Author's Note: Sorry for the delay, guys! I just entered college, and it took a while to settle it and get stable. Anyway, here's an amazingly brief recap: Unaii is a bounty hunter who attacks Samus with the help of forces from the "Republic." Samus hijacks Unaii's ship only to be captured by a Space Pirate destroyer captained by an anti-republic rebel named Re-Kuluk, who seeks counsel with Samus. However, instead of a peaceful talk, Samus gets more of the same--a battle, which she loses, blacking out. After that, Unaii and Re-Kuluk have a discussion in which Kuluk explains that he needs Samus for his plans to dissolve the Republic (he also hints that he is working for Dark Samus), a plan that Unaii by default cannot go with, as he is immutably vegenful. This chapter begins with Samus waking up in the medical bay of hte Destroyer. Thanks for continued readership!

Chapter 6

Samus was in a storm.

Once, when she was a little girl, a rain clouds blackened out the sky over the Chozo colony. She ran for the deeper caverns of Zebes, but too late; the impetuous winds, wielding dirt and rain, had swallowed her, and all she could do was crumple on the surface, her eyes stinging, her mouth burning, the dirt scratching against her skin through her clothes. She wanted to escape the storm, but she was blind, she was immobile, she was too burdened by fear and anxiety to dare to twitch.

They had found her crying softly to herself. They had taken her up, cradled her on her arms, and infused her imperfect blood with their own. They armored her in a power suit to forever protect her against the harsh winds of their universe.

They gave her the Hunter.

A decade later, the storm wielded her memories. The screams of her parents stung at her eyes. The explosion of the Space Pirate facility still burned at her skin. A Space Pirate clawed at her limbs, bit her in the neck, threw her to a place next door to death. But these feelings were not supposed to exist. They had infused her with their blood. They had given her a suit. She was supposed to be impermeable.

The Hunter had left her. To show how much she needed it. And now, it was taking back control. Never again would she mistrust it, she told herself, never again.

And so, just as the Chozo wove their greater blood into her biological fabric, so did the Hunter infuse her with its rage. Unfettered, uncontaminated rage.

The bright blue lights of the medical bay burst into her vision. A shadow looming above her began to make muffled noises, but she tore herself away from the plank that was her bed. The azure tint of the room did nothing to calm her; if anything, it gave her an intense feeling of claustrophobia and anxiety.

She had to get out of this ship. Now. Her enemies surrounded her. Waited to pounce on her. She had been betrayed. She had slipped earlier—had let her emotions and her immature self-pity hijack her instincts—and now she was in center of the worst situation in her life. How could she ever mistrust the Hunter, the entity that had rescued her from her inhibitions, who had bravely destroyed the Space Pirate colony on Zebes, who had avenged the death of her Chozo guardians many times over? The Space Pirates had butchered women and children, too. The Hunter was only being fair, was only acting on the basic rules of reciprocation that applied to all sentient life. If those rules were neglected, what kind of state would the universe be in?

The ones that resisted went down first. A few of the unarmed ones made it beyond the doors; most did not. It was only fair to treat them all the same; how and why should she discriminate Space Pirates based on trivial physical characteristics? Healthy, infirmed, males, females, adults, children—they were all the same in the beginning and the end, and could therefore only be treated identically in the interim.

By the time she stepped from the medical bay, her smoking arm cannon warmed the hand within. Never again would she throw out these simply rules of justice of fairness. The Space Pirates had drew first blood. They had killed her mother and her father and the normal life that she should have lived. What did it matter that she was taking more than they had from her? She was merely winning the war that they started.

She bolted down the corridors, letting her fury guide each step, too engrossed by her tumultuous emotions and new trend of thoughts to be irritated by the alarms echoing throughout the ship. Most creatures that had the fate of encountering her fled into the nearest room, the doors hissing shut just as they were splashed with plasma from her arm cannon. But these were Space Pirates, beings who worshiped a distorted sense of honor more than any god. Those who had trouble balancing their fear with their pride were killed in their moments of hesitation. She left a sick path of them in her wake.

With a slight flick of her mental will, she pulled up a construction outline of Space Pirate destroyers on her inner visor. She reviewed it as she downed a group of security forces. Yes, there. The engineering bay. She was really going to do it. Her stride weakened at the thought, a certain repulsion touched her stomach.

But it was too late. She would not succumb to her foolish hesitations, her irrational inhibitions, as she had when she had spared Re-Kuluk's life. The Hunter was not a beast. Not an animal. She was a rightness. She was a glint of fairness in an unfair world. She was a principle that had stuck by Samus and kept her alive despite all her doubts and mistrust.

The ship was in the Hunter's storm.

--

Zebesians did not sleep—what Unaii, upon learning the varied states of consciousness of human minds, had always considered it a compensation for the shorter Zebesian lifespan—but sometimes, albeit rarely, when free from their grueling work and zealous training, they took a silent, sometimes cogitative, moment to be by themselves. To, perhaps, examine the stars.

Her eyes had been like stars. Like two stars, radiating from the blackness, without any kind of purpose, any kind of activeness or agenda, but with the passivity with which stars burn.

He imagined what it would have been like if she had been with him, then. What the conversation would be like.

"Unaii" the conversation would have gone. "You are a fool."

"Why? Because I seek to right a wrong? Because I seek to put the universe into balance?"

"Is this how you balance a universe? Do you balance something by adding more to the heavier side?"

He would have been stupefied, as he had always been by such misleadingly simplistic statements. There would have been silence. He would have tried to find a way to say, "I love you." But there was no word for "love" in Zebesian.

Damn my people, he thought.

An alarm went on outside. He did not have to guess the cause.

He slid a pulse gun appendage over his right arm. A claw over his left. He had retrieved both from his ship. The claw appendage was simple enough, but the pulse cannon had been his final invention, designed solely for this vendetta. Injected with a anti-atomic core, a single pulse could cut through any material armor in the universe. Including Chozo armor.

"Unaii…" she would have begun.

"I'm going to avenge you."

"And so you sacrifice one honor for another. One is for our people. One is for yourself. You really are a fool."

"I am doing this for you."

"Do you think I really care right now? You, once a scientist, and among scientists once the most rationale—you, who alone nixes the beliefs of our people, seeing only emptiness where others see heaven—do you honestly think I care what you do in my name?"

He looked once again at the weapons. They wrapped around his arms like casts.

"I am not a scientist anymore." He rose.

"Stay," she hissed, curtly, looking with those eyes, the eyes that burned like two bright stars, adding guilt to the void that his apostasy had created and his obsession had deepened.

But that void was too deep. No memory, no imagined tableau, and no emotions precipitated thereby could even begin to fill it.

"No."

--

Samus took a breath. Before her, the warp core was a prism of colors as narrow as her arm.

By now, the situation had enervated her anger. Security teams became squads became regiments, and she found herself in increasingly tighter encounters. Instead of simply plowing through the next force, she retraced her steps and took alternate routes. Now that she was forced to cognitively assess her immediate actions, she found herself more discouraged to execute her overall plan. But the Hunter was recalcitrant, and when Samus finally blasted through the door to the engineering bay, she knew there would be no turning back.

The engineers had evacuated the area. She would have killed them all. Paradoxically, some part of her felt relieved that they had left.

But of course she was relieved that they had all evacuated. If they hadn't, she would have expended valuable time butchering them before proceeding.

The engineering bay, a rectangular facility, was sundered by a deep gorge—the spacious conduit of the warp prism, which stretched imperceptibly downwards into the bowels of the ship. The gap was bisected by a railed bridge that bypassed the prism to the right, and upon the bridge, before the prism, was the prime terminal. Her target. Or, rather, her means.

She approached it, walking slowly upon the bridge. Her internal computer detected the security protocols that could only be bypassed by the captain and chief engineer, or whatever he was called among Space Pirates. Unsurprisingly, the aged destroyer did not tout the refined encryption algorithms of its more contemporary counterparts; with a flick of her thoughts, she disabled those protocols, hacked into the system, and injected the prism with more antimatter. She felt the ship around her suddenly jerked forward as it achieved this unusually high speed. Perfect. Now all she had to do w—

A door slid open on one side of the bay, she crouched but did not move. A force of heavily armed Zebesian commandos dived into the bay with the Space Pirate's characteristic lack of uniformity. They trained their guns on her. She readied herself.

"Hold," barked Re-Kuluk, pushing two commandos aside as he stormed into the bay, the warp prism reflecting off of the core of his red phazon suit. He eyed Samus. She stood tall, her arm cannon stretched in front of her, meeting the crosshairs of her opponents with her own. This encounter with Re-Kuluk would not be like her last.

A few moments passed of extremely awkward silence as she stared them down. A glint of mania jolted through Samus' mind as she realized that she had been in this situation too many times before.

"Are we play this game forever?" she said brazenly, addressing the whole crowd, though knowing that none of them could understand her.

"Ishuk kul-kana amal eh tek," said Re-Kuluk.

The chill that splintered Samus' spine disrupted her aim.

"I want peace, hunter," he had said.

He was speaking Zebesian. And she was understanding it.

His eyes brightened with excitement. "I added technology to your suit to make our negotiations go more smoothly."

She scoffed, hiding her bafflement and anger. "Negotiations?" she hissed. It took a few seconds to realize that she had just spoken Zebesian. Again, she hid her amazement. "You tried to kill me." The words slipped off her lips as easily as the Federation language did. How?

"You misunderstood me, Hunter."

"I think I know when one of your kind is trying to kill me."

"It is a tradition, among surzaks, to confirm each other's ferocity on their first meetings. It is a ritual that is often abused when a more powerful surzak dislikes another—no one can be blamed if one surzak is weak enough to be killed by the other. But I wasn't trying to kill you. No. I need you."

The term surzak stood out to her. Her conception of it, she found, was vague. It roughly translated to "deity."

"Surzak?"

"A creature of power. One they will follow unquestionably." He looked to his troops around him. "A warrior, an overlord, a being that commands absolute loyalty—the top of an unbreakable hierarchy that has kept us alive for centuries."

"But I am no leader of your people."

"But you could be," he gestured to his troops. "They are afraid of you, Hunter, and the fear of a Space Pirate is the respect of a Space Pirate. They have heard of your deeds."

Their eyes bore on her listlessly.

"They have seen—some personally, others imaginatively, a few in their nightmares—they have seen the fires that burn in your spirit. They have seen you battle Ridley himself when you could have been a coward and fled. No, they would follow you. If you would only move in the right direction."

"What direction is that? The burning of planets? The torching of innocent men and women and children?"

"Those are not things you are unaccustomed to."

"Your people struck my people first. I'm just returning what you dealt."

"You are just like that fool, Unaii. All you care about is the past. What of the future—a future that concerns both our people?"

"My vision of the future doesn't include your damned people."

"Then we will do this forever. There are too many of us. And you refuse to die. What is the point to it all, Hunter? We will do this forever."

"Perhaps not, Re-Kuluk," said a voice from behind. Samus spun. Unaii stood in the doorway of the other side of the engineering bay, his own arm cannon—a rare type that she had never encountered before—trained on her. "All it takes is a little adaptation. After all, failure to adapt means failure to survive."

"Unaii, leave this fight for another day," Re-Kuluk growled. "The liberation of our people takes precedence over your sightless blood-hunger!"

"Do you know how I got here, Kuluk? I followed the path of our dying brethren. How many more must die before your sensibility overtakes your damned naivety?" He eyed the troops, gauging how his words had affected them. Nothing yet.

"You will fail if you are trying to break the loyalty of my warriors. You forget that I am a surzak."

"Of course. A surzak, one they will follow unquestionably. But will they? I could tell by the variety of the ships from your hanger alone that these pirates are from all clans, which means they've tossed aside loyalty before. Our species may have a haunting cohesiveness, but we are sometimes willing to suspend our sense of solidarity for the purpose of individual welfare. You yourself said you split from the rest of the clans as they merged with this new Republic. No, we are all renegades here."

The commandos twitched, slightly. To Unaii, that was a huge sign that he was getting to them. It did not hurt that Re-Kuluk seemed to be cooperating—or, at least trying to—with Samus Aran, an entity they had all been conditioned to despise.

That entity, meanwhile, was using this opportunity to code a warp fluid injection sequence that would give her enough time to get off this ship and too little time for them to stop it.

Re-Kuluk, rendered oblivious by the heated argument, sensed the sudden wavering of his people, too, and grew furious. "Do not be seduced by a few well-placed words!" he spat to them. "I am offering you a future! He is offering you death! Do not let it slip from your puny minds that this is the same coward that, in his fear, refused to fight Ridley, a fellow surzak, in the Apocalypse Room on Zebes, as tradition dictates! And now he is nothing. Not a surzak. Not a warrior. A coward, an obsessed rebel, a heathen who would let his personal agenda override the welfare of his race!"

Unaii knew that he had hit on some points, but realized Re-Kuluk, calling on their adamant convictions regarding authority and honor, had reaffirmed all the objections of his people.

Seeking no other alternative, Unaii brandished his arm attachment at Samus.

"Don't do—"

"Your plan failed, Re-Kuluk."

Samus activated the injection sequence.

"I will kill—"

"Not before I kill her."

"Think about—"

"What in all of the universe have I to lose, you fool?"

He fired. The ship suddenly jerked forward with such violence that everyone stumbled. Samus fell backwards, hitting the railing of the bridge, as a globe of energy bolted past her face before exploding into several Space Pirates beyond. The close encounter left her feeling suddenly vitiated, as if the bolt had drained her suit as it swept past. Tiny bursts of light appeared all over her body as her dampened suit partially dematerialized.

She was burning. She was blind.

She flipped, backwards. Over the railing. Into the abyss.