Chapter 7: More Human Than Human?

	Its one human eye stared unblinkingly back at her, while the lens that
served as its other eye glinted crimson in the dim lighting of the chamber.
	Rosa found herself staring at, literally, a tightly-wound machine.
Yet this machine had muscles that twitched as they visibly tensed.  And those
eyes--hard, implacable, vindictive.  She was held by those eyes, for while the
rest of its face and features were cloaked in shadow, the emotion that
smoldered behind that gaze was unmistakeably clear, and unmistakeably human.
Hatred.
	The strange hybrid of man and machine advanced a step toward her,
compelling her to take a corresponding step back.  Confusion slipped into her
own eyes as it--he?--spat a single word: "Celes!"  And then the creature was
leaping at her, foot extended in a vicious flying kick that aimed to crush her
skull in.
	Blind instinct took over.  Rosa felt the kick graze her scalp as she
dropped to the ground and rolled quickly back to her feet.  She had an arrow
nocked in an instant, and spinning on her heel, she aimed and released it all
in one movement.
	She wasn't quick enough.  Her attacker seemed not to touch the ground
at all, but merely flicker into visibility one second and then disappear
again.  The arrow struck the earthen wall where...  Rosa faltered again.  He,
she finally decided.  Where he should have been.  The steel arrowhead sparked
as it struck a flinty outcropping and then fell to the ground.
	Rosa's eyes darted swiftly about the cavernous room.  He moved pretty
fast for someone half composed of metal, she had to give him that.  But who
was he--what was he--and why was he attacking her?  /'Celes'?/ she repeated
silently, her brow wrinkling.  She was at a complete loss as to what might be
going through this creature's head.  Celes hadn't even been around the last
week or so.
	/Pathetic!/  The "creature" was torn between laughter and contempt.
/No wonder she has to rely so heavily on magic.../  A sneer crossed half-human
features as the Magitek warrior watched the woman swing another arrow up and
around.  As always, his tongue got the better of him.
	"You're losing your touch, old girl," he remarked from behind her.  As
she whirled in surprise, he brought a swift foot up and cracked it soundly
against her wrist.  She didn't drop her weapon as he half expected her to, but
her shot flew wild, the arrow lodging itself in the ceiling above.  He clucked
his tongue disapprovingly and shook his head in mock sadness.  "Oh, quite
disappointing.  I suggest you stick with your Runic Blade."  The confusion in
her face doubled, and he snorted.  Hero of Light!  She didn't deserve the
appellation.  Scorn faded into general bitterness as he again recalled all
that this "general" had led him and his friends into.  The Moon, the Whale,
Edgar, Lore...  The memories churned and contorted and screamed at him.  /They
should have listened to me!/ he seethed.  /I never trusted her!/  His fingers
flicked, and suddenly a shuriken gleamed between them.
	The glint of light caught Rosa's eye, but she was a little too slow in
dodging this time.  She winced as a thin line of blood was drawn across her
cheek.  At the same time, she wondered briefly why she hadn't already sent an
arrow through this creature's skull--circuitry--whatever.  She'd had ample
opportunity to do so.  Something about him, however, had made her hesitate.
He seemed to stand always in shadow, so she still couldn't see his features
clearly, but there was something familiar about his voice and manner.
	Her attacker remained a step ahead of her, and Rosa dodged the first
shuriken only to have two others slice into her arm and shoulder from the
side.  They bit deeply, and she paled slightly.  She redoubled her grip on her
weapons, refusing to lose that modest advantage now.  All hesitation was past
as she fitted a third arrow and retaliated with a lightning-fast
counteroffensive of her own.
	Her speed in recovery took her adversary completely by surprise.  He
jumped quickly to one side, but didn't quite evade the missile.  A grunt of
pain and shock escaped him as the shaft sank deeply into his chest with a
metallic *thunk*, just missing his heart.  /Do I even have one anymore?/ some
remote part of him asked.  It hardly mattered now; he felt nothing as he
lunged at his enemy.
	He fell before he reached her.  The shaft protruding from his chest
suddenly flared into life, and he realized too late that it was magical.  Ice,
he realized, as a vicious chill crept tangibly from his chest area outward.
Now he felt pain, though it was oddly alien to him; it was the effects of the
cold on his inner wiring.  His flesh, on the other hand, merely felt numb.
	Rosa watched him smash a metallic fist into the ground and haul
himself back to his feet.  "Damn you!" he exclaimed, obviously as furious at
himself for being hit as at her for hitting him.  Quickly, she reached for
another arrow.  Before her hand was halfway there, however, he had seized her
by the throat and slammed her back against the nearest wall.  Rosa struggled
against his grip, but he had her pinned.  His chest heaved with roiling
emotion as he hissed in her ear, "You never could hold your own without magic!
Why don't you try casting your precious Ultima now?"
	In spite of the iron grip on her throat, Rosa managed to draw enough
breath to speak, with difficulty.  "What are you ranting about?" she spat,
thoroughly baffled and angry now.  The grip on her throat tightened in
response, and she knew she had gone too far.  She steeled herself, and waited
for the monster to snap her neck in two.
	It never happened.  The cold metallic hand and the pressure it applied
quite suddenly seemed to just fade from her consciousness.  Rosa blinked,
feeling strange.  And found herself seeing the entire tableau differently,
through eyes that were not her own.  "Rydia..." she whispered, recognizing
this nearly-forgotten sensation.
	She felt, rather than heard, Rydia's acknowledgement.  They shared the
same vision now, through a common pair of eyes that were not human...  A third
presence filled them, or rather, they filled it...  /I've never been able to
quite figure out which was the most true,/ Rosa noted detachedly, and felt
Rydia's laughter.  She gave a mental nod.  /True, Rydia.  Both, I suppose./
	The Magitek warrior squinted through his red-tinted eye.  His hand
suddenly grasped only empty air.  /Where...?/  A shadow loomed over him, and
he spun around to discover an alien-looking but beautiful woman standing
there.  Blue and silver gossamer flowed and floated about her form, and
shortly-cropped blue hair framed an unearthly face that held a similarly
bluish tinge.  The pair of translucent wings she bore on her back rendered
her quite faerie-like, and she held a staff in one hand that completed the
effect.  She waved that staff now, and its tip began to glow.  Familiarity
suddenly slammed home as memory stirred in the deeper recesses of the Magitek
warrior's mind.  /Shiva!/  He looked frantically for the best way to get out
of the Ice Queen's way, though he knew he was already too late.  The glow
emanating from her staff blazed abruptly outward, and then ice shards were
tearing down at him from all directions.  He tried to protect his face and
neck, but the rest of his body was still vulnerable.  "Rydia!" he screamed,
knowing who the only possible source of this onslaught could be.  His voice
was lost in the storm of ice.
	It grew very quiet.  Rosa dragged herself to her feet as she felt her
consciousness sift gradually apart from Rydia's, and from Shiva's.  She was
herself once again.  Raising her eyes, she tried to get a bearing on her
surroundings, and saw the Thamasans, who had up till now remained fearfully
huddled in the background, begin to stand up and drift toward the center of
the room.  At the center of the room--a block of solid ice, where the
half-man, half-machine creature had been.
	Rydia was a short distance away, still fighting the disorientation
that always followed her Summonings.  She always suffered the worst
aftereffects. Stumbling forward, Rosa went to her and offered a hand in
helping her stand.
	"FLAME!" a muffled voice suddenly roared from the center of the
chamber.  A veritable explosion of ice rocked the shelter then.  Both women
were knocked off their feet again as chunks of ice erupted everywhere.
Tongues of flame licked hungrily outward in the ice's wake, catching a few
slower Thamasans in their path.  From one corner of the shelter, a small boy
watched in horror as three of his neighbors were engulfed by fire.  Their
shrieks were terrible.  Shuddering, he tried to shut his eyes and ears to the
scene.  "Edge..." he whispered, unable to believe what was happening.
	Edge was too blinded by rage now to really notice the consequences he
had wrought.  He had lost it again, submitted to the madness that had hovered
constantly over him since awakening as this new... MONSTER in Doctor Tingley's
lab.  As the last of the ice melted away from him and the aura of flames
surrounding him slowly died, he cast his gaze about for Celes Chere.  She had
brainwashed Rydia now, had turned his own love on him!  Fear mingled with the
rage.  /I WILL NOT LET HER TURN MY OWN FRIENDS AGAINST ME!/
	Rosa was horrified at the sight of the innocent bystanders caught in
the flames, but she knew there was nothing she could do for them now.  The
inferno's source had to be dealt with first.  Rising to her feet once more,
she paused only long enough to locate Rydia again.  If they worked together...
She spotted the girl just in time to see her face suddenly drain of color, and
her mouth open in an attempt to shriek a belated warning.
	The Full Moon boomerang seemed to come out of nowhere, and the sound
of its impact against Rosa's forehead was less than pretty.  The force of the
blow carried her backward, and she slammed against a wall, then slid to the
dust below.
	She put a hand to her head, suffering the worst headache thrust upon
her in recent memory.  Her fingers came away stained red.  Warm, sticky blood
coursed down her face in rivulets, blurring her vision.  Rosa cursed herself
for allowing herself to be caught offguard.  Then she turned her anger onto
her attacker.
	"So that's how you want to play it?" she muttered through a haze of
pain, her eyes narrowing.  "So be it..."  Fighting past the fog in her mind,
she searched for the ancient knowledge that not even Zeromus had been able to
stand against, in ages past.  It came to her slowly, but it was still there.
As she began chanting the arcane words, however, she saw the wretch coming at
her again.  /No time.../  She closed her eyes and prayed as she chanted.
	Footsteps echoed in her ears...  An almost bestial yell of triumph
told her he was upon her.  Rosa clutched reflexively at the orb shard that
hung round her neck, and her eyes flew open.  "WHITE!" she screamed.
	Radiant bluish-white light exploded into being, suffusing the room
with sacred power.  Rosa's breath caught as she saw her assailant thrown
backward.  She hadn't been sure the spell would work, with the known goddesses
destroyed and gone, but apparently it was powered by faith in some greater
Good out there, higher even than any traditional deities.  At least, this was
all she could suppose for the time being; she didn't have the time to ponder
it now.
	The light gathered and focused itself into a single mass of glowing
energy, seemed to hesitate the briefest of seconds, then plunged straight for
the metallic fiend.  As it surrounded and permeated him, the light grew
dazzling, brilliant, blinding...and then seemed to grow yet brighter, if that
were possible.  All in the room had to cover their eyes; it was almost like
staring straight into the sun.
	The light was slow to subside, but when it finally did... Rosa and
Rydia--perhaps the only two people in the room who understood the potency of
the magic just unleashed--did double takes.  The monster stood untouched and
unharmed.  They watched dumbly as he looked down at himself, observed the
same, and began laughing hysterically at them.
	The awful sound fell on deaf ears, though.  Rosa was oblivious to it,
too confounded by the spell's failure to pay much attention to anything else.
Apparently she had thought wrong when she'd assumed the spell was still
effective in the absence of the goddesses.  Either that, or...
	"Rosa!"  Rydia's cry ripped her back to reality.  Jerking her gaze
upward, Rosa saw that the monster had stopped laughing and was now bearing
swiftly down on her with a set of seriously sharp catclaws extended.
	A resounding crack split the air as a whip lashed out, followed by the
sound of metal crashing to earth.  Edge shook his head and looked down at the
leather coiled round his ankle.  His human eye flared with cold fury, while
behind the crimson lens, a grid of green squares covered the green-haired
girl who held the other end of the whip.
	"Rydia!" he barked.  "Stay out of this!"
	Rydia froze.  Squinting, she peered more closely at this man-machine
hybrid.  She suddenly remembered what had brought her, along with Rosa, down
to this makeshift underground shelter in the first place.  The spell cast
earlier--Flame--returned to her in a jarring new light.  But...  No, Rydia
argued with herself--that didn't necessarily mean anything.  *He* didn't even
have a magic source anymore; he'd given it to Cecil.  Right?  She looked again
at the face before her.  And yet...
	Rosa was equally shaken as she reexamined her attacker.  Now she took
better note of the skin; the little that remained exposed to light was charred
almost as black as the metal that covered the rest of his body.  If he'd ever
had any hair, it had been scorched off entirely.  As if he had been
horrendously burned by fire...  Or by magic.
	"Edge!" both she and Rydia exclaimed at once, and exchanged mirrored
expressions of disbelief and shock.
	"So that's why it didn't work," Rosa murmured.  "The White spell only
harms evil..."
	"And Edge is not..."  Rydia trailed off as she continued to stare at
Edge.
	So the doctors *had* been able to do something for him.  The two women
looked at the dark plates that covered half his face and body, and the
thoughts of one mirrored those of the other: /But what have they done...?/
	Edge raised a hand high and sliced cleanly through Rydia's whip with
his catclaws.  Instantly free again, he leaped lightly to his feet and faced
them both with hackles raised.  "Yes, it's me," he growled.  He fixed Rosa
with a look of utter loathing.  "Laugh if you like."
	Rosa shook her head.  "You know I wouldn't do that, Edge."
	"Oh, really?"  Her blatant lie sickened him.  The Empire had taught
her well, it seemed.  He wondered how opposed she really was to this New
Empire coming to power.  "And why should I believe that?" he snarled, inching
almost imperceptibly closer to her.
	"Why shouldn't you?"
	"Why?" he almost shrieked back at her.  Rosa was disconcerted by the
intensity of this unflagging hostility.  Every pore continued to ooze
animosity toward her.  "When have you *ever* given me reason to trust you,
Celes Chere?!"
	"Celes Chere?!" Rosa echoed in shock.  "Edge, what--"
	"Enough of your lies!" he bellowed.  "This ends NOW!"  All control
snapped completely, and he pounced.
	It was surprisingly easy, Edge reflected, as his catclaws tore into
her throat.  He felt no remorse at all as the wicked edges severed her jugular
cleanly; only a grim sense of justice filled him as she staggered before him.
	Rosa reeled in shock.  She tried to gasp, and couldn't.  She tried to
think, and couldn't.  The world seemed to flood crimson then, and she couldn't
even scream as she fell.