When Knight Man next came to the bleary state of semi-consciousness he'd experienced earlier, panic rammed him, a charging bull in foaming fury. Full wakefulness now, his sole battered optic trying desperately to find something familiar. Nothing.
He saw all around him an engineering laboratory, much like the one in which he'd been constructed in the first place. His spark had been installed early on; Dr. Wily had let Knight Man see most of his own body assembled.
Knight Man recalled thinking something had been very wrong with Dr. Wily in the last three or four days of his construction. It was as though the old man had begun to slowly unwind, only feigning interest when in truth there was no soul left in his work.
Knight Man had seen it, and had trembled. He felt certain now that the lack of attention on his creator's part had contributed to his eventual defeat at the hands of Megaman.
An error made in a lab much like this one, he thought. His battered optic roved, but otherwise Knight Man couldn't change his perspective. His head turned to one side, he could only hope he wasn't alone.
He made to speak, and heard his own voice coming not from his helmeted head unit, but rather, from a speaker somewhere behind him. "Hello?" No response, at first, and then a nearby whoosh of a pneumatic door opening. "Hello?"
"Ah, you're coming round," said the gravelly voice of the man calling himself Hephaestus. "That's excellent, truly! Don't try to move or access your diagnostics; you're in the process of being transferred to a new body."
"What," Knight Man said, and now his voice sounded like it was coming from about the right place. There was a stutter in his vision, and suddenly, he found himself looking down at Hephaestus, who stood at a massive control console, looking up at Knight Man.
"You are presently loaded mostly into my Spark Transference Unit, a computer system I designed in order to allow for the transfer of all hard disk data and the spark itself to a new frame," Hephaestus said. He reminded Knight Man of someone, another Robot Master, but one that came before his time. But this thought was shunted roughly aside as the notion of what Hephaestus was suggesting sunk in
"What you are describing should be impossible," Knight Man said. He tried to turn his view, but once again found he could not. "Why can't I see what I want to?"
"Your optics are currently slaved to the cameras above the monitor of this workstation," the crimson and white mechanoid replied evenly. "I apologize for the disorientation. In a few minutes, your perspective will change again. There will be a minute or so of pain. I cannot change that, and for that, my friend, I am most sorry."
Knight Man pondered this for a moment. He realized now that his head was but an image displayed on a monitor screen. His spark, his very essence, was still in the wrecked heap that was his original body. He wondered for a moment if the mechanoid calling himself Hephaestus had undergone a similar transformation at some point.
No use in wondering, he thought. The darkness and world-rending pain chased this thought like a belligerent gorilla through the jungle of his being a moment later.
Lances pierced him from all sides, followed by the heaving crush of axes and the searing lash of swords about his body. Knight Man could feel the agony assail him in a dozen guises, but he could feel the weight of his mace in his hand. Yes, he thought, my mace, with which I can beat back this nightmare. My mace, with which I can fight through!
Carried through on this thought, he envisioned himself in his mangled body, one-armed, beating back hordes of imps and demons as they clawed for him. A faint blue light began to shine from his eyes, soon engulfing his body, and with a savage roar, the vision went purest white.
Slowly, ever so slowly, the world began taking shape again before his optics. With a start he realized he had two working optics again, seeing quite clearly through a window port. He was standing in a charging tube, or something similar. He felt oddly potent, more powerful than ever before.
Hephaestus was ten yards away, his left side facing Knight Man. But that lasted only a moment. The screen he'd been looking at now showed bars of sliding readings and text data. The red and white mechanoid turned to face Knight Man, and approached. His eyes held joy and excitement.
There was a rush of air, and then gravity kicked in. Knight Man felt heavy, but when the door swung open to the right, the Robot Master stepped out of the stasis pod and took a wobbling stance of readiness.
"Ah, you should see yourself," said Hephaestus. He scampered off, wheeling a full length mirror over in front of Knight Man, who could only stare in wonder at his new body.
He looked like a futuristic suit of demonic plate armor, tinged dark blue and purple. His optics were hidden behind a face grille on a horned helmet. He looked, in short, like an unholy horror. On his left hip was a huge mace with three prongs on its head.
Knight Man took up the weapon and held it aloft, watching electricity spark and ripple between the prongs.
"What do you think," asked Hephaestus.
"I think it is most wondrous," the Robot Master said, shocked by the demonic snarl that was his voice. "I can never thank you properly, except to now swear my fealty to you, as would any knight proper."
"Knight? No, my friend. You are no longer Knight Man."
"No?" Knight Man tried to raise an eyebrow, felt his helmet mimic the attempt. "Then who am I now?"
"Paladin," Hephaestus said, and the Robot Master nodded. It was well, he thought. All was well.
There came then a host of tests in an adjoining chamber, to help the mechanoid formerly known as Knight Man get used to his new body and its inherent abilities. Using holographic projectors, Hephaestus sat in a small control booth and made the test chamber look like a war-torn battlefield swarming with soldier-like robots.
The first new ability Paladin used was an energy shield, which projected in a curved wall of purple light when he held his left arm up in a shield-bearer's stance. Activating the shield took only a moment's thought. The only restriction, Hephaestus told him as mock bullets rebounded off of the shield, was that the shield followed the movement of his arm always when it was on.
"No different than my old shield, then," Paladin replied. He pivoted swiftly on his front heel, swinging his right arm out in a broad arc. The mace in his hand smashed into the hologram of a soldier bot, which fell apart to the ground. The impacts on shield and weapon felt quite real. "How is it these holograms have weight when I fight them?"
"Receptor falsifiers," the crimson and white mechanoid said behind his protective booth wall. "I'm feeding tactile input directly to your sensory systems via relay signals. If they hit you, you'll feel it and your system will respond. Not to worry, though; it's perfectly safe."
And Paladin felt several white laser bullets hit him then from the right. Flinching from the impact, he turned to face his unseen foe, and froze, fear tearing through his mind. "Megaman," he rasped. The Blue Bomber was much smaller than Paladin, now that he was in his new body, but that mattered not a whit; here stood the bot who'd essentially killed him.
"Remember what he did to you," Hephaestus said quietly through the speakers of the room. The scenery shifted, and Paladin was now back in his throne room. "Remember your rage as he shot you, over and over again. Let the rage be your tool, Paladin."
Paladin closed his optics for a moment, taking a deep breath. He didn't need the oxygen, but his programming allowed for human-like behaviors. He opened his optics, took a defensive stance with the shield held up, and put the mace back in its slot.
His right arm whirred and snapped, changing into a small catapult. A plate on his back slid open, and a high-yield contact explosive was deposited into the catapult's cup on a small segmented swing arm. Then Paladin roared a ghastly war cry, and launched the explosive.
It blew Megaman into a thousand sputtering, blackened pieces. Smoke curled through the air, heavy and cloying, but Paladin paid it no heed. His back plate slid shut, and his arm whirred back into shape.
"A most excellent outcome, my friend," said Hephaestus, shutting down the program. "Come, let us introduce you to your brothers."
Paladin followed his new master through several dozen twisting corridors in a massive complex. Bots worked away everywhere, many of them familiar to the core memories ported from his time as Knight Man; Hard Hats, Sliding Shockers, Green Meanies. All appeared to be engaged in construction and repair work. A fee stood about in small groups, chit-chatting, but these were few and far between, and the ones conversing differed in color from their working look-alikes.
"The ones that talk are the result of years of experimentation," Hephaestus said over his shoulder as he walked ahead of Paladin. "They all have persona programs, which act as artificial sparks."
"So, they are sentient?"
"In a way, yes. They each have a close approximation of individuality. These ones are put in charge of platoons of their bot type."
"That must be useful."
"Indeed. It frees me up to do my real work, you see." Hephaestus stopped at an elevator, and when they entered, he pushed a button marked 'W'.
"Where are we going now?"
"To the level of the complex reserved for you and your kinsmen. I believe one of them is out on a mission right now, but he should be back any time now." The slightly larger mechanoid put a heavy hand on Paladin's shoulder. "You are the last, my friend. All are now gathered. I have been working toward this moment for longer than you could imagine."
As Hephaestus drew his hand back, a question came, unbidden, from Paladin. "Master, what year is this?"
"2152," came the reply. Paladin went stock still; he'd been lying dormant, at death's door, for a hundred and twenty years, roughly. A century had gone by, while he lay in a broken heap, forgotten by the world. Surely his old Master, Dr. Wily, was dead and gone by now.
As the elevator came to a stop, the doors whooshed open, and Paladin followed Hephaestus out into a entrance lounge of some sort. Plush and regal, it had the style of a Persian palace chamber. Across the room from them were a set of black double doors. On the left and right walls, two steel shuttered gates, of the variety that Wily had used to lead in and out of the combat chambers of his Robot Masters.
Paladin pointed to a skull insignia above these gates, each with a yellow 'W' stamped in the forehead. Hephaestus loosed a low chuckle. "Yes, I thought them appropriate. Your kinsmen, my other friends here, were also once Robot Masters. All of you were clinging, just barely, to life. Your sparks had not yet faded. Yet do not misunderstand me," the larger mechanoid said, walking toward the double doors. "You will not recognize any of them at first. They will all have new bodies, like yours, made into perfect machine-men."
"How many of us are there, Master," Paladin asked, though he suspected he already knew the answer. As Hephaestus opened the double doors, revealing a kind of war room dominated by a round table, he chuckled. Seven other mechanoids looked up at them as they stepped inside. One of them was just sitting down.
"Why, eight, Paladin," said Hephaestus. "It's always eight."
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