...

It was dark, with only a dim orange glow separating sight from blindness. Samus woke up breathing heavily, her heart pounding in her ears. She was lying on her side, curled into a loose ball at the bottom of this wide, fabric lined bowl. The glowing transparent lid that lay over it might have been claustrophobic but this place had been made to house someone far larger than a six year old girl. She wouldn't have to wait long. They always let her out soon after she woke.

Samus' chest continued to thud but she didn't move. She just stayed lying on her side, only her open eyes proving that she was awake. Even those eyes didn't move, focused on a single spot of dark purple fabric so near to her face. It wasn't any articulate thought that held her still, just a fear so pervasive and ill defined that it didn't even register as an emotion anymore. Thought was not relevant to survival, so Samus refused to think. She just shut down.

The glowing energy canopy stretched above her bed. It was orange, and round, like the colony dome at sunset. Her home. But that was gone. Far away.

A dark shape moved in the stone hall outside the nest. Samus saw it in the corner of her eye but she remained still. Then the orange glow blinked out, and the dark shape remained.

The force of watchful eyes pressed down on Samus' back so she sat up. It was hard to rise, everything felt heavier here. With the canopy gone her lungs were already starting to tingle with discomfort. But there it was, a huge hand with long fingers, holding out a pale green mask. Samus leaned forward and let the hand press the mask against her face. For a moment it cupped her mouth and nose and then something about the mask changed and she could barely feel it anymore, only a slight pressure on her face and she could breath freely again.

The tall dark shape drew back its hand and stood up. It was very tall. Samus' eyes were adjusting to the shadows and she looked up at the looming figure. Dim yellow eyes stared down back at her. She recognized the grey feathers under that hood; like a bird that had gotten old. The other one of them was more brown.

The old bird made a soft clack with its beak as it stepped back. Samus got onto her hands and knees and crawled up the soft fabric rim of the bowl bed. If she didn't then those hands would reach down and grab her; gentle but so very strong as it lifted her. But she moved on her own and in a moment she sat on the rim with her feet against the far edge of the nest that sloped down to the ground. She was already breathing heavier again. Everything was so hard to do here, it felt like her body was filled with bricks. As she steeled herself Samus noticed her chest was hurting again today, despite the mask on her face. That was bad. That meant they would put her back in the tank soon.

Samus slid down to the floor and pushed herself up into standing. The old bird watched her, so tall that Samus only tended to look at dark brown robes around its knees. Then without a word it turned and walked away down the dimly lit stone passage. Samus followed, her feet awkwardly heavy against the weathered floor. Walking was cold, they hadn't given her back her shoes. Samus looked up at the huge figure walking before her. She couldn't see its legs under the robes, but she thought that it might be taking very short steps to help her keep pace. Samus kept her head down and continued walking through the shadows.

They passed a room full of machines that Samus didn't understand and then the old bird suddenly stopped. For a moment its tall back was still and then the old bird trembled with a harsh cough. Samus watched it. They had been coughing more lately. She had an idea that it was the air. When they first brought her in here the air had stung her eyes as well as her lungs. Now it was better, but the birds had started coughing sometimes. She wondered if they went into the tank too.

Then the old bird continued on and soon they walked into the bright room. It was only bright in comparison to the other places here but still Samus had to squint her eyes as she took her heavy steps inside. The stone walls were very very tall, and somewhere so far up that it hurt Samus' neck to look that high there was a window, one that let down a thick shaft of warm yellow light.

Samus looked around and saw the other bird standing by the round metal cabinets that filled one wall of the room. The old bird stopped walking near entrance and Samus continued on across the open space. There was a corner of this room that the birds had made soft. There was a cloth-like a rug on the floor, there were small things to sit on, and a thick board set on the ground that Samus could use as a table. Samus reached the little metal block she used as a chair and sat down on the folded cloth someone had put on top of it. She tried to not look like she was panting as the other bird walked over and set a small deep-walled bowl on the wooden slab in front of her. Then it tapped the green mask on her face and it slid off easily, before being set set down on the low slab next to the bowl. For a moment, Samus didn't move, just feeling the faint burning in her lungs again, but the robed figure standing over her reached out its huge hand again and gestured to the bowl.

"Kektayok'd."

Samus reached out and grabbed the bowl with both hands, bringing it up to her lips so she could suck out some of the warm tan mush inside. The bird above her made another noise, a vague grunt that Samus didn't think was a word even in their language. This one spoke a lot more than the other. In fact for the first few days Samus had thought that only one of them had a voice.

She continued eating as she silently watched them move about the room. Or at least she watched the Voice, the old bird was soon gone again. She rarely saw them both at the same time. At first she had not known how many there really were; before she learned to recognize them it seemed like there could be hundreds of the creatures. It had been terrifying. In those days she'd been trying to escape, imagining finding the ship that she dimly remembered seeing the inside of when she woke in pain with cold burns on her skin and tears in her eyes. But every time she wandered away here she only found more dimly lit stone rooms or huge metal doors she couldn't open. Then she would turn around and one of the birds would be standing there, silent and strong like statues dressed in robes. It was ok that she failed though, Samus didn't know anywhere else she could go to. Her home was dead.

So she when she finished eating her food and pressed the mask back on her face she just sat on her little seat and watched Voice do whatever tasks occupied his time. These feathers weren't grey like the other bird's but from what Samus could see of his head and forearms there seemed to be fewer, exposing wrinkled grey skin below. She guessed he was a boy, because she knew boy adults went bald sometimes. Well, people did, so she supposed birds could too.

As Samus watched Grey Voice wave his hands on the other side of the room to summon of a glowing web of alien letters floating in the air, she wondered why she didn't feel afraid any more. She just felt tired, and empty. She wondered if fear was something you could use up, and if you spent too much time feeling it then you never could feel it again. She hoped that was true. Then maybe the nightmares would stop soon. She didn't want to dream of smoke and wind and the shadows of wings anymore.

But then, even if it was hard to walk, Samus couldn't sit still for any longer. She got up slowly, keeping an eye on Grey Voice's back as he continued to conduct the orange symphony in the air before him. Not having shoes was cold on her feet, but it made her quiet. Samus slipped out of the room.

The string of connected stone halls here were tall and they were endless. Samus thought that this place might be underground, she had only ever seen the one window. She walked down empty passages, her feet making soft claps on the smooth floors that echoed off the silent walls. She thought that there were supposed to be more people here. The room where she slept had eight of those nest beds, though all but hers were always dark and empty. Most of the chambers she poked her head into were shadowed and dusty, filled with metal machines that glowed with dim lights like they were in a deep sleep from which they might never awake. Samus touched her hand to a painted wall, tracing her fingers around the feet of a bird person painted there. This wall stretched down into the distance and every inch was covered with those images, an endless row of silent images. There had been a lot more people here once.

Then Samus came up against another one of the metal doors that blocked her way. Her face didn't even come up half way on it. She lowered her brow as she stared at it and the thin film of glowing white energy covering the metal plates. You couldn't touch it with your skin, it shocked you. Throwing rocks at it didn't work either. But she knew they opened. Days ago she'd seen Old Bird down a hall as Grey Voice was taking her back to bed. He had been standing in front of a door like this, but after Samus passed out of sight she had heard the sound of metal sliding and a brief hiss of pressurized air.

She wandered away from the door, back into one of the many abandoned rooms filled with machinery. It was all so quiet. Grey Voice would notice she was gone soon. Then one item caught her eye, sitting on a table like surface by itself. It looked like a hollow metal hand. It looked like one of the bird people's hands. Samus had an idea.

Then she tried to lift the hand and she began thinking that her idea might not have been so smart after all. Things were so heavy here, and the hand was very big. It toppled to the ground with a loud clang. But Samus was not about to give up just because she realized her genius might actually be stupidity. She discovered that when she managed to lift the gauntlet up by the wrist and planted her feet firmly she could drag it along the floor. It made a horrible scraping noise that echoed down the halls but she could move it. Walking backwards and straining her tired arms she managed to to bring the hand to the door, always looking up to see if either of the bird people were racing down to grab her. Her panting made the inside of the facemask fill with uncomfortable moisture but the hall behind her was still empty. Then she reached down, got a grip, strained, and lifted the gauntlet up to touch the door.

The energy barrier disappeared and a breeze blew past Samus' hair as the door opened. Outside was something new. Samus stepped through the door.

If the previous places she had seen on this world were empty then this new cavern was certainly abandoned. Cracks had appeared in the stone and the moisture that dripped down had brought with it life, spreading out in waves of colonization. Samus edged around the fungus-like vegetation, looking out at the lawn of tiny stalks which glowed blue at their tips, casting a tint on everything like the tunnel was underwater. It was cold, and the stone sucked heat out of her through her bare feet. Then another color of light added to the milieu and Samus turned back to realize that the energy barrier had sprung back on the metal door. She had left the gauntlet inside. That was bad.

She gripped her hands into little fists at her side. Well, there was nothing she could do about that. If she wanted to get back she'd just have to find another way. Her eyes were starting to sting, like the old air had done before. It was very cold. Her body began to tremble, shivers rattling her bones as her feet burned where they touched the bare ground. But as she squinted against the pain, her eyes had adjusted just enough to see a faint light further down this tunnel, one that had a comforting warm glow to it. Samus kept her hands clenched as she began to walk.

When she bashed her toes against a sharp rock it only added a deeper pain on top of the numb burning that was already spreading across her exposed skin. When her hair brushed her face it stung. But Samus recognized the color of sunlight whose indirect glow painted that rough wall ahead. If there was an opening to the sun it would be warmer there and she could plan her next move. She kept her eyes focused on that promise of light as she carefully made her way past a broken fissure in the floor, a dark chasm that led down into some more natural cavern. There were distant noises down there, sounds like clicking scissors. Samus began to move faster.

Her jaw began to hurt from how tightly clenched she kept it to prevent her teeth from bouncing off each other in her building shivers. Shivering didn't make her feel any warmer, it just made important things harder to do. She wished she could stop it once and for all, just like the fear. She'd traveled quite a ways now, this tunnel was longer than she'd thought. The noises behind her were getting closer; scraping noises like claws on rock, climbing up from below.

Then Samus was running, clumsy bare feet jabbing down on broken rock. She stumbled, scraped, and bled but then she was up again and still running. There were thumps behind her, the sound of something jumping and then scrabbling and then jumping again, all the while filling the tunnel with the echoing sound of its heavy wet breathing. Samus noticed a second, shrill and muffled noise mixing with the air in pulses that timed with her own frantic panting and then she realized that she was screaming. It was a horse, weak scream that clawed its way out with each breath she shoved out of her lungs, a sound born only to strangle in the space of her little mask. The thing was going to catch her. She hadn't even seen it but it was coming. With every time Samus' foot slammed down onto the rock her mind supplied the imagined feeling of claws cutting into her back, weight bearing her down the the ground, and teeth around her neck. So she ran.

Then she reached the end of the tunnel and her fingertips scraped at the rock as the flung herself around the corner towards the color of daylight. Shafts of blazing light cut down from above and it was so bright it blinded her. Samus threw an arm up over her eyes and in that same moment she tripped. But when she fell it was onto a soft surface, a spongy mat of course fibers, and when she opened her eyes she lay on green moss in a pool of light. There was a trail of red behind her. She looked down and saw that her feet were bleeding. More blood trickled down from her knees.

A loud thump pounded from the dark tunnel. Samus could barely see though the shadows anymore; the sunlight had stolen her vision. But there was a shape creeping forward there, strange and terrible. She saw two huge legs that arced up like those of spiders, and teeth in a grasping mouth that hung below. Samus sent silent screams at her leaden limbs, pushing herself back as she crawled along the ground. The creature briefly shied away, it didn't like the light. But it was hungry and so it took a step forward, claws piercing into the pale shaft of day.

Every muscle in Samus' body ached with tension as they surged like wound springs, but she knew in some primal part of her that she couldn't keep this up. Any of these movements might be the last she had strength for. And then, through the bitter burning cold that surrounded her, a new shiver passed across the back of her neck. Slowly, driven by a sense other than thought, Samus turned her head away from the hungry breast.

A massive metal statue sat crouched at the end of the cavern, a cyclopean watcher amid this mossy ruin. It looked a little like the birds who had captured her. A dimly glowing orb the size of a human torso was clutched in its long fingered hands but as Samus turned to behold it, a building flame rushed up from somewhere deep within the metal plates. The statue's eyes ignited red. It saw her.

And it was angry.

A trembling spread through the ground as the statue shifted its torso, like the planet itself was quaking in fear. Then, with glacial speed and power, the statue stood up. It was shaped like the bird people, but stronger, plated in armor and a head that was only reduced to a single slit of burning red eyes. Samus knew she needed to move but she was paralyzed in place. Her mouth was open but she didn't even breath. Back at the mouth of the cavern the beast roared in anxiety, bouncing back and forth across the line of shadow as its stomach fought with its fear. The ground was shaking but it smelled blood and so the decision was made. With a harsh shriek the creature leaped forward.

The movements of the statue were slow but unending. In a single smooth continuum it let go of the precious orb with one hand, and that arm unfolded outwards with curious slowness. But that powerful motion traveled down each joint from shoulder, to elbow, to wrist, building like a wave approaching the shore. The long metal fingers unfolded in the same deceptive grace. They brushed through the air and then met the path of the leaping beast in midair. Viscera splashed against the far wall. A thin mist of blood sparkled in the sunbeams.

Samus let out a breathless yelping shriek as the predator's body smashed down beside her, green blood pulsing out of the mortal rent as it trashed in the confusion and shock of its final heartbeats. Its other leg fell down across from her, severed. The statue was still moving and its feet slowly crunched against the stone as it turned to face the on the girl before it. Samus rolled and scrabbled away, fingers and toes biting against the stone without any concern for pain of cold. A huge metal hand gently waved through the spot were she had just been lying and the shards of shattering stone exploded out to cut across her legs and back. She couldn't scream if she wanted to. Samus crawled and rushed across broken ground as heavy footsteps fell behind her. But then she was pressed against a corner of heavy damp stone on each side of her. She turned back and before her stood the statue, pure black against the beautiful sunlight behind it.

Samus closed her eyes as it drew back its hand once more.

Then a rushing sound filled the cavern and a blast of wind sent Samus' blond hair flying. The world echoed with the collision of two unstoppable forces. She opened her eyes to see a new shape standing over her, both arms raised to meet the impact of the statue's falling hand. Dark brown robes whipped one last time in the speed of their arrival before they fell down to once more cover the clawed feet that had scratched the stone on each side of her. Old Bird's powerful limbs trembled with exertion as he held up the weight of an angry planet above a scared child.

A single pale yellow eye was in view to look down at two little blue ones set in red veins irritated from the hostile air. Then, as he looked down at her, Old Bird slowly opened his beak. Samus had only ever heard him say a handful of words in the months they had held her here. He had always seemed content to let Grey Voice be the one to break the silence of their dusty, lonely world. But now he turned his head back to face the terrible burning eyes of the statue and he began to speak. No, he began to sing.

Samus didn't know if it was words. She didn't think it was. But it was a note that spilled out through metal and stone, flesh and bone. In it there was sorrow, and regret, and endless endless years, but under it all there was strength and righteous fury. It was the fire that burned within and knew that even against the vast uncaring universe and impossible odds there was no choice but to stand up against all creation. To throw everything one tiny life had against the might of infinity. With this song it might be an even match.

The statue stood still. Then it drew back its hand and turned to slowly walk back to its plinth, sitting down once more to clutch that glowing orb. It fell silent and the fire departed from its eyes. Then the only sound in the cavern was Old Bird taking a heavy, shaking breath. For a long moment he stood there, back heaving as his hands trembled with the echo of more exertion than he had made in centuries. Then he felt a small tug at his robes, down below his knee. He turned and saw the small pale human child, weak with fear and cold, exhausted beyond all measure, with blood pooling at her feet. But this child was standing on buckling legs and held his robe tight in her fist as forgotten tears made lines down her face. Her eyes met his.

Old Bird kneeled down to gather up the child in his hands. As soon as he clutched her, he felt the human go limp. Her eyes closed in sudden merciful sleep, the last tiny reserve of energy depleted. Her injured legs folded against her chest, Old Bird could cradle her in his hands like holding an egg. For a moment he looked down at this tiny creature in silence. Then he stood up and walked back towards the temple halls.

The ancient statue sat alone in the empty cavern as motes of dust danced in the sunlight.

...

The crackling electric screech of a metroid echoed through the halls of the Research Station. Samus ran, her mind leaping through the possibilities as her blood pounded with the familiar beat of fear. A metroid outbreak on the planet. Who'd brought them here; the Pirates, the Federation? The Pirates had been firing some sort of live cargo in their missiles. The Federation had a history of experiments with metroids. And Samus also remembered a series of ancient empty metal canisters in the labs behind her. The Chozo inscription had mentioned a creation, had that race released those monsters of theirs here as well as SR388? Whose sin was it this time? Whatever the case, Samus was not in any shape to fight anything on that level. She needed to contain it or escape, and right now escape was far preferable.

The glass window of an office flitted by on her right as her orange reflection flashed across it. Samus' heart rate was rising but fear was not allowed to take purchase in her mind. She'd only rebuilt three of her suit's shield emitters so far, once they failed her armor was just metal and carbon. The path through the floor plan still shone in her eyes, an illusionary line traced through walls to the rendezvous point. She needed to contact Aurora, message Nakamura. Let them know that every living being on this planet was in mortal danger. And if those in command already knew, then...

The next office wall she passed lay on the floor as scattered glass shards. It was broken inward, and inside she saw small piles of grey dust. Scan still said that the material was simply unorganized organic molecules, simply another form of normal dirt, but now it sickened her. One part of the dust pile still retained its shape as a human forearm, fingers outstretched and grasping. Samus kneeled down beside it, boots crunching on the broken glass. She reached out with her gauntleted hand and brushed the grey arm. At the slightest contact the ashy shape lost cohesion and dissolved into the same fine grey dust which covered the rest of the office. A feeding metroid consumed everything. They left only a shadow.

Samus glanced up at the computer terminal still projected up over bashed and gouged desk. There was an alert flashing there. "Emergency procedure A1" Whatever that plan was it hadn't been enough for this victim. Also, this plan of security through obscurity didn't help Samus right now. Aurora would know but that upcoming meeting had just plummeted in priority. Samus' map had redirected to show her a path straight outside. Right now, she'd prefer to fight the entire Pirate landing force than what was lurking in this laboratory. She started running, following the glowing line that only existed before her eyes.

Around the corner the hallway opened up into some large central room, a kind of hub for the researchers combing through the loot of the Chozo ruins. Samus' eyes were locked on the next exit, only dimly taking in an expanse of clean tiles and circular administrative desks from the periphery of her vision. Then her suit radar blinked in the corner of her mask and she dropped into cover before she had time to process the thought.

She was down on the floor, her armored back against a kiosk desk, when a shadow washed across the far wall. Other than the sound of her breathing echoing through her skull, the only disturbance to the silence was a faint crackle. Samus could feel her ears straining as she focused on that sound, like tiny sparks and ozone. A metroid barely had anything that resembled biology; their locomotion was an independently generated antigrav field. They didn't walk, or breath, or copulate. But they ate. And they grew.

The numbers flashed on Samus' visor as the suit calculated the size of the creature that cast that brief shadow. It was still on the small side, not yet near the next metamorphosis. That was good news. However, though the metroid hadn't spotted her suit-shielded biological signatures from anything short of line of sight, the creature had drifted over to the path Samus had planned to take out of this building. Well, that plan wasn't happening any more.

She didn't move, having no choice but to trust a the thin barrier of metal and concrete or whatever the architect had decided to use for this desk feature. She was just lucky that the suit helmet meant nothing could hear her loud breathing. All she had to do was watch the wavering orange dot move along the floor plan map that floated before her eyes. There, it was leaving. It would just take a second to...

The dot stopped. The faint crackling, popping sound got louder. Samus' hand clenched inside her weapon. It was still fine, that pattern had other explanations. Metroids at this growth stage moved in strange, random ways. It hadn't detected her, it was just...

A hungry electric chirp echoed out across the flat white walls of the lab. The dot raced towards her. Well, so much for hiding. Samus sprang up and vaulted over the desk bank with one hand easily lifting her body. Behind her the curious chirping instantly transformed into a furious screech like lightning and tearing metal. However, even as Samus' feet hit the ground in a full sprint a wash of angry light grew in the barrel of her weapon. She reached the far exit in under two seconds, the toes of her boots gouging holds in the industrial strength tiles that lined the floor. The she was at an intersection where she spun around to meet the coming charge.

The metroid flew towards her, its bulbous transparent dome half hidden behind the grasping talons and fangs that sparked with arcing energy as it screamed. The creatures always looked incomplete, an organ that had broken free of some grotesque host to float along propelled by its own malevolence and hunger. But it was fast. Samus narrowed her eyes and let fire the fully charged blast from her power beam.

In the tight confines of the funneling hallway the metroid had no chance of dodging. Of course, in Samus' damaged state that meager beam also had no chance of actually harming the creature but the sudden burst of light, heat, and force was certainly surprising. Before the metroid recovered its shaken equilibrium, bobbing and twitching in the air amid the dust raining down from the blast-cracked ceiling, Samus was gone.

Her boots made a good deal of sound impacting the floor at this pace but right now Samus was more concerned with speed than secrecy. The metroid would be back on her in seconds. She needed a way to fight. Her darting path took her past labs full of disassembled Chozo machines or slabs of carved inscriptions. The her visor flashed as the suit scan offered up a new destination; a little rectangle in the floor plan map labeled Security. That would have to do.

Samus smashed around the corner already firing at where the Security office should be. A charge beam blast hit the armored security glass, followed by a volley of smaller shots that propagated the dissentingly thin web of cracks as she ran forward. Really, she had to complement whoever had sprung for the quality of materials in this seemingly low security wing. However, even the resolute glass couldn't stand up to an armor enhanced punch at her full running speed. The gun crunched through the shattering window first. Her suit's main armament was a hyper advance beam weapon of unparalleled adaptability, but it was also thirty pounds of ultra dense alloys strapped the the end of her arm. So sometimes she hit things with it.

Samus rolled up to her feet amid the expanding rain of flying glass. The far walls of the Security station held weapon racks, and Samus was already firing her weapon to reduce them to base components even as the suit returned its disappointing scan results. She supposed that hoping for a full belt of cryomissiles was a little too much, but still she'd been hoping for more than ten low voltage stun guns when a Metoid was hunting her. As she blasted apart the few more promising looking supplies one of the guns escaped destruction by slipping off the rack. It hit the ground and fired off two little needles with a soft chunk, trailing thin wires. They bounced off Samus' thigh.

Amid the smoke and dust, she swept her gun across the room, the barrel now sucking in the newly aerosolized rubble. Plasma coil components and heavy element shards; better than nothing. Still not really useful against a metroid. Particularly one that was currently hurtling towards her with the intent to devour. Time to move.

"Basic Missiles Restored"

However, that did open up new possibilities when it came to this floor plan she was navigating from. Scan opened and closed the far security door, letting Samus out just in time for the metroid to smash into the metal as it slammed shut behind her. That should hold it for two and a half second. Then she heard a shattering sound behind her and had to commend the little guy on being stronger than he looked. It was a pity it still wanted to rip her molecules apart.

She took the next corner at a speed that would be illegal in a school zone, her toes briefly denting footholds into the paneling. By this point in her life she was quite experienced at running for her life but unfortunately metroids were fast and didn't have to worry about things like traction. Her only chance was to keep it uncertain and confused. Her still healing chest strained as she sprinted, the crackling ionization closing behind her. Then she stuck out her hand into a passing doorway and abruptly pulled herself back in a bone jarringly swift change of direction. The suit and her innate enhancements meant she didn't quite dislocate her shoulder as her fingers dug into the metal frame. The metroid missed that turn, but it was still not quite enough. In that same instant an ionizing scream behind her and its lunge scratched against her right shoulder.

Pain shot through Samus' every cell as she screamed, even as she launched back to her feet and kept running. A single point of the metroid's fangs had scraped across her suit's shoulder plate as it hurtled by in its missed strike, but that was enough. The life energy absorption attack didn't care about armor and was barely dampened by shields. No, that crackling spark jolted straight to the core of that mystical essence that defined all life. Identifying that fundamental force had been called the Chozo's greatest discovery. So of course they had made a monster that consumed it.

Samus' lungs spasmed in protest as she still ran through the darkened facility, hearing the telltale sounds of the metroid swooping back around and launching after her trail. It was faster than her and Samus was uncertain if she could withstand even another glancing blow. However, up ahead a very interesting part of this building's floor plan matched up. Her gun shifted as the metal rearranged itself, and as she ran her right arm thudded three times. Energy shrouded projectiles launched out and downwards, all detonating against the floor up ahead. Right above where the map said a particularly high ceilinged room lay below. Samus jumped and spun in the air, turning her back to the floor as it crumbled and collapsed beneath her path. The metroid screamed as it raced through the air, but the gun thudded again as missiles shot straight up at the ceiling above. Samus fell down through the crumbling floor as the top of the room fell with her, sealing the way behind her. The metroid's thwarted shriek reverberated in fury and hunger through the shifting rubble as it collided and bounced off.

Samus smirked as she plummeted down into the dark. Then she hit the floor flat on her back and abruptly remembered that her organs weren't done healing yet.

Ouch.

...