New Megaman Battle Network

A complete reimagining of the universe and stories of Megaman Battle Network.

Story 5: A World Outside of Time


Chapter 8: Course Correction

Roll slowly drifted through an expansive white void, with ghostly images of places and times flying past her. She scanned them briefly as they floated past, able to see Sigma's malicious influence on them as if it were lit up in neon. Her enemy had been manipulating events beyond the scene for years, if not decades, building up to the moment where his pocket universe would be created. The resulting disaster, decades in the making, had been averted by mere minutes. Roll had Megaman to thank for that.

She knew that she couldn't simply undo all of the damage that he had wrought over such a long span of time. The resulting chaos would be nearly unquantifiable, and the future that resulted would be unrecognizable as a result. Fixing the damage done by Sigma would require a light touch. She had already identified the two parts of history she would have to touch in order to thwart Sigma's plans. One of them had already been fixed. The other was slowly coming into view in front of her.

Before her eyes was a moving image of an advanced laboratory, as if she was looking at it through a screen. She hovered closer to the scene until she entered it effortlessly, floating high in the air, looking down at the figures moving below. She could see herself, cross-fused with her operator Mayl, slowly walking through the laboratory, eyes scanning the machinery around her. Several steps behind her was a fiery, red-and-black Navi with a Long Blade formed on the end of its right arm, sneaking up on her as quietly as possible. In a few seconds, Mayl would meet a quick but painful end.

Hovering over the both of them, Roll reached out her hand to fix what Sigma had broken. She would barely have to change a thing. All that was needed was one little noise.


In the basement of the lab, a Cross-fused Mayl was carefully making her way through rows of complicated-looking machinery. She could see the large, reinforced steel doors of the server room out of the corner of her eye; she had already been through it, recognizing nothing inside, but she was fairly certain that none of it was supplying power, either. She kept a careful look out, having some vague idea of what she wanted to find.

Her eyes eventually caught a large red sign, with white lettering and bolts of electricity, reading DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE. Stepping closer to it, she found next to it a large device with all sorts of cables coming out of it. This had to be what she was looking for.

"Finally…" she said quietly to herself, summoning a Sword chip on her right arm. Before she could utter another word, she froze as she heard a sound behind her, like metal landing heavily against metal. She whirled around, gasping as she saw a humanoid figure wielding a Long Blade on its arm. The strange Navi quickly swung, and Mayl was forced to jump backward to avoid the blow. She swung her own sword and caught the advancing blade, pushing it away, but her enemy's blade still managed to nick her shoulder, piercing her armor and leaving a small cut.

"Who are you?!" she demanded, the pain from the cut barely registering. "What are you doing here?!"

The Navi forced a smirk onto his face, hiding his irritation at his sneak attack being thwarted. "I just don't want anyone ruining the fun before the party gets started." He aimed the hand that wasn't wielding a sword directly at her. "It's going to be a real blast!" The hand transformed into a cannon, which quickly shot a blast of fire toward its target.

Mayl yelped and rolled to the side, able to feel the searing heat against her skin, even through Roll's armor. She continued to run as the flamethrower swept toward her, vaulting over various pieces of equipment, trying her best not to panic. Taking out a handful of viruses was one thing, but she was absolutely not prepared to battle another Navi in this state. She wasn't the warrior that Lan was, or Chaud.

Ducking behind a corner, she took a moment to catch her breath, trying to come up with a plan in the short amount of time she had. She needed to end this fight as soon as possible, or she was likely to end up burned to a crisp. On top of that, she still needed to destroy the power conduit and neutralize the threat of Pharaohman. After thinking on the matter for a moment more, she realized that maybe she could kill two birds with one stone. She took a deep breath and planned out her next few actions carefully. One slip-up could spell the end for her, and everyone else.

As her foe rounded the corner after her, he had to take a quick step back to avoid the swipe of her sword. Before he could retaliate, she dashed out of the corner to the other end of the room, narrowly passing by him, and turned back toward the power conduit she had spotted before. Acting entirely on reflex and instinct, she aimed her left arm, which had a Cannon formed on the end of it, and fired.

She watched nervously as the round sailed through the air, as if it were happening in slow motion. The hastily-aimed projectile eventually collided with the power conduit, causing the whole thing to explode in a shower of smoke and sparks. Immediately, the lights around them began to flicker before they faded to black, and the hum of the laboratory slowly fell away as the machines came to a stop.

Mayl slumped and exhaled in immense relief, before she realized that there was still a source of blue light from somewhere in the room. She turned toward it and froze, still able to see the terrifying form of the fire Navi, lit by the blue flames that shot out of his helmet. She could see his face twist into a smirk in response to her confusion and fear.

"Well, well… looks like the Dimensional Area generators are running on their own power source," he mused aloud. "And here I was, worried that you were about to ruin my plans."

"What plans…?" Mayl took a careful step back, holding her sword in front of herself threateningly. Her opponent simply laughed, amused by her meager courage.

"Stick around for a while, and you'll find out!" came his reply. He aimed his cannon arm at her again, and another massive plume of flame issued forth. She dove to the ground and rolled behind an inactive machine, forming another cannon on her free arm. Once the sound of flames subsided, she stood up and thrust her arm out in front of her, ready to fire a retaliatory shot. Instead of the flame-lit silhouette of her foe, however, she was greeted only by darkness.

"What…? Where'd he go?" She looked around the room for a moment, studying the inky blackness in front of her. "Did he leave?"

He's probably causing trouble somewhere else, Roll offered. Are you alright, Mayl?

"I'm fine," Mayl answered. "But I can't see a thing. How are we supposed to get out of here and find him?" She tried waving her hand in front of her face, unable to make it out. There was absolutely no light to guide her.

Try touching the square panel on the front of your helmet, her Navi suggested. If your body is anything like mine, it should provide a flashlight. Mayl nodded and did as she was told, reaching up and feeling out a raised square panel on her helmet, before pressing down on it. She could feel it push in slightly, as if she had pressed a large button, and immediately the room was lit with a bright spotlight, issuing forth from her forehead.

"Good… thanks, Roll." She looked around again and quickly spotted the door to the room. "Let's go. We have to find Lan and Chaud again before that monster does." She started jogging as fast as she could, her helmet lighting her way through the darkness, as she tried to locate her friends once again.


Pharaohman screamed in pain as Burnerman drained all of the power out of him, his eyes widening and his breathing getting harsher as the immense power flooded his frame. After a few moments, the light show stopped, and Pharaohman fell to the ground uselessly, now merely a shell with no life inside of it. His enemy laughed, floating in the air still, the strange, warped aura that once encompassed Pharaohman now surrounding him instead. The floor was weakly lit by a set of emergency lights, but the bright blue flames of Burnerman's helmet were drowning them out.

"Incredible… so much power… this is exactly what I've been looking for!" He steeled his gaze and tightened his muscles, powering up, assessing his newfound strength. Lan, Dr. Hikari and Magnus Gauss watched in horror through a large pane of glass, feeling the heat in the room rapidly increase. "Now, I can truly burn this whole world down… starting with all of you."

"What's going on? Who the hell are you?!" Gauss demanded, taking a couple of fearful steps back. "How did you get in here?"

"You should really teach your workers to keep your doors locked," the Navi replied with a smirk. "Waltzed right in via the Cyberworld without a second thought." He raised his arm, forming a flamethrower cannon on the end of it. "Then again, you probably aren't going to be able to tell them."

Lan watched the enemy Navi aim his arm cannon at the glass, toward the room behind it. The cannon quickly started glowing, ready to fire in nearly the blink of an eye. Reacting on instinct, he grabbed his father by the wrist and ran toward the window. He turned and wrapped his arms around Dr. Hikari protectively before leaping out the window, glass shattering all around him. He fell heavily onto the lower floor below, sore but mostly unharmed, just as Burnerman shot a massive fireball into the room they had escaped.

Lan looked back as the fireball exploded upon hitting the back wall, bursting into an enormous ball of flame that encompassed the entire room. His heart was in his throat, his stomach twisting as he anticipated the screams of Gauss, burning alive in the inferno. After several seconds, however, there were no such screams, causing Lan to pause for a moment. Noticing some movement out of the corner of his eye, he looked down at the floor beside him, gasping as he saw a cross-fused Mayl lying amidst the shattered glass, her arms wrapped protectively around a terrified Gauss.

"Mayl!" He let go of his father and scrambled to his feet. "Are you alright? What are you doing back here?"

"That Navi attacked me!" she exclaimed, similarly letting go of Gauss, who looked as if his life was flashing before his eyes. "I tried taking out the power, but it didn't work!"

"Great… so that's what happened to the lights." Lan turned to face the floating Navi before them, who was glaring down at them maliciously, drunk on power. "Looks like we're beating him the old-fashioned way."

"Who are you? What's going on here?" Everyone turned around to look back at Chaud, clad in Protoman's armor, a Long Sword already summoned.

"Chaud!" Lan called out, as his father got to his feet behind him. "We have to delete this Navi, right away! He stole Pharaohman's powers!"

"What?! How?!" Chaud exclaimed, looking up at the strange fiery Navi hovering in the air.

"Explain later," Dr. Hikari spoke quickly. "Action now. You three fend him off. I'm going to the master control room to shut everything down." He didn't wait for Lan to affirm the plan, running off, happy to get as much distance between himself and the pyromaniac as possible.

Burnerman watched him go, not worried about the consequences of letting him live, before turning his attention back to the Cross-fused Navis standing around him, smirking. "Three normal Navis, versus one who has absorbed a god… you all might cause me to break a sweat."

"You're going to break a lot more than that," Lan shot back through gritted teeth, summoning a Wide Sword onto his arm. His fear was being steadily replaced with anger, as he thought about this bloodthirsty monster trying to hurt Mayl or his father. Burnerman wasn't going to escape him a third time.

Beside him, Mayl summoned a High Cannon onto her arm. "So what's the plan?" she asked quietly, under her breath.

"The plan is, we delete it," Lan responded unhelpfully, not having anything more concrete than that at the moment.

"I know, but…" She cut herself off as she glanced down toward her feet, realizing that something was missing. She looked around in a light panic, her eyes quickly homing in on the retreating frame of Magnus Gauss, as he ran for one of the emergency exits. "Hey!" She started racing after him, at a drastically faster speed than she would have been capable of without Cross Fusion, as he began climbing a short metal staircase.

Above them, Burnerman snarled. "Where do you think you're going?" He aimed his right arm at the fleeing magnate, spewing a massive plume of flame from his cannon. Lan and Chaud gasped as both Mayl and Gauss were consumed by the flames, which spread to cover nearly the entire back wall. Once the flames finally died down, the figures of Mayl and Gauss became visible once again, through the thin, colored, translucent wall of a Barrier chip. Both of them were starting to sweat from the sheer heat the flames had issued, and Mayl's face looked weakly sunburned.

She turned back toward Gauss with a bit of a growl. "If you want to live, stay where we can see you." She made no attempt to conceal her rage and contempt, as she beheld the man who had framed her father and sent him to jail. Gauss recoiled from the look in her eyes, not sure if she or Burnerman was more frightening at the moment.

The fiery Navi started to prepare another flame attack, but paused as he sensed a bit of movement from behind him. Turning around quickly, he saw Chaud leaping toward him, blade outstretched, hoping to end this battle in a single blow. Burnerman calmly reached out and forcefully grabbed Chaud's wrist, pointing the blade away from him, as the young Official struggled to summon a Cannon and get himself free. The Navi used his other hand to grab the sword, violently breaking it off in one large chunk, smaller pieces of the blade falling away from the bottom.

Burnerman grinned an evil grin as he turned the broken blade around and raised it above his head, prepared to plunge it into Chaud's chest. Before he could carry out his murderous action, his whole body was painfully jolted from an explosive impact against his head, causing both the sword and the boy to fall from his grasp and hit the floor. Chaud scrambled to his feet and backed away, counting his lucky stars, as Burnerman turned around once again to see Lan glaring at him, the smoking barrel of a Mega Cannon at the end of his arm.

Burnerman roared and formed cannons on both of his arms, spewing a massive flamethrower at Lan, who ran out of the way as fast as he could, his armor still getting lightly singed. The boy winced but brushed it off, aiming his own cannon and firing a Shotgun into his foe's chest. Burnerman felt almost nothing from the blast, but the explosion of the Shotgun created a large cloud of smoke, obscuring his vision. He tried and failed to blast the cloud of smoke away with a jet of fire, before he had the sense to move away from it. He cried out in pain as he felt a blade slicing deeply into his side, unable to see who had delivered the blow before he flew out of the smoke cloud.

The rogue Navi gritted his teeth angrily, as he held his injured side. He had all of the power he could dream of at his disposal, but he was learning that he didn't have the fighting skills to battle three opponents at once, one-on-one. It was time for him to start turning his near-limitless power into overwhelming force. He would turn this laboratory into a firestorm.

Burnerman raised his arms and roared before plummeting to the ground, slamming his fists into the floor of the laboratory. The area around him erupted into pillars of flame, spreading out in a circle more than thirty feet in diameter. His three opponents were all forced to retreat to the corners of the room, Mayl lifting Gauss by his arms and roughly pulling him along. All of them started to sweat as the temperature in the room skyrocketed.

"Now I've got you!" he declared gleefully, grinning wide as he saw his opponents sheltering in the corners. He extended his arms out in either direction, shooting giant plumes of fire toward Lan and Chaud, who quickly erected barriers to try and ward off the oncoming flames. He looked back and forth between the two of them, wanting to see who would break first, when he felt a couple of stinging pains in his cheek. Grunting, he looked back toward Mayl, who was aiming her crossbow at him, her face wearing a mixture of determination and panic.

Undeterred, Burnerman moved one of his flame jets away from Chaud and toward Mayl, wishing that he had a third arm to put pressure on all of them at once. Mayl erected a barrier of her own, trying to shoot light arms through it, just as Megaman was trying to fire his buster. Both of their meager shots were consumed by the sweltering flames that issued forth from Burnerman's body, long before they could touch him. He grinned wide, encouraged, and poured even more energy into his flame cannons, watching as they completely consumed the barriers.

He kept up the assault, wanting to render both of them unconscious from the heat, but his focus faltered as a large wave of water suddenly emerged from behind him, dousing the flames all around his two opponents and allowing them to beat a hasty retreat. Looking down, he saw that the powerful flames that had bathed the laboratory were now gone, with a thin layer of water covering the floor, the result of a Big Wave chip. He spun around to face Chaud, eyes widening as the boy dashed forward with a Step Sword. Burnerman backed away as quickly as he could, but not fast enough to avoid a wide gash across his chest.

"Gah!" He cried out in pain, holding his chest, hovering farther up into the air to avoid any further assaults. His rage was now reaching a fever pitch, and he was seeing red as he sized up his infuriating opponents. He felt himself growing hotter and hotter, as the flames of darkness and hatred rose up inside him. He didn't bother fighting them, letting the immense heat consume him. This felt right. This was what he had always wanted. This was how he would win.

"No more playing around!" he declared, as his body began to glow with the strength of the flames within. "I'll burn all of you alive! You and your precious city will be reduced to ashes!"

The three child warriors, as well as the cowering Gauss in the corner, winced and hissed as they felt the temperature spike, even hotter than before. All three of them backed off in unison, looking around at each other for some sort of plan, as the machinery around Burnerman began to smoke and melt. Soon, the ceiling and floor would follow suit, and all of Den City would be exposed to the tiny sun that was forming in its midst.

"I'm doing it!" Burnerman exclaimed, his body starting to glow a bright white as he grew hotter and hotter, reaching higher temperatures than he ever had before. "I'm going nuclear!" He could feel heat and energy building up inside him, forming an immense pressure that was demanding to be released, demanding to destroy everything in its path. As the air around him began to shimmer and glow, he prepared to detonate himself, with enough force to decimate not only the lab, but the entire city around him.

Just before the nuclear bomb that was Burnerman went off, he felt the air being sucked out of him, as a cold sharpness and piercing pain suddenly cut through him from all sides at once. He gasped for air as he looked down at himself, feeling the heat rushing out of him, seeing the large, deep incisions from three simultaneous Life Swords that had cut through him to his core. His glow faded in an instant, and the room returned to the relative darkness of the emergency lighting overhead.

Around him, Lan, Chaud and Mayl lowered their arms, the glowing green Life Sword energy dissipating from all of them. Lan and Mayl both collapsed to one knee, panting, drained from the exertion of the Program Advance on top of the sweltering heat; Chaud forced himself to stay standing, watching as Burnerman fell to the ground in several pieces. The villainous Navi's arm reached out in front of him, trying to grasp for the nexus of heat he had formed moments ago, as if it might be able to resuscitate him. Seconds later, his arm fell to the floor, and he moved no more. His lifeless frame remained on the ground, still bonded to the physical world by the Dimensional Area that surrounded all of them.

"We did it…" Mayl managed, her heart finally starting to come down, as adrenaline began to leave her system. "That was way too close…"

"Yeah…" Lan nodded in agreement, pulling himself back to his feet. "I don't want to know what that freak could have done to all of us…"

After a few seconds spent catching their breath, all three of them could hear the omnipresent humming sound in the background slowing to a stop. Moments later, they could feel energy being sucked out of the air around them, as the Dimensional Area finally fell away. Their bodies glowed as their Navi armor receded, returning to the PETs that they came from, formally marking an end to the nightmare that Gauss had created.

Finally back in his own body, Megaman let out a long, slow breath, his eyes closed. "Thank goodness that's over." He opened his eyes. "Good-"

He abruptly stopped as he took in the sight in front of him. He had expected to be safe and sound in his PET, his frame recovering from the intense battle that had nearly leveled the entire city. Instead, he was still inside the SciLab building, surrounded by half-melted machinery. His operator was standing in front of him, eerily still, not moving a muscle, not even a strand of hair shifting. Looking around, he could see Mayl, Chaud and Gauss scattered about the room; all three of them were perfectly still, not breathing, not blinking, held in some sort of bizarre stasis. He could even see wisps of smoke suspended in the air, motionless. It was as if time itself had stopped.

"What the…? What's going on?" He glanced back at the center of the room, freezing at the shadowy figure that now stood in front of him. The creature had a humanoid build, with plentiful muscles, a bald head, and pure blue eyes that glared at him with familiarity and cold hatred.

"You wretched interloper," the creature commented in a gravelly voice, seething with barely-constrained anger. "You have interfered for the last time."

Before Megaman could ask who the person was, or what he had interfered with, the figure stepped backward and vanished through what looked like a seam in reality. It was as if he had found a crack in the air that he could step through, and his body was slowly consumed by the paper-thin rift until he had vanished entirely. Megaman blinked and stared at the space where the being had been, unable to see any evidence that it had existed at all. He could feel a seed of fear growing in his stomach, afraid that the real threat was yet to come.


Sigma re-emerged many years prior, stepping through another crack into reality and into the network of a familiar computer system. His eyes quickly found what he was looking for: a large glass container, with numerous cables protruding from its sides. Inside the glass was the motionless, incomplete, blue frame of the Navi that would go on to ruin his long-laid plans. Soon, the Navi wouldn't get the chance to ruin anything.

Eliminating Megaman this way would be much easier, though the outcome would be much messier. He would eventually get his pocket universe, though this entire galaxy would end up sacrificed in the process. The resulting battle with his counterpart would tear it to shreds over several millennia, but he would eventually come out on top. It would be a worthwhile sacrifice - everything was a worthwhile sacrifice - for the sake of him taking his rightful place as ruler of the universe.

"Time to put an end to this," he muttered to himself, as he formed a large energy ball in his outstretched hand, firing it down at the Navi below.