Axl reeled in the anchor while Zero stood on the prow of their rowboat, a pipe in his jaw, an eye patch over one eye, and a Z-Saber where his right arm had been. He was staring out over the limitless blue ocean, puffing bitter tobacco into the sky.
"What're we looking for, Zero?" Axl asked, checking on the sails.
"Call me captain!" Zero barked.
"Uh… captain, why are we using a rowboat? What happened to the teleportation device?"
"Axl, as me first mate, ye have t' understand that th' sea turns boys into men, and men into salty men! And what salty men understand is that ye don't catch yer prey by teleportin' into th' middle of the ocean. Ye have t' look fer it."
"Or drop a purified hydrogen bomb in its general vicinity."
"Aye, there's that," Zero agreed with a nod and a puff, "But if ye want to be a salty man ye have to be there, with th' currents pullin' yeh down into the bottomless deep, grappling th; big catch with both your hands…"
"What happened to your arm, anyway? Don't tell me X tore it off? And what's with that eye patch?"
"Don't question th' captain!" Zero barked again, "You're me first mate, not me wife!"
"Once I'm not your cabin boy," was Axl's sour reply, and then he pointed in the distance, "Look, Z- captain!"
Zero pulled out a telescope.
"Thar she blows!"
A few hundred yards from their rowboat, Splash Warfly had surfaced, blowing a steady stream of water into the air.
"It's the blue fly! Quick, boy, use this harpoon!" the salty captain ordered, detaching his Z-Saber arm to give Axl. It was attached to Zero's shoulder by a length of cable. Axl stared at the Z-Harpoon, at Zero, at Warfly, shrugged, and tossed the damn thing. It struck Warfly cleanly, but the Red Alert reploid dove underwater again.
"Hold me pipe, boy, I'm goin' in after it!" Zero cried, dumping the pipe and lump of burning tobacco onto Axl's lap. The latter yelped and danced about on the rowboat while the cable attached to the Z-Harpoon yanked the captain clear out of his boots and into the deep. Dragged at terrific speeds into the ocean, Zero used his free hand to inch along the cable while Warfly thrashed and swam deeper and deeper. They left the sunlight behind, and only the Z-Harpoon lit their way to the unfathomable abyss. When Zero was close enough to his catch, he grabbed onto the cable with his teeth, and used his hand to reach behind his back to draw another Z-Saber. With the ocean churning and crushing into him, Zero stabbed at the heart of the beast just as he lost consciousness from the intense water pressure.
He awoke with none other but X looking at him. He sat up in the rowboat, ignored X and barked at Axl, "What of the big catch, me boy?"
X and Axl gestured. Zero looked over the edge of the boat to see Splash Warfly's body lashed to the prow with rope. Zero let out a hoot of victory.
"I caught him! I caught the blue fly!"
"Yeah, and X came along to fish you out of the Marianas Trench."
Zero squinted at X, who offered him his pipe and asked, "Permission to come aboard, captain?"
Zero took back his pipe and lifted the eye patch to reveal a perfectly good eye.
"Permission granted."
888
X, Zero and Axl walked into the lounge.
"FINALLY!" Hannah cried, throwing up her arms, game controller flying, "You blockheads are working together again!"
"Yeah, I think we should kick Axl out of the team. All in favour?" Zero asked, raising a hand.
"HEY!" Axl said, "Both of us collected all the upgrades so far, Zero! X hasn't collected any! He doesn't have the Quick Charge or Triple Barrier or anything!"
Zero snapped his fingers.
"Hey, the kid's right! I vote X off the team."
X bequeathed to Zero a boot to the head.
"Hanny," X said, counting off his fingers, "we've ploughed through five Red Alert members so far…"
"What's this 'we' business?" Axl snorted, "Me and Zero did all the work!"
"You mean I did all the work," Zero corrected him. Axl pouted and folded his arms, looking away. Hannah read her copy of Electronic Gaming Monthly.
"Says here the Cyberworld's next, so load up on your antivirus and spam filters before Alia magically uploads you to the Internet."
"Yay, I get to use the Internet!" Axl cheered. X and Zero cocked invisible eyebrows and looked at each other.
"New to the Internet much?" Zero wondered.
"Does he have any idea what he's in for?" X asked.
"Hey, I'm standing right here!" Axl whined, "What's so terrible about this Internet? I hear it's a neat place where you can email and chat and play games!"
There was the audible sound of everyone else in the room slapping their foreheads.
"Alert the trolls, we have a noob on our hands," Zero muttered.
"Will he even survive the initial shock?" X groaned.
"Just keep him away from all the popups and email attachments," Hannah warned, "I already spent the last month cleaning up HQ's mainframe because X thought he really had won a million dollars."
888
They were teleported into a fantastic world of hyperlinks and TCP Internet protocols.
"Hey, why am I rendered with so few polygons?" Zero protested, "What kind of hack program are you using, Alia?"
"Sorry, guys, your online avatars are the best I could do on my coffee break."
"You don't drink cof… you know what, let's move on," Zero sighed, grabbing X away from the shiny allure of a 'national lottery' popup. Axl, however, was rooted to the spot.
"Zero," he said in a faraway voice, "why are there so many pictures of naked humans?"
"Because, Axl, humanity lusts after its own flesh," Zero replied.
"Whuh?" Axl cocked his head to one side, still staring at all the naked humans.
"Shall we tell him, X?" Zero enquired.
"Let's," X agreed, and both Hunters cleared their voice generation systems.
"The Internet is for porn," they sang.
"Huh?" Axl blinked.
"The Internet is for porn," they clicked their heels, "So grab your d-"
"Mouse," X interjected. Zero shook his head.
"That's not the word in the song."
"Not in front of the child," X warned him. Zero spread his hands to encompass the plethora of pornography already floating in front of Axl's eyes. X shrugged.
"Point taken," he said, and they continued the chorus, "So grab your dick and double-click for porn, porn, porn!"
Axl clapped as X and Zero took a bow.
"I don't have a dick, though," Axl said. The Hunters patted him on the head.
"That explains a lot," they said simultaneously.
888
The trio found Snipe Anteator (yes, that is how his name is spelt) sitting on HQ's Internet pipeline; the virtual representation of Maverick Hunter HQ's connection between their intranet and the World Wide Web. The Red Alert member was sitting on the top of the translucent, glowing blue cylinder, staring at the vast cornucopia of pornography that stretched into infinity.
"Decadence," he said, dribbling from one corner of his mouth, "Human decadence. I never thought it would be so… alluring…"
"Old man?" Axl called to him, but the aged reploid never broke his gaze from his porn collection.
"I was sent here to destroy Maverick Hunter HQ's connection to the Internet, effectively blocking most of their communications, but I was… distracted."
"'An old man is a nasty thing,'" Zero quoted, "Now I know why Hemingway said that; he was a prophet."
"I don't understand," X frowned, "How could a reploid be sexually attracted to… anything, for that matter?"
"It's not a sexual attraction," Anteator drawled, "I have lived a long life of fighting battle after battle. I even participated in the last six wars before this one. I thought I had seen the worst both humanity and reploids had to offer… until Red sent me on this mission."
The old reploid wiped the drool from his mouth.
"Here I see the future of humanity. A future dedicated to decadence and debauchery, a future without rhyme or reason, devoid of morals and ethics. Here I see the true face of our creators! If our creators have fallen into such abysmal ways, then our fate, as their created creatures, will be even more awful!I have lost the will to fight. Kill me now, before I lose my mind completely."
X and Zero walked up to Snipe Anteator. They raised their weapons in one hand each, but used their other hands to touch his old shell. X's ruby oval forehead gem and Zero's sapphire triangular one came to dazzling life, multiple facets glimmering as Anteator's DNA data was downloaded and relayed to their internal circuits.
"We will not slay you," X said, "You see only one side of humanity."
"Yeah, put some filters on your search engine, for God's sake, and I don't even believe in God," Zero sneered. They walked back to Axl.
"Where's my weapon?" the kid demanded. Zero held two fingers to his own forehead gem, and then thumbed Axl's large, round sapphire forehead gem. Axl's gem and his emerald eyes lit up with the data transfer, outlining his internal and external circuits with neon lights.
"You now have Anteator's DNA data," X explained.
"Whoa… that felt… weird!" Axl said, swaying slightly, eyes unfocused.
"And that, my boy, is how reploids have sex," Zero said, clapping Axl on the shoulder. Axl threw Zero's arm off.
"EWW! You just had sex with me!?" the kid sputtered, scrubbing his forehead gem with both hands. X and Zero burst into uproarious laughter.
"Alright, that's enough, guys, head on home before you traumatize the kid any further," Alia's exasperated – but slightly amused – voice said, as she returned them to the real world.
888
While Axl went to take a very hot shower, X and Zero had a little talk on the parapet overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
"So why'd you decide to come back?" Zero asked, leaning against the railing, casting his eyes over the endless blue.
"After you destroyed my office, I read through my comic book collection. There's this graphic novel, 'The Death of Superman' where a high school student asked Superman if caving in someone's head was the only way to work things out," X recounted, sitting on the railing with both boots dangling over the edge, "Superman replied that he really wished that violence wasn't necessary, but that 'violence is the price we pay to accomplish a greater good.'"
"'As heroes, we choose to protect that good,'" Zero finished the quotation for him. They smiled at each other. They had gone to hell and back several times together.
"Will we end up like Superman? Killed in action?" X wondered, looking to the horizon, "Will Red, or Sigma, or some other foe be our doom?"
"Superman came back to life. I died a few times. We're not like him, X; we can be rebuilt better and stronger every time we're destroyed."
"I've never died," X said, eyes distant, "At least, I don't remember dying like you did."
"It's no less meaningful when a hero dies for a cause they believe in," Zero shrugged, "Whether the hero is fully human like Batman, an alien like Superman, or not even classified as living creatures, like us. Heroes uphold the same ideal: what we fight for is much bigger than us."
"You sound like a self-help booklet," X snorted. Zero kicked him off the railing.
"That's for quoting Kefka on me when I'm trying to be serious," Zero called after him.
"As soon as I recover from this four thousand foot fall, I'm gonna kick your ass!" X yelled as he fell. Axl walked out of the base to the railing beside Zero, sniffling a little.
"I feel dirty," Axl said, voice cracking.
"Walk it off," Zero advised, popping a fresh cig as he returned to the base proper.