Training against each other for so many decades might have given the Guardians a disadvantage, because they knew how to read each other so well. It also meant they could read each other so very well.
Omega's bulk, designed as a weapon of intimidation rather than, or as well as, a weapon of war, made him good at crushing vehicles, homes and hopes but meant that a small, agile target was hard to hit, especially when it was perched on Omega's shoulder investigating his neck joint and if wounds would be healed around metal spikes rather than ejecting the foreign material first. Phantom was thinking about various types of small bombs, although getting them delivered safely to the battlefield might be difficult. Or not. What was Weil doing, that he was letting them get away with this?
Large arms swung slowly, and Omega's intelligence had been limited, clearly. Weil had used him for two things: crushing conventional armies and fighting X. Omega didn't know how to deal with two opponents, even after fighting X and Zero.
Of course, he'd lost that battle.
He'd also lost the battle against Leviathan and Phantom, in that the two of them had accomplished their objective and escaped with their lives. During the Elf Wars, anyone would have counted that a victory, when it came to Omega.
Fefnir would fire, Phantom would get out of the way in time to avoid the Armed Phenomenon form's blast (perching on one of those ostentatious bits of Omega's armor, if not ducking behind Omega's back) and Omega might take one or two ponderous steps towards him, or even activate hover to move towards the greater threat (or at least the one doing more damage: Phantom was not going to call Fefnir greater), but then Phantom would dig a blade in somewhere and Omega would lose that train of thought, trying to slap the small menace.
Fefnir would probably find this hilarious later, Omega trying and failing to swat Phantom like a fly, and Phantom might even smile himself, but right now this was harder than he was focusing on making it look.
He'd impersonated X before. X could not fall. Even though the entire city wasn't watching (they had bomb shelters, deep underground), the command staff surely were.
Phantom had passed Aurora off to Fefnir, since Phantom had to get in close. Even if losing X's body would be a massive morale loss, letting Omega get its hands on Aurora? Without X and (currently) without Zero to counter Omega's powers, that would lose them the war.
Oh, there were things that could be tried, and even though Harpuia hadn't wanted to talk about the possibility of Weil's or Omega's returns he'd still made contingency plans, but even the sacrifice of every elf in the city would only delay the inevitable, unless they had some way to target Weil.
Still, Phantom knew he should be pleased that Omega didn't know how to deal with an enemy getting in close, actually touching the beast like this. It made sense that Omega had this weakness: X might have learned the beam saber because of Zero but he'd never been one for close range combat. Being close to them meant they could hit back, and X had never really understood the idea of a fair fight or warrior's honor or anything like that. Giving his enemies the ability to hit him meant that X might lose, and if he lost people would die: that was the only reason to fight. So losing wasn't an option, destroying the enemy as quickly and painlessly as possible was… well, it wasn't the right thing to do, but it was the only thing he could do, for so many years. He might have been reluctant to kill, but he'd never been willing to lose.
Omega had fought an enemy who rarely bothered to waste an opportunity to damage him on anything less than a charged shot. He hadn't fought other hunters: he'd crushed them. Getting in this close to Omega would have been suicide when he'd had the Dark Elf- Aurora imprisoned. It would have overwhelmed an ordinary reploid's mind, perhaps even altered Phantom's into a form that could be controlled, and used him to attack Fefnir.
There was actually a spot on Omega's back he couldn't reach: the joints just didn't bend that way. It would have lowered Phantom's opinion of Weil's skill if Phantom wasn't sure of the reason a weakness like this had been allowed to exist: it simply didn't matter.
Even Zero wouldn't have perched on an enemy quite like this. The beam saber needed more room to swing than Phantom's kunai.
Phantom had watched Omega fight Fefnir, and fought inside Omega's mind. He'd seen Omega evolve. Right now, he might be climbing on a dumb beast, not need much to defeat him but grip strength and some simple strategy, but that would change.
What grated on him was how much time this was eating up. Yes, they were keeping Omega from reaching the city, buying time for Leviathan and Harpuia to hopefully do something more productive, but Omega was keeping two of the four of them tied down.
Also, the longer 'X' fought like this, without actually winning, the more it might… No, actually, Phantom was more worried that he'd slip, he acknowledged to himself with a grimace as he finally managed to inelegantly bash through armor weakened by successive blasts. He smirked when he felt his kunai go in through an eye: it was a rather distinctive feeling. Thin shell, gel interior, then wires and boards instead of support struts or armor.
Now, where Weil's design was truly flawed was in this: Zero's original body was held paralyzed inside Omega's shell as long as it was functional. It would only be released to fight if the shell was destroyed. That meant that if Phantom could strike through the armor, or get inside the interior cavity, the far more deadly weapon at Omega's core was helpless. With the brain dead, the body followed. If they destroyed the outer shell but not the beast inside, the way he and Leviathan had, that was a different story, but for now they didn't need to worry about…
A hand grabbed Phantom's arm. The other eye opened, red as that of a Cyclops that had been up three days straight guarding its flocks from those pesky gods and heroes.
Phantom was pleased with himself that he hadn't panicked, even as Omega's outer armor exploded into shrapnel around him, shards hitting his body hard enough that hand lost its grip. Or maybe he'd been let go, to make an ungraceful arc and skid along the battle-scarred ground for a few meters.
The second option was more worrying. Omega was programmed to destroy: it should have grabbed him and torn him apart, not let him go and get bashed up a bit. Contrary to the mythology, Omega hadn't been sadistic: It wasn't smart enough. It didn't understand anything but destruction and orders, it wasn't capable of play, even that a cat did with tunnel rats.
Had Weil started giving orders?
The fact Phantom was able to get to his feet without being attacked made that more likely.
The fact Omega was standing there, his eye healed but with that outer shell showing no signs of reforming around him lowered Phantom's estimate of how likely that was. Weil had meant to tear down X and Zero. To have Omega defeat his enemies while looking like Zero, reminding them of Zero's power? If Zero's stolen body, Zero's shadow could do so much, what did that say about the legendary Crimson Hunter?
Fefnir fired again while Phantom was still studying his enemy.
The blow wasn't blocked with the copy of Zero's beam saber (X had kept the original) Omega wore. Omega hadn't even drawn it. Instead, a shield like the one Aurora had summoned had flickered into existence when… had Omega snapped his fingers?
Phantom liked surprises, but only when he was causing them to happen to other people. He knew very well how a surprise could screw up someone's entire day and battle plan. Omega was Weil's beastial killer, his mockery of all the heroes had stood for. There was no way in hell that Weil would have programmed it to have style.
Phantom flipped the two short blades he wielded at the moment into guard position, instincts screaming at him louder every instant Omega didn't attack.
"I'm fond of ninjas," Omega said in Zero's voice, "but dragons are overdone." The second half of that sentence had a different voiceprint. Not Weil's. No one Phantom recognized.
"…Grandfather?" Apparently Aurora did recognize it.
Phantom wanted to say something along the lines of, "Do you mean Zero? You have to mean Zero, the alternative is… That man is dead, even his echo is dead! He has to be, or else…" but Phantom knew, and knew well, that the universe didn't care if it was cruel. If it faced them with impossible odds. If it broke them. So Phantom's only hope was not to panic, because if this was who he was morbidly certain was, then Phantom's only prayer was that he wouldn't notice Phantom's panic, wouldn't wonder if Phantom had a special reason to panic, didn't have any hidden code in his own work that would let him figure out what Phantom had done. It had seemed perfectly safe at the time, in the hubris of his youth. Less unsafe than the alternative.
But then, Doppler had thought using a killed-virus vaccine had been perfectly safe, and it should have been. Except Dr. Wily had known enough of medicine to forsee someone attempting that, and specifically design the virus so that it would seem to work.
"I've gotten sick of watching Lightbots destroy my work so easily. Even if you deserved most of the credit at first." The being in Zero's body removed the saber from its holster, but didn't turn it on, instead examining it almost idly. "Or, actually, I deserve all the credit. If I hadn't shut down the damage nullification program Weil activated, you wouldn't have been able to so much as scratch him." He snorted. "No pain, no evolution: that invulnerability was meant to be a strategy, not a crutch..."
Fefnir growled, then almost squawked when Aurora left his body. What did she think she was doing?
"It's alright, Grandfather sent me here. He told me that you were in trouble, and if he's controlling Omega… Grandfather won't hurt me." He said he didn't need to, after all.
"I didn't send you here to help them," he corrected her. "I sent you here to get you out of my hair. And I didn't shut down the access of Omega and the baby elves to help them, I did that because this isn't some franchise." Weil had used his technologies, his strategies. For all the good it had done either of them. "I was going to let Weil conquer this world and then yank it out from under him." Ah, now he felt a smirk coming on, even if not quite a laugh yet. "He thought he could use my technology safely?" What a fool. "But, now he's got X, Zero, and two more blue lightbots up there with them, one of them idealistic. Speaking as someone with extensive experience with this kind of thing, he's fucked." Weil's copy of the lightsaber knockoff X and Cain had built Sigma was lightly tossed aside. Littering was petty, but he felt petty. Again. It was good to have his old self back. "I've tried technology, I've tried trickery, strategy, mind control, and it's all useless. X copied my strategies, so I'm going to copy his."
"By which you mean…" Because Phantom knew there was no way this man, this vengeful ghost, was talking about friendship, about care for others, about faith.
"I'm going to do what he did, and his brother before him. The patented Lightbot answer to everything: Charge into that fortress and kill everything that gets in my way." Fortress?
He meant Neo Arcadia.
There were several answers to that, most of them useless. Aurora's gasp. Fefnir charging up his cannons again, because better to go down fighting and who knew, it might work.
Phantom's was, "Genmurei." He'd spent hours inside Omega's head and the beast hadn't been smart enough to guard its library of techniques. Phantom was a Lightbot and they'd almost called his race copyroids. He might not have the raw power of Omega or Zero, but his copy of that ultimate technique might-
Be dashed aside, struck to the ground to do nothing but make yet another crater by an almost impatient wave of a white-gloved hand. "You're a quarter of a millennium too early to challenge me, children," the ancient said, and laughed.
People who have played Zero series likely recall that even before it got the Dark Elf, the Guardians weren't able to damage Omega. The fact Omega was so easy to kill to begin with in this fic was a Chekov's Gun: Sigma mentioned elsewhere that WilyAI had barred Infel Phira to unauthorized accounts, like the Baby Elves. According to this fic's worldbuilding, Omega was using reality warping to protect himself against attacks that otherwise would have damaged just about anything in the games & when fighting X during the Elf Wars. With its ability to reality warp shut off, it was at a massive disadvantage since the defenses it had evolved no longer functioned.
Also, letting the ordinary soldiers of Neo Arcadia (or their munitions, due to them not being idiots) harm the great Omega that even the Guardians couldn't stop in the games worked with the theme. Still, I wanted to make it clear that there was a reason they could do so other than the author powering down a canon character in order to make other characters look good, even though in this case it was for the benefit of minor canon characters rather than a Mary Sue.