The Space Pirate base on Zebes was a crater. The Metroids were gone. The Mother Brain was slag. Ridley was a fossil in the making.
She crawled through ventilation shafts, her heart pounding loud enough to mask the skittering of the Zebesian bugs. She stunned, strangled, and avoided. She was no longer a juggernaut. She was a ghost. She found a secret Chozo shrine hidden beneath the wreckage—a place the Pirates had never discovered. In the center, a statue held out a gift: a simple, unadorned handgun. The Legendary Power Suit.
In the heart of Norfair, she found him. Kraid.
Samus ran. She sprinted through Tourian, her legs burning, her suit sparking. She burst out of the complex just as the world turned white behind her. Her gunship was waiting on a plateau. Metroid- Zero Mission
The new armor was not the same. It was sleeker. More aggressive. The shoulder pads were smaller, the visor sharper. It hummed with a power she’d never felt before—the distilled will of the Chozo, fused with her own desperate survival instinct.
She punched the engines and broke atmo.
She looked up.
She emerged from the wreckage as Ridley was torching the remains of her old gunship.
A massive, dragon-like ship descended. Ridley. The cunning god of the Space Pirates. He hadn't been in his lair. He’d been waiting.
The Zero Mission was complete. But Samus knew the truth. There was no such thing as zero. There was only the mission. And the next one was already waiting in the dark between stars. The Space Pirate base on Zebes was a crater
The brain floated in a column of nutrient goo, a grotesque puppet-master surrounded by gun turrets and laser walls. Samus had done this before. She remembered the victory. She forgot the cost.
The behemoth roared, his belly a grotesque arsenal of spikes. He was a mountain of rage and poor hygiene. Samus didn’t flinch. She danced between his pounding fists, feeding missiles into his gaping maw. When he finally collapsed, the resulting seismic wave cracked the foundation of the lair. She stood on his corpse, breathing hard, and felt the faint pulse of a new ability resonating from his hoard: the Varia Suit. The heat became a mild annoyance.
His talons caught her in the chest. She felt her suit’s systems fail one by one. The visor went dark. The servos locked. She crashed through rock and metal, tumbling into the depths of the crashed Frigate Orpheon—a derelict Pirate vessel from a previous battle. Ridley was a fossil in the making
She hit the Tourian checkpoint, and the world went silent. No bugs. No Geemers. Just the low thrum of a cloning machine. And then they came. Metroids.