Chapter 9
Meta Knight, the other knights, and the children reached Dedede's throne room the same time Samus came storming out of it with her unwilling companion. She was holding tightly to the back of his neck as she and the King of Dreamland entered the hall. King Dedede was struggling in her grip and making a huge ruckus even though she ignored his protests. As she and the penguin king went by, neither noticed the group who had stopped to watch them.
"Where are they going?" Lololo asked as he and the others continued to watch the two figures move further down the hall.
None could answer that question but it was obvious every one of them wanted to find out. However Meta Knight had his own plans and turned to Sword and Blade to give them instructions.
"Men, take the children back to their parents," he ordered. "It is not safe for them to be out here."
"Hey wait, Meta Knight!" Tiff exclaimed, knowing what he was getting at. "You can't just-"
The Star Warrior turned sharply to face her, cutting off the rest of her protest. "I do not want to hear any arguments, Tiff," he said his tone making it very obvious he was not in the mood to deal with her stubborness. "Just do as I say and go home. Take Kirby with you. I know you will be able to protect him if something happens."
"But what about you?" she asked.
"I have something I need to take care of," was his answer. "Now do as I say."
Before she could protest Meta Knight had run off, leaving the girl and the others behind.
Sword and Blade moved to obey the star warrior's order. "Come on, Tiff," Sword said, stepping forward and facing the children. "Let's get you back to your parents."
"All right," Tiff said, moving to follow the others though she did pause to look back in the direction Meta Knight had gone. Something wasn't right, the Star Warrior's behavior seemed off, she just couldn't quite figure out why.
"Tiff," Sword's voice brought her out of her thoughts. "come on."
The girl looked back at him and began to follow the rest of the group back to her family's apartment. Luckily for them they did not run into anymore trouble from metroids who all seemed to have left the castle, leaving the halls relatively empty. The group were grateful for that, as it got rid of the problem for the time being.
Just as they reached the door to their living quarters, Tuff noticed something. Has anyone seen Kirby?"
"What?" Blade exclaimed.
"I don't see Kirby," Tuff replied. "I thought he was with us, but I don't see him anymore."
Sword and Blade looked around and saw that the boy was right, Kirby was not with them. Oh great, now what were they going to do? The only thing they could do, drop the rest of the children off at their suit and then going looking for him.
"All right then," Sword said, escorting the children toward the door. "We need you to go inside and stay there, we'll go and see if we can find Kirby."
While the other kids headed inside Tiff was more slow to follow, in fact she stopped in her tracks and then spun around and took off in the opposite direction.
"Tiff!" Sword called after her. "Come back here! Where do you think you're going?!"
She ignored the knight, speeding up her pace instead of slowing down, she was out of sight before too long. Sword and Blade quickly ushered the rest of the kids into the apartment, realizing now they had two kids to go after and bring back instead of one.
No surprise it was Tiff.
That was the plan anyway until Lady Like decided she wanted the two knights to stick around and protect her and her family. Both were too polite to decline and the Lady was just like her daughter, stubborn. It was best to just do what she wanted them to do.
Elsewhere in the castle Samus Aran had drug King Dedede to his limo and tossed him into the driver's seat of it. She then climbed in after him, though she barely fit since she was much taller than the king, which is why she stood instead of sitting down in the passenger seat. He tried to protest with her about it, claiming he didn't know how to drive the thing but she wasn't have any of it. She glared at him and snapped.
"Just drive," and he did so without any further protest. It wasn't like he was going to argue with her any further, not with that giant gun aimed at his head. With that he hit the gas and sped out of the castle grounds and down the road to the forest.
The car and its passengers passed quickly through Cappy Town and into the woods. Samus did not day a single word the entire way there but King Dedede could sense by the rather terrifying aura surrounding her that hesitating or trying to convince her to change her mind was a very bad idea. She was bound and determined to find that thing and she was going to make him show her where it was. Not too long after the car had put Cappytown way behind them, the king took it into the forest then drove it in as far as he was able. Once the car was driven to its limits she made him park the car and then forced him to go on foot, leading him along with an arm cannon aimed at his back.
"It was around here," King Dedede explained leading the bounty hunter to the exact spot where the giant metroid had attacked him and Escargoon, a small clearing of which the two had just stepped into.
Samus, activating her helmet to use the visor's multiple functions, looked around the clearing and the surrounding woods, hoping to pinpoint where it had gone. After a moment the infered picked up on a faint heat signature. She deactivated her visor and grabbed onto the King's robe. "Let's go."
He protested now. "Hold it!" he exclaimed. "I showed ya where me an' Escargoon saw the monsta' now it's time to let me go-."
"Wrong," she cut him off. "This entire situation is your fault and you're going to take responsibility for it." he started to protest again but she interrrupted him. "and I do not want any arguments!"
Dedede shut his mouth, deciding it was best he kept his beak shut from then on. He'd been hoping to weasel his way out of the situation after taking Samus to the location of the monster, but that was not going to happen. Instead he merely nodded and allowed himself to be drug by her, deeper into the woods.
Further in, the hunter paused when she heard roaring. Dedede nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard it and grabbed onto her leg, looking around in panic. If they could hear it, it meant that the beast was close by and it would attack them any second.
Why wasn't she doing anything? The least she could do was make sure he was safe, why couldn't she at least show enough respect to protect a king? What was wrong with her?!
And just as he was beginning to feel more offended than scared Samus suddenly grabbed him by the back of his robe and jumped into the air. A heavy mass hit the ground where they had been standing and when Dedede looked down he saw something almost completely identical to the monster in his throne room. It looked up at them and roared.
Dedede screamed in panic, wiggling in the bountry hunter's grip as she landed on the high branch of a tree and dropped him off there before jumping down to deal with the metroid.
She rushed at it, getting within a few inches of the metroid before jumping into the air over top of it and firing her ice beam at it's face and mouth. The beast roared at her, expelling a blast of fire from it's mouth, melting the ice before it reached it. This didn't deter her as she rushed around behind it, firing missiles at it to distract it.
Her strategy worked as it became so focused on destroying her projectiles she got close enough to it that she could jump right onto its face and shove her arm cannon right into its mouth, blasting ice inside of it as it flailed around helplessly. After too long the creature stopped moving, having been frozen from the inside out. Samus then repeated the same process on it as she had on the one in the throne room, going into morph ball mode and setting off an explosive charge inside the body which detonated and blew the creature to pieces.
Samus stood over the creature's remains for a moment before turning away from it. She walked toward the tree where she'd left King Dedede and stared up at him as he clung to a branch. "Hey!" he yelled down at her. "Get me down from here!"
Samus obliged, aiming her arm cannon at the tree.
"Hey, wait a minute!" he exclaimed, flailing his arms. "I didn't mean like that! Don't do anythin-" she fired, shooting a missile at the branch and sending him plummeting to the ground. "AHHH!"
She caught him easily and set the fat king on the ground. "Let's go."
"Go?!" he demanded. "we found the monster in the woods now I can go home."
"Wrong," she corrected him. "That is not the monster I am after. The one I want is bigger and still out there." she deactivated her visor to frown down at him. "What we're looking for is a queen and the metroid over there is not a queen," she gave him a push. "Now get moving!"
King Dedede did as he was told, though he still had to wonder what the point was. Did she expect him to be able to tell her where the "queen" was? How was he even going to do that when the only location he was aware of where a metroid was, in the woods, and she'd already killed the beast! What more did she think he could do or tell her?
Besides, how in the world was she even going to find that queen?
He got his answer a moment later when the bounty hunter headed to the part of the forest on the other side of the clearing where the beast had come running out of. she then knelt down and scrutinized something on the ground. This got him curious and he couldn't help glancing over her shoulder to get a peek at whatever she was looking at.
When she suddenly straightened up he had to back away a few steps so not to get hit in the nose by her elbow.
"Come on." she said to him. She grabbed onto his arm and led him further into the forest.
"Hey, here are we going? What did you see?"
"I picked up its trail," she explained, not looking at him as they continued on. "It is going to lead us to the nest of the metroid queen."
From then on it was easier to continue the search, however Samus proceeded with more caution. If her theory was right things were going to get more dangerous. Maybe she should just let the penguin king go, but she'd resolved to teach him a lesson before she did. It was his fault after all and he was going to take some responsibility, but if things got so bad his life would be in real danger then she'd just let him go.
She was angry at him for causing this situation in the first place but not enough to let him die. After all, he did not know the being he was buying could devastate a planet in a matter of hours. But Tiff had explained Dedede did pretty often orders monsters to kill Kirby who was a little baby, so she wasn't going to let herself feel sorry for the patriarch either. An innocent victim he was not and she was going to give him a stern lecture about it after all of this was over.
Hopefully he would learn something.
Half an hour later the duo had put the forest behind them and were now heading to a place that looked like some kind of canyon. Samus paused, and looked down at King Dedede.
"What is this place?" she asked him, pointing into the canyon. "What is down there?"
The King looked up, warily eyeing the canyon before them. "Kabu canyon," he responded. "There's nothin' much there except Kabu."
"Who is Kabu?"
"Well he's this big talking rock," he explained. "I mean he doesn't do much else but predict the fucha' sometimes."
"Anything else?" there had to be more to this Kabu than that. She looked into the canyon, a thoughtful look on her face.
Dedede shook his head. "Naw." For a moment he wondered why she was even asking him the questions then he remembered that the reason they were out there to begin with was to find out where the beast in the forest had come from. Obviously she was so interested in Kabu canyon was because she believed that that was where the queen was located and now that he thought about it... "Ya can't go lookin' in there!"
The bounty hunter frowned. "and why not?" she wanted to know.
"Because, uh," he was having a hard time coming up with an excuse. "There's nothin' there."
Samus eyes flickered to the footprints, barely distinguishable on the rocky ground, and then back at the penguin king. "I guess we'll just have to go down there and make sure."
Kirby had followed after Meta Knight after he'd left the children at the castle. The young star warrior could tell something bad was going on and he felt he needed to step in and help. Until Sword and Blade's attention was focused on the other children before he'd taken his chance and rushed away, taking off after the older star warrior.
But he'd lost sight of Meta Knight and wandered out of the castle and onto the road, nearly getting run over by Dedede's car when it shot out of the castle grounds. He'd spotted Samus in the car and had taken off in pursuit of them, completely forgetting about the star warrior.
Wherever she was going with him it surely had to do with the metroids, right? If she ran into trouble he was going to be there to help. Kirby intended to help if he could. Dreamland was his home and he had to protect it as well as his new friend.
He'd actually been watching when Samus had taken down the monster in the woods and was amazed by her abilities. When she and Dedede had headed further into the woods after the thing had died the young warrior walked into the clearing and looked at the body briefly, poking the corpse for a second before rushing after the two adults. As he followed them he'd noticed Meta Knight up in the trees.
The older star warrior was also looking in the direction the two had gone and hadn't even noticed Kirby. The fact he was there but hadn't made his pretense known to them made Kirby wonder why, but how could he ask him about it? Before he could even try to get Meta Knights attention the warrior disappeared in a fluffy of dark colored wings.
Kirby jumped back, startled and blinked. Had Meta Knight flown away? Did he have wings? Since when and why didn't he ever use them in front of people? Weird.
Oh well, it wasn't important right now. The young warrior had other more important, things to think about right now and Meta Knight having the ability to fly wasn't one of them. He had to catch up with Samus.
So, completely forgetting about the older warrior, Kirby turned back in the direction the adults had gone, and rushed after them.
Kirby had not been seeing things. Meta Knight had indeed been in the trees and flew off using a pair of blue and purple bat wings. Nobody knew about this part of him, not even Sword and Blade. It wasn't because he was hiding it from them, he just didn't feel the need to make a big deal about it.
Right now he was using those wings to follow after Samus and King Dedede as they made their way to Kabu Canyon. The determined way the female bounty hunter was walking made it apparent that she believed she would find what she was looking for somewhere inside the canyon.
Was that where the queen was? he wondered, flying closer but still not making his pretense known to the two on the ground. If it was maybe he could find it first and figure out a way to deal with it.
Unlike Samus Aran, Meta Knight did not have any equipment specially made to take down metroids, as they were mostly weak to freezing, especially the more vulnerable early forms. That didn't mean conventional weapons couldn't do anything. If memory served him the later more durable forms could be damaged by conventional weapons, including projectiles. His sword beam ability might even cause the queen major discomfort.
Suddenly, as he was thinking about this, something entered his mind, an old memory and he was instantly overcome by an awful feeling of dread. For some reason the idea of confronting the queen became a very bad idea and he wasn't sure he wanted to even try to locate it anymore.
Don't be foolish, he scolded himself. You have to find it, you have to find it and kill it before it gives birth to more of them.
Pushing away the terrible feeling he pressed on ahead, flying over the canyon but seeing nothing. If he wanted to find anything down there he would have to get closer and he was not looking forward to doing that, because even though he wasn't willing to admit it, he was dreading what he would find.
Maybe it isn't down there after all- but before he could finish the thought, he caught sight of two transparent green bodies floating quickly out of the ravine. It didn't take him too long to realize what they were.
Metroids and by the looks of it they had recently been hatched too. He considered that for a moment then swooped in, swinging his sword at one of the newborns. The blade slipped over the transparent skin, actually managing to slice it open. The newborn metroid let out a distressed squeal before floating downward back into the canyon depths. A moment later a loud roar ripped through the air.