Egil resisted the urge to slam his fists down on the control panel as he watched the giant Mechon shrug off his command codes and run off in the opposite direction. It had been his fourth attempt to resume control over the rogue war machine. All four had been met with confusion then resistance, a mental battle of wills that resulted in Egil being thrown out of the Mechon's command interface as though he were a hacker or a virus. That was how he had been treated: as though he had no right to be commanding a Mechon, that his commands were some kind of anomalous signals. He, who had wrested command from Meyneth herself, and who could control the core of the Mechonis. He who rightfully controlled the entire Mechon army.
It was impossible for such a Mechon to even be able to refuse his orders. Any rogue Mechon would be acting completely out of control but would not have enough presence of mind to resist his attempts to regain control. As soon as he came back into contact with the Mechon and repaired its systems enough that it could actually carry out the order, it would immediately follow any instructions given to it. A functional Mechon would not have disobeyed his commands. They would have responded to Egil as though he were the Core of the Mechonis itself. Mechon were not like living soldiers, who needed to be placated and their morale kept up; they understood their exact place in the chain of command, worked ceaselessly, in perfect synchronisation and without complaint. A Machina, or maybe a Face Mechon whose consciousness had not been correctly reprogrammed, would show such imperfections. This Mechon, however, was neither. It was an old Mechon, one who had lived a long time before the first Face Mechon had ever existed. Neither was it controlled by a Machina. It was an entirely automated system. Such machines were not given that much authority in the ranks of Egil's Mechon army; they were too vulnerable to being attacked with the Monado, not to mention the benefits of a living, growing brain when adapting to sudden changes on the battlefield. While there existed some extremely powerful non-Face Mechon, they were generally used for simple but dangerous tasks, such as guarding important mental installations. This machine demonstrated outstanding levels of resistance to unauthorised command signals, something that would only have been programmed into a high-ranking officer. He could live with a high-ranking automated Mechon still existing, but the fact that a machine so high in authority could be made to not only refuse his orders, but forget that he even existed as an authority, was a major security threat that had to be dealt with immediately. It was made worse by the fact that, when he scanned the machine, it could not be found in his database at all, and its predicted power levels were above those of any of his Generals except possibly the Silver Face herself. It was unknown, immensely powerful and it wasn't on his side.
He turned to the Metal Face, a Face Mechon Commander whose name, in his former life, had been Mumkhar. Out of any of the Face Mechon, Egil trusted him the most, as he had been co-operative even before he was reprogrammed. However, he wasn't sure if he should be trusting anyone at all with the knowledge that his powerful allies could betray him and had already done so. He decided that he would prefer to think on the matter himself. One thing he could rely on the others to do, however, was to hunt down and kill the dangerous traitor.
"Metal and Jade," he called, watching them blink and wake from standby as soon as he spoke their names, "I have an urgent mission for you. I have tracked down a powerful rogue Mechon. While its logic circuits are far beyond repair, it is still capable of attacking us. I wish you to pre-emptively attack and destroy it. Its location has been marked on your map. I wish to stress that this Mechon is extremely dangerous, even to you two. You must not attempt to engage it alone, or fight recklessly against it, even though it is only one faulty Mechon. If you can, please try to salvage some kind of identifying markers on the Mechon, such as its record logs or at least a large enough part to reverse engineer, but do not attempt to capture the enemy alive."
After re-affirming their orders, the two Face Mechon disappeared up their launch tubes. While he hoped they would return victorious, he also secretly held out that he would come up with some idea of exactly what the enemy was before they simply destroyed it with their usual merciless efficiency. At the very least, he hoped they succeeded in bringing back something he could study. While he awaited the outcome, all he could really do was return to more hypothetical study, at least until he thought of something else that he could ask the information database about.
After a few minutes, a thought came to him; such an ancient Mechon would probably have existed before he assumed command, or even before he was created. If that was true, and it had been damaged and then abandoned, it may never have received the signals that identified him as being in command. If it only awakened recently, such a primitive and limited model may not be able to adapt to the new situation. Some such models were discontinued in favour of improved models later in history, so a legacy model would not have been recovered in battle. Still, such a powerful and high-ranking individual Mechon should have been considered an exception, as it would cost too much in resources to replace. It also begged the question of how such a Mechon, disconnected from the system, would have suddenly received a signal to wake up, and from where. He brought up the archives and keyed in the commands that would take him as far back through the Mechon factory records as possible. It hadn't occurred to him that discontinued legacy Mechons would be a thing that suddenly caused him trouble. Waging war was only another way of making history, and yet it wasn't the history itself he expected to sneak up on him from behind.
Daedala sat inside the cave in the cliff face and watched the surf pounding the rocks below. Inwardly, he waited for his security systems to calm down. Someone, a Machina he did not recognise and who was not Miqol, had tried to issue commands to him, commands that made no sense. When he walked past the Machina who were hiding in the pipes, the ones he had chosen to ignore for now as he was still scanning the area for threats and they were not threats, he had been given the order to attack them. His purpose was not to attack Machina (except when they tried to hack him), or any other inhabitant of the Mechonis. He was designed to protect the Mechonis from outside threats. He needed to report back to Miqol and explain that someone was trying to usurp his authority – someone very powerful, as they had almost succeeded. The trouble was, he still had no idea where Miqol was. He wasn't even on the Mechonis. While he now understood that there were other inhabitants of the Mechonis here, he had yet to find a Mechon that worked well enough to answer his simple questions and he couldn't risk going close enough to a Machina to ask them questions, in case it provided another opportunity for him to lose control.
During his scout of the small, dead object jutting out of the sea upon which he had fallen, he discovered that the Machina had a settlement where they existed in fairly large numbers, although nothing like they did in Agniratha when he used to guard the city. While it was clearly a large section of the Mechonis that had been detached, it had lain there for so long that life had begun growing, settled on its surface and even burrowed inside it, none of it native to the Mechonis. He remembered being told about the Bionis, and that it was dangerous. Miqol had expected the invasion, the first true war ever experienced by the inhabitants of the Mechonis, to come from the Bionis. Daedala didn't see any of this unstoppable plague of attackers he had been told to defend the Mechonis against, only small avians, four-legged predators and prey that roamed the plains, aquatic creatures and a lot of foliage. He wondered how long it had been since this section of the Mechonis had seen war.
Later, he decided on an aerial reconnaissance of the area. It looked like the Mechonis' left arm, but he could see the Mechonis in the distance with a perfectly intact left and right arm. It must have taken a long time to rebuild its entire left arm and a great disaster to remove its entire arm in the first place. He needed to return to the Mechonis immediately. There were too many gaps in his memory, too many weaknesses that could be exploited. He tried to calculate how far he would have to fly to reach the Mechonis, how long it would take, whether he could go that long without refuelling and whether he had the strength. There were other small structures in the sea, possibly more debris from the disaster, where he could rest and refuel. The Bionis was also fairly close, although that was too hazardous an option.
His thoughts were interrupted when his radar blipped to warn him of Mechon activity and he saw two figures appear on the skyline, then slowly glide towards the beach. After a few seconds, he saw a cloud of smaller Mechon trailing behind them, in organised formations rather than the pointless wandering of the faulty Mechon on the Arm. The two large Mechon, a design he hadn't seen before, alighted on the sand and began searching the area. His systems alerted him to the fact that he was being scanned down and he realised he would soon be spotted. He decided to jump down and meet them halfway. If they were functioning correctly, they might have answers for him.
As he approached them, he saw the slightly taller green-painted Mechon turn to the shorter, bulkier Mechon with the claws, point Daedala out to him and whisper something.
"Serial number unknown! State your identity!" yelled the clawed Mechon in screeching, grating voice.
"I am Daedala, Prototype Mechon One," he replied, "I require assistance and information. I have become disconnected from the mainframe due to an incident, I do not know my location, and a malicious hacking attempt was recently made on me..."
"It is him! Get him!" screeched the clawed one. The green one drew a pair of laser rifles and began firing at Daedala, who instantly sprang out of the way and glided backwards until he was at a more comfortable range to start firing his laser cannon. The clawed Mechon ran at him screaming, his claws a whirlwind of slicing death. Daedala knew he wouldn't be able to keep either of them at range for long, and he could hear the whine of smaller jets as the small army of Mechon descended to join the fray. He was surrounded, heavily outnumbered and fighting his own allies, something he had no experience of. He could defeat all of the Mechon in theory, but he knew that a highly organised force with an advantage of numbers was far more dangerous than the sum of its parts. He prepared to retreat, although he didn't know where he would retreat to. These were fully functional Mechon, arriving from the direction of the Mechonis. It was possible that the Mechonis had intended its forces to attack him. If that was true, he had nowhere left to go.
Just as he had processed that thought, the sky darkened. His sensors told him that the temperature had noticeably dropped and there was an Ether reading off the scale somewhere above him, not far away. Then a terrible roar resounded, shaking boulders free from the cliffs and whipping up the sand, and the entire sky lit up with dark Ether energy. Most of the smaller Mechon were disintegrated, others fled without being given orders to. The two larger Mechon lost interest in Daedala and looked up at the sky, and the voice that boomed,
"You should run now. You have more important things to worry about back home..."