MEGA MAN ZERO: SHADOWS OF A HUNTER

A Novelette by Eric "Erico" Lawson

End of The Dreamless Sleep

April 9th, 2220

Southeast Asia

Lost Ruins

There had been darkness. Calming, overwhelming darkness. It had been comforting to him, pushed away all his thoughts and memories. The pain, the guilt, and the weariness had once left him.
And then came light. A part of him reacted violently to the intrusion; it shattered his silence, pushed away his darkness and left him screaming, clawing at the shining warmth.
No, not again...please, just let me die...let me sleep...
It ignored his pleas. A shrill cry pierced through the noise, ringing hard in his ears. What little consciousness he had been able to bring back to bear was torn apart...shredded in a blink as the light, once blinding, consumed him as fully as the darkness had.
He had...known things once, he had. His past. His pain. His own demise.
All was torn from him, and the darkness vanished.
Still, a part of him whimpered, even as what he was, his memories and very spirit were crushed in front of him.
Not like this...It wasn't supposed to be like this...

The darkness left him. A twitching, spasming sensation ran through his body, from head to toe, leaving him trembling for a moment.
Inside of him, systems long deactivated began to power up. A hand came up and pressed against his chest...
No hole was there. His power core was intact. He blinked a few times...But...No, it was too fuzzy.
For just a moment, he saw a flickering image...of a man in red with long yellow hair, dying on the ground, nothing but a legless and one armed torso watching the world collapse around him.
His eyes narrowed...no, that was wrong. He shook his head. Was...had...it been him?
His head was pounding, trying desperately to forge connections to things and people he somehow knew...but could not remember.
Feverishly, with increasing panic, his hand reached up and over his shoulder, trying to grasp at something. An instinct, really...one honed by training and experience he couldn't recollect.
His hand closed over empty air.
And that was when he finally paused long enough to acknowledge the presence of another person nearby. The shivering and trembling was what drew his eyes.
It was the glow in her eyes, the way her hair cascaded behind her back, and the gentle, but terrified tone of her voice that kept him from wandering back into the recesses of his brain.
"Zero..." She choked out, eyes streaked with tears. "Zero, help me. Please."
...Zero...Zero?? He thought feverishly for a moment, unbelievingly. But somehow, a fraction of a second later, he knew it to be true. He couldn't remember it. He couldn't compare it. But somewhere, within the pit of his electric soul, it felt right.
More movement caught his eye. He looked beyond the young woman who had begged for his help...only to see a marching row of blue robotic figures with single red eyes in their heads coming towards them.
His eyes fell to the floor, covered in water that came up to his knees. He stared around...and found ruins. A dilapidated structure which had seen far better days.

Somehow, it was familiar to him...but familiarity had to wait.
He caught his reflection in the water, stunned as he looked at himself.
Zero.
He seemed...different. But everything was different, and nothing, outside of his name felt right.
The blue figures came closer, and the blond haired girl in pink clothing screamed in terror, running behind him. In response, they all lifted up their right arms, which transformed in milliseconds to wicked looking blasters.
His eyes narrowed. He knew this, though. He knew what those were capable of firing...plasma. And he knew now what the woman was asking his help for. She needed protection. From them.

At last, his voice found him.
It too...felt right.
"Get down." He said quietly, stunned at the noise. The first words out of his mouth...and somehow, he had known what to tell her to do.
The blue drones fired...a hail of plasma rounds, rapid fire, low intensity, came spiraling towards them as the woman dropped quickly onto her hands and knees, staring in horror at the approaching storm.
Zero ran the calculations. They would all pass safely overhead. She was safe...for the moment. But the drones had to be dealt with.
In another move of pure instinct, one that left him surprised, but pleasantly so, rockets blasted forth fire from his boots and he dashed in a belch of flames to the side, easily dodging the hail of plasma.
His right arm came up...He blinked for a moment, once again seeing one image and having his fragmented mind telling him that it was different than how it used to be.
For a moment, he felt as though once upon a time...he had had a gun on his arm like the blue drones. Now only a fist pointed at them, and he cursed. He looked around the room, eyes somehow knowing to scout for a weapon.
In the hands of a fallen soldier in green fatigues and shattered goggles was a small, but menacing looking white pistol. He dashed away from another hail of firepower and rolled to the corpse, snatching away his first line of defense.
There was no time for thinking. No time for talk.
But plenty of time...for instinct.

He continued to dash across the waterlogged room, the hail of plasma chasing after him. At the last moment, he made a jump up onto the wall, and then backflipped off of it, somehow spinning in such an unusual way that his pistol lined up with the closest drone. He fired off a quick barrage of five shots.
Every hit impacted with precision and deadly speed. And like them...he too, was firing plasma.
It was different...yet somehow, all the same over again.
Stunned, his mind left him. Instincts took over once again, and he dashed towards the remaining cluster that had wandered into the room. They fired at him, trying to block his attack.
Instinct made him dodge and weave through the storm as easily as a speck of air might bob around raindrops. In the end, his blaster rang out fifteen more times.
Three more blue drones fell dead, bleeding a reddish residue into the water.
The woman got up from her position and walked over to him, slowly and tentatively.
Zero breathed in and out. "...How..."
"We have to get out of here." The woman insisted, still panicked. "They've got this place surrounded now...and they'll stop at nothing to take me."
Zero didn't know much. He couldn't remember anything.
Even his name had taken prompting.
But there...there were instincts in place that defied this. A sense of automation that guided him.
And an overwhelming sensation, in his heart and spirit...
That this was a woman he had to protect with all his might.
"We'll get out of here." Zero murmured, staring around the room for a moment, and then down at the blaster in his hand. "I promise we will."

"Drones" and "Pantheons" were two terms that Ciel used to describe the odd Cyclopean droids that seemed to come at them endlessly as Zero led her through the long abandoned and forgotten hallways of the ruins. He moved at a speed that still stunned him, but he was fast becoming used to it. He set his mind on autopilot and relied on instincts honed from some time he couldn't remember...and those marvelous instincts served him well.
They may have been many, but they were slow...Not even the robotic sentry spiders they had brought with them proved a match for the fast and furious plasmafire that Zero was throwing out. The Buster Gun, as Ciel had told him it was called, hissed and spat off curls of smoke after the most recent barrage, and the last of the Drones collapsed to the floor, their singular red eyes flickering to a dull red lifelessness as the electric stunrods they had for permanent arms flashed their last current of electricity.
A few disturbing thoughts rose up in his addled mind...severely addled, confused, and certain of only his name and his desire to protect the young woman behind him. The troopers, these "Pantheons" seemed eerily familiar to him. The shape of them...the blue hue of their armor, and how they held their arms to fire at him were all subliminal cues to a portion of who he was he could not recall.
Fragmented, deformed, and corrupted...That was the portion of his brain dedicated to his long and aged memories. The subliminal processes that kept him running had run more than a few diagnostics since he'd woken up, and had flashed in the corner of his eye with queries of whether or not those corrupted files should be completely severed; they couldn't be erased, but the connections could be destroyed, thus minimizing any further corruption.
For a reason he couldn't explain...maybe fear, a fear of losing who he was...he hadn't severed those connections. His memories, addled and incomplete, existed as they would.
He took in a breath and peered around, gun tensed in his left arm. Nothing blue was moving.
Except for Ciel's eyes. The young woman glanced around, her gaze shining brightly as she looked in every direction, stunned at how easily Zero had torn through the enemy forces. "Zero, you...you're incredible." She exhaled disbelievingly.
Zero tucked the blaster behind his back, once again feeling the familiar sensation that a different sort of weapon belonged there...A tiny electrical current created enough of a magnetic force to latch it securely to him until he'd need it again, without damaging his delicate circuits and wires. Ciel ventured out in front of him, moving forward and meeting a wall of rubble.
"Wha...it's a dead end." She uttered, shaking her head. "Now what do we do?"
In response, the ruins themselves found an answer. The floor beneath her feet cracked, caved inwards, and began to collapse underneath her. As Ciel uttered out a short cry of panic, Zero's instincts kicked in once again.
He dashed towards her, swept her up in his arms...and as the floor gave way even quicker underneath his added weight, he held her tight against him, bracing her from the impact as he plummeted down a long abandoned shaft which had perhaps once contained an elevator or lift of sorts. Nearly eighty to a hundred feet later, his feet hit bottom, and his legs bowed out to carry out the impact.
Ciel, shaking in his arms, opened her eyes and looked up at him. In response, Zero cracked an easy smile and gently set her down on her own feet. "Relax. I said I'd protect you."
She got her footing back soon enough, and smiled weakly back at him.

"Zero...thank you." She took a few tentative steps forward from the bottom of the shaft into a new hallway. "This place seems to be a prehistoric laboratory. We may be able to find a Trans-Server, which we can use to get back to the resistance base."
Zero frowned at that. "Trans-Server? What's that?"
Ciel mentally slapped herself and shook her head. "My apologies...Think of it as a transporter for those who have no internal warp mechanisms. After the Eurasia crisis, they also became the only reliable way to warp...and most importantly, they finally allowed instant transit that was safe for humans."
Names and ideas rambled by Zero's mind, and he couldn't make sense of them. So he did the only thing he could. "Oh."
Ciel moved through the hallway, passing by a row of long forgotten consoles, and Zero trotted dutifully behind her. She met another wall of rubble...dead ends seemed to be everywhere in this place.
"How nice..." She muttered grumblingly. "This passageway's collapsed in. Shall we go back?"
If Ciel was disappointed, Zero was suddenly on full alert. He could hear something behind that rubble inaudible to Ciel, and it struck a note of fear in him. "Stay back!" He cried out, running towards her with his hand outstretched. Ciel blinked at him in confusion a few times, not sure of what he meant.
His reasoning became clear when a gigantic metal fist slammed through the rubble that served as a wall and snatched her in its tight grip, pulling her through the gaping opening. Ciel let out another high pitched cry of dismay, and Zero, his instincts taking hold once again, dashed in after her.
The rubble crumbled behind him, trapping him in the next room. Hovering with little regard for him at the opposite end was an armored mass of metal...and worst of all, it had Ciel in its right hand, held up close to his face.
"Zero, run!" Ciel cried out. "It's a Golem, you can't stop them!"
Zero's jaw set firm. He reached a hand behind his back and pulled the Buster Gun back out, running hardened calculations in his head.
It wasn't going to be easy; Ciel was positioned in such a way that any errant shot would mean certain injury or death to her. Even the beast itself, if it became too overanxious, might harm her indirectly.
"Zero!!" Ciel screamed at him. "Get out of here! You can't stop it with a Buster!"
Zero drew himself into his stance and shook his head. "He's not going to get you...I won't let him."

The battle was furious...The Golem was indeed well protected. Only shots to the head seemed to have any effect, and a minimal one at that. The laser embedded in the back of its throat chased him up the wall before petering out...and potentially more damaging, had he not been as limber as he was, was the hail of rubble from the ceiling the monster's blasts knocked loose. And then it would charge at him.
Shot after shot sank in...still, the damage was negligible. If Zero hadn't had to worry about being so precise with his fire, then he could have cut loose and overwhelmed the thing's defenses. But...it had Ceil. And so caution was the order of the day.
It wasn't enough...Exhaustion was beginning to take hold of him. He'd fought quite a lot for being so recently recovered, and his body had yet to fully make amends.
"It's too late for me, Zero!" Ciel cried towards him, shaking her head. "Escape from this thing...find the Resistance base, you're their only hope!"
"NO!" Zero cried back, just as harshly. "I'm not leaving you behind!"

And yet...He couldn't defeat it as he was. He knew that. It wasn't enough.
The room they fought in had apparently been a massive monitoring system at one point. Now the enormous horizontal viewscreen flickered back to life, shining a strange symbol of iridescent rainbow colors. Zero, exhausted and seeing the monster pause as well, noticed it...

But it was when it began to speak that his ears truly did perk up. "What...Huh...?"
In a beam of shimmering light, an object appeared in midair, flickered to life, and embedded itself in the ground.
A metallic cylindrical casing. A glowing green beam of pulsing light...contained plasma kept within the confines of an electromagnetic barrier than gifted it with a supreme edge.
"Use this...Zero..." The voice said, overwhelming but gentle.

It struck a resonant chord in the addled shift of his memories. Familiar...Very familiar to him, and yet he could not place it. Whoever it was, the reaction did not prompt hatred, or rage, or concern...but a gentler sense of familiarity. "W...Who are you?" Zero asked, his voice a forced whisper of disbelief.
"Hurry..." The voice continued. "You have to...save her. Don't waste time..."
The symbol flickered a few more times, and then vanished, taking the voice with it.
Zero was left in silence and doubts once again...but standing at his feet was an object which a large portion of him recognized, and was drawn to.
Plucking it up in his right hand, the Buster Gun put behind his back once again, Zero marveled at the harsh glow and the power within. It had a name...a part of him instinctively knew what it was.
A beam saber.
No...
Z...Z-Saber...
At last, another part of who he was shifted back into place. Gripping it tightly in his right hand, Zero felt a resurgence of power and will rise up in him.
This weapon was his. And he knew that this was not the first time he'd used it.
Ciel had been knocked into stunned silence by the entire incident...But as the Golem revved back to life and fired another scathing beam at the floor underneath Zero's feet, the Crimson Warrior lost no time whatsoever.
Dashing backwards, he scampered up the side of the wall with an agility and grace that made all his former efforts pale. It was poetry in motion, this blade and he...like two pieces of a grander ballet, they could only dance in perfect harmony with each other.
And with his saber in his hand, Zero felt invincible.
The beam never touched him. It came up the side of the wall behind him, and never touched. At the peak of his climb, Zero jumped off of the wall in a powerful thruster aided leap, raising his saber high and gripping it with both hands.
A low and guttural rumble began in his chest...and when it came out, it was a fierce and unending warcry that echoed about the room in a scream that shook Ciel to her very core.
In a flash of light, and the briefest gash of ozone, half of the Golem's head was cleaved from it in a diagonal fashion. Badly damaged, and beginning to collapse apart, the Golem let go of Ciel, who collapsed to the floor with a not so gentle oomph. Zero's eyes caught the flickering light dancing within the behemoth's shell, widened as he realized what was about to happen. In one deft motion, he dashed towards Ciel, plucked her up in his free hand, and dashed away from the mass of metal, throwing her to the ground and shielding her as the Golem blew apart in fusion fire.
The smoke and light cleared. The facility grew silent. And Ciel's breathing became more labored, staring up at him in a combination of disbelief and wonder and admiration all.
Zero looked at her for a long moment. Long enough to realize that she was all right.

And then his eyes wandered back to the glowing green Z-Saber in his hand. His Z-Saber.
His.
He had done that.
"Christ in Heaven..." He whispered in awe, lost in the depths of his blade.
"You truly are Zero..." Ciel squeaked meekly. "The one and only."
For the man in red armor with long yellow hair, he knew he was Zero.
But he no longer knew what that meant.