Giro... Aile... Ashe... and Lan...
Running against time, they did their best to reach ground zero ahead of their hundred meter nemesis...
Although eight pieces were needed for Empress' copyroid, nine were key to its power, and in a vault underneath the former Star Force headquarters, the ninth piece awaited unification with its "brethren".
By land on her bike, Aile knew it wouldn't be easy to reach her destination.
From a nearby hill, she looked down on the hoard of Mavericks whose purpose was clear: They didn't want her in the way. And looking beyond them towards her destination on the horizon, the look of hopelessness on her face gave way to one of utter determination.
Revving her bike, she left a trail of dust in the desert land, concealing the shots that were fired at where she was before. Aile turned to face the Mavericks, shifting left and right to dodge shots as she charged through their ranks.
With speed not thought possible for bipeds they followed, Aile cursing under her breath as she heard the rumbling from the army's feet draw ever closer, despite her gunning the bike to its limits. Sure enough though, they caught up with her. But Aile's reflexes were faster than the Mavericks'.
One jumped towards her, trying to knock her off her bike. It met the business end of a saber and got sliced vertically in half. She turned 360 degrees to take out a round of Mavericks, and continued on towards Empress, weaving in and out of the crowd of Mavericks that had taken over this wasteland. More tried and died to stop her. Yet it seemed that she couldn't stop them no matter how many robotic bodies she left behind.
Aile revved her engine into the red, pushing harder on the pedal, sending the speed needle off the scale. She leaned forwards, holding her sword out in front with one hand and grabbing her gun with the other.
If ever there was a time the hours spent tuning my bike would pay off, this is it. Aile smiled at the thought of all the midnight oil burning sessions her quest to squeeze the last drop of speed out of her bike's engine demanded.
"Alright then, time to get serious!" Aile scowled. With no hands on the steering system, it would be disastrous if one of the mavericks stood up to the front end of her bike for more than a few seconds.
She made sure that none of them did.
Slashing and shooting for her life, Aile deflected and/or destroyed every single thing that attempted to make her stray from her course. However, despite her enthusiastic attacks, many more mavericks kept coming. So she continued, slicing, dicing, bashing or thrashing everything she could. The few times that something managed to hold on to her bike, (usually the back) she whacked it with whatever part of her body was free, dislodging it.
Minutes passed in a flurry of energy blade flashes and explosions. Then, suddenly, the mavericks thinned out. Aile looked around her, noticing the sheer number of mechanical carcasses behind her and the lack of anything moving before her. Off in the distance, not nearly as far as she should have been, Empress terrorized the lands around her.
Aile grimaced, leaning forward on her bike, gripping the handlebars solemnly. Tired from her battle, she only hoped that she would be able to gather her second wind in time.
By air via his rocket boots, Protoman surveyed the oil field desert below as he flew towards the giant, ancient evil Navi in the distance. With his thoughts going a mile a minute, his mind raced through all the options, trying to figure out a way to deal with Empress when the time came.
Empress however, would have to wait, as the slightly more pressing issue of a jetpack powered Maverick armada blocking his way took precedence.
"Unoriginal" Protoman said aloud before moving in lower with the guards rushing to meet him.
Protoman pulled his saber and severed the heads from the front few while flying upward again to dodge the fleet, as more guards seemed to come from oil drills and miniature barracks all the way from here to Empress. Sadly the enemies appeared to be faster, so the game was on.
As more reached him, he sliced three times to destroy a total of seven. He kicked off of one and spun, slicing several more in half. He pushed forward again, slicing his way to clear a line through their rank. However, the incoming Mavericks filled that gap, and Giro was already surrounded again.
He swung down and flew down, blowing up more and starting a chain reaction. Yet more came, in seemingly impossible numbers. This time they charged Protoman one at a time to wear him out. Protoman sliced and kicked them in rapid succession. The ones he kicked flew back into the next one, knocking enemies out of the air and giving Protoman a split second to prepare his next strike. As the enemies came faster, Protoman's mechanical body had a harder time keeping up, yet still his sword was a white blur, appearing to be multiple swords as he slashed in multiple directions.
As the desert floor was filling with falling robot parts at an ever increasing rate, Protoman was indeed getting worn out. His jets were using quite a bit of power, and his body would need to rest before the battle. Thankfully though, it seemed like the next line of reinforcements was the last.
A head fell before the jets lost power. A body to Protoman's left was impaled and used as a baseball bat against his allies. Another received a swift, jet–powered boot to the head. Protoman found that as he was descending the remaining power in his body drained. He could recharge it if he could rest long enough, so it was a relief to him as one last enemy made a brave stand. The mechaniloid tried to destroy Protoman from behind, but Protoman (who already landed on the large pile of robot parts), did a backflip and sliced him from the head down and landed crouched on the pile, looking like a badass for a few seconds before he keeled over to rest. He wasn't bothered too much, however since he knew where Empress was heading and he'd be just fine by the time she got there.
And Ashe, from the skies high above, watched the chaos from the deck of a Legion airship. A few hundred meters below, the ground seemed to evolve into a surging mass of mavericks and bodies. Ashe scratched her nose, grinning.
"Heh heh, look at that lot! Darn, almost makes me wish I was down there fighting them! Ah, well..."
Shouts from behind however, interrupted her reverie by drawing her attention.
All across the ship, Legion soldiers scrambled in preparation, and as Ashe looked back at the sky ahead, the reason became all too apparent.
"Tch, looks like I'll get to fight after all!"
She megamerged, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the maverick airships the ship's radar had detected moments ago. Even before she drew her guns, the Legion soldiers began firing. However, even with all the firepower the ship held, there were still enough mavericks left to fulfill Ashe's need to shoot things.
"Yeehaw! Take that!" she yelled loudly, as she fired her weapons, guns akimbo. While most of them were hit by her attacks, high speed still ensured the survival of quite a few foes, including a small group of bird mechaniloids intent on taking on the problem from the source, the airship's control center.
Ashe, acting quickly, aimed at them all with her homing shot, decimating them just as they were about to fire. "DE–NIED!" Ashe said with a large grin, then turned to her left just in time to avoid the gargantuan claws that gouged the deck beside her.
Transforming into the Model ZX Mega Man, she slashed wildly at the mechaniloid, who was now stuck in the deck. Unable to counter–attack, it was made short work off.
Ashe returned to her Model A form and smirked as some of the pieces were dragged off by the wind. "Now this is fun!" she exclaimed, looking back to the front of the ship, ready to fire at more mavericks.
None came. To her partial dismay, the maverick attack had ended just as quickly as it had begun, leaving a hyped up Ashe glancing around, unsure of why. Apparently, the Legion soldiers weren't bad shots themselves. Glancing ahead, Ashe saw the large form of Empress dead ahead. In fact...
Empress stared at them with hatred, then shrieked.
"Uh oh..." Ashe muttered.
Empress herself, however, was no stranger to the location and purpose of the ninth piece, and with each earthquake inducing step she took, she narrowed the lead the others had on her.
Ruined foundations, collapsed walls and scattered paraphernalia, all made nearly unrecognizable by the passage of time. This was where the dreams of an era had come crashing down four hundred years ago.
Casting dirt aside with his bare hands, Protoman dug his way to the vault that contained the final piece of Empress' copyroid. Without its stabilizing properties, it would only be a matter of time before Empress' body lost cohesion and fell apart. With it however, Empress would gain the closest thing to invulnerability anyone could ever hope for.
Fully aware that this was the last chance they would ever have at victory, Protoman ignored the pain of digging with one's bare hands, even managing to double his efforts.
"STAR F…" Part of a large blue sign read, the rest of it mangled beyond readability. The only thing left to tell the tale of the place's once glorious past. Five letters and the upper three arms of a five arm yellow star.
The Star Force HQ. Back in its day, it was one of the most secure locations, in no small part due to its Dimensional Area force field.
"Giro!" Aile, having arrived on the scene, shouted as she turned her bike around on the spot. "Aile, this is the vault I told you about. I can't stress how important destroying its contents is." Giro said as one last sweep of his hand revealed the top of a concrete structure of unknown size, but immense importance.
"Then what are we waiting for." Aile responded, opening fire with her gun on the structure... only to find her shots doing nothing more that raising dust.
"That won't work Aile, this vault was built to resist wars..." Giro tried to explain, only to be cut off, by a certain look in Aile eyes, one that he knew all too well.
"Wars huh?" Aile said, raising her hand to the comm link on her ear. "If it's a war it wants, it's a war it gets... Ashe... We're having trouble cracking open a vault, need a precision strike on this position from that big ol' airship of yours. Maximum damage!" Aile said with a very indicative grin on her face.
"Maximum damage, huh? Then stand back, and enjoy the fireworks." Ashe replied, cutting their link, then turning to face the crew of the airship's bridge. "You heard her. Maximum damage." Ashe said, turning around to face crew of the airship.
"Got it!" The captain replied, the airship opening up with all weapons, seconds after having been issued the order.
Circling the area, the ship pounded the vault with everything from missiles to plasma rounds, kicking up impressive amounts of dirt in the process.
With each hit the ground shook and the vault crumbled while Aile and Giro having dashed to a safe distance, watched the show. Giro was standing up while Aile was cross–legged on the ground.
The bombardment was intense and spectacular, but Giro's mind kept repeating only one nagging thought. This isn't going fast enough.
With Empress only a hair's breath away, the bombardment was never going to succeed in time, and raising his hand to his comm, he called Ashe... and was completely taken aback to see the ship suddenly drop out of its original course, and settle on a new one.
"Collision course locked! Weapons on auto–fire cycle 3! Everyone, emergency transport!" These three commands rang out throughout the ship, and soon enough only the captain and Ashe remained. One "Good luck," later, and the captain himself transported away.
Ashe made her way to the deck and off the ship, first in the form of Hedgeshock's rolling ball attack (to get as far away from the ship as possible) then as Queenbee.
Guns blazing the ship impacted full speed with terrifying accuracy, utterly annihilating the vault and all its contents, sending debris for kilometers around with the blue Star Force sign prophetically embedding itself into the ground between Aile and Giro.
"Mission Complete!" Ashe said with a wide grin as she megamerged back to Model A form, and landed right in front of the two.
Like feathers gently floating in a spring breeze, bits and pieces of everything that made up the Star Force HQ fell all around as Empress, clearing a building, several fences, and a highway in one final step, arrived on the scene... and promptly started laughing.
"Do you really think you've won? That by taking out one piece, I'll start melting like some fairytale witch and you can all live happily ever after?" Empress said, with an evil grin on her face as she extended her right hand directly forward then, closing her hand into a fist, proceeded to draw an imaginary horizontal circle in midair with her index finger.
And, almost in real–time, a sparkle of light started circling the three, going round until a larger version of the circle Empress drew now surrounded Aile, Giro and Ashe.
With her circle now drawn, Empress turned her hand, palm side up, and no sooner did she do so, than a perfect semicircle of earth rose up from underneath our heroes, carrying them towards the sky before landing in the palm of Empress' hand.
"Did you really think I'd go through all this, knowing full well that you'd do your best to destroy as many parts as possible before I could use them?" Empress went on, as she turned her gaze to some point in the sky, away from the three.
"Right… about… there…" Empress said, pointing with her other hand towards the spot she was looking at. "Right there, in geostationary orbit, is what doubled as my home for the past four hundred years." She continued as her gaze once again shifted to the three. "Ever since I was forced into space at the end of the war, I have waited and I have planned…" Empress said, her fury building, as she got ready to crush the three standing in the palm of her hand. Something which they became all too aware of…
"I started the war that would topple a world, I nearly annihilated humanity as a whole, and I made sure that this time everything WILL go down the way I want it!" She practically screamed, crushing the earth mound into dust.
Aware of her intention however, the three jumped backwards as Empress crushed the dirt mound left in her hand, and opened fire on her as they drifted backwards and away.
"Oh no you don't!" Empress yelled, as her left hand shot out towards the three, grabbing Ashe while her right hand came in from the side, swatting Aile and Giro into the front of an abandoned nearby building.
"Albert made sure that there would always be redundant copyroid parts around to replace any you might destroy." She then said, calming down, as she brought the struggling Ashe to a level just meters away from her face. "Why do you three of all people think you were given the biometals? Hmm?" Empress, said as a white light, now engulfed Ashe, sapping her of her strength. "To fight for justice? To defend the downtrodden? To create a better world?" She now said, as she raised her right arm towards the city, and again began absorbing large amounts of materials and reploids, with no other motive than to hammer home the point.
"Well, you weren't! Everything you ever went through was nothing more than a show for my own enjoyment, and YOUR biometals are NOTHING more than spare parts Albert made in case I ever needed them." Empress finished her speech as she brought Ashe even closer to her face, her grip tightening to near unbearable levels. "And guess what I need right now!"
By now however, Aile and Giro had resumed their attacks on Empress, and as Ashe was on the brink of losing consciousness, Lan made his best entrance since saving Aile.
From a nearby news airship, he jumped towards Empress, and with a Giga Meteor and Hero Sword, rescued Ashe before either her or Model A took any real damage. One precision cut from the Hero Sword was all it took to separate Empress form her left hand, which then splattered into a large pool of grayish liquid metal as soon as it hit the ground.
Knocked backwards by the force of the Giga Meteor then off balance by the loss of her arm, Empress fell to one knee, breathing heavily even though her copyroid body didn't actually need any air. Steadying herself against her still intact right hand Empress stared at the stomp of her arm seemingly shocked as Ashe and Lan ran to rejoin the others.
"Wa…s that it?" Ashe finally asked, with a hint of disappointment evident in her voice, breaking the ongoing silence.
"How can it be over…?" Came Empresses' spoken reply... "When it hasn't even begun!" followed by her unspoken comeback as she swung around then threw a large slab of concrete at the group, forcing everyone to jump to safety.
Not particularly threatening in itself, the slab did however do its job, and by the time everyone's attention was drawn back to Empress, she had already returned to her feet.
Laughing maniacally, she lowered her sight to the stump that was her left hand, stopped laughing, then turned her gaze to our heroes and grinned.
"You had it coming!" Shouted Lan's little cyber elf safety switch as it flared a bright white glow, drawing the towering figure's attention and causing Empress' grin to be replaced by surprise and curiosity.
"Is that…" Empress began saying, then stopped mid sentence as the realization of whom she was talking to, kicked in.
"It is… The mighty Slur…" She said, her grin returning, this time at the little elf's childish demeanor.
"Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Gone from humanity's appraisal, to humanity's slave and now to a kid's toy. Bet you never thought you'd be reduced to this back when you were Duo's right hand, or navigator for the humans' flagship, did you? What were you, third in command I believe?"
"I'm proud of what I did. I've seen and done things you can't even imagine. And it was fun!" The little elf replied whilst striking a defiant pose… or at least as defiant a pose a circular ball of energy can strike. "We're doing the right thing, and that's enough for me!"
"Well then…" Empress then replied, surveying her left hand as metal started flowing down the stump, progressively rebuilding her arm, Empress watched her copyroid body's auto repair system in action, deliberately slowing it down for added drama.
"fun little warm up aside…" Empress then said while raising her newly repaired arm, first towards the four, fist closed index finger pointing in their direction "I hope you're ready to do the right thing, cause I've been waiting four hundred years for this fight..." then towards the sky, causing heavy storm clouds to quickly gather above and around, spewing massive thunderbolts in the distance. "…and I'll settle for nothing less then one EPIC battle." She shouted, now raising her right hand towards the sky in a similar fashion, causing the electrical activity overhead to go into overdrive.
"NOW FIGHT ME!" She yelled, bringing down her right arm pointing towards the four, commanding the clouds above to strike down her foes. With but a gesture, Empress ordered nature itself to do her bidding… and nature all too eagerly obeyed.
O_O
WTF? This can't be right, please wait a moment while I go double check this. *Double checks.* You have got to be friggin' kiddin' me! An update? AFTER TWO AND A HALF FRIGGIN' YEARS! What kind of sick puppy does that? Honestly now, how on dear sweet EARTH is anyone expected to remember anything about this story after two, count them, two... Friggin...' YEARS? Dude...
Everyone, everyone, calm down, please. We're all friends here, so put down the pitchforks, torches and boiling tar, so we can talk about this. I absolutely assure you that I had one of the soundest reasons possible for my 2 and a half year absence. Something beyond real life problems and hardware failures. In truth, this absence was due to... me being too lazy to actually do anything...
*nervously awaits rioters' reply...*
O_O zomg! Flame Thrower! no! No! NOOO! Aaarrgh...
On a side note, I'd like to take this opportunity to give my sincerest thanks to my two (most likely ex by now) beta reader who have helped me enormously in writing this chapter. Thanks a bunch Inferno05 and SubZeroChimera. You guys are the best beta readers anyone could possibly hope for.
And one final side note, I was initially hoping for this story to be the first in a series of three stories (first one would be primarily about Lan, Aile, Giro and Ashe, second would have started where the first one left off and would have been about Vent, Aile, Maylu, Ashe and Grey, and the third would have explored the ramifications of the heroes' actions from the first two stories, and would have been about Chaud, Aile, Ashe and Geo Stelar/OmegaXis). But, as of late, I'm starting to have serious doubts about the feasibility of this since, let's face it, it took this long to write this one story, and it's still not complete yet.
IF (and I stress the word IF) I ever do decide to write them, I may write them as unrelated stories. Anyone have any thoughts on this?