The life of a soldier is a life of endless waiting with intermittent flashes of terror.
I was lying in the grass on the back of a hill. I wait… and wait… and wait. There! The red lights in the fog must be the ship. The one where he drops off his robots. My fingers tense on my gun, heart pounding and sweat dripping, awaiting for the soon arrival of our foe's forces. I can barely see through all the dust and smoke from the fire of the burning city. No, wait. The lights have disappeared. This cannot be our enemy. What was it? The waiting commences once again. As enthusiastic as I may have been to take back the world from evil hands, I knew the wasn't going all that well. But I will not let the state of this world be proof we are useless and hopeless without Sonic. Waiting… and waiting… and waiting. The fire behind all the smoke and dust was close enough to illuminate the terrified faces in rows on both of my sides, each face as young as mine. Waiting… but not as long as usual. I hear an odd sound behind us. I never heard anything like it. It sounded like some kind of teleporter or something. Then I realized—they flanked us. It was a trap! And we were hit. Hard. "Surprise," I hear. I turn around to see a mysterious floating figure. He fired lasers straight from his hand, all simultaneously in the direction of every one of our soldiers. Some of our men began to run in the opposite direction in terror. They hadn't realized what they had gotten themselves into. Some of us hadn't reacted in time, and never lived to lift their body off the ground before he fired. I ran in the opposite direction. I would have charged towards this floating guy, but only if I had our soldiers by my side to do it with me. There was no way I could take on this guy like that on my own. I couldn't believe this was real life.
I ran past the bodies of my friends who never realized their demise, and watched my friends die in front of me before I could save them. The floating figure destroyed us all, one by one, alongside his antagonizing, terrifying laugh of madness. "Fall back! FALL BACK!" I heard in the distance. "Wow. That's a great idea! It's a shame you didn't go with that plan to begin with. Maybe, just maybe, you would have saved some lives that way. Hahahahahaha!" The deranged, masked figure said. The whole operation was a huge mess, and the plan was very sloppy and uncoordinated. If only I could have predicted what would happen that day. I ran to the closest ruins of a building I could hide myself behind; a small wall of bricks just high enough to hide my body. I looked out from my position to find the best time to run into the city and save as many civilians as I could before I die. Eventually, I found the right time to run, and ran.
As I walked through the city I heard no civilians. I say "heard" because I could only see about five feet in front of me. I eventually walked in the city to a point where I could fully see. No civilians. He killed them. He killed them all. I can't believe that eggman! No… a madman! This evil "Doctor Eggman" had to be stopped. But it's been six months, and nothing has changed. Of course, I knew that lots of civilians must have escaped to the resistance base with Knuckles. What ever happened to that master emerald of his? Better hope nobody goes for that thing while he's down here.
At that moment, though, I learned a very valuable lesson. My brain decided to find anything trivial that I was focused on at the moment and dump it in the back of my brain. One of those things was something I was so worked up on in the back of my mind that I didn't realize it was holding me back from exposing my true potential— I wanted to prove myself useful. I didn't want my image to be portrayed as someone useless when people tell stories about the time Eggman conquered the world. I didn't want to be an extra civilian in the background of a movie, doing nothing but fleeing and screaming from the events that came unexpected that are thought of as being possible, but probably never going to happen. But then, when they do happen, you don't react the way you thought or hoped. I didn't want to be just another guy under the strong heroism of Sonic. I wanted to help. But after dumping those thoughts in the back of my mind, I thought straight-forward. I knew how I could TRULY save the world.
I had to find Sonic.