mega Man X.

X would never be able to consciously recall ever hearing his brother speak to him. He would never know how Mega Man felt about his existence. At least...not in the waking world. But, perhaps, at night...when he slipped off into dreams...perhaps he'd have visions. Of the family he never knew. And that was enough incentive for his older brother.

Mega Man walked over and placed an ethereal hand onto the lid of X's capsule, staring down at the face that seemed to mirror his own. A serene contentment.

"X...the world is yours now. We've done all we can. It's up to you. But remember this, X. No matter where you go, no matter what you do, we'll be watching. Smiling. Watching you grow up. Help the world, X. Our age is gone, and it'll be up to you to guide the world during your own age. But I know you're up for the challenge, little brother. You're stronger, smarter, better than we ever were in life. And you have the legacy." Rock put one hand over X's chest, and his other over his own. "It's the legacy of us, X. The Mega Men. So make us proud, X. Make us proud."

Gently, Mega stepped back down and walked into the center of the room. Yet something stopped him even then from leaving. He turned about, still smiling as he summoned forth a black leather jacket and slipped it on, turning the collar down.

"X, do you want to know why I fought? Why I fought in the end, when Wily wasn't around? It was you, X. I fought for you."

One last smile...and then the legacy was passed on.

Mega Man left the physical world the same way he'd often appeared and reappeared in it.

In a shimmering beam of blue light. A blue light that signaled a new beginning.

For the world.