The monster crashed to the ground, having finally been defeated by Samus. It had once been her exact replica, then had grown to an enormous mutated mockery before finally yielding to the famed Bounty Huntress herself. As expected from all X, a blue gel core burst out of the creature, puffing with air as it floated away. Samus leapt after it, hoping to capture it for the abilities locked within it. But just as she did so, the core suddenly darted through the air and out of the room, oozing its way through some rubble blocking a passage beyond.

"Damn!" exclaimed Samus, denied both a potential resupply and assurance that her enemy had indeed been defeated. After all, that X could regenerate and come back. "Oh well," Samus shrugged as she jumped up to the top of the room, "This place is going to hell anyways. I'll see it there."

Her Fusion Suit aiding her, she reached a hatch at the very top of the tall, wide room. This hatch led into another, smaller room that resembled a starship's Bridge. The captain's chair and console were both directly in front of her as she came in, and a ring of operations stations surrounded a large holographic table in the very center. She strode to this table, and, tapping in a series of commands, finally reached the station's orbital controls. Right now, according to the readout, the station was nearing perigee. This was perfect news for Samus, it would make execution of her next command quite a bit easier.

"Deorbit maneuver in progress. Destination: SR-388. Arrival: three minutes" The space station's PA delivered this final message throughout the maze of its halls and chambers. As it did so, the station itself lurched as the thrusters began braking and lowering orbit.

There wasn't much time before the station's lack of reentry shielding would become apparent. Samus began her mad dash to the Docking Bay, as everything around her began crumbling. The station shook uncontrollably as the friction of the planet's atmosphere began to buffet the structure back and forth. Plasma erupted from power conduits which had shaken loose. Rubble from explosions littered the ground. And yet, Samus sprinted through it all, taking turns and sliding under obstacles, mantling over other obstacles, taking her body and Suit to the absolute limit in the race back to her ship.

"Arrival in two minutes." the PA announced just as she emerged through the Docking Bay access, only to see the empty berth where her ship should have been. "What the hell?" asked Samus aloud to herself.

She tried to raise her ship's computer on her comm channels, but before she could finish, a loud shriek echoed through the chamber. From the shadows across the room emerged the giant reptilian beast known as Omega Metroid; towering ten feet tall and brandishing its massive claws, it lunged at Samus without warning. The surprised heroine was barely able to leap back to avoid being batted across the room by the enraged creature.

She quickly assessed the threat coming at her, and knowing Metroids of all types were vulnerable to ice, quickly armed her Ice Missiles. The Omega Metroid had been staggered by its near miss, leaving its belly vulnerable. Samus let her first shot off, and the Missile hit the intended target. Strangely, however, the Metroid survived the hit. Samus tapped the Missile trigger in her Arm Cannon again, and once more her Missile struck home But again, the Metroid was entirely unaffected.

Then the Metroid regained its surprise advantage. Despite its immense mass, it suddenly jumped high in the air! Samus could only tuck and roll under the Omega as it came down. She had not quite finished her dodge roll yet as her enemy landed, and the tremor knocked Samus to the ground. To regain her footing, she crunched her legs to spring up from the ground, but it was too late. The Omega Metroid planted its foot on Samus, then the other foot, pinning her down. None of Samus' retaliatory Beam shots even fazed the thing, as it kept beating her into the ground. Samus could only watch and wait as her body was slammed into the ground again and again, her suit's shield energy depleting rapidly with each hit.

Then, from nowhere, salvation arrived in the form of an Ice Beam shot. Said shot hit the belly of the beast dead on, driving the beast back and off of her pinned self. As the Omega screeched in pain Samus, now luckily freed from death's grasp, rolled aside. She knew that her shield had been damaged heavily, to the point of triggering the "low energy" siren, and now there were two potential threats. She looked in the direction from whence the shot had come, and saw her mimicry standing in the hatch, Arm Cannon still raised at the Omega.

The SA-X began charging at the beast, its copy Speed Booster accelerating it to almost untraceable speeds. As it did so, it fired its Ice Beam again and again, until finally it was upon the Metroid, where SA-X used its momentum to somersault over.

But the SA-X had been weakened during its earlier fight with Samus, and as the Omega swiped above its head in a counterattack, this became evident. The X doppelganger was launched back the way it had come, slamming to the ground in a final slump of defeat. As it did so, the Core again emerged from the form it had taken, oozing out of the replica armor plating.

"Not this time," Samus said as she planted her boot on the escaping Core. Her Suit readily absorbed the Core's gelatinous substance into itself, and then into Samus' body. Just like all the thousands of X she had absorbed before, she absorbed the energies and data within, as if were food for her body and mind. This one, however, happened to be special. The suit shielding was suddenly recharged to its maximum. The Beam weapon finally gained its last upgrade, the one weapon Samus had had to go without the entire mission. Indicating this, the suit's Visor flashed a message across the screen, "Ice Beam Restored."

The PA chirped again, "Arrival in one minute."

Samus immediately acted, turning back to the Omega Metroid and pelting its belly with her Beam once more. Her new Ice Beam combined well with the other upgrades to the Beam, causing each strike to inflict massive damage. Aside from its loud shrieking of pain, the Omega could do nothing but try in vain to block the Bounty Huntress' shooting. And as thirty seconds remained on the clock, the Omega finally submitted to Samus' hail of fire, crashing down spectacularly in its final fall to death.

There was one last problem to be resolved. The armored huntress turned back to the berth where her ship should have been. Almost as if it were scheduled, the purple spaceship swooped in, lowering its ramp so she could leap into the craft. After her jump into her waiting ship, with the ramp closed behind her, it finally pulled away for good. Samus quickly made her way to the cockpit, taking a seat in her chair as the ship reoriented.

The space station, upon which Samus had conducted the mission, was now consumed in the fireball of reentry. In quite a spectacular fashion, began to disintegrate, shredding itself apart as it plummeted through the atmosphere of planet SR-388. The station split into several flaming fragments, which rained down on the surface. As the final, largest segment hit, and as Samus looked on, the bright flash of light seemed to cover the whole visible side of the planet.

"Well, at least all the X were destroyed," remarked Samus as she removed her suit's helmet.

"Heavy-duty space station reactors make great nukes," replied Adam, the artificial intelligence inhabiting and piloting the ship, "Threat eliminated. X parasites both on the ship and planetside have zero percent chance of survival."

THREE DAYS LATER

The stars that had once been mere lines now faded into the little points of light that they normally were, and the planet lingered in the bottom of the viewport.

"Here we are," Adam told Samus as he put the ship into orbit, "SR-666, the planet we got that distress signal from. According to the records, a Federation terraforming project is underway here."

"Well, the distress said something about containment going wrong," replied Samus as she gazed out the viewport to the lush, green and blue planet below.

"Yes, it did," responded Adam, "but this planet has an unusually thick and powerful ionosphere. Comm systems aren't designed to pierce such an intense blanket of interference, and scanners can't discern the readings from the atmosphere's trickery. Because of this, I can't reach anyone or see anything on the surface."

"Well, that means only one thing. It means we have to set down so I can scout out what's going on."

Adam pulled the ship down from orbit and began entry into the atmosphere. "Exactly. But where to land?"

The small purple gunship lowered further and further towards the planetary surface, and it was here that Samus finally could see the true beauty of the surface. As the ship skimmed over the treetops of the lush, green forest below, she could see a massive lake nearby, gleaming with the sunlight reflecting off of its nearly calm surface. Beyond it, a mountain straight out of a classical painting had seemingly risen from the ground and soared to the heavens above. Lava could be seen running down portions of its surface, stream after stream of molten rock flowed from the summit back to the surface below.

The dense forest the ship was flying over soon gave way to a vast, nearly blank grassland. It was here that Samus could finally see some of the structures that dotted the area, and to the relief of Adam, one of those structures was in fact a landing platform. Adam dropped the landing gear, and with a few last thruster burns, placed the ship perfectly atop the circle of tarmac. The engines powered down, the hatch opened, and Samus stepped onto the lift, letting it carry her up through the open hatch on top of the ship.

Samus spun a full circle from her vantage point, taking a look at what was around her, before finally leaping down with practiced grace to the surface proper.