...

Samus stood in the dark cavern as from every direction force fields dropped and the screams of thousands of ravenous metroids rang out. A single precious second passed as she was left frozen, staring at the metal floor, lit in the dim blue glow of Aurora's gently bubbling tank above her.

"I am sorry, Ms Aran. I have orders to protect my own existence for the good of the mission. You left me no alternative."

Samus breathed in. It had been quite a day. The Federation had betrayed her, resurrecting the monstrous metroids once again, at the expense of their own people. The Chozo had betrayed her, their last living member trying to strip her soul off her bones in pursuit of his own mysterious goal. Her suit had betrayed her, infected with something pretending to be the shade of her twice dead friend Adam. She was alone, and surrounded by enemies of more numbers than she could count and more variations than she could conceive. But if her time display was right, on planet J4M it was about to be a new day.

The dawn was coming.

For the first time in a long while, Samus was strong. She breathed out, reveling in painless organs and powerful surging muscles, bathed in the residue of pure life energy. Her visor happily blinked out full power in all current weapon systems, full missile stocks and shields. That red helmet now slowly tilted up, green visor muted almost to black against the electric shadows. Juvenile metroids swerved and swooped above her as the emerging swarm began to recognize the living pray that stood below. Samus' weapon smoothly swung up towards them.

It had been a while since she felt justified in truly letting loose.

She spoke out loud. "Manual control. Override first rank restraints."

Lines of yellow light traced up the seams in the suit's armor plates. Then the armor seemed to take a breath, expanding and contracting as faint bits of smoke vented from those same cracks. The air around her began to ripple with heat. Her visor read. "Performance inhibitors disabled. Time to irreparable biological damage: 38 Seconds. Time to operator death: 3 Minutes."

Despite everything that had happened, Samus couldn't stop herself from smiling as she slowly shifted her stance, her skin already beginning to feel the burning heat. Perfect.

Looming above in her cylindrical tower, Aurora's dark bulk pulsed in her shielded tank. She continued in the same helpful tone, as if betrayal and murder were just conversational speed bumps. "I have forwarded the best escape route to you. My simulations indicate that you have a sixty percent chance of survival if you start running-"

The wave of missile explosions cut off Aurora's blather quite decisively.

The cavern vault blazed with lightning cracks of explosions and blaster shots as Samus burst into a sprint, empowered by the overheated suit. Metroids smashed against the floor behind her, gouging the metal even as they were sent spinning by her returning fire. She didn't bother scanning for her next target, her dash simply carried her forward until she smashed into the nearest metroid containment cell. Then her single smoking, burning fist plunged through the chamber's back wall into the machinery hidden behind. She ripped it back out, trailing the crumpled, steaming core of a modified Anti-Thermal system like a sacrificial heart.

Samus turned back to Aurora, and the white glow of her weapon barrel brightened in time with the yellow light that began to seep out of her gauntlet around the crushed component.

There were no more mysteries. Finally, everything was clear and she could truly see the Bio-computer for what it was. AI's were always so very logical.

Text chimed in time with her pulling the missile trigger. "Ice Beam restored"

Samus jumped straight into the screaming flock of metroids in time to meet her own Super Missile detonating below them in a flash of white. The shock wave slammed up against her shields and knocked the breath out of her lungs but it also gave her the extra bit of height as her boost jets kicked in during the flight across the room. The upper walkway clanged and screeched as the metal bent under her landing, setting up a percussion with the sounds of tumbling metroids smacking into the other walls.

The air up here was also full of metroids, but even the ultimate predator had a moment's difficulty parsing the burning, banister-crunching meteor that had just crashed in front of it as food. The nearest floating faceless creature spun in place towards Samus with what might almost confusion, just in time to meet a flash of blue energy that burned the heat out of its cells with terrible cold. Samus punched it back, blocking more beasts with their stunned sister as she sprang forward, boots and fingers digging into the metal as her jets scorched the walkway black behind her, leaving glowing orange streaks under the oncoming metroid pack. She burst out the door at a blinding sprint.

Aurora was left behind in the dark cavern, huddling in her tank behind powerful shields that had to feel a lot less powerful right now. She said into the radio channels, whispering over the raging scream of charging metroids, "I hope you do well, Ms Aran. I am so sorry that events had to transpire this way, but I hope to work together again in the future."

Samus decided cursing at an AI was not an efficient use of breath.

She bolted forward through the tunnels at incredible speeds, leaving shattering ice and exploding destruction in her wake. Reinforced metal crunched at her touch and plastic coated wires scorched to smoke as she passed. But then, in the middle of her burning sprint, her breathing began to spasm. Samus just gritted her teeth and tried to bear it. Inside the blazing suit, searing cold bit through her weapon arm just as red hot needles stabbed an inferno across the rest of her body. Those safeguards had been in place for very good reasons.

At the next T-intersection she slammed into a computer station, super heated armor setting the plastic and metal on fire as Samus used the thing's million credit bulk as an ablative turning-aid. More alerts flashed in her eyes, redundantly notifying her that right now the suit was effectively eating her alive to keep up this level of violence and speed.

Then she glanced back and briefly saw a swirling tornado of a thousand screaming fangs. The stampede of metroids thundered through the tunnels like a biological freight train, ripping apart everything as it passed. Ice beam blasts might cripple one of the lead monsters for a moment, but anything she hit instantly vanished back through in the surging tide of ravenous hunger. Super-charged missile blasts detonated in their faces, driving back the swarm for a single second before it exploded forward again in many-bodied fury. Yes, Samus was content with the suit only "effectively" eating her.

Aurora had at least lived up to her word in one respect, the path ahead was clear of obstacles. However, as Samus exploded out of the first elevator shaft, she ducked to the side away from the computer's simpering trail of virtual arrows. This other, more familiar, hallway was empty, at least before Samus punched out with her weapon arm for a charged super missile blast. Then the hallway was empty, burning, and no longer ended in a closed door but rather a jagged archway of twisted metal fragments.

"Time to operator death: 1 minute"

The floor vibrated, as if the whole compound was trembling in pain from the viral horde loose inside it. Samus glanced back as she ran down the hallway and the air now cracked with ozone. Then far end of the hallway erupted into chaos as the lean metroids poured around the corner. They instantly sensed her and raced forward through the air, but Samus was done running. Instead she took a single step backwards into the newly open white room, trailing smoke from her overheated glowing suit. The machine activated. She raised her weapon and smirk tickled her lips as the room's familiar white walls began with shine with soft light once again.

The pain began to recede from her body and she let out a slow breath as the new healing outpaced her radiation damage. Samus could get used to this Life Energy Surge. After all, what was the point of new equipment if you didn't abuse it?

Across her visor, status reports shot outside their bounds as Aurora's overcharge machine went to work. The metroid avalanche thundered forward, drawn to this energy feast by their unbearable hunger like objects in free-fall. Light began to build up in the barrel of Samus' gun.

Aurora whispered over the radio, concerned voice crackling from the metroids' interference. "Ms Aran? You have deviated from the optimum path. I'm afraid your odds of survival dramatically decrease for each second-"

Samus interrupted, "Hyper beam. Twenty percent power."

Her visor tint slammed down to nearly opaque and the flash still hurt her eyes. The metroids leading the charge evaporated into carbon steam. The ones behind were thrown back, bodies shriveling to dust where they came even near that terrible light. Then the massive blinding beam was gone and all around its former path the hallway walls flexed in a ripple before bulging out, buckling like molten plastic from just the bow wave of Samus' attack. The shock wave hit the swarm of metroids who were not part of at sizzling hole drilled through the center of their party and their unstoppable charge was reversed in a single instant. Any sound of cracking impacts against the fall wall was lost, for in that moment there was no air left to carry the sound.

Then came the sonic boom, returning like a new explosion as the displaced air came rushing back to undo the newly birthed vacuum. Samus stood at the sharpest point of that long arrow of destruction, suit still glowing with lines that traced her armor plates. Here and there the ceiling dripped red molten metal.

She breathed out. "Renew first rank restraints."

The suit plates flexed out and in as the burning inner light faded. "Performance inhibitors enabled. Operator health steady at 85%"

Samus straightened up and then almost staggered as a moment of vertigo seized her. It seemed her brain chemistry hadn't quite caught up to these wild swings in bodily health, not that she could blame it. Unfortunately, she still didn't have time to coddle herself. There would be time to suffer a stroke later. She'd just caught a lot of metroids in that blast, but five thousand was more creatures than could fit into any hallway and it wasn't likely this trick would work twice. The compound was still filled with monsters.

She turned to go, tapping the temple of her helmet as she did so. Behind her the Life Energy Machine began to warm up again. Her program set it for a cycle of low level pulses that should draw the hunting metroids off her trail like a bucket of blood to a school of sharks. There was also the possibility that any metroids caught in the middle of a pulse might set off a feeding frenzy as the life overcharge made them abruptly delicious. Well, it didn't hurt to hope.

A faint audio crackle in Samus' helmet suggested Aurora was trying to say something but this wing of the facility was now bathed in enough radiation to scour the information off a physical data stick, let alone some measly radio waves. The AI would just have to deal with being silenced for a while. Samus set her map program for "up" and soon punched through a set of sliding elevator doors just as she heard more metroid shrieks behind her. It sounded like the Life Energy room was doing its job. The thought then occurred to her that if any of those creatures managed to monopolize the room while it was still operational, they might start racing forward through their life cycle at a concerning speed.

Well, that was a worry for Samus-from-the-future-perspective. Current Samus was concerned with surviving to exist in that perspective. Even with the rejuvenation from the Life Energy bath, her cells were still drained of the basic sugars and proteins they hadn't had time to refresh. And worrying about biology left her less space to think about all the other things she had to worry about.

The Federation had written off this entire planetary population as acceptable losses. However, to Samus' hatred, they still held the moral high ground over the Ridley's forces who were actively trying to exterminate the humans, rather than passively doing so. And then there was The Last. Samus had no idea what he was doing. She did not know his history, his goals, or even his name. Nakamura had brought her to is planet as a Chozo expert, but now Samus began to recognize her understanding for what it was, a child's knowledge.

She wracked her brain, had there been something her second family had tried to teach her, something they had said that still lingered in the dark corners of Samus' memory? But as the suit methodically tore her way up through the Research building in a storm of explosions and metal-rending punches, from those lost days she first remembered the emotions.

She remembered the anger.

...