Zero.Hero 2 - Prologue

“We’re losing ground to the southeast!” Benito shouted as his heads-up display flashed deep red on units seven through twelve. He leapt forward in his power armor, unleashing a haymaker on a dog-sized cockroach. Blood from the creature splattered across the chest of his suit, sizzling as a new notification appeared on the left side of his screen. 

The flat-voiced AI monitoring his suit blared in his ears, “Warning, chest armor integrity reduced to seventy three percent.” 

Benito smirked at the irony as he threw the cockroach carcass aside while the boric acid crystalized over its skin. The very chemical they’d used to destroy the rampant infestation had come into contact with a Fragmented roach, and mutation took over from there. Primadonna, the fabled queen roach of this entire army, was somewhere below their feet, pumping out wave after wave of ever-growing cockroaches. 

Units thirteen and fourteen dropped off the screen, their processors likely overheated. Benito opened comms to all military and XHRI channels. “Be advised, the queen is changing tactics. The smaller roaches have higher acidic concentration.” 

“We’ve seen worse!” Maria’s voice came through the speaker in his cockpit as she soared overhead. Her golden wings, fluttering like a cape made of stardust, soaked up the sun’s powerful rays. She put her hands out for a devastating blast of UV light and Benito’s video feed buzzed from the pure power. The bugs in her path shrieked and shriveled, then popped with grotesque squelches that sent acid blood spraying across abandoned cars and office buildings. 

Units two, five, and nineteen blinked warnings on Benito’s screen and he pulled his hands off the controls to run emergency diagnostics. He couldn’t let any more of the bots be compromised and leave the heroes vulnerable to flanking. Sweat dripped down his forehead, chest, and between his shoulders, tickling his back. 

The temperature control in his armor had been damaged an hour before, but he couldn’t afford to open any ports and risk the acidic blood of the cockroach monsters getting into the suit with him. The monster cockroaches had been changed by the Primadonna in ways that didn’t make logical, scientific sense, something that had baffled Benito for weeks. 

The cockroach blood could dissolve human flesh on contact and eat through muscle in under a minute. Their hearts beat at two hundred and fifty beats per minute, and their regeneration was staggering compared to an average insect. Biological warfare seemed to be the only realistic and final solution, yet Benito had reservations about KOH5. The government spouted low error rates for the gas, and high targetability for the roaches, but there was still doubt. There was a chance that the human population of Naples could be at risk. 

Not just risk of decreased longevity, or health factors, but death. Horrible, painful death, choking on their own blood as their lungs blistered. If anything went wrong, it could mean massacre instead of salvation. 

The warnings blared across Benito’s screen and he snapped from the far-off line of thought. His fingers dashed across the cramped keyboard in front of him as the orange overlay on his screen came to life with code. This wasn’t a time to go digging in the robot’s programming, but he didn’t seem to have a choice. 

Benito’s armor jostle and he shouted as he—in his twelve-foot tall mech—was laid out. The suit skidded back and screeched, drowning out all other sound as red lights flashed in his face. 

“What are you doing? Pay attention, Ben!” Maximus’ anger blasted through the speakers next to Benito’s head as he came to a stop. 

He groaned from the pain at the nape of his neck. Another trickle started and he knew this wasn’t sweat as sharp agony radiated down his spine. Benito lifted his head and wiggled his fingers. Not paralyzed yet. He activated the remote repo and grabbed the last .dmp files from the crashed bots. 

The armor rocked as a massive cockroach climbed over his legs, and another two small ones jumped onto his chest. The proximity warning flashed in Benito’s face and he growled at the interruption. He closed the notification and pulled up the real-time strategy game engine that the students at the University of Naples had hacked together for him to control the search and rescue bots. 

Units twenty-nine through thirty-six converged on his location at two taps of a button and ripped the offending cockroaches free. He returned to the code, ignoring he was flat on his back with acid eating through the metal of his armor. He scrolled through line after line in the counterattack routines, looking for the bug. The three units were stuck in a loop, unable to execute new moves, and Benito was certain it was due to the cockroaches rapidly changing tactics. 

“These damn things are learning faster than our bots!” Benito shouted as he disabled the counterattack code in question rather than trying to fix it. He’d built in plenty of fallback measures that should take over in the event of a missing command block. 

He double tapped the “Deploy to all - rolling reboot” button flashing on the glass screen in front of him. Each unit would download the update and restart in sequence as the others protected it, which should’ve minimized the losses. Benito found it amusing he was waging a war against the internal bugs just as much those outside his suit. 

“Battlefield patches? Now?” Maria asked as she swooped down, hefting Benito’s huge power armor back to standing. 

Benito pointed his secondary front camera down at the radiant woman and the screen in front of him split; Maria in great detail on the left and the view of the road to the right. Her golden-brown hair flowed behind her as ashes peppered her bright blue, skintight suit. He lifted his armor’s hand and caressed her cheek with one giant finger. She leaned into the touch and the Fragment imbedded in her chest shined molten gold. In an instant, her ethereal wings burst to life and she rocketed into the air.  

Maria caught a flying cockroach trying to sneak attack, wrestling it with a war cry. The starlit wonder grabbed the creature by the back of the head and ripped the left wing free in a single tug. The roach plummeted back to the earth with a shriek and she left it to Benito to finish. He stomped his massive mech foot down on the monster’s exposed belly and guts splashed out across his shin guards. 

The HUD flashed a warning in the corner that noted the reduction in his leg plating. 

“Computer, minimize all non-critical notifications.” Benito called to his AI and the system responded immediately. 

The warnings of downed units collapsed into a single blinking icon on the right with a [28] over it. His armor status shrunk to a third its size and pushed away to the bottom left corner of the screen. Benito tapped at the keyboard to activate his radiation cannon. The forward viewer expanded to take up the rest of his screen with the left, right, and rear views appearing in third sized screens pinned at the top. 

“Warning,” the AI interrupted his commands, “with chest armor at less than 75%, there is a moderate risk of harmful UV exposure. Are you sure you’d like to proceed?” 

“Yes,” Benito replied, steeling himself as the forward view filled with the horde of cockroaches. It looked like a wave of brown washing through the city, and he knew there was an analogy in there that did it justice. The damn bugs were the scourge of Naples. They’d been small at first, the size of rats, but they’d changed so fast. 

Benito hadn’t been completely unprepared. He’d had a gut feeling that the little pests were going to be a bigger deal than what the President’s science team had made them out to be. Unfortunately, when he’d warned the President of the need for evacuation four days prior, he’d been ignored. 

The only option left was to do an emergency evacuation of the city by air and land, since the ports were the first things the bugs cut off. The citizens of Naples had thought it was Xion that had caused the massive cockroaches to begin with, inflamed by the media claiming the organization was running terrifying experiments on the Fragmented. When Benito had warned of the risk and need to evacuate, it had only added more fuel to the fire of blame.  

The wave of fluttering wings and scurrying legs was almost in range. Just six seconds and he’d have maximum charge for the shot, but he had to conserve his power reserves. He hadn’t found many Fragments on the battlefield to power his weapons, and had only five in reserve. He couldn’t bank on more appearing to save his ass. 

When the cannon showed 100% saturation, Benito fired. The beam of brilliant UV light blasted through the street, his ultra-sensitive camera displaying it as a hazy lilac on screen. The beam zapped across half a mile of monsters in a single hit. A swath of them squelched, popping like B movie monster props, but the horde kept coming.  

“Cazzo! These bastards are relentless!” 

“Don’t worry, not a cloud in sight,” Maria called as she soared overhead, primed to take out the easy pickings. Her wings soaked up the sun, glowing brighter than ever as she funneled the star’s massive power through her Fragment and out her hands in a blinding lilac beam. 

Benito rattled in his suit as the ground trembled. He tried to activate his chain rifle, but the acid-burnt latch on the boxy container failed to open and reveal the deadly weapon. Benito growled, bashing the gun-shield with his other fist. The half-melted metal dropped away, freeing the three-barreled machine gun. 

Benito dropped to a knee and raised the primitive weapon at the advancing stampede of fluttering, scrabbling, and clawing insects. How were there so many of them? 

The suit controls shook like a jackhammer as the .50 caliber rounds blasted out of the end of the barrels. Bugs piled up int the streets, sending splashes of red popping across the tan building with every bullet. He took a step back as his right facing camera blinked, alerting him to an incoming enemy. He disengaged fire-mode, keeping the barrels winding as he twisted. The HUD marked several roaches and the targeting system took aim as he launched a fresh volley of hell. 

The earth shook violently as massive cracks appeared in the building beside him. “What the hell was that?” Benito shouted to the others. 

Maria flew past, blasting apart the flood. “There’s some kind of sinkhole opening near you, more roaches inc. This might be it, Ben!” Fear was in her voice as she spoke his name. 

“Cross your fingers!” Benito said as he disengaged the gat and hopped backwards, activating his high-powered jet propulsion system. 

Benito pressed a switch on his dashboard to change over to the military radio channel as he sailed away from the collapsing concrete. “Xion here. Status on the evac, General!” 

“Red zone ninety percent complete, yellow less than thirty,” The mid-fifties woman replied, gunshots sounding in the background. 

“We might’ve incurred the wrath of the Primadonna. Contingency may be necessary.”  

“Roger, preparing contingency,” the General said, her voice laden with anger Benito assumed was for him. He knew she believed Xion to be guilty, too, and didn’t have a problem letting Benito know every chance she got. 

He flipped back to his team channel as the chain gun sputtered. Ammunition jammed at the feeder and the metal whined in protest. A small, critical warning appeared over his weapons icon. “Culo,” Benito muttered. He bashed his left hand into the gun, trying the trigger again. The warning flashed brighter. “Mannaggia!” 

“What is it?” Maria asked, a hint of worry in her voice. 

“Weapons jam, I’m okay.” Benito replied as the 6 o’clock camera showed an impending collision with several roaches. 

He released the locks on his minigun and flipped his Bardiche staff from the holster on his back. One of the reserve Fragments slid down the suit’s arm and into the power pack at the base of the pole. The light weapon came to life with a zap-crack and he sliced it through the air as he spiraled. The roaches dropped back to the crumbling streets; wings severed. 

He landed next to the bugs with a heavy thud, stomping down onto their screeching faces. Blood splashed up his chest and his armor integrity flashed sixty-one percent over the tiny readout. The suit wasn’t made for this. 

“Primary viewer systems at risk of damage,” The AI warned as the top visor pulsed on the diagram, showing zero percent armor. 

Roach after nasty, chittering roach flapped toward him, but he slashed and stabbed each newcomer with deft accuracy. His spinning, thrusting, leaping dance of death had the processors working on overdrive and a heat warning blinked in the bottom-left over his suit readout. 

“You’re running hot, Benito, back it off!” Lazlie—the brilliant engineer too young and stupid not to follow him into combat—called over the comms. 

“I can handle a few more,” Benito grunted as he was knocked sideways from a boulder sized bug. He speared the thing as he fell to his back once more. His neck snapped against the broken metal support and his hearing droned. 

He rolled and hefted the bug off him as the acid blood trickled down the protective shield case of the Bardiche and coated his armor’s hands. The metal sizzled and the suit readout flashed. An angry buzz rang in his drowned-out ears and a popup appeared stating his glove armor had failed. His eyes itched as the rank smell of dissolving metal flooded his suit. 

Maria’s voice came over the noise of his tiny cabin. “Benito, bombers incoming. Is the evacuation complete?” 

He rolled onto his stomach and pushed to standing, shaking his mechs hands as if it could prevent them from dissolving. “Three minutes ago, red zone ninety percent, yellow thirty.” 

Maximus growled in anger. “We need more time, tell them to stand down!” 

“If the Primadonna escapes this could become a global threat. We can’t risk it Max!” Benito shot back. 

“KOH5 will cause thousands of casualties down wind. We can’t poison our own people, Ben.” Maria replied, outrage in her tone. 

Lazlie chimed in, “We can’t allow the queen to spread her mutated eggs over the entirety of Western Europe. Think of the billions at risk!” 

The suit shuddered as the ground gave way under Benito’s feet. The concrete shifted as the building behind him cracked, shattering the remaining glass windows. The cockroaches took to the air, swarming past Benito, uncaring of his presence at the collapsing of the city. 

“Don’t write me off that easy,” he snarled at the monsters as he activated his jets to one-hundred percent strength. He blasted from the sinking pit and rocketed away from the collapsing building. 

The general crackled to life on the heroes’ radio channel. “Come in Xion, this is General Esposito. Bombers are at the ready.” 

“Esposito, standby. We don’t know if it’s her yet,” Maria replied, always so levelheaded on the outside, even amid chaos. 

Benito reached maximum altitude and cut his upward thrust by forty percent, then activated the rear thruster as he watched the growing sinkhole. A massive antenna, thick as a light post, poked out from the rubble of the collapsing city followed by a hooked claw longer than Benito’s armor. 

“Dio Santo. It’s her,” Benito whispered. 

“Roger that, bombers starting their run. You have three minutes, Xion. Esposito out.” The radio went silent. 

The building crumbled in front of Benito just as his suit cleared the sinkhole. Hundreds of tons of rock piled down onto the huge roach: the Primadonna. She shook it off easily as her house-sized head emerged. 

The Primadonna chittered and reached a spined leg out to slap Benito from the sky. Maria swooped down in Benito’s rear camera and looped her arms under the shoulder panels of the suit. She lifted and Benito returned full power to the upward thrust. Air whooshed against the duo, blowing them off course toward a cracked building. 

Maria tugged harder, lifting him up to the roof before releasing the armor to skid to a stop. She touched down next to him and Benito could tell that the hours of combat had not been kind. Her long hair had been singed short and the skin around her Fragment was burned with irritation. Her bright blue suit was ripped at the stomach and legs and acid burns splotched across her body. 

“We can’t let that bomb go off,” Maria warned. Her lilac UV shield shimmered around her body as Benito’s AI identified its weak points. 

“You can’t survive much more of this. We need to pull out,” He said to just her through the outward facing speaker on his suit. 

“We have to give them more time. There are too many people in the affected area. If those bombs go off it would only take minutes for unprotected people to die.” 

“We don’t know that for sure,” Lazlie cut in over the comms. Maria’s earpiece had been picking up everything. 

Benito sighed. “We can be certain that the genetic encoding in KOH5 can’t predict the genetic variation in everyone in the area. It will fail for some—” 

“An error margin of point five percent!” Lazlie declared. 

“That’s still fifty thousand souls, Laz!” Maria’s calm voice broke in outrage. 

“Think about the seven billion we need to protect!” Lazlie snapped back. 

Diego boomed over the comms, “We need to evacuate in the next two minutes, or we’ll be in that same area of effect,”  

Maria looked away from Benito, toward the struggling cockroach queen. The ground sank around her as she stepped up, causing the buildings to collapse farther behind her and bury her body. Maria looked up toward the incoming bombers, then back to Benito’s camera. 

“I love you,” she whispered and her wings exploded in a burst of UV light. Benito jerked in his suit as she grabbed him again, tugging him away from the Primadonna. 

“What are you doing?” He asked, activating his thrusters to help her. 

“Taking you out of range. Your chest armor won’t withstand the blast at this range, it’s already too thin.” 

“I won’t leave this to you,” Benito protested as they soared over the city. Even if he reversed thrust at this point, their momentum was too great. He’d only hurt his love. 

Maria shouted to overcome the whooshing wind and angry swarm of fluttering wings. “I’m sorry for taking that choice away, but our daughter will need one of us.” 

“She can have both of us!” Benito roared in frustration as his fists tightened on the controls. 

“Ben, what’s going on?” Lazlie asked over the comms as he and Maria registered out of the red zone on their group map. 

“Everyone, evacuate to yellow zone!” Maria yelled, her voice strained. 

Maximus clicked on. “Maria, you can’t be serious!” 

“I know what I’m doing,” she snapped back. “KOH5 will kill our citizens, my ability is stable, I can control it!” 

Buildings crumpled as the massive cockroach rose from the sinkhole with a chittering roar. They were running out of time to stop her. In the distance Benito saw the bombers starting their attack run. 

They dropped down to a short building and Maria faced him. “I couldn’t sleep soundly with our sweet child knowing we’d condemned thousands to suffer here today.”  

Benito activated the release cycle and the top of his suit popped off. The chest piece groaned as the melted metal pulled itself apart, releasing Benito to the cool, Napoli breeze. He flopped very ungracefully to the ground and she helped him to stand. 

She looked worse in person than from behind the camera. The reddened skin stretched up her cheek and down her chest, with marble sized boils that looked more painful than he wanted to imagine. But her smile was still bright and full of love. 

She ran a hand through his black, sweat-soaked hair. “Don’t think of it as goodbye. Think of it as see you later.” 

“Please, try to survive.” Benito begged and Maria’s smile twisted to something full of pity. 

“I’ll see what I can do.” 

Benito pulled her in tight for a kiss. Not something full of love and warmth, as her kisses had always been, but something desperate. Tears slipped from his eyes and joined the sweat as it rolled down his chin and pattered against the golden fragment seated between Maria’s breasts. 

“I love you both more than anything in my life,” she whispered and the Primadonna roared in reply. 

“We love you back even greater,” he smiled, though his eyes were shedding tears faster than he could blink them away. Her golden-brown hair was blurry like a halo around her face as her massive wings spread open to the sun. Then, she was gone from the rooftop. 

Benito gritted his teeth to bite back the tears as Maria shrank into the distance. The comms were alive with activity but he could only hear his heart breaking with every thunderous beat in his ears. The bottom of his stomach dropped away as he imagined the life she could’ve lived with him, if only she hadn’t been…  

There was no point thinking it. 

“Hurry, Laz!” Maximus’ command broke through his trance and Benito climbed back into his armor. 

The Primadonna flapped her secondary wings, again and again, sending huge plumes of concrete dust into the air. He pulled up the map and checked the location of the others. Lazlie was still in the red. He changed channels and opened his comms to just her. “What are you doing Laz, get the hell out!” 

“Suit compromised! On foot!” She came back, panting and terrified. 

He activated the location app on her watch and she appeared on the map a few blocks from the armor she’d abandoned. “You’re too slow, take cover!” 

“I can make it!” 

He mapped his way to Lazlie: twenty seconds at max thrust. He put in the commands and closed up his suit as best he could missing the top cap. The bombers roared overhead as he blasted down through the narrow streets. His secondary cameras tracked the action in the sky from the roof of the building where the top of the suit was left while his primary camera showed only what lay ahead of him. 

The camera highlighted the missile ports on the bombers opening and flashed a warning as they approached the red zone. Maria’s light grew brighter by the second and Benito was forced to turn off UV detection as he swapped channels again. “Fighter pilots, disengage. Maria is going nova and you are in range. Your systems will be disabled.” 

“Negative Xion, orders stand,” a pilot replied flatly. 

Benito growled. “But you’ll die if you don’t turn back!” 

The channel clicked and Benito knew the pilots switched off. Damn stupid bastards! He returned to their group channel as he thrust around the last turn. Lazlie was stumbling her way down the middle of the road, holding her bloodied side as she limped forward. 

Maria’s soft voice crackled in his speakers, a prayer on her lips. 

Warnings flashed on Benito’s suit as the radiation exposure reached dangerous levels. “Move your ass, Laz!” 

He moved in low over the street and picked up speed. Lazlie turned around, running as fast as she could in the same direction as Benito as he swooped down and scooped her into his gnarled metal arms. She bashed into his chest and went limp as Benito nav’d the fastest way out of the red. 

Maria’s voice was strained and her microphone fuzzed with static as she continued the prayer. Benito could see her floating above the Primadonna, the sparkles of her golden wings moving so fast it looked as if they were about to burst. She was radiating energy directly down at the sinkhole in a cone, blanketing the city. 

Benito turned a hard left and put them on a road away from the blast zone. The secondary camera was fuzzy, the connection with his suit growing weak, but he could see the Primadonna as she lifted into the air, her powerful wings pushing out clouds of ash and dust. Huge boils grew on the cockroaches’ head and she swatted a hooked foreleg at Maria. Then the camera lost connection. Radiation warnings flashed on his screen as they neared the edge of the yellow zone. 

They weren’t going to make it.