Chapter 25: Emperor S
16:56 PM (Japan Time), Wednesday October the 6th…
"… We've finally gotten all of the ten keys. It's taken us two days, but we can now launch an assault on the Great Sky Temple. We will acquire the final energy mass and run out of there before the black hole closes. But we will have to battle Emperor S and his two companions, too, so we shall realize the truth of this affair."
Yuuichirou was briefing the team while looking serious.
"Finally, we…" Netto muttered.
"… Will meet Emperor S…" Saito muttered.
"Let's go! Every second may be vital." Enzan rallied.
"O-oi! Wait a min! Don't go sans the "Light Armor": it's vital to fight this battle!" Obihiro ran in.
"Whoa. Finally… We'll take 0 HP of damage from the atmosphere exposition! Incredible…" Netto whistled in surprise.
"Everyone. Good luck." Hunter Man told them.
"Thank you."
The Navis installed the final program and looked at each other: the final battle awaited them.
"The time has come!" Knight Man exclaimed.
"To curse them… Heh, heh, heh, heh." Shadow Man chuckled.
"Oh come on." Needle Man looked skeptical.
"I don't see the point." Laser Man muttered.
"Like there is any." Gyro Man grumbled.
"Yeah. There's none." Magnet Man fumed.
"Heh, heh, heh, heh… Let's go to curse them, yes…"
17:13 PM (Japan Time)…
"… Alright. We've arrived here…"
The team was standing in the plaza beneath the Great Sky Temple.
"Excellent. Let the keys open this up." Emperor S greeted.
The ten keys flew towards their keyholes and the grooves in the columns lighted up: the whole circle descended and formed a new rim around the plaza.
"Wow."
A red circle on the middle of the plaza shot a beam of light skywards towards the base of the building.
"However! Only 3 of you can come in: Rock Man. Blues. Roll – san. You're the VIP guests of today. We'll extend the red carpet to you three. Heh, heh, heh!" Emperor S announced.
"… I guess 13 VS 3 would be somewhat unfair even if they're stronger than the foes we've battle insofar… They must want an honorific one-on-one duel." Blues guessed.
"I don't care: it sounds fair enough." Roll announced.
"I suppose no harm will come upon our companions while they wait here?" Rock Man questioned.
"No. They can wait down there: they'll get no damage at all, anyway. Let them chose." Emperor S replied.
"We will wait!" Search Man announced.
"Yeah!" Everyone announced.
"… Thank you. Everyone." Rock Man smiled.
"We're going." Roll added.
"Let's go!" Blues announced.
"Yeah! To the decisive battle…!"
Each of them stepped into the beam and quickly rode towards the insides of the building: it then stopped with a loud hum and the patterns on the plaza's ground began to glow with an intermittent glow.
"The system has gone into reserve mode to be engaged anytime, it'd seem." Obihiro commented.
"Good luck!" Everyone encouraged.
"… Are we inside?"
The three of them entered a round, tall and empty room and realized that they had entered the room through an open generator device: there was a glass circle on the ground which allowed one to look directly down into the plaza.
"Yikes. You better not have vertigo." Rock Man muttered.
However, the architecture was clearly different, since the generator device didn't have the hexagonal container above of it: the room had several curved large black metallic ledges set at different intervals which climbed upwards towards somewhere out of sight.
"Whoa."
The walls also had three circles facing north, east and west which had had to be the spots from where the sub-generators had sent their energy to feed the main generator.
"I guess the throne room must be above us." Blues guessed.
"Let's climb up, then." Roll suggested.
"I'll take rear just in case." Rock Man announced.
They climbed up through the ledges and crossed an archway which seemed to once have held a gate of sorts, but it had been removed time ago, judging from the marks.
"Suspicious: almost as if they'd forced their way in." Rock Man frowned.
"Very. Reeks of a desperate race to get deeper in…" Blues confirmed.
They walked down a corridor and spotted some wood doors set at both sides of it as well as the circular metallic door: the wooden doors were protected by an energy field colored purple
"Please head ahead." Emperor S requested.
The group reached a metallic circular door which split into two and slid into the slots built into the walls: the group stepped into the throne room and gasped upon seeing B and H standing next to it.
"Those two must be B and H." Blues guessed.
"So! The one in the throne has gotta be Emperor S." Roll guessed.
"We finally meet, it'd seem." Rock Man announced.
"Heh. Hikari Saito… Roll – san… Blues. Welcome to our Sky View Room: the central spot of this world." Emperor S greeted.
"How about you show your faces?" Rock Man challenged.
"Heh. Why not… I'll go first." H announced.
She removed her hood and showed that she had reddish-colored hair and her eyes' irises were red.
She looked on her mid-teens, about fifteen or sixteen years old and had a smug smile on her face.
"Name me Kagehi Somari." She announced.
"My turn."
B also lowered his hood.
He had white unkempt hair and a pattern which looked a trail of lighting painted on his right cheek, running down from below the eye: his irises were also red.
He wore two strange pendants reminiscent of an ancient culture which were attached to his ears.
He also looked around fifteen or sixteen years old.
"I am Kuroumi Solo." He announced.
The throne turned and they gasped.
"Surprise, surprise."
Emperor S was of the same age as the other two.
His hair was colored silver and had a messy style to it while his eyes' irises were a mix of red and golden.
He wore a simple black tunic with a shooting star emblem colored purple placed on the exact center of the tunic's torso: he sported black leather boots and black leather gloves.
A purple cape hung from the back of his shoulders and reached all the way to the feet.
"Yamikawa Saruba." He announced.
"B-but… Then why did they use the initials B and H?" Rock Man asked of them.
"That's because we have a battle form. Going by the "S" on our names would be hard to distinguish us, so…" Kagehi shrugged.
"We pick up the initial of our battle forms." Kuroumi shrugged as well.
"But I go by my first name's initial instead." Yamikawa added.
"Then, the reason for the distorter was…! You didn't want to us to realize that you haven't aged in 15 years…?" Netto gasped.
"And guess why."
"…"Spectrum"…!" Saito gasped.
"Yeah. "Spectrum". That's where all began!" Yamikawa confirmed as he leant forward.
"Hmpf. Saito. You travelled 20 years back in time when Shade Man attempted to rewrite history." Kuroumi brought up.
"Yeah… That's true."
"Didn't you emerge close to a "sea" which was in truth a bug caused by the failure of the "Spectrum Experiment"? The "endless abyss", as it was named by Colonel EXE…"
"Yeah. Was that the inspiration to build this place?" Saito admitted before guessing.
"Correct. There was once a man… Let's name them "Ruler" for the time being. That man was conscripted to the "Spectrum Project". More than its capabilities to influence Time – Space, as discovered during the test day, he was interested in its original purpose of allowing humans to freely live in Cyber Space." Kagehi continued.
"But! There was a desire to rule everything and claim "immortality" behind the idea. Since the "Spectrum" Team was to be relocated because the project was being abandoned, he faked his death in a boat accident and everyone fell for it. He then lived in the KA – 222 Island alone and began working with the "Wily Program" and the computers installed on the facility but without trying to bring it to activation mode." Yamikawa explained next as he leant back on the throne and began to tap the right armrest.
"The "Wily Program"…" Blues muttered.
"Fitting, wasn't it? After all… You guys later labeled it the "Dark Program" because of its sinister uses, didn't you?"
"Five years passed by and the construction of the Dark Realm was concluded: everything was activated. However… The man had one last idea: he was already past his 30s, so he wouldn't look much like "eternal youth". He then decided to pick three guinea-pigs to complete his ambitions: us three!" Kuroumi exclaimed.
"T-then…! You three are humans transformed into cybernetic data by using Spectrum's algorithms!" Netto gasped.
"Correct! We three: your everyday Japanese middle school students were picked."
"Then… You knew "Ruler"…?" Roll guessed.
"Of course we did. But we believed him to be dead. Anyway… The man hired some thugs with the black money he'd amassed over those five years of making secretive and petty underground deals. That fateful day was July the 14th, 1991. That same night… We three had gathered at my home for one of our amateur astronomy sessions and to discuss how we were gonna organize for the start of high school… The thugs broke in and drugged us three." Yamikawa made a grimace as he reached this point.
"They then brought us to KA – 222 Island by using a black chopper which flew low to avoid radar. "Ruler" paid them a large amount of black money and told them to get lost. He then split us into three separate devices built inside of bulletproof glass prisms. He sat on a metallic armchair set atop some steps and then began to boot the system to execute the last transfer. Before we could understand what was happening, our bodies were turned into cybernetic data and plunged into the Dark Realm via a tunnel which was opened… We were then scattered into each Temple and… and…" Kuroumi trailed off.
"That man…! He locked us on the basement dungeons! The fucking son of a bitch! That fool! That imbecile! That fucker! That bastard!" Kagehi began to hiss.
"Goodness!" The three of them gasped.
"The Tribe Leaders quickly realized that we'd been forced to take part into it, but they were forbidden to speak with us. They and their Tribe members were treated as mere slaves who had to do force labor such as building roads, tunnels, bridges and elevators. The "Guardians" were there to keep them under check, too." Kuroumi growled.
"What the…!" Enzan cursed.
"You can see it: that man had no morale anymore. After the transfer, the system shut down and the tunnel was destroyed. A time bomb then took care of the control room which no one got to use anymore since Twilight came up with a different system altogether from scrap. But that's another tale." Kagehi scoffed.
"Then…" Saito muttered.
"Can you imagine it? Being a normal person and you suddenly find yourself locked in a dungeon which in turn is part of a gigantic cage which no one can find! The thought of being stuck there forever and the fear and confusion which accompanied it devoured our minds until we almost had a breakdown. I was ready to commit suicide and let it at all end: what point was there to life anyway? But the man had foreseen this: because we were cybernetic beings, we could be rebuilt and the whole process would begin again… It was nothing short of a living Naraku!" Yamikawa actually stood up, infuriated.
"… A living Naraku…" Netto muttered: he was pale by now.
"But… The Tribe Leaders couldn't bear it anymore: they weren't there to be used. They had a will of their own, they could think, and, above all, they had honor. They couldn't bear seeing us suffering in that rat's hole, so they decided to screw the man and broke us free from it. They then made us realize something: we had infinite potential. If we tried to channel it into reality, we could build anything. That's where the idea for our combat forms came out from." Kuroumi continued.
"We spent those large five years designing, training, learning from mistakes, improving and doing all we could to try to come up with enough power to stand up to the "Guardians". Even they had limits to their power and mass, but they were designed to keep on regenerating their power cores." Kagehi explained.
"Thus, I began work on the "R – Program". And that's why you saw the many upgrades and changes written into it. I was always calculating its energy consumption, output, the mass, the size and other variables. However, by now, the man had us be closed inside of the temples and we couldn't exit because the "Guardians" were there to stop us. We managed to assemble transmission devices to communicate between us and try to improve the calculations."
"And, finally, on August the 28th, 1996, a breakthrough was achieved: our power increased enough to destroy the power cores and then attack the new one as it regenerated. That forced them into shutdown mode and we finally were able to come out of the Temples."
"There was one last thing to do: depose "Ruler" and end that tyranny ruling over the Dark Realm. Only then we would be able to chose our own road and carve a better future for all of us inside of this world since there was no way out. The man had been engrossed into stirring terrorist incidents, mafias and organized crime all around the world by using the proxy Navis. He then was arrogant enough to issue a challenge."
"…"You want to kill me… Then go ahead and try it. You lowlifes will the ones to die and be cast into the Infinite Naraku." … Such was his challenge. But we knew better. We crept into this place on September the 5th, 1996, and I then tried to negotiate one last time. But he claimed that we were "defective guinea-pigs" and that his use for us had expired. Enraged, I plunged my sword through his body from behind and both Solo and Somari – chan plunged them from the front. I then decided to be ironic and told him "Tu quouque, fili mi?"… He was deleted and we made sure that nothing of his data remained. There was no other way around. That man had lost its humanity and had become a despicable criminal. I wouldn't see such another criminal for many years." Yamikawa concluded the tale.
"And thus… We named that period "The 5 Years of Tyranny". It's a taboo by unspoken code. We only brought it up for you guys to realize what we had to go through."
"Afterwards… We returned to the Temples and were going to live there with each Tribe while leaving this place empty. However… The warriors claimed that our power was great and fair. We would be able to guide them forward with it. Given how they requested of us, and how much we owned them, we accepted that request and I was named "Emperor" by them. However, we always come out and go spar and train with them from time to time." Yamikawa explained.
"And you then began monitoring the outside world to see what had happened during those 5 years…" Meiru guessed.
"… Wait a min. "Tu quoque, fili mi?"… It's commonly believed that Julius Caesar muttered that during his assassination on the Ides of March because his adoptive son Brutus was there… Then…?" Enzan gasped.
"… Yamikawa Danzero. That man… He was my father." Yamikawa looked at the ground.
"What!" All of the presents gasped.
"But…! What kind of father would toss his own son into a dungeon? What kind of father would he name his son "guinea – pig"? What kind of father would try to make us suffer forever? What kind of father would go and try to have us killed? Can such a man be labeled a "father"? Can it be labeled…? It cannot! It was a Demon… A tyrant!" He roared as he stood up with obvious accumulated rage and hate.
The three of them stepped back, taken aback by the display.
"And remember one thing: my body is still 16 years old. But, mentally speaking, I'm 31 years old. Can you image how is it that your body never grows yet your mind evolves? "Eternal youth", that man called it? No! This isn't "eternal youth": it's a curse!"
He suddenly jumped down from the throne into ground level and swung his cape backwards.
"… I wouldn't normally think of making such a display. But realize something: this chance of opening up, even if it were to be closed again, would give us the opportunity for someone to know our sad and tragic history." He seemed to have cooled down a bit.
"Saruba…" Kuroumi called out.
"I know. The tale is over. But… You came here seeking the central energy mass. Didn't you guys?" He switched topics.
"Yeah. But it wasn't in the generator downstairs. Yet, since the black hole is growing, it was to be somewhere." Saito admitted.
"That "somewhere" is… Inside of my body… You want it? Try to defeat me in battle."
"Finally… Some boilin' action!"
"Tee, heh, heh, heh, heh… Let's go~!"