Axl was seated behind Zero on the Ride Chaser. Feeling the cool oiled metal hull, touching the real leather seats, Axl pointed at the right handlebar.
"What's that red button for?"
Zero swatted his hand away.
"Never, ever, push the red button."
After a solid glare at Axl, Zero ticked off the clipboard in his hand.
"Helmet?"
"I can't take my helmet off, and neither can you!" Axl groused.
"Sure I can. It's just that the world would burst into flame at the sight of my full sexiness revealed."
"How philanthropic of you," Axl muttered. Zero ticked off another item.
"Have you removed all metal items from your body?"
"I'm a REPLOID! And we aren't doing a CAT scan, so let's go!" Axl whined, rocking back and forth in his seat. Zero ticked off another item.
"Are you allergic to shellfish?"
Axl covered his eyes with one hand.
"You're just making things up now, aren't you?"
"Maybe," Zero said, tossed the list away, and revved the Ride Chaser so hard that the floor melted under its exhaust. Axl jumped and clung to Zero's waist for dear sweet life as the Ride Chaser blasted out of the garage at subsonic speeds, tearing concrete and asphalt apart as it screamed through Hunter HQ, shattering windows and overturning vehicles. While the bike went SCREE! Axl went "AAAAGGGHHHHHHHH!!!"
Zero banked a corner: the Ride Chaser literally kicked off the side of a building in order to change direction, heading out of Hunter HQ, trailing grass, trees and small animals in its wake. Axl's wild and terrified eyes swiveled about him, and although his optic sensors had a shutter speed of 1/8000 second he could not get a bearing in the blur the world had become.
"HOW SOON TIL WE GET THERE?" Axl shouted.
"WHAT?" Zero yelled
back.
"I SAID, HOW S-"
The Ride Chaser stopped at the entrance of the Central Circuit. This is not to say, it came to a gradual halt. Its forward thrusters activated with an explosive blast, tearing up the road as they brought the vehicle to a dead halt within five metres of igniting. Axl lost his grip during this time, so Zero watched him fly four or five hundred feet ahead.
"Good thing he has a helmet," Zero said, lighting a cig and nudging the Ride Chaser into a leisurely hover after the road kill formerly known as Axl. Reaching down, Zero grabbed a leg and tugged the rest of him out of the asphalt.
"You okay kid?" Zero asked in a noncommittal manner, dragging a smoke and looking at the road ahead. Axl spat rubble from between his teeth.
"That was TOTALLY uncalled for!" he yelled in Zero's face, "You KNEW I would fall off, didn't you?"
"Kwitcherbitchin' and get back on the ride," Zero frowned at him, causing the Ride Chaser to roar at the flick of his wrist. Grumbling – and without an alternative – Axl complied, but opted for the sidebars instead of the irksome smoker's waist. Zero prodded the bike into a bare five kilometers an hour.
"Why are we moving at the speed of smell?" Axl enquired. Zero pointed with his cig.
"See those immobile morons blocking the road, waving at us? We have to rescue sixteen of them in every area, so I don't think ramming them at the speed of sound will help."
"Why sixteen?"
"Mavericks have a fetish with the number 8, it seems."
They bumped into the first reploid and it teleported away. Axl blinked.
"Wait… why are they waiting for us to touch them? Can't they teleport on their own power?"
"No, you see, kid, we use this teleporter beacon," Zero held up a microchip the size of a Tic Tac, "To prevent enemy troops from just dropping in, the signal is badly scrambled in all war zones. For rescue purposes we just slap one of these homing beacons on a reploid and the HQ transporter room picks them up."
"Speak more slowly, and with smaller words," Axl grumbled, impatient with their slow progress.
"It's MAGIC!" Zero said, bumping into another hapless reploid with his magic touch. Axl noticed beeping red boxes on the ground.
"Hey Zero, what're those?"
"Bombs."
"Bombs. BOMBS?" Axl said, jumping to stand on the bike seat with one leg hiked up in alarm.
"Sixteen of 'em. Boarski's trying to destroy the highway leading to his lair."
"Why wasn't I told of this?" Axl squeaked, hopping from one leg to the other. Zero flicked a lock of his flowing golden mane.
"Alia is currently bitching in my ear about our imminent doom."
"You're very bloody calm about all this!"
"Stop getting footprints on the leather!"
Axl sat down, staring at the back of Zero's head.
"As we are not currently buried under a pile of burning rubble, I assume there's a timer?"
"Alia?" Zero asked. Her voice came over loudspeaker, "About two minutes to go! HURRY UP!"
Zero flicked off the hysterical operative. Axl shook his head.
"And you don't care?"
"Not a whit. I have to rescue these impotent imbeciles first, and then I can worry about our explosive death."
Folding his arms and resigning himself to his fate, Axl went along for the ride. Zero navigated the course with barely a blonde tress disturbed by the wind, bumping into reploids to magically rescue them.
"There's a gap ahead," Axl warned him. Zero plodded the bike onward.
"Look, there's a ramp and everything. And a met-all with a warning cone on its head, for some reason."
The bike drowsed.
"ZERO!"
"Huh? What? Sorry, was thinking about how miserable life is with a backseat driver."
Zero revved the engine and they went careening over the ramp onto the next section of highway. But Zero hit the brakes immediately, nudging the bike into two reploids spaced wide apart.
"You'd think they would all gather together in a group," Axl griped, counting with his own timer. At twenty seconds to go, he said, "Well, we rescued everyone, but we might as well scrap the mission and teleport back to base. We barely collected ten bombs out of the sixteen!"
"Can't. Teleporter's jammed in war zones, remember? We can only teleport once the boss is dead, because Mavericks keep the jamming device in their leaders."
"Then what the HELL are we going to do?" Axl cried. Zero pointed at his right handlebar.
"See the red button?"
"Yeah?"
"Push the red button."
Axl did so. Zero hunched forward, gripping the handlebars.
"Hang onto your fusion core, kid."
"Why?"
A shimmering blue haze surrounded the Ride Chaser.
"What's that?" asked the rookie.
"Forcefield. It prevents the vehicle from burning under atmospheric friction."
"Burning? That only happens to…"
A high-pitched whine emanated from the engines behind him. Axl stared wide-eyed as the Ride Chaser's hull split open and a pair of wing blades folded out on either side. Zero, puffing steadily away, cracked a grin at Axl in the rearview mirror.
"This is the twenty-second century, kid. Our bikes are multi-purpose."
Axl's hands locked around the sidebars as he experienced a thunder and acceleration that F-16 pilots of the twenty-first century endured, except they had been in mid-flight among clouds, not twelve inches off the hard, hard ground as he was now. The Ride Chaser sped along the highway trailing fire. Four seconds left.
"Six hundred kilometers per hour," Zero announced. He nosed the Ride Chaser into one bomb after the other with only the precision a machine can perform. Two seconds left.
"Eight hundred kilometers per hour."
Axl had happy thoughts about walking.
"One thousand. Brace yourself."
With a second remaining, Axl was not prepared. There was a moment of pure, pristine silence as they surpassed the sound barrier and the air itself gave way, and then the earth-shattering sonic boom. His audio sensors went offline. The servos in his arms overloaded. Axl clung onto the bike by sheer force of will. Zero picked up the last bomb with fractions of a second to spare, and the Ride Chaser took flight, leaving the highway far below in a shockingly small space of time. Floating through the clouds, the wind lashing Zero's hair into his face, Axl asked, "Do you do this for every war?"
Zero snorted, flicking away the dead ash of his cig.
"Heck, I do this on weekends just to piss X off and make him cry."
Axl's grin was the exuberance of youth itself.
"I want to be a Hunter when I grow up."
They passed the biker gang's layer below where Boarski was waiting.
"Hey, aren't we supposed to kill the boss?" Axl pointed. Zero grunted.
"You're right. Let's…"
Zero's helmet beeped.
"Hey, Zero, good news. Boarski's weapon is useless."
"Hmm? Hannah?" Zero frowned.
"Yeah, I took a poll in the GameFAQ forum, and everyone agrees your lightsaber does much, much more damage against bosses weak to the stupid wheel thing Boarski gives you."
"Oh. Thanks, Hanny."
Zero turned the bike around and headed back to Boarski's lair, but dropped into a nosedive.
"Zero? Are you trying to make us crash?" Axl gulped, pushing his fusion core back down his throat.
"Remember those bombs we picked up earlier?" Zero had a curious smile on his face. The Ride Chaser leveled out, and a compartment underneath it between the twin antigravity pads released the payload.
Three hundred feet below, Ride Boarski was running in circles around his cage arena.
"THOSE PUNKS! Why aren't they confronting me head-on? Ooooh! They make me so MAD!"
"Sir?" a grenade-throwing mechaniloid interrupted him, "Remember those bombs you made us plant along the highway?"
"Yeah?"
The mechaniloid pointed upward. Boarski looked up, and began yelling "YOU PUNK!" about twenty times in a row before the fiery explosive death meant for the Hunters greeted him in the face. Seeing as his weakness was the Circle Blaze (according to GameFAQ's, of course) this bomb payload atomized him.
"Carpet bombing. Crude, but effective," Axl commented.
"Whatever; his weapon was useless. Let's go home, kid," Zero said, dropping the butt of his cig into the flaming ruins below, guiding the Ride Chaser home.
888
Leaving Axl in the garage to scrub and polish the Ride Chaser, Zero managed to suck three cigs dry before he arrived at X's office and had to enter the No Smoking Zone that was Hannah. The latter wrinkled her nose at his smoky self.
"Ever heard of showering, Zero? It does wonders."
"What kind of wonders?" he yawned.
"The kinds that don't end up with you plastered to the wall by a fire hose."
Wincing, Zero asked, "Is X here?"
"No; he had to go outside to clean his litterbox."
"Not again? I thought the last war broke him out of that bad habit."
"Will you two stop insulting me?" X hissed from Hannah's desk console, "Send the Hindenburg in, Hanny."
"Right away. You heard the kitty; scat!"
The door swooshed opened to X's Spartan office. He had nothing in there but a desk, console and chair.
"Did I ever tell you how much your office makes my titanium crawl every time I walk inside?" Zero muttered, "It's like I'm visiting Lifesaver, and he has a Maverick shot waiting."
"You'll get worse than a Needle Saber in your backside if you pull a stunt like that again!" X glared at him. Zero held up his hands against the outburst.
"I completed the mission and saved every reploid, didn't I?"
"You destroyed two kilometers of highway!"
"The highway was inaccessible in the first place!" Zero sputtered in defense.
"I don't want to hear your excuses!" X yelled, slamming his palms on the table, causing the smooth metal desk to dent, "Use more discretion next time! The entire human population is watching!"
"You wouldn't be saying these things if you were DOING something!" Zero sneered as he walked out. He wished he could slam the door, but the blasted devices had been hijacked from the USS Enterprise. Hanny wisely kept quiet as the Red Ripper fired up another cig and went off to his next mission.