...

Blaster fire lanced around her cover, splashing off corners in a spray of blackened stone. Samus checked her suit's display in the corner of her eye as she knelt behind this block of basalt beside a newly broken piece of Federation research tech. At least ten of the attacking Pirates were within scan range and the whistling approach of another missile barrage indicated the rest were waiting just beyond. Samus twisted and leaped to the side as her former hiding place exploded into fire and shrapnel.

Tiny shards of glowing metal peppered her back, draining the shields slightly until the slowed fragments bounced off her suit's metal skin. The brief shield glow melded with the soft red light that dominated this long hall of towering pillars and silent watchful engravings. Many of these carved Chozo held their own weapons, ready for this war that came only a few thousand years too late.

Samus pushed these thoughts to the back of her mind as her weapon found another target and unleashed a punishing eruption. She'd been tricked, and she'd been tricked because she had behaved predictably. Just as Nakamura had warned, the Pirates had used their knowledge of her personal history to set up this trap, laying the bait of a lone child surviving a brutal pirate raid on a ruined colony. The levers of her mind were all too obvious. How had they secured Roger's cooperation? Scan still said that his transmissions were from a real child's mouth, not a computer simulation, and Aurora would have known if the identity had been faked contrary to the colony population, but Samus didn't have time to worry about that right now. She had a fight and she let that be the whole of her attention.

The attacking Pirates were fearsome, they were well armed, and they died; one by one. Their curses and screams filled the com frequencies until some stupid field lieutenant evidently decide to remotely shut off the coms on his forward soldiers. Those forces died even faster after that, cut off from intel about the blazing armored meteor that raced among them, but at least that dying was quieter for those who stood in the back. At Ridley wasn't here; a being his size couldn't exactly hide anywhere in this. Strange, Samus would have thought he would loved to gloat over her.

Samus stood behind a stone column, looming over the smoking enemy that lay in this corner, cracked against the wall like a turtle in the road. Underneath the calm beat of battle meditation Samus' breathing was growing heavier. Her right arm inside the power beam was now uncomfortably hot; in its current state the suit couldn't keep up with all the heat this prolonged gunfight was generating. Despite everything, the Pirates were still advancing, slowly making their way into this long red hall.

She would have to give ground. Even with all this death around her, the suit's energy reserves were dropping sharply and she didn't have time to grind these fallen armors into alloy fragments for more missile seeds. So she bolted; racing for that distant glowing octagonal door that led deeper into the temple. Her gun raised, a missile launched off in a white streak, and to Samus' surprise it smoothly passed through the shimmering blue energy barrier without a ripple. Huh, apparently that was not actually a door, just a screen to keep the heat in. She winced as she heard her missile explode against something fragile sounding deep inside the temple even as more hostile missiles erupted on the hallway floor directly behind her, courtesy of the furious Pirates.

Explosions chased her through the open doorway and Samus ducked to the side, just barely dodging the next volley of blinding blaster fire that rained sideways through the portal. She needed to figure out some way to drive the Pirates back or cut them off from their supply lines. A quick glance back out to the hallway cost her a shot to the helmet that further drained the shields and set her ears ringing. However, she'd seen that the Pirates were pausing too, setting up a quick defensive line within the temple hall as they lugged in shield generators and other supplies. In the very back of their formation, almost black against the night outside, Samus had barely made out the looming bulk of a squad of Pirate Elite armored suits, advancing among the other soldiers like walking tanks.

Taking advantage of this brief pause, Samus belatedly thought to look around at her own surroundings. This second temple room was much larger, no longer a hallway but a vast open chamber. Past the circular walkway Samus found herself on the whole room seemed to be shaped like a massive sphere. The cavernous interior space was occupied by a vertical structure, something like a spindle composed of a dozen jointed metal arms, spinning rings, and gears all rotating around a central column eight stories tall. It made no sound but a faint hum as the whole complex device continued to move through the rotating patterns of a slow endless dance. Its spindle's burnished metal surface glimmered faintly in the low yellow lights that bloomed and died on the chamber walls whenever one of the huge arms passed close by.

Samus had no idea what that thing was. Her home on Zebes had never exactly been a center of technology for the Chozo civilization, and with her past experience in Chozo "minimalism" this device could be a star harvester or a vegetable peeler with equal likelihood. But Adam's reconstituted mind was waking up in the suit so she finally had someone she could ask to help, someone who could read through the reams of data without suffering from the mundane distraction of currently being shot at.

"Adam, scan analysis of possible function?"

Text appeared in her eyes, "Fate sets your advance to terminal genesis. Press on."

All right, maybe Adam wasn't actually awake yet. Rebuilding a mind from only a 54% download was bound to take a while, especially in an alien architecture like the suit's Chozo computing. Of course, the base principles behind the Federation's electronic resurrection program were an outgrowth of the Aurora designs, who were in turn founded on the lessons learned from Chozo biocomputers. It made sense that his fragments might be talking like them. Sometimes if seemed like the whole galaxy was playing the the Chozo's abandoned leavings.

Samus' wandering train of thought shook back onto the rails as a new and sudden screech echoed through the temple. She twisted back towards the door to the entry hall, the sound had come from that direction. Or rather, the sounds. She recognized those hungry, crackling shrieks. This temple entrance were just at the edge of the colony wide sacrificial cordon Ridley had constructed of his own soldiers, but the prowling metroids had still smelled this feast of life and death. Calls rang out through the narrow canyon outside. The hungry beasts were coming.

The Pirates' weapons now pointed in the opposite direction, away from Samus, lighting the dark canyon in flashes and streaks as frantic blaster fire hailed out the temple door. The huge door itself began to slowly close again but it was too late as three distant flying shapes swooped inside and crashed among the rearmost Pirate forces. Samus added her own fire, leaping out from cover to pelt the Pirate forces from the other side, hoping to keep them pressed against the metroid meat grinder. However, a single weapon's worth of shots, no matter how precise, couldn't suppress a small army that would unanimously prefer getting their heads blown off to what now lay behind them. They charged at Samus, oblivious to her fire.

Samus had to turn and run as well. Building speed towards the chamber's central void, she reached the edge and leaped up to on the nearest long mechanical arm as it rotated near the equatorial balcony. That metal clanged and sank under her as she landed, then her weight suddenly increased as the mechanism rose up, lifting her swiftly towards the upper dome in a wide rotation. Here and there behind her little bits of federation equipment, sensors likely, clung to the central spindle like white-shelled parasites. Then Samus left all that behind as the rotating arm carried her up along the ceiling. The dome glowed with letters as she passed.

A constant chatter of panicked Pirate communications swirled around her head but Samus ignored all this as she found herself sliding up through a drifting constellation of floating orange symbols that bloomed and died in the air around her. It was writing, a swirling world of script and data the burst from slumber as the machine stroked across the dome. Down below the pirates were beginning to spill out of the entrance hallway but up in her sweeping course Samus let them be and tried to decipher this silent storm of whispers. It was too fast; her eyes could only read scattered blurring words here and there, but the suit scan swallowed it whole as the mechanism's arm began to rotate faster and faster.

She wondered what this room could be. She looked around, trying to make some sense of this gale of information. Suddenly she staggered as she found herself blinded, every inch of her visor filled overlapping blue text flashing and changing within the second. However, a second later it was over and the wall of text vanished. Samus waited, tense and panting as the arm rotated.

Her perch began to plunge. Samus crouched down and caught hold of a lip in the metal as she suddenly found herself racing back down towards the distracted Pirate forces fleeing out onto the equatorial balcony. The nearest were stood gaping up at the swirling heart of the sphere chamber, unable to decipher its immensity and unclear purpose. However, Samus' charged beam-shot at the foremost's head did wonders for focusing their thoughts. At least her weapon was still working normally.

Shouts and return fire followed her as the spindle arm swiftly dipped down below their sight. Down here in this lower hemisphere the words continued to swirl in blooming death. There were also rings of floating platforms rotating down here. From time to time one dipped out of the circuit to stop near the wall and a short crackling beam of blue energy shimmered out to tether it. A brief cloud of words shimmered around it and then the platform would begin to rise up to join its comrades rotating around the ceiling.

Hesitant, Samus triggered a scan as she braced for enemy missiles to come racing down from the Pirates that were sure to peak down any second. Little green icons appeared in her eyes, overlaid on the little floating platforms. At least whatever chaos Adam's half-awake mind was wrecking through the suit still at least allowed materials analysis. It couldn't tell her if she was damaging a priceless arcane treasure or a spellchecker, but in either case she leaped off the spindle arm and landed on one of the floating platforms, ripping off a panel and plunging her gauntlet hand into it's inner workings. She gripped and tore, and the dying platform staggered in the air as motes of light enveloped Samus' hand, dissolving and absorbing the key component.

The hail of text in her visor resolved itself into words. "Your grapple beam has been restored. Well done."

Samus allowed herself a weary smile.

Ten pirates gathered on the rim of the walkway, looking down through the shifting web of spindle arms and circles of floating rectangles that filled the lower dome. Then, far across on the other side of the massive room, a line of crackling blue light like lighting briefly shone out through the forest of jointed arms. A few of the pirates exchanged confused looks and one shrugged. Then a new moment of crackling blue light blinked in and out before they lost sight of it again. The Pirates on the balcony raised their weapons as behind them the gunshots and explosions signaled that the defense against the metroids was still ongoing.

Far up above, Samus detached a new grapple beam from the spindle arm at the height of her forty-mile-an-hour swing. Then she plunged down onto the lead Pirate's back with the grace of a mortar shell. Her weapon swung up and shot the Pirate next to her in the face but the others in the line spun around to meet her. Samus threw out her left hand and the crackling blue beam lanced out to grip onto the chest armor of the middle soldier. He had time to look down and gape before Samus spun around and he was yanked off his feet, over the pit in a sweeping ellipse. Then his orbit returned and he threw his arms over his face as he bowled through comrades who had barely had time to each get off a single glancing shot on Samus.

She looked down with satisfaction as they tumbled down into the deep bowl with a crunch. Then she looked up with much less satisfaction at the forest of weapon barrels now pointed her way from the remaining bulk of the Pirate forces. Her left hand reached out in a wave and the grapple beam whipped out to catch a passing spindle arm, jerking her back as a thudding stream of missile launches from her weapon added their little extra speed. Jetpack Pirates took to the sky as a spray of blaster shots traced Samus' path, but up here she was an acrobat, swinging and flipping in a pattern that defied prediction.

She could probably harry them like this for any amount of time as their numbers were lessened by the metroids at their back. Floating weightless at an apex, Samus glanced down at the main door to see just how the Pirates were faring with those metroids. The bulk of the Pirate forces were still making their way along equatorial platform to one of the other exits deeper into the temple. That squad of heavily armored elites was still near the entrance and unfortunately seemed to be holding back the floating predators for now.

Then she saw the tall, feathered Chozo huddled in the center of their square formation.

Samus slammed her chest into the metal beam of a spindle arm, having completely forgotten that she was soaring through the air. They brought the Chozo here?! Those stupid damn idiots flung their most valuable prisoner into the middle of an ambush in unsecured territory?! Samus tumbled down sixty feet though void before reaching out to grab the joint of another mechanical arm. Her shield readout was starting to get low but she couldn't bring herself to think of that. The Chozo was here, right in front of her.

Right in front of the metroids.

She let out a curse that she'd only heard once when a drug dealing Byratian sex-monk accidentally closed an airlock door on his own arm. That same curse now still lasted on her tongue as she swung up to the top of the central spindle and planned her assault. The last two references to the ill-behaved mothers of certain gods rolled past as she raced forward to leap off in an arcing dive.

As she plummeted through the air, one of the metroids finally burst through the doorway from the entrance hall. It swooped up in the air through the soft orange light and then it screeched as it dove down at the only visible figure that wasn't wearing armor over its nourishing organic flesh. It dove at the Chozo.

"No!" Samus screamed out, her suit's amplification echoing even over the roar of the firefight. Too far away, the Chozo looked up.

Crackling hungry fangs plunged down from above, and only a bare hand reached up, long fingers splayed in useless repulsion. Samus landed on stone tiles with a crash and the scene was hidden behind the ranks of Pirates between them. There wasn't even a scream.

She charged forward, weapon burning as she fired again and again, bowling through the first Pirate ranks not by superior armament but by sheer aggression. Then she sprang up the front of a surprised heavy armor Pirate and caught hold of an unwisely low flying air-trooper, swinging up as she pressed the muzzle of her weapon deep into an unfortunately unarmored limb joint. For a brief moment she could see over to the Elite squad that was only now managing to meet the metroid threat among them. But there where she expected to see the hideous devouring of her living miracle, she instead saw a different miracle.

That metroid floated above the floor, shivering and bobbing in some flurry of emotion, but never leaving contact with the huge, long fingered hand that reached out to touch one vicious arcing fang. The Chozo stood tall, looking silently at the all-consuming monster that now showed no desire to consume. It was impossible. Then one of the pirates shot the metroid and it bolted to the side with an earsplitting screech as its fangs sunk deep into the chest of this new victim.

Samus pushed her way through the mass of enemies, brain still skipping and disoriented. She had to admit that by now the only reason she wasn't dead was that even Pirates were reluctant to unleash crossfire in the middle of a dense group of their comrades; at least without a direct order to do so. She estimated she had about three seconds before Ridley gave that order. The current barrage of fire was focused on the metroid among them, but as long as the creature was consuming its current victim it seemed to be healing at the same rate it was taking damage. As distractions went, Samus had to give a hungry metroid in an infantry platoon rather high marks. The battle shifted again and she caught sight of several Elites trying to rushing the Chozo off away from the heart of the fighting. Samus cut across towards them.

A sharp hit impacted her shoulder and sent her spinning. A metroid's dying scream rose over the roar of combat and explosions as her ears rang. Samus hit the ground, armor scraping across stone, then her booster jets surged and she slid through her attacker's legs. A grapple beam, a flip, a very surprised shout, then two quick shots and she managed to reach the Elite squad now at the forefront of the fleeing pirate force. However, that was the point when Ridley's voice crackled over the com channels and Samus glanced back at forty armed Pirates who now had orders to attack her without concern for friendly fire.

Fortunately, there seemed to still be a moment of hesitance, even with orders from the supreme commander, so Samus grabbed the only chance she was likely to get. She sprang up, jets surged in air, and her grapple beam caught hold of the very tip of a swiftly passing spindle arm. The resulting arc yanked her between the hulking armored Elite's firing lines, straight to and past the captive Chozo's position. It was just a pity that "to and past" in this case also included "through", so Samus' first introduction to the man she was saving included quite a bit more impact than she would have otherwise preferred.

The Chozo crumpled against her weapon arm, winded and stunned for a brief second before Samus suddenly had to deal with holding an uncooperative long limbed passenger over two feet taller than her. By then they soared out over the vast empty sphere of the center of the room, narrowly avoiding other randomly flexing spindle arms. Behind them, the pirate coms were exploding with clashing shouts and orders so the pursuing fire was disorganized. Fierce rotational acceleration strained her arm, but Samus detached her grapple beam and enjoyed an abruptly linear path across the room to the equatorial balcony on the far side of the huge sphere. Then she spun for her landing, stuck it, and heard a series of pained shouts which reminded her that her taller passenger had just had his legs and arms slammed into the floor.

Samus released the Chozo as gently as she could, allowing him to gain his own feet out of mercy as well the need to have her weapon free to start shooting. Well, perhaps mostly for the shooting. She raised her gun arm and fired repeatedly, suit systems tracing for the rare open paths through that complex shifting web of arms and platforms rotating around the central spindle. Out of the corner of her eye she watched the Chozo begin to slowly rise beside her.

He was tall, and dressed in dark red-brown robes that looked much like what Old Bird and Grey Voice had once worn, except this new example was decorated with intricate thin patterns of golden thread. The hairlike feathers on his head showed a hint of gold as well, a faint metallic sheen like flecks of pyrite adding to the deep brown color. His eyes and beak were strong and dark. He looked young, though Samus realized that her perceptions were skewed. Old Bird and Grey Voice had endured centuries of hard living prior to finding Samus, on top of their untold lives before. This Chozo was not wearied and beaten down like them; he was alive.

As Samus held her breath as she watched from the edge of her perception, he stared down at her with all of his. The Chozo loomed over Samus even as he stepped back away from her, his forward-slung head swaying slightly as he surveyed her with disbelief in his wide yellow eyes. Then his beak cracked open with a gasp of breath.

"That armor." The voice was was deep and at the same time almost a whisper.

A shiver passed down Samus' spine and somehow the suit itself seemed to echo that rippling sensation. It had been so many years since she'd heard that language from a living mouth. But she could not allow herself to feel that homecoming rapture, she had a task to complete. The Pirates were advancing at a full run, they would round even this huge room soon enough. Samus had no confidence in her ability to fight that many and live; to fight while protecting another was flat out impossible. Still shooting, she called up suit telemetry and noticed that there was a new door a little distance behind her, leading to some other chamber deeper in the temple. She also noticed that on that map this grand sphere of a room now had now acquired a label and a name.

"The Library of the Winnowers"

She wondered when the suit had added that.

The Chozo slowly stretched out his long arm toward her, fingers splayed as if reaching to grasp. "I thought I was the last. I thought everything was gone," he gasped with wonder and relief. But then something dark passed through that revery and his hand drew back. A recognition of scale clicked and his eyes narrowed. Tall as she was among humans, Samus only reached up to the chest of an adult Chozo. She was far too small to be wearing that armor.

His hands curled at his side as he looked down at her. "What are you?"

"A warrior," Samus replied in her own voice carried on the suit's speakers. The Chozo stepped back confusion mounted at the sound of his native language fluently spoken through an alien mouth. "And now is the time that I rescue you."

The Chozo's expression did not have any less suspicion. He angled slightly towards the approaching pirate horde. "Where do you believe you will rescue me to?"

That was a good question. Samus had been playing this by ear since she discovered the boy Roger's transmission had somehow been faked. That kind of improvisation wasn't going to be enough now. She looked at the suit's sparse map of the temple and cursed inwardly. Aurora had been so stingy with data outside the planned operational area, always following the same Federation pattern of compartmentalization and need-to-know military. Samus had seen far too many people die for that kind of need and now she had to make sure there weren't two more.

Aurora was still there but Samus couldn't ask now; Ridley could hear any transmission. So instead Samus looked around, trying to glean some information from the heavy doors behind her to see if it was a valid path to safety. Just as the scan suggested, the way was shut. Above the heavy metal gate a few word were inscribed deep in the interlocked sheets.

"Chains of Death and Life"

Sometimes she really hated the Chozo naming conventions. She'd once found a ruined washroom called "Dust's Oblivion". This door here could lead to a jail, a mausoleum, or a cafeteria for all she knew. Then blue text blinked across her helmet visor once again. Adam's digital mind was flailing as it regrew, an arrow was pointing forward, another was pointing back, and amid it all it flashed, "You are in danger. You must continue. You are in danger. You must continue."

Samus tried to think, shaking this useless babbling out of her eyes. Interaction with the Library seemed to have worsened whatever had already been happening in the suit's processors. But Adam was still trying to communicate something.

During this the Chozo had noticed her looking off in that direction. He turned back and saw that same door. Samus heard a sharp intake of breath and a word too soft to be understood. Then he began to walk forward towards that door, slowly, as if half asleep. Samus was about to yell after him to stop until she realized that she didn't exactly have any better ideas. The chamber of Death and Life was currently as good a chance as any of the other options. The Pirates would be here in thirty seconds.

She spun and sprang into a dash towards the door, fiery energy building in her gun as she prepared to fire at its weakest point. However, even as she sprinted past the Chozo in a wind-swept rush, he raised up one long-fingered hand and the heavy metal door began to slide apart of its own accord. The sickle shaped sheets of thick metal separated like unfolding feathers and revealed a dark hall within.

Samus slid to a rapid stop with a shrug. Then she darted back, bodily scooping up the protesting Chozo before bolting to sprint into the new chamber even as the charging Pirates rounded the last corner. A volley of hostile missiles screamed into the air behind them but luckily even under his outrage the Chozo had the sense to quickly command the door to slam shut as soon as Samus and he slipped through. Metal clanged and Samus came to a halt in a dark hall of branching corridors. In fact the Chozo seemed personally offended by their enemies choosing to shoot at all and he was grumbling surprisingly personal invectives against them as Samus lowered him to his feet once more.

However, once he was under his own power he seemed to forget Samus and the Pirates entirely. He stepped forward and walked through the dark branching halls as if in a dream. The barely visible green glow washed away his visible health. A long feathered arm reached out to gently run a finger across a stone ledge, thick with long years of dust.

His voice whispered out into the dark. "This place. Emptiness. Silence. So, they are truly gone, even from here. The lower forms were right, I truly am the last. I am the last."

Samus followed along behind, keeping a steady eye on the suit scan's monitoring of the door. Those Pirates would probably be able to get through that soon enough. The last Chozo had been forced to give them a lot of computing tricks during his captivity. Something in that small mountain of equipment they'd brought into the temple would undoubtably serve them for a key, given enough time.

But now The Last appeared to be searching this new labyrinth for something without really knowing if it was here at all. He walked past branching corridors and small open chambers with only a quick glance at the contents of each. Samus opened her mouth but in that moment the Last spoke instead.

"How did you acquire that armor?"

Now was not the time for that discussion, even if Samus had been sure of the answer. By now her armor was the ship of an interstellar Theseus, having been destroyed and rebuilt so many times any one answer on its origin seemed incorrect. Once they got to the time for those kinds of difficult questions Samus had her own volumes to offer. But before she could ask things like, "Where did they find you? How are you alive?" and "Where is everyone else?" she had to make sure that they themselves would remain alive.

Still, some instincts of obedience were drilled very deeply into her. Samus said, "I was trained in the ways of power and knowledge since I was a hatchling in my first mind. My teachers departed with all the other living Chozo I was aware of in the galaxy, leaving a battle suit in my charge."

The Last exhaled sharply. He continued walking through the dark, never looking back. "Trained in knowledge." That tone sounded disbelieving. "A warrior." That tone was was unmistakably so.

This sensation within Samus' head was a strange kind of vertigo. With each breath and word of his presence, this Chozo seemed to erase decades of Samus' life. She blinked and for half a second she was very young and walking behind Grey Voice through the quiet halls of Zebes. In that moment she once again needed to prove herself to those she loved.

Her whisper now sounded weak and small. "Energy is matter, matter is life, life is thought, and thought is energy. Past and future are the same present. All devisions are an illusion."

Halfway through her speech the Last stopped in his tracks, frozen. Then he turned back, his features barely visible in the dark. "What was that?" His voice was breathy and shaken.

"Knowledge. The heart of the Chozo."

Samus was not sure what reaction she expected, but it certainly wasn't laughter. The Last tilted back his head and laughed long and hard, each peal echoing off the narrow stone walls to clash together in a harsh cacophony.

Humor and something darker clashed in his voice. "The fools. Hypocrites. And yet they are wise in the end." He took a few more strides forward and then stopped once more. "The path forward is rutted too deep for any of them to fight. And it is my path."

He turned at another square chamber like many they had already passed but here the Last saw something different. Technology of an unknown purpose stood along each wall and conduits led to a sort of podium in the center. Samus' eyebrows lowered and she tapped her temple to initiate a scan as the Last walked forward into the center of the room. Somewhere behind them the sound of metal scraping metal signaled that the Pirates had secured some override to the locked door.

Blue text appeared in Samus' eyes, interrupting the scan readout. "Please, run."

Samus agreed with Adam. It was time to go. "Unless this equipment has the secure path to stop the advancing enemies, we must leave at once or suffer recapture."

For all his previous curiosity, the Last now seemed barely to recognize Samus' existence. He stroked a finger over the central pedestal's dark bronze metal. The dim light changed slightly as something in the room powered up. "I saw the creatures outside, those floating predators. They were created; creating using that heart. Something beautiful, going into the manufacturing of something so crude."

"They are named metroid."

Now he actually looked up and met Samus' eyes. "By their designer?" Suddenly he looked to the left and right, shivering with suspicion. The thud of pirate feet searching the maze-like corridors was approaching but that didn't appear to be what the Last feared. "This place. They laid a new prophecy. Yes, I can feel it. Someone has tried to change what will be."

That weightless feeling washed back through Samus. The strange undercurrent of this planet, the press of subtle influence all around her, he sensed it too. "We were both brought here to intersect."

The Last's attention returned to the pedestal. He was only half paying attention as he addressed Samus. "No. Not both." He pressed some new control as he murmured, "Things such as you are not actors in this calculation. You are just one more piece of detritus caught in our wake. First you attacked the Urtragians' command ship, thus providing the link of motivation between the humans and myself. And now here you deliver me to this precise location, completing my entry into the ascension path. Your part is done, little thing, and what is to come may now discard you."

Samus took half a step back, her boot sliding on the dusty stone. Her weapon arm twitched up, she'd heard enough vaguely ominous speeches to recognize them from the first few words. But she couldn't aim at him, even as her pulse elevated, sensing violence soon to come. No, she couldn't. The Last was still disoriented even in the midst of this new confidence. Everything he said indicated an uncertainty of what had happened in the galaxy for the last century or so. He'd evidently experienced some period of isolation off wherever the Pirates found him.

She just had to reorient him before this turned worse. "Hostiles will reach this room soon."

"Hostiles? Oh yes, that." He carelessly reached up and brushed a metal ornament clinging to his robe. Samus' suit instantly picked up a short range transmitter signature. The Last said, "Followers, eliminate all those loyal to Commander Ridley."

Samus' gun leaped to attention even as blaster shots and screams rang out through the warren of narrow corridors. The Pirates obeyed him. The Last frowned down at the her weapon muzzle pointed straight at his face, as fifty yards away Pirate soldiers were executing each other. Samus did not twitch or tremble as she kept his aim steady on his forehead. The power beam's burning energy began to reflect in the Last's eyes as glowing pinpricks.

He said, "Your existence disturbs me, little thing. You will tell me where your creators hailed from." He then interrupted himself. "No, it does not matter. The Urtragians have plenty of data on you in their computer banks. I will examine it in a moment."

A brief moment of silence was punctuated by a few more pairs of nearby blaster shots from the halls outside. The issue of pirate leadership here had apparently now sorted itself out. Suit scan said that the survivors were regrouping and slowly advancing. Samus stood there, frozen even as her finger felt the weapon trigger. "You weren't their prisoner."

The Last looked back down, continuing to manipulate the controls on the pedestal in front of her without any more concern for the weapon aimed at his head. His tone was calm, and almost conversational. "No. Not to them. But at first they thought I was. In fact their over-enhanced commander persisted in that belief until, oh, about nine second ago."

Samus tried to breath, her soul still swaying the the feeling of hanging out over a great gulf. The plummet from miracle to adversary was horrifying. She remembered the large metal box in the Pirate ship. It had been empty, empty as a cell when the prisoner had escaped. Inside the power beam, her finger twitched. No, she couldn't kill him. She still didn't know enough.

Text blinked in her eyes, "Please"

The Last was still Ridley's enemy. He was just trying to get back to what might have once been his home. Whoever he was he could still be convinced. He didn't know her yet.

"I do know you." The Last's voice rang out even in a murmur, rebounding off the stone and metal walls. He sounded like he was delivering a lecture on some boring subject. "You are not complicated enough to hold much mystery. It is written on you. Human, a rising omnivorous species. Acquired by some outcast sect of my people, likely no more than a few individuals. You were evidently young enough to still be in an imprinting phase, which explains why you do not harm me. Then when my people left to complete the project, they handed you an adapted battle suit and set you lose on the galaxy alone, presumably as some way to assuage their nagging guilt at the memory of the days when we governed these stars. One last bandage thrown at the dying slum they were leaving behind."

More lights came on, illuminating the room in greens and blues. He clicked his tongue in satisfaction. "And you were strong. Of course you were. Having even one percent the nature of my people, you would tower over these caterpillars which surround you. But you still could not touch the path and so you have been left flailing, caught in the web of time that you could only barely perceive. Trying and failing to be one of my people. You felt the missing space in the prophecy between stars and so you strived with all your might to fill it."

Samus realized that she needed to act but she still only stood there frozen, caught between sinking horror and desperate, dying hope.

The Last stepped over and touched yet another panel, saying, "But the path you felt was never yours." He wasn't even talking to her now, just addressing the idea of her. Samus' weapon was still trained on him. Whatever he was doing on that pedestal, she needed to shoot now. She needed to kill him.

She needed to.

The Last stretched his long arms at his side. His feathers glimmered in the building power and his beak shone with the reflected light. Footsteps thudded behind Samus and a group of Pirates ran up to fill the chamber doorway but they froze when they saw the Last raise his hand. The Chozo chuckled. "There is always a strange humor to see the prophecy in motion. Those floating creatures outside, this stolen mangled armor, they appear to me like a presentation of evidence; showing how my hypocritical people perverted my work. After sentencing me to punishment, they wielded the very accomplishment that they named as my crime. And then this scavenger species has the nerve to call them angels."

He looked back and once more his eyes met Samus'. The light in the room grew brighter, building to a blinding white. She'd missed her chance, and she knew it. Inside the weapon, her right hand shook.

The Last stared down at her, helpless despite all her armament. "Be at peace in this moment, little thing. This has always been beyond your control. After all, I am the one who wrote your heart."

Then he touched the pedestal as Samus' finger pulled on the firing trigger. The world vanished in light and pain as a wave of energy passed through her.

She recognized that pain, searing past metal and shields to strike at flesh.

It felt like the touch of a metroid.

...