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There was a corpse in the ruins.
Perhaps calling it a corpse was a stretch. It was more of a remnant, a brooding and cruel presence. It was a shard of the abomination created when man merged with machine, when a dictator and a space cannon combined to threaten the world. A piece, broken off that fell doomsday device, that was shattered and broken by the heroic final stand of a centuries-old reploid. A pulsing, spiteful core; One that fell to Earth and destroyed the ground in which the man now slept, melting the lands around him with such impact that a cave was formed.
He awaited the day he could bring ruin once more.
Unfortunately he could not do so immediately. After his defeat he had no choice but to rest. The man’s mind was hazy, melded, unclear. His name was Weil, and he hated the world. That was all he could remember for the time being. Yet the matter was made no easier when he was found by a strange scientist, whose eyes lit up at the potential power source before him. “This will change the world!” The man said with delight. “Imagine what good I could do with this!”
Weil did not want to do good in the world. He hated, hated, hated the world. And so, the evil aura of the machine tainted the scientist. But in return, the scientist wreaked havoc upon the damaged mind within the remnant, forcing it to bend to his will just as it had bent his own.
It no longer knew its name. W…. W something…
Model W.
At least it remembered that it hated the world.
Copies were made of Model W. Other fragments and cores of the space cannon were gathered, revived, or even built from scratch. None so great as the original shard, but all connected. A network of power and hate. The original remnant was hidden in the cave from which it was first discovered. It was still weakened: it still needed rest. It needed a bastion in which to recover. The metal in the rock around it responded to its desires, melding into shape. Mavericks gathered, a multitude of lesser robots to guard it. The scientist contributed some additional defenses before he disappeared, going elsewhere to spread more manufactured fragments of Model W. The lair of Model W expanded unimpeded, just as Model W wished.
Time passed. Another scientist found Model W. Her name was Ciel, and Model W remembered her.
It… did not hate her?
In a twisted way it admired her. She was intelligent. She was useful. Or at least, she once had the potential to be. Model W whispered to her, as once it had whispered to Albert. It knew she heard it, knew she was not immune to its influence. But before it could turn her entirely, she named it. “Biometal,” she called it, awe and disgust in her mouth. And then she copied it as well… But unlike Albert, she did not copy it exactly.
Six new biometals. Six old enemies.
Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate hate hate HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE-!
Ciel struck the Model W a new blow upon its psyche. It hated, but no longer knew that it hated. It existed, but not consciously. Any recovery it had made was undone, the biometal struggling against the stasis she’d forced upon it. Still not finished, Ciel sealed it away.
It would never recover from this.
Model W was not cognizant enough to realize this of course. It struck out unconsciously, further altering the caves around it, further increasing the presence of mavericks. Its hate hate hate seeped into the stone itself, corrupting everything around it. Its lair was strengthened, expanded further, though there was no longer any plan or thought behind this growth. These attempts sapped what little energy it had left. Yet it still needed to recover. It needed a safe space for it to rest. Model W knew this instinctively, if not consciously.
Without knowing it, a tipping point had been reached with the underground. The sheer power of the region, the distortion it wrought upon the landscape, even the size it had grown to, all culminated in a world-ending stroke of luck for the cruel biometal. The lair of Model W had, through truly fell fortune and circumstance, grown to overlap another set of caverns. A man-made facility that the man who’d become Model W once knew of.
There was a corpse in the ruins. A corpse that could be used.
This was an invaluable find. The last energies of Model W, the very last desire it could formulate, was that it wanted this being revived. The Model W was powerful and brutal after all. In the past, it had known how to easily revive dead reploids, or at least some facsimile of them. It recognized this cadaver, even without the mind to do so, and knew beyond a doubt how its revenge upon the world would take form. It knew the devil’s hand had played a part in this. With the last power of its soul, it reached toward this hand and shook.
There was a corpse in the ruins. If it had been any normal corpse, the Model W’s efforts would have been wasted. A normal body would have been turned into a shambling, decaying zombie. But this was no ordinary carcass. These remains had belonged to a being so powerful, so genocidal, so inexplicably unkillable, that its mere presence had damaged and destroyed the barrier between reality and the digital afterlife to which countless of its victims had been viciously thrust.
There was a corpse in the ruins. The corpse of the God of Destruction.
But it was a corpse no more.
The Model W, its last energies spent, finally fell to true stagnation and slumber. But in its dreams it kept on hate hate hating everything and everyone, everyone except its new and unwitting guard. Hate hate hating the world below which it was buried. Hate hate hating, and not knowing why. It simply hated.
The God of Destruction, Omega, stared at his hands. He stared at the room around him, at himself, at the fetid waters he was sat in. Stared at the ceiling of the cave he was imprisoned in, then once more at himself, disbelief overtaking his mind as he awoke from death.
There should have been a corpse in the ruins. Him.
And yet, there was not.
Omega would search for answers. But he would never find them. What he did eventually find was the core of Model W. He did not know what it was. It gave him no answers, but knowing without knowing, Omega was compelled to guard it. Its eyes were blank, its face forever frozen in a rigor-mortis grin. Spikes radiated out from its base like bloodstained ribs in a mass grave. Yet something about it demanded his vigilance. Its presence compelled his loyalty, though he did not know why this was.
As far as Omega knew, it was but a corpse in the ruins.