Honour. Honour and right, that's what his Kingdom was founded on. Honour claimed by his right to the throne, and Right because it was his place to rule. His time on the throne was running out, but without a suitable monarch to replace him, it looked to be the end of the kingdom. Sally had no grasp of politics, and she spent too much time running that little rebellion of hers, which he only tolerated because it reminded Robotnik how easy it was to take him down. Then her choice of mates! Sonic, that hyperactive unreasonable hedgehog, who knew even less of politics and was possibly the worst choice for the kingdom.
There was Elias, his eldest son, and a far more suitable choice, but he was an introvert when it came to the kingdom and his ministers, and he didn't contribute enough. He had attempted, and failed, to encourage him to join in the debates, but he resisted, for a reason he could not fathom. For some reason, he wanted to spend more time with his family than running the kingdom! Max understood the feeling, but he had always suppressed his personal desires for those of the kingdom.
He had made sacrifices to ensure his kingdom lived on, emotionally and strategically. He would make sure that his kingdom would not fade into the backwaters of history, even if that meant forsaking his offspring and adopting a new prince to become the king. If he could not leave his realm in the hands of his son or daughter, he would find a new one, one more fitting to the role.
Speaking of which…he had a meeting to attend to, the G.U.N Protectorate was once again trying to expand into his borders, and he once again had to remind them where the line lay, both to his country and to his leniency.
Beside a small window on a well-crafted chair in his quarters he sat, in silent contemplation of the next move he would make. His hand moved finally from the armrest and shifted a rook two places to the left.
His opponent sat in the chair opposite him, Geoffrey St. John, a skunk and the king's closest advisor, frowned at the move in confusion. He always lost at this game, despite being logical as his king dictated, but he believed beating him at this simple game gave the King some simple pleasure, and reminded St. John of who was truly in charge. His strategy in chess, just as in life, was a mystery to Geoffrey, only becoming clear in times where the skunk offered assistance. He shifted his king away from the source of the danger, a pincer movement the king had set up, and rested back in the comfortable chair slightly. As much as he detested the game, he felt it kept his mind sharp and these moments of solitude offered him some reprieve, and a chance to observe the king's nuances.
"Strange move, you are fond of that little shifting of the power balance." He heard the king say, the old man not looking up from the board. King Maximilian Acorn was old, definitely, but he was maddeningly robust and healthy. In his prime he had been a dangerous sword master, and though his reflexes had dulled a little with age, he was still the match and more of many in the kingdom, apart from that damned Antoine, who could come extremely close, and Elias, but the boy was receiving his training from the king – he was his son, after all, and though he would grow to equal him, he would never be his better.
"Something wrong, Geoffrey?" the king asked, eyes flashing up to fix on the skunk for a moment.
"No, no, your highness, but your statement briefly reminded me of your swordsmanship." He leaned forward again and took the rook with a pawn, adding to the small gathering of taken pieces. They were late into the game, and Geoff had accumulated a few fallen pieces, but so had the king, and as aforementioned, Geoffrey never won.
"That is why I hired you." The king told him, the gruff, solemn voice speaking from the board, "you think differently to me. Your ways differ from my own, and the best viewpoint is often a fresh one." His bishop danced through the gap left by the pawn. "Sometimes your thinking is flawed…" he paused as the king piece snatched the bishop from the table, "…other times, it is exactly what you need." He moved his queen in a final move across the board, taking the pawn and checkmating the king.
Geoffrey conceded and sat back, the king doing likewise. "Do you know why I like these games?" he asked his aide. It made the skunk a little nervous; it wasn't the sort of question he asked. He remained silent, assuming it was rhetorical.
"No, it isn't a joke, why do you think?"
When Geoffrey answered, his voice had a light quiver in it that he could not suppress. I, well- I assumed it was because you enjoyed the victory."
"A fair assumption, yes." It drew a faint smile from the old monarch, "but no. It is because I enjoy the certainty, the logic of it. Imagine if every battle was fought this way, soldiers filled with unswerving loyalty, willing to follow your orders to the letter, even if for no gain or to march to their deaths. A pawn, the most unlikely pieces in a game, can carry the match, provided you use it correctly, as you will recall."
Geoffrey did, he had lost a few times to an interesting checkmate involving a few pawns.
"But often it will be used as a commodity, something expendable." The king continued, "lost in the first few moves of the game. Think of a soldier that gave you such devotion you could do just that."
"Perhaps if that were the case in all things, you would have no need of my council." Geoffrey ventured.
"Indeed, though I think I would have employed you anyway, it gets awfully boring up here on a slow day, and Alicia finds chess dreadfully dull." There was a hint of resentment in the king's tone.
"It is indeed not a game for everyone." Geoffrey reassured him, "I have found women have different interests to their husbands, no matter who they are."
"Well, we are not here to discuss the avocations my dear wife indulges herself in, but I thank you for your words. Now, we have a mission of diplomacy with the G.U.N Protectorate, do we not? We shouldn't keep them waiting. You are dismissed, Geoffrey. Dress accordingly and go to the throne room in half an hour, and tell the Protectorate I will be along shortly."
Geoffrey rose from his seat bowed subserviently to the king, before wheeling and marching from the chamber. As ordered he washed, changed clothes and smartened himself up some for the audience, but he still had a few minutes to waste and so instead of taking the direct route through the palace, he made a short detour to his quarters, and once he was sure the door was shut, he flipped out a small data-phone from his pocket and held it to his ear.
"How are the supply lines?"
"We are having problems creating a route to circumnavigate patrols, and we had to put down another one for defection."
"Keep trying, there has to be a route, I know it."
He flipped the phone shut, not waiting for a reply. They could deal with those issues, he had a king to watch, for a little longer, at least. The king knew about it, at least, he knew there were things that went on behind his back, things Geoffrey didn't tell him, but he had assumed for some time that they were merely mundane matters, ones that he didn't need to trouble himself with. Things were deeper than he imagined, but it was a myth that he did not want to dispel.
"You're doing it again!"
"What?"
"You're not listening to anything, not taking it seriously!"
"Because you're taking too long on things!"
"This happens with you every time Sonic, you're always convinced that you can sprint in, beat the bad guy and sprint out again with nothing bad coming of your actions!"
"Well it works!"
"Not all the time, and the last time it went wrong you almost got all of us killed, and we only escaped in the end because Knuckles used his hyper form to shatter part of angel island!"
"Tone it down, both of you." Tails interposed himself between the arguing pair, pushing Sonic and Sally away from each other with his namesakes, light bursting from his fingertips. "Keep the domestics at home, not when you're trying to brief us on this next strike. In fact, if this is going to keep going for the entire mission, I'm splitting you two."
"You-"
"You don't-" they both objected.
"Yes, I do, I can, and I will. Sonic, you will go with me, Amy, Telera, and Lupin. Sally, you will go with Fiona, Retis, and you have Nicole with you too, and don't object, I'm not putting it up for debate. These petty arguments are going on enough already without you starting fights between each other when you should be fighting Robotnik."
"Tails, we should move now; I don't think this is going to progress any further." Lupin growled in his assent, and Telera raised one hand silently, adding her agreement. Lupin, a grey wolf with a head for hunting, was often the referee in these scuffles, his unbreakable mind-set an almost physical barrier.
Telera was peculiar – at least, peculiar to the freedom fighters. At nineteen, the tigress was unnaturally tall for Mobian, just over five feet, though she had been inducted into the 'fighters through merit of speed and balance in combat. She had suffered severe mental trauma under Robotnik's study during her first mission, and the damage had left her teetering on the edge of madness. Nicole had reprogrammed her neural pathways and saved her from this madness, though she was still mute, though it had only seemed to increase her focus. She was expected to be a survivor. Lupin had been trying to chat her up for some time, an unusual pairing she had at first shown an interest in, but she remained aloof, silence being a form of blessing to her.
Tails nodded in agreement. "Come on Sonic, let's go, get ready. Sally, you prep your team."
It was almost as if she were about to rebuke him for the interruption, instead she nodded with a quick smile and left with Retis and Fiona following.
"Thanks for the save, man." Sonic muttered in Tail's ear.
"I wasn't saving you, I was shutting you both up. We don't have time for arguing, and to be perfectly honest, I'm in agreement with Sally at this point. Sonic, I know you like to live like the wind, as you always said, but try and think what's happening to the rest of us when we go in."
"You're starting to sound like her."
"No, I'm not taking it as far as that. I'm not trying to change you, I don't mind your lack of planning, just as long as for a few minutes you sit down beforehand and work out what happens if you go wrong, and maybe think of going at it a different way. Four yearsago you did this alone, four years ago – not now. Now it's time to start looking before you leap."
"Awwww…" Sonic began to moan, then Tails punched him in the shoulder. Not aggressively, but enough to get his attention.
"I'm being serious." Was all he said, before leaving Sonic to talk to Amy, Lupin and Telera.
"You coming?" Tails called back to the sulking hedgehog, "We have to get there within the hour."
"Yea, whatever." Sonic spun on his heel and trailed after them, trying to mull it over in his head.
Had Tails just told him off?
Sally cradled the modified Mercy II combat pistol, the only weapon she felt comfortable using these days, aside from her own body, which was a finely tuned weapon in itself. Pressing herself against the tree, feeling the bark against her skin, she stared out at the newest combot factory Robotnik had unceremoniously dumped in the middle of the Acorn forest. Several patrols were already patrolling the perimeter, whilst spider-legged construction drones erected electro-barriers and automated turrets.
Glancing behind her she checked the rest of the team. A pair of Nicole-drones crouched with her, the AI using heavily modified Onslaught robots, sized down and with a different weapon load-out, mobilised to make up the numbers and provide Sally's group with technical support. Above, Fiona found her position in the trees, methodically checking every inch of her sniper-variant Judgement rifle before scanning the base with it.
"More guards that you expected, Sugar-queen, you still think we can do this?"
Sally shuddered at the use of her nickname, but replied, "We can do it, I trust Tails." She carefully avoided using Sonic's name, her own silent retribution against him. Fiona picked up on it.
"You can stop hiding it, sugar-queen. You and blue-boy are going to be married before the year is out, the way you two are already arguing, just like a married couple."
Sally began to form a reply as Retis tapped her on the shoulder. The Echidna was clumsy, courtesy of his gloves, but the medieval black armour he wore hid his bright vermilion skin and he eschewed weapons, functioning as the party's heavy-hitter. It was his job to go in when things started exploding, then not coming out again until he made sure everything had done so.
"I'm getting the heads-up from Lupin that the others are in position."
"Alright then. Fiona, you have lead."
"Got it lovebird." The vulpine whispered through the comm-link as she watched the Judgement run through a quick half-second check that all systems were working. The weapon had to test itself before each clip fired, to ensure that the energy clip didn't explode when loading. She sighted one of the teams, and flipped the round-counter over to SED, and sent out a single shot. Each SED round used ten charges, but was just as powerful. She watched the round streak away, punching through the armoured carapace of the lead combot, then detonating in a spectacular firework display, showering the rest of the patrol unit with smaller, but just as dangerous, energy-shrapnel.
Six of the remaining nine went down as the singing blue bolts cut through CPUs, optics, and ammunition stores. A seventh listed sideways into the mud as a piece bit into the leg piston and another jettisoned its arm as sensors detected leaking fuel line. It left only one fully combat capable in the squad, one immobilised and the other only at half-combat capacity. Two nearby patrol squads responded to the threat, raising weapons, switching to combat optics and activating weapon feeds, while a construction spider redirected to repair the damaged squad.
Below, the two Nicole-Class Onslaught attack robots surged forward, Lacerator skates alighting with blue light, bolt cannons connecting internal weapon feeds as they close on the squads. Fire began to whip their way, scoring gouges in the ground as the heavy-bore arm-cannons sought a mark, and each shot was evaded with lethal grace only achievable by Nicole in control. Still moving, one Onslaught raised a single cannon and spun out a lone shot, the fuel dump igniting and sending the self-propelled round into the torso-chamber of the nearest combot, detonating within and forcing it apart. The second arm rose, punching off a stream of rounds towards the beleaguered half-squad and construction spider, smashing through the delicate outer casing. Nicole calculated firing lines on the move, realigning trajectories and distances in microseconds, though she was not infallible. Shots went astray as the combot squads began to coordinate properly, then Sally and Retis joined the fight proper.
Retis showed himself first, breaking the cover of the tree line at a sprint, curving towards a combot group, further away and moving to engage. Sally followed him, leaving the Onslaught robots to cope with the first two squads and Fiona to deal with overwatch.
Mercy bucked in Sally's hands, cracking off ES shots as she moved towards the squad, more cautiously than Retis, but hoping to gain ground anyway.
Across the compound, some distance from the fighting, the second group waited. Lupin with a pair of gauntlet-mounted arm sabres, each one running back along the outside of his arm up to the elbow. Along with his dark cloak, he wore no armour, just the standard military-grade boots.
Telera had taken a little more time with her out-load, and she had fitted a pair of blade-gauntlets, each one housing a foot-length blade that shot out through use of a neural command. At her belt was her own, standard issue Mercy II, and she wore a black body-glove and a steel chestplate.
Amy still wore her standard red dress, despite Tails having deemed it 'unsuitable for combat.'
Sonic was fidgety – it wasn't like him to wait with any sort of patience, it was in his blood to run, but he couldn't help noticing Amy and Tails. She had asked Tails out a few months ago, and to his knowledge he had said yes, and they seemed to be doing so well. The arguments they had barely lasted a few moments, less of the hour-long shouting matches he and Sally were wont to engage in. Damn…how did Amy, the obsessed, screaming little teenager he had known not all that long ago, ended up with Tails, in a relationship that seemed at the least content. It was that thought, as much as anything else, that made him restless.
"Smells like Sally and the others have got their attention Tails." Lupin growled to the fox, who seemed to be the self-appointed leader of the team.
"Alright, Sonic, do what you do best." That was most definitely his cue.
From his lean against the tree he was moving, cooling systems in his shoes pumping away the heat as he accelerated beyond 100mph in a matter of moments, angling towards the electric fence. The gap between him and the obstacle narrowed rapidly, and he jumped, chaos-enhanced musculature carrying him up and over the low-tech defensive line. The moment he was over he stopped, scraping a line in the grass as he arrested momentum, and turned to look at the buzzing electric wall. It looked just as it did from the outside, bar a few narrow pillars, too think to even think about spin-dashing without being fried on the purple electricity. He had to get the others in, or he would just be confirming that he was impetuous, arrogant, all the things he was trying to deny.
He began to pace, more comfortable with his thoughts when moving, racking his brains for some way through.
"Tails, you reckon you can disable the shield? Looks like my field of expertise isn't going that far over here. I can't touch it without being barbecued, you think you could pull a trick with ring bombs?" he finally gave up, at least Tails might have something to get the other three through.
"There's no external generators this side…I'm going to toss some fusion rings over, just catch them and lob them at a few of the generators, will you?" came the reply through the comm.
For the next five minutes, that's exactly what they did. It took Tails longer to programme fusion rings that other types, and then he had to hope Sonic would be there in time before they hit the ground.
The clincher was that if Sonic failed to catch one when it hit the ground, and he was standing near it…it didn't bear thinking about.
And so they all breathed a sigh of relief as the energy field, overtaxed by the sudden loss of four of the pylons, collapsed like fallen curtain. Sonic waited on the other side, quite un-vaporised, watching the curtain of electricity sweep away, before casting another look at Tails.
"You really have to teach me how to make those one day."
"They certainly work."
"I mean the fireworks they give off!"
"Oh. If that's the case…then no. I'm not having you setting those off in Knothole – everyone will think there's a war on."
It took Sonic a few moments to get the irony of the case, and eventually he let out a chuckle, but it didn't last long, as it died away and the five turned to look at the grim, metallic shell of the factory exterior.
"Shouldn't it be, you know, bigger?" Amy asked to no-one in particular. It was Tails who answered, with an explanation possible slightly too long for a battlefield.
"Robotnik doesn't need them to be big – they're little more than automated production lines, nothing really inside to use except a few service hatchways to access key points if maintenance really is necessary. No workers or workstations, so very little needed to make a working factory. We should be able to cripple it from out here."
Amy, who should have been bemused by this lengthy explanation, just clung to him instead, and over his shoulder he could tell that she was ogling Sonic again. He knew what she was doing – the old go out with his best friend to make him jealous thing – he had heard it before. He went along with it as his way of helping out Sonic and Sally.
And besides, Amy wasn't all that bad looking…four years had seen her….develop. She was smarter than she had been back then, and more level headed in all matters that didn't concern Sonic.
"Alright then…" Tails began, Amy releasing him as if on cue, watching him summon half-a-dozen ring-bombs into orbit around his hands, "let's make some noise."
Guided by a series of magnetic field generators built into the palms of his gloves, the rings sailed forward into a line, detonating in a string of blasts against a localised area. When the dirt and shrapnel had stopped flying, the group looked up again to admire his handiwork – a few metres of metal had been excised from the wall, creating a sizeable looking hole taken up by bent and crushed pipework.
"Amy, your turn."
"Ok dear." She told Tails, taking the damage at a run, hammer held back in preparation for striking.
It should be noted that Amy's hammer was wrongly-classified when Robotnik first got his hands on it. Initial readings confirmed that the hammer was hollow and made of steel, painted to avoid rusting. After retrieval, Tails had examined it in more detail and found that it was in fact made of a fusion of Megatal and aluminium, resulting in a weapon that was both near-indestructible and light enough for one such as Amy to carry with little effort. The interior had in fact been hollow, and it was there that Tails had stored the EMP charge, a tracking device, and a loyalty drive that pulled the hammer back to Amy, provided she was close enough.
She closed the gap and swung with all her (minimal) strength, triggering the EMP device as she did so. As the hammer connected with the cracked and damaged piping, it hammered through it as a ripple from the EMP spread out and a ring of detonations silhouetted the hedgehog girl as processors and turrets cooked out and exploded.
Tails caught Sonic glaring at him. "What?" he asked.
"Just making sure you remember it was you who modified that hammer."
A/N: This is the beginning of the Violet Era series, a set of story arcs which are going to be a full continuity in their own right.