[TheFightingSpirit]

Well, I have something a little different for you this week. Call it the mid-season break if you like, but you lovely lot are still getting some fiction to tide you over until the next "act" of Cross Ranger begins.

I was racking my brain trying to think of something awesome to do when I realized something. There are parts of the Fighting Spirit Saga that have yet to be touched, and others that need to be expanded on, and the mid-season break is the perfect time do that.

So without a do being in any way furthered, here is Cross Ranger's "Episode Zero"*

Five years ago

The young woman dragged her fiance up the hill by the hand.

“Come on, Walt. We’re going to miss it!”

His foot sunk into a molehill causing him to stumble. He sighed and looked back at the car. “It’s cooold. Why ever would you want to stare at the sky for a few hours? What’s so important about a bunch of lights?”

“It’s the actual Ziegler meteor shower,” she said, throwing his hand back at him. “It happens once every two centuries, and is getting more and more infrequent. It’s important.”

“Its just a load of rocks, Jen. Why don’t we head into the city and catch that new film you said you wanted to see?”

She stopped with her back toward him, and took in a hissing breath through her teeth. “I was trying to do something romantic. For once.”

“Oh. Okay...”

“Damn right, oh!” Jen looked up at the sky and shook her head. “What the hell is wrong with you?!”

Walt threw his hands in the air. “Forget it, I’m going back to the car… This stargazing stuff just isn’t my thing, dude.”

She looked at him aghast with eyes wide as he turned and trudged back down the hill. A shooting star sailed overhead, flaring a brilliant white in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. It didn’t matter what Walt wanted to do, she told herself, she wanted to watch the shower.

Jen dashed the rest of the way to the crest of the hill. The longer she watched more and more meteors joined the procession of lights.

Pfft. He wouldn’t recognise something amazing if it hit him in the face. He’s the one missing out here.

Though she was acutely aware of a growing commotion behind her, Jen was so engrossed in the night’s sky she thought nothing of it.

She heard footsteps on the ground behind her and smiled. Here it is. My apology.

A man in a black t-shirt barrelled past her clutching a portable telescope. A second man carrying a tripod followed closely.

“That’s not … what’s happening?!” the first screamed, nearly tumbling down the opposite slope.

Jen frowned. “Wait... what?”

She glanced over her shoulder. An overweight woman wearing thick lens glasses ran up to her, a pleading look in her eyes. Behind her was a trail of her belongings. “You have to run.”

She saw Walt scrambling towards her.

He’d left the car door wide open.

A bright flash turned night into day.

A split second later a thunderous explosion knocked them all off their feet.

The last thing thing she remembered was Walt wrapping his arms around her and yelling, “I’m sorry. I do love-”

She wanted to forgive him, she really did, but time had ran out.

By the time the falling meteorite blew a chunk out of the hillside and tore a long, tapering scar across the land, Jen, Walt, and the three stargazers were no more.

o0o

A silver armoured ranger clad in flowing white robes stood at the edge of the crater. Below him smouldered the still white hot fragment of rock along with what remained of the poor unfortunate souls killed in its dramatic fall to Earth.

He shook his head.

“This world is not the one I expected.”

His voice sounded jagged, broken and fuzzy, like a low quality audio recording. It almost seemed to have a polyphony to it.

Though it pained him to look any longer, the ranger forced himself. He glazed over the eviscerated finger, the splinters of telescope, and the molten glass of a car windshield to peer deeper into the crater.

“There.” His helmet HUD zoomed in on the rock, and more specifically the flow of black liquid that oozed from it.

[You could help them now, if you had the balls. Change the future. Do it.] said a female voice over his helmets intercom

“Too soon.” The ranger sighed. “This world will only be ready for me when the Spirit tries to take control.”

He turned to walk back into the forest, back the way he came, but a ghastly wailing broke his stride.

The bodies of the crash victims, red, raw, and fused together into one horrifying mass of flesh, pulled itself up over the lip of the crater and howled in pain.

“I’m - wrong... car!”

The ranger hung his head.

“Sorry, s-sorry, ruuuun...” Each word, phrase and sentence fragment had a different tone to it, as though spoken by multiple separate people.

[Now you want to help?]

“Let me end your suffering.”

The silver-armoured hero shrugged off his robes and crouched low. He leaped into the air, glowing much like a star, and rocketed straight through the mutant mass and out the other side. The monstrous form began to collapse in on itself.

[You and I both know that’s not going to be enough to defeat it, sweetheart.]

“No… you’re right…”

Without hesitation, he reached up and pulled the glowing red jewel off the centre of his chest, with an audible shearing of exotic metal. A rainbow of light poured out from inside his suit.

The voice on the other end of the comm line sighed. [This again? Are you really going to make me wait another decade or two...? I'm not the immortal here, I'm not getting any younger!]

“I have to do this.”

[So you said the last time you killed yourself… and the time before that. What you have to do is to find a way of ending your battles that doesn't involve suicide.]

He stepped up to the screaming mutant, unafraid of what would surely happen next. He drove the jewel directly into the open wound with his clenched fist.

The monster roared one final time. “What. Whaaat! Have to… I love y- y-.”

The ranger shifted his gaze back to the fragment. “The rangers of this era will handle the evil.” He looked up at the mutant, and spoke as though talking to it directly. “Today I sacrifice myself for you, souls ripped too soon from the physical realm. This is not my time.”

The energy in his suit built to overload, burning the two of them from the inside out. “One day, they will truly need my help. Then I shall return, don’t you worry. No one else will have to suffer the fate you have this night.”

He bowed his head in respect for the lives lost, and in that moment, the fire ball blossomed to consume them both.

o0o
Three years ago

Thankfully the messenger from his superiors left as quickly as he came. General Bryant grunted in frustration.

He dropped his new orders into the waste paper basket beside his desk and took up his jacket and beret from the coat rack by the door.

It had been two years ago, days after the initial mutant attacks, that he had first suggested the formation of an agency whose sole purpose would be to protect the populace and ensure the infection spread no further than that acursed forest.

Two years on and the Black Water had wiped out no less than ten towns and villages in the south and had long since passed the forest boundaries, all because his superiors thought the combined might of the army and the pandemics squad would be enough.

Had they listened perhaps the world would be 20,000 people stronger, he thought. Of course… of course they knew better.

“...And only now they decide to agree,” he finished out loud. “Too little, too late!”

His subordinates flinched away from him as he passed them in the corridor. They never had grown spines. Then again, they were no long his subordinates at all. They were General Hartford’s.

Effective immediately, he was needed at some top secret mountain base just outside of Steele City. With apparently no time for an official hand over, Bryant hoped Hartford was less of the fool he’d been lead to believe all these years.

As long as I get my pick of personnel I might be able to turn this whole mess around.

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Stay tuned in the next few days for more announcements and sneak peaks. I'm not done yet!

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*in true anime and manga style, chapter or episode zero always seems to come after the fact... don't ask me why.