A/N: It's shorter than I'd like, but I figure it makes for a good prologue Thanks for reading, and please review!

"You want just one criminal in a crowded room killed, send an assassin. You want to kill a few, send a bounty hunter. You want to kill them all, you send The Headsman."- Popular Marshals' adage in the Border Clusters

It had been a while since Samus had seen her own blood.

It looked...weird. It was a lot brighter than she remembered; more viscous. It oozed along the fractured plates of her armor and down her arm. Dripping off the end of her finger. Pooling onto the sand swept rock. Staining the tips of her honey blonde hair.

This was not good.

Samus didn't know when her helmet had come off. She remembered taking the hit, remembered the grenade and the explosion. She remembered the painful tumble into the small box canyon she lay in, but for the life of her, she couldn't recall when her God damn helmet had popped off. It lay on its side some ways from where Samus had landed. The visor cracked and dented at odd angles, deep rents along the dome from heavy claws, plasma burns blackening the vibrant red paint scheme. To her right lay her trusty Arm Cannon, equally as dented and tarnished as her helmet. Mottled by scratches, ozone drifted up from its ion-burnt muzzle with an audible hiss.

Samus blinked and reached out to her weapon tentatively. A sensation like pins and needless raced up her arm and focused at the tips of her fingers as she grabbed hold of the tubular weapon and pulled it to her. Carefully Samus pushed herself into a sitting position, immediately pain spiked up from under her right armpit. The tell-tale sound of blood belching up from between the plates of her Suit let Samus identify the source of her agony, a section of her armor had been blown completely open and an ugly feeling gouge had been punched into her ribcage. It hurt like a bastard and it was bleeding bad. With pained effort Samus managed to reach her left hand around and over the gaping wound in hopes to apply some kind of pressure on it to step the flow of carmine fluids down her Power Suit.

The rumble of boots against loose rock and dirt caught her attention. "Hey, Boss! She's down here!"

Samus leveled her Cannon at the bandit's fuzzy shape and fired a succession of power beams. The ruinous bolts of energy struck the bandit in his neck, jaw, and face, rendering those parts of his anatomy into a charred crater.

"Shit, Huey!" Another bandit screamed. Samus snapped onto him and fired another volley but missed as he ducked behind a turn in the passage. "The crazy bitch is still alive!"

Too late Samus saw the lance of energy lashing out with a crash and burst into a flash along her collar. The blast knocked the wind clean out of her and sent her against a slab of sandstone. Her vision blurred up and her head throbbed even further.

"Don't know when to quit, do you?" A voice hissed as gravelly footsteps approached. Through the bright spots in her eyes Samus saw the vague shapes of her quarry saunter towards her. Gordan Thaleed. Escaped convict, petty criminal, and serial bank robber. Most recently Gordan's biggest accomplishment was the armed robbery of a caravan in a city to the south-east, the number of security personnel and local law-enforcement officers Gordan and his team managed to gun down before fleeing the scene had served to graduate him to the pool of most wanted men by the Interstellar Law Marshals. But it was a long list.

Like an expert rogue in a den of cutthroats, Gordon was flanked on one side by two of his cronies. Samus didn't recall their names, the gang had swelled their numbers so much in the past month it was hard to keep up, but both were outfitted in modest tactical gear and toting slug-throwers they had bought using the payment from their heist.

"Think you could just come back to Valmora and everything would be the same? Still the sparkling jewel of the Border Clusters just like the good ol'days," Gordan sneered, spitting a load of phlegm. "Well, part of that might be true. But you forgot everything she taught you. You shoulda been in that ship of yours, rained this whole pissbox crevass with enough plasma to scorch it to glass and come after our remains. Like the Guild taught'cha. But you didn't. Instead, you came at us from up front. Tits out an guns blazin'. We led you on a merry little chase, didn't we? And when your wits slipped up you got lured into a bottleneck and gunned down like a bitch. Walked right into an ambush by a bunch of third-rate crooks. How the mighty have fallen, grown fat on the Federation's dime and lost what Valmora had made you into."

Gordan came to a stop beside Samus' helmet and she glowered up into his pale gray eyes wishing she could actually glare daggers. "The Champion of the Chozo. Maiden of New Malinois. Mightiest bounty hunter in the Federation, Samus Aran."

Gordon reared his foot back and struck Samus in her abdomen before she could react. The bandit lord grinned gleefully at the pained croon Samus gave an agonized groan as she clutched her midsection. A second kick connected to her shoulder and knocked Samus over again. In some loathsome part of her being, Samus knew Gordon was right, and her current state was deserved. What the hell did she think she was doing, coming back to the Border Clusters and snatching up the first job that caught her eye? What did she expect? She honestly didn't know, but it never crossed her mind that she would be outdone by a stick-up man high on the stink of his own shit, and the smug goons on his payroll.

"To be honest, I'm a little disappointed," Gordan sighed. "How many people did me and my guys kill in Vitya, two or three dozen? And the best the Marshals can do is sic a has-been Fed lackey. Are the Marshals so starved for help that-"

There was suddenly an explosive report that rang out from somewhere above the bandits, and an instant later the side of the one of the thug's head blew apart like a melon, spattering bits of bone and brain and blood across Gordan and the other bandit as they flinched away, a flurry of oaths spewing from their mouths.

"Sniper!" Gordan only just managed to shout as a second shot rang out and his chest erupted in a spray of bloody pulp and he tumbled back to the sandy ground with a wail of agony and a fit of curses. The last of his cronies made to flee back down the passage he had come but was gunned down with a shot to his neck before he made it ten feet. His body smacked against the canyon wall before collapsed into a heap with a wake of blood marking his passage.

Samus lay in the death-strewn crevice and stared at Gordon as he struggled to his feet, one hand clutched the hole in his sternum while the other supported his weight. The sound of metal grinding against rough stone and plate clanking against plate filled the small enclosure as something large and heavy landed in the dirt. Gordon gave a furious roar and charged out of sight. His defiance was short, and rapid thuds - the telltale sound of a fistfight - preceded a sharp crack of breaking bones. Gordon's voice sounded with a shriek that was cut short by a whipping sound. Gordon's body collapsed onto the ground across from her, twitching violently. Blood sputtering from the stump atop his neck where his head should have been.

Plated black boots sauntered across the disturbed sands in front of her eyes, a glowing red muzzle brake casually swinging beside them at the end of a barrel still wafting gunsmoke. Samus glanced her eyes up at her inadvertent rescuer. A black colossus defiant of the vibrant blue sky loomed above her. The rifle hung on a sling around his shoulders; one hand clutched the handle of a white bladed knife that gleamed with a patient and sinister cunning and the other held the severed head of Gordon Thaleed by a fistful of hair. A mask of black death that gleamed under the glare of the morning sun and two red slits of light glared into her very soul. The backdrop of the desert stuttered suddenly, and a pixelated pattern crackled across the sky. The scorching heat of the sun gave away to an enclosed capsule.

"Now," Sloan said as the simulation ended, and Samus' surroundings returned to the VR capsule on his ship. "Tell me what you did wrong."