Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The dim sun stared down on the planet Locust as if judging it for its actions.

For a planet deep into the Lylat System’s outer rim, no one ever stumbled upon Locust by accident. It was a small planet inhabited by conmen and bandits on its best days and swarming with felons on its worst. It made the perfect hideout for anyone that was gutsy enough to stay there, and it was the perfect hub for the system’s toughest bounty hunters.

Locust was covered by a sprawling and uneven city, and in its center was a palace made of scraps, an inhuman mesh of various junked ships and building parts. It had seemingly random decorations and most of its windows were barred, but it was majestic compared to the short and decrepit buildings that surrounded it. A large docking bay jutted out of one end of the palace, perhaps the cleanest feature of the building. All kinds of fighters and ships arrived and left the palace constantly, like bees swarming around a hive.

One such ship, a smaller fighter with black plating and indigo markings, touched down on the docking bay in the late afternoon. Other than the unique paint job, the ship was nothing more than a standard-issue gunship that many rogues knew like the back of their hands. The ship’s pilot, on the other hand, was anything but unremarkable.

Other bounty hunters on the docking bay stopped what they were doing and stared at the vixen that exited the small ship. Canines and vulpines were common in the Lylat System, even on a planet as remote as Locust, but no other creature in the galaxy shared this vixen’s deep cerulean fur and unique tribal markings. She adjusted her black jacket around her arms, but she was less interested in hiding the dark scars on her chest and stomach. Her dark blue tail flicked in anticipation as she tossed a heavy satchel over her shoulder. Her long indigo hair billowed around her as the engines on her spacecraft finished powering down. Her dull, silver tiara briefly sparkled as she caught a glimpse of the setting sun in the distance, but her eyes were cold and dark, like black ice on a landing track.

No one dared to stare at her. Most of the rookies and lesser hunters either cowered away from her, or they began to inquire loudly about her until they were hushed by the others. Normal conversations became quiet murmurs as she walked through the corridors of the palace, and rumors started to fly instead.

“Is… is that Kursed? I’ve never seen her in person before,” one rookie said.

“Quiet, she’ll hear you!” hushed another, “I heard she can hear you from hundreds of meters away!”

“I heard she doesn’t even use a blaster, she uses this weird-looking staff instead,” one said, “and she avoids enemy blaster shots by just dodging them. How can she move that fast?”

“No one can move that fast,” commented an older hunter, “I think she’s an android. Haven’t you seen her arm?”

Kursed said nothing, but she slowly adjusted her jacket sleeve over her right arm as she continued past the nosy hunters. This was nothing new.

The entrance to the palace’s central room was marked with large, brightly colored doors, fitting of the guildmaster that resided beyond them. Two large feline bodyguards watched the entrance, but despite their intimidating appearances, they cautiously stepped out of the way once Kursed appeared in front of them. Neither of them addressed her or made eye contact with her as she pressed on the doors with her free hand.

Natural light washed over Kursed’s face as she entered. The guildmaster’s room was the most spacious in the palace, and it also had the most windows, even though most of them were barred like the others were.

“Ah, Kursed! Pleasure to see you again.”

“Salvador.” Kursed spoke quietly.

The crow spread his arms to welcome Kursed, or to show off his extravagant robes and gaudy jewelry. He remained seated at his desk as Kursed approached and removed the satchel from her shoulder. She set the bag on his desk with an audible thunk.

“I take it the mission was a resounding success,” Salvador’s black beak contorted into an uneven grin. “Were the masked bandits hard to deal with?”
Kursed shook her head. “No. You’ll find proof of their defeat in there.”

Salvador unraveled the tie on the bag like a giddy child on Christmas morning. The room lit up with a red tint as a bright crimson gemstone fell out of the loose bag, surrounded by several damaged masks. Salvador giggled as he ignored the rest of the bag’s contents and picked up the gemstone for further inspection. Its crimson sheen filled his dark eyes, and his grin grew even larger.

“Yes, this is certainly it,” he held the gemstone up to the light over his desk, “the one and only serpentine heirloom… mine at last! Oh, just look at how it sparkles! It will make an excellent brooch. Is it not the most brilliant red you’ve ever seen, Kursed?”

The excited crow pressed the gemstone towards Kursed’s snout. Instead of flinching, the surly vixen stared at him with her cold turquoise eyes, even the gleam from the jewel was not enough to brighten them. Salvador hesitated, but he sighed and tossed a smaller sack at Kursed. Old credits clinked together as she caught the sack with her left hand.

“Here you go, job well done once again,” Salvador said, but his attention was already back on his prize after the payment was transferred.
“What’s the next job?” Kursed asked bluntly.

“Next job? Already?” Salvador set the gemstone down on his desk and pushed the rest of the bag to the side. “Tenacious as ever, aren’t you? Most hunters around here give it at least a few days before they come back for another job, you know. Aren’t I paying you enough to give you a break?”

No response.

“Anyway,” Salvador sighed as he set a few papers and holograms on the desk. Each outlined details for a new bounty or other odd job that circled around the area. Salvador prided himself on a large selection of jobs, although it was difficult to defend the paying price most of the time.

Kursed took a glance at the jobs. Nothing unusual. There was a small gang of small-time hustlers that needed to be disbanded a few planets over. One bandit stole from another and now they wanted a third party involved. Someone wanted protection against wild Gronkats, whatever those were. The only thing consistent among the jobs was the pay amount—not much.

“Is this all you have? I can barely keep my ship running for this much.” Kursed expressed her disappointment, but Salvador just shrugged and remained focused on his jewels.

“Sorry,” he clicked his tongue, “That’s all I’ve got. Maybe if you give it a while, I’ll have something more valuable for you.”

“You’re hiding something.” She stared at the distracted crow with heightened focus.

Despite the competitive job market, Kursed seldom had opportunities to take full advantage of her telepathic powers, and she relished them whenever she had the chance. Reading a simple mind like Salvador’s was child’s play compared to some of the entities she had scanned before. A brief memory of Aparoids flashed in her mind, but she buried it before it could fester.

Salvador turned to face her. He was beginning to mouth “What?” before he stopped himself and rolled his eyes again.

“Oh, right, telepathy. I forgot. I guess there’s no use keeping secrets from you, hm? It’s a good thing I don’t keep any safes around here.” He tapped his beak with a bejeweled digit. “Yes, there is one other job. A personal one. I need someone to get rid of a rogue hunter to me.”

“That’s all?” Kursed replied. Her expressionless attitude almost turned into a scoff.

“Not just any hunter! He used to be the finest hunter I had, so I can’t just send anyone after him, or they’ll end up dead and then he’ll come after me and I don’t want that kind of drama. And I didn’t want to tell you about it because I don’t think you can handle him. Let’s be honest, you’re not a half-bad hunter, but you’re no Samus.”

“Then why don’t you hire her instead?” Kursed had heard the name Samus a few times since arriving on Locust, but she had never seen the “famous hunter” in person, and if Samus was as impressive as the rumors made her out to be, then it was hard to believe she would ever visit a place like Locust.

“Who what? Hire Samus? Samus Aran!” His necklaces shook wildly as he threw his head back and guffawed. “Silly girl, I can’t hire Samus! She’s—how should I say—too famous for a place like this. Yes, she used to stop by many years ago, but nowadays she just works for those stuff-shirts Galactic Federation or whatever they call themselves. A waste of talent if you ask me. Yes, having her here would solve all my problems, but I’m just not that fortunate.”

“Then it sounds like I’m the best you have,” Kursed smirked.

The crow sighed as he set a new hologram down on the desk, and a distorted image of a masculine leopard appeared. The leopard’s pilot jacket was flashy like his spotted fur, and his arrogant but menacing grin brightened the room as the hologram slowly spun around.

“He goes by Leo. But he’s serious business. He was my best hunter up until he decided he didn’t want to do business with me anymore, so now he’s going around and stealing all my bounties and cutting me out of the deals. We can still track his ship since he used to work with us. I’m not sure why he hasn’t just removed the tracker, but he probably thinks that no one is brave enough to challenge him. He’s one of the quickest draws on Locust, his kill count is higher than any hunter that’s ever worked here, even Samus.”

“And you want me to get rid of him? Easy,” Kursed said as she scooped up the hologram. Salvador sputtered as she turned to exit the room, as if his warnings hadn’t been severe enough.

“I’m serious!” Salvador asserted himself, although he doubted his words would sway Kursed at this point in their conversation. “He’s a monster. Even veteran hunters don’t want to deal with him. And apparently, he’s been raiding Space Pirate freighters lately. He’s either confident or stupid but considering his skills it’s probably the former.”
“Space Pirates?” She stopped for a moment.

“You know, ‘scourge of the galaxies?’” He chuckled. “Sometimes I forget you’ve only been out here for a year. You’re almost more of a rookie than those kids on the landing pad! Ha!”

“A year is a long time,” Kursed defended herself.

“Not long enough to learn about Space Pirates, I guess.” Salvador smirked. “I thought you had heard of them. They’re a race of reptilian beasts, they specialize in bioengineering. I thought their bases of operation were at least a few galaxies over, but they’ve been more active in Lylat lately. I heard they’re filthy rich with their advanced tech and bio research, but no one is insane enough to challenge a group that big or organized. I guess Leo thinks he can handle them. No idea what his strategy is, but if you go after him, you might have to deal with them too. It’s a suicide mission, really.”

But Kursed was already on the way out the door as Salvador finished explaining. “I’ll be back soon.”

Salvador grumbled. “That confidence is going to get you killed one of these days.”

But the doors were already closing shut as he finished his sentence.

…

Leo’s tracking beacon lead Kursed far away from Locust, past a few planetoids and asteroid fields, until she arrived at a large ship drifting in deep space. It looked like a transport ship, but its design was unfamiliar to her. It didn’t have the same menacing design as Aparoid ships had, but it was far more advanced than the standard hunters’ ships she saw buzzing around Locust. It was covered in black plating and was decorated with gold rims that glimmered as the light of distant stars passed by. Leo’s ship was haplessly parked alongside the ship; his small, bright-red fighter was like a blemish next to the dark freighter’s sleeker design.

Kursed moved in closer to the freighter and took aim at Leo’s ship. A few quick volleys from her ship’s twin blasters were enough to disable Leo’s hyperdrive just in case he had plans to make a quick getaway. Once the escape route was locked down, she parked on the opposite end of the freighter’s cargo bay and gathered her things. She was half-focusing her mind on the ship as she loaded her blaster and sheathed her staff on her belt.

The interior of the freighter seemed quiet. Normally her telepathy gave her access to hundreds of different thoughts and voices if she focused hard enough, but she only picked up a single thought pattern from the ship that seemed relatively normal: it was a series of excited thoughts, as if someone had struck gold and didn’t have a bag to put it in. She smirked as she entered the freighter.

Kursed’s trek lead her through multiple dark corridors full of stray blaster shots and damaged turrets. The hallways were dimly lit and eerily quiet, as if the ship’s main generator was out and the auxiliary power was barely holding on. It was odd to traverse such a large craft without hundreds of machine noises to scramble her thoughts, but she was grateful for the quiet. Focusing on the single thought pattern was much easier.

Eventually she arrived in a larger, circular room. Computers and monitors of all shapes and sizes lined the walls, but the large tubes in the room’s center caught Kursed’s attention much easier. Each tube contained a dubious parasitic blob: a mesh of tendrils, nuclei, and asymmetrical teeth. None of them were of Lylat origin; even Andross had never come up with bioweapons like these. Leo stood in the center of it all, hunched over one computer and tapping away at the keyboard while occasionally looking up at the specimens in the tubes. He turned to face Kursed as he saw her approach.

“Who are you? You must be another bounty hunter.” Leo welcomed her with a calm voice. Kursed didn’t know whether it was the darkness that was hiding her appearance or the giddiness of Leo’s previous thoughts, but he did not seem intimidated at all.

“You must have picked up the distress signal too.” He gestured to the computer screen and to the tubes around him. “Look at all this biodata! The likes of which Lylat has never seen. I know people who would pay millions for this kind of knowledge. Space Pirate ships are mobile treasure troves. And the best part is, there are no Pirates left here. All the escape pods are gone, and I made sure there weren’t any stragglers. I guess one of their experiments went wrong or something, but it’s just you and me now—and all this loot.”

Kursed took another look at her surroundings. Leo was right—she figured this was a Space Pirate ship based on Salvador’s description, but even if she had never seen a Pirate in person, there were none in sight, and using her telepathy only let her delve deeper into the primitive and underdeveloped minds of the bio-blobs that hovered in tubes above her.

“Normally,” Leo’s expression darkened, “I would cut other hunters out of the deal, but you seem new, so I’ll cut you a break instead. You can have whatever I don’t take. Besides, I can’t take all this treasure even if I wanted to.”

“No thanks,” Kursed unhooked her staff from her belt and extended it to its full length. “I’m here for you. Salvador’s orders.”

Leo took his focus off the screen and turned to Kursed again. As he stood up straight, he better resembled the cocky but menacing hologram that she saw earlier. “Oh, my dear, I would rethink that decision.” He grinned viciously as he flashed the blasters at his sides. “Didn’t Salvador tell you anything about me? I will kill you.”
“But,” he didn’t cover the blasters up, but he resumed a casual stance, “you seem like a nice lady, definitely a rookie, and you caught me in a good mood. How about we forget about whatever bounty ol’ Sal put on me, and you can scurry on away. And if you don’t step out of line again, I might let you keep something on the ship. Otherwise, I’ll send your limbs to Sal, and he’ll stop sending pests after me. Sound good?”

“If you didn’t want pests, you should have turned off the tracker.” Kursed narrowed her eyes and took a confident pose, her staff aimed towards Leo’s face.
As quick as a flash, Leo drew his blasters and fired a volley of rapid shots, but regardless of his apparent prowess with firearms, he fired the same plasma blasts that Kursed saw many times before. She weaved around Leo’s shots with the grace of a dancer, all the while rapidly closing the distance between them. Her staff stayed at her side like an additional appendage, ready to strike at a moment’s notice.

Leo’s shots grew sloppier as he noticed Kursed’s movements. He had never seen anyone move so quickly before, much less someone who was gutsy enough to challenge him to a fight without a blaster. Once she was only a few inches from him, he roared and unloaded both weapons straight at her head, but after the flash from the shots disappeared, he only saw a tinge of indigo hair. A gold staff swung into his view, slamming into his wrists until both of his blasters clattered to the floor. Before the leopard had time to react to the pain, another precise swing struck him in the chest and knocked him against the central monitor.

The leopard’s casual façade vanished completely by the time he scrambled back up from the mess of computers he created.

“I don’t know who you are, but you’ve made a big mistake. No rookie messes with Leo and lives!” He growled audibly as he reached for a pocket hidden in his jacket.
Kursed was unwavering. Leo was much bigger than her and maybe had more bounty hunting experience, but she didn’t sense any unique tactics from him. He was just another big target, and her warrior’s blood boiled within her. She was almost excited for Leo to ready his next weapon.

Beep… beep… beep…

Suddenly, a familiar and sickening noise filled the vixen’s ears, and a phantom pain erupted in her right arm. She froze as her eyes fixated on the round grenade that Leo lobbed at her feet, and her tail contorted. Instead of ducking for cover, the vixen flinched and remained in place, like a deer in headlights.

BOOM.

The smoke grenade detonated at Kursed’s feet, and a wave of dark smog enveloped her, causing her to yelp and cover her eyes with her right arm. The grenade’s countdown rang in her ears and her heart was racing. She tried to catch her breath to calm back down, but it only made her cough more. Her focus evaporated, and even as the smoke began to clear, her feet remained glued to the same spots on the floor.

“Now I’ve got you.” From the receding smoke, the figure of a sly leopard appeared, and he brought down a large knife towards Kursed’s head with an overzealous swing.
What happened next was difficult for the leopard to follow. First, he saw scraps of the vixen’s black jacket scatter as his knife tore it apart, but then he saw sparks erupt where he should have punctured flesh. Before he could process the sparks, he felt the vixen’s staff smash against his chest, and then her foot slammed against his cheek. A silver fang spun through the air as Leo tumbled across the room and fell into a heap on the other end. Kursed sneered as she sheathed her staff and stole a glimpse of her exposed right arm. She hoped it would go unnoticed, but the dim lights from the room reflected off the metal on her arm as if shining a spotlight on it, and the rest of her was illuminated better as a result.

“What… is wrong with you…!” Leo roared as loud as he could, but he could barely muster more than a scathing whisper. “You could buy your own planetoid with the money in this room alone. Why are you so focused on the bounty? Salvador is barely paying you a fraction of all this.”

“I didn’t come here for Pirate data,” Kursed responded firmly while trying to hide her shortness of breath. Her eyes darted around the room to try and find the scraps of her jacket to cover herself back up.

Leo paused as he stared at her arms. “Wait… I know you,” he coughed, “you’re that Kursed hunter.”

“Yeah? What about it.” Despite the rush of emotion, she was holding fast.

“You really are a rookie,” he managed a raspy laugh. “You were barely starting out with Salvador’s guild by the time I left. The other hunters wouldn’t shut up about you, how you were strong and all that. I guess the rumors were true. Even the one about your arm.”

Kursed grimaced. She knew better than to listen to a beaten enemy, but she was still trying to calm back down. Leo’s words were getting to her far more than the hunters back on Locust.

“I don’t understand you.” Leo sat up and sneered. “So, you’re as strong as they say. Why aren’t you taking advantage of it? Forget kissing up to Sal! You know why I left, right? Because I didn’t need him. I don’t need anyone, and you don’t either. I know you’ve been through hell. I can tell by your arm. This whole freighter is your ticket to a better life, and you don’t need someone to help you get it.”

“You… you don’t know what I’ve been through.” Kursed frowned as she turned to make her right arm less visible but doing so only made her holstered blaster easier to notice.

Leo almost laughed. “That’s your blaster? It’s not even lethal, it’s a stun gun. There’s no way Sal wanted me alive. Is that all you have? I know the rumors; they say you only use your staff when you fight. You haven’t killed anyone since you started, have you? You’re a pathetic excuse of a bounty hunter.”

“Enough.” Kursed spoke quickly as she drew her blaster, but Leo’s verbal assault continued.

“Listen. I don’t know what moral code you’re trying to follow, but you want to know something? Morals mean dust out here. You’re a bounty hunter now, and you’re no different from the rest of us. You’re never going to get anywhere unless you cut a few ties. Someone’s going to end up killing you one of these days and they will not care—"

There was a sudden flash of light and the uneven sound of old blaster fire, and Leo fell silent immediately. Kursed’s stun gun wasn’t the most potent model, but it was at least good enough to keep the leopard quiet until the mission ended.

Smoke was billowing off her blaster as it fell to the floor. She stood motionless, staring towards Leo’s body but not looking at him. Her thoughts were racing a mile a minute. Maybe Leo was right. Maybe the morals meant nothing anymore. She gritted her teeth. No, now was not the right time to think about that. She lifted Leo’s limp body over her shoulder and turned to leave, while knowingly ignoring all the data around her.

The corridors were even more silent as she exited the ship, but with no other thought patterns to focus on, her own thoughts were deafening.

“You are a warrior; you are a bounty hunter. You deserve this life.”

Normally she could tune out the intrusive thoughts, but the terror induced from the grenade prevented her from calming down. The Pirate data wasn’t hers to take, but if she ignored it, then how much longer would she be alone? She had only been a bounty hunter for a year, and it was already taking its toll on her. She wondered if she would even be recognizable if Fox—

“No… not again. I don’t want to think about him.” She spoke aloud as if asserting her thoughts.

She took a deep breath as she arrived outside the freighter, and the beauty of space around her offered her a brief respite.

Before she was a bounty hunter, her name was Krystal, and she was an innocent girl with short hair and teal-green eyes full of wonder. She was hopeful and brave, and she had an intense perseverance that rivaled her old friends. Love and compassion were second natures to her, and she recalled how her willingness to help others got her entangled in many adventures.

Now, she was a bounty hunter, and she was much different than she was before. She was thinner, her hair was longer, and she had scars and an ugly robotic prosthetic where her right arm used to be. She was hardly the same as Krystal, but no matter how badly she tried to bury her old memories of Star Fox, she could not forget them. Even after a year of isolation, her surly façade was not impenetrable.

She stared into the sea of lifeless stars, and they stared back with a beautiful but empty comfort. Was this all there was? When she was this far in space by herself, her morals were all she had, but if she didn’t let them go, she was doomed to be alone for the rest of her life. Without her morals, she had nothing else to stop her thoughts from echoing in her mind.

“You are a warrior; you are a bounty hunter. You deserve this life. You deserve to be alone.”

Her eyes began to reflect the light of space around her, if only for a moment. Tears began to well up.

“It can’t end like this. It can’t…”

Chapter Text

The mission started the same way as many others.

It was supposed to be a quick job to clear out a small gang of bandits that were holed up in an abandoned Venomian warehouse. The whole Star Fox team was still together then: Fox, Falco, Slippy, and Krystal, as tightly knit as they had been when the Aparoid queen was destroyed just a few months before. Even ROB 64, their robotic companion, seemed to have an emotional connection with them all somehow. Compared to what they dealt with on the Aparoid homeworld, this mission was going to be cake. They didn’t have the Great Fox anymore—it was nobly sacrificed during the climax of the Aparaoid invasion—but their replacement craft, aptly named the Great Fox II, sufficed just fine.

While ROB manned the Great Fox II far above the planet, Falco and Slippy patrolled the air in their respective Arwings in case of aerial backup, and Fox and Krystal landed near the enemy base. The gang’s base of operation was nothing more than an old warehouse that hadn’t been in service since the Lylat Wars from several years back, and it would have been mistaken for a junkyard if it were not for the occasional gang banners hanging about, as if they were painting a large red-and-white target on themselves.

There was little ground resistance. Fox with his blaster and Krystal with her staff headed to the central warehouse on foot. Countless machines and generators greeted them once they arrived inside, each with its own monotonous hum. To Fox it was just basic white noise, but as Krystal tried to access her telepathy to scan for thought patterns, her psionic senses were bombarded by a composite orchestra of machine drawls. Tapping into her sixth sense allowed her to read thought patterns from far away, but the hum from the machines interfered with her heightened senses and filled her head with noise. The further she reached with her telepathy, the more machine noises she picked up. By the time she had expanded her mind to cover the whole warehouse, the static in her head was unbearable.

She was no novice to using her telepathy, but she had never found herself in a place like this before. The Aparaoid homeworld had many machines that threatened to assault her senses, but the world was so spacious that she could focus freely without everything assaulting her mind at once. Sauria, of course, had hardly any machines to begin with. But here? Everything in the warehouse was tightly packed together and echoing off each other. There were so many different sounds messing with her telepathy that she could not focus on any of it. She cringed and rubbed her eyes.

“Krystal. Everything okay?” Fox watched as Krystal’s ears twitched, “I know we’ve been on a lot of missions lately, have you been able to rest enough between? Do you need to sit this one out?”

“I’m just fine, Fox,” Krystal lied, “Why would I need a break? No one else on the team does. I can handle myself.”

The others never talked down to her, but she hated being the “new one” in the group. Everything was so new to her, and she felt like Fox was always making accommodations for her and teaching her about mundane things that she felt bad for not learning herself. Her focus was being jeopardized by the environment, but she tired of seemingly holding the team back. She would probably have an awful migraine in the morning, but at least the mission wouldn’t last for long. She stared at the ceiling to focus better, her ears twitching all the while.

“Krystal, don’t strain yourself…”

“I said I’m fine,” Krystal snapped, a bit more forceful than she intended. This was her chance to prove herself, and no amount of telepathic interference or headache would hold her back!

She spoke again after a pause. “There’s five of them in the back. I can sense them crowded in a corner.”

“I guess they decided to hide after they heard us coming.” Fox commented. “Hang tight; I’ll handle them. You should stay back and rest.”

“They’re just bandits!” Krystal mocked as she extended her staff. “Nothing but cowards. I’ll take them out myself.”

“Wait--!” Fox tried to protest, but before he could warn Krystal about any unseen danger, she was already far above him, hurdling over the warehouse’s obstacles like a professional gymnast. Fox sighed and quietly ran on foot to cover her, even though he could see little more than a blue blur above piles of old machines.

Her head was ringing by the time she picked up the group’s location again, but she landed in the middle of them with the finesse of a ballerina. The goons hardly had time to turn to face her, much less ready their weapons, before she lashed out with her staff like the crack of a scorpion’s tail. One ruffian went down after a swift kick to the chest. Two more were flattened against the floor after her staff swept under their legs. Another managed to fire a laughably inaccurate shot before his blaster was forcefully shoved into his snout and he fell over backwards. The last goon only had time to yelp before a series of staff swings sent him tumbling into the nearest wall. Fox arrived on the scene just in time to see Krystal resetting her staff with a victorious smirk on her face.

“See? Cowards.” Krystal grinned.

Fox breathed a sigh of relief just in time for an unpleasant noise to fill his ears.

Up on a balcony on the opposite side of the warehouse, a turret finished its startup process and charged a great energy blast.  The loud hum of machines throughout the warehouse had effectively masked its startup until Krystal saw the turret’s laser sight aim at Fox’s chest.

“Look out!!” Fox shouted as a ball of green energy spiraled towards them. Despite the projectile’s ear-numbing force, it was much slower to arrive compared to the blaster fire she expected from the other ruffians, and a quick side-step was all she needed to avoid harm. The energy charge crashed into a pile of generators as Krystal steeled her nerves and looked towards the turret. The explosion from the blast reverberated in the warehouse like an echo chamber, and Krystal could hardly see straight as the turret began charging a second blast.

“Take cover, Krystal!” Fox charged up his blaster, but Krystal was not listening. Her head was already aching from the overstimulation; the sooner she could dispatch the turret, the better.

Just as quickly as she approached the group of ruffians, Krystal jumped and flipped over stacks of machines until she reached the balcony where the turret was set. The bandit operating the turret was fumbling with something in his pocket as Krystal approached him, but he had no time to do anything else as she delivered a flurry of kicks to his face and midsection, making his armor seem rather useless. As the bandit doubled over, she spun her staff in the air and unleashed a powerful gust of frigid air towards the machine’s controls. The energy charge at the turret’s tip faded into nothing as the machine slowed to a silent halt. But as soon as Krystal’s ears stopped ringing, she picked up a new noise.

Beep… beep… beep…

The dazed ruffian had been fumbling with a grenade, which had fallen to Krystal’s feet. She gasped and prepared an energy field with her staff.

BOOM!!

A deafening explosion tore the balcony apart, turret and all. The blast blew a hole through the warehouse’s flimsy wall, and a cascade of machine parts came tumbling down with the rest of the balcony.

“KRYSTAL!!” Fox cried, his voice barely audible past the reverberating explosion and the noise of the falling metal. The terrified vulpine dashed towards the wreckage as the last piece of scrap landed on the floor. It all happened so fast. Did her energy field come up in time? He couldn’t think.

“Krystal!” He furiously dug through piles of metal until he found a tinge of blue fur… and a hint of red. He repeated her name until she was completely unearthed from the wreckage, and he was able to get a better look at her. Her staff’s energy field had worked, but only partially.

Her right arm was gone.

Fox’s throat became so dry that he almost choked. He winced as he stared at the garbled mass of red that separated her body from her staff, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off it. It was like a bad dream, or something he would see in a movie. This wasn’t real. This wasn’t--

“ROB!!” Fox shouted into his comms unit, his voice cracking wildly, “Emergency! Krystal needs immediate medical attention! Get down here right now!”

…

Fox’s vision remained cloudy from the moment the team loaded Krystal back aboard the Great Fox II, until she was transported to a Cornerian hospital. His pedigree as the galaxy’s savior multiple times over ensured that Krystal was given immediate treatment, but Fox did not feel an ounce of calm until he saw her sleeping peacefully in a hospital bed many hours later. He had hardly slept by the time she woke up from the first operation.

It was common for Slippy, Peppy, and even Falco to go out of commission occasionally. Fox remembered a few times during the Lylat Wars where their ships were damaged, and they had to retreat. He also remembered Peppy’s brave sacrifice of the Great Fox that led to the victory over the Aparoids. But no one on his team had ever suffered an injury like this. Even General Pepper pulled through with minimal issue after his craft was hijacked in the later stages of the Aparoid crisis, and Peppy got away from the Great Fox’s destruction with nothing more than a few scars. But Krystal had lost an entire limb. He couldn’t remember loss this severe since his parents’ passing.

Some care packages arrived while Krystal stayed in the hospital. She did not have many connections past Fox’s group of friends, but Peppy and his family made sure to make her the nicest care package they could manage. Fox didn’t have much, but he did not leave the hospital while she was there. He couldn’t get the events of the mission out of his head. If he had just been a better leader and had gone in alone like he had done in the past, then this wouldn’t have happened. He had let her down, and she had paid dearly for it. She would never be the same again. He cringed every time he looked at her in the hospital bed and saw an empty space under the blanket where her arm should have been.

Recovery was slow. The Cornerian doctors’ expertise was enough to provide Krystal with a prosthetic arm in place of the destroyed one. Her new metal arm was a marvel of technology, with many moving parts and somewhat organic movements, but it was far from the same as before. It was thicker and heavier than her other arm, and it lacked any blue fur or tattoos that her other arm still had. She struggled to move it during physical therapy, as if it was an awkward beam of weight stapled to her shoulder.

Finally, she felt well enough to have visitors. Fox was the first to see her, but she seemed completely different when he stepped into her room. The metal arm caused her to lean awkwardly to the side, and her eyes were dull and lifeless. Fox wanted to say something—he wanted to apologize for everything that she had gone through, but he couldn’t take his attention off her arm.

“Krystal, I… I am so sorry.”

Krystal stared at him for a moment, but her expression grew more upset as she did. Fox’s expression changed to match.

“What’s wrong?” Fox asked solemnly, even if it seemed like a bland question in hindsight.

“Fox,” she spoke quietly. Her voice was cracking as if she would cry at any moment, but her eyes remained empty and lifeless. “I can’t… I can’t feel you… my… my telepathy is gone.”

He felt sick. He didn’t know what to say. He went to embrace her, but he felt the cold metal of her prosthetic on his back, and it smashed his heart into pieces. Even her embraces were not the same anymore, and he felt as empty as ever as he pulled away from her.

The doctors explained later that they assumed Krystal lost her telepathy due to her strain during the mission and the trauma of the accident, but since no one else in Lylat had an ability like it, they couldn’t determine whether she would ever get it back. Every time Fox looked at her, a wave of sorrow and guilt washed over him. She had lost so much, and it was his fault. She was hardly the same vixen anymore.

After what felt like months of recovery, she felt well enough to leave the hospital, and she insisted to come back aboard the Great Fox II with Fox and the rest of the team. Those were the longest days of Fox’s life. There were no missions to accept; Fox hated the idea of putting Krystal back into harm’s way. For all he knew, she’d end up losing something else.

Having lost so much, Krystal seemed like a shell of her former self. She never smiled or greeted the rest of the team, but just having her on the ship was enough to tear at his emotions. Every time he saw her, he saw her prosthetic and the depressed look in her eyes, and all he could remember was his failure and the pain she experienced. After everything she had been through, all the fighting she endured, she ended up with a worse injury that anyone else on the team. He could tell that she struggled to get used to this changed life, and he couldn’t bear to think about it. He found himself keeping his distance from her as the days went on.

As he spent less and less time with her, horrible thoughts began to fill his head.

Krystal was not a pilot. She was a Cerinian; the last survivor of a doomed race. She was lost among the stars when Fox met her for the first time, and even if her roots were that of a warrior, her skills with an Arwing only went back a year or so, much less than even a rookie at the academy.

They had been distant ever since the accident. Their last embrace had been on her hospital bed, and Fox was so stricken with guilt that he felt no passion when he saw her. He only saw his mistakes, and he could only think of more scenarios where she would get hurt. Similarly, Krystal seemed totally disinterested in him, or anything for that matter.

Maybe she wasn’t meant to be part of Star Fox.

Maybe it wasn’t meant to be between them.

…

“She’s gone, Fox.”

The phrase echoed in his head as he shakily reached for another cup of the most bitter coffee he could brew. His eyes remained glued on the computer screen, but his mind was playing the same events in his head repeatedly. He remembered their last mission together like it was yesterday. He remembered her grievous injury, the time they spent in the hospital, and the brief time they spent back on the Great Fox II. Worst of all, he remembered when he told her to leave the team.

Staring down at Andross’s hideous true form was nothing compared to the anxiety and hopelessness Fox felt that day. Originally, he had planned a detailed explanation for all the reasons he was taking her off the team. Maybe if he explained everything in detail, they could separate on a high note. But even though her telepathy was gone, Krystal knew what he was going to say as soon as the meeting started, and she stared at him with the same depressed and empty eyes. The pain in her expression was so severe that Fox only managed to choke out the simplest sentence: “I’m taking you off the team.”

“I understand,” was Krystal’s response, but there was nothing about her lifeless tone that would suggest she understood his decision fully. She slowly got up from the table, using her metallic arm to support herself, and she exited the meeting room without a word. Fox’s expression shattered the moment the meeting doors closed. He felt as if barbed wire had ensnared his chest and throat. He wanted to sob, but his emotions were so wild that all he could muster was a contorted expression of unexplainable sorrow.

Less than a day later, she disappeared. Slippy didn’t want to break the news to him; only Falco was brave enough to approach Fox in the late morning to tell him what happened.

“She’s gone, Fox.” The phrase bombarded his thoughts once more. “Krystal’s Arwing is gone, her room is cleaned out, and her flight schedule hasn’t been touched. I don’t think she’s coming back.”

She didn’t come back. General Pepper contacted them later to inform them that she left her Arwing at one of Corneria’s stations, and no one knew where she went afterwards.

Months had passed since she left. How many months had it been? It didn’t matter, he regretted all of it. After spending many nights sulking in his room aboard the Great Fox II, his sorrows turned into regrets, and his regrets formed into a warped sense of determination. He wanted to find her and apologize. Even if she wasn’t going to join his team again, he wanted to know that she was safe. He would do anything to replace his last memory of her.

Now, through the power of warped determination and black coffee, he was trying to search for her, although his exhaustion was forcing him to look in circles. The last few nights had been spent in front of his old computer, contacting everyone he knew and searching anywhere for any trace of Krystal, but constant memories of their last mission and her pain prevented his searching to bear any fruit. He was prepared to search with keyword “Cerinian” for the umpteenth time when his painful memories were finally interrupted by someone.

“Up early again, huh?”

Falco was standing in the doorway of Fox’s dimly lit room. Fox couldn’t make out of the details of his friend’s face because of the light from the hallway, but he noticed the shape of a duffel bag strapped over the avian’s shoulder. A sudden pit formed in him stomach.

“Falco, I’m busy—”

“Just listen, okay?” The avian approached Fox’s desk and hovered over him. Fox kept his eyes on the screen while trying to hide the numerous empty coffee cups behind him.

“I’m quitting the team.” Falco’s words were quick and concise, just like the last time he gave Fox bad news. The duffel bag made perfect sense now.

“Leaving again, huh?” Fox sighed heavily. He wanted to be upset, but he had no spare energy to be. Slippy had already left the team to start a family a month or so ago. It was only a matter of time before Falco did something similar.

“Yeah, Katt and I are putting together our own team. You can join us if you want.”

Fox hesitated. “Are you and Katt…?”

“Nah,” Falco half-chuckled, “we just have a lot of similar interests, you know? That’s why we’re forming a new team. She told me about another ace pilot that’s going to join us, I haven’t met him myself, but she says he’s great…”

Fox said nothing.

“I mean yeah, I’m crazy about her, even if she drives me up the wall sometimes,” Falco continued, a bit more jovial this time. “Maybe I was just jealous of what Slippy had going, you know? I mean did you see him after we had that one mission on Aquas? That lady Amanda was the only thing he could talk about after that. I’d never seen someone so happy to stay on that soggy mess of a planet. Last I checked they’re planning on having three kids. Can you believe that? Three kids! Slippy, of all guys!”

Fox tried to smile.

“Buddy. Listen,” Falco had an uncommon tone in his voice. “You should go find her.”

“I’m trying,” Fox gestured to his computer screen, “but she’s long gone now. I’ve been up all night trying to find something about her or her homeworld, but there’s nothing. There’s so many planets and sectors to check in Lylat. And what if she’s in a completely different system now? I have no leads.”

“What, are you giving up, then?” Falco scoffed, “Fox McCloud, giving up! Next thing you’ll be saying is that we should just drop everything and become grand prix racers for F-Zero or something.”

“Could be fun.”

“Come on Fox, I’m serious! Look, there’s got to be someone out there that knows what happened to her. Someone she could have confided in. Have you tried talking to Peppy?”

“Yeah, and Slippy too. Multiple times,” Fox responded after typing in the same keyword again, “but they haven’t heard anything. Nor has General Pepper, but they weren’t very close to begin with.”

“Okay, what about Star Wolf? I know Panther clicked with her.”

Fox grimaced. “Yeah, I contacted Panther. He said he invited her to join Wolf and his team when she left us, but she turned him down and called him some names he didn’t want to repeat. He hasn’t heard from her since.”

“Maybe there’s a place she would have gone, instead of meeting a person,” Falco suggested.

“Where?” Fox thought aloud, “She never connected with Corneria very well. Most of the planets we visited together were barren or filled with hostiles, and she’s been afraid to go back to Sauria ever since—”

Suddenly, Fox’s eyes lit up for the first time in months. He fumbled for the headset sitting at his desk among crumpled paper.

“ROB, set a course for Sauria immediately!”

“Whoa, slow down, tiger!” Falco laughed, “Let me leave before you got into hyperspeed!” He walked back to the entrance of Fox’s room. “But yeah,” he adjusted the duffel bag over his shoulder. “I guess this is goodbye.”

“I’ll see you again,” Fox offered a small smile. “You always come back.”

Falco grinned. “Yeah, I’m sure we’ll cross paths again real soon. Let me know if you find her, will you?”

He stopped before disappearing into the hallway. “Oh, and by the way. Maybe get some shut eye on the way to Sauria. You look like you just took a bath in Venom’s poison ocean.”

“See ya, Falco,” Fox smiled.

…

Despite the bereavement assaulting his mind, Fox was happy to go back to Sauria and see it it on piece, just as long as he stayed far away from Krazoa Palace. A wave of nostalgia washed over him as his Arwing hovered above the Walled City of Sauria; the architecture of the city and the shape of its inhabitants were recognizable, and King Tricky was no exception. The Earthwalker must have heard a report of Fox’s ship approaching, since he was already outside the city and waiting for Fox’s arrival by the time Fox’s ship began its landing sequence.

“Fox!! I’m so happy to see you!”

Fox only got about ten feet from his ship before Tricky tackled him. For a moment, Fox felt like nothing had happened since he saw Tricky during the Aparoid crisis.

“Happy to… see you. Too! Tricky,” Fox exclaimed through labored breath.

“Oop, sorry!” The large dinosaur got the hint and got off Fox before he could create a fox pancake.

The two old friends caught up for a while. Things on the dinosaur planet had been quiet since the Aparoids were wiped out, but it didn’t take long for Fox to talk about the rest of his team and what they were up to.

“You’re all that’s left of team Star Fox, huh?” Tricky smiled weakly.

“Yeah, it’s just me,” Fox nodded.

“Don’t worry, Fox! I bet you’ll get a cool new team together soon! Anyone in the galaxy would love to join your adventures! You’re famous, you know! Even my friends here on Sauria talk about you sometimes. I bet Slippy and Falco enjoyed their time with you, just like Peppy did.”

“Thanks, Tricky.” Fox smiled. He needed to hear that.

“Oh, but what about Krystal? You didn’t tell me about her… OH, wait!!” Despite his large stature, the Earthwalker was hopping with excitement. “Fox, I almost forgot—I have a message!”

“What is it?” Fox struggled to get to his feet as Tricky shook the ground, but his negative thoughts could not stop his hopes from rising.

“She was here, Fox!”

Fox almost fell over again. “Where? She didn’t go back to the palace, did she?” He hoped not. Regardless of what secrets remained there, he knew she was terrified of it.

“Oh no, she was at Thorntail Hollow! I remember she stopped by a few months ago. She asked for supplies, and we gave her as much as we could. I asked her why she was here by herself, I thought you would be with her. But when I asked, she said she was going off by herself to become a bounty hunter.”

“A bounty hunter?” Fox repeated, baffled. Did he hear that right? That was the kind of job that someone in Wolf’s domain would choose. The moniker didn’t mean much before the Lylat Wars, but nowadays it was a generous title given to a kidnapper and assassin.

“Yes, and she said she was going to work in Lylat’s outskirts,” Tricky confirmed, “she told me not to tell anyone, but I can’t help it! I know how important she is to you, Fox! I couldn’t just let her go off by herself!”

Fox stared into Sauria’s sky as he processed Tricky’s words.

“And I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you earlier,” Tricky continued, “but you know we don’t have any of the same technology you do. No communication lines or anything. I just had to hope that you’d show up, and you did! I’m glad it didn’t take another invasion to bring you here…” He offered a weak smile.

“Did she mention where she was going?”

Tricky shook his head. “Sorry Fox, she didn’t give a specific place. She just said that she was going to Lylat’s outskirts, but maybe she meant the planets on the other end of the system? Sauria’s remote as is, right?”

“You’re right,” Fox confirmed. His mind began to race with ideas about where she could be. It wasn’t a ton of information, but it was a lead. “Thank you so much.”

“I guess you’ll be leaving soon to find her,” Tricky tilted his head. “One of these days you should come over and relax! But finding Krystal is way more important. Need any supplies?”

“Sure,” Fox smiled, “maybe some Dumbledang Pods for the road,” he could barely identify the strange fruits with a straight face.

Once his ship was as full of spare fruits and eggs as it could hold, Fox bid Tricky and the other Earthwalkers farewell and departed Sauria almost as fast as he arrived. His mind was swirling with thoughts as soon as he reached the starry night of space. Why had Krystal told Tricky about her plans? She may have told Tricky not to tell anyone, but maybe she was hoping he would spill the beans. Wishful thinking, maybe.

A few days ago, Fox had no hope of finding Krystal. Even now, all he had was a lead on an occupation and a faint idea of her location. Still, it was a lead. Searching a planet or even several would be easier than searching multiple systems.

His search started as soon as he left Sauria. Starting as close as the desert planet Titania, he searched further and further out into the system for any sign of any bounty hunter that would resemble Krystal. Even if he had to search for a needle in a haystack, he was confident that there was still a needle to find.

Only ROB accompanied him on his search, but Fox did not mind. His determination had not burned this bright in what felt like years. He had experience in contacting bounty hunters and other ruffians before the Lylat Wars began, but he was afraid of Krystal’s apparent inexperience. What would become of her? He assumed she was out on her own, on an unfamiliar planet, without an Arwing, with a prosthetic arm she couldn’t use well, and without the telepathic powers she had relied on for years. He hoped she was alright, but as his concern grew, his determination grew to match.

His search took him far past the asteroid belts of Lylat, far beyond the distant and barren Venom, and into sectors that he had never seen before. Even if he had lived in the Lylat System all his life, he felt like he had hardly scratched the surface of its expanse. Familiar places like Corneria, Fortuna, and even Macbeth were long gone now.

At last, his search brought him to a small planetoid, further than even Sauria managed to reach on the system’s opposite side. According to the intel he had gathered from his search, it was a hub for all sorts of hunters and other criminals. If he wanted to find any bounty hunter in Lylat, he should look there.

Locust.

…

Meanwhile, far from the Lylat System…

The sector near planetoid Tallon IV never saw any activity, save for a unique orange gunship that occasionally made its rounds through the area. The planet was a bit too far to be under watch from galactic civilization, but Samus preferred to check on it personally every now and then, partially to see if she could learn any more about the mysterious tribe of Chozo that used to live there, or to check to see if Space Pirate activity ever found a resurgence. Normally, it seemed like she only made the rounds around Tallon IV out of boredom, but her current visit was more important.

Anyone who knew Samus Aran knew she was a renowned but terrifyingly efficient hunter. Her constant quest to eradicate the Space Pirate menace had resulted in the eradication of many Pirate strongholds and starships, but also the saving of countless innocent lives. She had single-handedly stopped planet-destroying threats on multiple occasions, but there was not as much activity lately. One of her most recent adventures had taken her to rogue planet Aether, where she aided the mysterious Luminoth in their war against the vile Ing, a hivemind of invaders that would have destroyed Aether completely if Samus had not arrived in time. However, throughout her travels on Aether and its second dimension Dark Aether, she encountered only a few Pirates, far less than the amount she had seen on planets like Tallon IV and Zebes from previous adventures. The few Pirates she saw were mostly wiped out by the Ing before she arrived.

Even now, despite the new mission, Pirate activity was borderline silent. Tallon IV was once one of the Pirates’ biggest operations, but not a single Pirate inhabited the planet now.

“These mission details are perplexing.” Samus’s computer spoke up, breaking the silence of her ship.

Samus stared at the computer, waiting for it to continue.

“The Galactic Federation sent us an anonymous tip about a Metroid onboard a Space Pirate frigate, last seen near Tallon IV. We understand how rare and valuable Metroids have become, but Tallon IV has been devoid of all Metroids since they were moved and contained by the Galactic Federation. My bioscanners have picked up no uncommon frequencies from the planet’s surface. Tallon IV is as free of Pirates as it was when our mission ended there.”

Samus nodded silently, but she was lost in thought.

“The anonymous tip may have been false, or it was intercepted incorrectly.” Her computer continued. “I initially thought that the tip was from a faction of rouge Pirates, but I scanned the tip after it was sent to us, and there were no connections to Pirate origin. We have not encountered any new data about the Pirates or their activities since the Aether crisis. We have no updated information on their plans.”

“Computer,” Samus spoke suddenly, “were the Pirate bases on Tallon IV destroyed?”

“Negative,” the computer responded, “their mining colony has been corroded by Phazon over time, but Pirate strongholds are largely left intact due to a lack of Pirates to operate them. Because of its status as a remote planet, the Federation has elected to make it off-limits to civilians while focusing conversation efforts on areas that are closer to the Federation’s reach.”

“Some of their logs might still update,” Samus thought aloud.

“Indeed, if it is like the frigate Orpheon from the previous encounter in this area, then their logs may update even after the ship has crashed and become submerged in water.”

Some time had passed since she infiltrated the damaged frigate Orpheon, but she still clearly remembered exploring its depths, even when it had crashed on Tallon IV’s surface. Even once the ship had lost its power, she was easily able to access Pirate data with her modern scanning technology.

Suddenly, another thought clicked in her head. Despite her helmet covering her face, Samus smiled slightly.

“Set a course for Tallon’s Phendrana Drifts. I have an idea.”

Chapter Text

The dream always started the same way.

The first thing she saw was the blue crystal suspended above Krazoa Palace, a memory as clear as day. Just moments before, she was staring at the judging expression of a Krazoa statue, then suddenly she sensed a malevolent presence, and she was whisked away to the center of the palace, where her confinement awaited her.

She had such large aspirations as she arrived at the palace. What started as a quest to find answers about her parents’ fate and her home planet Cerinia turned into a mission to save planet Sauria and the injured Earthwalkers. Sauria had been invaded by the tyrannical General Scales and his army of Sharpclaw dinosaurs, but Krystal had a chance at restoring peace if she could collect the six Krazoa Spirits and return them to their home in Krazoa Palace. For all she knew, the otherworldly Krazoa may have helped her find out more about her past.

The first Krazoa Spirit had been easy to find; she figured gathering the others wouldn’t be much harder. She would restore Sauria with the Spirits’ help and get that much closer to finding her family and her home. Instead, her mission was cut cruelly short, and she remained confined above the palace, trapped motionless inside of a blue crystal. She was helpless but to watch the other Krazoa Spirits flow around her, as if they were mocking her for her failure.

That horrible crystal prison… even now she was terrified of it. Her life energy gradually drained as she stayed helpless inside of it. It was not painful—she simply felt her consciousness slipping, as if she needed more sleep. She was slowly dying, and she could not move at all, not even to curl her paws or flex her tail. Her trusty staff could have helped her avoid the peril, but she lost it during a confrontation with General Scales before she arrived at the palace.

She knew her mission to find clues about her past would be perilous. She fully expected to encounter hardships, and she was not afraid of death, either. But she was terrified of dying on top of Krazoa Palace, where no one else was around. She was wasting away into nothing, and not a soul knew where she was. Thousands of dinosaurs may have lived on Sauria, and some of them still dwelled in the palace itself, but even the patrolling Sharpclaw and the dying Earthwalkers did not know where she was. She was going to die and be forgotten, just like the rest of her doomed race.

As time passed, she grew more horrified and more desperate. This couldn’t be how her story ended! There was so much left to uncover. She had tried to use telepathy to reach out to anyone that would listen, but she never knew if her thoughts were reaching anyone. She thought she sensed someone finding her staff on Sauria’s surface, but as her life force grew weaker, her ability to use her telepathy waned and she became cut off from the rest of Sauria.

But then, just as all hope seemed lost…

“She’s beautiful!”

A sudden voice tickled her subconscious. Using what little energy she had left, she could feel the presence of another, gazing up at her. It was a faint presence, like a faint memory or a lucid dream that she couldn’t wake up from. At the time, with her fleeting consciousness, she didn’t believe it was real. Her disbelief was destroyed completely as the sixth Krazoa Spirit was released, and it swirled around her along with the others. Suddenly, she felt a sharp pain.

“What’s going on? You said this would save her!”

The pain was enough to keep her awake. She felt the remaining Spirits pass through her as the first did, and moments later her prison disappeared. At last, after what felt like years, she was able to move again… and she immediately fell towards the palace’s foyer below. A familiar presence jostled her thoughts, and on instinct she reached out to grab on to her staff. Her staff! She looked up and got her first look at the someone who had found her staff and brought it to her.

He was a fox, like her in size and shape, but his fur was orange, and he wore a green suit with a white jacket, much unlike her Cerinian attire. He returned her stare with the most beautiful, emerald-green eyes she had ever seen. She would have gotten lost in his eyes right then and there, if it weren’t for the peril beneath her and a familiar malevolent presence that was creeping up behind her once again.

The next moments were an equal rush of emotion. The malevolent presence finally revealed itself as a false god that threatened the destruction of the Lylat System. Krystal got her staff back from her savior and used it with such grace that it was a shock that she hadn’t used it in so long. The orange fox boarded his own ship and pursued the wicked god once the staff’s fireballs became ineffective. After the dust cleared, the malevolent spirit was eradicated, and the orange fox returned as a hero. She was relieved, not only for being rescued, but for knowing that the one who saved her was safe, too.

As her hero and his ship came back into view, her dream grew foggy and her memories skipped forward.

Time passed… perhaps a year.

By now, the orange fox’s ship was much more familiar to her. In fact, she had a ship of her own. It was called an Arwing, and even a year after seeing one for the first time she was still enthralled with its compact and sleek appearance. Her Arwing meant so much to her. It was like a reminder of what she did with her hero and the rest of his team. That year had featured some of the best moments of her life, at least from the part of her life she could remember. Clues to Cerinia were few and far between, but for the first time of her known life, she felt like she had a real family.

Unlike on Sauria, where her memories were dominated by the horrors of the palace, there were many pleasant memories around the time of the Aparoid invasion. There was adversity everywhere, but if she felt the warm feelings of her team members, she felt unstoppable. This was nothing like being helplessly imprisoned in a crystal. She had complete control and being close to him only made her stronger.

One standout memory was the Aparoid invasion of Sauria. They made a great team together, as potent as a team as they would have been if she was able to help him gather the Krazoa Spirits, perhaps. After the Aparoid threat was wiped from the planet, one of his Earthwalker friends joked about them having their honeymoon back on Sauria. The thought danced in her head long after the exchange, even though he had tried to shut it down immediately. She still remembered his blush that day.

Later, they teamed up again when they reached the Aparoid homeworld. He was surrounded with enemy ships and his Arwing crashed, but before he could plumet to the planet’s fatal forcefield below, she cast out her staff and he grabbed it the nick of time. She saved his life in the same way he had saved hers. His emerald eyes seemed to sparkle even more that day, and her heart fluttered when she saw him. Even while they were behind enemy lines, they shared an immensely powerful bond.

She almost regretted the end of the Aparoid war. It was the closest she had ever been to him. After the Aparoid homeworld’s destruction, she remained in her ship with the rest of the team close by. His kind words echoed in her head.

“My friends. Thank you.”

She wished that calm moment could last forever, but the moment never lingered. Sometimes she still struggled to process how she had fallen so much. After everything that they went through together, they were split apart, and she was alone again.

The dream seemed to pass over the events that came afterwards, as if sparing her. Foggy memories played out in front of her as if she was fast-forwarding through home videos, using ancient technology she was unfamiliar with. There was so much pain in these memories. Her injury, his decision, their separation. The countdown of a grenade rang in her ears.

She watched herself pack up her things in her room aboard the Great Fox II, and she only used her Arwing up until it got her off his ship and onto Corneria. Her service under Star Fox ensured she was able to get a generic but serviceable craft on a neighboring planet. Before she knew it, Corneria and other familiar planets of Lylat were far behind her.

Her dream concluded as she drifted in space. Her craft had fuel, but she floated aimlessly from planet to planet, nothing but a shell of her former self. It was just as isolating as her time back on Krazoa Palace. She felt as if a new crystal had formed around her, and this time she would never be able to get out of it.

The time with Fox was only temporary. This is how her story would end.

…

A foreign numbness in her right arm jostled Kursed awake, and her head thumped against the headboard of her bed. She was breathing heavily, and her eyes were misty. The cobalt vixen wiped her eyes and growled quietly, as if someone had seen her moment of weakness. She hated that dream. No matter how many times she had it, it always got her emotions to flare up. She slid out of her bed and sauntered towards the washroom.

“It shouldn’t get to me anymore,” she thought to herself. Ever since she escaped from her old life, she had been trying to bury her emotions as deep as they would go. For the most part, it worked—on the surface, she was nothing like she used to be. As she approached the bathroom mirror, she recalled the toll that bounty hunting had taken on her body. She was covered in scars now, ranging from a blaster burn from a lucky shot to a scrape with a vengeful gang leader. Her metal arm was the hardest to ignore. She raised the prosthetic and sighed as she flexed its lifeless fingers. She wasn’t flexing her fingers, it felt more like she was telling a computer to open and close an apparatus. No innocent vixen would have a prosthetic like this. Krystal would never look like this. Her scars were the proof of her decision to start this lifestyle. She felt a faint numbness from where her arm used to be as she set her prosthetic back on the counter. She had practiced a lot with it, and moving her fake arm was much easier now than it was when she first got it, but she was still ashamed of it.

Familiar negative thoughts bombarded her conscious as she looked down at her ragged appearance in the mirror. Other than the ugly metal arm, all her scars had accumulated since she started the bounty hunting lifestyle a little over a year ago. She wondered how much more she would change if she kept at it. For all she knew, there wouldn’t be anything left of her after a few more years. What would Fox think if he saw her now? He probably wouldn’t even recognize her, or he’d still be repulsed by her broken appearance. She could feel the tears coming back with reinforcements. She wiped her eyes and growled again, although her voice cracked a little more this time.

“Enough, Kursed!” she told herself, “Why is this still upsetting you?” It didn’t make sense. She was alone for years before she met Fox McCloud and the rest of his team, so why did reserving herself to this new life sting so much? Before she became trapped on Sauria, she remembered drifting from planet to planet with no real home. She had minimal flying experience; she relied on other pilots and freighters to get her from one planet to the other. At least now she had her own ship and her own home. Her home was a tiny shack out in the middle of Locust’s underside, but it still provided her with a bed and a roof of protection against the dim sun nearby.

She even managed to get her telepathy back. Her mind was shaken for months after her last mission with Fox, but once she was used to her isolation, the stress and shock from the event diminished enough for her to focus again. She frequently found herself using telepathy to scan other hunters and find better bounties, as she had done with Salvador many times before. She didn’t need anything else to survive, so why was she so upset?

“You are a warrior. You have been alone for years. Why does this upset you?” She continuously asked herself the same question, even though she already knew the answer. Her emotions grew more chaotic as she stared at her reflection. Her expression contorted and she clenched her teeth.

Impulsively, she shut her eyes tight and took a deep breath. She expanded her mind as much as she could, scanning for any familiar thought patterns on Locust and deep into the stars beyond. Was he anywhere nearby? Was her Fox out there somewhere, looking for her? Kursed never wanted to see him again, but Krystal’s hope still shone through in desperate times. Scanning a whole planet was very difficult for her, and scanning anything more than that was almost impossible, but with no other white noises around, her sudden desperation was enough to motivate her.

No, no sign of Fox in Locust’s city. How about further? Her head began to pound. No, he’s not anywhere on Locust. Keep going further. Locust was so far away from other planetoids in Lylat. Could she sense Venom? That planet was at least closer than Locust was. Her ears were ringing.

Finally, the strain became too great, and she fell to her knees. She was breathing heavily as she held her head. No… she couldn’t feel him. Fox was nowhere nearby. Her mind ached so severely that she thought her head might explode. No matter how many times she tried, her mind could barely reach past Locust’s atmosphere, and she was left with no hopeful results and intense pain every time.

“Kursed… please… stop.” She berated herself. This needed to stop. Fox was nowhere near Locust, and he was not looking for her. He had moved on from their split. For the most part, she had moved on too, but there was still a small part of her that had not. The small part that made her constantly upset.

Even after everything that she had been through in the last year, she felt like she couldn’t escape. She was far away from Corneria, but she was still in the Lylat System. She still had a flicker of hope that things could go back to the way they were, even though her metal prosthetic was clear enough to show that things could never be the same again. She gripped her fake arm with her left.

Maybe the solution was to move farther away. So far away that no one would ever find her again. So far away, that Fox and those memories would be pushed to the back of her mind. Her current abode was small and cheap, so leaving wouldn’t be so hard. She was still used to sleeping in the cockpit of her fighter, anyway. And bounty hunters were needed in all reaches of space. She would find work easily no matter where she went.

How could she raise enough money to travel that far? Almost everything she earned went towards food and fuel, and occasional maintenance, both on herself and her ship. The normal, small-time bounties only kept her treading water for a few days at most. Leo’s bounty would help for longer, but there hadn’t been any major galactic threats since the Aparaoids were vanquished. Star Wolf wasn’t really the scourge of the galaxy that it used to be, and Oikanny and his cronies had been strapped for cash ever since their humiliation during the initial Aparoid invasion.

She sat on the floor of her washroom for a while, taking deep breaths until she was able to see clearly again. She wiped the mist from her eyes and got up slowly, using her metal arm as a stand. “I just need some fresh air,” she assured herself, “and then it’s back to Salvador.” She slipped on a new jacket as she stepped outside her shack.

Kursed’s paws pressed into Locust’s dirty surface as she made her way from her shack towards her parked fighter nearby. The gentle breeze calmed her nerves as it blew past her, and she took another deep breath. She paused for a moment to stare into the ethereal sky and take in the view, but a strange image among the stars caught her attention.

Locust’s atmosphere allowed for clouds occasionally, but something about the clouds today seemed off—a particular patch of clouds was moving through the sky faster than normal. As Kursed focused on it, the patch of clouds began to break off from the rest of the sky and approach the surface. An anxious pit formed in her stomach as she saw the tip of a small spacecraft appear where the clouds separated.

It wasn’t uncommon for ships to fly by her home, but the small speck in the sky rapidly grew into a massive freighter as its cloaking device disappeared. Kursed grimaced and checked for her staff and blaster at her waist. She specifically chose a home in the middle of nowhere so something like this wouldn’t happen. Some of the enemies and rivals she had made over the last year would love nothing more than to find her hideout and give her some extra scars. Still, if the inhabitants of the dubious ship had meant to destroy her, then they would not have bothered with removing their cloaking device or beginning a landing sequence. Black dirt and sand scattered as the large ship approached the surface, but Kursed could still make out the ship’s shape with the help of binoculars.

It was too nice of a ship to belong to any of the riffraff that picked a fight with her before, and it was far larger than any ship Salvador owned; its design was sleek, black, and foreign to her. There appeared to be multiple command areas and several docking bays, and cables and towers jutted out of the top of the hull as if the ship was a floating city. Alternatively, the ship’s multiple wings were long and sharp, and more wings seemed to unfold as the freighter drew closer. Despite the dirt surrounding it, it was in pristine condition, and the spotless black plating was only partially illuminated by Locust’s dim sun and the ship’s own gold veins, which reflected the light.

Kursed hesitated. The black plating and gold rims reminded her of something she had seen very recently. She watched as three specimens exited the freighter and began to approach her. She held her weapons close, but curiosity outweighed her cautiousness, and she found herself walking out into Locust’s wasteland to meet the three figures.

These creatures were unlike anything she had ever seen. Reptilian creatures in Lylat were already rare, but even General Scales’ bizarre creations back on Sauria were not as strange as these three. They each wore unique equipment that covered most of their top halves, but she could still make out their sharp jaws, digitigrade legs, and dinosaur-like feet. The figures resembled Swiss Army Knives with the various arm cannons, metallic wings, and beam swords grafted onto their bodies, but their equipment was far more advanced and intimidating than the weapons that she saw other hunters on Locust use. All three creatures were muscular and lumbering, and their equipment gave them a bulky appearance, but their movements through the dirt were graceful and dignified. As they drew closer to her, Kursed began to realize how much larger they were compared to her. Even while hunched over, the shortest among the reptiles was almost twice as tall as she was. She continued to approach the unusual creatures until they stopped about ten feet from her.

There was a moment of hesitation as the three creatures stared at the blue vixen with their glowing orange eyes. Finally, the middle creature broke the silence as it raised a three-clawed hand and bowed to her, and the others followed its lead.

“Greetings.”

A strange, metallic voice spoke as the lead creature growled deeply, as if their message was being translated in real-time. Did they not know Lylat’s common languages?

Of course… Space Pirates! She knew the gold rims on their ship looked familiar. The dark freighter she found Leo on had a similar design, even though that ship was smaller and battered from asteroids and frontal attacks from Leo’s ship. But why were they here? They must have found out about her trespassing onboard their damaged craft with Leo. She tried to read their minds, but her desperate search earlier in the morning left her mentally drained. Without reading the creatures’ minds, they looked like they could lunge at her at any moment. One of the monsters’ blades was almost as long as her leg. She grew uneasy as she reached for her folded staff.

“We seek no quarrel,” the metallic voice spoke quickly, “We only seek the one named Kursed.”

Kursed stopped and looked at them while slowly nodding. Despite their expressionless faces, they seemed pleased at her response.

“Bounty hunter Kursed,” the middle Pirate raised its head and looked at her. “We are grateful for your defeat of opposing bounty hunters and the preservation of our research data. We have come to offer a new job.”

The creature approached her and outstretched a hand to reveal a hologram of a large structure nestled between an expansive mountain range. It was tall and imposing, like the bounty hunters’ guild she frequented, but without mismatched parts and uneven floors. It looked closer to the skyscrapers she saw on Corneria, but combined with a more ancient architecture, like a castle in cyberspace. Instead of barred windows, the structure was covered in decorative banners, and a large bridge connected the structure to other parts of the mountains. A sea of small buildings laid far below the structure, and its highest point pierced the clouds in the sky. Even if it was just a hologram, Kursed was mesmerized.

“During a previous recon mission, an army of space-travelling warriors known as the Luminoth attacked one of our outposts and stole an invaluable specimen from us. One of our own succeeded in tracking the invaders to their base of operations. This structure… the Sanctuary Fortress, is their base on planet Aether, and it contains the precious cargo we seek to recover.”

A moment later, the image of the fortress disappeared and was replaced with a hologram depicting another unusual creature. The top of the creature resembled the hood of a jellyfish, but with several nuclei and veins housed within it. Four sharp mandibles jutted out from underneath the hood, which the creature tapped together as it swayed in place. Kursed raised an eyebrow. She had never seen a creature like it, but it seemed familiar somehow.

“This is the cargo. It is a creature called a Metroid,” the Pirate said as it watched the menacing hologram with Krystal. “It is a fascinating species, but it is almost extinct. This may be one of the only living Metroids in the galaxy, and we cannot afford to lose our only chance to retrieve it.”

“Why not just go to a bounty hunters guild?” Kursed asked. This seemed odd. Even if she had never met Space Pirates before, she knew there were a lot of them—the huge freighter they came from was proof of that. So why were they asking her to accept a mission on her own?

“We were impressed with your strength against Leo when he invaded one of our freighters,” the creature answered, “and this assignment must be done by only one person. Many other groups of hunters we considered are too large and would attract too much attention. Had this opportunity arose years ago, our team would have no issue with eradicating the Luminoth ourselves, but considering our current numbers, making enemies with a warrior race is not a viable option for us. But they will have more difficulty in tracking a solitary hunter or a single-passenger fighter. You are the best option we have for this job. We are familiar with how potent a single hunter can be.” The creature looked off to the side.

She didn’t pay any attention to the remark. Was that supposed to be a compliment? “What’s the pay?”

The Pirate flashed a different hologram that simply displayed a number. Kursed raised an eyebrow. That was… a lot of zeroes. “This mission is of utmost importance to us,” the creature said, “and we intend to compensate you appropriately.”

Kursed stood motionless for a moment, keeping up her poker face while being lost in thought. The reward was astounding, but this mission seemed far more perilous than anything she had attempted before. She had never heard of the Luminoth, but if Space Pirates were involved, then she had a nagging feeling that Samus Aran might be involved too. She remembered stories of Samus’s fight against the Pirates. Despite her confidence when confronting other hunters, the rumors she heard about Samus made Kursed want to avoid the mythical hunter at all costs. Still, after surviving her ordeal on Krazoa Palace, this seemed less terrifying, and the reward was certainly helping to sway her.

“Do you accept this mission?” the middle Pirate asked after a pause.

“I accept.”

“Excellent,” the Pirate responded while offering the holographic devices to Kursed, “we will provide you with coordinates to Aether and all battle data we can provide on the Luminoth.”

Kursed pocketed the holograms as the Pirates prepared to digitally send her additional data, although she was hardly focusing on their exchange now. Regardless of peril, the reward was enough to let her live comfortably for years. More than enough to finally get her out of the Lylat System for good, and hopefully enough to get her far away from anyone that would make her feel the way she had been feeling.

Soon she would be all alone, as she was meant to be, and she would not mind.

Even Fox wouldn’t find her.

He wasn’t looking for her anyway.

Chapter Text

“Yeah, I’ve seen a blue vixen kinda like that. Kursed, right?”

Fox’s heart almost stopped. He focused on the voice’s source with determined eyes while keeping one hand clutched over a wad of credits.

“Kursed? Is that her name?”

The masculine leopard sitting across from Fox twisted a whisker. “Yeah, Kursed. Bounty hunter. I knew her back when I used to be a hunter too. She was just starting out then, but everyone kept talking about how ruthless she was. They say she’s never been beaten by another hunter before, but I don’t think she’s that great. Just lucky.” The leopard rolled his eyes.

“Where is she now?”

“Well, I ain’t her keeper,” the leopard shrugged, “but she’s probably still working for Salvador, he’s one of the biggest bounty guildmasters around here, and he knows it. He talks a big talk, but his base is on that scrap heap planet called Locust, so I don’t know why he acts so high and mighty all the time. Probably cuz he has Kursed as his little lapdog.”

Fox slipped more credits over the table to the leopard, who gave them a sideways glance.

“So you’re going after Kursed, eh?” the leopard grinned wickedly, “sounds like she’s making lots of enemies. Heh. Serves her right.” Fox raised an eyebrow as the leopard chuckled. “I’m only telling you all this because I couldn’t care less about what happens to either Kursed or the rest of that lousy guild I hated working with them anyway. You don’t look like you can handle her, but at least I’m getting money out of it!”

…

“What was with that guy?” Fox thought. The conversation with the leopard echoed in Fox’s head even as he sat in the Great Fox II, far from the old trading outpost he met the leopard at. Still, his concern and confusion were overwhelmed by a sense of anticipation. After months of searching, he finally had a hint on Krystal’s location. He had never heard of Locust before, but arriving at a new planet was never a problem for him before. Even Venom seemed like a walk in the park to him now.

As the Great Fox II rocketed through hyperspeed, he couldn’t help but focus on all the questions he had. Who was Kursed? Was it really the Krystal he was looking for? It had to be—space was vast, but he couldn’t think of any other vixen that “kinda” looked like Krystal. And the name was similar, at least. Was she as ruthless as all the rumors said? He knew Krystal was a potent fighter when she was part of Star Fox, but she was never “ruthless.” He couldn’t tell if the leopard was just lying about everything, but Locust was a legitimate planet, so that was true at least. If it really was Krystal, he wondered how much she had changed. He couldn’t bear to think about what she had to endure since their last mission together. Fox winced.

“Approaching Locust air space.” ROB 64’s robotic voice chimed in over the intercoms.

Fox snapped out of his trance just in time for the hyperspeed veil around his ship to disappear, and for Locust to come into view. The leopard was right about calling it a scrap heap; it was a small and dull planet, covered in dirt and rocks on one side but stacked with metal scraps on the other. What he assumed was the guild’s base was sticking up among the planet’s metallic side, like a rusty nail lodged into a gob of iron. Fox’s eyes narrowed. For all he knew, his beloved Krystal could be in that tower right now. He would find her again, no matter what!

“Deploying Arwing,” ROB confirmed, “Good luck, Fox.”

Fox nodded. Even if Star Fox was long behind him, he felt like no time had passed as he sprinted through the hangar and hopped into the cockpit of his Arwing, a routine he could perform blindfolded. With the blast of the Arwing’s G-Diffuser, he was jettisoned from the Great Fox II with incredible speed. He didn’t mind the bulk of the bigger ship, but nothing beat the compact size and breakneck speed of his Arwing. He somersaulted as he entered Locusts’s atmosphere, and he could feel his determination burning brighter and brighter as his ship closed in on the tower. Unsurprisingly, Locust had no traffic control, but years of weaving his ship through hordes of enemies and massive space armadas made the approach to the tower easy. He only had to steer clear of a few other fighters as he found an open spot on one of the base’s multiple landing pads. 

Fox took a deep breath of the thick Locust air. If it weren’t for his blazing determination, he may have retreated. To an ordinary bystander, navigating Locust alone was a fool’s errand. It wasn’t just a change in literal atmosphere: he felt the planet’s hostility bear down on him like a heavy mist, but by the time his boots touched the landing bay, he was so full of adrenaline that he didn’t care. Krystal’s whereabouts was all he could think about. He was already processing how he would interrogate the tower’s residents as he approached the entrance to the base.

“You’re a new face.”

A lizard with red scales and an unpleasant expression eyed Fox moments after he entered. “Mind introducing yourself, pup? You’re a long way from home, whoever you are.”

Despite the venom in the lizard’s voice, Fox’s composure remained stalwart. “I’m here to see Salvador,” he said plainly.

“Oh, is that so? Sorry, Sal doesn’t just see any old dog that comes by,” she peered out a barred window and spotted Fox’s ship sitting on the landing pad. “Tell you what. Let’s assume you came here by accident. Why don’t you hop back onto that pretty ship of yours and leave, otherwise someone’s gonna shoot you full of holes and take your ship before you’re able to think. Make sense?” Her red tail flicked around as she toyed with the blaster at her waist.

“Actually, I have a better plan,” Fox spoke fearlessly as he raised his voice, “You’re going to tell me where to find ‘Sal,’ or I’ll gun down everyone in this junkyard you call a base. Make sense?”

“Ha! Really? You’re trying to threaten me?” the lizard sneered, “You have no idea where you are. Come on boys, let’s give him an introduction.”

As the lizard raised her voice, other hunters began to appear near Fox, each with a sneer as wicked as the last. Some of them already had weapons drawn, as if they were itching to fight. The lizard’s grin grew more twisted as Fox glanced at the growing crowd. “See this?” she laughed, “You can die out here. And you will unless you start following rules. I can tell you’re horribly inexperienced, so here’s one last chance. I’m gonna count to three, and you’re gonna either leave on your ship or we’ll take everything you own. Ready? One—"

“Three.” Fox drew his fully charged blaster with the ferocity of an apex predator. None of the hunters seemed to react to his Star Fox uniform, so none of them knew the kinds of battles Fox had fought before. A room filled with skilled hunters was nothing to a mercenary that had wiped the ruffians from the Stargasso space station or had braved the Aparoid’s twisted homeworld on foot. He had not had a proper mission since the last one with Krystal, but he could feel his combat instincts firing up even before the first hunter drew her blaster. The hunters all lunged at once, like a wave that was about to collapse on him, but he was ready and eager to flex his skills.

A volley of blaster fire rocketed towards him, but he snagged the reflector from his waist and a light-blue shield enveloped him, which sent the lasers spiraling back towards their source. He launched several blaster rounds of his own, as fast as the group had done together, and the wave of hunters began to recede. One confident hunter took a swipe at him with a large claw, but a flurry of kicks from Fox’s metallic boot sent the aggressor tumbling into another group of hapless hunters. Several more prepared their weapons, but Fox planted his back foot into the floor and suddenly dashed forward, leaving blue afterimages of himself as he slammed into the hunters and scattered them. An avian hunter tried to land on top of him, but Fox swiveled on his back foot and unleashed a bicycle kick to the attacker’s chest.

The onslaught continued but gradually lessened as Fox pummeled every hunter that dared to attack him. As the group in the main room dispersed, he made his way higher up the tower. Stray blaster shots followed Fox constantly, but not even one hunter’s rocket launcher could touch him. No one in the tower knew of Star Fox, but they were learning rapidly.

…

Salvador gave his mirror another pass as he flashed his latest necklace off the dim sun from outside. Gorgeous! The red sparkle of the heirloom was even more beautiful now that he wore it. It matched his eyes and his other jewels so well, but his cocky grin became a frown as he stared at his dark wrists. With the addition of a fourth necklace, his left arm now had far less jewelry by comparison. Such a shame, he needed to get a new bracelet! But he couldn’t spare one from his other wrist, else it would throw his color scheme off completely. The gaudy crow sighed. Truly, his life was difficult.

Suddenly, his communicator on his desk lit up. “B-boss!” wailed an older terrier, “We’ve got trouble! There’s someone here that wants to see—" But Salvador clicked the communicator off before the message could finish.

How annoying, it was so hard to admire his wealth when there was outside noise. Were some of those swine on the ground floor starting a fight again? Probably just another bounty dispute. Nothing he needed to concern himself with.

The noises only grew louder, though. More crashes, a few explosions, and the sound of frequent blaster fire filled Salvador’s ears. Was his palace under attack? The last fool to try that didn’t even make it past the landing bay, much less the two guards in front of his room. If this was really an invader, then they were getting very close to his chambers… but suddenly everything fell silent. Salvador unclenched his feathery fists and prepared to sigh. Sounded like it was just a temporary scuffle after all.

A deafening blast blew the doors of Salvador’s room off their hinges and the limp bodies of the two guards went flying in either direction. An orange fox with a green flight suit and a white jacket stepped through the smoke with a charged blaster raised. Salvador stared at the intruder; his eyes were as big as the jewels around his neck.

“I am looking for Kursed.” Fox’s emerald-green eyes were sharp and serious.

“Humph! You think you can intimidate me?” Salvador scoffed, “you may have bested my guards, but I have many others. Here, watch!” He pressed a button on his desk, and it lit up with a red light.

“Guards!” Salvador bellowed on the intercom with a surprising surge of force, “All hunters on the premises, report to my office at once. I’ll grant an extra bounty to whoever destroys the intruder!” He turned back to Fox and cackled. “Haha, you’re in for it now. You’ll rue the day you dared to intrude on Salvador’s palace!”

Nothing happened. Salvador’s cackle shifted to a weak giggle and then to nothing at all.

There was an awkward pause. Fox flashed a sly grin.

Salvador coughed. “Uhm, excuse me a moment.” He tapped the comms button a few more times, but he got no response. He couldn’t even hear movement from the floors down below. “Where is everyone!!” he groaned, “did everyone get coffee at the same time?”

“I told one of your friends I’d gun down everyone in the palace if I had to,” Fox said, “and I did.”

Salvador gulped. “D-did you really… kill them all?”

Fox ignored the question. “Tell me where Kursed is, or I’ll do the same thing to you.”

“K-Kursed? Hmm… Yes, I believe I saw her before…! When was that? Let’s see…” As Salvador drew out his sentences, he was slowly reaching for the secret compartment under his desk. “Oh yes, Kursed! She was one of my hunters for a little while, probably my #1 hunter, actually! Yes, she fought my previous #1 hunter about a week ago. He was a leopard named Leo, perhaps you heard of him?”

“Really?? She’s been here that recently?” Fox asked. So the leopard was right! What’s more, that might have been the “Leo” that Salvador was talking about, even though the leopard had never introduced himself. Fox’s eyes lit up.

Salvador stifled a grin. Just a few more moments…

“Yes, Leo was great, but Kursed was greater! Normally she comes by every day, but she hasn’t been around since then…” Salvador gripped the pocket blaster. “Die, intruder!!”

With surprising dexterity, Salvador swung the pocket blaster out from under his desk and fired at Fox’s chest. The small blast pierced through a blue afterimage of Fox that immediately disappeared, but the real Fox was much faster. Mere moments after the shot left the barrel, Fox greeted Salvador on his side of the desk and grabbed the crow by the neck. Lavish jewelry and black feathers went flying as Salvador was hoisted up from his desk and was introduced to the wall.

“Let’s get something straight,” Fox growled, “You can’t take any of those jewels with you. Either talk now or join everyone else.” He pressed the barrel of his blaster between Salvador’s eyes, whose red eyes shrunk to the size of marbles.

“Okay, okay!! I’ll talk! Just don’t shoot!” Salvador flailed his feathery arms as his remaining jewels clattered around.

“She really was one of my best hunters! She always came by for more jobs but after the fight with Leo she stopped showing up, I think Leo killed her.”

“Liar!” Fox pushed Salvador further up the wall until the crow’s talons were no longer touching the floor. “I know who Leo is, he said she’s alive!”

“Okay, Leo didn’t kill her!” Salvador wailed while kicking his feet, “My guys said she got a sweet deal with some Space Pirates, and that’s why she hasn’t shown up lately. That spoiled girl, she doesn’t need Salvador anymore, so she just abandons me!”

“Space Pirates??” Fox repeated, “You expect me to believe that? They don’t operate in Lylat!”

“WELL, THESE PIRATES DO!” Salvador shouted, although Fox’s grip on his neck made the sound come out raspy. “I heard she was going to some faraway planet called Aether to do the Pirates’ work for them. I’ve never heard of it, it’s probably outside of Lylat.” He paused for air. “My guys tried to get her hyperdrive coordinates so we can get a piece of the Pirates’ reward, but she’s already disabled the tracking we put on her ship!”

Fox stopped and thought for a moment. He stared at the wall near Salvador’s head. His blaster was still focused on the crow’s big beak.

“That’s all I know, I swear!” Salvador protested, “Some of my hunters have tried to get data from the Pirates but they always end up dead. I have no idea why they would reach out to Kursed, but they just did! You’ve got to believe me!”

Finally, Fox loosened his grip on Salvador, and the panicking crow slumped to the floor in a well-dressed heap. His blaster powered down.

“I believe you.” Fox’s façade changed instantly, “Thanks for the info.”

“G-good!” Salvador gagged, “Now will there be anything else??”

“I got what I came for,” Fox replied as he turned to leave, but he stopped as he reached the gaping hole where the doors used to be. “You might try working on your lines a little bit. ‘Die, intruder’ is cheesy. By the way, your friends will wake up in a few hours. I just used a stun blaster on ‘em.”

“I… what? You mean you didn’t kill them?”

“Nope,” Fox said, “Who do you think I am? Star Wolf?”

“Star Wolf? What in the world is that?”

Salvador stared at Fox with confused silence as Fox disappeared back into the dim hallway of the base, past the ruined doors and many stunned hunters. Despite the smell of grenade smoke and spent blaster munition, Fox couldn’t help but get excited. Soon he was back aboard his Arwing and exiting Locust’s atmosphere, with no other fighters pursuing him.

“How was the interrogation?” ROB spoke up as Fox’s Arwing landed safetly back inside the Great Fox II’s hangar.

“It was just fine, ROB. Do we have any data on a planet Aether in the database?”

Rob thought for a moment. “Aether is a rogue planet located beyond the Lylat System. Our database is limited, but we know where it is located.”

“That’s good enough,” Fox smiled. “ROB, you know what to do.”

“Setting course for Aether,” ROB confirmed. Moments later, the familiar veil of hyperspeed overtook the Great Fox II, and it disappeared from Locust air space as rapidly as it arrived.

Krystal, involved with Space Pirates? It sounded ridiculous. Fox occasionally heard about Pirates through General Pepper and the rest of Corneria’s defense system, but the closest he ever got to seeing a Pirate for himself was when a peaceful transport ship passed through Venom’s outer rims. Even if he still had many doubts, his search was bearing more fruit now than ever before. He didn’t even care if Aether was more desolate than Venom. If Krystal, or Kursed, was there, then that’s all that mattered.

Still, all the talk about Kursed from Salvador and Leo got him thinking. What had happened to Krystal? If this “Kursed” character was really Krystal, then was she really so ruthless? Krystal was a great fighter when she was part of Star Fox, so he didn’t doubt she could beat up someone as big as Leo. Maybe her moniker of “ruthless” was based on her appearance. Fox cringed as he remembered her injury and her prosthetic arm. He briefly wondered what other injuries she may have suffered since starting her life as a bounty hunter, but he quickly perished the thought.

“Hang in there, Krystal… I’m coming!”

…

Smoke was still emitting from Samus’s arm cannon as she finished her patrol of the ruined lab. The whole of the old Pirate base in Tallon IV’s Phendrana Drifts had been ablaze with turret fire and missile blasts ever since she arrived, but now her scanners were picking up no additional hostiles, and she was finally able to survey the fractured base again. No Pirates this time; she cleared out the base of any Pirate activity during her previous mission on Tallon IV, but there were still a handful of sentry drones left behind to keep her company on her second visit.

The armor-clad hunter stepped over one of many piles of robot scraps as she switched from her combat visor to scan visor. Through the clearing smoke, her scan visor could make out multiple computer monitors scattered on desks around the room. Several were damaged or off, but one monitor with a dim orange glow caught her eye.

New [Pirate Data] entry found. Space Pirate encrypted data decoded.

Log 12.543.8

The Luminoth assaults continue. We believe they gained access to our comm links from our old equipment that was left on rogue planet Aether. We did not know the Luminoth had the technological literacy to repurpose our comms, but we fear that the attacks will continue until we are able to either remotely shut down their equipment, or if we dispatch a force to eradicate Aether completely. We have limited resources to perform the latter, but it may be an option we will be forced to consider. The most recent attack was the most devastating so far. Freighter Lambda was attacked while it housed the infant Metroid we managed to recover. Many of the crew aboard the freighter were captured, and the Metroid was stolen as well. We are unsure why the Luminoth would bother to capture our crew instead of killing them, but considering their new possession of the Metroid, we have an idea as to why.

Samus paused. Luminoth? Was she reading this correctly? She hadn’t heard of the moth-like residents of Aether since her mission there. She recalled the Pirates’ small presence on Aether during her mission, but she didn’t know the Luminoth were so reactive, considering their numbers at the end of the Ing’s invasion. She hated to imagine a war between the two groups, but if her memory served her correctly, then neither the Pirates nor the Luminoth had many resources left. She was confident she saw most of the living Luminoth left on Aether after her defeat of the Ing, and the Pirate’s goals had been aimless at best since their ranks were demolished between the missions on both Tallon IV and Aether.

Her mind full of questions, she continued her trek through the base. Another dim screen in a different room remained on as she entered.

New [Pirate Data] entry found. Space Pirate encrypted data decoded.

Log 12.544.8

We have determined the infant Metroid is being held on Aether, within the Luminoth’s Sanctuary Fortress. Our original expeditions on Aether gave us little intel on the fortress due to the danger imposed by its robotic guards, so we have decided that a frontal assault with our dwindling forces is an unviable option. Instead, we have sought the help of a bounty hunter who goes by the name “Kursed.” We have observed her in combat when she indirectly spared one of our transport ships from another hunter’s attack, but we believe she is neutral enough to accept a job from us. Although calling upon the help from a third party is often unadvised, we believe an individual hunter is a better option, since the Luminoth may be so focused on our forces that they will not notice Kursed or her mission until it is too late. Later, we will have rebuilt enough of our forces to eradicate Aether and the Luminoth for interfering with our plans, but for now we will rely on Kursed and await her success. If all goes well, then we may not need to worry about any hunters for many cycles.

Since she had scanned countless Pirate logs, Samus knew to take their updates with a grain of salt, but these logs made the Luminoth sound hostile, even aggressive. This wasn’t right. The Luminoth leader, U-Mos, had guided Samus during her journey on Aether and had developed a bond with her, and she had greeted several other Luminoth in person after the Ing were destroyed. She recalled the Luminoth’s history as a warrior race, but it seemed uncommon for them to attack other groups, regardless of what morals those groups may have. If anything, their focus should have been on rebuilding their planet and their race, rather than trying to stamp out another with their dwindling resources.

As she exited base’s interior and approached her ship, she had far more questions than answers. She learned where the Metroid was being held, but why would the Luminoth want it? Considering everything the Luminoth had been through with alien invaders, it seemed odd for them to try and reach out to other groups now, when rebuilding in isolation seemed more predictable. Unless the Metroid could help them rebuild—but how could a life-absorbing parasite help a dying race? She was still wondering as she boarded her ship.

“Computer,” she instructed, “Set a course for Aether. We need to check in on some old friends.”

A sense of unease washed over the armored hunter as her ship disappeared into the stars. Fighting the Luminoth was a possibility she did not want to consider, but she realized that if they truly held their own against the Ing for years, then their skill as a warrior race may have been more commendable than she thought. Plus, Space Pirates almost never hired outside help, so they must have been very impressed with Kursed’s skills. Whoever this Kursed hunter was, it sounded like someone Samus would cross paths with soon.

…

“So that’s Aether,” Fox murmured, taking in the view of the planet before him, as the Great Fox II exited hyperspeed once more. “It doesn’t look dangerous.” Unlike more familiar planets like Venom, whose toxic atmosphere was constantly enshrouded by sickly green clouds, Aether’s metallic blue sheen looked beautiful by comparison, inviting even.

However, ROB was quick to challenge Fox’s statement. “Aether is currently plagued by ion storms in most regions, except the northern mountain range, but landing there is ill-advised. Shall we wait for the storms to pass from other areas?”

“No, Krystal might be down there, I can’t expect her to wait on me. ROB, you stay here with the Great Fox II, and I’ll prepare the same Arwing I used on Locust.”

Even if he couldn’t sense her, Fox grew increasingly anxious as he boarded his Arwing again and darted towards Aether’s surface. Dark clouds obstructed his vision briefly, but without the fear of an ion storm, he cut through the clouds like a knife through gray cotton. He wondered what kind of place Krystal had found herself in. His thoughts were answered as he exited the clouds overhead. A majestic castle covered with ancient hieroglyphs and colorful banners appeared in front of him, but before he could admire its architecture, his eyes locked on to the anti-air cannons lining the castle’s walls, which were locking onto him in turn. Moments later, the fortress lit up as the turrets opened fire.

Fox spun in the air as the first volley of shots flew past him. His G-Diffuser powered up fully and boosted him across the castle’s right side as a second volley rang out faster than he could comprehend. “ROB! I need some help down here!”

“Location confirmed. Sending supplies.”

Fox was stunned. It was almost as many defenses as he saw on Venom, except it was all condensed onto a single castle. Dodging a few streams of enemy fire was nothing new to him, but even if the Arwing was designed with speed and agility in mind, it could not dodge everything. Just as Fox’s somersault avoided another heat-seeking missile, a large orb of yellow energy charged towards his hull with deadly precision. Fox gasped.

A sickening explosion rang out in the air. Fox’s Arwing erupted in flames and spiraled towards the distant mountains.

Chapter Text

Aether’s slate-blue atmosphere sparkled like a star as Kursed’s fighter approached its surface. She appreciated the view at first, until the metallic color reminded her of her prosthetic arm. Her expression soured and she turned her attention back to the holographic map near her seat.

The Space Pirates gave her ample information on reaching Aether’s Sanctuary Fortress. Their map of the stronghold showed that it was armed to the teeth with anti-air defenses; no wonder the Pirates were uninterested in a large frontal assault. As soon as she descended below the clouds, she dipped low below the fortress, hugging the lowest mountains to avoid the range of the fortress’s defenses. She weaved around the lower peaks for a time until she found a small mountain alcove to park her ship in. She took a quick moment to stretch her arm as she exited, and soon she was hiking up the side of the mountain towards the imposing fortress above.

The Pirates had told her that the Luminoth’s Sanctuary Fortress was an ancient structure that was built during a previous crisis many years ago, but it was still in immaculate condition. Even as she approached from below the fortress, she saw the same banners flying from the hologram the Pirates had shown her, and the castle’s polygonal architecture reflected off Aether’s natural light like a Cornerian skyscraper. Thinking about Corneria’s buildings made her realize how far she was from any familiar place, but even if the fortress was well-fortified, she would take the well-kept, and well-lit stronghold over the dim scraps of Locust any day.

Her telepathy picked up the quiet hum of a robot approaching her from around the mountain. She cautiously hugged the wall and readied her blaster, but she was met by a large, bulbous robot with many arms that seemed to stare at her with its “eyes” but didn’t mind her presence at all.  “Must be a maintenance drone,” she thought—a maintenance drone that was circling the mountain and ascending back up to the fortress. She jumped from the wall and landed on the side of the drone’s round head, but it only paused for a moment before it continued its ascent, and it carried Kursed up to one of the fortress’s lower balconies. She opened the nearest door with her blaster, and moments later she was inside.

The fortress’s spacious halls were brighter than the exterior; even the walls were constantly moving with lights, and swarms of miniature bug-like drones scuttled on the floors and walls surrounding her, their metallic backs reflecting the natural light that came through the windows. Kursed felt like she was in a high-tech research lab, or in a top-secret base full of hyper developed technology, but it was far from the historical structures she remembered from Sauria. She cautiously stared at one of the bug-like drones as it bumped against her foot, but it simply corrected itself and continued on its way without a moment of hesitation. Before she could breathe a sigh of relief, she heard a sharper metallic noise behind her, and she spun on her heel to address it.

Another sharp noise rang out through the large corridor as a much larger robot rounded the corner. The robot’s four sharp legs clacked against the metallic floor like a spider as it patrolled the hall, its bright red eye scanning the area for anything out of the ordinary. The unordinary vixen dove for a pile of crates near the corridor’s entrance and huddled against them as the robot approached. The tall, four-legged guard paused for a moment to shine its red eye on the pile of crates, but it resumed its normal patrol shortly afterward. As it turned away, Kursed slowly emerged from her hiding spot to get a better look at it. Several weapons and what looked like a shielding device covered the head, while sharp edges and additional artillery covered the robot’s four blade-like legs. “QUAD-MB” was printed on the legs. Fighting one of these “Quad” robots didn’t seem too challenging; her experience fighting hordes of goons or even groups of Aparoids did not fail her, but she was nervous that one of the Quads would activate a security alarm and make her Metroid prize harder to obtain. The last thing she needed was for a blast door to impede her progress.

The Pirates’ map of Aether’s surface was detailed, but their map of the Sanctuary Fortress’s interior was nothing to go by—apparently most of their operations on Aether had been in the planet’s desert regions—and she doubted the Luminoth would leave a map hanging around their base like a touring brochure at a museum. The little drones bumping into her toes probably wouldn’t offer directions, and she wasn’t about to take a chance with the Quad robots either.

Instead, she closed her eyes and began to think carefully about her surroundings. Her telepathy picked up hundreds upon hundreds of different machines and processes, each with its own distinct robotic drawl, but she had trained herself to handle environments like this. Innocent Krystal would have been unable to handle all the different noises, and her mind would effectively shut off, but Kursed had come a long way since her last mission in the Lylat airspace, where her inability to focus had haunted her and motivated her to train. The machines in this fortress were spread out over a great distance, she didn’t need to worry about the noises echoing in a smaller space constantly.

She expanded her thoughts to try and cover as much of the fortress as possible, but the sea of monotone machine hums persisted. The Pirates described the Luminoth as organic, and she doubted they were a hivemind like the Aparoids were, but she couldn’t sense anything that would resemble Luminoth thoughts. At first there was a distinct lack of organic thoughts in the base, but eventually she picked up something different. She tuned out the machinery around her to focus on thought patterns that were more mature than any thoughts she had read in a while. It was the mind of a hunter, but it was far more focused than Leo’s mind or any other hunter she had read on Locust. Kursed shuddered. She had a faint idea of whom the thoughts could belong to, but she didn’t want to think about it. The Pirates had warned her that a certain other hunter would be after the Metroid also. Had the other hunter reached the Metroid already? Did the Metroid have thought patterns of its own? She took her mind away from the hunter’s mind and focused for any more unusual thought patterns.

She picked up another series of thoughts far away from the hunter. They were at least organic, and they were much more erratic compared to the static noise from the robots, but they were garbled as if the thoughts were trying but failing to think of many things at once.  Was it an Aparoid? Impossible—they were all wiped out with the queen’s destruction, and these thought patterns seemed much simpler, almost juvenile. Simple words and phrases passed through this mind, such as “hungry” or “glass” but they were repeated so often that they seemed to echo. It was difficult for Kursed to concentrate on other things as she listened to it.

She quietly exited her hiding spot and made her way towards the source of the strange thought patterns. Quad robots and other turrets became more prominent as she delved deeper into the fortress, but avoiding security was as familiar to Kursed as beating up hapless ruffians. The Quads may have been intimidating, but their patrolling was hardly more advanced than the Aparoid turrets she recalled from the war.

Her pursuit of the thought patterns took her past a large spherical chamber with spinning dynamos and around the outskirts of a massive dome cluttered with unfinished robot parts. She encountered many doors and devices with locks she couldn’t open, at least not without ample noise, but her litheness allowed her to navigate through small gaps that the Luminoth architects did not design for. Her metal arm was still unruly to use, but it only impeded her slightly as she crawled through air ducts and climbed over magnetic walls meant for more of the sanctuary’s many drones.

After dropping down from a vent in the ceiling, she found herself in an uncharacteristically cramped and dim corridor, with a pair of metal doors at the end. Her telepathy confirmed that the strange thoughts’ source was beyond the door, so she quickly “hacked” the door’s locks by shooting at the nearby controls with a blaster shot.

The room beyond the doors was dark except for a series of small lights from various machinery. Computer displays and cords were scattered around the room, all focused on a small, glowing tube in the center. Inside the tube was a familiar, jellyfish-like creature. The Metroid! It continued its menacing sway back and forth even in the smaller confines of the tube, but it stopped swaying shortly after Kursed began to stare at it. It seemed to stare back at her, despite the apparent lack of eyes. It screeched occasionally, although the glass tube muffled most of its noise.

Now that she was right next to it, Kursed confirmed that the Metroid was the source of the strange patterns. She could read its “mind” clearer than ever now, and even though its thoughts were still garbled, she was able to pick apart bits and pieces of it: Bored. Confined. Hungry. The longer she stared, the slower the thoughts seemed to become, as if the Metroid was trying to communicate with her in its own way. It clicked its mandibles together and pressed against the glass, but somehow Kursed felt like it wasn’t trying to take a bite out of her. Eventually she picked up a new word: Mama!

Kursed’s eyes grew wide as the Metroid began to chirp and Mama! became the focus of its thoughts. “What?? I’m—I’m not your mother!” she thought, as if trying to reason with it, but the Metroid didn’t listen or couldn’t listen; it only continued its muffled screeches and kept repeating the word in its juvenile mind. To Kursed, it was almost cute, if it weren’t for the Metroid’s unsettling appearance. She sighed. In a way, she felt bad for the creature. Despite its appearance, it was clearly an infant that was held against its will. She had half a mind to free it and find a safe place for it to live… Kursed shook her head. What in the world was she doing? This was an important mission! She’d earn enough money from this bounty to start a new life in seclusion, away from heartbreak. Why was she empathizing with a parasite? This was no time for compassion, she had a job to do!

As she briefly took her mind off the Metroid, she picked up the mind of a focused hunter, much closer than before. She needed to get out, and fast.

She noticed a handful of latches that kept the Metroid’s tube attached to the central computer, but it was easy to remove. She figured that several Luminoth had already moved it around before, considering the scratches along the tube’s bottom—hopefully the scratches weren’t from a certain creature’s mandibles. The tube detached itself with a satisfying click, as if she was dismantling a vacuum cleaner. The Metroid’s chirps grew more excited as the tube was removed, but Kursed paid no attention. She had half a mind to try and reason with it more, but she doubted it would understand her. It seemed to have a connection with her, but she had no idea how. Now wasn’t the time to concern herself with that, anyway. She felt the other mind getting closer.

She still had no map, but hopefully she could just retrace her steps and—

Suddenly, a muffled blast rang out from beyond the metal doors. Kursed’s fur stood on end. The explosion sounded close. She dreaded to think that removing the Metroid’s container would cause security to come after her, but she was worried that the explosion was from something else. She tucked the Metroid’s container under her arm and ran for the doors.

As soon as Kursed began running, the automatic doors flung open, and a tall figure dressed in orange and red armor appeared. The armored warrior’s right arm was accompanied by a large green arm cannon that was still emitting smoke. Kursed couldn’t see the figure’s face past the armor’s green visor, but she could tell from the figure’s posture that it was the source of the focused mind she picked up. She had encountered the bounty hunter Samus Aran, and in the worst possible place.

Kursed stopped short and took a step backwards. Up until now, all she had heard of Samus was stories, some more outlandish than others. Some suggested Samus could destroy whole planets and populations on her own, while some claimed she had saved the universe more often than even Star Fox had in their biggest years. She had seen pictures, but she was not expecting the armored hunter to be so tall and imposing. Samus’s armor was much brighter than any armor Kursed had seen on other hunters, but the vixen suddenly felt very underdressed by comparison.

“Put the Metroid down.”

Samus aimed her arm cannon straight at the blue huntress’s head as the smoke receded, and bright energy particles began to form at the tip. Her voice was commanding, and her pose matched. Under normal circumstances, poor and frightened Krystal would have cowered away and listened to the hunter’s demands, but Kursed was not one to be intimidated, especially when her future was at stake. She feigned lowering the Metroid’s container while drawing her blaster with her free hand, but she barely had time to raise her blaster by the time Samus fired her first shot.

A lump of yellow energy rammed into the barrel of Kursed’s stun gun, knocking it out of her hand and across the dark room. As Kursed recovered, a second shot flew past her face, grazing her cheek with heat. Samus was already charging a third blast as Kursed faced her again.

“Last chance.” Samus said sternly. “Drop the Metroid. Now.”

Kursed figured the first volley was just a warning, but the blasts had a distinct shape and speed compared to the blaster shots she was familiar with. Slower, too. She wasn’t as well equipped as Samus, but she could use her lack of armor to her advantage. She steeled herself as she set the Metroid container down on the floor, but she reached for her staff on her back at the same time. Even if Samus’ shots weren’t any bigger or slower compared to the bullets she was used to, Samus was barring her only exit out of the room, and avoiding the hunter while carrying the Metroid’s heavy container was out of the question. She spun her staff in her hand and dashed towards Samus with incredible speed.

Samus fired her third charged shot, but Kursed was ready. She dodged the blast as if it was a dodgeball and kept up her dash. The whiffed blast flew to the back of the room until it smashed into a mess of lab equipment, and the force caused the Metroid’s tube to fall over and begin rolling around. Samus switched to rapid-fire shots as Kursed closed the gap between them, but Kursed weaved in and out of the blasts like a phantom. Constant training had allowed her to dodge blaster shots of all kinds, and Samus’s bigger and slower shots were no more difficult to avoid.

Once she was within range, Kursed slid underneath Samus’ last shots and took a mighty upward swing with her staff, but Samus jumped over the swing and spun in the air, her body becoming encased in deadly sparks. Kursed hugged the floor as Samus passed overhead, but by the time Samus landed again, Kursed was already on top of her. The aggressive vixen stayed on the offensive as she unloaded the results from her Cerinian combat knowledge on Samus. Her staff swings were as quick as lightning but as precise as a mantis. The armored hunter kept up at first by using her arm cannon and free hand to deflect Kursed’s attacks, but the vixen’s constant barrage was forcing Samus to walk backwards slowly, even as she gradually formed another charged shot. Suddenly, Samus shifted out of the way of an overhead swing and fired a point blank charged shot at Kursed’s head, but the vixen dove backwards and used the tip of her staff as a balance as she slammed her heel into Samus’s stomach. Not fast enough. She thought. Engaging Samus like this was pumping her with wild adrenaline. The tip of her staff became encased in an electrical power as she changed its setting.

As Samus reeled back, Kursed jumped in the air and prepared to sink her electrified staff into Samus’s neck like a javelin, but she was met with an electric grapple beam that grabbed at her legs and ruined her trajectory. Kursed fumbled with her staff and awkwardly landed as Samus landed a charged shot on the back of her shoulder. The force of the blast sent the shocked vixen flying until she landed near a mass of computer screens, and she laid motionless. The Metroid squealed as its container rolled into a wall.

Samus scanned the beaten vixen for a moment before turning her attention to the Metroid. It chirped and flexed its mandibles in response, as if it wanted to take a bite out of the hunter at any moment. But before Samus could pick up the Metroid’s container, a bright flash of red energy slammed into her side. She stood up straight and faced Kursed just in time for another blast of fire to assault her helmet, and the fiery mist clouded her visor. Grunting, she fired a missile towards the fire’s source, but the determined vixen was far past the missile as it tore through a series of machines with an audible explosion. Kursed kept her staff aimed at Samus and she bombarded the armored hunter with more fire blasts, each a direct hit. Samus tried to return fire, but her clouded vision restricted her to shoot in Kursed’s general location, and Kursed was more than fast enough to dodge every volley. The walls of the room were lined with explosions and stray blasts as Kursed kept up her assault. Samus launched a super missile in frustration as her suit repelled the extreme heat and cleared her vision, but instead of hitting Kursed, it connected with one of Kursed’s fire blasts instead. The resulting explosion leveled the room, knocking the two hunters to opposite walls and wrecking the rest of the lab equipment. The Metroid screamed as its unscathed container rolled around on the floor. The room was ablaze with fire now, and alarms were blaring.

INTRUDER ALERT. The robotic voice repeated over the speakers in the room and down the hallway.

The automatic doors opened again and two Quad robots stormed in, clearly unhappy to see intruders. One robot focused its laser sight on each hunter, and they aimed their weapons back in response. Suddenly, the hunters’ tussle between each other seemed less important.

The robot targeting Samus began to unleash a flurry of bright energy as she shifted to dodge and return fire. Kursed’s opponent fired a concentrated beam at her, but she had no issue dodging it after the volley she had endured just moments prior. She glanced over and saw that Samus was already preoccupied with the Quad targeting her. The Cerinian hunter dashed to the Metroid’s container, scooped it up, and slid underneath the Quad’s legs as fast she could.

“Wait!” Samus shouted, but once the robot lost sight of Kursed underneath, it focused its attention on Samus instead. Moments later, Kursed was out of the burning room with the Metroid in tow, where additional explosions were muffled by the distance. She wanted to stop to rest, but the sirens were still blaring overhead, and she was sure that more drones would arrive soon, and Samus wouldn’t be preoccupied with the two Quads for long.

The vent she used earlier was too small for her to fit along with the Metroid’s heavy container, so she closed her eyes tight and tried to focus to find an optimal escape route. For a while she only picked up Samus’s intense focus and the Metroid’s babbling, but suddenly, she picked up something else.

She balked. It felt like a mind that she had read countless times before. It was the mind of someone that she cared deeply for, or at least did at one time, but even if she had spent months trying to shut him out of her life, she still recognized Fox’s familiar mind as soon as she sensed it. But how was that possible? Fox, here? It couldn’t be. She was hundreds of thousands of lightyears away from any familiar person, why would she be sensing Fox’s presence now? It had to be a trick. The Metroid’s echoing thoughts must have been tampering with her concentration. Maybe the explosions were opening her mental scars. She couldn’t bear to think about it. She ran for the nearest door and pried it open. She’d get out even without telepathy.

…

Wrecking an Arwing was never a situation that Fox enjoyed, but it was at least something he had encountered before. His fight with the Aparoids led to the destruction of many of his personal craft, and even if the Sanctuary Fortress had torn his ship apart faster than any Venomian threat could, Fox was still unscathed as he landed on one of the peaks surrounding the castle.

Sirens were already going off by the time Fox climbed up to a disclike platform near the fortress outskirts. Was the fortress already aware of his presence? No—hopefully it was due to a bounty hunter intrusion. He drew his blaster and opened the nearest door to the fortress, while running to the sirens as fast as possible. If Tricky was right, and Krystal was really a bounty hunter, then he hoped she was the reason for the sirens. And if not, hopefully it would be a hunter that would get him closer to her.

The corridors were spacious but there was no one else around except for an occasional worker drone as Fox ran. He wondered if the station’s whole staff was wrapped up in the explosions. He tried to keep his thoughts focused, but as the explosions grew louder, he began to feel a strange presence in his head, as if someone familiar to him was nearby. Was it really Krystal? Was it just a false hope? He found himself thinking about her, back when they fought the Aparoids together on Sauria. Then the ugly memory of their separation entered his mind. Oh, how could he have been so stupid?

The distant sounds became less frequent, but Fox only ran faster. He rounded a corner and found himself in a series of hallways lined with Luminoth banners and weaponry on display. He dashed past the columns overhead and glimpsed at the combat gear and some of the defunct robots, but he stopped short as he faced forward again. There, on the other end of the chamber, was a familiar vixen. Even at the end of the hall, her cerulean fur was unmistakable.

Krystal!

Fox could barely control his thoughts. His blaster clattered to the floor as he stepped back. This couldn’t be real, could it? He was silently hoping she would be on the station, but he was not actually expecting it. But there she was, only a hallway’s length away from him, as real as she could be. Her outfit was different, her hair was longer, she seemed thinner, she had more scars… she still had the same mechanical arm. Her expression seemed rougher than it used to be, and her beautiful emerald eyes seemed less innocent than before, but she was still Krystal. Her face contorted to an equally shocked expression as Fox stared at her. They stared in silence for a moment, broken only by the occasional quiet screeches from Kursed’s captive Metroid.

“Kuh… Krystal!” Fox stammered, his voice cracking and his eyes becoming moist. He had no spare energy to dedicate to controlling his senses, but he was so overwhelmed with emotion that he didn’t know what to say next. He had so many things he wanted to say. To ask. Why was she here? He was so sorry! Where did all those scars come from? What was that parasite/jellyfish thing she was holding on to?

“I finally found you!” Fox finally said. He stepped cautiously towards her, worried that he might scare her away. She only stared back.

“Krystal, I’m so sorry! I should have never kicked you off the team. I miss you so much. Please come back.” Fox spoke again but his speech was so rapid that he didn’t even stop to think of what he was saying. As he got closer to her, his gaze began to fixate on her scars. They were a sickly red, a stark contrast to the white and blue of the rest of her fur. She looked like she was in constant pain. “Krystal, I’m so sorry. Your scars… What happened to you?”

“I…” Kursed tried to speak, but before she could, a bright flash of light erupted behind her. She shouted and fell to her knees, even more dazed than before. Behind her, a towering soldier dressed in pristine white armor lowered its smoking arm cannon. The soldier looked at Kursed briefly before scooping her up and the cylindrical container she was carrying.

“KRYSTAL?!” Fox shouted so loud that he thought his voice would give out, but he didn’t care. He immediately grabbed his blaster from the floor and rushed towards Kursed while aiming his blaster at the armored assailant, but before he could reach them, a large metal blast door suddenly slammed shut in front of him. His charged shot smashed into the doors but left nothing but a few sparks as it dissipated.

“NO!!” Fox roared as he pounded a fist on the impenetrable wall. Krystal was so close to him now: just on the other side of the door. He glanced at the blast door’s central unit to the side. His blaster wasn’t strong enough to destroy it, and he swore off grenades ever since Krystal’s accident.

Behind Fox, one robot began to vibrate and roar to life, much unlike the others on display. It tore its huge arms from their charging ports, and it stomped out from its display area while powering up the cannon on its left shoulder. Its three laser eyes focused on Fox as he turned, and it slammed its huge fists together. “INGSMASHER ONLINE,” the foreboding robotic voice boomed.

“I don’t have time for this!” Fox groaned as he faced the Ingsmasher, which was already raising its massive fists over its head. A great energy field spread from the Ingmasher’s fists as it pounded the floor, but Fox jumped and used the Ingmasher’s cannon as a mount to reach the upper floor’s balcony. He backflipped to the ground level while avoiding a concussive blast from the Ingmasher’s shoulder cannon, but an axe kick to the robot’s head did little more than force the Ingmasher to counterattack with a right hook. Fox ducked the swing, just in time for the robot’s fist to slam into the wires on the wall and create a divot of newly-scrapped metal.

Fox’s adrenaline was reaching a boiling point. “Come on!!” he shouted as he beckoned the Ingsmasher to try again. The wily vulpine stood in front of the Ingsmasher’s range, but before it could connect with another hook with its left arm, Fox dashed away as a trail of blue illusions followed him. The Ingsmasher furiously stomped after Fox and continuously swung its fists at him, but each time Fox was just out of range. Finally, Fox was cornered up against the same blast door that prevented him from reaching Krystal. He tried a kick against the robot’s chest, and it reacted with a jab with its right hand. The Ingmasher’s fist rushed forward like a torpedo, barely missing Fox’s arm and instead connecting with the blast door’s circuitry on the wall. Suddenly, the robot was ablaze with electric sparks, and the blast door began to raise slightly. On instinct, Fox slipped underneath the narrow space, rolled, and got back to his feet in a quick motion. He heard the Ingsmasher short-circuit and fall over as the blast door readjusted and closed behind him. More turrets threatened to slow him down as he rushed by, but he was too fast for normal turret fire to track, and his reflector device made quick work of any heat-seeking projectiles.

He smashed through a window leading into an outdoor area, complete with a huge suspension bridge that connected the main fortress to the rest of the mountains. At the other end of the bridge, he spotted the same armored soldier from before, and Krystal’s limp body being loaded onto a transport ship.

“Stop!” Fox shouted as he sprinted across the bridge, but he only made it about halfway across by the time the transport ship rose above the bridge towards the silver sky above.

Fox was so close. He had seen her! The ship was already gaining distance from the bridge, but his wild adrenaline demanded he follow. He took a running leap off the bridge and dashed forward in midair with his illusions. So close, he was only meters away. He had one more trick left. Ensuring his reflector device was secure on his waist, he activated a device on his wrist and clenched his fists. Together with the power of his reflector, he became encased in an intense wave of thermal energy. Heat radiated from him until fire formed around the tips of his boots and his tail. He shouted and rocketed himself forward in a burst of flame, rapidly closing the rest of the gap between him and the ship.

As his flame-powered burst receded, he desperately reached out his hand towards the ship’s closing latch, but he did not reach it. Everything seemed to slow to a crawl for a moment, but Fox’s blazing determination took a sudden halt as he realized where he was. The transport ship was far out of his reach now, and the bridge was far from him. He gasped as he began to plummet towards the city thousands of meters below. He tried to activate the thermal device on his wrist again, but it needed to recharge.

Suddenly, an electric beam snagged Fox’s heel and jerked him back, and moments later he instinctively grabbed the ledge of the bridge. A warrior clad in red and orange armor sheathed her grapple beam back into her wrist as she offered her hand to Fox.

“Thanks,” Fox gasped as he climbed onto the bridge and sat down.

Chapter Text

Fox sat up on the bridge while his breathing slowed down. He looked out at the sprawling city below, even if part of him still thought he was falling towards it. He took a deep breath and looked at the armored hunter who saved him. The hunter’s armor seemed familiar to him, even if had never seen it in person.

“Thanks for saving me,” he repeated, “but why?”

“I watched you try to reach that ship, and I saw what you did to that Ingsmasher,” the warrior responded with a feminine voice. “No one with that skill deserves to die so easily, even if they’re acting desperately.”

“If you knew what I was after then you’d be desperate, too,” Fox retorted.

“Are you after the Metroid?”

“Metroid? What’s—no, I’m trying to find a friend.” As his senses returned, he allowed himself to focus less on his “friend” and more on the Metroid that the hunter mentioned. It was a species he rarely heard about, but he had learned enough in his travels to know who most associated with them. The hunter’s voice was the last clue he needed.

“Wait, I remember. You’re Samus Aran, the bounty hunter, right? I can’t think of anyone else that hunts Metroids.”

Samus nodded. “And you are?”

“Fox. Fox McCloud.” He instinctively offered his right paw for a handshake, only to realize that Samus’s right hand was covered by an arm cannon. He recovered with his left paw before she noticed. “I’m from the Lylat System.”

“Lylat?” Samus tilted her head. Her posture suggested confusion, even if her helmet hid most of her facial expression. “That’s very far from here.”

“Maybe, but you’re far away from your base too, right? Aether’s one of the most remote planets I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of planets. Don’t you usually fight Space Pirates?”

“If there’s no greater threat to the galaxy, then yes,” Samus explained, “but Pirate activity has been down for a while. I heard they had a Metroid in their possession, but the Luminoth on Aether have it instead. It was being kept here.” She gazed up at the Sanctuary Fortress, as if expecting additional hostiles to come out. “The only Pirate connection here is Kursed: the cerulean fox that just left on the transport ship.”

“So Kursed is one of them?” A hint of worry followed Fox’s question.

"No, she’s not assimilated,” Samus shook her head. “They’ll only treat her as a Pirate if she’s infused with the same technology as they are. My scans show she was hired to recover the Metroid.”

“That’s a relief,” Fox thought out loud.

“Is that the ‘friend’ you were talking about?” Samus tapped the chin of her helmet, “What’s the bounty on her?”

“That’s not why I’m looking for her,” Fox said half-heartedly. He was already thinking about her again.

“She must be important to you.”

“Mhm.” Even if he was still in a conversation with Samus, Krystal was the only thing on his mind.

Part of him believed that it was all just a dream. He had only seen her for a short time, maybe only seconds. He remembered saying something to her, but in the heat of the moment he didn’t remember any of what he said. All he could remember was her battered appearance and her empty expression when she saw him. Was it really her? They had been apart for more than a year, but he was expecting more emotion from her. He wondered if she still resented him for removing her from the team back then–maybe that was why she didn’t come running to embrace him.

Stranger still, Fox could still sense Krystal nearby. Even though he saw the mysterious soldier with gleaming white armor carry her onto the transport ship, he felt as if she was sitting next to him on the bridge. At first he assumed it was because he couldn’t stop thinking about his one-sided exchange with her. He tried to focus more on Samus as she stepped away to check a logbook, but the feeling persisted.

A gold glimmer caught his eye as he stared off towards the other end of the bridge. The feeling of Krystal’s presence rose as he approached it, and his emotions began to flare up to match. A familiar gold staff was laying on the edge of the bridge, covered in Cerinian engravings and tipped with a magical gem on each end. A sentimental yet odd sensation fell over Fox as he picked up the staff, much like the experience he received when he first found Krystal’s staff jutting out of the ground back on Sauria. There was no denying it now– he had seen Krystal, and they had been closer than they had been in more than a year. Although he couldn’t explain why, he could feel Krystal’s presence through the staff.

Suddenly, it dawned on him: he realized that Krystal had regained her telepathic abilities. She was not outwardly communicating through her staff like she had done in Sauria, but he could still feel her mind through it, as if she had left a comm link open. For the first time in months, Fox felt genuine joy, and he could not hold back a smile as he looked to the sky. He still winced when he remembered one of his last interactions with her, where she dismally told him that she had lost her telepathy after the incident in the warehouse, but she recovered! She regained that power, even if they both thought it was lost forever. Her ability to recover made Fox wonder if their relationship could be saved in the same way. He held Krystal’s staff close to himself.

She was too far away now for him to find her exact location, but as long as he had her staff, he knew he could get to her eventually, and knowing that she was almost within reach was an incredible motivator. He would find her and help her to heal, no matter the cost.

Samus took her attention off her log book as Fox returned with the staff in hand.

“Is that Kursed’s staff?” she asked, “or do you have a weapon like she does?”

“Nope, she’s one of a kind,” Fox said, fully intending the double meaning.

“It’s a powerful tool,” Samus commented, “she must have dropped it while the Luminoth soldier was taking her to the transport ship.”

“What can you tell me about these Luminoth?” Fox had half a mind to ask if Kursed fought Samus with the staff, but his mind stayed focused. “You said they’re the ones with the Metroid.”

“Yes,” Samus closed her log and faced Fox again, “and one of their soldiers captured Kursed. I’ve never seen a Luminoth in full body armor before, but I have logs suggesting body armor was common in an earlier war.”

“But why would they want Krys– Kursed?” He hated seeing her pained expression in his memories. He wanted to track down the Luminoth soldier who hurt her and save her once and for all. Still, it seemed odd that the soldier would go out of his way to capture her, while leaving him and Samus behind.

“I am unsure,” Samus said quietly, “I knew the Luminoth as a peaceful race when I was here before. I do not know what has caused them to become hostile, but I have only been able to identify two Luminoth since I arrived—the two on the transport ship that just left. One was already on the ship before it departed.” She again peered over at the fortress, but frequent scans from her equipment yielded no additional results.

“Are there any others?”

“Yes,” Samus said hopefully, “I befriended them during my last mission, but communication has been poor since I arrived.”

“We need to find the ones who took Kursed!” Fox’s grip tightened around the staff, “and you need to find the Metroid they have. We should team up.”

“Our priorities match, but unless that staff can point you to where Kursed is, we can’t track them.” Samus looked to the stars beyond Aether’s atmosphere. “They’re out of range of my scanners, and my ship was parked near Aether’s temple grounds so I could establish communication better. Do you have a ship?”

Fox shook his head, remembering his destroyed Arwing at the hands of the Sanctuary Fortress’s air defenses.

Incoming data. Samus’s helmet chimed and interrupted their conversation. “New Luminoth translation complete,” her computer stated.

Samus nodded and turned to face the exit at the edge of the bridge. “Let’s go to the temple grounds. We might be able to talk with the Luminoth leader after all.”

…

He hadn’t thought about it when he first arrived on Aether, but Fox began to realize how far he was from Corneria as he walked across Aether’s environments. Nothing about this planet was familiar to him, other than a breathable atmosphere. The Sanctuary Fortress’s architecture was polygonal and erratic, much unlike the simple rectangular buildings he was used to. He only saw the interior for a moment, but the machines inside the fortress were more intimidating than even the abominations the Aparoids created.

Samus told him more about her previous adventure in Aether as they traveled from the mountainous fortress to the temple grounds below. She told him about Aether’s other environments, such as Agon and Torvus, and how a cataclysmic meteor had destroyed their natural beauty. Agon was now a wasteland with intense climates, while Torvus was now a flooded bog with venomous and aggressive organisms.

The temple grounds were as new to Fox as everything else. The giant structure in the grounds’ center carried some of the same architecture and hieroglyphs that the fortress had, but their presence didn’t make Fox any more familiar with them. Ruins of old Luminoth buildings and ancient mechanisms were scattered everywhere, and although Samus seemed to understand them well enough with her scanners, Fox was left in the dark. Even the plant life was unlike anything he had ever seen. Sauria had its fair share of unusual plants and hostile mushrooms, but Aether had plants that glowed with bioluminescence, red flowers with striped and jagged patterns, and gigantic trees that wrapped around ruined buildings like wooden serpents.

All throughout the trek, he realized how much Krystal had experienced. He didn’t know how much she had seen of Aether–hopefully the temple grounds didn’t ignite memories of Krazoa Palace– but he knew that she had seen many more unfamiliar planets just like this one. He realized that Locust was just scratching the surface of the uninviting locations she had been to.

He still vividly remembered his reasoning for kicking her off the team. After her injury, he began to assume that she was unfit for dangerous missions; he was worried that she was being forced into a role that was too hostile to her. Her skills with flying a ship were still lacking compared to the others on the team, and even though she could hold her own against enemies, her frequent lack of a firearm made him worry that a well-aimed blaster shot would be enough to severely wound her. The grenade blast from the incident cemented his fear.

He already regretted her decision to remove her from the team, but he realized now how much she had grown in the short year that they had been apart. He failed to realize how fast she was at learning how to fly her ship, and how she often preferred her staff over a blaster because her skill with her staff was well beyond anything she could do with a normal firearm. She had not only traveled to many hostile planets like Locust and Aether over the last year– she had excelled at it. He heard many stories about her success as a hunter, and how she did it all by herself. She was never unfit to be on Star Fox. She was easily one of the team’s greatest assets, and he constantly asked himself how he had been so blind to remove her from the team.

Good member of the team aside–he loved her! He still did. No matter what kind of injury she had, he never wanted her to leave forever. Despite the horrible memory of their experience in the warehouse together, he still remembered their happiest moments. He remembered her beautiful green eyes when he first rescued her on Sauria, and he remembered the amazing chemistry they had both on the battlefield and off during the Aparoid crisis. He loved everything about her, from her strength to her beauty, from her stubborn confidence to her overwhelming kindness.

He hated himself for not thinking about all their wonderful experiences when he considered removing her from the team. Samus’s presence nearby prevented his emotions from taking control of him, but he still continued the trek with a gloomy expression, while holding Krystal’s staff close to himself.

A few moments of quiet traveling later, and they arrived at the entrance to the Great Temple, the giant structure in the grounds’ center. A large silver blast shield barred access to the interior, out of place compared to the natural environment around them.

“How do we get through?” Fox tried to think of other things to keep his mind intact.

“There was a new lock on the temple when I arrived,” Samus explained as she keyed in a code on a computer screen near the door, “but I had my ship use the translations I acquired from my last mission to decipher the new code.” She combated the code as if solving a puzzle.

“Through vigilance and strength, we create peace.” A calm, robotic voice spoke as the metal door lowered, allowing Samus and Fox to walk across.

“I don’t know if ‘peace’ is the right word, if their fortress is so hostile,” Fox grumbled.

An elevator took them to the Temple’s main structure above the grounds, and Fox admired the Temple’s design. It was well-lit by countless windows, including glass floors that showed the planet below. The walls were not aglow with machines like they were in the Sanctuary Fortress, but several bioforms made of pure energy floated around the hallways and kept each corridor lit with their solar-like power. The two adventurers followed a trail of power cords until they arrived in the main hall.

At last, Fox got to see the Luminoth in person. The chamber was populated with a group of tall, moth-like creatures. They were all exceptionally tall, far taller than Samus in her suit, and their arms and legs were lanky but sturdy. Their eyes glowed a light red but their stoic expressions seemed kind and hospitable. Graceful wings flowed behind their backs like capes and the fur-like material on their chests ruffled as they walked. The armored soldier he saw in the Sanctuary Fortress had armor much unlike what these Luminoth wore, but the physiques were largely the same. Many pairs of light red eyes stared at Samus and Fox as they arrived, and the centermost creature stood taller to address them as murmurs among the crowd began.

“Samus Aran,” the middle creature said, “we are grateful and relieved to see you.”

At once, every Luminoth in the room bowed low, and suddenly Fox felt taller. He quietly sheathed the staff on his back. Samus bowed formally in turn, and Fox followed suit.

“U-Mos,” Samus responded, “what happened? Why are you being held here?”

U-Mos walked towards as if he was floating, his ethereal wings gliding behind him like mist. “I wish not to trouble my people with this discussion once more, they have had to endure it first-hand and that is enough. Please come with me.”

Aether was not a small planet, but it seemed so as Fox stepped into an outdoor area of the Temple along with Samus and U-Mos. A large but quiet machine that housed a great orb of energy hovered above them, and the starry, silver atmosphere bared down on them. From this height, Fox could see the wasteland, bog, and mountains that Samus told him about.

“Are you a friend of Samus? We are pleased to make your acquaintance,” U-Mos said.

“My name is Fox McCloud, it’s nice to meet you.” Fox turned and offered his paw on instinct again, only to realize that the Luminoth’s three long fingers were much different from the shape of his paw. U-Mos didn’t notice, and instead bowed again with his fingers across his furry chest.

“I am grateful to have another ally,” U-Mos continued. “Please listen to the latest turmoil of my people.” Fox and Samus watched him intently.

“You learned much about us when you saved our world and our race from certain peril, Samus Aran,” U-Mos began, “and many Luminoth will remain in your debt forever. However, merely a cycle after your departure, a new issue arose from a place I did not expect. One of ours grew disdainful of the aid we received and intended to create a civil war among the few survivors.” As he spoke, he outstretched his hand and showed a hologram of another Luminoth. It resembled the soldier Fox saw, but its armor was tan and it was decorated with flashy robes, uncharacteristic of the muted colors that most Luminoth seemed to have.

“His name is V-Lir, descendant of O-Lir, the previous sentinel of the Sanctuary Fortress. After the war’s end, the three temple sentinels and myself met to discuss plans for reconstruction. The sentinels of Torvus and Agon both agreed that we needed to leverage our remaining resources as best we could to purify the land and return it to its former glory. We intended to begin research on ways to remove the radiation that has plagued Aether since war began. However, the sentinel of the Fortress had differing plans. He was aware of Space Pirate activity in the Agon region and he wanted to use their data to track their ships and ransack them, and then use their spoils to rebuild. His cause seemed just at first, but as we learned more, his method would potentially lead us to another skirmish that our race may not survive.”

U-Mos closed his fist and reopened. A new hologram appeared, this one showing a cylindrical space station.

“V-Lir uses the Sanctuary Fortress as his main hub to process spoils from ransacked Pirate frigates, but his main base of operation is an old space station that was left behind by a different organization. We believe he does not wish to tarnish Aether with whatever horrible experiments he does in the station.”

“That explains why the fortress was hostile,” Fox thought.

“Samus Aran, Fox McCloud,” U-Mos spoke slowly, “we cannot bear to ask any more of you, but please, we must request your aid to stop V-Lir. The fate of our race and many others is at stake.”

“V-Lir has a Metroid,” Samus said plainly, “Anyone with that kind of power threatens the galaxy, no matter what their intentions are.”

“We are aware of his acquisition of a Metroid,” U-Mos nodded sagely, “and when we learned what he plans to do with it, my people became terrified. We have tried multiple times to reach out for aid, but V-Lir confiscated all of our ships and has confined us here in the Temple, so we have been unable to contact outside sources unless V-Lir allows it.”

“We have a ship,” Samus spoke, “if you know the station’s coordinates, then we can go there.”

“Approaching the station by ship is ill-advised,” U-Mos shook his head, “V-Lir has fortified the station’s perimeter with defenses potent enough to stop a small armada. He seems certain that an assault from Space Pirates is all but an uncertainty, so both the fortress and the station are as armed as he can manage.”

“Maybe going through an ion storm wouldn’t be so bad,” Fox wondered.

“There is another way,” U-Mos said, his tone rising, “V-Lir has only a few Luminoth working with him, far less than the necessary crew to run a station of that size. He has rounded out the rest of the station’s workforce with mechanoids of his family’s designs, but there are large parts of the station that are unused. We have been working on a portal system to connect with the station—like the portals we fashioned to reach the Ing’s domain. We have targeted one of the rooms on the Southern end of the station, where V-Lir’s defenses are less focused.”

“I remember using the portals to reach the Ing,” Samus thought aloud, “where is the portal?”

“It is functional, but only partially,” U-Mos admitted. “Due to V-Lir’s security we cannot ensure that the portal works both ways; currently, it can only send someone in one direction. We cannot use the same system to return you. You may be stranded there.”

“We need to get there as soon as possible,” Fox said, “there are things on that station that we need to get to. If he’s really confiscated all those ships then we won’t be stuck. We’ll find a way back.”

Samus nodded in agreement.

“Very well,” U-Mos said, “please take a few moments to rest for the impending battle, and I will finalize the transportation process. The station is old and has not moved from its orbit since V-Lir inhabited it, so we can ensure safe travel.”

…

Samus disappeared off somewhere for a while, perhaps to recharge her suit or to restock on ammunition, but Fox had trouble preparing. He couldn’t think of a plan of attack or think about the condition of his weapons—they were fine, anyway.

Fox never had anything close to telepathy, but he had gained a kind of connection with Krystal’s staff thanks to his extensive use of it back on Sauria. He still remembered how she begged for help through the staff, and his first time seeing her trapped above the palace. He couldn’t hear her calling for help now. Either she was safe, or she was too far away to communicate. He hoped it was the former, but an uneasy pit formed in his stomach regardless.

He stared at Krystal’s staff as if trying to bend it to his will, but it did nothing in response. He could only think of her, and how close he was.

Their brief moment together came back to play in his head on repeat. He still didn’t remember what he said to her, but he remembered her ragged appearance. Her right arm was covered by her tan jacket, but he could still see her metal hand clutching what he assumed was the Metroid and its container. She gave almost no emotion, up until the mysterious armored Luminoth shot her in the back. He was never good at reading her mind, and now that her physical appearance had changed so much, it was even harder to figure out what she was feeling. Did she really still hate him? His mind wanted him to think it was possible, even if a small part of him hoped she never resented him in the first place. Even if it was unrealistic at the time, he badly wanted to find her, run up to her and embrace her for hours, and to continuously apologize for his mistake.

“You seem troubled.”

Fox turned to see U-Mos approaching from behind. The Luminoth’s wings came to a halt as he lowered himself to sit near Fox.

“I’m fine,” Fox lied, “just mentally preparing myself for the mission.”

U-Mos seemed to smirk, despite his expressionless face. “Mental preparation to deal with your troubled heart, perhaps? It seems you have already prepared to fight V-Lir, but something else is bothering you. Someone else. An old friend you encountered at the Sanctuary Fortress.”

“How did you know?”

“We Luminoth have lived for many decacycles, many years. We are capable of sensing these things. Are you afraid that your friend is beyond saving? It is true that some individuals in the galaxy are beyond redemption, but that should not matter to you. If your friend is redeemable to you, then that is all that matters.”

“What if she resents me?” Fox blurted out, “I’m the reason this happened to her. I was not able to protect her and I removed her from the team. I made a horrible mistake.”

“You realize your mistake,” U-Mos responded, “and that is a good start. Your risk to find her is admirable. I sense that she may blame herself as well, since she exiled herself after she left the team.”

Fox sighed as he looked away, but he kept his ears open for U-Mos to continue.

“Fox,” U-Mos’s voice was calm, but serious. “You have traveled between many planets. You understand the vastness of the galaxy, and of the universe. Think how unlikely it is that you and her would cross paths in your lifetime. Despite the countless worlds and creatures that inhabit them, you found her. Not only that—you found her twice! Even after a year of absence, you still crossed paths again, lightyears away from any familiar place. Fate brought you together, and it seems intent on keeping you together. Your search for her has paid off, and you will see her again soon.”

“Thank you.” Fox spoke quickly, before his emotions could get the better of him.

“The portal is now ready,” U-Mos finished, “and Samus is waiting. Are you ready?”

Fox said nothing, but rose to his feet with a stoic expression. He followed U-Mos towards the portal chamber.

Heading into a dubious location without a ship and without an easy way to return was nerve-wracking for a normal person, but Fox was ready. He had not felt this ready since he arrived on Andross’s Venomian doorstep with Falco, Peppy, and Slippy for the first time. Getting a glimpse of Krystal was inspiring him, and U-Mos’s words helped even more. He could already feel his adrenaline rising again as he stepped onto the risen platform with Samus, where a large Luminoth machine stood in front of him.

“Best of luck to the both of you,” U-Mos spoke from behind the portal’s control system, along with several other Luminoth. “May the light of Aether guide your way.”

A ring of energy encircled the inner circle of the machine. Lightning cracked and the machine noisily roared to life, causing Fox’s ears to twitch. A series of bright flashing lights erupted from the machine, but a portal of light-green energy formed in the machine’s center once Fox’s eyes adjusted.

Samus, unfazed by the portal’s initialization, valiantly stepped forward. Fox was quick to follow, although his conversation with U-Mos arose in his head once more. The conversation helped to lift his spirits, but something seemed off. He had never told U-Mos anything about Krystal, and he didn’t imagine that Samus did, either. How did U-Mos know about their previous meeting on Sauria? Did the Luminoth sentinel know more than he was letting on? Was he a telepath, like Krystal?

Fox wasn’t sure, and he didn’t have any more time to process it as his hand entered the portal, and soon the rest of him followed. U-Mos and the other Luminoth bowed as Fox’s tail disappeared into the portal’s bright energy.

Chapter Text

Kursed’s head was pounding as she woke up. She groaned as she realized she was sitting up, but when she tried to lay down, a sudden force snagged her neck and pulled her back. She sighed as her eyes adjusted. Despite the lonely lifestyle she chose, Kursed was not used to wearing chains. Her wrists were bound with copper-colored cuffs and her neck was bound with a metal brace to keep her sitting straight in her seat. She hated the sound the cuff made around her metallic wrist, but at least the chains were not so tight that she couldn’t move. The last time she was in a prison was above Krazoa Palace, but this was child’s play compared to that.

A quick scan of her surroundings revealed that she was in the back of a smaller transport ship. There were other seats near her with chains, but she was the only one in the chamber. The ship was dim and quiet, save for a small window nearby that showed stars flying by at incredible speeds.

A sudden pain from the middle of her back reminded her of how she got into this mess. Despite her headache, she closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on any thought patterns nearby. She picked scattered thoughts of the Metroid almost immediately, but not much else. Strange–it seemed unlikely that the Metroid was piloting the ship, but she couldn’t read any other organisms onboard. Out of morbid curiosity she reached out just a little farther, to see if Fox was nearby… no. She couldn’t sense him at all.

Eventually the stars outside the ship began to slow as the ship exited hyperspeed and a dull, reddish tint appeared on the window. She craned her neck as a copper-red space station came into view. She heard a few muffled voices coming from beyond the chamber, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. She looked out the window as the space station became closer, and soon the ship was inside a hangar with a dull, silvery aesthetic.

The craft came to a halt, and Kursed’s chamber was opened to reveal a pair of very tall creatures. One of them was covered with bright white armor that reflected the station’s dim light like a prism, but the other had no armor and showed its features much easier. She assumed they were Luminoth: her clients had explained what the moth-like creatures looked like, including their fluffy manes and flowing wings. She was surprised that such lanky proportions could fit properly into an armorsuit, but the armored Luminoth looked commanding as it approached Kursed and stopped in front of her, piercing her with its red eyes. The unarmored Luminoth interacted with a control panel on the wall with its long fingers, and Kursed’s neck brace detached itself. The armored Luminoth said nothing, but its posture and its gestures were more than enough instruction. Kursed kept up her fearless façade as she stood and exited the ship, with a Luminoth on either side of her.

The reddish hue of the station seemed fine from the ship, but the dull interior was old and unkempt. Loose wires and scrap parts littered the hangar’s corners, and scrapes and scuffs from other ships covered the runway, even if no other ships were in use and the stars beyond didn’t suggest any others were coming in.

Unlike the Sanctuary Fortress’s bright and spacious corridors, the hallways in this station were cramped and dirty. A handful of tattered banners hung lifelessly from some of the hallways’ ceilings, close enough for the Luminoth to bump their heads against. The dirty nature of the station reminded her of Salvador’s base back on Locust, and in the worst way. Most lights were either dim or flickering, and most chambers she passed by were barren or disorderly as if the building was recently going through renovations. She gagged at the amount of dust from everything.

As the trio traveled deeper into the station, Kursed saw a few other Luminoth– some armored and some not– that were tending to crates of supplies or checking maps. They all stared at her with their inquisitive red eyes while murmuring to themselves. Kursed tried to avoid their stares and tried to use her telepathy, but she was met with nothing but a void. A few cleaning drones were around, doing as best they could at combating the station’s dust issue. A quick dive into the “mind” of one of the drones confirmed that she could still use her telepathy perfectly, but she still felt nothing when she tried to scan the Luminoth around her.

The hallways grew cleaner and more spacious as they took elevators higher up in the station. Some rooms were still in disarray—other rooms were completely leveled—but there was also more advanced technology strewn about, and more Luminoth designs that she recognized from the Sanctuary Fortress. Eventually they reached an elevator that guided them up to the station’s central tower. As the doors quietly opened, Kursed was greeted by a large room that was clean and well-lit, a stark contrast to every chamber that came before it. For a moment, she thought she was back on Aether, but the sea of stars beyond the chamber’s large windows reminded her that she was far from any planet now.

As Kursed stepped off the elevator, the two Luminoth muttered something and took the elevator back down, leaving Kursed alone.

Almost alone.

There to revel in the barren expanse of stars with her was a particularly regal Luminoth, who turned to face her as she approached. He wore a set of dark gold armor like the Luminoth that followed her earlier, but he also wore colorful robes that draped over his shoulders and fell to his waist. Red and white lights faintly glittered from bits and pieces of his armor, revealing a few golden accents. Although Kursed did not know about the Luminoth’s leadership structure, he was undoubtedly an important member of it.

“Good afternoon, Kursed,” the regal Luminoth said. He spoke in a common language, but his voice was surreal and metallic behind his mask. “I am V-Lir, the monarch of the Luminoth. Welcome to our new research station.”

Kursed blinked. How did he know her name? She assumed the Luminoth must have gathered intel already.

“Yes, Kursed, we know who you are,” V-Lir continued immediately, “You’ve made quite a name for yourself as a bounty hunter, although we have little clue as to why you would find interest in a Metroid. One can only wonder where you may have received information on our Metroid or our fortress… but no matter, that is not important now.”

V-Lir shifted his tone and he approached Kursed, the skewed light of the room combined with his tall stature caused her to be completely enveloped by his shadow. “I must apologize for bringing you here so forcefully. I imagine that our treatment of you may have soured your opinion of us. That will not do. On top of my most humble apology, I wish to explain more of what we Luminoth have endured.”

The cuffs around Kursed’s wrists detached themselves and clattered to the floor. Startled, she held her wrist with her fake hand. This was certainly new; she had never been caught on a mission before, but any other gang she was stealing from would have liked to torture her immediately instead of taking her far away just to talk with someone. What were they planning?

“I understand this may be surreal to you,” V-Lir continued, “but there is a very good reason we have brought you here, Kursed.”

Kursed hesitated. Once again, V-Lir’s speech seemed to be a step ahead. Was she really that predictable?

V-Lir didn’t seem to notice her changing expression. He turned to gesture to the space around them and then to other parts of the station that were visible from the windows. “This research station has been abandoned for years. It was a home to a large faction of bandits up until recently, but now it will serve as one of the Luminoth’s new bases. It may be unfitting of us to choose such a desolate base, but it is the greatest option we can currently consider because of our dwindling numbers, and it will serve as a steppingstone for us.”

“Steppingstone?” Kursed thought.

“Do you know much about the Luminoth, Kursed?” V-Lir asked. “We are a proud race of interplanetary travelers. We spent an unfathomable amount of time seeking out the ideal planet to serve as our home; eventually we found Aether, a paradise in every sense of the word. It had beautiful forests, oceans, and mountains, and we lived there peacefully for many years. We were blissfully unaware of any other species or planets that may be near us, but that was acceptable at the time.”

The Luminoth monarch lowered his head and set his hand against the glass. “But I suppose our happiness was doomed to end. A meteor impacted our world, and a great cataclysm erupted. Our beautiful planet became tainted by the meteor and the wicked species that came from it, and there was nothing we could do but to watch as our home became ravaged, and our race was almost wiped out. I want nothing more than to reconstruct Aether and return it to its former glory.” He turned to face Kursed. “Indeed, our planet’s beauty was destroyed, and it is my goal to rebuild and continue the great Luminoth legacy. Does this goal sound familiar to you, Kursed?”

Kursed slowly shook her head. “What are you talking about?” she thought.

“Since the contamination of our planet,” V-Lir continued, “I have led a faction of Luminoth to begin our reconstruction process. It is just a small faction, but we have been able to obtain technology from other races to aid our goals. And at the head of our technology is our Metroid. Space Pirates dared to desecrate our sacred temples on Aether, so we used their leftover technology on Aether to track their ships and take what we could from their vessels, including that Metroid. They were planning to use the Metroid’s energy siphoning abilities to create a deadly race of parasites.”

V-Lir shook his head. “Horribly close-minded, those Pirates. Do you know what Metroids are capable of? Their ability to siphon life energy from prey is astounding. We have observed many species during our travels, but we have never found a power so unique. Metroids can come back from the brink of death by absorbing life energy from others. If we can harness that energy and use it for ourselves, then we can use it to restore our broken race. With enough research, there is no limit to what we can do: we could cure diseases, or repair broken limbs. We may even gain the ability to raise the dead.” He outstretched his arms to make a spectacle of his speech. “And you, Kursed, hold the key to our research.”

“Me?” Kursed parted her hair, “why me?”

“You are a Cerinian, are you not?”

Kursed froze. She stared at V-Lir, who returned her stare with his gleaming red eyes.

“Yes, you are from Cerinia... Despite the prosthetic, the white markings on your fur are unmistakable.”

Kursed gasped as she grabbed her real arm. She realized that she could hear his voice much clearer now, as if he was not wearing a mask. She had not sensed another’s presence in her mind for so long that she had forgotten what it felt like for another to communicate with her telepathically. But how did…?

“How did I know you were Cerinian?” V-Lir’s thoughts spoke through her mind again, “My ancestors crossed paths with hundreds of unique tribes among the stars before they colonized Aether, and the vulpine warriors of Cerinia were among them.”

Kursed’s poker face was diminished completely now. She looked at V-Lir as her jaw hung low. If it weren’t for her shock, she would have been begging for the Luminoth monarch to continue.

“Telepathy was a trait passed on to my ancestors by an ancient avian civilization,” V-Lir explained. “We can all sense when other telepaths like us are present. And from reading your mind I have confirmed it—you have a special power that our ancestors coveted. That is why I had my subordinates bring you to me. We Luminoth are still trying to learn how to use the Metroid’s life energy for our benefit, but you already possess that talent.”

“What talent are you talking about?” Kursed asked in her mind, mesmerized. She tried to say something else, but instead her vision became blurry. She rubbed her eyes to readjust her focus, but her head became clouded, and her vision worsened as if she had overexerted herself.

V-Lir and the station were fading all around her, replaced with the same starry darkness of space as outside the station. Then, the darkness began to disappear as well, and a new image began to fill her mind. The sky changed from black to dark blue and became filled with imposing storm clouds. A constant rain fell overhead, but she was not getting wet. The gloomy atmosphere and rain reminded her of a familiar place, and a pit formed in her stomach.

Gradually, the rest of her vision revealed itself: tall but eroded pillars rose around her, and a structure covered in tan and gold tiles appeared underneath her feet. Each tile was worn and scratched with age, but they still reflected a faint violet light from the middle of the building. Kursed’s anxiety worsened as she realized where she was. The decrepit space station had been replaced by the top of Krazoa Palace, complete with a familiar but foreboding purple crystal that floated above the middle of the roof. The six Krazoa Spirits were all there, swirling around the crystal as if nothing had changed since she left. As her eyes adjusted, she peered deeper into the crystal and saw herself trapped inside. Or, she saw innocent Krystal, who was motionless and helpless. She reached out to try and rescue herself, but she had no arm to reach with.

“You remember this place, don’t you, Kursed?” V-Lir’s telepathic voice echoed over the sound of the quiet rain. “Or do you prefer the name ‘Krystal?’”

Kursed could only stare at the crystal prison in fear. Even if it had been several years since she visited this place, she hated the top of the palace more than anywhere else in the galaxy. It was a place she associated with loneliness and certain death. It represented a cruel fate that she narrowly avoided, but seeing it again reinforced her belief that she could not escape it.

“I know this place brings you great pain… but look!” V-Lir gestured to the six Krazoa spirits encircling the crystal. Just like in her dream, Kursed watched as the six spirits passed into Krystal, as if she was absorbing them. Moments later, they dispersed from her body and into the malevolent presence that had been observing them. The statue housing the malevolent presence ascended far into the sky, but Krystal was left trapped and unmoving. Kursed’s breathing accelerated.

“Do you see it?” V-Lir appeared behind her. “Your ability to channel the Krazoa spirits’ powers is closely related to the ability to channel the Metroid’s life energy. With your help, we can accelerate our research and rebuild our race faster than we ever dreamed. As the last Cerinian, you are the only one in the galaxy who can help us.”

There was a moment of quiet, despite the intensity of Kursed’s heartbeat. She tried to focus on V-Lir’s words, but revisiting Krazoa Palace and seeing herself in complete isolation reawakened her fears. Her mind was racing, and her head was pounding, but she could not help but stare at the fate of her innocent self. She clenched her teeth to stop the tears from falling.

Suddenly, she saw another familiar presence. She saw a vision of her hero, her Fox, who rose to the top of the tower and climbed the stairs to greet her. He was not looking at her, but she felt her breathing slow as soon as he approached the crystal prison. Suddenly, her mind was full of emotions other than sadness and dread. Fox was here in the vision, just like she had seen him earlier on Aether. A warm feeling in her chest gave her strength, and her eyes adjusted.

“You… You mentioned Metroids siphoned power…” Kursed finally spoke, still taking deep breaths between sentences, “Where do they get their life energy from?”

V-Lir paused. “Several individuals have given their lives to help us realize our dream. Their life energy was willingly offered to our Metroid. However, soon we will need to find new sources of energy. The bandits that once dwelled in this station were more than willing, but they are all gone now.”

Kursed thought back to the infant Metroid on Aether, how it was agitated until it began to communicate with her. “It’s not right to use a species as a tool,” she protested, “you should not hold the Metroid captive like this.”

“The Metroid is weak-minded,” V-Lir responded, “you have read its mind as well, haven’t you? It doesn’t have the ability to think about anything except for absorbing more energy and growing stronger. We can have it help us instead.”

“So you can control its mind,” Kursed confirmed.

“We have a gift, Kursed,” V-Lir said sternly. “We were blessed with telepathy. Would we not use the gift we were given to control those with weaker minds? Would we not use our blessings as they were intended to be used?”

“Then I suppose the bandits that used to live here were more ‘weak-minded’ sustenance?” Kursed’s gaze turned icy. “Our powers do not give us the right to take advantage of others. Is this how you Luminoth have survived all these years?”

V-Lir’s posture shifted. “They were only bandits, Kursed. If we did not interfere, then they would have someday threatened our livelihood. Several of my Luminoth underlings fail to understand this: if we continue to remain passive, then we will be attacked by another great threat and we will be wiped out for good. If we want to rebuild, then we must first ensure that there are no threats left. We must destroy others before they are able to destroy us! Haven’t you learned this as a bounty hunter?”

Kursed recalled Leo’s lecture back on the Space Pirate frigate, and a similar anger grew in her chest. “Why not use our blessings to take advantage of others? Because after we have finished stepping over everyone, and our goals have been accomplished, then all that’s left is for us to reflect on the people we hurt.”

“You’ve hurt hundreds before, when you were a part of Star Fox,” V-Lir accessed her memories again, “Your kill count from the Aparoid war is undoubtedly high. Why the change in morals? Are you trying to impress someone? Since you are the last Cerinian, there is no one left for you to impress.”

“Morals are all we have!” Kursed shouted, “If I choose to ‘use my blessings’ and kill anyone that gets in my way, then I’ll be no better than the brigands that I’m hired to dispatch. And when I die, only my enemies will remember me. I want to be a bounty hunter so I can stop evil and save those who cannot defend themselves. I want to leave a positive impact on someone.”

“Ah, yes,” V-Lir grumbled sarcastically, “I’m certain that Leo thinks very highly of you.”

“Leo was dangerous, but he quit being a hunter after I beat him,” Kursed asserted. “He used to think like you: he thought he needed to attack others before they attacked him, but hundreds of innocents are no longer bothered by him. He might still be a jerk, but he’s turned over a new leaf. He realizes that he doesn’t need to hurt others to succeed now. If I killed him, then he wouldn’t be able to learn this.”

“It is wasteful to save everyone,” V-Lir’s voice rose, “especially those who are unfit for second chances.”

“Fox is giving me a second chance.” Kursed thought to herself, as she remembered seeing him on Aether. “Anyone can be redeemed. Everyone can be saved.”

“You are the last Cerinian,” V-Lir spoke to interrupt Kursed’s thoughts. “Your goal should be to further the legacy of your race, not to save a few ungrateful bystanders. It is no mere coincidence that you have crossed paths with us; fate has called for us to come together and perform far greater acts.” The monarch offered his hand to Kursed, but there was a sense of tension in his words. “Join us, and we can help you build your legacy as you strengthen ours. Fulfilling your destiny only costs a few meaningless lives.”

“How many of those ‘meaningless lives’ will you need to kill before everything is back to normal?” Kursed growled. “You will rebuild Aether, but your legacy will be about the people you killed, not the ones you saved! Other planets will be afraid of you!”

“If they are afraid, then they won’t threaten us.”

“No,” Kursed exclaimed, “those who feel threatened are most inclined to fight. You can create an empire, but if you try to mitigate threats with fear, then the threats will collapse over you. Have you heard of Venom? It once housed the strongest military force in Lylat, but when it tried to control the system with fear, the rest of the system rose to destroy it.”

“Venom was ruled by a tyrant that deserved to be destroyed.” V-Lir’s voice grew deep.

“That tyrant was a maniac that wanted to establish dominance by killing anyone who could threaten his rule,” Kursed growled. “He failed to realize that he couldn’t kill all his enemies.” She gazed into V-Lir’s glowing eyes with commanding determination. “You will only make more.”

“Misguided child,” V-Lir’s postured shifted as his eyes glowed brighter, “I had hoped you would be more receptive to my proposal.” The vision of Krazoa Palace remained vivid, but V-Lir’s figure grew larger until he was the focus of the vision, his shadow reached over Kursed and blanketed her in darkness.

“Do you not understand your situation, Kursed?” V-Lir’s voice boomed over the rain as his figure swelled in the darkness. “This is your opportunity to be something more than a worthless bounty hunter. You have done nothing to contribute to the legacy of your race. You may have stopped the Aparoids from eradicating the Lylat System, but Fox and the rest of his team received the credit. No one remembers you.”

“That’s not true,” she protested as the vision of Fox flashed again. “A legacy is only important if there are friends and loved ones to share it with!” Despite the adversity, she remembered how important Star Fox was to her. Her emotions were going wild, but seeing Fox reminded her that her time with him and the rest of his team were the happiest moments of her life, as far as she could remember.

“Do you think Fox cares about you?” V-Lir asked rhetorically as he accessed her mind once more, “Fox thinks you are dead weight. He thinks you are ugly. Have you forgotten why he kicked you off the team? It’s because of your ugly prosthetic. You let him down and you disobeyed orders.”

“You’re wrong.” Kursed’s glare hid a slight wince. She saw Fox on Aether. He was looking for her! He had to be! “Get out of my head!” she shouted. She could still feel V-Lir’s presence deep in her subconscious, corrupting her thoughts.

“I can see everything, Kursed,” V-Lir roared, “There is nothing you know that I cannot. I know what you think of Fox, but I also know what he thinks of you. As far back as your memory goes, there is only heartache and sadness. It’s no better than being trapped back here, isn’t it?”

The crystal prison appeared near her again, just inches away from her. If it grew any closer, she would become trapped in it all over again. Kursed closed her eyes, but the vision of the infernal prison did not go away. Her heart was racing. Memories of Fox and her time as a hunter filled her with determination but the fear of the crystal and V-Lir’s poisonous thoughts in her mind cut her down just as fast. She fell to her knees as her graze broke away.

“We knew the Cerinians as a proud race.” V-Lir said sternly, “They would be ashamed to have their legacy end on such an empty note. Join us, Kursed, and we can help you to build your legacy, too. Otherwise, you are doomed to be lonely and unloved for the rest of your meaningless life.”

She tried to concentrate, or to empty her mind so much that V-Lir would have nothing to read, but V-Lir remained rooted in her mind as her emotions overpowered her. She shook and huddled close to herself. She felt as if she was shrinking as V-Lir seemed to grow larger still. She tried to shout, but all she could manage was a quiet whine.

“How disappointing.” V-Lir scoffed, “The legacy of the great Cerinians, reduced to one scared little girl. Perhaps you are too naïve to realize how important this is for us. No matter. Regardless of your stubbornness, you are still in a Luminoth base. We shall keep you in a safeguarded place while we wait for you to change your mind.”

V-Lir’s shadow began to fade away, and the vision of the rainy atmosphere vanished along with him. Gradually, the image of the old space station filled Kursed’s vision, and her mind was freed from explicit fear. She rubbed her head, but she was on her knees, and she struggled to keep her eyes open. She was too unfocused to notice the pair of armored Luminoth that had appeared behind her.

“A Cerinian should leave behind an important legacy, no matter who gets hurt,” V-Lir repeated as the armored soldiers carried Kursed towards the elevator. “You will never amount to anything if you try to save everyone. Look at what your morals have afforded you so far: you are alone, Kursed!”

Kursed tried to respond, but exhaustion was rapidly clouding her remaining thoughts.

“For your sake, I hope you change your mind.” V-Lir stared coldly at Kursed as the elevator doors shut on her.

“If you don’t, then I will change it for you.”

Chapter Text

Fox saw stars and nebulas among a veil of darkness as his eyes adjusted to the portal’s fading light. Planets of all kinds rushed past him as if he was running faster than light speed, but he was standing still with Samus just a few paces ahead of him, and even though it looked like he was stranded in space, he was not freezing. It was as if he was surrounded by a moving slideshow, and he was fascinated with it. Samus was less fascinated and was focused on the bright light that the two heroes were rapidly approaching. Fox shielded his eyes as the incoming orb of light absorbed them.

There was a sudden flash, and Samus appeared in a dimly lit room with dirtied floors and scattered wires. Stray bolts of electricity bounced around the edges of the unkempt room as Fox followed suit. The armored hunter’s visor glowed with a bright green light as the portal of light disappeared behind them, leaving them in relative darkness. Their new location was a far cry from the ethereal spacewalk in the portal. Empty and destroyed crates were littered around the room, and gigantic metal doors covered the farthest wall, decorated with flickering red lights. Tiles on the closer walls had been ripped off, revealing severed machine parts and wires inside. To Fox, it looked like a cargo bay that once saw many kinds of spacecraft and imported materials, but considering the room’s lack of even auxiliary power, it was unlikely that the bay had been used in a while. The destruction of the crates and surrounding machinery suggested that a battle may have unfolded, but the lack of discarded weapon rounds among other things concerned him.

“Cargo Bay B,” Fox read as he spotted old letters printed on the wall. He was grateful that part of the wall was left intact. “Stands to reason that there’s at least one other bay, then.”

Samus stepped forward and looked over the edge of a balcony overlooking the farthest wall. “Based on what U-Mos told us,” she said as she turned to Fox, “V-Lir is likely located near the station’s highest point, where he has the best surveillance.” She swapped visors and took a careful scan of the surrounding room, but the closest she found to a hazard were the frayed wires lying around. “And there’s no surveillance in here. Judging by the location of the bay doors, we must be near the station’s bottom.” She turned to face the closer wall for any trace of direction other than countless mangled cables. “I’ll see if I can download a map of this station somewhere, but Bay A must be higher up in the station.”

“You can, but I’m going to find Kry– Kursed first,” Fox said quietly, but he was mesmerized by the glow of the staff, which was much more obvious among the cargo bay’s lack of light. Even if he lacked Krystal’s telepathic abilities, he could still sense her as if the staff was a radar leading to her subconscious, and it pulsed dimly as he held it up. He guided the tip of the staff around the room like he was using a metal detector, until he stopped in front of a hexagonal door. As he faced it, the staff seemed to pulse brighter.

“Do you trust her?” Samus asked as Fox set a paw against the door.

“Of course!” Fox assured as he turned to face her, the staff glowing a bit less as a result. “Whoever this V-Lir is, I can’t let him hurt her. And once we help her, we’ll have a powerful ally.” 

“Then I will help you.” Samus took a quick shot at the door Fox was pointing at, and the door opened immediately. “She is a potent warrior. The less advantages V-Lir has over us, the better.”

Fox nodded as the two of them passed through the door together, and they ventured through the darkened hallways using Samus’s visor and Fox’s staff to light their path. The trek was quiet for a while, accompanied only by the echoing sound of their footsteps against the cold metal of the floor, and the occasional flicker of sparks from stray cables. Fox watched his surroundings as he kept the staff facing forward. Whoever had gone through here had made sure to pillage every salvageable piece of machinery, including the metal from the walls. He felt like he was venturing through a construction site.

“Who is Kursed to you?” Samus asked to break the silence.

“Business partners,” Fox responded vaguely, but the staff absorbed his focus.

“Just business partners,” Samus confirmed with a hint of disbelief.

“We used to travel together in a team,” Fox turned to Samus. “But she got hurt, so I took her off the team so she wouldn’t get hurt anymore.” He frowned as he reflected on Krystal’s soulless eyes back on the Great Fox II, when he gave her the bad news. “I hated to see her in pain.”

“Then she became a bounty hunter, when she had nowhere to turn to.”

“How do you know that?” Fox almost stopped walking for a moment.

“It makes sense,” Samus responded as she adjusted her posture to appear more stoic. “That’s how a lot of hunters start: no family, no friends, no connections. It’s easiest when you have nothing to look back on. Some of them have goals, but I know a lot of hunters that wander aimlessly, like they’ve lost their purpose, or they don’t know what their purpose is supposed to be.”

Fox winced.

“Does she have any family?” Samus continued.

“I don’t know,” Fox said quietly, “she doesn't remember her past, either. She comes from a place called Cerinia, but we don’t know where that is. We don’t even know if it exists anymore.”

“Did she ever look for Cerinia when she joined your team?”

“Well, no,” Fox scratched his ear, “she brought up Cerinia sometimes, but she didn’t research it very much after she joined my team.”

“Sounds like your team was her purpose.” Samus shook her head. “She probably didn’t want to search for Cerinia anymore because she felt like she found where she belonged.”

Fox’s frown deepened. He felt plenty of remorse already, but he never realized how little Krystal brought up Cerinia after she joined. He figured it was because she didn’t want to burden everyone with her personal goals. He remembered her goal back on Sauria was to find Cerinia and her family, but once she met him and his team…

“When she left the team, she wandered by herself for a while, probably looking for Cerinia but not having the funds to find it. I was wondering how someone from Lylat could travel so far away.”

“I know I made a horrible mistake,” Fox sighed. “That’s why I’m here. I need to find her and fix my mistake.”

“What will you do once you find her?”

“Well,” Fox paused, “I want to apologize.” Part of him wanted to tell Samus exactly what he wanted to say to Krystal, and how badly he wanted to embrace her, but going into excruciating detail seemed unnecessary with someone he didn’t know well. “But what if she doesn’t accept? The original team isn’t even together anymore.”

“Then it needs to be more than just an apology. You need to give her a new purpose.”

“A new purpose…” Fox repeated.

“She seems like most other hunters I encounter: fulfilling bounties to get by but without a goal in mind. If you don’t have the old team to invite her back to, then make a new one. Give her a reason to come back.”

Fox nodded. Even if doubts of Krystal’s willingness to come back plagued his mind, his determination to confirm her safety was enough to overpower them.

“Maybe,” he wondered to himself, “finding Cerinia would be a good goal to have, now that Star Fox has disbanded. Krystal might have had her fill of mercenary work by now. Or maybe she wants to keep being a bounty hunter?” His mind was suddenly processing many ways he could talk to her. He would do anything and take any job if it meant winning her back, whether that was continuing as a bounty hunting duo or anything else for that matter. Suddenly, resuming the old search of Cerinia seemed like a good idea, but how would he do it? He never had any leads when he researched it on Krystal’s behalf. Details like those could wait. If it’s what she wanted, he would try his best. But he needed to find her first.

Some time passed, absent from smalltalk. Fox’s plans erupted in his mind, and he grew anxious as he realized that his opportunity to speak with Krystal again might be close, even if the fear that something horrible had happened to her was growing as well. He said nothing to Samus except to explain which corridor they should take according to the staff’s pulsing. The station’s halls never seemed to become any less derelict until they found a spot of luminescent light hiding behind a dark corner. Fox managed to put his anxious thoughts on hold as he eyed the approaching light.

As they rounded the corner, Fox and Samus found themselves in a hall that forked into a much more luminous room. A wide set of stairs led up to the room’s taller second half, and it was covered in decorative banners that vaguely resembled the ones they saw back on the Sanctuary Fortress, but they were gaudy compared to the decrepit floors and walls. Parts of the ceiling and floor had been replaced with much brighter tiles and lighting as if the room was undergoing a disorganized form of remodeling. Samus scanned the room for any signs of threats, but Fox was already heading further down the opposite hall with the staff pulsing brighter.

Suddenly, Fox paused as he picked up a faint sound. White noise was common since he and Samus arrived in the station, but it wasn’t until he felt a subtle change in the wind that his ears twitched and he stopped moving. Samus stopped a few paces from him and looked back. 

The alert vulpine spun on his heel just in time for a laser shot to come barreling towards him, seemingly fired from nowhere. Instead of reaching for his blaster, he snagged his reflector from his waist, and milliseconds later he was covered with a hexagonal shield of energy. The burst of laser fire bounced off his reflector and shot back in the opposite direction until it connected with something before hitting the wall. Sparks and flames seemed to phase into existence, until the sentry drone dropped its camouflaged shielding and crumbled into pieces on the floor. 

Samus took aim at the once-cloaked drone, but she realized it was already scrapped. “That is a potent reflector,” she commented as she looked around for additional hostiles, “Does it strengthen the reflected shots?”

“Yeah,” Fox responded as he lowered the shield, but he kept a hand on the device just in case. “I’ve had it for years.”

“I wonder if it can repel more than laser fire.”

“Never tried it with anything other than blaster shots,” Fox shook his head.

Suddenly, a much louder noise erupted, and a huge metal blast door descended from the ceiling, slamming the floor with no hydraulics or friction. Fox stumbled and adjusted his stance, only to realize that the blast door effectively shut him off from Samus, and there were no panels in sight to raise it, much less Ingsmashers to help. The blast door was covered in scuffs and scratches, but it was too sturdy for either of them to punch through with any of their weapons.

“Samus! Can you hear me!” Fox pressed his paws against the door.

“Tch. That cloaked drone must have got its emergency signal off before it was destroyed.”

“Hang on, I’ll find a way to you,” Fox assured, already looking around the cramped hallway for any vents he could use.

“Don’t worry about me,” Samus said. “Go find your friend. I’m going to find V-Lir. Meet me at Cargo Bay A, we can plan our escape from there. If that doesn’t work, let’s meet back where we used the portal.”

“Got it,” Fox said as his fists clenched. “We’ll meet again. Good luck.” A familiar determination burned within him, and in moments he took off with Krystal’s staff at his side.

“Same to you,” Samus said quietly, but she could tell the determined vulpine was already gone. 

As Fox’s footsteps disappeared down the hall, further muffled by the old but sturdy blast door, Samus was left in silence. She adjusted her scanners and approached the larger room once more. As soon as she stepped into the luminous room again, her scanners picked up multiple readings. She raised her arm cannon and carefully looked around the room, expecting more cloaked drones to fire at her at any moment.

Instead of more robots, a large figure emerged from behind one of the banners near the back of the room, and it stood at the top of the stairs. The lanky but imposing creature resembled a Luminoth, but dressed in tan armor and decorated with banners like the ones surrounding it. The armored Luminoth’s eyes glowed with a hostile red that reflected off its mask. Samus took aim without hesitation.

“Greetings.” V-Lir spoke with an unpleasant tone, far less compassionate compared to U-Mos. “I am V-Lir, monarch of the Luminoth, and you are trespassing upon my space station.”

“I don’t recall the Luminoth having a monarchy,” Samus said dryly.

“The Luminoth require a powerful leader to achieve true species restoration,” V-Lir spoke as he paced around the top of the stairs. Samus’s weapon followed his trail. “I will ensure our race does not dwindle away.”

“U-Mos is a fine leader. He stayed awake while you and the rest of the Luminoth were in hypersleep. You would be dead without him.”

“Samus Aran,” V-Lir growled as he turned to face her, “you symbolize the Luminoth’s weakness. Your existence is a problem for us.” As he spoke, several other Luminoth appeared behind him and joined him at the top of the stairs, each armed with spears and firearms of their own, although their armor was whiter and less regal compared to their leader. “If we are to survive as a dominant race, then we must not rely on anyone. I fear my people will grow complacent if they realize that a ‘great hero’ like Samus Aran will come to rescue them in times of peril. I am certain U-Mos asked you to rescue them from me as well.”

“You trapped them in a secluded temple and prevented them from contacting anyone. You have imprisoned your own kind.” Samus kept her weapons raised, even as her number of adversaries visibly grew. “You are the enemy of the Luminoth now, you are no leader.”

“How dare you question my leadership!” V-Lir roared through his mask and raised his arm. The armored soldiers on either side of him readied their weapons. Samus’s stance did not break.

“You are no Luminoth,” V-Lir growled, “you could never understand our struggle. With my leadership, the Luminoth will be reborn and strengthened until no one dares to challenge us. Including the likes of you. Now that you are here, I will ensure that you will never defile us again.”

The lights flickered and the room adapted a shadowy hue as V-Lir took aim with his own arm cannon. A blend of pure white energy and opaque dark energy swirled around the tip of the cannon, creating an eclipse of beam power. Samus was forced to look away from the blinding combination of beams, and V-Lir’s soldiers did the same.

“You stole our weapons and used them as your own,” V-Lir snarled, “but you only gained access to the weapons that failed us during our struggles with the Ing. You cannot fathom the kind of beam technology I have created in your absence.” The soldiers on either side of him readied their own weapons and charged their own blasts, but none of them were as potent as V-Lir’s, which was glowing so bright that it warped the colors of the entire space. Even the gaudy banners seemed muted by comparison. “You shall be the first victim of my ultimate Annihilator Beam.”

V-Lir grasped his arm cannon and unloaded the charged shot Annihilator shot, and at once the soldiers around him opened fire. Samus sidestepped the blast, but the resulting noise disrupted her sensors and filled her vision with static. Two soldiers jumped down the stairs and rushed towards her with spears raised. Samus jumped in the air as a volley of laser fire tore the floor apart where she stood, and she unleashed a rain of missiles at the small army of soldiers aiming at her.

Meanwhile, V-Lir was already charging another shot.

…

Fox ran through cramped hallways full of fizzling lights and erratic sparks, while parkouring over old machines and damaged decorations. All the while, the staff glowed brighter and brighter, until it began to outshine the surges of sparks around him. He ran faster as his anxiety grew.

She wasn’t reaching out through the staff, but he could feel her presence through it, and it felt like she was very close. Just one room away. In a burst of motivation, he dashed through the next door and found himself on a small balcony overlooking a larger room below. Unlike the previous corridors, this room had many machines that were still functioning. He looked up just in time to see a turret mounted on the ceiling begin to turn towards him, but he ducked out of the way before it could see him.

Cautiously, he looked down at the floor below. Several humanoid robots sauntered around the room while looking at the machines and mumbling processes to themselves. On one end of the room was a large monitor, but on the other was a pair of large glass cylinders and a small tube that connected them. In one tube was the Metroid; despite its lack of facial features, it seemed agitated as it swirled around every inch of its cylindrical prison while screeching and tapping at the glass with its mandibles. Even from a distance, Fox could notice the tube’s wear; despite being small, the Metroid had done a number on it. The other tube housed a battered reptilian creature with damaged armor, but Fox only glimpsed at it while he looked for any trace of blue in the room. The robots were all the same dull monotone as the machines they worked on, and the tubes were a light green. Fox checked the staff. Maybe Krystal was hidden somewhere in here, or in a room beyond? But the staff’s feedback made it seem like this was the right spot, even if she was nowhere in sight.

The monitor on the wall flickered for a moment, and a creature wearing extravagant tan armor and glowing red eyes appeared. Fox recognized the creature as V-Lir, from the hologram that U-Mos shared. His eyes narrowed as if he was looking at Lylat’s Most Wanted list.

“Our knowledge on the Metroid’s potential grows ever steadily,” the recording of V-Lir spoke. “With this series of tests, we shall determine how effectively the Metroid can gain life energy. As with other tests in this series, you shall have the Metroid perform its task and gauge its energy levels afterwards.”

“Life energy?” Fox thought to himself. He had never seen a Metroid in action before, and although he heard about its terrifying power, he was less familiar with the “life energy” that V-Lir referred to.

The routine recording of V-Lir ended, and the robots in the room began to speak up as some machines powered on. The tube separating the two cylinders opened, and the Metroid immediately screeched and dashed through the tube to meet the reptilian creature on the other side. Fox winced as he saw the Metroid latch onto the reptile’s head with its mandibles and began to absorb energy with a sickening sucking sound. The reptile roared weakly, but it only thrashed about for a few moments before its body began to grow coarse and frail. The color drained from its black and green scales until it was left as a gray husk. As soon as the Metroid let go, the husk dissolved into dusty powder and scattered to the bottom of the tube. Fox had to look away. 

The robots communicated with each other as if they were disappointed with the results from their test, but Fox couldn’t bear to wait another moment. Even if he couldn’t see Krystal, he couldn’t bear to think of her suffering the same fate as the reptilian creature. He grabbed the edge of the balcony and launched himself in the air, unloading a volley of blaster fire on the ceiling turrets and charging through another with his illusion technique. The robots below looked up and drew blasters of their own, but Fox was already on top of them by the time they began firing. The first robot tried to activate an alarm on its chest, but it only got to play the alarm for a split second before Fox kicked in its polished head with his boot. As quick as a flash he tossed his reflector up to block the other robots’ shots, and he threw his staff like a spear through another robot’s chest plating before his reflector powered down. Another robot was flattened as one of the damaged turrets detached from the ceiling and landed on it, sending scrapped parts in all directions.

The last robot continued to fire at Fox without regard for how quickly its allies had fallen, but a flurry of rapid kicks was enough to shatter the robot’s armor and flip it over. The robot’s blaster came loose as it reeled back, and it began to pelt the room with random blaster shots like a sprinkler. Walls, equipment, and light fixtures were all pierced by hapless laser fire until Fox jumped and stomped on the loose blaster before it managed to punch a few holes in him too.

Fox paused to breathe, and he took another look at the room around him. Nothing was shooting at him now; the turrets on the ceiling were either destroyed or disconnected, and the robots below were in pieces. The last robot’s stray blaster did a good job at clearing the other turrets that Fox hadn’t hit yet. Light metals cracked under his boots as he walked over the mess to find Krystal’s staff still jutting out of one of the robot’s chests.

Suddenly, he heard a familiar screech behind him, much louder than it should have been. He whirled around just in time to see the Metroid floating above him, no longer stuck in a tube but still seemingly agitated. In the heat of the battle, he hadn’t noticed the stray blaster shots destroying the Metroid’s glass prison. The parasitic predator swayed back and forth as it drew closer to his head, saliva dripping from its mandibles.

In his shock, Fox didn’t think to draw his blaster again. He could only muster a gasp and a quick step back as he raised the staff as his only weapon. He aimed it at the Metroid while desperately trying to remember the staff’s setting for Ice blasts, but the Metroid stopped short as he aimed the tip at it. Suddenly, the Metroid’s screeches seemed to turn into softer chirps, and the saliva from its mandibles receded. It stopped pursuing Fox and instead slowly circled the tip of the staff, as if curious. As it pressed its domelike body against the staff, the staff’s jeweled tip lit up, and Fox’s ears were filled with the sound of a familiar voice.

“Krystal…?” Fox wondered. There was no mistaking it; he could hear her voice, but it sounded distan. They were thoughts addressed to the Metroid, as if she held a previous “conversation” with it and that her messages had never left the parasite’s mind. As the staff remained tapped against the Metroid, he picked up their whole conversation. Even through the Metroid’s memory, he could pick up the compassion in her voice, hidden behind a surly façade. From their conversation, it sounded like the Metroid mistook Krystal for its mama. He almost smiled.

After a while, Fox raised the staff from the Metroid, but the creature remained calm. Instead of diving towards Fox, the Metroid floated towards the room’s exit, chirping quietly and moving slowly as if goading Fox to follow it. Fox raised an eyebrow, but with the staff still raised high, he decided to follow.

The Metroid guided Fox through additional corridors. Part of him was worried that the robots he attacked would activate additional alarms and impede his progress, but he hoped that Samus was keeping V-Lir and his security busy. Either way, he didn’t mind taking on an army to get to Krystal, wherever she was. 

Eventually they reached the end of a hallway, and a stairway lead further down. An illuminated door sat at the bottom of the stairs, marked with another Luminoth banner.

“Is… is she in there?” he asked the Metroid, without realizing how silly it seemed to ask. The Metroid said nothing; it only chirped a few more times and then floated away, disappearing past the stairs. He turned to follow but realized the staff’s glow was only bright as he faced the door. Would it be okay to leave the Metroid alone? He realized he could help Samus find it again with the staff’s help, if Krystal’s thoughts still echoed in it. He wasn’t here for the Metroid anyway. He took a deep breath as he set a paw against the door.

What was once an old cabin bay for workers had been repurposed into a brig of sorts. Despite the glowing door, the interior was as dark as the rest of the station, only lit by occasional fixtures that were likely powered by a secondary generator. Many of the cells and sleeping pods were open or broken, but even the functioning cells were vacant. For a prison, it had a significant shortage of prisoners, but Fox realized that the battered reptilian creature may have come from here. An intense wave of worry washed over him, and his search through the walls of cabins accelerated rapidly.

What if she was already gone? The staff was pulsing brighter than ever now, but Fox’s irrational fear was climbing faster than he could search the empty cells. He was running so fast that he almost missed a cell covered by a forcefield. The patch of cerulean fur out of the corner of Fox’s eye was unmistakable. 

On instinct, Fox jammed the staff into the cell’s control pad, and it erupted into sparks. Moments later, the forcefield over the cell powered down. A vixen with familiar blue fur and long indigo hair sat on the cot in the cell. She only raised her head as she realized the forcefield was removed, and her dull but still beautiful eyes glimmered as she made eye contact with him.

“Fox?”

Chapter Text

Kursed was alone again, and she hated it.

Even though she sat in a cell with nothing and no one around, her mind was racing. Exhaustion from her trek in the Sanctuary Fortress and her earlier fight with Samus was beginning to catch up to her, but she couldn’t sleep.

The conversation with V-Lir echoed in her mind, accompanying her headache leftover from his tampering. His goal to revive the legacy of the Luminoth was created from good intention, but his aggressive methods reminded her of planetary dictators that she had researched during her search for Cerinia.

However, V-Lir’s talks of utilizing his unique telepathic powers to establish rule over the galaxy seemed strangely familiar to Kursed. None of the tyrants she read about had any supernatural abilities past their brilliance as military generals, scientists, or some other occupation. Stranger still; V-Lir was the first person she held a telepathic conversation with; she couldn’t remember anyone else. No one else in Lylat possessed the power, and the wicked Andross only obtained it briefly when he stole the mysterious Krazoa’s powers back in the palace.

She wondered. Did the people of Cerinia have similar goals? She assumed that others on Cerinia were like her, and they probably had telepathic powers like she did. Had they wanted to establish dominance like V-Lir? She couldn’t remember; everything before Sauria was a haze to her. Her vague memories claimed Cerinia was destroyed long ago, but she had no proof of it. She couldn’t even remember what the other Cerinians were like, other than the fact that she must have had a family of some sort. Thinking about Cerinia and things she couldn’t explain made her head hurt. She held her head while she tried to think of different memories.

Remembering Andross and the Krazoa brought the memories of Krazoa Palace back with a vengeance, but Kursed felt different towards the memories now. Normally, revisiting the infernal crystalline prison above the palace was horrible; she could barely process her fears as V-Lir showed her the prison in her mind. However, V-Lir had helped her face that fear more than he realized. Reliving her experience of solitude on top of Krazoa Palace made her remember something that V-Lir was not expecting: Fox was there for her. Even now, she vividly remembered V-Lir’s vision, where Fox came to her crystalline prison to help her.

He was always there for her, and she was always there for him. No kind of adversary, whether common ruffian or otherworldly mechanoid, could separate their bond with each other. Being trapped in the crystal prison was the worst moment of her life, at least from her shallow pool of memories, but Fox had come to rescue her. As long as she had loved ones nearby, she would never be trapped like that again. She regretted letting the fear of the palace drown out the joy she felt when she saw her hero for the first time.  

A dull numbness jostled her conscience, and her face fell. Maybe Krystal could rely on loved ones to keep her safe, but Krystal did not exist anymore. Kursed was nothing like Krystal, and she had the unsightly prosthetic and horrible scars to prove it.

“You are Kursed,” the toxic thoughts festered. “You are not worthy to be with Fox or anyone on his team. You were dead weight to them…”

However, her venomous thoughts were put on hold as she sensed footsteps approaching, and she did a double-take as she saw a familiar figure clad in orange fur and a green flight suit pass by her cell. Moments later, Fox jammed the tip of his staff into the cell’s control panel on the wall, and the soft hum of the cell’s forcefield fizzled out.

Kursed gasped as Fox stumbled into the cell, and her eyes met his. His eyes were still as beautiful as the day she first saw them at Krazoa Palace: eyes that assured her that everyone would be okay, even in her darkest times.

“Fox?” An old feeling in the back of her mind asked her to smile, but she was too shocked to. She took a moment to hide her metal arm from his view, even though she still wore her tan jacket.

“Krystal…!” Fox exclaimed. Part of him wanted to refrain from making a scene in front of her, even if she was a captive audience to his ramblings, but he didn’t want to miss his opportunity again. No one else was in the brig with them, not even an occasional work drone. He couldn’t ask for a better chance.

“Kurs– Krystal, I am so sorry.” Even after playing the conversation in his head hundreds of times, Fox was still tripping over his words in nervousness. “Please, I want you to come back to Star Fox.”

“Yes, yes!” cried an innocent voice in Kursed’s head, but she growled and pushed her hair back with her left hand. She tried scanning his mind with her telepathy, but she sensed compassion in his words. The rush of emotions bombarded her like a meteor shower, but the surly facade she had developed over the course of many months attempted to take control of her thoughts again. “Join Star Fox?” Kursed repeated with an unsavory tone, “I don’t belong to that group, I was never worthy of it. Did you really come all this way just to get your business partner back?”

“I just want you close to me, in my life, team or otherwise,” he persisted, “I’ve been so worried about you, and words cannot express how regretful I am for anything. I’m so sorry.”

Kursed glared at Fox as she probed his mind. Even his most shallow thoughts were full of remorse and of grief, but also honesty and compassion. Fox still had the same caring and respectful attitude that he always showed her, even before her injury. It reminded her of their time back on the Aparoid homeworld, when she was repulsed by her surroundings, but Fox and his warm feelings were there to comfort her. Her expression softened in turn, but she caught herself. No, this wasn’t right. Krystal’s life was over, and Kursed did not deserve this. Fox’s words were only skin-deep, he didn’t really want her back. She was just imagining things… even if her telepathy was not often wrong.

“Why now?” Kursed’s expression remained distorted and hurt, but the old feeling from before was growing stronger. “Nothing is different, Fox.” She presented her metal arm to him, and he looked away from it. “This is the reason you made me leave, isn’t it? I still have this metal prosthetic and I always will. It symbolizes my inability to follow orders, and my inexperience. You told me to leave because I was holding the team back. And…” her lip was quivering now, and her voice was cracking, “you told me to leave because you couldn’t bear to see me in this state. I’ve become so ugly to you.”

Tears were welling up in Kursed’s eyes, breaking through her normal facade like holes in a neglected dam. She tried to growl, but she could hardly muster a whimper. She buried her head into her knees and lowered her metal arm until it dangled lifelessly off the cot. Fox paused to give her a moment to calm down.

“I… couldn’t bear it because I thought I failed you, Krystal,” Fox said softly. “You were never unfit to be on the team. told you to leave because I was afraid. Because every time I looked at your arm, I blamed myself.”

Kursed wiped her eyes and raised her head from her knees. “What?” she whispered. She looked at Fox, who gazed back at her.

She flinched as she saw his expression. During their time together, she had seen many expressions from Fox: brave, defiant, and stoic, to name a few. Fox was, if anything, emotionally composed when the situation demanded it. As she got to know him better during the Aparoid crisis, she learned he was often subtle, a little shy, but warm. The look on his face now was something she’d never seen before. His eyes had a haunted look, scared, and pained.

The old feeling in the back of her mind flickered brighter, and she suddenly felt a strong urge to be right next to him and embrace him, to purge him of the negative emotions that plagued his mind. It wouldn’t be the first time in their life that they had sat and talked together. Regrets on their inability to communicate when she left the team still haunted her, but she pushed the regrets to the back of her mind. Now that Fox was right next to her, they could both communicate better than they had in what felt like several years.

“Krystal.” He cleared his throat as he looked deep into her eyes. “I take responsibility as leader of Star Fox. Even if Star Fox has changed a lot since our time on Sauria, you are all both my comrades, and my friends. It’s my job to see everything through, to lead us through danger and keep us safe. I do this because you are all, every single one of you, the most important people in my life. Falco, Slippy, Peppy, and you. I do this to make sure we get to finish the mission, come home safe, and have one another.” He leaned forward. “You understand that, right?”

Kursed nodded very slowly, so subtly that Fox didn’t notice as he looked down at his paws. His breathing became ragged as he began to shake. He stood quietly for a long moment, and Kursed watched him carefully. Her curiosity and her own flare of emotions goaded her to delve deeper into his mind. She got closer to him and prepared to say something, but–

BANG. Frail metal clattered as Fox’s fist slammed on the cell wall. Kursed jumped.

“Why didn’t I see that grenade in time?” He wailed through clenched teeth.

The words floated in the cell and echoed throughout the spacious brig, but Kursed realized her telepathy was not necessary. Never in her time knowing Fox had she heard such pain in his voice. She tried to think of something to say, but her shock prevented her from forming sentences. Instead, she felt her heart beat faster and her willingness to be near Fox grew rapidly.

They sat in silence for a while longer as muted sobs came from Fox. After a while, he shook his head, steadied himself, and looked back at her.

“I blamed myself, Krystal,” he whispered. “I…every time I saw your arm I just thought, why didn’t I see it? Why wasn’t I good enough? Why did you have to suffer for my failure?”

“…Fox,” Kursed whispered.

“I was so scared,” he said. “I thought it would happen again. I would fail you again and lose you for good. I just couldn’t…I…”

He wiped his eyes. “I’m so sorry, Krystal.”

He came closer. Gradually, conviction came back into his eyes.

“I can’t let that fear get to me anymore,” he said. “You are part of this team, Krystal. You’re our friend. Whatever I did or didn’t do doesn’t change that. I was wrong to ask you to leave, and I want you back. We need you. I need you.”

He lowered his head, still looking at her. A blush was faintly visible on his cheeks.

“I love you, Krystal,” he said. “More than anything.”

Kursed whimpered. Something welled in her throat, and reinforced tears streamed down her cheeks. She made one last attempt to dive as deep into Fox’s subconscious as she could. Somehow, somewhere, she expected a tinge of doubt or dishonesty in his psyche, but she found nothing like that. Her mind kept insisting that this was not real. It was just a fairy tale. Fox wasn’t really comforting her; she was well past redemption and kindness. Kursed was a warrior that lived alone and didn’t deserve anyone, but no matter where she searched in his mind, she only found overwhelming love, and no part of him cared about the lonely life that she had led over the last year. Fox’s feelings of pure kindness and caring fought back against her doubts with incredible persistence. The only negative emotion she could find in him was regret: regret from their split, and regret that he had not found her sooner. Her old feelings of unconditional love were once just a flicker, but now they swelled in her chest as her search concluded. For the first time in months, she felt warm inside.

“Fox, I…” The vixen could hardly form her words. The warmth inside Kursed had melted away her disposition, and all that remained was a vulnerable vixen, the same one that was trapped above Krazoa Palace and the same one that fell in love with Fox so long ago. Even if she still looked different because of the prosthetic and the scars, she was still the same Krystal that Fox remembered, and from her telepathy she had confirmed it: he never stopped loving her.

“Krystal,” Fox said as he gently raised his paw to wipe the tears from her cheek, “I will never let something like this happen to you again. I want to be with you and protect you. Even if we have dangerous lives, I can’t imagine a life without you.”

“Oh, Fox!” Krystal whimpered as tears streamed down her cobalt cheeks. She tried to say more, but her speech was warped by her shaking lips. She made no further attempts to hide her emotions as she reached out her arms.

Fox and Krystal embraced. The cold metal from her prosthetic arm felt odd on his back, but the immense warmth from the rest of her body was more than enough to offset it. He was finally with her again, after what felt like months of searching. As the realization struck him, his smile widened.

Krystal’s wailing turned to sobbing. Her knees grew weak, and she began to bear down on Fox as she hugged him. He bent down with her and moments later the two foxes were simply sitting on the floor of the cell, still together, and still crying.

How she missed this. No one ever made her feel like Fox did, and no one made her feel so warm. He had a friendly and heroic warmth that made her feel safe. Even if one of her arms couldn’t feel him, she focused on the warmth of his chest against her own. The nightmares of the crystal prison were nothing but a distant memory now. As long as Fox was close, she felt like she could handle anything. She did not need to run anymore. She was not doomed to a lonely life. Kursed was gone, and Krystal was free.

…

They stayed together for several minutes, silent but exchanging warmth as they held each other tight. Krystal missed the warmth so immensely that she hoped it would never end, but after a while she allowed her thoughts to wander just enough to pick up a familiar set of familiar thought patterns.

“Is Samus Aran on this station too?” she asked as they pulled away from each other.

“Yes,” Fox nodded, “she came with me to confront V-Lir and find the Metroid. Are you still trying to find the Metroid also…?”

“The bounty doesn't matter to me anymore,” Krystal replied as she shook her head. Space Pirates found me and asked me to retrieve it for them, and I was going to use the money to travel far away. I wanted to find Cerinia, my lost home. I didn’t know what to look for–I still don’t. But I thought I would have a better chance at finding it if I had enough money to travel across several systems.”

“I can— I want to help you find Cerinia!” Fox said as he remembered Samus’s words. “We don’t need to be bounty hunters. I have enough money saved from our old mercenary work to keep us afloat for a while. Once we leave this station, I want to help you find your home and your family.”

“But… I already have those things, Fox.” Krystal looked at him. Fox’s heart fluttered as he witnessed Krystal’s first genuine smile in more than a year. Her eyes were not only the same brilliant emerald as normal, but they also sparkled with the same kindness and pure happiness that he remembered from their best moments together.

“I was so lost that I never realized it– you are my family.” Krystal’s eyes gleamed as she spoke. “I know you, Slippy, Falco, and Peppy better than anyone. For all I know, Cerinia was destroyed, and I might really be the last Cerinian, like V-Lir told me. But I’m okay with that if I get to live a life with the ones I love.”

“Krystal…” Fox felt his emotions flaring up once more. Despite her different appearance, there was no denying that this was the same vixen that he fell in love with. His past regrets were being overshadowed by joy and relief.

“And,” Krystal continued, a certain determination rising in her voice, “I know what I want my legacy to be: I want to help others, like I used to do. I want to protect you like you have protected me, and I want to save innocent lives like we did in Star Fox.”

She frowned as her expression grew more sorrowful. “Fox, you came for me when I needed you most. Thank you… thank you so much.” Moments later, she pulled Fox into another hug. “I want to go out and rescue others too,” she said after a pause. “No matter where they are in the galaxy… I want to protect them. I want to save them from the hunters I’ve encountered. And I want to save them from people like V-Lir.”

Fox nodded as his determination rose to mirror Krystal’s. “V-Lir must be stopped,” he agreed.

“I know about his goals,” Krystal said as she separated from Fox again. “His plans to further the Luminoth legacy will endanger many innocents.”

“Then let’s go help Samus,” Fox responded. “V-Lir might be dangerous; we need as much help as we can get.”

“I can sense her thought patterns,” Krytal reminded him. “She’s not close, but we can catch up if we hurry.” She rose to her feet, and Fox followed suit. “As long as we stick together, nothing can break us."

“Welcome back, Krystal,” Fox said quietly. “Your staff, ma’am…” he grinned as he held out Krystal’s staff as if presenting a royal gift.

“I’ll take that.” Krystal chuckled as she snagged the staff with finesse and spun it effortlessly. She adjusted her jacket as she turned to leave the cell. Fox followed closely behind her after drawing the blaster from his holster.

Even after finding Krystal, Fox’s motivation was still burning brighter. After being separated for so long, his desire to team up with Krystal on a mission was stronger than ever. They had both come a long way since their missions together during the Aparoid crisis, but Fox was only thrilled to be with Krystal again, even in an unfamiliar environment and facing adversaries unlike anything the Lylat system had to offer.

Krystal took off running as she left the brig, and Fox accelerated behind her. They both dashed down the darkened hallways together, closer together than they had been in ages.

Chapter Text

Visions of the Great Fox flashed in Fox’s mind as he dashed through the Luminoth station’s derelict corridors. The long and straight hallways reminded him of his routine run through the nostalgic hangar towards his trusty Arwing, along with the rest of the Star Fox crew. Before he found Krystal, he was afraid she would never make the run with him again like they did in the Aparoid days, but he was thrilled to have her back. He peered over to her as they ran.

Nostalgia couldn’t hide how much had changed. Falco, Slippy, and Peppy were all doing their own thing now, and even though Krystal was back with him, she was much different as well. Her fur-tight pants resembled the jumpsuit she wore during the Aparoid crisis, but her hair was longer and dyed indigo, and her tan jacket was nothing like her old tribal outfit from Sauria. Even subtle details about her were different: her gait was wider than Fox remembered, and her right arm moved less than her left as she ran. She was more rugged, but Fox could tell she was stronger now. He’d have to ask her about her adventures over the last year or so; no doubt her experiences had made her a force to be reckoned with. The possibility that she may have fought with the famous hunter Samus seemed more and more plausible.

“Is Samus close?” Fox asked to break the silence.

“Closer,” Krystal confirmed. “She’s just a few floors above us now.”

Gradually, the environment around them grew brighter and cleaner as they ascended the station. The dusty hallways became filled with more lights and the salvaged walls were replaced with brighter tiles as they climbed stairs and dashed through taller hallways. Damaged machines and destroyed turrets surrounded them as they went, and Fox realized that Samus must have come through the same place already. Was the Metroid nearby as well? In his rush to find Krystal, he had almost forgotten about it.

They rounded a corner and stopped in front of a large elevator overlooking a large empty shaft with no perceivable bottom.

“We need to go this way,” Krystal commented as she approached the lift. “We can’t take stairs from here.”

Fox nodded and they got into the lift together.

They rode in silence, but the elevator's lights made Krystal more visible to Fox than she had been in a while. It was hard to see her in the darkness of the brig, and he only noticed her wider stride as she ran with him earlier, but now that they were in a confined space together, he got a better look at what had become of her.

Krystal had changed physically. If Fox asked, Krystal would remind him about how battered her body had become, such as the scars across her stomach and chest, the hole in her ear, and the unmistakable prosthetic that caused her gait to appear slightly lopsided. However, Fox focused on the other changes she didn’t mention. She had grown thinner, but her body was more toned. Her form-fitting dark pants did nothing to hide her strong legs. The scars on her stomach couldn’t mask her toned abs, and even though her tan jacket covered her arms, he could tell her shoulders were broader than before, and he imagined her real arm was at least as muscular as her legs were. Finally, although he loved her original, short hairstyle, her much longer hair flowed behind her like an indigo veil, making her appear graceful but powerful at the same time. He wondered why she was so insecure about her “battered appearance” when she was still so beautiful, but by getting lost in thought he failed to realize that he was staring.

“What’s up, Fox?”

Fox looked up and noticed Krystal eyeing him with an eyebrow raised. He looked away to hide his blush. “Just happy to have you back,” he said truthfully. Krystal hid a slight smile as she stared through the lift window again, while Fox felt a slight presence in his mind. His blush deepened as he remembered her telepathy was still as potent as ever.

The elevator slowed to a stop, but the two vulpines’ ears twitched as they picked up faint noises from the other side of the lift. They exchanged looks, and Fox raised his blaster to his shoulder. An armored Luminoth soldier came into view as soon as the lift doors opened. Fox saw the soldier's weapon just in time for a supersonic blast of light and dark energy to come barreling towards him.

“Watch it, Fox!” Krystal called as she wrapped around Fox’s waist and tackled him to the floor as the blast shot above his head and tore a hole in the lift’s opposite end. The Luminoth growled as it began charging another shot, but Krystal had already got off of Fox and dashed out of the lift with her staff raised.

The Luminoth fired another shot, but as Krystal dodged it, the supersonic blast curved slightly as it passed by the jewel on her staff, and it smashed into the ceiling instead of its intended target. Krystal did not spare time to think about the strange interaction though, because her foot was implanted on the Luminoth’s chest a second later, and the soldier was sent sailing into the nearest wall. Fox raised his blaster for support, but the armored warrior was already incapacitated. “As if she didn’t seem strong already…” the amazed Fox thought.

“Samus is up ahead,” Krystal commented as she wiped her brow and kept moving, and Fox followed. The sound of constant laser fire grew more pronounced as they reached the end of the hallway.

The two foxes found themselves in a large gyroscopic chamber with a rotating generator. A siren was blaring throughout the room, but the deep grumbling of the generator drowned most of the noise out, even though Fox could still pick up the sound of blaster fire on the other end. He traced the sounds until he spotted Samus through the spinning rings protecting the generator’s core. The armored hunter was on the other end of the room, locked into fierce combat with a small army of soldiers like the one Krystal just blew past. Samus’s volley of power beam blasts were quick and precise, and as soon as one of the Luminoth soldiers attempted to rush her she parried with her arm cannon as if swatting an insect. More Luminoth and aggressive drones were joining the fray as Fox watched, and enemy fire grew more constant in turn. He began to make his way around the chamber to sandwich the hostiles between Samus and himself, but Samus spoke up as she saw him approach.

“Go stop V-Lir!” Samus called over the sound of the action, “He’s in the control room. I can handle things here!”

A light energy beam bounced off her left shoulder, and she concentrated fire on the Luminoth that shot it before sidestepping another Luminoth’s spear. “Go!” She gestured towards the door at the top of the chamber. Fox stopped hesitating and hopped up to the stairs leading to the chamber, and Krystal was right behind him. He gave another look over to Samus as he approached the door.

“Come on, Fox!” Krystal reminded him, “Samus can handle herself. The faster we deal with V-Lir, the faster we can help her.”

Fox’s face hardened as he nodded to Krystal, and they rushed through the door together.

…

The following hallway opened up into a large observatory with countless windows overlooking space and the nameless planet that the station orbited. Countless controls covered the far wall nearest to the windows, coupled with several large computer screens, and the tall ceiling was covered with additional lights and many of the same Luminoth banners that covered other parts of the station. V-Lir was among it all, transfixed on the room’s biggest monitor and seemingly unaware of the foxes’ arrival. The tan Luminoth furiously typed on the controls as he watched the fight with Samus continue. Other screens displayed soldiers approaching her position.

“All units, destroy Samus Aran!” V-Lir slammed his armored fist onto the control panel. “She cannot possibly defeat all of us. Postpone the search for the Metroid while Samus is here. We will recover it after Samus is destroyed, and I will deal with whoever freed the Metroid personally.”

“Give up, V-Lir.” Krystal raised her staff to face V-Lir’s cape.

“Krystal?!” V-Lir whirled around and stared. His voice suggested shock, despite the deadpan expression on his helmet. He turned to Fox next. “How did you…”

“For a telepath, I’m surprised you let that slip past,” Krystal responded.

“He must have been so focused on Samus that he wasn’t thinking about us.” Fox whispered to Krystal. She responded with a smirk.

V-Lir paused for a moment, and his eyes glowed brighter. Fox felt a slight presence in his head, but it was devoid of the compassion that Krystal had when she tried to read his mind.

“So, Fox McCloud, you were the one who freed the Metroid.” V-Lir adjusted his posture, and a large spear appeared in his left hand. “I’ve seen enough of Krystal’s memories to know that a harmless goon like you would never need a Metroid. I’m sure that Samus poisoned your mind with visions of superiority. You and her have no right to govern us and tell us what we can and cannot use to restore our race.”

“I didn’t bust your Metroid out,” Fox responded, “you can thank your junked ‘bots for that. I came here for Krystal, and now we’re going to stop you.”

“Ah, but Krystal, this is your chance!” V-Lir’s voice rose as he turned back to her. He began to approach while raising his arms. “I’ve seen everything in your mind. I know the turmoil you have endured, and it’s all at the hands of this backstabbing mercenary.” He pointed an accusing finger to Fox, who tightened the grip on his blaster. “Fox is no better than any other mercenary you’ve met. Now is your chance to strike him down for all the pain he caused you.”

“You’re delusional, V-Lir!” Krystal shot back. “Not all bounty hunters have the same morals. It’s not just his fault that I became Kursed. It’s my fault too. We didn’t communicate, and we both paid the price. Now we both know better. I don’t have time to strike down anyone that upsets me. I’ll only strike down those who threaten innocents.” Her eyes narrowed and she took a fighting stance.

“I am disappointed in you, Krystal,” V-Lir spoke with venom in his words, despite the mask muffling his expression. “Not only have you refused to help us, but now you threaten to eradicate the Luminoth as well. Do legacies matter this little to you?” The decorative holes in his armor became full of light as his arm cannon powered on. “How can you be satisfied with ending Cerinia’s legacy like this? You’re the last hope of your race, if you applied yourself then you could discover Cerinia and its inhabitants and rebuild it, just as I am trying to do with the Luminoth. Are you actively trying to end our legacies?”

“Finding a lost planet means nothing to me if I’m alone,” Krystal responded, with greater conviction than ever. “My legacy should be about finding loved ones and creating a family. I’ve found people that care about me, and I should have never let them go.”

Fox smiled.

“V-Lir,” Krystal’s voice rose as she continued, “you’re no different from the bounty hunters I’ve encountered: the ones that demand I create a legacy by abusing my powers and hurting others. No legacy is worth that.”

“Power is all we have!” V-Lir roared as he approached Krystal, towering over her. “We will fade into nothingness without it. We were blessed with power, and we should use–”

“Enough!” Krystal shouted as she spun on her heel and delivered a mighty kick across V-Lir’s helmet. The Luminoth stumbled back as Krystal landed gracefully. “No more, V-Lir,” the cerulean vixen demanded, “we are talking in circles. You will not convince me that what you’re doing is just.”

V-Lir’s red eyes glowed intensely as he readjusted his helmet. “Very well,” he growled, “then I will show you the unparalleled might that I will use to cement the Luminoth as the greatest power in the universe.” The regal Luminoth took aim with his arm cannon as Fox approached Krystal with a hand on his reflector device.

Banners and ceiling fixtures rattled as a lump of annihilator beam energy spiraled towards the two vulpines. Fox dove into the air with his reflector raised, even as the blast began to curve in conjunction with Krystal’s staff. The blast shot back towards V-Lir, but it only connected with an afterimage of him. Despite his size, the Lumionth phased out of the way of the blast and appeared a few meters away from the reflected shot. He took an imposing step, and suddenly he vanished again, this time appearing right above Fox with his arm cannon aimed at the orange vulpine’s head.

A new wave of beam energy was already forming on V-Lir’s cannon, but before he could manage a point-blank shot, Krystal swung her staff upwards to dislevel V-Lir’s weapon and send the blast into the nearest wall instead. Without looking, the Luminoth grunted and swung his spear towards Krystal’s direction, but the lithe vixen was too fast for him. As he turned around, she dove underneath his wide stance and took aim with her staff as it became shrouded in intense heat. A bright flash of light erupted as Krystal’s fire blast hit V-Lir square in the back. The flames made short work of the Luminoth’s cape, but his armor remained intact except for a series of burn marks that appeared.

“Fool! Your powers mean nothing to my armor! It is far beyond the strength of my subordinates!” V-Lir mocked as he whirled around to face Krystal again. Fox drew his blaster in a flash and unloaded a volley on V-Lir’s left side, but the shots only managed to make V-Lir flinch for a moment as he tried to fight Krystal.

Even as V-Lir used a combination of spear thrusts and beam shots, his offense could not keep up with Krystal. She felt like she had hardly rested since her fight with Samus, but she was keeping up with V-Lir’s assault and then some, occasionally launching a spare ice blast or fire shot as she deflected V-Lir’s blows. However, each of her extra attacks did nothing to penetrate V-Lir’s armor except to make the furious Luminoth flinch momentarily.

Fox kept up his assault on the Luminoth’s back, but his blaster shots only bounced off the armor. Fox cursed himself and wished he had access to a smartbomb or something of similar power from his Arwing, but suddenly he had an idea as he remembered the reflector unit at his side. He held up his reflector as he saw Krystal flip out of the way of V-Lir’s spear and unload a frigid beam of ice at his face.

“Krystal!” Fox shouted and held up his reflector, “Over here!”

V-Lir wiped the ice from his helmet and fired a shot near Krystal’s head, but she dove underneath him and aimed her staff at Fox. The tyrannical Luminoth attempted to stomp on her, but she rolled out of the way as her fire blast barreled towards Fox. The orange vulpine shouted as the reflector turned red and became cloaked in an intense heat of its own, until the reflected fire blast rocketed towards V-Lir like a comet. The Luminoth only had milliseconds to turn around as the radiant blast smashed into his back, knocking him over and sending his spear spinning through the air until it bounced off a window and landed in the corner of the room.

As the heat of the strengthened blast evaporated, V-Lir’s armor had finally begun to show wear, especially at the point of impact. The left shoulder pad was mostly destroyed, and singed fur peaked through large cracks on the back of the torso.

“Damn you, Krystal!” V-Lir shouted as he angrily slammed his fist on the floor. “If you wish to oppose us so severely, then I no longer have any use of you!” He got to his feet and tapped on his arm cannon, which began to display different lights.

Krystal growled as she spun her staff. Without his spear, V-Lir was much less effective at close range, and she prepared to capitalize on his new weakness.

V-Lir roared as he stepped and phased forward, then phased again. Fox closed in and kept his barrage of blaster fire aimed at the cracks in V-Lir’s armor, but the Luminoth was too fast. As soon as the phasing tyrant appeared in front of Krystal, she jumped and aimed her staff at V-Lir’s weak points, but to her shock, he phased once more.

Suddenly, everything appeared in slow motion.

The viscous sound of a sword being unsheathed perked up Fox’s ears. A long, jagged bayonet extended from the tip of V-Lir’s arm cannon as he appeared behind the airborne Krystal and grabbed her ankle. In a swift motion, he pulled her from the air as he raised the sharp bayonet to her back. A mass of red flashed as the jagged blade stabbed through the vixen’s torso and came out the other end. Krystal gasped.

“KRYSTAL!!” Fox screamed as the color drained from his face. V-Lir pulled the stained bayonet out of Krystal’s stomach and cast her body to the side as if discarding waste. Her sullied jacket fell to pieces around her.

In a blind rage, Fox began to power on his illusion device, but the ruthless Luminoth rushed him and swung his arm cannon in a wide arch, enough for the bayonet to reach Fox’s chest and tear through his suit. The shock of the slash sent Fox to his knees, while V-Lir closed the gap between them and pinned Fox to the floor. Fox tried to get up instantly, but V-Lir stomped on his chest to keep him in place as the arm cannon began charging again.

“This is your fault, Fox McCloud!” V-Lir seethed. “If it weren’t for your meddling, Krystal would have agreed to help me, but she had second thoughts just because you couldn’t leave her alone!” Fox sneered and grabbed at V-Lir’s armored foot, but the whelming weight on his chest prevented him from moving or firing off a retort of his own. “And now,” V-Lir continued as the annihilator beam was fully charged, “neither of us will have her. I’ll make certain that I never need to see you or your kind again.” Fox’s vision faded as V-Lir’s grip hardened. He feared he would pass out before the arm cannon did anything.

A familiar screech rang out in the room.

Fox’s ears perked up just in time for a green dome-like creature to dash towards V-Lir like a bullet and latch onto his face, causing the stunned Luminoth to reel back and let go of Fox. Fox rolled away on instinct and took a deep breath. He tried to get his vision to adjust, but out of the corner of his eye he spotted Krystal, rising slowly and clutching a disturbingly large wound on her stomach. Krystal bared her teeth and clutched her staff with both hands.

The Metroid screeched furiously as it punctured V-Lir’s helmet with its mandibles, and the Luminoth roared as he thrashed around and tried to remove the parasite from his head. Finally, he managed a proper grip and tore his helmet off with the Metroid still attached. The helmet fell to pieces as the Metroid spun away in midair, but as soon as V-Lir’s vision adjusted he saw Krystal rushing him with her staff raised high, her intense adrenaline making her oblivious to her mortal injury.

Suddenly, V-Lir was terrified. He thrust his arm cannon forward and fired the strongest beam he could muster in such a short time, but Krysal vaulted over the shot and caught the energy in the tip of her staff. The jewel changed from red and blue to a blinding black and white, and her whole staff glowed with an immense power that covered the room with vivid light. V-Lir only managed half of a gasp as Krystal dug her heel into the floor and swung her staff with the might of a seasoned warrior. An immense explosion of eclipse-like energy erupted as the tip of Krystal’s charged staff connected with V-Lir’s exposed head. The Luminoth was launched like a ragdoll towards the computer screen, and sparks erupted as V-Lir’s armored body smashed the screen to pieces and fell to the floor in a sprawled mess.

Fox could barely move his body, but his compassion refused to keep him away from Krystal for a moment longer. He ran towards the explosion and got to Krystal as soon as the smoke was clear enough to see her. Instead of a red blob where her right arm should have been, there was instead a sickly red gash through her stomach, so severe that it seemed the vixen would split in half. A familiar but horrible feeling washed over him.

“Krystal… no…” Grief began to tear at his emotions, but a sudden rush of adrenaline demanded a different reaction.

“Krystal, hang in there!” Fox spoke quickly, “We’ll get you healed up in no time. This station’s got to have a medbay somewhere. Samus must have found one.”

Krystal just looked at him and smiled while breathing slowly. Her eyes sparkled with kindness despite her wound, and her genuine expression made Fox’s throat hurt.

“Fox… it’s okay.” she coughed.

“No, no it’s not okay!” Fox cried. “Don’t say things like that. Don’t talk.” As gently but as quickly as he could, he put his arms underneath her shoulder and neck.

“Thank you, Fox…” Krystal whispered. She slowly reached her left arm up to his face.

“Krystal?!” Fox held up her head. “Please, don’t…”

“Thank you so… much for coming to find me,” she smiled genuinely. I’m so happy… I could see you one last time…”

“This isn’t the last time!” Fox shook his head. His vision became blurry with tears as he held her hand close. “I won’t let this turn out like our last mission did. You’re going to be just fine. I promise.”

Krystal slowly closed her eyes as gravity weighed down on her raised hand.

You gave me… my greatest memories… Her mind flowed through Fox’s head as clear as day.

Then, he heard nothing.

Grief stole so much of Fox’s focus that he could not breathe. He could only choke out sobs as he continued to hold Krystal in his arms.

A quiet chirp above Fox jostled his ears.

The Metroid hovered into view and flexed its mandibles, but Fox only noticed it as it lowered and attached itself to Krystal's stained stomach.

“What are you doing? Leave her alone!” Fox tried to growl, but he could only manage a whisper that the Metroid refused to hear. Instead, the Metroid’s mandibles squeezed Krystal’s body as the crimson nuclei inside the creature’s head began to glow like a lightbulb.

The light was dim at first, but as the Metroid remained attached, the light grew more vivid until it was even brighter than V-Lir’s annihilator beam. The vivid light spread from the Metroid’s nuclei to the rest of its body, to its mandibles and then to Krystal. Soon afterwards, Krystal’s body was encased in the same vivid light, as if she became a being of pure solar power. Fox’s eyes widened and he let go of Krystal as her body grew as bright as a star, and he was forced to look away no matter how badly he wanted to stay focused on her.

The room was silent except for the faint sound of the light gleaming from Krystal and the Metroid. Fox squinted through the light to see V-Lir still motionless in front of the destroyed monitor, and he realized that the blaster fire from the generator room beyond had stopped.

An uncommon clattering sound echoed in the room, and Fox lowered his arm as soon as the light began to fade. He gasped as a familiar robotic prosthetic rolled towards him slightly, stopping at the shoulder. The soft light vanished from Krystal and traveled back up to the Metroid’s nuclei until it disappeared completely.

The silence was broken again as Krystal took a slow, deep breath and opened her eyes. She subconsciously raised her arms but realized her right arm felt lighter than normal. The Metroid filled her vision as it detached from her stomach and floated up in the air, still chirping softly.

“Oh my gosh…” Fox could barely talk as he stared at her.

No trace of red was left on Krystal’s body. The wound left from V-Lir’s bayonet had vanished completely, but so had all the gashes and injuries that once covered her figure. Pure, white fur remained where the scars on her chest and stomach were, even though her clothes were still torn from her fight.

Mama!

She twitched her ears as the Metroid’s familiar, juvenile thoughts filled her head, but then she realized that her right ear felt different. She raised her arm and realized that her ear no longer had any damage at all– both were whole again.

Then, she noticed the metal prosthetic laying on the ground next to her, and the realization that she could feel her ear struck her like lightning. She lowered her right arm and gasped as she stared at it. Blue fur… the same as her other arm, the same as the one that had not been destroyed by the grenade. She couldn’t believe her eyes. Her metal prosthetic had fallen off, replaced by an arm just as lithe and graceful as her other. Krystal blinked. Was this real?

She held her shoulder and a slight pain passed through her right arm as she flexed it, confirming she was not dreaming. She stared at her open palm for a long while, but she saw Fox approaching again out of the corner of her eye.

He badly wanted to say something, but he could barely process his emotions, much less the events he had just witnessed. Fortunately, he did not need to say anything. Krystal was suddenly on top of him and pulling him into an embrace that was devoid of cold metal. Krystal stared at her prosthetic on the floor, which made her hug him even tighter, and joyous tears ran down her cheek and onto Fox’s jacket.

They were still together as the far door opened and Samus emerged with her arm cannon raised high. She assessed the situation and prepared to open fire, but she stopped immediately when she saw Krystal and Fox together. They both smiled at her, and despite her helmet, Fox felt like she smiled back at them.

…

Krystal was sitting up in her hospital bed as she drummed her fingers on the window sill nearby. She was in a room near the top of the Luminoth’s Great Temple, and Aether’s gloomy expanse was sprawled out underneath her, but it was pleasant from her point of view. Maybe it was because she had endured more hostile environments, but it was likely because of her current headspace, which was far different from the last time she found herself in a hospital. Her accident with Fox at the old warehouse seemed so long ago now. She no longer had any injuries left over from that awful event, but she retained every bit of experience she had gained since it happened. She was whole again, and stronger than ever.

She stared at her right arm as she stretched it again. It looked and felt just like her arm before the accident; all it was missing was the white tribal tattoo near her shoulder. Her ring finger still hurt a bit from where the Luminoth doctors took a blood test, but the pain felt better than the numbness she would have felt from her old metallic arm. Still, she had so many questions.

The last few events were so surreal to her. One moment she was enduring intense pain as she rushed V-Lir, the next moment her staff absorbed his annihilator beam like a sponge, and then she suddenly woke up without a single scratch left on her body. Her adrenaline burned as she, Fox, and Samus found a ship to take back to Aether, but now that she was finally resting in a bed, she calmed down enough to wonder about everything that happened.

A large shadow lumbered past the open door to her room, and U-Mos quietly stepped in, his wings flowing behind him like a cape. His stature was comparable to the imposing V-Lir, but his movements were soft and careful. Krystal looked at him as he approached her bed.

“How is Fox?” Krystal asked without thinking.

“Don’t worry, he is fine,” U-Mos assured. “The wound is not deep enough to be a concern. With enough time, there will not even be a scar left.”

Krystal sighed.

“As for your arm,” U-Mos said as he gazed at her shoulder. “Our doctors were unable to find anything wrong with it. We would be happy to run more tests for you, although we are unsure as to why; nothing seems wrong with your body.”

She nodded and sat quietly for a moment, lost in thought. “Then how did I get it back?” She wondered aloud. “Did the Metroid give me a new arm somehow?”

U-Mos scratched the tip of his beak. “Most of our research on Metroids was shared with V-Lir. He spent many cycles trying to find species that can harness the Metroid’s life energy. Did he mention this research to you?”

“Yes,” Krystal nodded slowly as visions of Krazoa Palace appeared in her head. She still faintly remembered the strange pain she endured as the Krazoa Spirits passed through her. “He told me that my ability to channel spirits was comparable to absorbing the Metroid’s life energy.”

“Then you have a rare gift indeed.” He gently put his hand on her shoulder. “If what you say is true, then it was likely because of the Metroid’s life energy that your body was restored. It is clear why V-Lir valued you so greatly, but his kidnapping of you is unforgivable.”

Krystal stared out the window again as she held her right arm with her left. Her thoughts were still racing with questions, but she was grateful to know that her arm was as real as it could be.

“Krystal, we Luminoth owe you a great debt,” U-Mos changed the subject as he bowed. “Our legacy is alive today because of you.”

“You don’t share V-Lir’s visions for a legacy,” Krystal confirmed.

“Not at all. V-Lir wanted the Luminoth to rise beyond reconstruction and become a mighty force across the galaxy, but our ancestors have always wanted us to remain on Aether and allow it to prosper, and only spread our ideologies to those who willingly accept them. We Luminoth have never been known for war, save for one to protect this planet.”

“Are all Luminoth telepaths as well?” Krystal grew uneasy as she remembered V-Lir’s telepathic ability to make anyone “willingly accept” his demands.

“All Luminoth have telepathy, but to varying strength,” U-Mos explained. “It was a talent that our ancestors inherited, but it has gotten weaker as generations pass. Many Luminoth today are unable to use it, save for a few outliers. I possess only the ability to read emotions, but V-Lir was among the greatest telepaths we have seen in generations. His power may have been the reason he so desperately wanted our race to assert dominance. It pains me to see the skill gradually becoming lost to us, but if it means we will have less Luminoth like V-Lir, then it is for the best.”

“No one has the right to abuse that kind of power,” Krystal agreed.

“Indeed,” U-Mos nodded, but he lowered his head in shame. “V-Lir may have had ideologies that differed from ours, but he was still a Luminoth that we failed to detain, and you suffered dearly for it. However, in spite of the suffering, you rose above V-Lir’s plans and defeated him when none of us could.” He began to bow to her again. “We cannot possibly repay you for everything you have done, but if there is anything you desire, please tell us.”

Krystal thought for a moment, even if she already knew what she wanted to ask. “V-Lir knew I was a Cerinian. Is it true that the Luminoth once encountered Cerinia during their travels?”

“Yes,” U-Mos said as he looked out at the sky beyond the window. “The Luminoth spent untold cycles traveling the stars in search of a suitable planet to colonize. We encountered many races and discovered many planets during that time. Cerinia was one of those planets.”

Krystal’s heart swelled as her hopes rose. “Do you remember where Cerinia is?”

“Only my ancestors saw Cerinia,” U-Mos shook his head in sadness. “I was not among those who saw it, nor were any of the current generation of Luminoth. However, records of our ancestors’ travels still exist. It will take time to go through those records, but we would be more than happy to see if our ancestors left any more information on Cerinia.”

“Yes, please.” She felt excited for the first time in a while.

“Thanks to you, Fox McCloud, and Samus Aran, we are no longer oppressed by V-Lir and we can access the ancient texts left from the generation that traveled the stars. We shall begin our search right away, and we can contact you as soon as we find something. Else, you are welcome to stay on Aether with us.”

“Thank you for the offer,” Krystal replied, “but I have a home to get back to.” She smiled as she remembered Fox’s smiling face. She had only been apart from him in the hospital for a short while, but she already missed him. “Speaking of; are Fox and Samus out of the hospital?”

“Of course,” U-Mos beckoned for Krystal to get up. “They’re both waiting for you in the main hall. If you have no other requests for tests, then you’re free to go as well.”

“Thank you, U-Mos.” She was out of the hospital bed in moments.

“No, thank you, Krystal.” He bowed again as she exited.

…

Considering her only interactions with Luminoth were with V-Lir and his hostile subordinates, Krystal was pleasantly surprised to learn that U-Mos and the rest of the Luminoth were much more compassionate and grateful to its three heroes. As she left the hospital wing and made her way through the outer walls of the Great Temple, she was greeted by many other Luminoth, but none of them bore weapons or attacked her.

She was still far from Corneria or any recognizable place, but this experience was nothing like what she would get on Locust or its surrounding planets. Instead of fear and rumors, she was greeted with looks of admiration and praise. Every Luminoth bowed to her as she passed by, but many others also verbally praised her. Defeating other bounty hunters was satisfying, but it was nothing compared to the euphoria of saving those who were truly thankful. She couldn’t help but smile.

As the small crowd of Luminoth began to disperse, she spotted a familiar orange vulpine at the end of the hall, near the lifts that led to the temple’s exit.

“Fox!” She smiled and ran to him.

“Krystal!” He shouted back. They ran up and hugged like schoolchildren at the playground, but Krystal did not mind how juvenile the scene might have looked. She was grateful that things had turned out so differently from the last time she stayed in a hospital bed.

“What did they say about your arm?” Fox asked as they pulled away.

“It’s every bit as real as my other,” Krystal replied. “I don’t know how, but I think the Metroid gave me a new one.”

“F-fascinating!” The experience was still dumbfounding to Fox, but he was just happy to have the love of his life back. He prepared to hug her again, when he caught a glimpse of a familiar armored hunter in the corner of his eye. Krystal followed his gaze to see Samus approaching them with a cylindrical container in tow.

“How did the recovery go?” Samus asked.

“I’ve never felt better,” Krystal smiled.

“I’ve had far worse,” Fox grinned as he patted the bandage on his chest. “How about you?”

“Just needed my suit to recharge. You know, you two should consider power suits of your own if you keep fighting monsters like V-Lir.”

“Good idea, but I don’t think we would fit in them!” Fox laughed.

Krystal couldn’t remember the last time she giggled, but it only made her laugh more joyfully. Fox was shocked that Samus was capable of laughter at all, but he could tell she enjoyed the joke in spite of her opaque helmet.

“I’m going to take the Metroid back to the Galactic Federation,” Samus said as she gestured to the container at her side. “It is still a dangerous parasite that could ruin the galaxy if it fell into the hands of someone like V-Lir, but I’ll make sure the Federation puts it in a safe and secure space.” The Metroid remained afloat inside, but it did not seem agitated at all. Instead, it calmly clicked its mandibles and seemed to be staring at Krystal despite its apparent lack of eyes. “U-Mos told me that V-Lir has been imprisoned at the foot of the temple, and he’s under constant surveillance.”

“Hopefully that’s the last time he tries to start something.” Fox’s expression soured. “He’d be in for a galaxy of trouble if he tried to pull any of that back in Lylat!”

“I don’t think he’s going to be a problem anymore.” Samus shook her head. “The Luminoth engineers have already begun reprogramming the robots from the Sanctuary Fortress, and the rest of the Luminoth that were helping him have all been confined individually. He isn’t capable of anything on his own, but I have offered to come back to Aether to check in occasionally.”

“We could check in sometimes, too,” Krystal offered as she gestured to Fox. “I want to help these Luminoth with their peaceful legacy.”

“Good plan,” Samus agreed as she looked at Krystal. “Perhaps we can choose to patrol at the same time, in case you were looking for a sparring partner.”

“No hard feelings about our fight?” Krystal asked.

“You were doing what you had to as a hunter.” Samus nodded respectfully. “I understand that better than anyone.”

Krystal returned her respectful gaze.

“You are both potent warriors, though.” Samus’ tone shifted to be more optimistic. “The Galactic Federation could use more warriors like you two.”

Thanks,” Krystal replied, “but Lylat still needs us.” Her time as a hunter reminded her that Lylat still had its fair share of criminals to take down.

“I understand,” Samus nodded. “Lylat will be safe as long as you two are there! But feel free to visit if you change your mind.”

“Thank you, Samus,” Krystal said, “we’ll meet again someday.”

“It was a pleasure working with you, Samus!” Fox offered a salute.

Samus returned the salute and waved goodbye as she turned to take the lift. Krystal heard one last grateful chirp from the Metroid as they disappeared down the lift shaft.

Things were silent for a moment, but Krystal was beaming.

“So,” Fox turned to her. “What now? Wherever you go, I’ll go with you.”

“I’ve had my fill of bounty hunting for a while,” she smirked.

“Well don’t worry about that!” Fox said quickly, “I still receive a small stipend from the Cornerian Army. You don’t need to start bounty hunting again.”

Krystal smiled.

Fox’s expression suddenly grew less confident. “And, we also don’t have to have an exact plan yet. In the meantime…” His weight shifted from one foot to the other as he looked all around the room. “Uh, how about… how about we get dinner somewhere? I… I found some pretty cool eateries while I was traveling around Lylat looking for you.”

“Why, Fox McCloud, are you asking me on a date?” Krystal scoffed, but her heart was fluttering.

Fox’s orange and white cheeks were suddenly flushed with a deep red. “Uh, what do you think?”

“I think,” she grinned, “that I’ve been waiting for you to ask for a long time!” she elbowed him with her right arm, which made his blush deepen.

“I should have asked you before we separated!” Fox blurted out. “But now I want to make up for lost time.”

“A lovely idea,” Krystal’s expression softened to one of pure happiness. “Yes, I’d love to get dinner. Come on, let’s go home.”

They exchanged another hug as they boarded the lift and began their descent. Fox’s blush didn’t go away until they got to the bottom, and Krystal couldn’t stop smiling at him.

She loved him so much. Her time as Kursed threatened to make her forget, but she had finally remembered her legacy. Whether or not she was the last Cerinian didn’t matter to her; as long as she was in a familiar place surrounded by those she loved, then she was happy. Finding Cerinia was still on her mind, but she could establish her family anywhere, and Fox was a great place to start.

Yes, she thought, that was a legacy worth pursuing.

THE END