Another chapter is here. And a reviews to answer.

LirialRaito: True, Sephiroth have bullet proof in a magic sense. And Kunsel indeed survive.

Andrew Mackenzie: Party at this time is as following. Cloud, Tifa, Aerith, Red XIII (Nanaki), Crimson (Cissnei) and Kusnel. Also, Barret is not dead.

Neal: Sadly Cloud never deal with women before and thankfully Kusnel will help him out the situation in this chapter.

Enjoy!

Cloud followed the Second-Class SOLIDER to the Sector 6 Park, nestled between the Wall Market and what used to be the Sector 7 Slums.

Naturally, the place was abandoned. The plate fall had left the ground cracked, fissures stemming from the entrance where the massive weight descended and then destroyed the entirety of the slums. The force of the impact scattered bits of scrap metal, leaving it strewn all over the park.

"We won't be bothered here," Kunsel said as he leaned against the metal support of the swing set, which was miraculously still intact."We can talk without reservation now."

"What's this about?" Cloud asked. He was still unsure of what to make of the man. They were both SOLDIER, and Crimson seemed to trust him enough to help them out, but he couldn't seem to read the man behind the shades.

"A few things, actually," he said. "Crimson will probably be pissed at me later on, but let's start with how you managed to screw up back there."

Cloud's lips flattened into a frown. "I still don't see what I did wrong. I'm a SOLDIER, same class as Sephiroth. They would die if they tried fighting him, but I can at least stand my ground and kill him a second time if I don't have to protect them."

Kunsel sighed exasperatedly. "That line of thinking is exactly the problem. Saying you don't need them, and that they'd hold you back, is the same thing as demeaning them and stepping on their pride. It makes you sound ungrateful to them, which is especially rude considering everything Crimson went through."

The words were cold and sharp despite being so quiet. Like a hidden dagger pressing into Cloud's skin. "She went against people she considered friends and colleague. She bit the hand that fed her, and turned her back on them. She gave up everything to try and save you and Zack."

"Who is Zack?" he asked, just a small note of discomfort in his voice. The pain born from that name felt duller than before. Was it because of his earlier reaction to Sephiroth? "She's mentioned him before, but I never got a decent answer out of her."

"A person she and I admired more than anyone else," Kunsel said, replacing the sharpness in his tone with a contrasting softness. "He inspired us to follow our own code of honor and morals, and to do what we believed was right no matter what the price was. That was why I helped her so far, and why she gave up her old life to follow what she believed in… only for you to tell her that she wasn't needed now by trying to cast her aside."

"That's not what I meant." Cloud turned around, feeling restless as he thought over what he had said. From a certain point of view, it did look that way. "I didn't mean for it to sound like that."

"She probably knows that," Kunsel said. "It's why she stormed off. She figured you were being innocently insensitive and felt bad for yelling at you since you didn't realize it. If you think about it, that's also why your black-haired friend stormed off without saying anything."

Cloud did think about it. Tifa had lost as much as he did back then, and she had been training since then to become stronger. How many hours of blood, sweat, and tears did it take for her to go against Shinra's forces and weapons on equal footing when they fought to bomb the reactor? It had to have been thousands at least.

She put in all that effort only to be told she wouldn't be needed by proxy. That he would go alone and get revenge against the one who destroyed their home without her input. When you looked at it like that, it made sense why she had been upset with him as well.

Kunsel took the silence as a cue to continue. "Each of those girls is a capable fighter, and you technically can't make them stay behind in order to protect them. If anything, they'll be liable to leave you behind if you don't treat them as comrades."

The ex-SOLDIER nodded. "Right, I'll apologize to them both."

"Onto the next topic then." Kunsel brought his hand up and adjusted his shades. "Cloud Strife is your name, right? Part of the First-Class?"

Cloud nodded. "Yeah."

Kunsel got straight to the point. "Here's the thing, I never heard that name before Crimson contacted me."

Cloud crossed his arms, a minor scowl forming on his face. "It's not that strange. Not everyone is familiar with everyone else."

"You misunderstand." Kunsel stood ramrod straight. "There's no fan club, no friends among the SOLDIER ranks to ask, no records—nothing legitimate that mentioned someone by your name in the First-Class program. That just doesn't happen."

There was a nagging sensation in the pit of Cloud's stomach at where the conversation was going. "What are you getting at?"

"Crimson told me that you were an infantryman who was sent alongside Zack Fair and Sephiroth to investigate an incident at the Nibelheim reactor," he explained. "The rank-and-file are normally beneath notice to those higher than them, but not to their peers. So I did a little digging and found an infantryman who knew someone by that name years back, to confirm what Crimson told me. Are you getting where I'm going with this?"

"That can't be!" It had to be a lie. His eyes were proof that he was SOLDIER, eyes the color of mako. "If it's a lie, then how do I have these eyes, and these memories?"

"You have the answer already." Kunsel pointed to the Buster Sword, where there was a materia placed inside one of the slots. "Mako contains the planet's knowledge of various phenomena. Taking that knowledge and crystallizing it into Materia allows someone to use it with considerable mental power and training. It can even rewrite a person's natural abilities, such as how Sense allows Crimson to process information far too detailed for a human mind to naturally take note of."

"Get to the point." Cloud said tersely.

"The point is that mako naturally acts as a conduit for information, and you were in a tank of the stuff for years alongside him from what Crimson told me. It's possible that the memories were transplanted during that time. The fact that you were comatose for nearly a year afterwards could have been due to your mind simply readjusting the information, and something triggered you into waking up—probably Zack's death."

Cloud wanted to say otherwise. He desperately wanted to. But Hojo's words echoed in his ears. The madman called him a failed experiment from something he called the Reunion Theory. What did that mean to him?

"What did Hojo do to me?" Cloud asked. It was a reasonable question.

Kunsel shrugged. It was a question that he didn't have the answer to. "Hojo is a genius, but he's also insane. Who the hell knows why he does anything that he does, besides the fact that it's for science?"

He had a point. The man tried to crossbreed two entirely different beings for the sake of what he claimed was preserving their races. Heaven forbid Red XIII not be lucid and intelligent, otherwise that could have gone horribly.

"Whatever he did, I'm guessing it was equivalent to what they put SOLDIER candidates through," Kunsel continued. "With Zack's memories, it may have even been meant to speed up training. The only one with all the answers is Hojo."

Cloud didn't want to hear this. He… He had to be SOLDIER. He left Nibelheim for that reason. If he had been an infantryman, then that meant he originally failed. "Why are you telling me this?"

"The truth needs to be told," Kunsel stated. "If I let you go on thinking that those memories were yours, it would have been harder on everyone when the illusion finally broke down. Crimson and Aerith would have had to constantly dance around the topic, slowly growing uncomfortable with the notion that someone they cared about was being impersonated. Your friend would have likely been wondering what happened to the person she grew up with. Not to mention it would have been an insult to Zack as well—he died for your freedom, and that meant being free from the lies as well."

Kunsel walked past him, coming to a stop just behind him and adding, "Search for the truth and find out who you were before you were taken. You have the strength to do so now, and you have allies who will walk with you along the way. Don't squander them."

Left alone with the burden of questioning what the truth was, Cloud remained rooted in place by his thoughts as Kunsel departed back towards Aerith's home.

[-oOo-]

"I can offer you an ear if you wish to speak, from one warrior to another," Red XIII told Tifa. They were both sitting in the garden that bloomed with flowers, and had been making small talk until that point.

"What makes you think I have something I need to vent?" she asked.

"You smell troubled," he explained. "I take it the reason is because of what transpired with the young man just now?"

"… I lost everything when my home was burned down," she started, after a pause. "I lost everything again when the plate fell. There's nothing left for me to do now but chase after Sephiroth. It's what I've trained to do ever since that day, and if I don't grab the chance to take down Sephiroth myself…."

Red XIII finished for her. "Everything would have been for nothing?"

She nodded and looked down to her fists. "There's blood on my hands, and I have nothing left from my old life except Cloud and vengeance. If I lost both of them, I don't think I could keep pushing ahead. I thought he would understand that and tell me he wanted me to come with him."

"Have you tried telling him that?" Red XIII asked her. She shook her head. "Then explain it to him. Do not waver out of fear of reprisal."

"Let's say I do, and he still tells me to stay behind?" she asked. "What then?"

Red XIII stretched his back and then laid his head down. "If you are the warrior I believe you to be, then his response won't really won't change what you'll do. You're not asking for permission. You're just explaining why you will fight no matter what and that should be recognized and respected—warrior-to-warrior."

"Hmm, you're right." She smiled in gratitude and rose to her feet to do just that. "Thanks, Red."

[-oOo-]

Crimson sat down in one of the pews that remained intact within the Church, leaning her head back over the top and closing her eyes in thought. It was such a simple plan that she had at first. They would get the information and then leave without anyone being the wiser they were there.

Then, in a single day, everything went to Hell and back.

For a second, in a pure moment of weakness, she wondered what it would have been like to have never been assigned to watch Zack Fair after his mentor had died. They had met on and off the job before then, the first time being him saving her from a Genesis Copy after she made a mistake. But it was during the vacation that she truly gained insight into his nature and came to see him as someone she wanted to be close to.

If she had never gotten to know him to the extent that she did then, what would be different?

She was roused from her thoughts when she felt a touch on her shoulder. It caught her off-guard and her training reflexes kicked in. Her weapon was in her hand and pointed at the owner of the hand's throat of in a flash.

"Easy," Cloud said, keeping his tone soft and un-offended at having a weapon at his jugular. "I just wanted to apologies for earlier."

"Sorry, you caught me off-guard and I reacted poorly." She put the weapon next to her. "It was my fault. I let my awareness slip while thinking of the past."

Cloud removed his Buster Sword and placed it against the wall, taking a seat next to her on the pew. "Kunsel told me about how I might have come across as being ungrateful. You gave everything up to help me, and I didn't take that into account."

"I understood where you were coming from." Her hair shifted as she turned to face him. "But you know I've had plenty of training, and I can still beat you in a match any day of the week. I'm not someone who needs to be protected."

"I'll keep that in mind from now on…." He seemed nervous to her as he trailed off, hesitant to speak as he clasped his fingers and looked to the flowers growing beneath the opening in the roof. "Can I ask you something personal?"

"You can ask, but whether or not I'll answer depends on what it is." Crimson brought her legs up, planting her feet on the pew and curling her arms around them as she looked him in the eyes. "So, what do you want to know?"

"Who was Zack?" Cloud asked, wincing as he did so. "Why did he help me?"

She stared at him in a stunned silence for an elongated pause as her mind drew conclusions. Then she let loose the breath she had been holding in. "Let me guess, Kunsel told you?"

He nodded. "He said that he died for my freedom, but I can't even recall what he looks like. I have his memories of certain places and things and people, but I also have my own. I want to know the truth of the man whose sword it is that I've been using."

"When you put it like that I really don't have much of a choice but to tell you, do I?" She sighed. "He… never wavered in following what he believed was right, and had a strong sense of morals. He encouraged others to follow their dreams and protect their honor, no matter how steep the price. He was a great guy, and so forward about everything that it was impossible not to like him."

"Did you love him?" he asked next. An awkward silence followed the question as Crimson lowered her head behind her knees. Cloud backpedaled, sensing he'd stepped on a sensitive topic. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have—"

"Maybe I had something of a crush on him," she admitted, hiding a blush. "Maybe I did love him to an extent. But he was already in a relationship with Aerith, and I was just a colleague who idolized him. At best he saw me as a friend."

Cloud looked at the Buster Sword, taking in all of this new information. "Was I also his friend?"

"I think so." She unfurled her legs and rose to her feet. "Zack was always protective of his friends, so I don't doubt he would have been willing to take on an army for you."

"He would go that far for me, and yet I don't remember a thing." His expression grew pitiable at his own words. "You, Aerith, and Kunsel are helping me because it's what he wanted as well. It feels wrong that I can't even remember what he looked like after all of that."

"Which is why we need to head to Nibelheim next," she said as she crouched down to look him in the eyes from his seat. "The Shinra Mansion there is where it all began. If we go there, we might find some clues to getting your memories back, or maybe even Hojo. I still have questions for him."

"And if there aren't any answers there?" he asked. "What then?"

"Then we keep searching." She set her hands on top of his in a gentle manner. "I've decided that I want to see for myself who you really are, so I won't leave your side until we get your memories back in order. If that means going up against Sephiroth or the Company itself, then we'll cross those bridges when we come to them. But you don't have to do it alone."

"… Okay," he said. "We'll go there together."

[-oOo-]

Tseng stood at attention on the helipad of the Shinra building as a B1-Alpha Helicopter whirred over his head, with over a dozen other aircrafts approaching and landing below. Next to him were Elena, Rude, Reno, Heidegger, Scarlet, Palmer, and Reeve. The surviving executives and Turks had assembled in order to await the arrival of the new president.

The helicopter landed. The door to it opened and revealed Rufus Shinra, adorned in a white coat and suit. He climbed out, accompanied by an augmented guard hound known as Dark Nation, and stood in front of the assembled men and women with his hands behind his back.

"I've received your message about what has happened," he said. "As of this moment, I am taking command of the company. Everything that my father had been doing, every resource that was at his disposal, is now mine. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir!" was the collective response of the assembled group. None of them could claim otherwise.

"I'm different than my father," he continued. "His methods were inefficient and look where it got him. His forces cut in half, his headquarters in ruin, and an early grave by a monster of his own creation. I will not make the same mistakes, and I will not tolerate failure that could have been avoided. None of you are exempt from this. Is that understood as well?"

"…yes, sir." they responded again, albeit with more uncertainty from the other executives. Of the assembled, they had the most to lose should he be true to his word. For the Turks it was always a matter of fact.

"Good." He marched towards the entrance, the guard hound at his side. "Then let's get started with cleaning up the mess he left behind."