Better Judgment:
The Dr. Wily Story

By Hadrian (Hardman) Howell

Chapter 19

200X

“Um, technically, master?” Cut Man reported sheepishly, “I think we have a problem.”

“Talk to me, Cut Man,” I growled, “what SORT of problem?”

“There's someone here!” Cut Man reported. I didn't have a visual link to him, only an audio one, but the concern in his voice was obvious. “He just ripped right through the Big Eye and he's coming down the hallway right now. What do I do, master?”

“End him,” I spat. “No matter how well trained he is, there isn't a human who can stand against you Robot Masters.”

I heard the gate open and close. “Cut Man?” a voice came through. Familiar, in a strange way.

Cut Man hesitated. “And who are YOU supposed to be?” he barked with some measure of bravado. “Some kind of cosmonaut?”

“Cut Man, come home! Dr. Light can get you back to normal-”

“Dr. Wily is my master now!” Cut Man countered. “Nothing you can do can stop me, blue boy.”

The voice sounded... almost sad. “Cut Man... I can't let you hurt anyone else. I'll bring you down if I have to.”

“I'd like to see you try it,” my Robot Master replied. “There's nothing you can throw at me that I can't take!”

“Oh yeah?”

There was a terrible noise, like some sort of whooping blast, and the communications line went dead. I tried to re-establish a connection, but to no avail. Worse still, Cut Man's diagnostic readouts started to show some really distressing signs. He was fighting for his life, and he wasn't winning.

“What in the hell?” I said out loud. “What just happened? There isn't a human weapon on Earth that can destroy one of these Robot Masters, let alone HURT them. How in the world...” I watched as Cut Man's indicators red-lined, and then suddenly went dead.

“WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED?” I shouted in a rage.

Little did I know that this was the first of what would become many, MANY setbacks caused by that little blue dweeb. Mega Man would forever after be the one thing that stood between me and total victory over that fat fool, Thomas Light.

20XX

Mega Man was the one thing I could bet on, without fail, to beat Robotnik.

“This isn't your battle, little one,” Robotnik chuckled. “Run along, and maybe I'll spare you.”

Mega Man looked nonplussed. “Wily,” he asked dryly, “is this one of yours? Are your robots going crazy again?”

“What?”

I brought the Combat Pod down the the ground, powering down its weapons and popping the hatch to stand up. “Nope. He's a bit of a long story though.”

“Do we have time for it?”

“STOP IGNORING ME!” Robotnik thundered, wheeling around to bring his weapons to bear on me again.

“Apparently not,” Mega Man sighed. “Stay there, Wily, I'll be with you in a sec.”

“Not going anywhere,” I shrugged. At this point it would be pointless to try and escape. Besides, I wanted to watch. This was going to be good.

“Mega Man, is it?” Robotnik said slowly. “Why stop me? I'm going to kill your enemy!”

“No,” Mega Man said, walking toward Robotnik, “you're planning on killing a human being. No matter what Wily has done, he's still human, and robots cannot harm humans or, through inaction, allow one to be harmed.”

“Such a tired cliché!” Robotnik rumbled. “I'm more than a robot, you pest. I'm a human mind uploaded into a gigantic, dangerous robotic body!”

Mega Man seemed to give this some thought. “Ah, well that's different.”

This gave me some pause. “It is?” Robotnik and I asked in unison.

Mega Man smiled, his colors shifting instantly to brown and white as he neared Robotnik. “No.” With that, he threw a Super Arm powered punch into the Egg Titan's ankle, and I heard metal bend and scream in anguish. Robotnik recoiled away from Mega Man like he'd been set on fire, while Mega Man himself simply flexed his hand a few times.

“Hm. He's a bit tougher than I thought he'd be...”

“How the HELL did you do that??” Robotnik demanded.

“Annoying, isn't it?” I smirked.

Mega Man shifted back to his normal blue coloring. “Look, stop trying to kill Wily, and you can still walk away. Or limp,” he corrected himself. “Continue to try and act on your declared intentions of murder, and I take you to pieces. Your choice.”

“You arrogant little...”

“It's only arrogance if it's unjustified,” I said, mostly to myself. “In Mega Man's case, he's just being correct.”

And this was true. I had tried on more than a few occasions to actually beat Mega Man. In fact, you might say it was my purpose. To crush that little blue robot boy beneath one of my powerful war machines would be a key step in humiliating Tom and winning my final victory in our arms race. But no matter what I did, no matter how much I threw at him, no matter how many times I thought I had won, Dr. Light's second son would just walk through my fortress, calmly deliver a devastating blow to my machine of war, and just as calmly take me to the authorities unless I had an escape plan.

It was uncanny.

Robotnik, however, wasn't afraid. “I have decades of security footage from Wily's fortresses. I've seen you... how you move, how you fight. I can predict everything you can do. You can't be programmed for every possibility, no matter how smart your creator may think he is!”

“And yet, YOU have the dent in your leg,” I found myself heckling him.

“Shut up!”

“Can we move this along?” Mega Man asked. “I have a pretty full day's work ahead of me.”

“You insolent pest! Do not think you can brush me aside so easily! I am Dr. IVO Robotnik, ruler of the Eggman Empire and the immortal genius of our era! Nothing you can do will stop me!” I had to admit, he had the presentation portion of the ranting down. It had taken some work on my part to sound that crazy all the time. In his case, though, I think he just WAS that crazy.

“Yeah, that was boring, and your colors are weird. Red and yellow with gold trim?”

“SHUT UP!” he thundered, swinging both spiked arms down to crush Mega Man.

… but he wasn't there anymore. There was a flash of purplish light, and suddenly Mega Man was to his side, his purple coloring fading even as it was replaced by a green and white. Cartoonish bombs appeared in his hands, and he threw them with practiced aim. The Hyper Bombs detonated near the Egg Titan's knees, shaking the whole machine and eliciting a groan of weakened steel.

Roaring in unintelligible rage, Robotnik spun again and leveled his machine guns, spraying bullets at Mega Man with wild abandon. Each threatening shot was jumped over, slid under, or simply moved past as Mega Man closed the distance, leaping up as he got close and changing to a dull gray color. He found purchase on the Egg Titan's leg with a pair of Rolling Cutters, and used them as a launching point to jump back and away from the Titan as it flailed again, trying to shake him off. Mega Man's secondary color became a stark yellow, and electricity filled the air as he fired the Thunder Beam, aiming for the embedded Cutters.

The bolt hit home, and the leg shook wildly with the extra voltage. Robotnik himself screamed in agony, but Mega Man wasn't done yet. The less damaged leg became frozen to the ground with a well-placed volley of Ice Slashers, and the Egg Titan tumbled to the ground, shaking the whole Wreck Room with the impact.

“The bigger they are...” Mega Man smiled.

“MUST you say things like that?” I groaned. Then I remembered: built by Thomas Light. Probably PROGRAMMED to say things like that.

“Argh...” Robotnik groaned, trying to sit up. “I hate you both! DIE!”

The volley of missiles would have been concerning, but Mega Man was already on top of it. The temperature in the room spiked as he activated the Fire Storm, the white-hot fireball destroying most of the missiles while the rest blew up harmlessly from the shielding effect the weapon had. Robotnik's grasp of spoken language, already tenuous at best, gave way to his anger as the Titan got back to its feet.

Mega Man was already in motion, using the Oil Slider, he leaped onto the Egg Titan's arm as it tried to stand up, and vaulted himself up to its shoulder. “Hey, Robotnik, I'm right here,” Mega Man taunted him.

The predictable happened. Robotnik swung his free hand around to try and crush Mega Man, but the more nimble and smaller robot simply moved out of the way, causing a terrific clang as the spiked arm bounced off the Egg Titan's hull.

“OW!” he cried out. “Dammit, what is this, a cartoon?”

“I'm not sure you'd get good ratings,” Mega Man told him, now standing on top of what my brain insisted was the head, but was really just a lump between the shoulders. There was another flash of purplish light as he used the Time Slow again, and by the time my brain could perceive the world, Mega Man was standing beside me, and the Egg Titan was covered in Hyper Bombs.

“You cheating lit-”

The explosion was tremendous, and had Mega Man not been there to catch me, I would have been thrown several feet. As it was, shrapnel from parts of the Egg Titan rained down around us. Amazingly enough, however, I could still see the Egg Titan trying to stand back up through the haze of my vision, and I blinked a few times in disbelief.

“Wow, he's WAY tougher than I thought he would be,” Mega Man commented. He didn't sound worried. Just impressed.

“How...” Robotnik's voice was a mess of audio garbage now, but it was still intelligible. “How are you so damn POWERFUL? It would take a psychopath or a genius to program such an incredible combat robot!”

Mega Man smirked. “Combat? I'm just a lab assistant.”

“WHAT?” Robotnik thundered.

I flashed back to the first war as Mega Man echoed himself from that time. “I never HAD combat programming. I'm just making it up as I go.”

“That's not POSSIBLE! NO Robot could operate outside the parameters of his programming! You can't just MAKE IT UP, you have to be TOLD! That's what robots ARE! TOOLS! SLAVES!” It was uncanny. Robotnik was repeating the same things I had said back then. It was almost like I could feeling the burning air in my lungs as I laid there, defeated, beside my ruined Wily Machine as Mega Man stood over me in victory.

“It doesn't matter what YOU think is possible,” Mega Man replied. “All that matters is that I beat you, and to that end, I can accomplish anything I can think of to win. I'm not going to stop just because you think it's impossible for me to move forward.”

Now back to his blue colorings, Mega Man raised his arm, now converted into the whirring, high-pitched whine of the charging Mega Buster. “I fight for an everlasting peace, Robotnik. Why do you fight?”

The Egg Titan finally got its feet under it, and it brandished its guns again. “I'm fighting you to kill him! So I can claim my place in the world and rule over it like I was MEANT to!”

Mega Man sighed and let the charged shot fly, the blue ball of compressed plasma sailing cleanly through a hole the Hyper Bombs had blown into the Egg Titan's chest. The charged shot detonated, causing sympathetic explosions throughout the Egg Titan's torso. It was the damaged leg that gave out first, causing the Titan to list to one side and collapse in near slow motion as Robotnik shouted and raged in impotent protest.

“DAMMIT!! I WILL WIN! I'LL TAKE YOU BOTH DOWN WITH ME IF I HAVE TO!”

Realization dawned on me. “He's going to self destruct!”

Mega Man looked angry. “I'll be fine, but what about you?”

“I can't get away fast enough!”

“Really? THIS time you have NO escape plan?”

“Solutions now! Insults later!”

Mega Man frowned. “FINE. Where do those shafts go?”

“To my processors, but-”

“Way down?”

“Well, yes, but-”

And he was off like a shot, charging his Time Slow and riding an Oil Slider. I tried to climb back into my Combat Pod for protection, but there was no way I would have enough time. Mega Man was really my only hope of getting out of this alive.

There was a flash of light as the Time Slow activated, and I couldn't tell you for the life of me why, but for some reason I could watch it all play out. The Egg Titan was mere seconds away from going up in a truly spectacular fashion, and Mega Man leaped off the Oil Slider as he used Time Man's ability to slow down time around him. He took on the Oil Slider's colors again, spraying dozens of shots around the Egg Titan, and then switched quickly to the Super Arm. He landed, reared back, and threw a powerful punch, and the Egg Titan's husk took off like a rocket, aided by the Oil Slider.

It was like a perfect pool shot, and the Titan's bulk crashed into, and then slid down one of the Wreck Room's access shafts that led down to the processors. As the world returned to normal, a terrific thump was heard and the ground literally heaved beneath me. The Egg Titan's explosion carved a cavity into the bedrock below, and totally destroyed the processors and the automated assembler beyond.

This fact made me swear under my breath as Mega Man approached again.

“It's over Wily. I'm taking you in.”

I sighed. “Yeah... I figured. But hell, at least I'm alive.”

I walked toward him, my hands held high in a non-threatening way. Mega Man was looking at me strangely. “Say, Wily?”

“Hm?”

“I never asked you before. Why do YOU fight?”

I felt myself break into a grin. “Well, Mega Man, if I had to be honest...”

“Why start now?” he smirked in return.

“... I'd have to say,” I continued, ignoring him, “that sometimes, the world needs something to unite against in order to be united at all. Someone has to be the bad guy. It might as well be me.”

“... that's kind of stupid.”

I gave this some thought. “You know, I thought so too, at first. When I first heard it said, it didn't make any sense, but... Heck, after all this time, I guess its as good a reason as anything.”

“You're crazy, you know that?”

“I have been told as such, yes.”

“Come on,” he said, holding my arm to prevent me from trying to run. Not that I COULD have escaped.

“I have to make a quick stop first,” I said.

“No tricks, Wily.”

“No tricks. Just one last thing I need to do.”