It had begun when he was just a boy, a boy named Ronald. A spry young lad, running and jumping and playing without a care in the world. Yes, it had begun simply.
Father had been a tremendous engineer, working for Haslin Robotics. Father designed and maintained soldier and law enforcement bots. Sometimes, he worked on his own bots in the garage.
And Ronald, well, he was fascinated, from the young age of six. He begged father to let him help. Father obliged. Father spent many hours after school teaching Ronald all the math and science he would need to learn to work on robots himself in the future.
Ronald proved to be a genius, capable of absorbing information and grasping ideas faster than just about anyone.
He got put into a special school, one just for kids like him. In just five years, Ronald did all the school it normally took other kids twelve years to do. He was very good at math and science. After taking some tests, he was let into college at Light University. Eleven years old and in college.
In the summer before he went, father and mother decided to take him on a trip, to go to a great big park to celebrate. But they never made it to the park. A drunken truck driver swerved into their lane and hit them head-on.
When Ronald awoke in the hospital four months later, mother and father were dead, and Ronald's left arm was gone. He had a new one, a mechanical one. Ronald liked it, but thought it looked too much like a mechanical arm.
So as soon as Uncle Todd and Aunt Mary came to take him home, to live where he'd lived with his mother and father, Ronald started trying to find out how to make his arm look real. This was how he found out about this new stuff called synthskin. The newest type of bots, called reploids, used it to make themselves look more like humans.
So Uncle Todd used some of the money father had left for Ronald to buy some, and Ronald moulded it to make the new fake arm look real.
Ronald went to college soon after that. In his first year, Ronald learned all about the basics of robotics, and something he'd never heard of, called cybernetics. Intrigued, he took up studying equal amounts of both. By the end of that first year, Ronald used what he learned to create a pair of cybernetic legs for himself, covered in synthskin to make them look real.
He couldn't very well replace his legs himself, though, could he? No, he would need help. So he began quietly and carefully tracking down those who could help him. He found a man named Krell, a man who worked for Light Industries, who had once been an authority in cybernetics.
Uncle Todd never asked what the money was for. He assumed Ronald wanted more robotics equipment.
Ronald arranged for a cover story of staying with friends, all of whom helped, while he went and had the legs changed out.
Over the course of four more years, getting his doctorate in robotics at an advanced pace at the age of 17, Ronald had three more surgeries. He was a cyborg, looking for everything like a normal human being.
And Dr. Krell? All he'd asked in return, after that first surgery, was for Ronald to attend some meetings with him.
Ronald became a member in good standing in the Cult of Wily.
X had arranged his secondary weapons for a third time, and stashed two emergency energy tanks in the holsters in his legs. He was as prepared as he could be.
Hephaestus awaited him in the Wily Manor. The Manors were the stuff of legends, brutal gauntlets that defied simple description. It had been said that if Wily spent half the time on his Robot Masters that he had on the Manors, there would have only been two or three campaigns. He would have ruled the world.
X wasn't so sure of that. Yes, the Manors had been terrible, but Megaman had always triumphed. In the end, Wily had done nothing to defeat him and Dr. Light.
A nagging sensation was holding him back, keeping him in Hunter HQ. He couldn't figure what stayed him, but he couldn't afford to wait and figure it out.
X left his office, perhaps for the last time. The cam-drone hidden in the corner of the room watched him go.
"He's coming," Hephaestus whispered. He clicked on his commlink. "Caretaker, are the chains filled?"
"Yes, master," the ghoul replied. "We are ready for our guest of honor."
"Excellent. Now comes the time of lessons true."
Jasper Marlow offered his most winning smile to Briett, who returned it in kind, as he walked into the Hunter HQ. X was soon to depart, and as soon as he was gone, Marlow would begin sweeping the building with his sniffer. He already knew several of the drone spies were here; his tracking program at home had narrowed down the primary clusters of the devices.
There were at least five of them in the Hunter HQ building in Central City. More of the sniffers were being produced, and they would be sent to the other locales on the list he'd compiled and forwarded to Zero and various law enforcement agencies the world over.
Governments wanted to be the only ones doing the spying.
The whole ordeal already had tech pundits questioning what happened to older technologies that still had a solid use, especially if they could be used in ways to harm the average citizen. Marlow figured it would create a whole new facet to technological warfare, maybe something the media would dub "Fossil War" or "Obsolete Elite", something marketable like that.
But none of this concerned him. He was here to perform a favor for the legendary Maverick Hunter, after which he'd return to his regular duties as a detective of human crimes. It was too bad, really. He was starting to like the new work he'd been doing.
He headed down to the main teleporter room, where X stood near the sending platform, Hoffer at the controls. The technician reploid looked flustered. "Something wrong," Marlow asked.
"It's the system. I keep punching in the coordinates, and the teleporter keeps rejecting them as water-washed and unacceptable for a standard landing." Marlow looked to X, who just shrugged. He had twenty-two hours to deadline, so he could afford to wait an hour or two for the technician to figure out how to get him to Hephaestus's lair.
"X, didn't we see the same kind of thing on the network satellite imagery," Marlow inquired.
"Yeah, we did. There's a lot of dead spots like that."
"Is there any way to filter out the distortion?"
"No," said Hoffer, stepping back from the console to collect himself. "I already tried that. The system wouldn't accept any filter types for these coordinates."
"Can you program a new filter," X asked. Hoffer chuffed disbelief, shaking his head.
"Programming a filter for this system and integrating it would take days, sir. We don't have that kind of time. You said so yourself."
"Is there any way to integrate it to just this room," Marlow asked.
"Again, about a day, day and a half. I'm open to any other suggestions. We could put you beyond the distortion with an aqua transport pack."
"No, that would take too long to get to the Manor, and I'd be trying to find it blind," X said. "Any way to tie in the UHF signal to the transporter system?"
"Negative," Hoffer said. "We do that, we risk having your programming skyjacked by the transmission signal. You'd show up braindead." Marlow and X exchanged a quick glance, both thinking roughly the same thing; Hoffer was getting nervous, and nervous techs made mistakes.
"I say you take a break, Hoffer. I could use another ten or fifteen minutes to prepare for this myself," X said. "Detective, hallway?" Marlow nodded and backed out of the chamber, and a minute later X joined him in the hall. X passed his hand over the smoothed top of his head. "I can't have him jumble this up. One mistake, and I could get dumped into the ocean a hundred miles off mark."
"Why can't the system see through the distortion anyway," Marlow asked. "I'm good with looking for information and low tech stuff, but this is beyond me." X thought about his question for a minute, then snapped his metal fingers.
"Think of it like this," X said. "You tell someone about a weird animal you saw out in the woods one night. You even tell him exactly where you saw it. But you don't realize that you only saw it because you had a flashlight, and it was drawn to that light. Your friend goes out that night, doesn't see the animal. Something is missing, but you don't know what. The teleporter system is like that right now. Something is missing in the equation."
Marlow nodded, appreciating the parallel example. "That's a big something missing all right."
"Tell me about it." X paced for a minute, took a deep breath, exhaled.
"Why do you do that?"
"Do what?"
"Take big breaths like that. You don't need oxygen, you have no lungs."
"No, no lungs, but air storage sacs to help simulate human expressions and soforth. I had them put in after the third Sigma campaign, help make me more approachable to the humans."
A light sparked behind Marlow's eyes. "That's it!"
"What is?"
"Those air sacs weren't there to begin with. Well, neither was this distortion, I'll bet." X stopped pacing, hooked an arm around Marlow, and fairly carried him back into the teleporter room. Hoffer, still staring at the console while punching in data, took a moment to look up at his smiling commander.
"Sir?"
"Pull up the global map for that spot one year ago. Just do it." Hoffer hesitated, clearly confused, but he did as asked. The distortion was still present. "Okay, two years." Hoffer switched the timeline again, and this time, a strange, skull-shaped compound stood out on a massive island on the point of the coordinates. Hoffer yipped with glee.
"Sir, that's brilliant! I can calibrate and configure from here! Go onto the pad, sir!" X patted Marlow on the back, then raced down onto the teleporter pad.
As the system powered up and sent X halfway across the world, a single staff member slipped quietly, unnoticed, from the room.
X had been gone a few minutes before Jasper Marlow headed up to the roof of the Hunter HQ with the sniffer device. He would begin his sweep up top and work his way down. When he turned the device on, the small red radar screen immediately beeped, showing him a drone a few feet to his left.
Marlow spun and drew out a small black gadget from his belt, pressing a yellow button. With a spark and crackle, the camera drone fell over from its perch atop the lip of the roof. "Gotcha," he whispered. No more on the roof, though he had another signal just a few floors down. "Time to do my job."
X materialized on a beach of black sand, the ocean waves roaring behind him, the skull-shaped edifice towering before him. The compound looked enormous, and he wondered momentarily how long he'd be trapped within. "Could be forever," he said to an indifferent wind. "Could be I die here."
A narrow path wound from the beach up through a stretch of craggy black rocks, and this X followed, coming to the peak of the path and halting. Stretched out before him was a flattened field of scrub grass, studded with patches of wild flowers.
It would have been beautiful, if not for the Wily Manor. The front entryway into the complex was a gap in the clamped teeth of the skull, which was flanked by more functional-looking towers. Steadying himself, X withdrew his left hand, making his cannon ready, and began walking again.
When he was within fifty feet of the darkened entryway, a whirring sound and movement in the grass made him twitch, taking a firing stance. A pole was rising up out of the grass, and X saw a tiny holo-projector atop it. He stood upright, cannon held down to his side.
A warble issued from the mounted speaker, and then an image of Hephaestus, seated on a throne in full scale, appeared before him. "Ah, X. You have arrived. I will, as promised, abort the launch sequence, since you beat the deadline I gave you." Hephaestus reached off image for a moment, though X could hear the rattle of a keyboard, followed by the drone of something powering down. "There we are. Now, allow me to welcome you to my home, X. Here, I vow in the name of Dr. Wily, to teach you a much-needed set of lessons. The only real question is whether you'll survive long enough to appreciate what you will learn."
"You have nothing to teach me, Hephaestus," X snarled. "You're the one who'll be doing the learning."
"Ah, that is most presumptuous," Hephaestus countered, waggling a finger at X. "The student must know his place. Now, I could tell you what I'd like you to learn, but I believe in the hands-on approach. It's much livelier."
"I don't suppose I could convince you to just surrender, could I?"
"Heavens no, no. That would be wasted speech. I don't enjoy being wasteful. After all, that's the way of humans, being so casual about the detritus they cast in their wake."
"You're well spoken for a sociopath," X quipped. Hephaestus just laughed and shook his head.
"My dear man, you attempt to vex me, that you might lure me into making a mistake. Ha! Cutting remarks are all well and good, but you may wish to conserve your wits. You'll need them if you hope to reach me."
"I doubt your contraptions will be much of a challenge."
"Oh, you are more wrong than you know." The hologram winked out, but the speaker chimed again. "Proceed, on your way, to oblivion." The pole slid back into the ground, and X passed into the Wily Manor.
Ronald had learned a great deal in his time as a member of the Cult of Wily. One of the things he learned was that Wily didn't hate Megaman; that Wily, in fact, deeply respected the Blue Bomber.
But Dr. Wily felt that Megaman was a traitor to his own kind, especially as Rock became more and more integrated with the suit. Megaman, according to the cult's teachings, was a cyborg, and cyborgs were the ultimate life form. They were the perfect balance of man and machine.
The Robot Masters were as close to perfection as a stand-alone machine could be. They were at the opposite end of humans along the line of bases to begin with. Much of Wily's late stage work in life centered around making organic components work within machines.
Simulated organs were the closest he came to a way of making a robot into a cyborg. Not a perfect solution, Ronald knew, but as close as could be had.
Humans could be augmented with mechanical parts, though they too had limits, by and large. As such, the balance could be reached from either end, human or robot. Wily believed that the right candidates had to be carefully selected.
In the case of robots, those possessed of a spark, this was easier to achieve. They were less prone to injury or ailment in the process and adaptation period. Humans were more tricky, but could be done.
Dr. Wily had, after his seventh campaign, completed three test subjects from both ends, humanizing three robots and mechanizing three humans. However, the six cyborgs all suffered grievous complications, and had to be put down.
He had been working on designing the perfect robotic candidate, Subject Zero, when he died. Ronald had seen Subject Zero once at college, giving a lecture on the duties of the Hunter Organization, trying to recruit human engineers.
Subject Zero, like X, was a traitor to the way of Wily.
Ronald had been working a long time at trying to get closer to Zero and X, to find a way to hurt them that would leave them with no doubts. Yes, they would know they had been betrayed, and the wound would leave them questioning all of their alliances, especially among the humans.
"All hail Dr. Wily," he whispered to himself, watching his prey. "All hail."
There had been a cam-drone on the seventeenth floor of the Hunter HQ, and it had very nearly escaped Marlow by flying through an open window in the office it had been hiding in. The office belonged to major Swing, but the gorilla-like reploid was presently down in the tactical division's offices on the third floor.
Marlow checked his sniffer, seeing that yet another drone was on the next floor down. He realized with a start that based on its tracking signature, it was right in X's office.
Wasting no time, Marlow sprinted to the nearby stairwell and took the steps two at a time. Who knew how much the enemy had overseen and heard there? As one of the commanders of the Hunters, X had tended to almost all of his official duties in that room, spied upon by a foe who was proving far more ingenious than even Sigma.
Marlow got to the office, thrilled to see that the door had been left open. He nipped inside, and held out the sniffer. There, tucked carefully on a floor-level shelf on which sat a Maverick arm, a souvenir from some past battle, he spotted the twitching wings of the drone.
Marlow jabbed the neutralizer out and hit the yellow button. With a pop and hiss, the drone fell dead. Marlow walked slowly over to it, crouched down, and plucked it out.
"Quite the find," said a voice behind him. Marlow turned about, staying knelt, and saw Dr. Veris walking over, his lab coat billowing slightly behind him, arms behind his back.
"Tell me about it." Marlow held the drone up to Veris. "Can you imagine what this thing has heard and seen in this office? I'll have to tell X when he gets back."
"I wouldn't worry about that," said Dr. Veris. He brought his left arm around, and at the last moment, Jasper Marlow saw a patch of synthskin sliding back from his palm, revealing a glowing weapon barrel.
"No," he croaked, just before Dr. Veris, once Ronald Forick before changing his name, fired his burst cannon into Marlow's face.
The entrance snapped shut behind X, throwing the entire entry chamber into darkness. Lights began snapping on above in long tubes of halogen bulbs, and X saw that he was standing in a large blue chamber filled with Hard Hats. The squat robots were all hiding under their helms, made of an unknown material that deflected all energy-based weapons.
X grinned to himself. Yes, he'd been prepared for this sort of thing. While the Hard Hats had always been able to hide from standard energy shots from Megaman and X's cannons, they were quite incapable of stopping electricity flowing up under them. X activated the Spark Gap, and fired it into the floor.
The Hard Hats began squealing and running, coming out of the cover of their helms, after the closest six exploded in a rain of shards and scrap. The Spark Gap flowed through the floor in all directions, and X dodged several shots from fleeing Hard Hats, rolling and jumping over the wreckage of others.
By the time the attack faded, only three Hard Hats remained. X took aim, and the moment each one poked its head out, he shot them, blasting them apart. The room had become a mechanical sepulchre.
Only one set of doors stood at the far end of the room, seventy yards away. X dashed forward, speeding himself up with his thrusters. As he neared them, the doors pulled open, revealing a long, low-ceilinged hallway filled with more robots of varying size and function.
The first one was a kind of giant bee, which X quickly dispatched. Behind it came three more, all easily shot down. A bot in the style of a green-jacketed, one-eyed soldier shot at him from past the bees, landing the attack, which did almost no damage to X.
He returned the favor with a Mega Buster Shot that crashed through ten more similar bots. The hallway was now empty. It stretched on for close to two hundred yards, and at the end, X could just make out a tall red steel door.
He walked carefully around and over the destroyed bots, picking his way forward until he could see that flanking the door on each side was a kind of beam emitter, covering the way forward with beams of orange light. He fired a shot at the left emitter, which bounced away, crashing into the ceiling and dissipating uselessly. Whatever material they were made of was like the Hard Hat helms, immune to energy weapons.
There were doors on each side of the hall, four of which he had passed and two still before him. "Okay, you want to make this an adventure, Hephaestus? Fine." X returned to the first door on the left half of the hall, and grasped the knob. When he opened the door, he could see that the chamber beyond was another plain blue room, like the entrance. No bots in sight, though.
X stepped in and looked skyward. What he saw there made him roll back toward the door, which had already shut behind him. Three heavy, rhino-like machines landed where he'd been standing, snorting and stamping their feet.
The first one charged. X dashed aside, firing blindly back at the rhino-bot. Four shots, five, but still the beast and its cohorts lumbered toward him, turning to keep him in sight.
X fired three more shots, and the front rhino fell with blast holes in its chest and head. It crashed in front of the other three, fouling their approach. X began charging the cannon, and as the three remaining rhino-bots lumbered around their dead companion, he fired on them.
Two were blasted apart by the Mega Buster Shot, but the kinetic shielding around the third one flickered when the tail end of the shot hit. Too much of the shot's energy had been taken away destroying the first two.
X started running toward the end of the chamber opposite where he'd entered. There was a rusty steel lever embedded in the wall there, and he ran for it as the last mechanical rhino chased after him.
X risked a look over his shoulder with ten yards to go, and found the rhino bot right on him. Five yards from the wall he jumped forward, using the thrusters and his overpowered leg pistons to jump off of the wall, vaulting up over the rhino. As he landed, he fired the charged shot, destroying the bot.
X stood upright, cannon charging at his side. He surveyed the large chamber, up and down, and noticed that several of the steel panels in the walls to his left and right were sliding open.
Keeping these in mind, X pulled the lever. The rust of the bar itself was an affectation; whatever mechanism it was attached to allowed it to lever down into position easily. As soon as he heard a loud zapping sound from inside the walls, fist-sized metal darts began firing from both sides of the chamber. The holes in the walls not firing these missiles appeared to be catching the spikes, in turn readying them for further salvos.
He would be made into so much Swiss cheese if he didn't time his return to the central corridor just right. X looked upward, but the answer didn't lay there. The spike holes went all the way up.
The overlap of the rows of spikes would not allow him to dash clear either, even at maximum speed. X considered his options. "Hmm, this isn't good."
On a lark, he shot at one of the salvos of spikes, knocking several of the projectiles to the floor. He waited, and sure enough, when that row of spikes was refired from the opposite wall, there was a small gap. For ten minutes then, X methodically shot down the spikes, then walked from the chamber into the hallway.
One of the beams of energy barring the door had changed to a light green color. X took that as a good sign, then strode across the hall. He noticed, just before opening the door, a small skull insignia above the door, bordered by a phrase.
"In the name of Wily," X read aloud.
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