Ch.26 The Final Hurrah
Zero stood as the energy continued to flow around him, waiting for Sigma to move again.
"I think something has you scared Sigma. Is there a pattern in the energy that you don't like? Or perhaps that even my energy alone is enough to fight back against you scares you straight down to your very code. It doesn't matter, you'll be dead in the end." Zero smirked, knowing it would only infuriate the Maverick tyrant. Sigma stood in a battle-ready stance, his face marred by conflicting emotions of confusion and anger. Zero continually checked his sensors, waiting for Alia and X's signals to disappear.
X dodged constantly as all three X-hunters came at him with a renewed passion, their latest incarnations the same as they had always been, with no change apparent to even their power levels. As X flipped backwards out of their attacks, he stopped and carefully aimed a blast at Agile, letting it go before he had even touched the ground.
Agile screamed as the plasma bolt struck his hand, the mass of charred metal left in it's place hardly recognizable, his beam saber dropping to the ground, the blade remaining powered.
"Interesting," thought X as he noticed it. "Apparently theirs aren't command controlled like ours are through the wireless weapons connection systems in our hands."
Roll forced herself to run as X blocked Agile's path to get to her. Once clear of the fortress walls she quickly brought her communications back up.
"Get me and Crystal out of here now Alia. She's going into labor!" Roll yelled as she stopped running and set Crystal down for a moment to check her. Sweat lightly beaded the girl's forehead as she groaned with each wave of pain. Roll hadn't had any real medical background, but even she knew that Crystal didn't have long to wait. She sighed as she felt the first tingles of the transporter beam effect before a two beams flew back up through the wilderness.
Zero grinned as he heard the communications line open up again. Sigma's expression quickly changed once more to rage.
"Zero, this is Alia, we've got Roll and Crystal. Now take Sigma out. And please, come back safe, for Crystal and your child's sake." Alia's voice seemed ready to break.
"No worries about me Alia. I always come back. Maybe not in one piece, but I will be back." Zero's grin grew wider and more vicious as he heard the communications line close again. As he finally allowed himself to fully concentrate on the fight, the fury of the energy around him intensified, becoming visible more often than it already was, his hair floating and waving wildly in the air behind him. "I'll never fall to the likes of you ever again Sigma. I promised someone I'd be here for her no matter what, and I'll be damned before anyone stops me from fulfilling that promise." Sigma smirked.
"Touching speech, but words are merely words." Sigma launched himself at Zero, slashing quickly with both sabers in an cross attack centered on Zero's head. His attempt was met only with Zero's blade, blocking both sabers as Zero's fist flew under Sigma's attack, his punch impacting with a small explosion as the energy around him coalesced once more with his movements, traveling down his arm into the front of his fist moments before the strike connected, bursting with massive force. Sigma flew backwards and landed on his feet, skidding for several meters.
X continued to dodge as Serges and Violen attempted to corner him. As Violen's oversized mace swung at him, X switched armors just before it struck where he stood. Violen grinned, an entirely unpleasing sight on his wide face, before sliding into shock as he realized that his mace hadn't made a crater. As the dust cleared from the impact, he realized that his mace hadn't impacted at all. X had merely used the Gaea Armor to block it, before switching back to his Ultimate Armor drop it and grab the chain, pulling it from Violen's grasp and snapping the connection to his arm.
"You're powerless without your weapon, and you know it Violen. Just give up now. Neither you nor Agile is even a challenge now that you're both completely disarmed." X commented as he kept an eye on all three, knowing Serges was vulnerable to attack the moment he even left his platform. Tho he had disarmed them, he knew the other two weren't quite as harmless as he'd made it sound, but was hoping that they themselves weren't quite as knowledable.
Roll quickly picked Crystal up as the beam set them down.
"Where to with her Doc?" She yelled, starting to panic slightly as Crystal cried out in pain.
"The infirmary, where else?" Light replied as he quickly showed a map on his screen, highlighting the appropriate room. "Alia's already there and preparing for your arrival. And do try to slow down a little bit. Jarring her around by running like a madman won't help any, nor will it really speed things up at all."
Roll didn't bother replying as she turned around and quickly ran down the hall, though not quite at her former pace. As she neared the training room she turned down another hall that she was fairly sure none of them had bothered to explore before. At least she herself hadn't been in there yet. One door was already open as she neared it, and she instinctively ducked in. Alia turned from where she was preparing a bed for Crystal and waved Roll over. As she set the pained girl down on the bed, she watched as Alia quickly started running small tests on her.
Sigma's rushes were becoming less and less frequent as Zero continually blocked and countered each of them. Any spot left open quickly became a target for Zero as he punched, kicked, and slashed away at every strike Sigma made. Sigma started twirling both sabers rapidly hand over hand as he rushed again, the blurs becoming a nearly solid beam as he got closer to Zero. Zero merely stood as he was and suddenly brought his blade up from below, striking at Sigma's hands in the center of the blurs, causing both to tumble away as Sigma jumped back, both hands sliced open and quickly beginning to ooze mechanical fluids. As Zero stopped and stood where he was, he noticed as Sigma's hands began to quickly repair themselves.
"So you finally broke down and overworked your self-healing system, knowing that was all that would keep you in one piece, eh?" Zero asked as he stood, his grin growing even more vicious, the red in his eyes seeming almost to glow. "How does it feel to be completely outclassed Sigma? To know that every movement you've made has been countered and blocked."
"You've hardly seen everything I have in store, you pest of a Reploid." Sigma snarled as he dashed back in, attempting to strike at Zero with normal blades that had come down out of his forearms. Zero didn't even bother to move himself, instead bending the energy around him to knock Sigma across the room. Sigma stood and picked up one of his inactive sabers as he did so, igniting the green blade again. As he swung again and again, Zero dodged his strikes, finally blocking one last slash before repeating the actions he had when Sigma rushed him before, the punch sending Sigma through the other wall instead of merely near it.
X picked up the chain attached to Violen's mace and swung it, tripping Serges off his platform before snapping the chain taut and beginning to swing the mace end as well, swinging it over his head and crushing the platform before Serges could regain it.
"Now all three of you are virtually defenseless. Surrender or perish." X's features were unusually cold as he sounded out his ultimatum.
"We'll never surrender to the likes of you!" Agile spat out.
"You may have been the original, but that just makes you the prototype," Serges cried out from his position near Agile. Violen merely nodded dumbly behind the two of them. X closed his eyes for a moment before opening them. They shone red, something none of the X-hunters had ever seen before from the Blue Bomber.
"You take lives for the fun of it. You destroy people's chances at happiness, and pass it off as building your damned utopia. How many more must die before people like you learn? How many more of your type must I destroy before there's an end to all of it?" X asked as he idly let the power build in the X-busters. "I've had enough of it. I'm tired of you destroying the peace that I keep fighting for. I'm not leaving enough of you to make even a remote chance at rebuilding. This is the end for the three of you, and if you ever come back again, so help me, I'll destroy that copy too."
As X brought his cannons up, he surpassed the limits Light had set before, his rage breaking through even Light's programming as he called up more power. As the energy began to run over his body the X-buster changed slightly, it's form bringing out more fins and cooling surfaces as he continued to charge it's power, before releasing it finally.
Alia couldn't help but grit her own teeth as she watched Crystal's efforts. The redhead screamed as her body tensed with the effort of labor. Roll could do nothing but stand and watch in awe, having read up on the process, but still nowhere near Alia's knowledge.
"Come on Crys, push just a bit more," Alia commented, hoping to try and soothe the girl's pain somehow. Dr. Light hadn't had the proper ingredients to make a proper medication for the process, nor had he been able to come up with an appropriate synthetic replacement.
Crystal gritted her teeth, feeling each movement of the child inside her as it moved closer to the outside world. Each contraction she pushed, and with each one that hit that she wasn't prepared for, she screamed for a moment before stopping herself again.
"Please Seero, don't make me go through all this just to raise our child on my own," She thought just before another contraction made her scream again.
Zero rushed forward as the dust settled from the wall's collapse, quickly leaping over it before Sigma had the chance to recover, stabbing his saber downwards through the green chestplate and pulling it back out as he rebounded off the injured Maverick and landed a short distance away. He could only watch as Sigma stood back up and began to heal even from a wound that was mortal to even most Reploids. The tyrant's face twisted into a sneer as he healed and stood fully again.
"Even you can't defeat me now. No wound is too great for my latest body to handle." Sigma began to laugh even before his words had died in the air. Zero treated his laughing to a quick stab through his throat, ending it even as he started. Sigma merely stumbled back a moment and waited for the healing process to take over as it did.
"I don't care how fast you can heal. Without your saber, you're barely even worth the time. However, you've made a few mistakes over these last few months." Zero moved forward within striking distance of Sigma.
"You've allowed me the chance to revive again." Zero commented coldly as he slashed and took off part of Sigma's arm.
"You've allowed me to rebuild the exact team that took you down before." Zero slashed at Sigma's other arm, taking off more of it.
"You've allowed me to become even stronger than I was before!" Zero threw more emphasis into his words as he slashed off a leg at the knee, making sure to kick it over before stopping in front of Sigma, watching as his arms began to rebuild slowly. His visor slid down and quickly began to trace the patterns of Sigma's circuitry.
"But most of all, you've threatened my way of life." The Z-saber could be heard swinging as it went through a shoulder section.
"You've killed two of my friends." The sound of the other shoulder hitting the floor was heard in the odd quietness of the base.
"And you've kidnapped, threatened, and hurt the one woman I love in this world. In doing that, you sealed your fate." Zero brought both arms back as the visor finally pinpointed the main center of the network of nanomachines that kept rebuilding Sigma. As he swung forward the energy that had been content to sit around him centered and combined with the Z-saber, the blade becoming a beam of white energy as it slid down through the main portion of Sigma's body at an angle, severing all workings of his healing process. As Zero socketed the saber finally, his armor began to turn a dark black, the extra energy from before flowing just beneath the surface in an odd pattern.
"You're doomed fool," Sigma said as his body slid in half. "You'll never make it out of here before this base explodes."
"I don't need to listen to the prattlings of an old Mechaniloid who can't even function properly. Rest with the ashes of this place as you should." Zero said as he turned and began to quickly dash back through the hole in the walls that he had created, jumping up and flying after a couple jumps, teleporting himself forward in small bursts as the base began to rumble.
The battlefield exploded around X as the X-Buster fired, the courtyard in front of him lit in an eerie light as it was singed and burnt within that space, destroying anything inside the blast. X could only stand as the X-Buster quickly began to cool off, before reverting back to it's normal form. His eyes reverted back to normal, tho his cold expression warmed only slightly as the blast area cooled.
"I originally wanted to end this conflict peacefully. But I guess you just couldn't have had it end like that, could you have? It was too much apparently to ask you to be tolerant of the humans. And any utopia cannot be based on such single-minded beliefs." X said as he stood for a moment. The base began to rumble and he quickly teleported out.
"You're almost there Crystal, I can see the head, just a little more!" Alia said excitedly as Crystal's face betrayed the immense effort she had to put into the pushes now. Roll still stood in a daze as she watched, amazed at how much the human girl could withstand just to bring a new life into the world. She'd never witnessed this at all just helping Mega Man and Dr. Light before.
"Some day this might be me," She thought, a hand idly moving to her lower stomach as she continued to watch.
Crystal let out another scream as she gave one final push, a baby's wail breaking the pattern of screams from it's mother as it breathed it's first breath of air. Crystal fell back against the bed, exhausted, but with a smile on her face.
Zero stopped as the air around him quickly began to heat up.
"It's all coming down and exploding at the same time. He must've set up a chain of explosions." He leaned forward and quickly boosted his speed even past what it had been when he'd fought Overdrive, even the blur he normally left fading into an after-image as he passed. As he passed into the burnt courtyard he could barely take note of it's altered appearance as the base began to explode behind him
"Alia, Doc, get me the hell out of here!" He yelled into the communications as he passed just outside the walls and continued moving before turning into a beam and moving even faster. The former headquarters of the Mavericks began to quickly crumble and burn.
My apologies to my readers in waiting for this chapter. I eh, kinda got a bit sidetracked with my life, and as such this story was put on a bit of a backburner to other things. All I've got to do now is write up the actual ending, and this part of it at least be finished.