Lightning Among the Stars

Author's Note: It's been ages since I've written a story, so I thought I'd try adding another chapter to this.

Samus, Metroid, Metroid characters, etc, all belong to Nintendo.

Chapter 2: Reforge

"All I had for protection was my rather useless emergency pistol. Infiltrating the Space Pirate Mother Ship so armed may have been foolish but I had no choice…Could I survive long enough to escape?"

-Samus Aran, from Metroid: Zero Mission

The room flashed bright, two heartbeats before a coruscating bolt of lightning crashed down where Samus had been standing. A flash, a gritting of teeth—the hunter somersaulted away, then ducked beneath the orb-shaped reflection, clutched in the hands of the living painting.

Living painting, indeed—Samus would have snorted at the irony, were it not for the hitch in her breath as she leapt away from another crash of predictable thunderous energy. The ruin dated back to an era where the Chozo had painted their art of war across the canvas of the galaxies, leaving weapons and relics for those with the ability, skill, and modular Chozo armor to take them. The first two were rare enough, but less than an hour ago, that last item on that list had gone from rare to extinct, when in a moment of respite, of loosening her guard, Samus watched her suit deteriorate into nothing, components mangled beyond recognition by the crash next to the Pirate's Mothership.

Her thoughts turned sharply back to the present as another discharge of lightning split the air. Samus fired her pistol into the glowing sphere, only to watch the orb return to reflecting her face as the bolt was a few scant centimeters from impact. As a burst of fresh pain shot through her solar plexus, the hunter wished that she could have her suit back, if only for a minute.

Why? Because every organ, tissue, cell pulsed with agony. Every hall she sprinted down, every tower she had climbed, every blast of galvanically accelerated energy from a Space Pirate—Samus felt like her body had been peeled apart and stitched back together, as through a faulty teleporter or a broken morph ball module.

What had she been thinking? Without her armor, she had been woefully outmatched in every encounter with the Pirates. Even if she had a standard Federation Power Suit, she knew it would have been a fool's errand to try to break into their hangar. Sure, she had her agility, but every encounter with the Pirates led to an exponentially reduced chance of getting out unscathed, and time was running—

The glowing orb struck her shoulder, as Samus's last jump lacked sufficient altitude. Holding back a grimace, Samus wondered at the intensity of the pain. It wasn't as though leaping into herself would have caused nearly as much damage—she had leapt off multi-story cliffs as a child on this very planet. Yet now, one more misstep would be fatal, as her energy reserve indicator was making pains to tell her. Taking a glance back at the floating globe, Samus felt her vision blur with the edges of unconsciousness.

What had been the point of this battle? Even if Samus prevailed against this macabre relic of the Chozo's bloodstained past, no such chances of victory awaited her outside this chamber. She had searched desperately for even a scrap of Chozo technology to do battle with, only to watch a Power Bomb—useless without the Power Suit, let alone the Morph Ball—be carried off by the opportunistic claws of the Pirates. Now, she stood at a dead end, without new routes or new ideas to explore.

Even as her thoughts drifted down these morose paths, her body continued to move. Leaping into the wall, her legs kicked off, keeping her above the mural as it swung the orb downward, scythe-like. Were these just the last spasms of her mortal self, keeping hairbreadths ahead of the reaper's touch?

Samus thought back to her memories of seeing this mural, her tiny fingers engulfed in Old Bird's hand. It was tempting to fall back to false bravado, with the idea that her survival on K2-L, training by the Chozo, and career with the Federation couldn't possibly end here. Even as the thought crossed her mind, cold experience dashed that confidence to pieces.

That sort of na?ve arrogance, so close to a sunk-cost fallacy, had been disproven time upon time as those who had eluded death's clutches for so long had fallen—be they among her Chozo care-takers, her Federation companions, or her Pirate foes. No, the possibility that Samus's end would arrive then, in a corner unseen by the inhabitants of the galaxy, drew itself out in each near-miss of the ethereal orb, each bombardment of lightning. Such a stark reminder of the coldness of the universe would have brought even the greatest warriors to their knees. Indeed, Samus felt her center of mass drop, legs folding in—

Just in time for her paralyzer to shoot point-blank at the glowing symbol inches above her head.

A calm filled Samus's being, even amidst the firing of neurotransmitters from her sympathetic nervous system and the pumping of epinephrine in her blood. At this lowest point, where all of the tools that Federation thought made Samus special had been torn away, and the Hunter held onto her hope. And that hope blazed.

Her hands lost their trembling. Her lungs compressed, then expanded, holding a breath a few seconds longer. This fight had nothing to do with power suits or arm cannons, missiles or power bombs. Out there, with the Pirates, those weapons had a place, but here?

An exhale. A heartbeat to relax. A single motion.

One last paralyzer bolt struck the orb, and the mural melted into the wall's pigments. As the child of the Chozo looked at her reflection once more, she saw her new will manifested—

And reforged.

Author's Note:

I hope you enjoyed!