Shattered Shine

**Shattered Shine** is the eighteenth chapter of Mega Man X: Unit 49's Season 1 and continuation of the last boss fight.

The chapter starts with Kran emitting several lights from his head, angered after remembering everything he passed in the last years and for hearing Zero insulting his dead mentor. He affirms the Maverick Hunters would call even a poor civilian a "miserable Maverick" if "their humans" ordered, that's what they did many times and their excuse to ruin innocent lives. He commands the 16 cannons to overdo their limit and shot randomly to open a gap for him to escape to one of his mirrors, and Zero goes back with Snacman to base because they were way more damaged than X. X finally gives up on trying to convince him and goes back to fighting. Kran uses one more trump card and disataches two mirrors from the network, maintaining them in the air with boosters. This time, X would have to fight alone and damaged, without a secure area to stay.

Kran manages to confuse X by charging all the mirrors the same time, shooting only energy rays but not himself, thus making his attacks even more unpredictable. When Kran apparently was going to a spot he couldn't dodge X's finishing shot, he simply detachs one more mirror and is reflected by the mirror while it is falling. He charges his arms with electricity and tries to attack X, but he manages to hold his hands, even though he wouldn't be able to resist for much longer. Kran mentions X's Unlimited Evolutionary Potential, saying he becomes stronger as he fights, but he was able to evolve intelectually to the point of learning how his opponents' minds work, meaning predicted their movements the whole fight. **X fears making a wrong decision and cause pain to mankind for that, yet he wants to preserve his own existence and paradoxically lets himself get beaten until there's a chance to defeat his enemies without great harm**, and that's the reason X hesitated to shoot Kran in most of his opportunities given to him, since that could be disastrous.

X says this is right, but he couldn't see any good in having a superior intellect capable of fooling two Class S Hunters if he couldn't clear the "evil clouds of revenge", that haze his sight of a world of peace, and suddenly his charged shot aura is transfered to his crystal and hands, giving him an absurd amount of strenght that could destroy Kran's hands in a second. This is supposed to be the same power that X used only decades before, in The Day of Σ.

Kran's will to fight remains even without his hands, and the lights coming from his head become even more frequent and numerous. He starts to corner X by moving the three floating mirrors at once, and when X realized, **Kran was coordinating all of the mirrors at the same time and all of them were floating.** He says X will have to choose between him and the humans, while X is still running towards the center. When he reaches it, in midair, the circle mark in the middle of the cross corridors opens and a disk-shaped mirror appears. X remembers Kran saying in Reception Hall that "*You should get used with things coming from below you*", and that was a hint to his final attack.

If he waited more, both would crash with the hovering mirror and die; if he shoot in that moment, he could have a chance of being thrown away by the shockwave, but the damage it would cause could be catastrophical.

X assumes his comrades would be once again demoralized if he died and would not be able to prevent the war between the Earth's Army and the Neo Maverick Army, and damages of the magnitude he was about to cause would be dealt over and over again. X shoots the mirror before Kran is able to materialize, making the mirror expell an energy beam upwards with more energy than a nuclear bomb in the first fraction of seconds, making a shockwave strong enough to throw X for more than a half kilometer away. After this, the already shattered surface starts to shoot powerful energy bursts in other directions, hitting the nearby cities until it finally becomes an explosion. The Iberian Castle falls apart, with only a small area of Castechno Inc. standing.

## **Trivia**

* The title *Shattered Shine*can regard both the lights coming from Kran's head when he sends command signals to the mirrors or the energy bursts of his demise, since they came from a shattered mirror.