II
Tseng lay across a console, feeling the uneven metal surface growing sticky with his blood.
It was all he could do to stay conscious and watch as Cloud strolled through the control room, prodding at buttons and looking at gauges. WRO soldiers lay dead all around him, hacked or burned or blown apart.
He had told Elena to stay on the top floor and guard the board members. It was the one thing he'd been able to do right.
"You won't find it," he managed to groan.
Cloud looked over his shoulder. "Oh. You're not dead." He said it in a detached, academic tone.
"Not quite yet," Tseng chuckled, immediately regretting it as pain flashed through him. "I'm old, but I'm not useless yet."
"Just stay there, then. I don't want to have to kill you."
Tseng watched Cloud continue to prowl around for a minute before he spoke again. "I told you that you won't find it. You might as well give up."
"I know you kept it," Cloud said. "Yuffie told me that much. So I will find it, even if I have to tear the building apart to do it." He cocked his head. "The board members are here, right? For a dinner party or something. Maybe one of them will know."
"We haven't even looked at it in years," Tseng hissed. "The project's shut down. Nobody's left who could help you."
He felt an involuntary shudder run through him as Cloud focused on him. "No," the blonde said. "I'm thinking there's one person who's left."
Tseng began to hyperventilate with pain as Cloud hauled him up by his shoulder, aggravating the deep chest wound he'd given him. Face impassive, Cloud pulled him over to a console that still functioned and slapped his hand down on the thumbprint reader.
"Ask it," Cloud said.
"You know I can't do that," Tseng replied.
Cloud blinked. "Ask it," he repeated himself, his tone unchanging, "or I'll find Elena, and I'll make her ask it. I don't want to, but I will if I have to."
"If you go through with this she's dead anyway," Tseng gasped.
"No," the blonde said with a pained smile. "Somebody might still stop me. So the question you need to ask is, do you ask the computer and gamble on that maybe happening, or do you do nothing and know that I will find Elena and do what I have to do?"
Tseng stared into the man's glowing eyes and saw nothing but resignation and detachment. He knew that look.
It was the look of a man who was marching willingly toward death.
"Central," Tseng croaked. "Give me the location of Project Terminus."
The computer chimed that Project Terminus was located in the subbasement, section A16, and that it was under Code Omega classification and access restrictions. A far corner of Tseng's mind noted how utterly appropriate that designation was.
"Thank you," Cloud said. He let Tseng drop to the floor.
Back in the security center, Tseng's access of restricted data was instantly reported and analyzed. A signal went out to all WRO personnel in the city, ordering them to ignore the devastation and chaos caused by Barret's explosives and return to the WRO Tower. It was a Black Alert.
The WRO was at war.
With one man.
The troops within the tower piled into the access corridors. Power had been cut to all the elevators, so the intruder had no choice but to take the long way down to his destination.
Their orders were clear: delay Cloud Strife's descent by whatever means possible, at any cost.
The first black-ops division took up position at a hallway intersection, killed the lights, donned their light-gathering goggles. They were trained, they were prepared, and they had the advantage of position and numbers.
Until they heard him singing.
In a low, unpracticed voice, Cloud Strife sang quietly to himself as he walked, the First Tsurugi trailing sparks along the floor.
"The minstrel boy to the war is gone, in the ranks of death you will find him…"
One of the new recruits, a young woman by the name of Katrina, sucked in a sharp breath of air at the sound.
A moment later, she took a Blade Beam to the torso.
"His father's sword he hath girded on, and his wild harp slung behind him."
The rest of the unit opened fire. The First Tsurugi whirled about in a lethal spray of metal, glowing with spirit energy, sending bullets flying and ricocheting wildly through the corridor. The glow of it overloaded their goggles; Johnson swore and ripped his off. A moment later he had a shortsword buried in his chest; Cloud had pulled it from his blade and hurled it even as he continued deflecting bullets.
"'Land of song!' said the warrior bard, though all the world betray thee…"
He was suddenly on them, the narrow space not making a damn bit of difference as Cloud cleaved his sword straight through the metal walls on its way to his targets. Blood sprayed in a fine red mist, superheated by the spirit energy cascading up and down the First Tsurugi. Almost offhandedly, Cloud pulled the shortsword out of Johnson's chest.
"One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard, one faithful harp shall praise thee."
The enormous, armored door in front of him said A16 in large, block letters. Underneath that was the symbol for Omega.
He blew the door apart with a Blade Beam and stepped through into the darkness.
The interior of the room hummed with a quiet rhythm, rising and falling, but not mechanical enough to be a bellows or hydraulics; it was tremulous, sometimes uncertain. Like breathing.
Cloud felt for a switch, found it. The lights came on at his command, and he was suddenly looking at Project Terminus.
It hadn't started life as a WRO creation. He remembered glimpsing its obscene angles and shuddering valves in the background of the video feed the radicals had transmitted to Reeve. The sickly-green glow of the thing's heart permeated its entire breadth, greased metal and pulsing pipes glistening wetly. It was not housed in section A16; it was section A16.
He felt the weight in the breast pocket of his coat. It was not a large thing he carried, but it weighed heavily on him, more heavily than the First Tsurugi.
"It's disgusting, isn't it?"
Cloud turned to look at the other man. "It is," he agreed. "And you kept it anyway."
Vincent Valentine, WRO trashman and immortal enforcer, stepped through the ruins of the armored door. "To try to understand it," he said. "You know that the knowledge contained in this thing could provide key breakthroughs for us in medicine and ecological management. Dr. Aleph was unbalanced, but he understood things that nobody else did. Reverse-engineering even one aspect…"
"If it was so damn useful, why did you go to such extreme lengths to make sure it was never used?" Cloud demanded. "You were willing to destroy it before you let the Sons of Weiss activate it." He closed his eyes. "You were willing to sacrifice your friends to stop it."
Vincent stood there for a moment in stony silence. "That's not fair, Cloud," he finally said. "Once it had been stopped, there was no more need to destroy it if it was protected. We could study it, we could –"
"You refused their demands for the Protomateria and they killed Tifa for it!" Cloud snarled, cutting him off. "You let her die, and then you let it sit in a basement for fifteen Goddamn years and didn't learn a single thing from it!"
"What were we supposed to do?" Vincent demanded. "Give the Protomateria to them? Let them activate it? Cloud, you know what could happen!"
"That's why I'm here," Cloud said, reaching into his coat. He drew out the glowing orb, a galaxy of illuminated pinpoints sparkling inside it. "I'm going to turn it on."
"You'll kill everyone," Vincent snapped. "I can't let you do this, Cloud."
"Just like you couldn't let me go in and save her? You, and Red, and Reeve, and the Turks, talking about 'not negotiating with terrorists' and the 'greater good.' She was my wife, Vincent! She was my everything. What the hell would you do if it had been Yuffie in there?"
Vincent's eyes went narrow and his expression venomous at that barb. "The same thing," he said.
"That's the difference between you and me," Cloud said, slipping the Protomateria back into his coat. "That's why I'm going to turn on this Terminus thing."
"I can't let you do that."
"I know you can't. But I have to do this. This is the only way I can see Tifa again."
He saw Vincent freeze. "No."
Cloud nodded. "It's terminal, Vincent."
They stood there in silence for a minute, the only sound the susurrus of the machine's breath. "I thought the Great Gospel eliminated the stigma," Vincent finally said.
"The mako treatments from the SOLDIER program made the JENOVA cells mutate and reassert themselves," Cloud told him. "I'm the only person left alive who'd ever have this particular problem. My spirit energy's corrupted, Vincent. I won't rejoin the Lifestream when I die. After everything we went through, the Planet's going to cut me off like a diseased limb. I'll never see Tifa again. So I have to turn on the machine."
"That's not fair," Vincent said again.
Cloud shook his head. "Of course it isn't. It's unfair, and arbitrary, and stupid. I saved the damn world, Vincent, and this is my big payoff." He raised the First Tsurugi until it pointed square at his old comrade. "So everyone got a few extra decades. Great. It'll all just be the same in the end, Vincent. Just like if I lost that day. Better, even. You ever stop and think this thing might be an improvement?"
"No, I don't," Vincent growled, laying a hand on Cerberus. "Because it's not my job to think about that. It's my job to keep the WRO safe, and to do that I need to stop you from turning on Project Terminus. So I'll say it again: I can't let you do this, Cloud." He drew the massive handgun, leveled it at Cloud's head. "A lot of good men and women died to buy me the time to get here and stop you."
With a sad, tired smile, Cloud observed, "I always did wonder if I could take you in a fight."
"Guess we're going to find out."
He squeezed the trigger.