I'M BAAAAAAACK! Just so you know guys if I ever update on a Wednesday, consider it a miracle. Wednesdays I have a paper route in the morning then breakfast, school, gym, music lesson, (I play keyboard) and then I hang out at my youth group. So that is not a good day for writing at all. OK enough of my complaining here is the next chapter, with LOTS more action and suspense (cliffhanger FTW)

Disclaimer: I do not own any Sonic characters, they are property of SEGA and Sonic Team. Special thanks to Tomoko-Tottori from deviant art for letting me use Cassy. All i own are the freaky evil guy and my ideas.

Chapter 1 - A Warrior and a Devil

"Do these guys ever give up!?!"

I ducked as another bullet whistled past my ear, then glanced over at the source of the shout. My partner on this mission, a hedgehog female named Cassy, was pinned down as I was behind the cop car we had commandeered to get here.

"Just shut up and cover me…"

I could see her glance over at me preparing to ask what I thought I was going to do, but before she could say anything I had already stood up and taken aim. Two quick shots and it was again silent. Moving quickly, I ran to the museum doorway in which they had been taking cover, and looked around for the bodies. I found them both lying with bullets to the head and their guns a few feet away. I gave the all clear sign and in a moment Cassy was kneeling down to check the pockets for any I.D. while I kept my gun ready to fire on the first thing that moved in the currently silent street.

"Hmmm…. I don't see any kind of- WHAT THE HELL?"

A quick 180 degree turn and glance around show no targets of any kind, and for a moment I wondered what she had shouted for, but then I saw what was going on. The only way to describe it was to say that the bodies were disintegrating. In less than two seconds all that remained was a swirling, dark mist, which promptly wafted away into the night.

"Strange… there's no wind, so did it fly away?"

My only response to her comment was a short glare in her general direction, before walking off down the street.

"Where are you going? The car is over here!"

I stopped for long enough to respond. "In case you hadn't noticed, both wheels on the left side are shot full of holes. It would be faster to walk"

With that said I turned on my heel and continued on, the sound of footsteps telling me that Cassy had decided to follow. This had been going on since we had first started this damned mission. Whoever set me up with this rookie was going to get it, and I had a pretty good idea who it had been. Sticking me with the only female hedgehog in the whole corps was my commanders way of telling me to lighten up and get out more. I glanced over momentarily debating whether or not to confirm my suspicions, but decided against it. She was wearing the black uniform of the special forces, which, when issued one after signing up, I had refused adamantly. There was no way I was going to go around looking like that. Other than that she looked like any other hedgehog, with yellow fur and brown quills, that for some completely unfathomable reason had blue tips. All in all she was the kind of girl that some people would call, what was it now? Ah yes "sexy". At that point a very clear picture of my commander, a bear about 19 or 20 came to mind. I mentally sighed, exasperated with my bad luck, then remembered the guy we had run into a ways back.

Oh well, at least she can shoot

I sensed what was going to happen a moment before it did. As we reached a three way intersection, fire opened from both sides of the cross street and the restaurant in front of us. Moving at almost the same time as they fired I homing attacked the tall office building to our left, held on for a second, then used a triangle jump to get to the second story wall of the restaurant. Executing a back flip of the wall, I gave the human men I landed in front of time only to stare at me for a second in shock, then I pulled out a shotgun and killed them both in one shot. A second later Cassy was across the street and behind the cover of the outdoor tables like I was. For the 23rd time today bullets were flying at me from all directions, kept from embedding themselves into my flesh by a thin barrier.

How do I get myself into these situations…

Flashback:

I awoke to the sound of birds chirping. The surface I was lying on was bumpy, and through the fur on my back I could feel something that seemed to be grass. I felt dizziness hit me as I tried to sit up, so I immediately gave up on that for a minute. I had no idea where I was or who I was. I tried to remember but that only made my already considerable headache worse. Finally, I decided I could gain nothing more from lying on the ground so I sat up. After a moment my eyes adjusted and I looked around. I was lying in the middle of a forest at sometime around mid-morning. Judging by my surroundings, whatever planet I was on was in late spring. As I stood up and took a step, I nearly fell back down again, partly because my balance was horrible at the moment; something must have messed up my inner ear, and partly because I had stepped on something about the size of my fist and harder that a rock. I bent down to examine it. It appeared to be a sort of gem, green in color and glowing with some sort of energy. I reached to pick up the "chaos emerald", or at least that's what my mind said it was, but as I touched it I froze in shock. Images came shooting back to me, fighting the Metarex, chasing Cosmo and Tails through the Typhoon, the final battle, all that chaos controlling….

It worked!

A small smile of victory crossed my face, but then I reverted to my usual impenetrable emotional barrier. Business first. I felt around in the grass and leaves for my inhibitor rings and the other chaos emeralds. Within about five minutes I found all of them. Before anyone could see, I hid the emeralds from view and put on my bracelets. For a moment I closed my eyes and stood in silence. My ears suddenly twitched in the direction of a faint sound, at least a sound other than those birds, the infernal pests. I debated weather or not just to chaos control my way in that direction till I found something, but decided against it seeing as I would just end up even more exhausted than I already was. Already sick of this forest and its birds, who seemed to have nothing to do but sit there giving me even more of a headache, I began to skate at a quick pace through the trees.

I shook my head. Three years seemed like such a long time ago. I remembered how I had wandered around for most of the day till I found a trail, then sleept under a tree till morning. After that I had followed the trail till I came to this city. Completely broke, exhausted, and starving I looked for something to do. Eventually, while in a rare helpful mood, I signed up to join Special Forces.

How stupid could I have been? Its been nothing but one mission after another ever since they saw my combat abilities.

At least I hadn't shown them my chaos control. They probably would have gone crazy and just fired all the other agents so they could give me every single mission that came up.

"Shadow are you going to do something or what!?"

Shaken out of my memories by her shout, I rolled my eyes then turned and shot the guy on her side in the head next time he came up, watching just long enough to see him morph into smoke like the rest. As I turned toward the guy on my side I caught a glimpse his face as he ducked back behind shelter. Suddenly, I knew that something wasn't right about the guy, but I'd have to figure that out later because he was now shooting back with spirit. I dodged behind a different table, as my old one was being rapidly dismantled by one of the most effective tools: a machine gun. Before I could retaliate however, he fell down with holes in his head, heart and left right arm.

"Forgot about me?"

"Hmph. My amnesia isn't that bad."

She stared at me for a moment and then, to my extreme annoyance, she burst out laughing.

"What now??!"

"HAHAHA, Shadow you just made a joke and you didn't even realize it!"

I sent her a glare that could scare death itself, but to my surprise she kept on chuckling and ignored me completely.

"ENOUGH! Lets move!"

"Yes, sir!"

Rrgg that mock salute is getting really annoying…

I got control of my anger quickly enough. If it hadn't been so late I wouldn't have had such a short temper, but I had been awake for over 24 hours now and it was really killing my mood.

Then an explosion rent the temporary silence of the night, and I watched in shock as a 30 story high office building collapsed, spewing rubble across the street ahead of us. A cold and completely insane laugh came from above us, and I looked up to see another human floating in mid air about 15 stories up. When I saw his face, I knew what my subconscious mind had been telling me a moment before. They were copies! Every single damn one of them! Somehow this guy above us had created multiple copies of himself, armed them with guns, and sent them after us. Well, at least that explained the mist.

"Well well well, if it isn't Shadow the Hedgehog." He laughed again in the same high-pitched, manic way. "Look what I'm doing to your precious town!" I watched in shock as he fired a bolt of the same swirling energy the clones had become, except this was solid, and was much more dangerous. I hit the ground a moment before the bolt hit the restaurant behind us, blasting it to shreds instantly. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Cassy on the ground a few feet away. I didn't have time to check her condition, as the strange man had begun charging up another, more powerful attack to destroy the building across the street, laughing madly all the time.

"Oh no you don't!" I growled as I stood up. Then, letting old reflexes embedded into my brain during combat training on the ARK take over, I snapped my fingers, teleporting myself between him and the building. The residual energy of chaos control held me in the air long enough for my air shoes to kick in. His expression became surprised, and for a moment he was silent. But only for a moment.

"HAH! You think that your puny powers can stop me? Then be my guest, I'll send you strait to the underworld!" And with that he fired.

Holding my hands out in front of me palms forward, and letting my subconscious mind dictate my actions, I yelled. "CHAOS BEAM!"

As swirling cylinder of purple and black energy shot out of his hands, a pure, golden beam of light launched from mine. Halfway to their respective targets, the attacks met with a blinding flash. Insane laughter was again coming from the other side of the glare, meanwhile I was silent, concentrating. While his blast was nearing its energy limits, mine was drawing power from one of the seven emeralds I always carried on my person. I drained more power from the gems, charging my beam to the point where it could have annihilated a whole block, and still I couldn't even sense a dent in my supply. A triumphant smirk was slowly appearing on my face, while the laughter had long since died out.

Finally both of our blasts had died out, his because of energy loss and mine because I had no intention of letting anything else get damaged.

"Im-impossible!" Suddenly energy swirled around him again and he straitened up, refreshed. Both of us floated down and landed, I stood again on the street while he touched down on the rubble pile. Suddenly he held both hands out preparing to attack me a second time. "It makes no difference! Now you will DIE!"

I simply crossed my arms and smiled "That's what you think!"

A moment before it was launched, I knew what his offensive would be. Small balls of energy went flying at me at near light speed, while, without moving a single muscle, I dodged them all by flickering in and out of chaos control. As the last attack, a strong one this time, hit right where I had been a moment before, I appeared behind him, executed a backflip kick, chaos controlled to just above him, and fired a chaos spear, hitting him in the left side. I watched in satisfaction as the shockwave hurled him into the adjacent building.

I floated lower on my air shoes to inspect the hole he had made in the side, and wasn't very surprised to find that he had drilled through most of it.

With another snap of my fingers I reappeared on the ground next to Cassy, who had been sanding there watching the whole fight with the same awed stare she had now. However, before I could open my mouth to give her strict orders to keep hers shut about this I heard another laugh behind me.

"Oh you have got to be kidding me!" Suddenly more dark energy swirled around the building, imploding it and causing a miniature earthquake. This was the last straw. I felt pure chaos energy moving through me to my fur, ready to explode outward destroying everything in it's way, which would hopefully include that asshole who refused to do everyone a favor and die.

"SHADOW?? What's going on?!" My anger quickly subsided, and I realized what I had almost done.

Shit I could have destroyed this whole city!

I would have time to berate myself later, but now I had to fight. With a thought I conjured the seven Chaos Emeralds in a circle around me. They spun faster and faster as I pulled more positive energy from them. "HRAAAAAAAAAHHH!" Lifted off my feet by the sheer power of the emeralds I watched my fur turn golden, and felt my spikes rise behind me. It was bliss. Even gravity couldn't hold me back! "Hmph. NOW your going on a one way teleport to hell!!"

With that said, I attacked. Launching through the air towards him, but at the last second transporting behind him, I extended my legs to kick him… and found myself ramming into an impenetrable shield of energy. Before he could attack me I chaos controlled away from him, but that didn't help much. Tendrils of pure, deadly power came flying at me, extended from my foes body like tentacles. As one past a streetlamp it brushed the top of it, instantly vaporizing the lamp on contact.

Shit.

I had only one choice: do what he would least expect. I turned, flying as fast as I could straight at him, time seeming to slow around me, though it didn't really. It was an illusion created by lightning quick reactions. As I entered the tendrils they converged on me, but before they could crush me I was suddenly above and them coming strait down toward my enemy. In a flash the tendrils were closing again, but I had expected that. I dodged his feeble efforts and chaos controlled behind him, my fist infused with all my energy that I didn't need to keep flying.

By the time my fist connected he was already halfway turned again. It didn't matter: it was too late. As I connected he hurtled away through the air, flying limply toward a skyscraper.

I'm not done with you yet! Chaos control!

Then I was behind him. and without even knowing what I was doing I opened a portal to nowhere. Actually all I did was create a portal without setting an end point, so it should go to nowhere. Or at least, that was my theory: I had never tried it before. He fell silently into the portal and vanished without a trace.

I allowed myself to float to the ground, and let the remaining energy run out of my body and into the emeralds, which fell to the ground around me. I jumped up and spun around despite my exhaustion when a loud bang came from behind me. I watched in silence as the area where the portal had been was distorted, like rising heat would blur anything seen through it.

Then for a moment I sensed something that made even my blood chill: an area of absolute nothingness that somehow managed to contain all of time. It was mind boggling, and even the brief brush with it that I had left me disoriented and confused for a moment. I had no doubt that extended exposure would cause insanity to any being.

At least any being from this dimension.

I had no idea where that thought had come from so I shoved it aside.

"HOW DID YOU KNOW HOW TO DO THAT!?"

The loud voice was accompanied by the once distorted area exploding into a portal; bolts on negative energy surrounding it. Then the man reappeared looking even angrier than before, but I saw something under his anger. Fear. I didn't know how I knew, but for him, that place was worse than death.

"You will pay for sending me to the Maze! But this just proves what I knew all along, you are weak! You do not have the power to ensnare me there for more than a minute! If my master didn't need you alive I would kill you now, sadly that is not the case. However, I have no such barrier between me and your old friends… I think I'll kill that blue one first…"

"WHAT??! Get back here you!" I called angrily, for at that moment he vanished into a dark mist.

Quickly I drew enough power from the chaos emeralds to transform into Super Shadow, and began powering up chaos control.

"Hey Shadow wait what are you doing?"

But Cassy's shouts were in vain because at that moment I had vanished.

Wait what was that? Did something just…touch me? Damn.

I glanced back and my fears were confirmed. At the moment I chaos controlled, Cassy had touched my shoulder, so instead of being frozen near me, she had been taken out of time too. Before I could do anything, we were hurled through space toward Mobius.

*sigh* poor Shadow isn't gonna get any peace... This story is gonna end up being something like adventure/suspense/sci-fi/supernatural/frendship/ and I don't know WHAT else. OK I think I'm gonna go collapse now.... apfjkasdfjasdpgjaspd (me falling asleep at my desk)