The Megaman War:
Part 2 – Decisions, Destruction, Duty, and Destiny

By Hadrian (Hardman) Howell

Chapter 22: Behind the Scenes

“Nice car…”

The all too familiar voice made Harold jump, but he managed to stop himself from shouting for security. It hadn’t helped before. Why should it help now?

“W… what do you want?” he asked shakily, turning to see Shadowman materialize opposite him in the motorcade car he thought he was occupying alone.

“Just popped in to chat, Harold,” Shadowman smiled, looking about the interior of the car and lifting a glass decanter of fine whiskey. “Hitting the bottle again?”

“Again…?”

“They’ve missed you at the AA meetings, you know.”

“H… How did you know I was an alcoholic?” Harold cried, one of his darker secrets being split finely down the center by the mysterious ninja.

“I know everything,” Shadowman shrugged, staring wistfully out the tinted window.

He smiled beneath his mask. “Today, I made an appearance down town. I’m an expert witness, you know. Because I say I am.”

“What are you talking about?” the White House Chief of Staff asked, but Shadowman continued on, ignoring the interruption.

“I said ‘Gentlemen, and I use that word loosely, I will testify for you. I’m a gun for hire. I’m a saint. I’m a liar…” The ninja-styled Master clenched a fist and looked at Harold. “There are no facts. There is no truth. Just data…” at this point Shadowman’s normally shut left eye opened, revealing the camera lens inside, “… to be manipulated.’”

“Why did you… What did you DO?”

Shadowman laughed in his quiet way, shaking his head. “I can get you any result you like. What’s it worth to you? There is no wrong, and there is no right, and I sleep very well at night, with no shame, and no solution, and no remorse, and no retribution.”

Harold couldn’t stop his jaw from slackening as the ninja spoke. His mind was racing. He appeared downtown… as a witness? What court case could he have had an influence on… That triple murder case? Not his style. No… wait… wasn’t there an investigation of some sort going on into the Siberia… Oh, god no…

Shadowman’s smile was obvious, even beneath the cloth of his mask, and his left eye retracted and closed again. “There’s just people selling t-shirts. Just opportunity to participate in the pathetic little circus. And winning, winning, winning.” As he spoke this last sentence, the ninja slid down out of his seat and crouched in the space between the two plush benches. A flash of motion caught Harold’s attention and he barely had time to scream.

The folded, molecularly sharpened steel blade of the katana plunged straight through Harold’s skull, neatly slicing between the two halves of his brain and plunging out the back with a silent hiss into the cushioning of the chair. The White House Chief of Staff felt surprisingly little pain, dying almost instantly. Shadowman took a black rag from his waits and wrapped it around the blade where it entered the skull, and pulled the sword out slowly, the blood being wiped off on the rag.

“But you lost, Harold. The Dark Lords have no further need of you,” Shadowman smirked. “You have done what they asked. You have betrayed your country, and handed the keys to the ultimate weapon to a madman. You even spared the life of the man who would order your own death and placed him in man kind’s final frontier where he could watch his grand scheme come to fruition. Good job.” Shadowman silently re-sheathed his weapon, looking down at the W symbol on his chest.

“But I have betrayed as well…”

And with that silent sentence, heard only by dead ears, Shadowman vanished.

Dr. Light kept looking at Protoman as if he’d seen a ghost as the red armored man told them his story.

“Wait, so you can just IGNORE time?” Megaman asked. “How fair is that?”

“About as fair as a walking tank and a hidden grenade launcher,” Protoman shrugged.

“The consequences for and action like that have to be dire…” Dr. Light mulled.

At this point, Protoman’s black-visored head nodded. “It burns like all hell all over if I stay out too long. Like being in a sandstorm that can go right through you. And coming back just hurts.”

Megaman sighed. “So why can’t I do that?”

Dr. Light didn’t know. “It’s theoretically possible, I guess, but… How?”

Protoman shrugged. “I do it more on instinct now. It’s like a reflex.”

“Incredible…”

“Handy as all hell too. It’s been the only thing that’s helped my rather meager firepower help me beat that Electro creep and save your blue boy here from Vile.”

“Electro… you mean that Elecman guy that was in Tokyo? All the news reports said that he’d been blown away by the U.S. Navy!” Megaman exclaimed in disbelief.

Protoman tapped his helmet. “I have the file footage right here if you wanna see it.”

Dr. Light shook his head. “Might as well take a look and see what we can glean from it, at least…”

Megaman was still uneasy about Protoman. It looked as though he had a new ally, but something still set him on edge. If he wanted to help, why couldn’t he just come out and do it before? And what was with the little black box he taken off of his back when he got to the garage? It looked a lot like the same thing Megaman had gotten in the box…

He sighed. Megaman and Rock were effectively the same person now. Not even HE could tell the difference anymore. How could he ever go back to the life he had? How could he ever face Roll or Theresa-

The blue hero smacked himself on the forehead. “You two do what you can. I have a prior appointment to keep…”

Protoman shrugged. “Have fun on your date, bro.”

Rock winced at the implications of the entire sentence, removing parts of the armor as he headed for the door.

Tron winced as well as she heard the heavy clang. “HEY! Careful down there!” she shouted indiscriminately.

“Babu…”

She sighed at went back to work. According to Dr. Light, he could provide a compact, inexhaustible power supply, so hopefully they could save more space for the living area. Rock had sat them down yesterday and gone over the general outline of a plan he had in his mind, which consisted of taking the Air Ship and using it to get by any ground-bound defenses Wily would have undoubtedly set up within a radius of the Fortress. There was, in the plans, a harness on the top of the air ship where someone could stand, secured by a heavy strap, and fire any hand held weapon at air borne opponents, and with Megaman’s Plasma Buster, as well as a pair of side mounted anti-aircraft guns Tron had added in herself, they could fend off any aerial attempt to bring them out of the sky…

Well, that was the theory, anyway.

Somehow, it wouldn’t turn out that way. She just KNEW it. She sighed again and looked up to see Rock leave without saying goodbye. She pouted and went back to work. At least he could say ‘Thank you’ or something…

He was probably going somewhere with Roll, his ‘childhood friend’. Hmph. A blind man could tell she had the hots for him.

Meanwhile, a blind man was sighing.

“I keep telling you, Gary,” Ben sighed, totally unaware his younger brother was not looking in his direction, and therefore totally oblivious to whatever he said, “There’s NO WAY she could be interested in you. OR me, for that matter.”

Despite this, they were still following Theresa Frost down the street. She was still wearing he denim jacket, and a pair of blue jeans, but her hair was a little different now, Gary could tell. She was going to meet someone. Gary was curious who.

Ben’s hand on his shoulder tightened. He’d been leading his blind brother through the crowd, but now he wanted attention. As Gary’s head swiveled to look, Ben’s face remained the same.

“Are you looking at me yet?” Ben asked impatiently. Gary nodded, then remembered that wouldn’t work.

“Yeah,” the younger brother said.

Ben sighed. “Why are we doing this?”

Gary shrugged, which Ben felt with his hand on his little brother’s shoulder. “What do you mean you don’t know?” the older sibling asked. “Where are we going? Where ARE we?” Gary shrugged again, and Ben smacked him on the head. “I swear, could you BE any more useless?”

“I could give it a shot,” Gary joked, receiving another smack on the head before setting off again. He’d almost lost sight of his voluptuous quarry, but managed to catch up to her again. In an unexpected move, she turned down an abandoned alley.

Gary followed, but turned the corner only to find she’d disappeared.

“Why’d we... oh for god’s sake,” Ben said, the felt around and grabbed his brother’s chin and turned him to face him. “Why’d we stop?”

“She disappeared!” Gary exclaimed.

“Good.”

“No! Bad! What if she got kidnapped or something? What do we do?”

“First, you calm the hell down,” Ben growled. Then his nose twitched. The loss of any of the five senses facilitates the sharpening of the others, and Ben’s sense of smell was almost on par with a decent bloodhound to compensate for his lack of sight. “Gary… where the hell are we?”

“It’s just an alley,” Gary shrugged.

“There’s been a murder here, Gary,” Ben hissed. “A day… two or three days ago, but the smell of blood’s still here! What the hell city are we in?”

“New Detroit,” Gary shrugged.

“WHEN DID WE GET TO NEW DETROIT?” Ben shouted at the top of his voice. Useless, he knew, but it made him feel better. “WE WERE GOING TO ****PHEONIX!”

“We were going to WHAT? TELL me I read that wrong…” Gary said with a worried look on his face.

Ben’s head dropped and he sighed heavily. Sometimes his brother could be the most idiotic… shampoo? That smell was the same smell the shampoo at the hotel had… That girl… did she have something to do with this murder? Was she… crap.

“Gary, do me a favor and look up,” Ben told him slowly, making sure he read every word.

Gary looked up. “Hey! There she is!”

There, on the walkway of the fire escape that led into the alley, was Theresa Frost, barely able to contain her laughter at the scene she’d just witnessed.

“I here, I thought someone competent was following me,” she laughed. “So who’re you two?”

Gary smiled. Even at a distance, he could read lips almost perfectly. Except in Jamaica. They talked weird in Jamaica. “I’m Gary, and he’s Ben.”

“You two were watching me back at the hotel, weren’t you? Yesterday?”

Gary nodded enthusiastically. “You’re good.”

“Gary?” Ben asked. Then he remembered himself, and smacked Gary on the back of the head, drawing his brother’s attention. “Gary? Can we go now? She knows we followed her. Can we PLEASE go now?”

Theresa was suddenly on the ground with them, landing softly from the ten foot fall. “No need to go so soon guys. I’m not a bad guy or anything. So what’s the deal with you two?”

Ben sighed. “He’s deaf and I’m blind,” he told her. Gary watched his brother’s lips, and realized he was talking to Theresa. He turned his head and nodded.

“Oh, and here I thought you were just using the buddy system,” she smiled. Ben’s hand immediately left Gary’s shoulder. “Well, I’m meeting someone, so I better be going… Care to come along?”

“Who’re you meeting?” Gary asked innocently.

Theresa shrugged nonchalantly and turned away. “Megaman.”

Ben’s unseeing eyes went wide, and Gary had no clue what just happened. ‘I guess we should go then,” the older sibling growled. “Not every day we meet a celebrity…”

Dr. Wily sat at his desk, tapping a pen on a paper. He was, simply put, bored. He’d run out of people to subdue and turn into Masters. The populace for miles around had been evacuated, and the American Military was gathering might on his borders, but until they actually attacked, Wily had nothing to do. He’d pulled all of his forces back home from Abroad, although the absence of Elecman was a blow to morale, and the entirety of Skull Fortress was really just a cage that he and his Masters occupied in the time they were not using to destroy everything.

He knew Vile had been destroyed, and that fact had almost made him angry enough to send the Yellow Devil to New Detroit to personally finish off Megaman, but Wily knew the blue dweeb wouldn’t have been able to do it without help. He wasn’t going to send his ultimate creation in without knowing exactly what it was up against…

He looked over the papers on his desk, the top one referring to the United Nation’s ‘Peace Keeping’ Robot, Gamma. Although all kinds of documentation existed, he never found even a trace of a schematic, let alone any materials to build the thing, anywhere under the Fortress, which struck him as odd. It was almost like someone had taken it all before he’d gotten there, but that wasn’t possible, was it?

There were other projects as well, for which no materials or plans existed under the Fortress, but had reports detailing progress and documentation focusing on theories and research. Research that couldn’t have been done unless prototypes of the projects mentioned had existed at some point… The one such project that interested Wily most was the prototype Walker known as the Hard Point, which seemed to be focused mainly on defense, with thick, insulated armor, and two main fist-like projectiles with a secondary chest-mounted cannon. Something like that, if automated, would be invaluable for base defense…

Someone or something had made off with several billion dollars worth of material and research just before, or possibly just AFTER, Wily had taken over Cheyenne Mountain. But how was that possible?

Reggae? No… he’d had an attack of conscience. He’d tried to warn anyone at all about the Megaman Killer, but for some reason his warning had fallen on deaf ears. One of his renegade Masters? No… Icema’am was just as unlikely as the departed Cutman. Shadowman, maybe, but there was no organization in the world that Wily was aware of that could possibly trust or even begin to understand the technology that drove Shadowman, and couldn’t, therefore, totally trust him… Besides, not even the ninja could make off with a 14 foot, 4 ton prototype.

Dr. Wily mulled over his questions to which he had no answers while Punk stood outside of his door. Wily’s paranoia had put him there to keep any further renegades at bay, just in case they all went crazy on him… It was probably only a matter of time, anyway…

Yamatoman, Knightman, Quickman, Topman, Plantma’am, Pharaohman, Magnetman… Which would be first?

Shadowman stood, invisibly, on the top of the Washington Monument. The city below his gaze was a mess of sirens and police cars, all trying to find the assassin of the White House Chief of Staff.

The ninja-like super human had killed before. In the name of Wily, he’d slain an entire division of the United States Marine Corps. In their sleep. His total silence and invisible motion had taken all of their lives without a sound.

This was the first time he’d killed for his new masters, however… The Dark Lords had no soul. Even Shadowman could sense that. They cared for nothing but themselves, and their philosophy mirrored the same one Cutman had babbled about when he thought he was alone. Replace humans with Masters. Build a better world…

That old man… Why was he doing this?

Questions spun in Shadowman’s brain as the city below him tried desperately to find an assassin that could hide in plain sight. High above the ninja, the eyes of his new masters were watching from Eden.