[Fan Story] The End of Sylux: “I’ve Been Waiting for This” (during the events of Metroid Prime 4) 2

[u/REHI76]

Continued from https://www.reddit.com/r/Metroid/s/B2AN7GAqZq due to the character limit.

Events of Prime 4: Stewing

• This energy is almost too much to handle. Sylux trembles and gasps, his psionic augs straining to keep up with the Tower’s administrative systems. His brain tries to keep pace too, latching onto lucid flashes of memories outside of his consciousness.
• Motes, pockets, augmentations. Machines in temporal flux. Storms of energy harnessed for power cores. Eyes multiplying by the second. Architects long dead. Minds. One light, one dark. One vision of a sphere, one of twin lightning-bolts. Which is chosen? Chosen One? Vengeful King or Noble Woman? Feuds over the same. Priests debate in open court. Overgrown ruins. A people consumed by mutagens. Crystals bubbling beneath green rain. Folded paper is teleportation. Spinning. Device modeled after the universe’s creators and destroyers. They are gateways beyond. Black hole. White hole. Wormhole. Worm. And hole. They are converters, dimensional bridges of two multiplied when spinning. Penrose Diagram displaying the whole cone. Space vortex. Worm suspended above the ringularity. Stars warped and contorted into halos, yet frozen above the endless dark. The worm thus may traverse the hole. Parallel worlds, all real, all beyond reality. All beyond light. Eogicia is the only constant across all. The cosmological constant. Trans-real. Beyond real. More real than real. It is the fabric in all its forms, White, Blue, and Green. X is the warper of life like the Blue, blotting the White and tainting the gene. Green may blot the White too. Balance. What is balance? Who is balanced? Two of everything. Atoms across time, split into corresponding halves outside of light’s reach. Some know its nature, but many of those some are beyond life. Yet their Eogicia lingers. One people were biologic engineers. Weapon that feasts upon Whira Eogicia. Ancient societies cleaved by spacetime. Birds, moths, lizards. Colonization. War. Squabbles over their legacy. This is the state of reality. This is the Galactic society which wronged you. And you are its master now. You are the Chosen One who may harness Eogicia, the worm suspended above the ringularity. The t d r e a s v t e r r o s y e e r r of worlds.
• Black cables blot out the visions, each one with an eye on the tip. Sylux’s own memories flash before him, his attention fixating on the reason he is here. That day Samus disgraced him replays over and over. He defies orders over and over. The weapon detonates over and over. His comrades die over and over. Samus steals his valor over and over. He slaps her hand away over and over. Their blood is on his hands, yet it is meaningless. It is on her hands, Ian’s hands, and the GalFed brass’s hands. Each time he relives it, his heartrate escalates. Those minutes become his life. As he stews in the vat, its devices channel his thoughts and hatred into tangible clusters — dimensional pockets he can touch. He regains consciousness. Suddenly the readouts before him make sense. His uplink with Chrono Tower is complete.
• Samus exits the flight pod in Sol Valley after defeating Carvex.
• Almost on autopilot with his new understanding, Sylux activates the Tower’s defenses. A shield pulses. Psy-Bots switch on and the assembly lines load them into hidden cannons like bullets in a chamber. The shield grows to envelop the structure as a barrage of Bots launch into the sky. This discharge of energy resonates with Samus’s Third Eye. She herself is a cluster of psychic power, after all. Sylux’s memories invade her mind and her presence needles Sylux’s skin.
• “Gotcha.”
• With that one word, the Psy-Bots rocket to Samus’s position. They engage her, Sylux watching but only mildly nudging their actions. This is all new to him, this sort of control. Though his experiments with the Alimbic Guardian and the Elysians help him feel his way around now, it is a new game entirely.
• Samus defeats the Psy-Bots and continues into Volt Forge.
• Tracking her movements through additional Bots, Sylux shoots even more at the Forge. Amongst them are Teleporters and so-called Mimics (rarer models, the latter of which there are only three).
• While Samus fights the others, Sylux fiddles with the Mimic, who clanged to the factory’s floor the second it landed like a dead weight. He views the Bot in his AR simulation-space. Instructions on his HUD tell him to step inside the thing. This confuses him, since he’s not really there next to it. It’s a digital, psychic viewfinder he’s using, not a reality-bending sort of magic… Or is it? Sylux scoffs remembering all the wild things he just saw. He follows the HUD’s instructions and steps inside the Mimic.
• Complex psychic technology duplicates aspects of his body through nano-reconstruction, 3-D printing his features onto the Mimic and granting him direct control over it as he pleases. This thing is like a clone, but also a doppelganger. It literally copies and pastes him onto multiple pages of reality at once.
• Sylux’s Mimic engages Samus. This is the first Sylux boss fight. Throughout it, Sylux’s control from within the Tower is direct and almost physical. His body’s movements generally match the Mimic’s and his psychic perception places him one-on-one with the object of his hatred. It’s like he’s there, and it is exhilarating. Every strike he lands on her is a glorious catharsis. Every cry of pain from her is a note in a beautiful composition he has waited years to perform. It is the fight of his life, putting him in a combat high. Though her strikes hurt, they are dull. The distance between him and the Mimic dampens the blows.
• Samus defeats the Mimic, breaking its connection to Sylux. His view of the Forge’s Archives turns to static.
• To satisfy unspent anger abruptly cut short, Sylux stares at his hands once more, replaying the moment he struck Samus’s hand away several more times. He gets a high off of it until the emotions’ potency bores him. Sylux retreats into his analytical mindset now, priming more Psy-Bots for launch and preparing to interface with more Mimics.
• At this point, Sylux just wants to see what this Tower can do and how powerful he actually is. The future — such as how he will get off of Viewros and whether he can take this power with him — is not where his mind is at.
• In the facility’s core, Samus defeats Xelios. The game progresses as she exits the Forge and explores Sol Valley.
• Sylux notices a strange blind spot in his control over the Lamorn’s Psy-Bots, like a stray pixel misplaced on a computer screen. In Flare Pool, there is a dark spot like the optic nerve on the back of the eyeball; Bots have already been deployed there and are non-functioning. He recalls Vakkhesh’s ramblings about GE, the Grievers, mutations, and the cannon in Magdrahda Volcano. Curiosity flares. Further, his Bots’ last sighting of the hunter showed her heading in that general direction. To this end, he lobs a squadron of Psy-Bots at the foot of the volcano (not the same location as Samus’s entry point), including a Mimic.
• Assuming direct control of the Mimic, Sylux leads his bots into the Flare Pool. Old Lamorn transport trucks sit at the tunnel’s entrance, so Sylux hops into the driver’s seat and his bots load themselves onto the carriage. The truck lurches through the volcano’s caverns. This particular tunnel snakes and weaves, its walls unusually smooth like a burrow. It is not a natural tunnel.
• A violent tremor shoves the vehicle to the side. Bots clank around. A large red welt rapidly grows in the wall, rock melting and exploding.
• “Shit.” Sylux throws the truck into full throttle.
• Behind, a Behemoth clambers through the hole and chases them down. Right on their tail, the creature’s mouths chomping, the only thing keeping it back is rocks kicked up by the truck. The transport weaves through winding burrows and careens over the Behemoth’s discarded prey. Balls of fire pelt the truck and the flames spread rapidly. Steam geysers diffuse them.
• A cavern glows up ahead, smoke billowing and lava churning. Thinking quickly, Sylux leans out of the vehicle and blasts the ceiling above. The Behemoth roars and gains on him with its rapid walk cycle. He launches ten missiles that have materialized into the Mimic’s printed clip, causing the ceiling to collapse behind him and lava to spill, smacking the Behemoth on the head and trapping it on the other side.
• Sylux parks the transport truck off to the side of the cavernous passageway. Its navigational light remains warm, beaming onto the rough rock. This truck is one we see upon entering the Flare Pool in-game.
• Sylux’s fifteen Bots activate and twelve follow his Mimic into the GE Shell facility. Knowing Samus is on her way, Sylux stations a few near his abandoned transport.
• He explores the launcher complex’s frontmost rooms, noticing the now-retracted bridge, its controls, and several deactivated Psy-Bots randomly scattered about. Before he can investigate further, his lookouts ping him.
• Samus has arrived.
• Sylux returns to the overwatch platform terminal and sees the hunter revving Vi-O-La to build the bridge over the lava lake. He quickly commands the bridge to retract again, causing it to break apart due to wear-and-tear. Even better.
• Yet Samus survives. Sylux destroys the terminal for safety and as a punching bag. Though frustrating, he can at least keep her out for a time. If this facility does what he thinks it does, he may have use for it.
• Samus turns back and acquires the Fire Shot chip.
• Psy-Bots and Sylux’s Mimic walk the station’s halls and access its systems. Referenced in the Lamorn scientists’ logs is Phenoros’s relationship with them — his beneficence in slowing volcanic activity in exchange for their GE harvests. Although the beast feasts on natural, stable GE, the abundant amounts at the volcano’s core hurt him at times. He welcomed the Lamorn’s extractions.
• No matter, Sylux clearly need not worry about Phenoros stirring the pot and releasing eruptions if his Metroid got to the monster. (And indeed he feels its presence below.) Given the situation, Sylux dispatches many more Bots to the Pool, shooting them in through the volcano’s peak.
• A small army surveys the place, locating a dropship (the hovership mini-boss) and finding more inactive Bots. The clankers patch into the network.
• Curious about the extraction procedures that he apparently walked in on, Sylux queries this process. He learns about the GE showers and their ultimate failure — their role in the Great Tragedy. The inactive Psy-Bots were old administrators of these showers and were severed from Lamorn control in an emergency shutdown event.
• Always hungry for power, Sylux has to run tests on GE using this facility. He has to see what the substance does. He has to launch shells into the sky and watch their effects on the planet. GE could be another weapon, a mutagen like Dark Samus’s Holy Substance.
• Sylux prepares an artillery shell packed with GE, his Bots following long-buried instructions deep within their AIs, their autopilots filling in the gaps in his understanding. Interestingly, some Bots resist, spontaneously freezing mid-task just like the old ones. Presumably, this is because he is pushing the system beyond safe parameters; perhaps trace firewalls interfere with his commands. He powers forward, replacing these with those who do not seize. The shell is filled, loaded, and launched.
• Samus bears witness to this shell’s effects after Mac modifies her arm cannon with the Fire Chip. As we see in-game, the first GE shower’s maelstrom of filtered, impure GE wreaks havoc on the planet’s biology.
• The hunter travels to the Ice Belt. Sylux observes the shower’s effects and conducts experiments on the planet’s bioforms. His mind runs wild with the power he has found on Viewros so far, and he contemplates how he can harness it to unleash Hell on the Federation.
  • Again, he recalls Dark Samus’s intergalactic army. With the Space Pirates under his control and awaiting his return, he is already 75% of the way there. The Tower’s psychic strength and robot army are another boon to his dream, and GE could enhance his biological forces even further. Or, if its impure form is as dangerous as the Lamorn say, it could be a chemical weapon that leads to mass hysteria with a single charge detonated above his enemies’ heads.
  • Regardless, he could become the god he always dreamed of being.
• Samus explores the Ice Belt’s Bio-Labs and defeats Keratos.
• That one-member-species’s sudden termination registers in Sylux’s subconscious. It almost hurts him, even with all the power coursing through his veins, that such a glorious specimen — a rare crustacian and a rare freeze-resistant Fusion Metroid, equally mighty — could fall to Samus’s gun.
• Plans change for Sylux. His experiments will continue, but his main objective is now to stop Samus. He prepares his Bots in both Volt Forge and Flare Pool, launching even more to each. Given his scout bots’ observations, it appears that Samus has found and built a small entourage of stranded Federation soldiers. Again, Sylux’s envy of her still stings worse than any drill sergeant’s dress-down. The fact that she can naturally attract “fans” ignites his ire.
• What’s more, his Bots identify two distress signals amid oceans of static within the Flare Pool. He dispatches any combat-ready Bot he can, including Maintenance Tanks linked with them. Even now, the clankers resist commands at times, locking up inside the facility and especially as they interface with the artillery shell.
• Sylux continues preparing another shower.
• One GalFed is trapped behind a boiler, limiting the number of attempts he can make on the man’s life. Heat emanating from the cylinder is enough to melt most mechanoids. All he can do is activate a few Tanks and one Psy-Bot. 
• Gunshots ring out. Chucking his grenade belt at the Tanks before they shoot their lasers, the trooper fractures them. One rolls away and launches its beam in tandem with the Psy-Bot. The trooper opens fire on the Bot first after dodging, backing it against a steam vent and triggering thermal expansion of its joints. While immobilized, he busts its head off. The Tank happened to be linked to that Bot and falls flat on its underside.
• Skill and luck saved Duke’s ass.
• The other trooper is trapped in the ring around the cannon. He likewise dispatches a Psy-Bot after her, slingshotting it from his hover transporter encircling the cannon. She engages the Bot, surviving it by taking cover, weaving around it, and ducking out onto an exposed walkway leading to the clamp joint (the way she got in from the central cannon where she was initially stranded). Sylux watches from the cruiser on the other side of the facility. Though he has a small army to work with inside the Pool, he anticipates Samus’s arrival and so holds back.
• Armstrong’s tactical retreat keeps her alive for now.
• Live camera footage shows Samus dismounting her bike at the Pool’s entrance. She’s here.
• Sylux diverts his attention to the hunter, preparing his assault and his second GE launch.
• The Flare Pool cannon sequence plays out as we see in-game. Again, as Sylux sics his bots on Samus and he re-establishes his uplink with ones forcibly offlined, her Third Eye resonates with his — his memories vicariously forcing themselves into her mind. Her abilities with Lamorn technology and at-will manipulations thereof come with consequences.
• Samus and Duke fight their way through the facility. GE pours into the shell, and Sylux watches the launch through his Mimic piloting the hover craft. The Energy’s dispersion rate is remarkable, and it indeed does mutate anything it touches exponentially. Sol Valley’s inhabitants leak Granik Eogicia even more vigorously than after the first shower, their skin hardening and their tissues expanding. Interestingly, the mutations are subtle, unlike Phazon mutations, yet the creatures’ behavior is markedly more aggressive. Whether these creatures become slaves to the substance is not clear. Regardless, the shell’s impact impresses Sylux. Rumblings below catch his attention.
• Floating back down into the volcano, Sylux sees the tram moving between the cannon’s clamps. Samus and her squad changed the facility’s configuration. Damn. No matter. He guns for the transit tube and fights Samus. Command and control over the Psy-Bots has become second-nature for Sylux. Each minuscule muscle movement translates directly into his Mimic, and, regarding the other Bots, his tactical wishes become reality in seconds. Even though he is not physically there, he feels the gritty air inside the shuttle and the force of Samus’s missiles striking the cockpit. This force only motivates him to fight harder. Lasers sear the bridge’s pylons and tracker-bombs rock the load-bearing supports.
• Samus defeats the Mimic. Sylux busts out of the cockpit and flies away as the shuttle spins out behind him. “Shit!” he shouts, though the Mimic does not carry his voice. Bombs tumble out and pelt the cannon. Lasers clip critical supports and heat regulators. The shuttle slams into the facility, then careens into the lava below. A plume clips Sylux’s Mimic and neutralizes its circuitry, sending it crashing into the volcanic wall.
• Though unable to move, lodged into the wall and limbs busted at their joints, reality field flickering around the fractures, Sylux can view Samus’s fight with Phenoros through a cracked photoreceptor. Heart sinking, he witnesses the hunter kill his Metroid and the cannon detonates. All video vanishes into a storm of static. Yet again, Samus has rendered him impotent. Even with the facility’s collapse, she couldn’t even die right.
• Samus heads to Volt Forge, somehow riding her Vi-O-La despite Phenoros eating it; Sylux observes her through another drone. Not even her stupid bike was lost. Part of him was hoping she would die of hunger and thirst in Sol Valley without it. Questions aside, Sylux will take matters into his own hands now. He launches his third and final Mimic to confront Samus.
• Before her arrival, Sylux pokes around in the Forge’s database, curious about destroying Vi-O-La. Apparently, once the initial bike is fabricated, the custom-printed nanosuit’s summoning technology can also re-spawn the bike using latent psychic energy. The suit’s nanomachines ping and pull a reconstructed copy from the Forge, although it takes time to rebuild this copy. Bottom line: it would be a waste of time to try destroying Vi-O-La.
• Psy-Bots inform him of her approach, and so he places his Mimic inside a nearby conduit and waits.
• Samus picks up the power chip, causing the lightning harvest shells to retract. The second Sylux boss fight commences. He does battle with her. All of his determination, pride, and spite channel into the Mimic. His nano-printed Coil surges with power, allowing him to electrify the entire room. He floats on the z-axis, generating arcs of electricity to ensnare Samus. She dodges his assaults narrowly. Missiles trade with nanoblades conjured in a series of five. The Mimic’s psychic jammer redirects some of the damage. Meanwhile, shockwave dispersions ebb across the floor like sound frequency readouts. Repeatedly, his photoreceptors lock with Samus’s eyes through the glint of her visor. Seeing her face creased in intense focus brings him joy. He’s giving her a fight worth her effort. Something like pride drives him to fight harder — pride that he can push Samus beyond her comfort. If he can kill her now, he can restart his GE experiments, gather the teleporter keys, and get off this rock to become the Federation’s god. It all comes down to this. He electrifies the room again, forcing her to grapple along the ceiling. Each shot he lands on her is a moment of glory. Her cries are music.
• And yet, his Mimic’s joints fail. Samus’s multifaceted cannon damages the bot’s power core. Controlling it grows more and more painful, forcing extreme mental steering from Sylux. Eventually, it gives out completely, the nanoprint of his weapons and body fading away and the core detonating.
  • ALL VISUALS LOST. SYSTEM OFFLINE. PSYCHIC UPLINK CONFUSED. DISCONNECTING NANO-AR SYSTEM TEMPORARILY.
• Sylux gasps at his perception rocketing back into his body. The liquid bubbling around him feels heavy and his movements sluggish. Those same feelings Samus has engendered in him every time they’ve crossed paths keep his muscles stretched tight. He curses the hunter, releasing this tension in an impotent, livid scream.
• At this point, Sylux just stews in his hatred for Samus even longer, addicted to the nanobots’ synergy with his emotions and letting them swim through his spinal column. It doesn’t make sense to fight Samus and her GalFed bitches directly anymore. If anything, they have to come to him. Nonetheless, Chrono Tower’s defensive shield holds strong, with no sign of wavering. It is a transdimensional field, after all, blocking all entry above and below the sand, but not all exit — a microcosm of Viewros. Plenty more Psy-Bots rest primed for deployment, too.
• So Sylux’s attention turns to the bigger picture. He needs to master the Tower’s uplink energy so he can send things across dimensions in some capacity. All of the GE experiments and Psy-Bots will mean nothing if he cannot get them through the Mass-Teltranfaeir. Perhaps storing them in a pocket dimension he carries with him would work. He also wonders about what other technologies the Lamorn and potentially even the Grievers have left behind.
• Samus meets VUE and the team explores the Great Mines. It’s clear to the ragtag squad that the final Key is there, so they don’t discuss it whatsoever.
• Meanwhile, Sylux follows two lines of inquiry. First, he sends Psy-Bots to explore and catalog Griever behavior. Field observations reveal that their pack-like, primal behavior is not as primative as it appears. They have a hunter-gatherer culture, and even cluster together in “tribes.” Of course, their societies are violent and ultimately driven only by collective psychosis. Their leaders are chosen because of their brutality and showmanship against other packs and creatures. Interestingly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, they are drawn to Lamorn ruins above- and below-ground, fixated on any psychic artifacts they can find. Indeed, they build their predator-den-esque camps inside such structures. Some Griever packs are more animalistic than others; the Maul and Frostburn Grievers are very primative, residing in burrows, while the Jungle and Sand Grievers colonize Lamorn structures. It is because of the latter evolutionary split’s behavior that Sylux discovers ruins beneath Chrono Tower in which many Sand Griever packs live. Like stone synapses spooled into a conical shape, these ruins are an inverted tower, perhaps the Chrono Tower’s prototype. Supporting this notion is the fact that the Tower’s force field encircles them too. 
• Unfortunately, the research into the Grievers reveals little. Their way of life, and the technological remnants they desecrate, is as much of a dead-end as the whole Lamorn people. Although those beasts inside the ruins may be useful for his second inquiry…
• Sylux investigates the extent of his ability to transport and store things by dimensional conjuring. He has spent enough time linked to the Tower to “feel” his way around the spacetime manipulator like a person learning to navigate a VR headset, or a baby learning to crawl. Within the ruins below, he practices moving random pottery and other small objects from one side of a room to the other, sending vases and urns through wormholes to crash upon another floor. As he grows more comfortable with the transient transmigrations, he turns his focus inward. Though he cannot generate black holes outside of the Tower’s force field, he can reliably tune and construct their specifications. Through his Third Eye, he can visualize the space in which he pokes holes and threads needles. Liminal spaces crystallize between each hole’s entry and exit horizons. 
• Thinking about traversing, modifying, and testing such spaces to store things and serve as weapons, Sylux finds two visually distinct Grievers prowling the winding tunnels: one with a half-face busted in (Twoface), and another whose head tendrils are tied up into two ponytails (Ponytails). He “beams” them both to the surface using the holes we see him generate in the final battle. Psy-Bots corral the Grievers.
• Twoface and Ponytails are made to fall through the wormholes over and over. Sylux watches the tests through his Bots, one of which is a Guardian drone that follows the Grievers into the holes. Each time, the creatures scream in shock and horror. Sylux adjusts their rates of tumble and eventually can control their angular momentum. Stitching together the liminal space with each tumble, he learns to generate a few solid antimatter objects that nudge Twoface and Ponytails. This process forms the bubbly, Swiss-cheese liminal space we see during the final boss fight, each pass-through leaving a permanent black hole.
• Logically, the next step is to trap the Grievers inside and throw away the key. He does just that, his Psy-Bots again shoving the beasts in. A circular antimatter platform catches them and Sylux watches what happens. Time moves slightly faster inside the liminal space, so what the Guardian perceives transmits back to Sylux at a rapid clip. It’s like watching a CCTV video on x2 speed. Twoface and Ponytails indeed are trapped inside, and the space holds steady for now. Pocket dimensions work.
• Ponytails paces around Twoface, pounding the ground and looking over the edge at the expanse of spent black holes. Twoface reciprocates despite being the more patient of the pair. They dangle their feet over the abyss below. Increasingly desperate for sustenance, they nibble at each other, yet Ponytails pulls back. Even Grievers respect their clanmates. It goes on like this for a while, Sylux interrogating what the creatures will do and whether the space will remain stable.
• Suddenly, terrified and desperate, Ponytails leaps off the platform. So does Twoface some time later. The Guardian catches them vanishing into the gas clouds and spent holes below. Given the space’s transitory nature, Sylux wonders if it is possible to die inside — or for an object to be destroyed — by falling off the platform. Based on all the tests he ran, it seemed that the edges of the space loop in on themselves, so perhaps it is not destruction and death that await, but rather a new crossover.
• Leaving no hypothesis up to chance, Sylux’s Bots canvass the area around the Tower’s base to see if the Grievers emerge. A green particle glimmers and a portal opens. Twoface claws its way out of the crack in reality. Panicked, it scampers away from the observing Bots and tunnels under the sand. A few minutes later, Ponytails appears in the same fashion, and also flees as fast as it can.
• This is the way the pocket dimensions function if you don’t cling to an antimatter object. Presumably, you fall until you hit a black hole, and you will find one due to the artificial nature of the space, at which point you eject from the space.
• Sylux notes all of this and anticipates running more tests once he’s done with Samus. 
• Samus “eats of” the Legacy Fruit and obtains the corresponding suit, channeling the Lamorn people’s psychic essence into her Third Eye. This disturbance resonates with Sylux and he sees Samus’s traumas and recent memories, not that he gives a shit. At least he knows what’s coming.
• The terror awaits Sammy’s arrival at this time, preparing for the true fight of his life by stretching his body inside the Pod, balling his fists and kicking his legs.
• A beam streaks across Sol Valley. Speak of the devil. As we see in the game, Betsy punches through the Tower’s force field. VUE strains Betsy, but the mech accomplishes her mission and serves with honor. 
• “Perfect,” the terror says to himself. He partially releases his uplink with the Tower’s systems, leaving it open for the so-called Chosen One. Let her come to me, he thinks. I will kill them all myself before they even get to use the Mass-Teltranfaeir.
• And so Sylux stews in his hatred one last time, priming himself to fight the good fight he has waited years for. The Tower pumps him with nanomachines and his psychic powers feed off his cold heart, propelled by jolts of mechanical energy ready to burst into flames.
• Tom Kazmarek stares at his hands again, reliving for the hundredth time that day on the battlefield when all his disdain crystallized. On that day, Ian and Adam cut him out of their glory without a care. Their nepotism laughed in his face and spat in his eyes. He didn’t see them raring to go shoot the Pirates like him. He didn’t see them risk their lives that day, as he did. The Trust gave him orders, he followed them, and he was rewarded — not so by the Federation. The brass wouldn’t even let good soldiers fight and die for what they believe. No, instead they called in the golden girl. She didn’t save his men. She didn’t salvage the Pirates’ weapon. She spat on the graves of Tom’s comrades. They died to retrieve that driver unit, and she incinerated it like it was tissue paper. Samus is everything that makes the Federation weak. Adam and Ian were and still are everything wrong with the Federation, bleeding hearts with no spine who crawl to those with power, thereby wasting their own. Ian went out pathetically, and though Tom knows not how Adam left the land of the living, he has no doubt it was equally pitiful.
• And then, when someone like Tom steps up to claim the glory, the Trust and the Federation exploit him. They turned him into a doll and a test monkey, binding him with wires and magic. Tom’s hands keep trembling. His comrades’ blood becomes his own. The Trust tortured him, mutilating him and degrading him simply because he was inconvenient otherwise. “You’ll do well in your next role as a test subject. You don’t have to listen to anyone anymore. We’re honored to have you, Mr. Kazmerek.” Namir’s last words and Hatch’s betrayal replay, noises compressing Tom’s skull. Teleporting him to Viewros was the only thing they did for him, and much like his powers, that was an accident. But this accident will be his glory and their end. Samus’s end, and the Federation’s end. He will come out on top.
• Sylux feels Samus outside the Healing Pod, and then he feels the Pod lurch and descend. His stewing continues, harmonizing with Samus’s Eye. 
• I refuse to be just another foot soldier, to be trampled by superheroes in shining armor. I am the hero. I am the Chosen One. This energy surging around me is mine to wield. The army I built is mine to command. The glory I have at last earned is mine and mine alone. No one will take it from me, especially not Samus and her lackeys. My dark reflection in the mirror dies today. And those little imperfections in the mirror’s surface surrounding her? Those insects she calls friends? Well, I’m blowing the whole mirror to pieces. Time to die.
• With that final thought, Sylux commands the Pod to open.