A/N: This was such a troubling chapter! Especially the first scene and the part where Yuichiro meet the delivery guy… he, Forte and Netto literally rebelled on me… thanks to Azure Euphoria for getting me past these particularly nasty blocks!

And you know what? Meiru, Yaito and Dekao were nice to me this time. They let themselves be written easily.

Anyway, I do not own Rockman and anything coming from Capcom. I do own the plot idea, though. And the writing. Yep. Writing's mine. And the plot. Plot is mine too. Kindly refrain from stealing it.

Az.

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Having decided on the best place to both order and bill his father for the aforementioned curry, Netto had headed back to SciLabs and was now floating through the corridors to reach Yuichiro's personal laboratory with people nervously backing away and fleeing hurriedly in sheer terror at his passage.

This created a conflict in Netto because, despite being greatly saddened at the fact that everyone was scared of him, now no one would ever try to harm him and Forte like they had tried to do with the Leeches. Now he wouldn't have to watch his back as often, although he was still wary when people that he didn't know well were around.

Still not entirely sure why there was all that hate between his partner and SciLabs, Netto turned a corner and came face to face with the same old scientist that had the bright idea of using the Leeches on him. The two stopped and the boy felt as if times halted with them as they warily regarded each other.

"You…" Netto hissed, unconsciously speaking exactly what Forte wanted to say.

The man, with a cast covering his entire left arm and a medical collar on his neck, backed away. His face morphed into a mask of pure terror. "Stay… stay away from me, monster!" his voice trembling as he stuttered, trying not to trip on his own steps. "Don't come any closer!"

Netto and Forte watched as the man turned around and ran away as fast as his sore body allowed him. "What…?" the boy asked softly, confused by the scientist's reaction to his presence. "Is… did I do that, Forte?"

The navi remained silent for a few seconds as he felt the boy's guilt. He tried to kill us, Forte replied neutrally, not remembering what had happened but still presuming how things went. He had it coming.

The boy's eyes softened and he looked down at the floor. "I could have killed him…" Netto replied in a low voice. "Does that make me a monster?"

Netto felt that the navi was on the verge of snorting. But for some reason Forte refrained from doing so as he kept his voice calm. Does it matter? He should count his blessings that we didn't kill him.

"Still…" the boy felt the guilt claw at his insides like a ravaging beast. Without realizing, he resumed to float down the corridor at a very slow pace. Nearing the intersection, he turned the opposite direction he had seen the man disappear into. "What if I really did kill him?"

Cornered by questions that he had no real answer to, Forte let out a low warning growl. It didn't happen, he replied steadily despite his increasing annoyance at the boy's guilt. Enough of this.

Netto cringed at the navi's harsh words, but the verbal slap he received woke him out of his self pity. Forte was right. It hadn't happened, so he shouldn't be too worried about it. Yet, he couldn't help but feel really troubled at how he could black out and easily harm anyone within range. "We have to get a hang on that," he muttered eventually, eyes losing their sadness and shining with determination. "It's not good to lose control like that… not even for us. Dark Mu could easily take advantage of our… mindless rampage…"

Returning to his usual self, Netto floated onwards and reached the intersection, turning left in the direction of his father's office. He just hoped that the delivery system of the curry shop he was going to phone would be fast enough to come before the meeting time with Dark Mu.
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Enzan looked down at himself, perplexed. He wasn't sure whether Rockman's idea would work, but he had to admit that doctor Hikari and Meijin were doing an exceptional work both in speed and quality as the suit he was currently wearing reproduced Forte's in every detail. People that didn't know any better would mistake him for the black navi if it were not for his lack of some parts that were still being produced.

Meijin had informed them that the helmet was the hardest to reproduce, where all the other pieces, like the armguards and the golden colored leg-guards had taken only an hour to do. The two pieces on Forte's back had been designed to contain some sort of battery that would feed a network of small wires running along the inside of the suit to emit the black navi's energy.

Yuichiro approached the boy with a purple marker in his hand. "Meijin just told me that the helmet will be ready within the hour," he said as he started to paint Enzan's face, careful to not slip. "I sent a colleague to the cloth store to get the right material for the cloak, then all we need is to ask for Forte to charge up the batteries for the suit."

Enzan wasn't exactly happy with how things had gone, especially when people had looked at him as soon as they needed someone to act as Forte, but he was willing to go with the hastily put together plan and rescue Meiru, Dekao and Yaito. The only problem was that if they noticed that he was being too tall or saw his blue eyes… the plan would instantly fail and the hostages could get seriously hurt.

"How are you going to make him help us?" he asked as he closed his eyes and felt the marker gently run over his eyelids. "Even if he seems to be mellower, Forte is not the type of person to just help us out with something…"

Yuichiro spent a few seconds in silence as he moved to the boy's forehead. "Well," he eventually said as he examined his makeup work. "I'll find a way. I know that he'll at least listen to me before refusing."

Enzan's mouth slightly went downwards in a frown as he remembered how the dangerous black navi, the same that was known as "Black Shadow", "Messenger of Darkness" and "God of Destruction", was willing to suddenly listen to a human with no less then a weak excuse of needing their help with something. Forte was someone that never wanted help from others and solved things by destroying them.

His thought process was halted when the door hissed open and a lanky man walked inside, looking around in nervousness. His eyes briefly stopped on Enzan and, after muttering something about stumbling into some sort of masked party or one of those conventions where people dressed up as their heroes, he turned to stare at the scientist standing next to the boy with a purple marker in his hand.

"Are you doctor Hikari Yuichiro?" he asked politely and watched as the man he had addressed nodded. "The kid dressed as a scary navi down in the lobby told me that you would pay for his order…"

Yuichiro blinked and raised an eyebrow. "Kid dressed as a scary navi..?" for a moment he was confused, but then he felt like literally smacking his forehead as he remembered that there was actually someone that would fit the description. "Ah, yes. Must be Forte…"

Pocketing the marker and walking up to the man, he grabbed the parcel and looked at it. "He must be hungry…" he muttered as he let his eyes idly wander up and down the list. "Three portions of curry, ramen, a yakisoba and shuumai…"

Then things just… suddenly froze as he felt that he was really close to a solution…

He looked up at the delivery man who was already proceeding to leave. "W-Wait! Can you tell me more about the… kid dressed as a scary navi…?"

The man turned to look at the scientist with obvious confusion. "Hmm? What about him?"

"Please… Can you tell me anything about him?" Yuichiro wasn't particularly sure on what he was trying to find, but something struck him as strange. Besides the strangely similar taste in food to his son, Forte would never rely on a human, especially to do something as trivial as paying a tab for a meal.

The man sighed at the troublesome request. It wasn't in his line of work to go around spewing information on other people, but as the payer of the food, the scientist had a right to know who exactly he was paying the food for. Taking out his PET, the delivery man clicked a few buttons to bring up the order record. "Let's see… He called using this number."

Yuichiro immediately recognized the number as his own, and prodded the man for more information. With another sigh, the delivery man searched his memory for the face of the kid in the navi costume.

"He looked like any other goofball kid to me. Let's see… a bat eared helmet… a cloak…" The man snapped his fingers as he remembered a few key details. "Oh yeah! And he almost threw me to the ground because of his eagerness to get the bag with the order. He was muttering to himself a lot, too. Kids these days…" he paused briefly and pocketed his PET. "The strangest thing, however, was how suddenly he changed moods. At first he was… I don't know… giving off this really uncomfortable vibe that made me wish I was as far away from him as I could, but as soon as he saw me, well… the uncomfortable feeling just disappeared…"

After thanking the man for his time and watching him walk out of the room, Yuichiro hummed in thought. From what the delivery man had told him, Forte had acted really out of character for a moment. That made him feel like he was really close to an answer to a question, but at the same time he was unable to grasp it.

"Something's up, isn't it?" Enzan asked from where he was standing, scratching an itch on his left arm. Wearing that kind of suit was totally different than "wearing" the one of his navi. While the second felt like a second skin that would never hinder his movements, the first kept pulling at points when he moved and after a while it became really uncomfortable.

Yuichiro turned around and nodded. "I'm not exactly sure what it is, but I feel that I'm really close to a solution. All I need is some time to sort things out," he commented as his mind quickly went over what he knew. Forte liking the same things Netto loved to eat, his mellower attitude towards him, Meijin and Enzan, his willing contact with his son and their supposed partnership against Dark Mu. Then there were the smaller details, like the navi never showing his eyes, him muttering to himself on more than one occasion…

At first he had written that off as quirks that Forte had because of his disorientation due to his sudden materialization and not knowing how that had happened, but now… now he still couldn't put his finger on it, but there was something that really bothered him, and it wasn't the fact that Forte was supposedly in contact with his son.

"Shouldn't you confront him for an answer?" Enzan asked after a while as he watched Yuichiro tiredly rubbing his eyes. "It's been a while since we brought him back to SciLabs and all he did was just float around without saying a word."

The man nodded again and sighed. "I know, but for some reasons, Forte's moods are fairly unstable. You weren't here when it happened, but he…" he paused and frowned as he tried to come up with the right words to describe how the black navi had been when he almost killed his colleague. "Let's just say that he lost it…"

"Speaking of Forte, dad," Rockman's voice suddenly filled the air as the blue navi appeared on the monitor of a nearby computer. "I just checked Meijin's progress with the reproduction of his helmet, and he said that it's going to be finished in a few minutes."

Yuichiro looked at his son's navi and smiled. "Thank you, Rockman. Now all we need is to find Forte and hope he agrees with the plan…"
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He wasn't sure what prompted him to look for his father. Maybe it was just that after eating his meal he had become too bored to just wander around and watch everyone run away, or maybe it was the wisp of a rumor he had managed to catch before the people talking saw him.

Apparently, Rockman had come up with a plan to have Enzan infiltrate the enemy's base and his father, Meijin and Enzan himself were working hard to enact it. However, when he entered the room, he wasn't expecting to see his friend wearing a suit with purple lines and Forte's navi emblem on his chest while the two men were fastening the armguards around his arms.

The white haired boy looked extremely uncomfortable, with his hair all pulled backwards with hair gel and a deep scowl on his face. Quickly, Netto lowered his head into the safety of his cloak as much as he could without being suspicious and bit his lip as he felt that he was really close to bursting into extremely loud laughs that would surely give him away. Another thing that helped him into keeping his calm demeanor was the fact that Forte was utterly insulted by what he had just seen and was almost sputtering in indignation.

"Ah, Forte," Yuichiro called as he finished fastening an armguard and turned around to regard the black navi. "Don't take this as an insult, but it was the only plan we could come up with such little time. We can't ask you to go to that meeting and risk having Dark Mu get a hold onto you and the code you have again."

Relieved to be distracted by the hilarious sight that Enzan provided, Netto turned his attention to his father and took a deep breath to steady himself. Forte was still grumbling in displeasure, but he had retreated into the back of his mind and was mostly keeping to himself.

Yuichiro, once he saw that the navi was giving him his full attention, went to the desk and grabbed two transparent batteries that had been masked to look like the two pieces on Forte's back. "Would you mind charging these up?" he asked offering the two objects to the silent navi. "It'll help Enzan fool Dark Mu into thinking he is you."

This is outrageous!

Almost rolling at Forte's increasing indignation, Netto reached out with one hand and took the two batteries. "Shut up," he idly muttered to his partner as he placed two fingers on the small connectors located on one end and started to slowly charge the devices with energy, being careful to not overdo it. Anything more than the batteries could handle and they would either blow up or melt…

Don't tell me to shut up, kid, Forte hissed in reply, miffed that he couldn't blast everything to pieces as he wished to. Although he had come to accept the fact that he couldn't move their shared body until their Cross Fusion was cancelled, there were still times when he wished he could take over and do as he pleased.

"Stop being so cranky, Forte," Netto replied nonchalantly, way too much used to Forte's presence to fear him as everyone else did. Maybe once they were back to being two separate entities the navi would seek revenge for how he was being treated by the boy, but at the moment Netto felt perfectly safe and wasn't bothered by all the threats and promises of pain coming from his partner.

When he saw that the batteries were filled with dark energy, Netto cut off the feeding and offered the devices back to his father, who took them with a nod of his head to thank Forte for helping them out. "I also would like to take a look at your side," he said as he carried the batteries back to the table and placed them on it again. "Your wound should be healed by now, so I can take off the stitches."

Yuichiro's words had the effect of having Netto bring his left hand to his right side. After everything he had gone through in the recent days, he had totally forgotten about his injuries. They didn't hurt anymore, nor pulled uncomfortably at his skin, so that meant that his father was right in saying that they had fully healed.

Gently nodding his head once, the boy returned his attention back to Enzan and for a moment his hidden eyes met with his friend's. His blue eyes were watching him closely, probably wanting to catch him off guard and disclose all his secrets, and that made Netto smile in amusement from behind the rim of his cloak and wonder when someone would finally unmask him.

He wasn't exactly sure how he had managed to last that long, especially with people that knew him well like his father and Rockman, but he was betting a portion of curry that it was thanks to Forte's reputation that no one ever pestered him more that it was strictly necessary.

A cheap imitation won't fool someone like Ninja… this human is too tall to pass as us.

Brought back to reality by Forte's observation, Netto floated closer to Enzan and took to circle him to observe his father and Meijin efforts. "Perhaps, but do you really think that Dark Mu will risk one of its best navis?" he asked as he observed the purple lines running down his friend's side. "They already risked Paladin once, and their plan failed. I don't think they are going for the same tactic once again when we could go to the meeting just to blast them to oblivion instead of saving my friends…"

Forte paused and had to admit to himself that the boy was right. Dark Mu was a fast learner, and unlike a lot of people, be them humans or navis, it never repeated its past errors and became craftier every time they encountered one of its emissaries. Last time they hadn't been captured once again thanks to Yuichiro, who had freed them from the Leeches by doing an almost suicidal dive onto one of the devices. Not that both he and Netto could remember it, but they had caught wind of it while aimlessly strolling through SciLabs after waking up from their forced sleep.

Leaving the navi to his thoughts, Netto stopped in front of Enzan and focused his attention onto the scarred emblem. Without even realizing it, his right hand traveled up to the one resting on his chest hidden behind the cloak and his fingers ran along the length of the slash, feeling the faint dip once again. If he focused, he could feel the memory of the pain Forte had once felt, and it stung. But what hurt more than that was the emotional pain he could suddenly feel coming from his partner.

The scar was a reminder of something horrible for Forte, and it was because of that that he was so full of anger and hate towards humanity.

Don't…

Forte's voice sounded distant and pained, but it was enough to snap Netto out of his trance-like status he had unconsciously gone into. Once back to the conscious world, the boy found out that he had unconsciously landed onto the ground and had his head slightly bowed. He wasn't sure how long he had been disconnected from reality, but he knew that even one second would count towards his discovery. Still clutching at the emblem on his chest, he turned around and floated to the farther corner to sit and watch the progress, cursing himself for getting so lost in his thoughts without even realizing it.

Forte's sudden change in demeanor, even if only for a couple of seconds, didn't go unnoticed by the other three occupants of the room. Enzan's eyes narrowed at the retreating figure, then turned to look at Yuichiro and the boy saw that the scientist was roughly thinking the same thing. The navi's sudden mood swing was not normal. Not even if he was still disoriented by his sudden materialization in the real world.

But further investigation would have to wait until Netto's friends were safe and Dark Mu was either defeated or laying low for a while.
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"I think we walked through this corridor a few minutes ago," Dekao whispered to his two friends as he looked around while he carefully trudged after the two girls in the lead. To him, the corridors they were moving through looked all the same save for the occasional indicative panel fixed on the wall.

Meiru turned her head to briefly glance at the large boy, then stopped at the edge of a corner to peek behind it for any enemy. "Roll is keeping tabs on our progress," she replied as softly as she could. "We might not have a map of the place, but we're making progress…"

"We just need to find the exit," Yaito continued as she peeked around the corner too before she walked into the new corridor and looked at it. It was as bare as the previous one, and it made her feel like they had ended up in the less used part of the base, or even the lowest level of the basement. "But we can't plug in to find that out or we could get caught," she admonished as she saw Dekao walk up to a panel with a plug in port.

The boy sighed and pocketed his PET again, muffling his navi's whines and protests. "If only we could materialize our navis, Gutsman would just beat them all and we could get out faster…"

If the boy wasn't so tall for her, she would have slapped Dekao on the back of his head. "Are you stupid?" she hissed, stomping a foot on the ground instead. "I suppose you haven't seen the news lately, have you?"

Dekao looked at her with a perplexed face and that made the girl sigh to release all her pent up frustration that she had accumulated since they had been kidnapped. "No, you didn't, did you?" before the boy could answer, she raised a hand and motioned for him to follow her and Meiru down the dark corridor. "I'm not sure how they did it, but a news station got footage on part of Enzan's fight against the first virus attack."

The boy looked down at Yaito with a raised eyebrow. "What about it?" he asked, not seeing the connection that the younger girl was hinting at. "It was a virus attack. Enzan had an easy time dealing with it…"

Yaito rolled her eyes but refrained from giving a sharp remark. "Yeah, he had," she replied as she remembered how well the boy had fought against the materialized viruses. "However, part of the footage also included another fight. Remember that black navi we saw at SciLabs? The one that Doctor Hikari freed from those restraints?"

Dekao slapped his fist onto his other hand. "Oh yes," he said as he remembered the navi in question and briefly shivered at the memory of those cold and furious dark red eyes. "He looked really angry when he was released…"

The blond girl nodded her head as the trio rounded a new corner and came to a better illuminated area of the base. It was still deserted of humans and navis alike, but they knew that they shouldn't let their guard down because of that. "The battle between him and the other white navi was short, but you could clearly see that they were both powerful. Now, I'm not saying that all the navis of this place are as strong as those two, but if only one with the same amount of power is here, I doubt that we could win even if we did a team action… not to mention that we have a limited supply of battle chips while the enemy doesn't seem to need them to fight…"

"Oh…" the large boy was unhappy to hear the truth that maybe Gutsman would be unable to win, but he understood that every single navi in that place was a danger if encountered. Especially since their navis were still relegated to their PETs. "Still, we would have an easier time if we could materialize Gutsman and the others…"

After their brief conversation, the three kids fell into silence as they slowly walked through the base while Roll kept an eye on the map she was doing as they progressed, Gutsman moped around and Glyde gave helpful advices on where to go. They went like that for perhaps half an hour, then they had to hide behind a door as they encountered two navis patrolling the zone.

"You think that the new batch is better designed than the older version?" one of them asked to the other, his voice sounding bored. "I've heard that the first version has some bugs that needed to be ironed out…"

"If that's true, then I want to get the second version as soon as I can," the second navi replied, grunting at the idea of having to rely on a bugged version of whatever they were talking about. "I don't want to have to deal with the Black Fury and then find myself unable to do something because I have a bugged Materializer."

"You got me there," the other navi tapped his emblem on his chest and murmured in displeasure. "The Black Fury is already powerful enough without us dematerializing because of random bugs… still, these things are useful… I would have never thought it possible for us to materialize in the real world without having to real on an operator or that… what was the name?"

"Dimensional Area," his colleague supplied as the two walked past the closed door where Meiru and her friends were hidden behind. "Both are so… limiting. With an operator you become just a spectator and you are used, with the Dimensional Area, even if you are free to move as you wish, you are stuck within it."

"Materializer, uh?" Yaito asked her friends as soon as the two navis had turned a corner and were out of hearing range. Slowly, she opened the door and peeked outside, walking out of the room only when she was sure that the corridor was empty. "Let's keep going, maybe we'll come across those Materializers too."

Nodding in agreement to the variation of their plan, the three walked down the corridor in the opposite direction the two guards had gone into. Turning corners, crossing bridges that were suspended over a seemingly endless dark abyss and hiding from the occasional navi patrolling the base, they eventually reached a busier section of the base.

Taking refuge behind some metallic crates, Meiru and the others kept their ears on full alert and listened to the chatting of the more frequent passersby. Some were talking about how Dark Mu was going to rule the world, some were talking about how rewarding it would be to praised by their emperor when the Black Fury was back in their clutches, but the most interesting of the rumors the kids heard was that the large supply of newest Materializers had been stacked in a storeroom with the label of "ST003".

At that, Yaito shook her head at how careless Dark Mu's followers were. Sure, they didn't know their prisoners had escaped and were sneaking around, but when you were part of a large organization, be it a game company or something out to conquer the world, you had to be at least cautious of everyone. Who knew if the guy standing next to you was a spy? It could happen…

And the map affixed on the opposite wall confirmed her thoughts. "Glyde," she said as she pointed her PET at the electronic display as soon as the corridor was clear of wandering navis. "Get a copy of that map without getting caught, then direct us to that storeroom. Those Materializers will come in handy soon enough."

"Yes, Yaito-sama," Glyde replied as he transferred himself to the device through the laser connection. Being a navi that dealt with high security every day, getting a copy of the map without tripping alarms would be easy.
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As the man watched the track outside the small window speed by while the plane landed, his mind went back to the past, remembering how happy he had been to have someone call a son and how pained he had been when he had been unable to help him when he really needed it. He wasn't sure why he had come back in search of him after so long, maybe it was the desire to reconnect, to help him now and maybe even live together again.

He had aged in the past ten years, not terribly since his wanderings around kept him on shape, but the man suddenly felt like he needed to tie things together and settle down once again. SciLabs had betrayed him and his son, but he could trust Yuichiro to do the right thing. He just hoped that he would be able to at least explain what had happened that fateful day before being killed. Ten years and he felt like his kid hadn't grown that much.

"Mister?"

The old man snapped out of his reverie and looked up at the young hostess with a kind smile. "Ah, sorry," he said with an embarrassed chuckle. "I was lost in my thoughts. Did we land already?"

The girl smiled and nodded. "Yes, all the other passengers are leaving. Do you need assistance with your luggage?"

The man unbuckled and stood up, dusting his casual brown dress. "Ah, no. Thank you, miss. I can manage," he replied as he opened the compartment above his head and took out a small bag. It contained all his belongings. Not much, but they were either necessary for his travels or important to his heart. "Thank you for your assistance, miss. I'll be going now."

be easy