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The world around Zero is burning faster than he can breathe.
Everywhere he looks there are trails of fire and buildings of ash. The city is plunged into a blaze that flatline communications, fritzes of loose cinder buzzing off the tips of infernos that are growing ever closer to engulfing his body. Back from behind him broad gusts from smoldering rubble overlay the blistered prints of once sturdy walls, the turrets and columns of the great iron fortress rumbling with the shouting cries of agony and the screams of the reploids and humans and men. Those who can’t move are feasted on by the flame, the spleurches falling back through the engulfed forest of a city for seemingly forever. And, at the center of all the hazed destruction and primal fear, he watches it decay with the eagerness of a starved vulture.
Zero is walking past the myriad of breaking forms. He feels like a ghost registering the eyes of the dead, the blank stone stares of the ones from his life clouded, magnetizing his attention against the revolting oozes of bloodied runoff. There’s comrades and reploids and commanders. Humans and technology and fluid. People he had never seen before in filthy piles of sliced flesh and torn bone.
He thinks he hears a sob were it not for the fact that it’s from the dead. The voices and explosions had become muffled into a mass of silence and spasms.
Was that good? Or wasn’t it? He doesn’t want to look back anymore at the pile. Someone around him is always suffering, someone is always breaking. Of all the things he wants to do right now, going back is most certainly one of the things on the bottom of the list.
He choses not to look again.
It was disgusting--all consuming to the eyes. Zero grimaces at the rotten, melting faces of the flames, the stench pungent and noxious through the dark. To a human the smell would be unbearable. To a reploid, the scavenged grounds and puked, warm earth still is reprehensive. The ground is soft at the base of his feet.
....
It was too much. Zero closes his eyes to forget about them, his sensors lost in the litter of the fire.
As he walks down the city streets he doesn’t need the calculations to know that it had been burning for a long, long time. By stench, size, and heat alone Zero’s analysis reports that it would be enough to engulf half in flames withinin in a matter of hours. He tries to guess when it could have been set.
He gives up trying on at least one thing.
But still, why are all of these people here?, he wonders, trying to remember where exactly this had started and ended.
Why had this happened?
Did....no one try to stop this?
He was beginning from a memory forged black, but something about this scene in particular outputs him. Had his unit not been able to at least evacuate some of the civilians to another city before this attack? Abel had police forces and warning sirens loud and alert enough for evacuation. There are over 2 approximately government installed safety bunkers for every building and fire hydrants within a 100 foot radius of another for flame based criminals. The fire must have started somewhere inside and abandoned--big enough to slip away into the background until it was too late.
No, not even the government could have predicted something like this, not even the Maverick Hunters. It’s so sudden--calculated. It’s something clever, something cruel. Only a primal monster would do. Not even Mavericks inflicted with the most severe cases of the virus had the will to slaughter innocent civilians not in way of their objective.
A terrorist, maybe. But what reason to attack all of Abel?
Except for the hunter base, none at all.
X could have stopped it easily. Unless there was a leak in the system, he has confidence that X would have been able to take care of this within a matter of hours. So why now? Why was everything burning before his eyes?
And...
Why is he always at the center of it all?
...
As if in response to his question a howl beat at the ground, the howl of a distant madman--the howl of a monster.
And for once Zero isn’t sure what he wants to tear apart first.
It’s a human alright, he realizes as he’s approaching--an old one based on the rickety voice and greyed fibers of his hair. He had seen him before in many nightmares, but had not once learned his name.
But he does know that the man is his creator.
And that must be why the city is burning.
“So you remember what your purpose is,” he spits, with an accent that swells sharply through Zero’s ears, “for once in your lifetime. This is what I wanted you to be. This is what you could have become. This city is mine--can be yours now that they are gone.”
Something breaks.
Zero’s alert systems are going haywire, begging, pleading to run. He does not feel safe around the man, wants to escape the clutches of fire. Because every time he appears there was always something horrid he had done--something he couldn’t dream of doing in a million years.
When the man was there, so was X.
But in his dreams he was the one who had crushed him.
Over and over and over and over again.
“I’m not a monster.....” Zero chokes, trying desperately to force out an answer, “I’m not like this anymore. This city. These people......I’m no savior but I couldn’t have done this to them or to myself or even to....him.”
“But you have,” he smirks, skimming his fingers against the bristly fibers of his mustache, almost disappointed at Zero’s fear.
“But I’ve changed,” he writhers.
And the world stops.
“Let’s see about that--do you want me to show you again?”
His cries couldn’t have been made louder.
With a familiar whine X is roused from sleep mode to the side of a trembling body.
Zero’s.
Ever since he had begun to dream there had been nothing but the familiar visions of nightmares. Specifically, ones deep and close enough to have embedded themselves into Zero’s cognative sleep system forcefully enough to have broken him to the core. X had tried everything--link cables, gem touches, even deep reploid sleeping pills but Zero couldn’t hold it down enough for the nightmares.
He knew what Zero was dreaming about. So many frightful things filled his vision each night that X had almost implemented his own fear through his mind.
Zero’s sleep processes are complicated. They are condensed into heavy power naps as to maximize energy recovery so waking him up from his stasis is near impossible. He could try, but it had always ended in screaming.
But there’s something else he had remembered for comfort, something to let Zero know that he’s still there.
Still together.
Taking a final breath, X rolls to Zero’s side again, squeezing his midsection hard enough to combat the shattering that he knows must surely be happening within the nightmarish clutches of his dreams.
It’s not much, but he hopes somewhere through the dark it’s reached him.