Outrun
Eggman ranted at a meadow that glinted chrome in the sunset, the feedback from his microphone echoing off its silvery mounds.
"Good evening, my loyal subjects! Are we ready for an encore?"
No one was around to hear. The silence meant his voice would crackle for miles. Not that he much cared, even as his metallic servants froze where they stood.
A sonic boom whipped past the grasping statues.
Liquid trickled down his back. Was it sweat cooling him down, or the virus finally gripping his torso in a cold hug? At this point he could no longer tell, and didn't want to waste time finding out.
Sonic clenched his fists the higher his tread lifted him toward the stronghold. Even though he didn't believe in goodbye, a grave sense of finality had settled into him that he found hard to shake.
Knuckles' words haunted him, little more than a stern whisper in his ear. Careful, Sonic. Someone might win this battle, but someone else was going to lose the war.
He dug his fingers into the material of his gloves as his steps whisked him noiselessly into impossible heights. He had to give it his all. For his friends. For their world. Despite the weakness pushing down on his limbs, his racing thoughts of Tails don't cry and Shadow's pale and I promised her she'll see fresh flowers again hardened his resolve to run. They were counting on him to remain strong.
Eggman's ship blotted out the sun, splintering its beams into razor-thin shafts of light. Challenging him.
He inhaled.
The ship's viewing ports crashed with a shriek, allowing cold winds to blast through the gaps in its broken pupils.
Gales howled at this altitude. He felt lightheaded, unsteady on his feet for the first time in his life. Taking a moment to stand amidst a puddle of broken glass, Sonic rose on trembling knees, breathing hard as he surveyed his surroundings.
Dominating the chamber heart was a throne with all seven Emeralds embedded in its circular back. Their essences dimmed, no bigger than candles, trapped under a glass so dark it didn't even shine.
A shiver hurried down his spine. He couldn't feel an ounce of warmth from them; a sinister presence had taken their place. That very something lingered inside them, judging him.
As he walked, his tread disturbed a cold, mercury-like liquid that wavered against the metal walls. His first step rippled toward the throne, and the liquid writhed under him as though it suffered his presence.
Sonic felt something roll under his heels and splashed out of the way to avoid it. It turned out to be a wave gliding toward the throne. When it reached the base, it clung to the steel girders and invited more tides to stack themselves on top, higher and higher, one after the other, until a reflective staircase ascended toward the man currently studying him from his perch.
"So glad you could make it." Eggman sat on the throne, leaning heavily to one side with his elbow supported on the armrest. A grin spread from the cheek he mashed against his fist.
Sonic gestured at the metallic patch growing on his chest. "Not like you gave me much of a choice."
The fat man chuckled at his naivete. He beckoned with a royal curl of his pointer finger. Another wave pushed against his ankles, spurring him on.
Now or never. Sonic jogged up the steps. The Emeralds' embryonic heartbeats pulsed out to him, small and quick, their panic increasing as their life dwindled fast.
Don't worry, he told them.
"I'm here, Eggman," he said. "Just you and me now."
"Just the way I like it."
The chamber hummed with electricity. Raw volts snaked across the throne's body, its every rivet and port sizzling a brilliant white.
"You've been a formidable opponent, Sonic. It'll be my pleasure to introduce you to your maker."
Something was dead wrong. The Emeralds whirled at a razor-sharp pace, their speed enough to blur their edges.
And then they shook.
Sonic leapt at the faint crack of glass breaking moments before the septet shattered, raining fragments over his absence. They'd shedded their glass forms. Now there were only corrupted cores floating above him, orbs lashing bolts at anything they saw fit to receive them.
Eggman's dark chuckle filled the room as each one of them sank consecutively into the throne's center receptacle. There they surged and dimmed, flared and ebbed, each one a violent tide renewing itself, only to crash and collapse.
Upon absorbing the seventh Emerald's core the central hatch closed, but that didn't diminish their power in the least. In fact, the light that operated the ship's extremities throbbed inside its exposed rivets like blood. Sonic could have sworn it was a form of resistance on the Emeralds' part, the way their energy pounded against their metal trappings like a collective heartbeat yearning to be let free.
"You know," Eggman said, a luxurious tap of his finger punctuating his words, "I was in the middle of designing this terror once when it hit me. What if you'd never found me? What if, by some ill stroke of luck, you'd left me to rot in that horrible little hamlet, and you, you annoying blue thorn in my side, would never see the beauty of what I've created? Why, I almost tore up my blueprints right then and stuffed them in the trash! Do you know what stopped me?
"An epiphany." So silent, he could hear his grin crackle the saliva in his mouth. "I have nothing to prove to anyone, least of all you. That's when things began to fall into place. This ship, the virus. It came so incredibly easy," he said, "it bored me to tears."
He sighed, briefly a resigned old man, before he sharpened again into malicious glee. "Don't judge, hedgehog, it's just my nature. When I get what I want, I want even more. I wanted you gone, but the months passed, and wonder of wonders: I wanted you back. I wanted conquest, and then total domination knocked on my door. It's an itch, always outside my reach. Maddening. And you, well. Let's just say your quills are just sharp enough."
Laughter bubbled from him, a sinister stream from an unraveling mind. "But you see my dilemma here, don't you, Sonic? If I don't know what it is I really want, what then? Would I just go chasing everything to scratch that itch? Wouldn't the world exploit my uncertainty? Wouldn't GUN poke at that sore spot? Wouldn't you? What could the man who has everything want but more? Funny thing, when you attain more: it turns into a hill of beans until the next new shiny thing comes along, doesn't it, Sonic?"
Eggman was nearly spitting on his words, not quite lucid in his train of thought, which made it all the more unsettling when he fell into a near-catatonic repose, his words clear.
"You won't touch a single hair on me," he said. "Do you know why?" Here he rose to a stand, elbows tucked behind his back. "You poor, spiky-headed fool." A Cheshire cat grin curled from ear to ear. "I'm the antidote."
Shock paralyzed him a split second. He shook himself out of it, figuring Eggman was lying to save his own hide, lurching a rigid step forward. "Listen, Eggman. No one said you had to—"
"Correct." He emphasized the word. "No one said I still had the ability or motive to bring this world to its one believed what I was capable of, my skills undervalued even as a humble journeyman. Am I to blame for your lack of vision?
"But why stop there?" His booming voice filled the chamber as Sonic turned his back and started down it. "Let's discuss your moral failings, shall we? Oh, don't run away, we were having such a nice conversation for once! You, on the other hand, hunted me down, kept Shadow from finishing me off, and let Metal go," he said. "What did you think he was going to do? Shuffle on home hanging his head in shame?"
He started out at a clipping pace, breaking into a full sprint.
"Run all you want. You can't escape your part of the blame."
He twisted sharply to the left and rounded the corner, his sneakers slapping the greasy floor as he tried to evade the man's presence. A difficult feat, as his voice manifested everywhere.
"You're still forgetting something, Egghead!" Sonic pumped his arms in front of him. "You weren't yourself back in the village!"
"Indeed I wasn't! And that lightbulb still didn't tick on!"
Go. There was no more reason to stay and listen to this.
He ran into an armament of Pawns, where a klaxon shrieked and trained a turret on him.
"We can do this all night, Sonic."
As he bounced between the corners of the room and bullets peeled away most of the coverings from the Pawns, Eggman continued, "Let's say by some twist of the tale, you are in the right. Why not have let Shadow finish me off? What did you think was going to happen, I wouldn't find myself again? I was going to remain that insipid tinkerer forever, building rides for children? And what, pray tell, did you think would sustain him? Wishful thinking?"
Sonic planted his feet on the turret and ran it down until his soles blistered from the friction of rubber on metal. The carapace's wiring ground against its hardware with an unnatural shriek; the bolts grew red hot and loosened, melting from their restraints as the turret malfunctioned, firing anywhere and everywhere. The bullets so weakened the wall in front of him that its guts simply crumbled like a wet sheaf of paper.
"Like it or not, I will always return. You lift a single finger to jeopardize that balance, I guarantee you won't just face me. You'll have to look Shadow and all your other friends square in the eye and tell them why you couldn't have done the right thing, why you had to put the world at risk—"
The wreckage allowed drones to creep in, whirling their blades in the blue dark.
Sonic hopped off the turret's smoking ruin, scrubbing the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand.
Eggman lazily stroked a section of his mustache during the ensuing carnage. A langorous sidestep allowed a smashed and bladeless drone to roll along unfettered. "—because you had to ease your conscience.
"Well, now, Sonic," he smiled, "right now the right thing is standing five feet in front of you, telling you to go back home before you meddle with any more lives."
"You done?"
"Ho, ho! Not enough for you to sink your teeth in, rodent? I'd be delighted to give you more!"
He clapped for a certain guest to arrive and 'entertain' them. Metal, his old longtime pal, appeared with a nice surprise for him. The laser it fired sliced through the support girders behind him, sent them crashing down with an unearthly metal shriek, their sheared edges glowing molten white as they dripped.
"There's another way!" Sonic protested. "You're just hiding it!"
"Not this time."
"No, doc." He refused to believe this all came down to showing mercy. "Think about it this way: When Shadow lost his memories, he didn't become all sunshine and rainbows. He was still the same grump he always is. Which tells me either you were playing back at that village… or that marshmallow really does exist somewhere under all that crap."
An irritable twitch of the brow marred his otherwise unshakable grin. "I've never heard anything more ridiculous than what just came out of your mouth."
"It's true, isn't it? Some part of you wants to be accepted. Once upon a time, you looked up to someone good. Remember?"
"And a fat lot of good it did him! He's dead, and I'm seconds away from achieving my full potential." The throne rumbled, gave way to sliding plates that locked into place around the doctor, forming a protective metal coccoon humming with electricity. "Try this on for size: once that virus hits the base of your spine, you'll no longer be able to move. Then it's a direct path to your future career waiting on me hand and foot."
His laugh grated his last frayed nerve.
"What's the matter, Sonic? Running out of steam?"
Sonic the Hedgehog was not in the business of giving up.
Thunder cracked, and wind bawled.
"Come now, make it challenging! Don't let my victory come as a complete embarrassment to you."
To say the ship was falling apart was a massive understatement. Eggman had leveled it to its barest bones, ragged girders and groaning supports swaying as they struggled to hold the collapsing ceiling upright. Molten steel rained down in entrails, which hissed bubbling holes through the floor. Sparks flew from dozens of exposed holes. The darkness itself, eaten away by the flashes, seemed to quake as aftershock shook the decaying chamber.
"You know what they say," Eggman taunted. "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!"
Metal plucked him out of the darkness and punted him through the wall. A consecutive series of blows leveled him, until the taste of blood leapt onto his tongue.
The fight had splintered into two fronts: against his enemy, and against his own body. Metal had pinned him down, his sharp knees digging gorges into his chest, for the express purpose of letting the virus finish its job. He was reduced to crawling away. No matter what, he had to keep himself in motion to stave it off.
I've had enough of you, Eggman.
You say everything you've done is in the right.
Nothing's right anymore.
Nothing.
(HAH
how adorable you are
strutting around with your nose in the air
you'll never reach glory that way)
Glory?
You think I did this for my ego?
Eggman waved to him with a flourish. "You put up a good fight, Sonic, I'll give you that much. But there is a time to accept defeat, and the era of my Empire has begun."
(does it hurt?
I thought you were stronger than this
seems I was wrong—
how unfortunate!)
Exhaustion had a greater hold on him than he thought. As the chilling substance prickled his flesh, he pressed his trembling hand against the floor, hauling himself one painful inch at a time toward the viewing port.
The city over which they flew—the last holdout of the Resistance base—grew smaller. Now a speck. Now a single drop of life amidst a metallic sea. Now an inconsequential spot of ink dripped onto a vast canvas, a miraculous accident someone out there called home. Sonic grasped for it until it slipped through his fingers and vanished.
(you forget, dear boy
a strong person wouldn't have to beg for mercy)
Eggman seized the microphone, catching wind of his intent. "Don't bother, Sonic, I've locked onto the coordinates—and my finger is this close to the activation button! If you don't want it to slip and drench your idiot friends, you'll do as you're told!"
—and are you going to convert them, the same you did to those people in the village? To the people who took care of you, showed you nothing but kindness when you didn't deserve it? To all those people in all those buildings? To the lives you stole while they were still living? Is that what you're planning for us, Eggman? A garden of statues in a scrap heap?
Sonic curled into himself, willing everything out. The more he pushed, the more the Emeralds' corrupted energies swirled around him and built up and crumbled:
Are you going to get us out of the way first and then chain us to some bigger factory out in Metropolis? Are you going to build a world out there where you won't have to deal with real living feeling breathing beings anymore? Is that it? Is that what you want?
this shattered world so deeply entrenched in his mind he was going to free himself and he was going to take him down: the more the anger snarled and fumed and flared, deepened into rage, scorched into fury:
I don't know what you want—I need help understanding what you want—help me make this picture CLEAR—
the more he ran in his mind, the harder his feet pounded the ground, until soon they didn't touch the ground at all. Stars snapped and burst and sizzled at his heels. Metropolis streaked into fuzzily-defined ribbons. The borders between reality and imagination wavered on collapse:
are you going to send your little tin-plated cronies out to kill everyone who resists, and when you're done are you going to walk over to that window where you don't have to lift a finger
till then his anger turned him into a heat-seeking missile, deadly and one-pointed: he punted Eggman's shield aside, his various parts flying like toys scattered in his path, and before he could cry out, they exploded in white-hot volleys of wire and flimsy steel tissue:
and are you going to see me outside your window, still running, still fighting, still struggling through the horde
no: not this time:
and are you going to point at me, try to kill me even though I'm too fast to kill
and are you going to be afraid
this time he would run: this time he would pick up his feet and move:
or
when you see me
are you going to stay there
and are you going to smile
and are you going to say
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG DIDN'T PUT UP A FIGHT?
With a wrenching, strangled cry, he clutched his head, resisting the virus' hold on his cortex. It wouldn't take his memories, especially not the last. Tails as he held him in his arms, sick and shaking and afraid. Tails with his head buried in his chest, Tails whose eyes wavered with a hurt he couldn't soothe. Tails, the bravest soul he knew; he couldn't forget what his brother had said.
Sonic, I'm scared.
While this thought echoed through his mind, an Emerald wafted from the throne, its rotation slowed significantly. Its whirling, glittering facets cut his reflection into splinters and turned a dull gray before coming to a gentle stop in the fringe of his vision, reflecting his mirror image in another world.
He peered into Metropolis, where the second Death Egg orbited his memories of imprisonment. Inside the other dimension, a missile swirled past an isolated tower; darkness swam at its edges, containing something writhing and lashing and waiting. This… was this him?
He saw something else; a blip of light, which grew into a flare. His super form blasted through the missile like a burning arrow fired through paper, scattering shrapnel into the far reaches of the city. He soared past Metropolis' crumbled ruins and the tiny colonies that it had left in its wake, past the dim epicenter, into a place where no light would dare follow save the infernal streak that scarred the void behind him. His flame would soon run out escaping the encroaching darkness, and one after another the Emeralds peeled away from him, weakening him.
Run, Sonic. As fast as you can. The Emeralds' corrupted cores taunted in chorus; it was like hearing his own voice, resonant with malevolence. His doubts resided in the darkness, and the darkness had claws and teeth, and it was only toying with him before it would engulf him. Even with him and his tremendous energy buried inside the core, its hunger would never be satisfied.
One Emerald remained, and it was rattling, flickering out, fading fast. He needed it to hold out. It had to. He couldn't maintain this chase for much longer. His heart slammed against his chest and his lungs burned.
As it failed, its limp body twirling into unfathomable depths, he heard a madman's laughter.
Super Sonic thrust out his hand, gave an unheard scream into the void and was sucked into blackness.
The vision snapped him back into his body like a rubber band. In the present, Sonic gasped and blinked back a heavy film of perspiration.
Slowly, he twitched one finger. Reached it out to contact the Emeralds—he needed to know, when, why. A golden spark hurried along his arm, scorching the synapse of air caught between his forefinger and the Emerald's surface, blowing out the living fuse that had overexerted the gems. Drained, the first fell to the edge of the platform.
Metal cocked its head. Transference failed, it announced. Circuit incomplete.
Eggman banged his fists against the controls. "Why isn't he reverting?"
Sonic's ears pricked while the shivering hiss of the hydraulic plates lifted, announcing Eggman's arrival to check on the situation himself. Immobile or not, he needed to get rid of the rest before the doc shoved these things down his throat like bad medicine. Drawing in a deep breath, he concentrated, trying to will some sensation into his limbs while the Emerald's six sisters churned inside him. He had to coax them out somehow.
His mind struggled until it reached a spot of clarity in the fugue. It brought him a splash of pink which coalesced into Amy. Unlike Tails, her words were noiseless. Angry, accusatory words. But the pain in her expression spoke volumes. How could you leave us behind?
Clink.
He collapsed as his left leg folded out on him, suddenly heavy and about as responsive as a concrete cinder. Pins and needles stabbed his flesh, but at least it was free.
And—his mind remembered—Cream and Vanilla—so frightened. The delicate way a mother rocked her daughter, as if she had been a newborn all over again.
Clink.
And—
Vector and Espio, who lost their friend.
Clink.
Shadow, Rouge; guilty, weary of anger.
Clink.
Knuckles, smoldering in his own helplessness.
Clink.
Amy, too strong to cry.
Clink.
One by one he ejected the overpowered Emeralds from the throne's receptacle by sheer force of will, grit his teeth against their bitter sting and forced them out. The whirling stopped, and he felt that manic energy that was crushing down on him like a boulder now receding back into its source. He tasted the lavender of cool oxygen on his tongue and for the first time felt that he could finally breathe.
The Emeralds were back to normal.
That's it.
"Yo, Eggman!" he shouted. "All work and no play makes doc a dull boy, wouldn't ya say? You know what I think you need? Just you, me," —this as roaring currents slammed down on them— "and a road trip for the ages!"
"Don't you dare! I'll—"
Sonic's hearty yell of Chaos Control cut his thought short.
Green Hill.
Water burbled into a lake through a small cleft in a gentle rock cropping. All else was quiet.
The peace shattered when a brilliant emerald flash split the darkness. An enormous man-shaped ship appeared inside, eclipsed by weaving shafts of light, before it pierced the dimensional membrane and plunged into the lake.
The resulting shockwaves sprayed debris into the sky and cast rainbow-like dispersions into the moonlight. A wild gust shuddered the treetops, slaking dew from their leaves. Cattails snapped their heads against the whiplash while the birds fled screeching from their pecking grounds, raising a chorus of disturbed insect life.
The vesselhissed in the water. Bits of debris hit the carapace with dull thudding sounds.
Moments later a gloved hand burst through the water, followed by another. The effort finally birthed a hedgehog, who flailed and gasped for air as if they were his first desperate snatches at the stuff.
After a coughing jag cleared the muck from his lungs, Sonic heaved himself ashore and lay facedown in the mud as the shippuffed oily smoke into the night. While waiting for his heart rate to slow, he turned his head, spit out a piece of flotsam and grimaced at the slimy taste, which did nothing to alleviate the bile ramming its way up his throat.
"Do your thing," they said. "It'll be fun," they said. "Don't drown yourself," they said. You sure do ask a lot from a guy, don'tcha?
Sonic rolled over, propped his cheek in one fist and smirked up at his coughing foe. "Whassamatter, Egghead? Don't like the change of scenery?"
One corner of his mouth lifted wryly up as he saw the white streaming through his nostrils. "Mind turning up the AC?" His sense of humor was turning a little bitter now that he had no idea what to do next. He couldn't escape the niggling thought that maybe he could've done something different, achieved a better outcome.
He rubbed his shoulder. Well, maybe that didn't matter now. He had to recover his energy so the next time he fought Eggman, he'd be prepared. Of all the chaos that had gone down today, he was certain of only that: they'd fight again. There was no doubt in his mind that whatever the doctor had planned for him wouldn't eclipse the prospect of another battle. The temptation for Eggman to prove his ego would be too great to ignore, and there, Sonic thought, he'd seize his chance.
He'd hold nothing back.
Eggman emerged from the foaming water like something out of a horror comic, nearly hyperventilating, his titan frame looming over the hedgehog, silhouetted in moonlight. Cracked glasses, flotsam entangled in his mustache, the tone of his voice nearly wrong in its sanguine cheer. "Sonic, my lad!" he cried. "Have a seat, will you? Time for an old man to school you in Technovirology 101!"
He opened his mouth to make a quip at the man's expense when he stumbled underwater, leaving behind a smatter of bubbles.
The sudden silence made his quills bristle.
"Eggman?"
No response. Sonic gave the water a nervous glance as its ripples lapped at the ship's battered edges. Even the most innocent of lakes had treacherous pockets where you'd simply vanish like a dropped rock. While it was possible the doc might've tripped into one on pure accident, something in his gut told him there was more to it than that. Was this part of the production as well? Would he drown himself out of pure pettiness?
Either way, he couldn't take his chances standing around. Despite his deep aversion to the whole thing, he waded in, stumbling a bit himself as he kicked out into a clumsy paddle that barely kept him chin above the surface. "Come on, man, game's over. You gotta get out of there." And, as he spat out another weed that washed into his mouth: "Stuff's nasty, take it from me!"
A hand slammed down on his head and dunked him under.
"Going somewhere, hedgehog?"
"Agh! Quit it!"
Neither resurfaced with much dignity. Sonic coughed and retched, and Eggman cursed and flailed in turn.
Just as his soles sank inches deep in the mud, a cold, uncomfortable suction pulling at his heels, he offered his hand. Instead of gruffly taking it, however, the doctor smacked the lake scum using the back of his own and sprayed him with algae.
"Keep your stinking hands off me!" Rogue bits of saliva ejected from his mouth, making Sonic wince. "Haven't you ruined enough of my things for one week?
"You think you saved anything taking out my virus?" he barked bitterly, before Sonic could shove in a single word edgewise. Then tossed back his bald head with an even harsher bark. "Ha! Why don't we discuss how I needed its liquid to keep the Emeralds' container close to absolute zero so the antihydrogen inside wouldn't quicken long enough to wipe everything out? And now it has nothing! That city is probably ashes and rebar as we speak! Less than, I'll wager!"
No—
No—
He was lying—
"That machine your blockheaded friends destroyed back at my factory? The world's most elaborate Ioffe trap, one I dedicated seventeen months of my life to perfecting. Seventeen months I will never get back, courtesy of you! Every failsafe I had is gone, but as long as you enjoyed stopping me, right?" He flailed, his complexion a dangerous shade of red. "That's what really matters in the end, isn't it, Sonic, having your fun at the expense of almost everything ELSE?"
They… They'd destroyed everything. Blood pounded in his ears, muffling them to all else Eggman had to say.
"It's a sticky business," the doc continued. "Nasty to those who don't have the know-how to harness it properly. Until you came along, I was handling it beautifully. But guess which one of us just damaged my ship's electromagnetic holding chamber beyond repair? I'll give you a hint: he's blue and looking a bit wall-eyed at the moment."
Paralyzed, Sonic dripped water.
"That's right, Sonic. I tuned my ship so precisely for Emerald use that it can only run for a limited time on its secondary engine. Any minute now the backup will fail and provoke an explosion, one you won't be able to outrun before everything here goes north of the clouds. And don't you dare leer at me," he snapped, "I'm simply picking up after your messes. See this?"
He thrust a handheld device in his enemy's face, spraying him with droplets.
"I stashed a single gram of antimatter inside the secondary engine for this exact purpose. Currently the only thing keeping it stabilized is the pressure my thumb makes on this button, keeping its vacuum seal snug as a bug." The smile he gave him was so sweet it reeked. "But you know, I've been working so hard these days, I may have had one tiny detail slip my mind. Be a sweetheart and refresh an old man's memory, would you? What was it again? Oh, wait... "
A horrible grin splitting his face, he let his thumb off the button.
"Carpal tunnel."
Sonic darted for the woods, moisture flying off his quills, bramble stinging his flesh. Blind run. Sanctuary. The last sound he heard thundered in his ears a loud, malicious clamor:
"Hahahahahaaaah, 'oops'! HOW VERY CLUMSY OF ME, SONIC!"