Back then, he didn’t know what he was looking at.

His eyes buzzed as the shimmering mist dazzled his sensors. The soul embedded within his breast stirred, recognizing one of its own.

A champion.

His flowing robes materialized first over the blinding miasma of light that shone from the collapsed elevator and crumbling roof of the laboratory doors. Then, in a miraculous display of fluidity, the light formed four limbs that entered the robe and became whole, forming something solid and utterly unknowable to the Cogs who looked upon the sight, seeing the amber eyes of a gaunt man stare back at them.

To gaze into those eyes was to gaze into fear itself. XJ-V willed himself to move. But Dr Janus held him back.

“The leader of the Divine Order comes to visit me personally,” the Dr said. “I should be honored.”

The eyes of the eagle, surrounded by the light-haze that propelled him forward, forming feet and hands that stretched their digits like those of a newborn, settled on the two machines standing before them.

“The honor is mine, Dr Janus. I have wished to meet you in person for some time.”

The voice shot through XJ-V’s sensors – even those of his present self-watching from what he assumed was the safety of the Dao-dream. It seemed that, in this moment of lucidity, the High Eagle was looking past his old self to his current body…addressing him directly.

“You have something that belongs to me, machine.”

The eyes of the Eagle flashed at XJ-V. But Janus was as calm and collected as he always had been.

“Yes…” Janus replied carefully, keeping a firm hand on his creation as the lab’s roof continued to buckle. “And I have waited for the day you would finally arrive. I’m quite sure we could talk the night away, you and I, discussing the philosophies that have led us to this pivotal juncture in our lives.”

The High Eagle nodded once, with the grace of an ever-watchful bird of prey.

“Quite so, Dr. But I am afraid time is not a luxury we humans have.”

“A pity then. I suppose you will just have to settle for a short interview. Then you can be on your way.”

“I think we both know that isn’t going to happen, don’t we?”

XJ-V saw the control console being thumbed in Janus’s free hand. His eyes flashed to his Master, begging him to resist. Together, they could best this man. He knew they could.

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But the eyes of his machine-father simply flashed back at him with knowing certainty. And what happened next was nothing more than a plan Janus had spent centuries building.

“Yes,” he replied to the Eagle. “I suppose we do.”

He pressed the console and spurred XJ-I into attack mode – the dog leaping from the shadows to eviscerate the intruder with his steel teeth. With little more than a cursory glance to his left the High Eagle spun, sent a tendril of light towards the Cog-dog’s torso, and speared it clean through its chest.

Janus’s own defenses then kicked in. His eyes flashed lambent red, and as he turned away from his child, XJ-V knew the time for apologies was now over.

“XJ-V,” he said as the mewling body of XJ-I was shattered into pieces. “Execute Process A9x21FG.”

Something exploded within the Cog’s chest, his servos flaring and processes blasting signals to his sensory matrix that compelled him to do two things and two things alone: run. And survive.

“J-Janus…” he groaned as he tried, in vain, to resist.

“GO!”

Janus barreled past him and ran headfirst into the High Eagle’s glowing chest, ignoring the destruction of both his arms as the glowing tendrils of killing light pierced his shoulders and threw them from their sockets. He pushed the Eagle back into the elevator shaft and they both fell into the depths of the earth, a scream of defiance rocketing up from the fading voice of the Dr as his body was eviscerated by Jin’ra’s lithe, flexile limbs.

He turned only once to see his child begin the climb to the surface world, and XJ-V, even as he knew it was against his programming, looked down to see his Master’s final moments as he crawled towards the burning sun of the Wastes.

“Go…on,” Janus told him. “Seize…the…fire…”

The last moments of the Dr Janus’s life were spent looking at the one thing that had ever really mattered to him. His self-destruct sequence was engaged just as Jin’ra pierced his core’s chassis, and his world ended in an explosion of atomic fire.

…

The next moments of the Dao-Dream, XJ-V already knew.

He could only surmise that he had forgotten the rest through a key contingency built into Janus’s Process that compelled him to complete the mission he had been born for. The Doctor must have thought that his memories would be a burden to his training. How ironic it was, then, that they were the very things XJ-V now clung to as a way to harness and cultivate his Qi.

He watched the ghost of his past self pummel through the Xu’Jan warriors as darkness descened on the burning fields of Hensha. He watched himself ignore the crippled, broken bodies of children screaming in the nightmare heat that had turned their world into a charred, scarred corpse of its former self. He ran past people whom he knew – whose fields he had tilled and who’s soil he had cultivated – who screamed out to him for aid. Yet his terrified eyes could do nothing but watch as his body pushed forward, compelled by the program written into each limb that set him on the path towards his destiny.

When he fell in the river, and watched as the carcasses of a thousand decommissioned Cogs floated up from its bowels, the Dao-self of the present day looked up at Jin’ra this time, and saw the crumpled head of Janus lying at the High Eagle’s feet. He also saw, now, the wounds that covered the murderer’s body. His face was almost lolling off his neck, hair crumpled and torn to shreds by the explosion that would have killed a hundred-thousand mortal men ten times over. That, and that alone, had been the sole reason the bird had not taken flight to chase its prey.

“No matter where you go, we are all connected.”

He’d never forgotten those words. Even now, he repeated them just as Jin’ra spoke.

And as the sentence left both their lips, he saw the Eagle twist his head, looking towards him now for certain – the him of the Dao. The him who was sitting in his chambers in Ramor-Tai.

Those eyes had found him. And within them burned a blaze that would engulf the entire world.

“You know I will come for you, XJ-V,” the Eagle told him. “You have always known. Like your Master before you, you shall die alone.”

The image of his Creator’s vacant skull, crushed beneath the light-wrapped feet of the Eagle, filled his vision. But it did not fill his mind. Instead, he breathed, channeling his Qi, and new images appeared before him like summoned specters ready to aid him in a battle – even if the odds seemed insurmountable.

Feng-Lung, Fai-Deng, Master Longhua, Planeswalker Ori’un, Kai-Thai – they and all the other Cultivators who had come to know him as their hero stood beside him on the ridge overlooking the dead sea of Cogs, a bulwark against the rising tide of the Divine.

“Once, I thought the same,” XJ-V told the High Eagle. “But that was before I came to know myself. And now I know one thing for certain: I am never alone.”

He touched his palm to the light brimming at his chest and saw Jin’ra’s predatory eyes flash with desire. Behind him, hordes of his Order rose from their ashen graves, ready to pounce as a single unit towards the envoys of the new world of the Wastes.

“The gift you carry is my birthright, machine,” he said. “If you fight us, you will fall.”

XJ-V smiled right back at the hubris of his foe.

“And still, we’ll fight,” he told him. “Like our fathers before us.”