A brief forward; I have started an online AU MMZ roleplay site. Anyone interested should check it out. I am posting the address in my bio. And we all know I don't own MMZ.
Chapter 12
"Harpuia." Zero spat the name viciously, like a curse. He sneered, drawing his ever-present beam saber.
I looked at him evenly. "I've been wondering when you would turn up again. Ironic that it just happened to be on my patrol."
"Lucky for me," Zero grinned, pouring venom into his voice. "Means I get to kill you this time." There was a kind of madness in his eyes, unmistakable once one noticed it was there. He himself had obviously seen better days- his armor was dirty, scratched, and cracked, with bits of mud filling the little fissures. The synthetic flesh on his face had a dry, cracked appearance, as though from over-exposure to the desert sun. His mane of straw-yellow hair hung behind him like a tattered cape, knotted and sticking out wildly. I wondered when the last time he had seen civilization was.
"Zero… you really want to fight like this?" I said icily. In truth, I was itching for a battle, and no other but Zero could prove a worthy opponent, yet this time, something was different. Zero was different. Somehow, I just felt it; he had lost sight of the cause he had been fighting for.
He came at me slowly, saber raised. "'Course I do. All you Neo-Arcadian dogs. You should all just lay down and die." He chuckled maniacally, waving his saber in a grand gesture. "None of you are any match for me."
They say there is no truer way to know a person than in battle. Were that correct, then I felt I knew Zero very well indeed, and it did not take a genius to know that this man standing before me was not the man he once was. No, he was not even the man he had been six months ago.
"What happened to you?" I said darkly. "I respected you once." I stared at my enemy, as though I could see into his soul with my gaze. If only. Where did this madness come from? Could this really be the same Zero?
Instead of answering me, Zero's slow, steady gait turned to a full charge and he shrieked a battle cry, leaping and coming down on me, intent on cleaving me in two. It was a sloppy move, and I dodged it easily, whirling and stabbing with my right-hand saber. He danced away and dashed at me with a sweeping horizontal chop. I leapt over it and hovered in the air with my boosters.
"You fight too sloppily," I said contemptuously. "You've lost skill since I last faced you." His face twisted in rage and he leapt up, kicking off a rock, and sailed at me. I dove beneath him and came up behind, striking upward with both blades. Somehow, he twisted in the air and avoided the blows, swinging one leg as he fell and unexpectedly kicking me in the face. I reeled and fell back to the ground, landing on one knee but recovering quickly. I rolled out of the way and leapt to my feet as he charged me saber-first.
"Ha," he grinned wickedly. "You keep fighting like that, and there'll be nothing left of you when this is done but scrap for the metal scavengers."
I swung both sabers, sending crescents of energy into his face. He ducked, although one splashed slightly over his eye, and he screamed out his rage. The skin on his face where it had struck was red and puckered, and coupled with the insane sneer he continued to hold, he seemed the very picture of madness.
"You have nothing to be so overconfident about," I growled. "I may have failed to defeat you in the past, but you are no longer the warrior you were." I leapt and dove at him, my arms out and to my sides, my sabers pointed back. He countered with a swing meant to block my attack, but I used that momentum to send him flying into the air, locking my blade under his and flinging upward. At the peak of his flight, I was there to greet him, and sent him hurtling back to the ground by smashing my elbow into his face.
He landed hard on his back, rolling away as I stabbed a saber into the ground where he had been. The impact had caused a cloud of dust to rise from the hot sands, and through this I could see Zero stand and fiddle with something on his saber. Inserting a chip, I realized. I knew that in some weapons, the energy output could be modified to emit something akin to an elemental attack. Ice, fire, and thunder were the names most people gave them, although that was over dramatized a bit. The "ice" chip simply reversed the polarity of the blade and caused it to cut by using extreme cold instead of extreme heat. "Fire" super-charged the heat of the blade, causing it to make smoother swipes through some material, while "thunder" electrically charged the outputted energy to short-circuit mechanical elements that it came in contact with. My blades had a mild electrical output of their own. None of these prospects sounded promising, so I leapt to the air, settling briefly on a rocky formation that jutted from the desert, and then coming down on him like a hawk on its prey.
He sidestepped my attack at the last moment and swung his saber in a move aimed for my face. I allowed myself to drop to the sand, just beneath the flying weapon. The blade barely missed my left cheek and I could feel a frigid chill in its wake, broadcasting which chip he had inserted. It concerned me little, the only real danger being the possibility of a frozen fuel tank, which would effectively ground me. But he has to hit me for that, and in the back nonetheless. I would never turn my back to my enemy.
I spun sharply and sent another crescent of blade energy flying at my crimson nemesis, who swatted it away with an almost careless gesture of his sword. Pressing the attack, I sprinted full on to meet him and brought a backhand swing with my right arm around to cleave him at the torso, while jabbing my left hand blade at his stomach. In a blindingly fast blur of motion, he batted away the first swing with a single handed slash, and then gripped his saber with both hands to force my stab downward, which then narrowly missed his thigh. Reversing the momentum of his attack, he arced the blade upward again in a powerful swing and I leapt back so that the frigid tip passed by my nose by mere fractions of an inch.
As Zero recovered from the upward strike, he carelessly left himself open and I cross-slashed at his midriff. He back-flipped just out of range and swung his weapon horizontally, the tip barely catching my own torso. The armor held, but I could feel a searing cold welt forming on the flesh beneath. I threw myself to the right and banked around him sharply, using my jets to make the turn quickly. I brought one leg out and swiped his left ankle out from under him while catching him In the chest with one blade, effectively dumping him onto the sand and making a noticeable gash on his armor.
He took the fall mostly on his shoulders and hands, flipping himself gracefully back to his feet almost before he made full contact with the ground. He spun into a wild attack that I parried with both swords, ending with our blades deadlocked together. I brought my knee into his gut, and he doubled over minusculey while I used the distraction to slam my fist and the butt of my saber into the back of his neck. He allowed himself to be knocked down and head-butted me in the stomach, hard enough that my breath escaped my lungs and I found myself falling backwards. I tried to bring my sabers up to defend, but he pinned my arms to the sand, creating a stalemate for the both of us. Wedging my knees beneath him, I managed to get my feet under him and kick upwards, sending him flying. Not waiting for a reaction, I leapt upwards and grabbed him by the throat and the arm, soaring some twenty-five or thirty feet before turning and driving straight for the ground.
The impact sent sand shooting out in a shockwave and created a crater in the turf. The force jarred my arms, but did more than jar Zero, I am sure. Despite this, as I backed away, he recovered himself quickly, holding his deactivated saber out to his side. I noticed an almost inaudible hum coming from the dormant device, and too late as I charged did I realize what it was. He released the charge button and the pent-up power shot out with a burst, sending little trails of frost to sizzle across the burning sands and dissipate quickly. The chill energy washed over me like a wave of ice, instantaneously creating a glistening frozen shell over any surface of my armor that it came in contact with. It crackled and shattered like glass as I kept moving . The beam itself dug deeply into my shoulder, finally slowing my forward momentum, and I yelled in pain. My inclination was to clutch my wounded limb, but instead I lashed out with my good arm and stabbed into his gut. The hit penetrated, although not as deeply as I would have liked, and Zero hissed in pain, clutching the deep laceration on his stomach. Blood seeped between his fingers in crimson rivulets.
I tried to speed away again with my boosters, but they sputtered weakly, and I realized that the unthinkable had happened; his last attack had frozen the fuel tanks. I could no longer fly. The fuel in my tanks had been of a type specifically made so that extreme heat would not ignite it and cause it to explode while on my back. The drawback was that it froze at a much higher temperature than normal. It was well below the freezing point of water, of course, but still much higher than it would have been. I'll just have to hope it thaws quickly. I don't like being grounded. I had never realized how much of a convenience flight was until I had lost it. Figures, I thought disdainfully.
I satisfied myself by banking sharply away from my foe, kicking up a shower of sand. Jets or no, I was still fast. I launched myself in a hasty leap with one saber out front, the other more conservatively at my side, since that arm was wounded. He brought his green energy blade up to block my red one and I leaned my weight into the push, attempting to drive him back. He too used one arm, the other holding the gash on his stomach closed so that it would seal up and not become worse. Left strength for strength, we struggled for a time, but I was slowly losing ground. I admitted, if only to myself, that he was stronger than I.
Instead of letting him win our little contest of muscle, I lashed out with a solid kick into his knee. It bent briefly at an unnatural angle and popped. The sound nearly made my own knee throb in pity. Zero went down on one knee, and I raised my saber to stab it into his skull. He dove into my knees and took me down hard, the saber I had been about to strike with flying out of my hand. He tried to pin me down, but I rolled out of his grasp, stretching for my lost weapon. Sand and grit worked their way into the wound on my shoulder and stung painfully.
Zero grabbed my arm, digging his fingers into the gash, and I gasped with the shock of the pain. I threw a clump of dusty sand into his eyes with my free hand and pulled away as he blinked and clawed at his murky, madness-filled eyes to remove the fine grains. Recovering my weapon, I continued my roll and stood, charging back off my forward leg to deliver a glancing blow to my scarlet opponent while he was partially blinded. Zero dodged away, but not before he suffered a wound to his left upper arm.
Zero may not have been completely sane, but he fought like a madman, never ceasing, never retreating, only attacking over and over again. I blocked the first of this new flurry and leapt over his head to avoid the second, slashing a horizontal swipe that could have bisected him at the chest had his armor not been so good. He seemed heedless of this new wound, and now ignored the bleeding stripe on his stomach as well. Something's changed him. I don't know what it is, but battle is all he's go left now. I think he'd even attack an ally in his present state.
"What is it with you?" I panted, trying to keep a wary distance from him "You're not the Zero I remember."
He grinned disconcertingly, the expression vaguely reminiscent of something I would see on Fefnir's face, but much, much more twisted. "Nothing's wrong with me," he laughed. "It's you people; you just refuse to die!" With that, he launched himself over the sand with a wild battle cry and swung his saber in a mighty arc.
Leaping high over the swing, I landed next to him and attacked again with both sabers, both of which he blocked. He lashed out with a kick to my stomach, and I flew back, hitting a nearby outcropping and breaking part of it off- with my head. I got up slowly, dizzily- too slowly. Zero was on me again, seeming to forget about his saber, and landed a solid right-hook on my jaw. I fell backwards, cradling my chin, which now had a fair quantity of blood running down it, with my hand.
"Y'see?" He laughed. "You're weak! You have no right to exist! Not while I'm the strongest!"
I spat blood onto the dusty ground. "Arrogance doesn't become you, Zero," I said slowly, my voice hard. "It's a thing that has gotten lesser reploids killed."
Zero dismissed this with a careless wave of his hand. "I have every right to be arrogant." He grinned feraly, showing his teeth. "After all… I defeated you twice before… took out your finest generals, your highest powers…" He barked an abrupt, biting laugh. "The only reason you're even in power at all is because I killed off your superiors. You should be thanking me."
I spat again and carefully tested my boosters. They seemed to work, allowing me to hover minusculey off the ground without Zero's apparent noticing. "Why this change?" I ground. "This coming from someone who spoke so self-righteously about his cause? Tell me; do you even have a cause now, Zero?"
For one instant- just an instant- I thought I saw him falter, thought I saw sanity begin to return to his eyes. And then as quickly as that, it was gone, replaced once again by this strange derangement. "My cause?" he began tonelessly. "My cause…" He began to laugh, shaking his head and causing his matted hair to swish from side to side. "The only cause I need is war; battle is all I need to survive."
"Then I pity you, Zero," I said softly, and I meant it. "I became that way... once. You're fooling yourself. War isn't all there is. Does peace no longer mean anything to you?"
His laughter grew in its intensity, and he allowed his sword to slip to his side. "Peace? There is no such thing!"
My face twisted in anger. "What about the peace you used to fight for? With X? I thought you protected the humans once; you believed in it then."
"That was… someone else…" He had a faraway look in his eye, trying to remember a past time that refused to be recalled.
"Then I guess it was someone else that I once respected." I leapt from the ground, running my boosters at full, and flew at my enemy. He had allowed his guard to slip, had put his saber down at his side, and my speed was great enough that he only had it halfway to a defense position when I struck him. The right saber hit first, smashing into his helmet and cracking the gem. He flew backwards, but I did not stop there. My left saber caught him as he fell, slicing across his ribs and pitching him into the air. He came down about ten feet from the starting point and struggled to get up.
"Who's the weak one now?" I allowed myself to boast. I jogged to his fallen form, intent on being certain that he stayed fallen- which he did not. Springing up just as I approached, he caught my arm and whirled, using my own momentum to hurl me as far as his impressive strength would allow- which amounted to about one hundred feet. My face hit the sand and I slid, eating a larger quantity of the dry stuff than I would have liked. My nose was bloodied; there was grit in my eyes. My face burned from countess tiny lacerations, and I spat a muddied combination of sand and blood from my mouth. I looked up. Zero appeared not to have moved.
I leapt and ran at him at a full sprint, activating my boosters after a few seconds to gain momentum, and gradually took to the air. My speed was blinding now, and the air itself seemed to crack in a protest to my passing. I swung a crescent of energy down at my crimson foe, and it elongated due to my speed, throwing sand up into the air and knocking Zero down at the same time. I leapt back to attack again, but he pulled out a small side-arm buster and pelted me with shots. One struck my stomach and I doubled over in the air, dropping to the earth
He raced at me, saber raised, and I moved- but not quickly enough. The blade bit deeply into my shoulder and then slid down to gash my chest and ribs open as well. The freezing blade made my skin burn with cold, and my own blood sprayed out over the sand. I tried and failed to hold back a strangled cry of pain, and jabbed sharply with one blade, scoring a deep stab to his left upper leg. He fell to one knee, but his maddened face betrayed no pain. In fact, it held no emotion at all except that of rage, pure and simple.
I jumped yet again to the sky's embrace, dripping blood as I went, and soared high- too high for him to shoot me with his fairly short-range buster. Gotta do this right… I allowed the electric charge from my sabers to course backwards, thought my arms and into my body, growing in power and magnifying, stinging my nerves. Releasing it all at once, I created an ion charge that forked invisibly to the earth, a conduit for Mother Nature, and she used it. A bolt of brilliant lightning, gold with a violet after image, struck down at the earth, to the highest, most likely target.
The impact created a small explosion, and Zero stood at the center, the strong electrical shock rampaging through his body. He dropped his saber, but managed to stay on his feet. I landed next to him, kicking the saber away. It skittered over the glass sheet that I had created with my bolt, and I elbowed Zero in the chin, knocking him onto the hard surface. It shattered, sending prismatic little shards everywhere.
"You're nothing but a maverick, Zero," I accused, grabbing a fist full of his hair and hauling him up to look at me. "You survive off the blood of others, thriving off everyone else's pain."
The murky eyes seemed to clear a bit, and he glared defiantly at me. "Why should I listen to the likes of you? How many have you slaughtered, Harpuia? How many innocent reploids have you killed without remorse?
I glared back. "At least I didn't enjoy it!" I met his nose with a solid punch and he fell back to the sand, but flipped over and stood up, ready to fight again despite his wounds. I would expect nothing less for a legend. My own wounds were still sending blood trickling down my armor and reminding me of their presence every few seconds with a new pulse of pain.
I ran at Zero, aiming a slash for the neck. I could not place it, but a change had come over his face, something that I could not quite explain. Perhaps he is returning to sanity. He twisted and dodged, diving to recover his lost saber, and came up on one knee beside me, trying to stab me in the ribs. I brought one saber down in a parry and pushed it away, driving the other toward his already-wounded gut. He danced back nimbly, performing a strong uppercut with his sword. I leaned back out of the way and struck out with a side-kick to his face. He turned his head, and the blow glanced off the side of his cheek.
He retaliated with a jab from his blade- easy to read, but hard to block. I jumped over it, and it passed through the empty space between my thighs. I raised an eyebrow, not even wanting to think about how badly that would have hurt had he struck higher or I jumped lower. I activated my boosters to add momentum, and continued my leap over his head, landing with my back to him and bringing my elbow sharply into the small of his back. There was a resounding crunch and Zero cried out in pain. He must be returning to sanity; he wasn't acknowledging pain before.
He went down, but he struck upward with a kick that nailed my jaw and cracked my teeth together. I tumbled backwards, off-balance, and he kicked again, this time in the stomach. The air was forced from my lungs in a strangled cough, but I still managed to turn to the side to avoid a third kick, instead aiming a stab downward with my saber at his head. He tried to block but miscalculated slightly, and instead of striking his blade, I cut deeply into his right forearm. He hissed between his teeth and withdrew quickly, lashing out once more with his feet in an attempt to take out my ankles. I jumped over the sweep-kick as he came to his feet, and I flew forward with both blades out, cross-slashing once I was within range. He caught both of my sabers with his and rammed his blade up through "X" formation, separating the beams and canceling my attack.
The battle was beginning to take its toll on both of us; we were both bleeding profusely, I from shoulder to ribs, Zero on his arm, leg, and stomach. We both sported bloody noses and blood trickling from our mouths, and I imagined that I probably looked as bad as or worse than Zero. I was still breathing hard from the kick to the stomach, and he stood bent over rather strangely and favored his left knee noticeably.
"Can you give me a real reason why we're fighting, Zero?" I said in between gasps to catch my breath. "Can you even tell me what you're doing?"
"You're… my enemy." Zero shook his had slowly, as though answering an inner voice. "I will fight against Neo-Arcadia 'till the day I die."
"You're a fool, Zero," I said scornfully. "You don't even know why you're fighting us anymore"
He struggled to stand up straight and took a step toward me. "What would you know about having a reason to fight? All you ever have done is follow orders" His face twisted in a snarl, and he continued pacing in my direction. "Even now you just carry on with copy X's ideals, never even thinking about how you could change what's happening." He stopped about eight feet in front of me, saber held out before him. "Don't stand there pretending to be the good guy. All you are is a murderer."
His mind seemed more lucid now, but I did not care for what he had to say. "What's done is done," I growled. "You have no idea what kind of position I'm in; I can't just wave my hand and make this mess disappear. Nothing comes without a price; especially not peace."
"Tell that to the men who died!" He came at me again, swinging a wide horizontal arc. I blocked and struck out, but he twisted to the side and slashed upward. I blocked the attack, but the force of the hit lifted me from the ground. I hovered a couple of feet from the sand with my boosters, and he leapt at me, attempting to slash my neck while grabbing onto one of the fins on my helmet. I ducked and threw him over my head, and he landed upside-down on his shoulders, kicking up to jump back to his feet. Without a pause he dashed beneath me and grabbed my ankles, trying to pull me to the ground. I rose higher with Zero in tow and, wrenching one ankle from his grasp, kicked him in the back of the head. He did not let go, so I swung my leg, causing him to swing with it, and grabbed a fist-full of his tangled hair. He clawed at my face with his free hand and scored a solid hit to my leg with his saber, slicing deeply into the armor and grazing the skin beneath. I cried out, more in surprise than pain, and pulled harder on his ragged ponytail, forcing his head back to expose his neck to my sword. He let go of my ankle then and dropped part-way from my grasp. My attack missed, so instead I took him up higher and let go, following the drop by swooping beneath him and knocking him upwards again with swift attacks from my sabers. He attempted to fight back in mid-air, but did not have the aerial maneuverability that I did, and so failed to block each rising attack which sent him flying higher. His back, chest, and legs were now covered with lacerations and he bled from each wound until it all ran together and blended easily with his crimson armor,
We were a good fifty feet from the ground now, and I grabbed him about the waist, plunging us both head-first for the shifting sands. I reached my top speed and the air cracked in a sonic boom. Veering off at the last second, I let Zero take the full brunt of the plunge, making a small mushroom-cloud of sand. I did not even wait to see my results, but instead moved to hover over him and coursed another charge from my sabers through my body and back out again, sending the massive bolt of lightning down to strike my already-wounded foe.
I landed in the clearing dust, both blades ready, blood pouring from my ribs. Zero lay prone on the sand-turned-glass, partially sunken into it himself. I had finally done it. I had beaten him. I strode forward to deliver the finishing blow, but… No. Not like this. I looked at my enemy, and I knew that I could not give him the honorable death of a warrior, not in his present state.
"You don't… deserve it," I muttered out loud. "I want to fight you as a my equal… not a deranged psychopath."
Zero's face was turned away from me, but I could still hear him say harshly, "Can't you just be satisfied with winning?" He struggled to get up, but found himself partially embedded in the new glass. "You Neo-Arcadians... you always want more, don't you?"
"It's not what I want, " I said coldly, "It's what I expect. I know that, had I been facing you as you once were, I may not have won. But now, you've sunken below the level you were on; you're no better than a drone, marching onward only because some voice in the inner shadows of your mind tells you to." I took a step forward and crossed my arms. "Perhaps this will one day be my downfall, but I don't really think so. I can't watch a legend die this way; I truly believe that there is still a place for you yet, Zero. You simply have to find it." My mouth twisted in an ironic smile. "Coming from me, this is the last thing you'd expect, but go find the Resistance." I began sending in radio commands for a transfer. "Somewhere in the back of my mind, I keep thinking you might just save the world someday."
He finally cracked his arms free of the glass and turned to look at me. The malignance and madness were gone from his eyes, leaving a slightly bewildered impression behind. "Been there. Done that." He answered my smile with a faint one of his own. "I think the next time we meet, it may end a bit differently."
I cocked an eyebrow. "If you're implying that you'll win, we'll just have to see." If there was any response, I missed it, for the transfer finally took effect and I vanished in a flash of light.