Chapter 10: Ground Zero

15: 18 PM (Japan Time), Saturday August the 7th…

"… Another 5 minutes until the refinement facility…"

"Good."

"So! What style?"

"Maybe I'll just look on."

"Ah… Let's see if this guy is up to the challenge."

"Yeah. It'll be amusing."

"Crap."

"Heh, heh, heh. Getting nervous, Subari~?"

"Stop with that silly nickname already! Gimme a break!"

Rock Man was complaining aloud while Burai and War Rock seemed to be teasing him in some manner or another.

"Burai… Can't you settle that later?" Dr. Lartes called out.

"Why?" Burai glanced over his right shoulder.

"Stress won't do well for him if he has to battle."

"… Fine. When we get back to Earth, though… I'll call you. You will come and I'll watch. I won't go beyond that phase yet. I don't care if I have to wait another whole year. I've got patience." He shrugged.

"… Maybe I can bear with that…" Rock Man muttered.

"Or do you prefer that Futaba guy?"

"I've got nothing to comment."

"Oho. Claw Man's been teaching ya using his lawyer knowledge?" War Rock asked with obvious amusement.

"Acid ain't Claw Man!" Acid Ace protested.

"Sure, Acid Disaster."

"This guy…!"

"Hmmm… These Jeeps seem to have been property of the JDSF and they've tuned them to use four hover engines instead of a central hover engine…" Kir Osh commented as he looked at some documents.

"Where did you find those?" Dr. Lartes asked.

"The glove compartment…"

"Someone forgot them, then."

"Yeah. "Property of Jeremy. Touch them, you get a jab." … Totally reflects how cultured Maria's grunts were..." Kir Osh ironically told him.

"Obviously… She hired them because they were capable and didn't doubt of using violence: the high salaries she gave them plus the "bonuses" were more than enough to ensure a fanatical devotion."

"Bonuses… What a madwoman." Burai cursed.

"Yeah. Totally. But she ain't getting outta that hole. Ever."

"3 minutes to the facility…" Rock Man reported as he glanced at display's map.

"Pst! Subaru! Ya won't mind me joining the party?" War Rock whispered to him in an amused tone.

"You go tell Ox who's stronger." Rock Man grumbled.

"Hah! Obviously. I'm so gonna blow the guy sky-high!"

"Phew."

"But ya never know… I might sneak into the party…"

"Jeez. Go compete with Sigma – san!"

"Stigma Man?"

"Oi! I heard that!" Sigma protested.

"Mr. Ears showed up?" War Rock laughed.

"What Mr. Ears? Come at full power!"

"Leave at null power!" War Rock taunted.

"This guy…!"

"He's worse than Sir Omega." Blood Shadow drily muttered.

"Yo! Brad Shad! What did Omega do?"

"It ain't your business, War Rock." He grumbled.

"Oh? I guess it was something "H"…" He chuckled.

"I told you: it ain't your business, War Rock!"

"Ya removed the shades and he got captivated by those golden and red eyes of ya?" War Rock teased.

"NO!" Blood Shadow roared.

"Roar Man showed up!"

"Why didn't they call you Troll Rock instead of War Rock?" Blood Shadow countered.

"Oi!"

"Hmpf! Eye for an eye!"

"Wha~t?"

"This is starting to look like a war… How lovely, really…" Rock Man grimly muttered.

"The Sengoku?" Burai asked with a grin.

"I preferred you serious and hostile."

"Hmpf. I thought it'd be funnier to test your limits."

"I knew it: Nebula Grey's set a curse on me!"

"The unlucky curse!" War Rock laughed.

"One minute to refinement facility…" Kir Osh reported.

"That reminds me… You were Harp Note, right? Wasn't that Dealer woman after you?" Burai called out.

"… It'd seem she's lost interest." Harp Note drily replied.

"I somehow doubt it." Burai grinned.

"You know something?" Harp Note questioned.

"No."

"Then get outta the way."

"Hmpf. That sounds more serious."

"… This Jeremy guy seems to be from Louisiana… He wrote several annotations inside which seem to be the result of poker games against some of the other guys…" Kir Osh commented.

"Typical…" Dr. Lartes shrugged.

"… Yet he comments someone named Smith left a journal in one of the workstations regarding the excavations' status… We should try to dig it outta the mainframe and read it because it could tell us when Maria started this up and why they left." Kir Osh added.

"Good idea."

"Journal Man shows up from behind with a creepy face~!" Omega suddenly joked.

"Omega? But I thought that Boss had isolated you inside of your capsule until you behaved in a proper manner and stopped trolling around!" Dr. Lartes sounded surprised.

"But I installed a little gadget inside~!"

"Crap. There's no stopping the guy?"

"What did you to Blood, anyway?" Dr. Lartes demanded.

"Check out what kind of guy he was, ya see~!"

"Are you an imbecile or what? Boss told you: Blood doesn't have "specifications" built into his body!"

"Oho. I thought he'd removed the stuff."

"Don't you understand that you don't have "specifications" either because androids don't need them?" Dr. lartes exasperatedly asked.

"I thought he wanted to recreate Bertie's body to the last of details if he wanted to make it convincing, ya see~!"

"Well! That reasoning is silly! There was enough with matching the height and shaping his hair and face to be identical plus voice modulation! Now shut your system down and stop plaguing us!"

"Look! An entrance…!" Harp Note pointed.

Two large lock doors had been slightly opened and the words "REFINEMENT FACILITY SUBLEVEL 0" had been written into them using electric blue paint: a faint glow came out from the inside plus a fog-like effect which gave it a creepy appearance.

"You're not gonna tell me Death Shadow is inside…!" Rock Man grimly muttered.

"Crap. I didn't beat it, then?" Burai cursed.

"You sure gave the guy a kickass, but he seems to have fled and come down here." Acid Ace deduced.

"Bothersome jerk."

"Let's reduce speed and get ready to face whatever is waiting for us inside of that." Dr. Lartes rallied.

"Looks like the gates of Hell have opened…" Kir Osh muttered.

"Well… It seems pretty cold to be Hell in my opinion." Harp Note told them with a hint of sarcasm.

"Let's go!" Burai grinned.

"Hai~…" Rock Man muttered in a resigned tone.

The cars entered through the doorway and reached a vast round room where some cargo trucks were parked at plus another three entrances which were unlocked: the central part had a round cargo elevator built into it which had descended down a shaft cut into live rock: this rock glowed with the bluish halo they'd seen earlier and the fog seemed to originate from the shaft: sounds of gunfire rang out from deep inside of the shaft, too.

"… There's no hitting this jerk or what?" Kurayami cursed.

"Che! I thought that the "R" Wizards were though, but… This guy is V3 by now and very fast!" Kanaya cursed as well.

"Hah, hah, hah, hah…" Death Shadow's laughter rang out.

"Can't this guy do anything else apart from laughing?"

"Dunno!"

"Our suspicions were true: Death Shadow is down there and giving those two trouble." Dr. Lartes commented.

"This must be kilometers deep… There's no safe way to go down safe for the elevator…" Acid Ace muttered as he looked down into it.

"Wait! I found something. Ta – dan!"

Kir Osh had been inspecting inside of a cargo truck's compartment where he found a metallic spheroid with six arms: two of them held circular saws on them, the other two had pneumatic hammers and the last pair had hands which gripped a container capable of being sealed: the whole set wasn't taller than a meter.

"An excavation droid… So this is how they mined." Rock Man lifted his eyebrows in surprise.

"We should've guessed it… This stuff is too dangerous to be handled without protection like when using uranium…" Dr. Lartes shrugged.

"Maybe I turn it on we can use its visuals input to see what's going on down there sans the need to come down!"

"Good thinking. Let's use proxy to fight proxy." Burai grinned.

Kir Osh examined the droid and blew some dust off it to reveal three "eyes" which were mere red-colored LEDs and a camera built atop it: two engine-like devices were attached to its back.

"This thing's battery is at 20%, though… It should last 15 minutes at the utmost… We'll just have a sneak peek and then recharge it using the devices over there…" Kir Osh told them.

"Fine. Let's send our Spy – kun down there." Harp Note grinned.

"Not bad." Acid Ace smiled.

Kir Osh pressed a switch and the droid activated: the two engines began to hum and made it hover above the ground while Kir Osh opened a port and connected his Hunter – VG to it using a wire: he inputted some commands before unplugging it and the droid gently began to descend down the shaft: Kir Osh brought up a Real Wave screen.

"… Descent ratio: 30 meters per second… Not bad. It can cover almost 2 kilometers in one minute…" Kir Osh reported.

"Does it have audio input?" Dr. Lartes asked.

"Yeah. I'm connecting it."

"… Grah! I'm getting fed up! Step away from that hole in the wall, you jerk! We don't have time to fool around! Get it? Or are you deaf to begin with?" Kurayami cursed.

"Yeah! Take this! Wood Slash!"

"Hah, hah, hah, hah, hah…"

"Grah! He countered with the Fire Slash!"

"Elemental attacks are in vain: he can counter with the opposing element when we hit the guy!"

"No more Mr. Nice! Grave Joker Galaxy Advance!"

"How's this one like!"

The droid's camera suddenly ended up in a wide and deep cavern: the shaft now consisted of four metallic beams and encircling segments of steel which allowed for the elevator to keep on descending: Kurayami and Kanaya could be seen quarreling with Death Shadow in front of a large hole which had the shape of the exoskeleton as if pointing out that he'd broken out through there.

"Hmmm… This cavern seems to have been created by the meteor's touchdown because there was an already existing pit opened by seawater filtration and earthquakes… The meteor fell down it while bouncing off the walls until it hit the bottom at some speed and the explosion provoked this cave-in… Or so Smith records in the journal…" Vadous suddenly told them over the radio.

"Is there a date on the journal?"

"Yeah. October, 2201. There's no specific day but he hints at being close to the end of the month." Vadous replied.

"2201? Dad had already been declared MIA by then…" Rock Man recalled with a sigh.

"Yeah… I remember it was around that time, too, when we boarded the "Bonds" space station…" War Rock admitted.

"But it'd seem they first landed here on January… They immediately realized the potential of the stuff and decided to exploit on industrial scale to then sell it to rogue nations as a new nuclear weapon. They set the machines up and used auto-programs to let them run while they departed and didn't come back until July to check: all main tunneling was done by then and construction was 80% complete. Satisfied, they left again and came back on early October. That's when Smith made this entry."

"So? What happened next?" Burai sounded interested.

"Mining proceeded naturally and they'd processed huge volumes of the stuff until, in late December, they met "THAT FREAKING SCARY MONSTER" to quote how Smith named it."

"Typical Western grunt…" Acid Ace chuckled.

"It'd seem the thing had been sleeping deep beneath the main cavern but they accidentally woke it up. And that was, in Smith's words, "the start of a hellish winter"…"

"Hellish winter, eh?" Burai kept on looking amused.

"They fought it with all possible weaponry until February when they decided to give up and come back later with better weapons. They did find out how to mass-process it and so they ended up selling some of it to those nations, yet, for some intriguing reason, it ended up decaying and becoming useless in less than a week's time. Further research surprised them because some microscopic cell-like organisms seemed to exist inside of this stuff and, when exposed to an atmosphere with little to none gaseous state substance on it, they initiated apoptosis… So they had to scram before the rogue nations could try to get to their necks. In the end, the whole project was abandoned because it was impossible to properly exploit… He overheard Izono Marco, Maria's PR man, talking to another man about the possibility that, if they improved the cells' DNA string, it could prevent the apoptosis and give them adaptation capability to other environments…" Vadous read.

"I see… And they surely were trying to come up with something which could be used to kill the monster." Acid Ace muttered.

"Yet, it'd seem that, over time, they forgot about it and didn't recall the whole affair given how they started to consolidate their power and Maria began to believe she was invincible and all that tyrant stuff."

"Did they lock down the whole area to seal up the monster and hope it'd die from hunger or something like that?" Harp Note guessed.

"Yeah. But, from what the scanners show me, the monster has managed to excavate an escape route using a drilling shaft left behind from the drilling machine testing: it leads directly to the surface and I'm sure its legs helped it climb up."

"Heh! So their own seal backfired on them." Burai grinned.

"Sure thing… Look: this is getting intense again!"

In effect: Death Shadow had morphed into his spheroid form and was moving around at a maddening speed to the shock of Kurayami and Kanaya who were unable to hit him.

"… Hah, hah, hah, hah!"

Death Shadow deposited a bomb which detonated and blinded the screen before it faded: he'd vanished from sight and the two enemies were growling and hissing as they somehow jumped back to their feet.

"Ran away… The jerk! Not gonna let him run!"

"Yeah… Me neither!"

They ran towards the opening on the wall while Kir Osh made the droid look downwards and spot the elevator some hundreds of meters further down.

"Hmmm… There's a jump of 900 meters until the elevator. I guess we're better off calling it up, going down and climbing the shaft. It'd be dangerous for us, but you guys, using the Denpa – Henkan forms, can use Barrier-type Battle Cards to repel the radiation. We'll climb up using one of the emergency shafts and we meet on the surface." Dr. Lartes suggested a course of action.

"Fine." Burai shrugged.

"Time for a thrill!" Acid Ace grinned.

"Thrill leads to disaster, Shidou, like the "Sweet Candy" you always eat whenever you have a chance to." Acid intoned.

"Jeez! Always stealing the glory outta me…" Acid Ace grumbled.

"Hmpf. Get ready, Rock Man…" Burai warned.

"Crap." Rock Man rolled his eyes.

"Jeez." Harp Note protested.

Burai grinned and jumped down ahead of the others while Rock Man slapped his face in defeat…