Upon Zero's return to base with Totten, the biggest and best hacker elf, Ciel took the opportunity to counterattack him.

"There's nothing wrong with granny underwear! It's a lot more comfortable than thongy lacey things!"

"Oh, so that's why those redheads on guard duty always look so pissed. I'll have to get their numbers."

Ciel turned pinker than usual. Zero walked over to her bedroom door, stuck out his hand, and the contraption swooshed open. He sent an accusing stare at the scientist.

"Guess who lets "A" ranks into her room as well?"

Ciel turned from pink to red, looking away. Meanwhile, Zero inclined his head to access Totten's memory file.

"What do you do, little guy?"

"I'm a girl!" said the voice in his head, "I help you in the damage zone."

"What does that mean? Invincibility? Less damage?"

"No, there are other cyber elves for those things. I get rid of all the spikes you come across."

"Whoa! Really? I'm going to raise you right away!"

"What! I heard what you did to Nuppie from the other cyber elves in here!"

"So? That's your reason for existing!"

"Give me to Ciel!"

"Ciel's already a hacker! She doesn't need help! Look, take these energy crystals…"

Of the nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine crystals he carried on his person (don't ask where; nobody really knows) he gave three thousand five hundred to Totten, watching her grow from a nerd with glasses to a witch with an X marking on her face.

"Oh, no! He's going to bite my head off!" squealed Totten, freeing herself from Zero's databank parameters in a desperate bid to fly off.

"Hey! Come back here!"

He lunged and grabbed the witch-elf. Ciel shrieked.

"Hacker elves don't work that way!"

"What?" Zero grumbled, "But my health bar increased after I ate Nuppie!"

"Ahhh! Save me!" Totten mewled, fluttering in futility.

"She must be set free to hack into the enemy's trap systems! You don't eat her!"

"Bah! Why must you always be right?"

Zero tossed Totten away. The world became distorted for a few seconds, and then resumed focus. Totten disappeared in a blue shower of sparkles. Zero blinked.

"What was that?"

"She died doing her duty," was Ciel's sour reply, "I don't appreciate your cyber-elf abuse. You need therapy."

"Didn't I tell you…?"
"I know what you said! But cyber-elves can be used in non-selfish ways, you know! Nuppie could have been used to heal all our injured reploids while Totten could have helped me crack the security system of Neo Arcadia's Trans Server!"

"What good would that have done?"

"X is at Neo Arcadia's core!" Ciel flung up her hands in despair, "How are we going to get to him if not by Trans Server? Neo Arcadia is surrounded by a Pantheon army!"

"Don't worry, Ciel, something will come up," Zero assured her, "For now, I have more missions, don't I?"

Ciel shook her head.

"You're impossible. But there is some data stored where we first met…"

888

Return to that dingy, old place. Zero knew he was older than this building. It had been built ­around him, to protect him, or… to protect others from him. For an ancient machine, he possessed too much power. Wasn't technology supposed to advance? Why were the contemporary machines so shoddy and ill-formed? And then there was his memory – his identity was gone.

Why? What event in his past could merit identity erasure? Had he been a tyrant, like this Megaman X? Ciel did say he had fought with X, but this business of X going to the dark side just didn't sit well with Zero.

"Why were you built?" Zero asked the ancient, ruined computers, sparing a glance at the monitor where the blue core had appeared and given him his Z-Saber. That core had expected him.

"I'm so confused, but I have focus," Zero resigned himself to that fact, and kicked up the pit from whence he and Ciel had fallen earlier.

"Whoa! Where did these come from?"

Rotating electrical traps blocked the way. Shooting them and slashing didn't work, so he was forced to time his jumps.

"You'd think X would make all his troops with the same metal as those traps," Zero sneered, climbing from the pit. More of those sadistic traps, shock stick Pantheons, floating bombs and spiders greeted him, but there was something else: gun turrets that crawled along the ceiling and shot not two, not three, but one bullet at a time! At the end of the stage, where he was born, he found a giant anthropomorphic elephant in reploid form.

"My name is Maha Ganeshariff. I am the data collector for Neo Arcadia!"

"Genius!" Zero exclaimed, "I would never think of lumbering zombies and retarded gun turrets to guard data!"

"If you want the data I downloaded here, you'll have to destroy me!"

"You know what, elephant man? You don't deserve my personal attention. I'll let this odd anime character from 4chan handle it."

"What are you…"

Dio Brando, screaming in Japanese, flew through the door to smash Maha Ganeshariff into the floor with a bright yellow steamroller. After punching the steamroller into the floor (as if killing the boss once wasn't enough) he stood on top the steamroller and roared with primal fury, "WRYYYYYYY!"

Brando then picked up his steamroller and left, presumably to find a bar. Zero touched the mush that was the boss and acquired the relevant data. Just then, the ceiling began to fall in sections, one at a time, edging nearer to where Zero stood.

"Oh, wow. A timed self-destruct sequence. When will they ever learn to do it all at once?"

Zero didn't even need to try that hard. Blast doors closed in his face, but he ripped through them with charged blows, navigating the broken terrain without incident.

"No enemies to stand in my way? I guess they acquired common sense and fled."

He landed at the bottom of the pit.

"Zero! Zero! Are you all right?"

"Yes."

"Cerveau can decrypt the data you found! Return to base!"

"You say that like I have somewhere else to go."

888

Upon return to base he made a beeline to the mad scientist and was rewarded with the Triple Rod.

"You can attack in eight directions with this, even downwards!"

Zero jumped, aimed downwards with the rod, and bounced off the floor with the energy blade. He grinned.

"Look! I can pogo!" Zero demonstrated this by bouncing off all the equipment in the lab, forcing Cerveau to flee before the place exploded.

"Ahhh! My life's work!" the Frenchman screeched.

"It's okay, I'm still alive!" Zero sang, bouncing onto the elevator and breaking it in two.

"Oopsie!"

Cerveau held his head and wailed.

"Arrrgghhhh!"

888

"Zero!"

"What?"

"Get down from there!"

Zero had been enjoying himself immensely with the Triple Rod. He could jam the thing into walls and hang off it, including the ceiling.

"But I'm as free as a monkey!"

"You look like one! Get down!" Ciel ordered. Zero unstuck the rod from the ceiling and landed. The command centre was pockmarked all over.

"Look at what you did! Cerveau has to repair everything now!"

"Aaaarrrghhhh!" was the mad scientist's howl all the way at the bottom of the elevator shaft.

"He has issues," Zero shrugged. Ciel smacked her forehead.

"Never use that in the base again!"

"But…"

"Just use it during your missions! That's what it was MADE for!'

"But I don't wanna!" he whined.

"That's too bad. Look, I have another mission for you!"

"Jesus, woman, when will it end? Send me to Neo Arcadia!"

"Do you want to be killed? I told you there's an army!"

Zero folded his arms.

"Psh. Not like it's stopped me before."

"Don't get ahead of yourself. Start small, at least?"

Zero sighed.

"Fine. I'm already the walking dead. What's the worst that could happen?"