Megaman X: Elysium Rising
Final Mission: Delete the Maverick Virus
Chapter 35: The Fall
BGM: Tesla – Only You
By Genoscythe
AN: Sorry Zero Asakura, I can tell you right now without spoiling any plot that Zero will not be taking over Elysium. There would be panic in the streets on Earth. Everyone would be subliminally forced to wear their hair in ponytails. Nations would abandon firearms and replace them with swords and bloodlust. All men would have to be undeservingly cocky and pumped full of attitude, while all the women would have to take habitual trips into space to keep their lord and master company. Ruling every aspect of a planet and its extremely fickle society can get very lonely sometimes.
For a number of very sound, easily justifiable reasons, Marx was nervous. First and foremost, he had left his assault rifle back at the command center at Genoscythe's request.
"I'll be honest, that thing's gonna be a burden and a distraction – but it won't kill you any Reaverbots." His words exactly. Genoscythe was probably right, but it felt like he was going into this unarmed (which he wasn't), and that never felt good. His shoulder cannons were deemed useful by the Almighty, and although it made him nervous to depend on his Plan-B weapons, it was all he had.
That, and Nephtis.
She promised to keep an eye on him, no matter how he persisted that that was the man's job. She now walked in front of him, staff dangling at her side. He would never admit it, but he was glad she was in front.
"What's the first thing you want to do when you get home?" She called back, half her face visible over her shoulder.
"There's a really good chance we won't make it home," Marx reminded.
"When someone asks a question…" Nephtis began, slowing down to his pace and pulling her lips next to his ear. Her voice dropped to a whisper. "They expect a goddamn answer, not an excuse."
Marx was willing to play this game. God knows his chances at spending any amount of time with Nephtis were dwindling when they began this march to death. "First thing I'd want to do, huh? Well, the first thing I'd do is find a way to fit 'we' into that sentence. Then I'd look through the list of things we can do…"
"Marx!" Nephtis knew where this was headed.
"…and find something cute, platonic, and intellectually stimulating for us." Marx wisely changed course. "Like a walk in the park. During sunset. With flowers blooming and singing birds flying around our heads."
She gave him a sultry stare. "Why do you automatically think that anything I would want to do that's not related to sex is doomed to be boring?"
"Is this a rhetorical question?"
"Not anymore." They continued on in this vein, desperately trying to keep the approaching objective out of their minds.
Their first priority in this first operation was, firstly, to reach Elysium's engines. X had told them that in order to fire off the Carbon Re-initialization Program, Elysium had to be in orbit. This was why Elysium existed as an island in the middle of the Pacific: the Omegas destroyed the engines as a failsafe in case the Alphas took control of the Master's systems.
The Maverick Hunters' job was to keep the engines from being fixed. Marx didn't think this should be terribly hard, because it takes time to fix anything.
If the Alphas could get a hold of the engine room's security system, they would have all the time in the world.
The Omegas currently held control of the security system, but their Reaverbot army numbered in the hundreds, and the Alphas' measured in thousands.
The Alphas would most likely break through with sheer numbers.
The Omegas hoped Sigma would be among them, and if so, then it would fall upon the Maverick Hunters to destroy him.
Sigma was likely not going to be there. He was likely going to be somewhere very safe and very secret, much like the Master.
In other words, this entire battle was a well-calculated failure from the beginning.
"I hate this place. Everything looks the same," were Zero's famous last words before they descended into the engine room. It wouldn't be appropriate to say that they went into the engine room, because they were still walking through a hallway. The only difference was that this hallway had three walls, and it wrapped around a massive ovoid hollow, which itself held three gargantuan spheres bursting with wires and thicker cables. The spheres, the engines, stretched on beyond the darkness below, and looking down over the side of the walkway made Marx a bit dizzy.
Suddenly, the figure clad in navy blue armor jerked to a halt at the front of their group. It was the Commander, and he was receiving a signal from the Elysium mainframe.
"They got it already," Genoscythe growled, his voice slightly muffled by the helmet.
"Got what?" X asked.
"The security system! Go!" Genoscythe began to run back through the crowd of Maverick Hunters and Lock, but he stopped short. His fiery red gaze went soaring over Marx's shoulder, so the hunter turned around. Several panels on the wall were flipping around, and Reaverbots were coming out of them. They were obviously not friendly Reaverbots.
All along the wall, panels began to move aside and Reaverbots were marching through. Luckily for Marx, he was outside the thick of it. Unluckily, one of them had its eye on him.
He managed to dodge one thin-beamed laser, but the Reaverbot didn't get a second chance. Nephtis ran by, slashing it with her staff as she went. It turned its attention to her, who had just rounded a corner and began leading it up the way they had come from. Above Marx's head, an automatic gun turret buzzed to life. As if he didn't already have enough incentive to leave.
He barreled after Nephtis and the Reaverbot, and found them squaring off in the midst of the hallway they had started their descent in. They were too close to the yawning maw of the engine room for Marx's taste.
Having a clear shot at the war machine's back, Marx activated his shoulder cannons. However, when Nephtis noticed him, she vaulted over the Reaverbot and came to stand in a combat stance before him.
"Thanks for bringing his attention to me," Marx snapped dryly.
"If we live together, we die together," Nephtis shot back. "But if we play this right, we won't have to die at all." She briefly relayed her idea to him while the Reaverbot hunkered down behind its shield. X is right, these things are stupid…Marx mused. They don't know a freakin' threat when they see one.
To get its attention, Nephtis began charging at it. When it seemed as if she would collide with the Reaverbot's shield, it swung away and the machine's buster replaced it. Nephtis batted it aside just as a piercing beam of light leapt from the barrel. In the same stride, she buried her staff into the side of its column-shaped head.
Nephtis dislodged her weapon by pushing off the Reaverbot, executing a beautiful backflip that only a highly-specialized war machine could perform. Below her, a pair of bolts from Marx's shoulder cannons sailed by and crashed into the Reaverbot's buster arm.
Its arm removed, a deep gash in the side of its body, the Reaverbot seemed to be on its last leg. Nephtis rushed in to finish it off, but it made an unexpected burst of speed. As Marx discovered belatedly, Reaverbots had feet designed to skid along the ground. It crashed into Nephtis, the weight of its shield throwing her almost perfectly into Marx's arms.
As it is so often described in books, time seemed to slow to a crawl. Marx could feel in the depths of his soul that something tremendous was about to happen, bearing down on him and his love with a force powered by the gears of fate.
This force punctured Marx's chest in two places, and from there buried itself in Nephtis's back. The automatic turret had picked out their sudden movements and spared two energy bolts, before returning to its primary targets down the hallway.
---
Marx couldn't believe it. His limbs were already turning leaden, his arms grinding against the warped metal inside his chest, but he refused to accept the realization that the rest of his body had already made. He was finished. Two holes, each the size of a reploid's fist, on either side of his reactor. There was no surviving a wound like that. His shock was so great that he forgot about Nephtis for the moment, who remained slumped in his arms.
Just when Marx felt like he would pull himself back from the proverbial edge, Fate dealt him another bad hand. The Reaverbot charged again, only this time it had angled itself sideways. Marx didn't have the power to try and stop it as the machine flung them off the literal edge. Equal amounts of cables, wires, and darkness fell away from his grasping fingers, plummeting in a near-freefall state.
Marx was suddenly stopped by a cable hooked under his right armpit. The sudden halt almost jostled Nephtis out of his stiff fingers, but he held onto her tighter than he did the cable. After all, there would be no point in trying to save himself if she fell. Though, he feared, it was already too late for that to matter.
He slid along the cable, which sloped down like a zip-line. More than once, he felt his arm slipping and a wave of static assaulted his vision. It was becoming increasingly difficult to hold on to either Nephtis or the cable, which more or less goes without saying. The worst of it was, he could have held the cable without Nephtis to worry about, and likewise he would have had no difficulty clutching his love in their descent without a cable to occupy one arm.
The cable ended above a ledge, which Marx narrowly swung them both onto. Lying on the floor, lacking the strength to stand, he looked over Nephtis. She wasn't speaking or moving, and the two scorch marks in her back were leaking both blood and a yellow, almost ethereal substance that constituted a reploid's reactor fuel.
The energy beams must have been fired at an angle; just missing Marx's reactor but converging directly on Nephtis's. Once again, Marx refused to believe this. He threw himself into a standing position, grabbing her and loading her onto his shoulders. Without powering himself so much as swinging his legs forward, he hobbled away from the ledge and down the corridor ahead.
Marx didn't get far, for he soon decided that he had stumbled upon a labyrinth. What was more, he had gathered an entourage of tiny Reaverbots – almost entirely composed of an eye and eight hooked legs. They came out of panels much like the larger combat Reaverbots, and seemed to be like vultures waiting for their starving prey to collapse.
This is what Marx inevitably did. Nephtis rolled off his shoulders, and the miniature Reaverbots began tugging it away immediately. On his knees, Marx swiped at them, tried to yell but found his voice box completely unusable. One by one, his non-essential life systems were shutting down. Now the little bastards were coming for him.
He succeeded in smashing one with his fist, but the blow was powered almost entirely by gravity and inertia. All references to a lack of strength before were now moot – he literally had no power left. From his kneeling position, he slumped heavily to the dull gray floor. All that remained was the power in his main processor, which could still run for three days assuming the Reaverbots wouldn't pick apart his brain.
Again, this point turned out to be moot. He couldn't even feel as the salvage machines – or whatever the hell they were – began dragging him away.
X gladly took the bit of respite offered by Genoscythe. All the nearby security systems were totaled, thanks to the efforts of X and an enraged Zero, and to a lesser degree the efforts of everyone else. Two enemy Purifiers were scattered in pieces at his feet – both dismantled by Zero. The crimson hunter was furious about something, but he wasn't yet rational enough to say what.
"We're wasting our time here," Genoscythe informed X. "If I had known they'd get the security system up so fast, we wouldn't have even tried this."
"But we destroyed two of their Purifiers," X pointed out. "That counts for something, doesn't it?"
"They'll just replace those two," Genoscythe replied bitterly. "Pi and Rho were nonessentials. Eden probably won't bother saving their personalities. We have archives of blank templates for that." As they spoke, X began to notice several spider-like machines skittering across the wreckage. They seemed intent on reaching the remains of the two Purifiers.
"What are those?"
"Salvage Reaverbots. They'll take Pi and Rho's processors back to one of those stations you found Alia at."
"…and put them in new bodies," X deducted, smashing a salvage machine with his boot. "Let's leave them with nothing to salvage, then." X proceeded to blast the Purifiers' heads into fine metallic powder. The Reaverbots immediately lost interest, and began digging through the armor on their larger cousins. They were soon found hauling beautiful, luminescent crystals of various sizes out of the destroyed Reaverbots. "And the crystals?" X plausibly asked.
"These…" Genoscythe began, reaching down and plucking a small blue gem from one of the salvage machines. "These will become mankind's greatest invention. Carbon refractors. Within ten years, we planned for humanity to be producing them on their own." Genoscythe's voice lowered suddenly. "Ironically, these things would solve most of the problems that Eden thinks can only corrected one way." He made explosion sound effects and hand gestures for emphasis.
"So they do…what?"
"Refractors are really just amazingly efficient power sources. Solve all kinds of things, like that fossil fuel crisis of yours. They can even be used in food production, to some degree."
"Amazing…could I bring one back home with me?"
"First off, you're not going back home. Second, no you cannot bring one back home. The apes have to learn to walk like men. Giving them one of these in this stage of their development would be like handing an Enigma-class cannon to the United States government, circa 1942. How would the remains of Hiroshima compare to the liquidation of the whole damn continent?"
"Okay…I understand," X replied, and he really did. For reasons unknown even to him, as a tiny Reaverbot scuttled by, he snatched the refractor out of its claws and slipped it into his utility belt.
End of Chapter 35
AN: I would like everyone to hold their flames until the end of the story (by flames I'm referring to Nephtis and/or Marx flames specifically; I'm still cool with the others). There is a good reason for what I've done to them, and it's absolutely necessary for the story. If you're really keen or you can read my mind, you might already know why that is. Sorry that this took so long, but this is one of those chapters that I had to do just so.