Prologue Chapter 3: Wrapped in Black Phase 2: Unified Chaos

"Shadow…The Hedgehog?" Joe Dark whispers out the name of the black hedgehog that had just appeared beside him with his shoes keeping him levitated in place. After a few seconds of thinking back, the monstrosity murmurs out a quiet laugh and widens his single eyelid while speaking with familiarity "Ah yes, I remember you now…I just had to sort through all the other Sonic recolors in the universe to pinpoint YOUR identity." Shadow "hmphs" at the remark towards the differences in color between him and Sonic, and with a gesture of his head towards the golden hedgehog Shadow asks with a surprising amount of kindness "How you holding up there, Sonic?" He cared not about acknowledging the demon's presence or words, a mistake that would likely prove fatal as during the moment where he turned his head away Joe Dark turned his whole body towards the black hedgehog and lunged forward across the air at incalculable speeds.

But alas, having predicted such behavior, Shadow whipped out a green Chaos Emerald into the grasp of his right hand and activated "Chaos Control" to teleport away from the path of the beast's aerial rampage and reappear where said demon used to be. In the place of Joe Dark's charge was an ethereal trail of howling darkness, and though the close proximity to it unhinged Shadow a bit he was still aware enough of his surroundings to hear Sonic say to him after changing his expression towards surprise upon seeing the black hedgehog so easily avoid the beast's charge "Hehe, I'm holding up fine here on my end for now…But Shadow, what are you doing here?" With his head turned towards the beast as it re-adjusts its position to look at both hedgehogs with a single swerving of its eye, Shadow replies to Sonic by saying "I sensed something amiss and saw you transforming into your Super form from where Angel Island was located, so I warped here using Chaos Control…"

"Well you better get into your Super form too Shadow, cause I get the feeling this guy is one tough customer!" Sonic, sounding rather excited to be fighting this beast instead of worried like one naturally should be, kicks his feet against the air raring to go while Shadow smirks at his ally and with a flip of the green emerald says "Of course…Do you think I came here with just one of these?" Flying out of Shadow's body without an explanation as to where they all came from are the six other Chaos Emeralds, which slowly form a ring around the black hedgehog's body as he holds his arms out beside himself and a golden aura spawns around his body with red electricity crackling between the sides of it as he powers up. "Now witness the ultimate power!" He declares as the light around him intensifies to a blinding extending and erupts in a fashion similar to what happened to Sonic earlier.

At the end of his transformation, Shadow is left with all of the black on his body replaced with a golden tint, but unlike Sonic his quills remain in the same positions they were in before just as his eyes remain the same color. Joe Dark looks down at the two golden hedgehogs with a smirk growing in his mind before he notes with a hint of sarcasm in his voice "Super Shadow? Hahaha…How redundant…" Shadow clenches his fist in front of his chest and declares to the demon "You have no idea who you're messing with, do you?" "Oh, I believe I do…And it matters not how fast you are, how strong you are, or how many of you hedgehogs pop out of the wind works to fight me…You will all perish on this island, and be the first victims of my newfound power!"

"Then we won't hold anything back…You ready Shadow?" Sonic turns his head towards his ally and watches as he nods his head and smirks with his eyebrows arched to show how seriously he is taking this battle. "Ready when you are…" "Then lets do this!" Sonic declares enthusiastically, thus signifying the continuation of their battle against Joe Dark. Shadow starts things off by using Chaos Control to warp above the beast with his right fist clenched above his left shoulder as a circular golden glow appears around it. When the luminosity begins to flicker rapidly, Shadow flings his hand out to release a barrage of miniature yellow spearheads that bombard the backside of the beast repeatedly without him so much as flinching once in response. He looks on ahead and notices Sonic charging straight at him at his fastest current speed, his fist flung behind his head as he approaches the front of Joe Dark's face ready to strike the eye.

However, predicting his movements ahead of time, Joe Dark commands the skin of his body to peel apart from the rest of the ethereal flesh, the cells swirling around to create tendrils that lash forward and wrap themselves around Sonic mid-charge. The hedgehog expresses surprise with his eyes widened and a quick "Whoa!" from his mouth, but that is all replaced with a strained grunt as Sonic tries to push forward seeing as he got his fist out partway and found that he was only a few inches away from striking the beast and dealing a crucial blow to his body. Naturally though, Joe Dark feared nothing from the once blue hedgehog seeing as though his momentum has been all but lost after being wrapped in his tendrils.

But as he grinned inside of his mind and laughed subtly at Sonic, Shadow stopped his prickling bombardment and Chaos Controlled beside the closest tendril to deliver a swift roundhouse kick through the center of the limb born from darkness. This broke the tendril off and weakened the part still wrapped around Sonic enough for him to break through with a simple burst of chaos energy from his body. Thanking Shadow with a nod of his head, the blue hedgehog flies back with his body leaving behind a golden streak while the black hedgehog turns towards Joe Dark and launches a swift barrage of Chaos Spears at the eye to make him seal his eyelids and disable his vision long enough for him to use Chaos Control and join Sonic as he stops hundreds of feet away from the beast.

"Not bad at all…" Joe Dark says with a tone expressing how impressed he was at the two hedgehogs, but as he creaked his eye back open he smirked inside of his mind and said to them "Now let me show you something…" Within seconds the demon raises his right claw into the air and slashes across the sky. Three inverted neon gashes appear where his claws connected, but what happens next catches the two hedgehogs entirely off guard. The claw marks don't just appear beside the beast, but in various random locations across the sky. Eventually the veil of gashes closes in on the two hedgehogs, forcing them to split up and speed across the skies to dodge all of the marks that keep appearing around them.

In the end though, the two have fallen for Joe Dark's trap, and while Shadow sees an opening and rockets through the air with the help of his shoes to hopefully strike the beast while he appears unaware Joe Dark notices one of the gashes appearing beside where Sonic would soon be flying by and with but a whim he slips entirely through the claw marks beside him and charges straight into the blue hedgehog with the top of his head. Shadow swings his right fist out, but finds himself taken aback when he strikes the air even though just a millisecond ago the demon was standing motionless before him. "W-What?" The black hedgehog stutters out in surprise as he looks up and sees Sonic being flung into the air by the force created by the beast lifting his head back up.

Due to how swift and strong the impact of the demon's head was with Sonic's body, the blue hedgehog is momentarily stunned, though the amount of time it would take for him to recover exceeded that of which it would take Joe Dark to launch an attack through his pupil, as evidenced by the swift influx of darkness around his demonic eyelid and the hazy aura building up at around the iris. "Chaos Control!" Shadow, after shaking off how quickly the beast had moved across the battlefield, activated his signature ability to appear by Sonic and grab him around his stomach, where he then used it again to end up back where he started from at the exact moment that Joe Dark releases a spiraling black and purple beam of energy with a hazy pale black center that was roughly the size of his pupil. The ethereal beam pierced the clouds and ingrained a two-mile wide hole through it. If Sonic had been caught by that attack, he would have died and that would be the end of that.

"You won't be so lucky again…Hedgehogs…" Joe Dark murmurs quietly as his attack comes to an end. He then dissipates into the air via a distortion of his entire body into an ethereal black mist, while Shadow quickly lets go of Sonic upon feeling him waking up once more. The blue hedgehog picks himself up and places one hand on his head, his body feeling a bit wobbly after being struck straight on by the beast's cranium. "Heh, thanks for that Shadow…" Sonic says upon noticing his ally standing beside him. "We don't have time to stand around Sonic…That demon vanished and I can no longer draw a bead on him." Shadow's calm if somewhat unhinged warning struck Sonic's eardrums and made the hedgehog quickly lift his head up so he could look around and try to see where the beast went off to.

Both hedgehogs were entirely unaware that for all their efforts to seek out their opponent, he was standing right behind them with his presence blended in almost perfectly with the dark skies until the moment that he is ready to attack, at which point his body slowly solidifies while he releases a guffaw so chilling that the cold grip of the dead is felt crawling up the backs of both Sonic and Shadow and finally alerts the two of Joe Dark's existence behind them and allowing them to swiftly turn around to face the beast with looks of shock on their face that last a millisecond before two tendrils are shot out from the demon's back and wrapped tightly around the two hedgehogs' bodies. With their arms forced to their sides, the two heroes can only wiggles their limbs about and grunt as they try to break free from the might of the boy's darkened limbs.

Without saying another word, Joe Dark swings his tendrils towards the center of his face, smashing both creatures together with enough force to break both of the tendrils binding them in place while at the same time disorienting the two hedgehogs and giving himself enough time to follow-up with another attack. "Fall…" With a flash of crimson light from the center of the beast's eye a cascade of screaming spirits mixed in with an energy waterfall of misty darkness falls down upon the two heroes, forcing them to endure the howling cries of the damned while also taking all the damage that comes from the pure darkness itself. At the end of the cascade, the two heroes are left paralyzed by fear and they don't even know why they should be after everything else they had faced before in their lives. They still had control of their thoughts, but their muscles wouldn't respond to what their minds tried to command them to do.

They were helpless, and this helplessness caused Joe Dark to grin inside of his mind with an air of arrogance growing around his phantasmal body. "Despair…" He muttered again, and with his eye glowing a pale black for just a brief moment the sky opens up to reveal a pathway to another dimension far beyond the comprehension of man and beast. Joe Dark summons forth from this perilous dimension a shadowy claw that is said to have rend entire landscapes with but a single motion at its full strength. But as these powers are new to the boy of darkness, he can only utilize a fraction of this hand's might to slam it through the two hedgehogs and drag them downward towards Angel Island itself.

Within seconds, the palm smashes against the ground after breaking through all the branches it could, leaving the two heroes imprinted in the dirt face first with a mighty thud. The claw withdraws back into the void as Joe Dark looks down and sees both hedgehogs lying motionless on the ground, much to his delight. His new form had proved spectacularly against the planet's strongest heroes, and this made the boy of darkness feel ecstasy over what would surely be a fantastic battle against his hated enemy Whiter whenever they met again. Turning away from the fallen hedgehogs for but a moment, Joe Dark suddenly senses something amiss, something violent and angry in the air that was directed entirely towards him. "What's this now?" Curious towards what he was sensing, Joe Dark turned back towards the ground and saw Shadow forcing himself up off the ground with red electricity surging across the ground from his body.

The black hedgehog looks to the right for a moment at Sonic, who has taken a pretty bad beating from all the attacks flung his way, and grits his teeth in anger towards the new Dark King as his eyes start glowing an eerie pale white along with the front of his mouth and ears. The rings wrapped around his wrists and ankles glow a similar color, and detached themselves from his body without so much as another thought from Shadow. Instantly, Joe Dark can feel the hedgehog's power increasing dramatically, and that very power increases more as his body is completely covered by a dark red tint. With one quick use of Chaos Control, Shadow leaves behind a burning ring of energy around where his body once was and appears several feet away from the phantasmal beast.

After a period of silence too brief to calculate, Shadow growls unnaturally as his muscles tighten and a thick red aura rises across his entire body. As he bends down and tightens his fists beside him, the aura's density increases tenfold and a powerful violet hue is added to the aura, while the entirety of Angel Island trembles in the presence of his overwhelming power to the point that random rocks and debris are pulled up from the ground and dragged skyward without end by the crimson electricity shooting out from the ever-growing field of dark Chaos energy. Joe Dark stands in place, knowing full well that no matter what the hedgehog did, it would prove to be in vain. However, he was still fascinated by all the power that Shadow had been holding back, and let slip a single word to express his intrigue "Interesting…"

Shadow, laughing so hard that it was clear as day that his sanity had been broken, ends his charge by condensing his massive aura into a sparkling, uncontrolled orange edged white aura and declaring with all of his might "CHAOS CONTROL!" The black hedgehog warps in a nanosecond beside Joe Dark's behemoth of a body and rapidly punches him with each connection of his fist creating crimson shockwaves that are each a mile in circumference, and this process is repeated on all sides of the beast's body for ten seconds. By that point in time, Shadow appears in front of the beast and claps his hands together to launch a swift if large bolt of chaos energy known as the "Chaos Lance", which is then followed up by the black hedgehog getting up close and personal with the demon as his lance pierces through the top of Joe Dark's head and declaring with one final breath "CHAOS…"

The white hot glowing segments of Shadow's body increase their luminosity to blinding levels while the red tint expands outward the exact moment that the black hedgehog declares in blinding rage "BLAST!" All of the energy that Shadow had built up until this point is expunged in one magnificent if destructive blast of fire and chaos energy, the explosion shaped like a glowing white with red edges dome of light that rapidly expands outward across not just the sky, but eventually the island itself as large parts of the forest and nearby mountains are thoroughly annihilated as the edge of the Chaos Blast makes contact with them. Even though the blast radius didn't cover the whole island, the attack itself was still fairly dangerous simply because of the winds kicked up by it along with the brightness that spread out for miles beyond the island and grabbed the attention of the people observing from the mainland down below, even more so then the sudden appearance of black clouds did earlier. Tails and Knuckles are unharmed simply because of they are just outside the range of the destructive explosion, but as the echidna lurches against a wall with a terrible feeling of déjà vu going through his mind he knew that he'd have to reprimand Shadow for causing obscene amounts of harm to Angel Island.

Finally, everything reaches an unnatural state of peace for the moment as the explosion winds down and Shadow is left in his normal form with only his shoes keeping him suspended in the air. He is exhausted, both mentally and physically, by the effort it took him to use that supercharged Chaos Blast, and even though his suppressor rings have returned to his body he knew it would take a fairly long while for him to recover from this ordeal. That is, if it weren't for the fact that the beast he tried so hard to kill was still alive in front of him. Shadow lifted his head up in utter shock and fear of the monstrosity as he noticed that despite the many singe marks alongside the smoke rising ominously from his body, Joe Dark was relatively unharmed. Out of fear and anguish the black hedgehog asks with his body quivering "W-What are you?!"

In response, Joe Dark sneers inside of his mind and sends two tendrils out to bind Shadow in place temporarily before pulling him in closer and widening his eyelid to peer deep into the black hedgehog's frightened pupils and declare in a chilling, subdued tone meant to strike more despair into his opponent "I am nothing more than your death manifested into a physical form, Shadow the Hedgehog…" But as Shadow stares deep into the ghastly pupil of the beast he sees something that strains his mind to try and recognize, and from there the black hedgehog mutters in fear "M-M-Mephiles?" The name matters little to Joe Dark, and with a single raise of the tendrils as a prelude the beast flings Shadow back towards the ground beside the now reverted Sonic, his body crashing down hard and creating a plume of dirt that rises up and obscures the two hedgehogs from the nightmarish eye of Joe Dark.

"And that's…the end of that…" The two hedgehogs were alive, albeit barely as detected by the gargantuan demon, but he was not going to kill them considering it would be much more frightening for them to live with the fact that someone as strong and frightful as himself existed in the universe. Joe Dark loved what this new form of his was capable of, and calling back to the Dark King's words inside of his mind he expresses ecstasy at the fact that he is not even at his strongest at the moment. Whiter was surely doomed when their rematch came to be, and the demon couldn't wait to combat him once more. Joe Dark turned around all ready to leave this miserable planet to its own devices when suddenly something shifted in the air. A sharp rise in power caused a jolt to pass through and briefly stun the demon before he said to himself "W-What the hell? I-It can't be…"

Pinpointing the exact location of the growing energy source, Joe Dark bends his head down and looks at the Master Emerald Altar, where the seven Chaos Emeralds have repositioned themselves onto the pillars surrounding it. That was not the event that caused the new Dark King to be at a lose for words though. In a matter of seconds, each Chaos Emerald grew until they were each the size of the Master Emerald itself, only with their bodies becoming completely engulfed in white light in the process. The Master Emerald then reacted to the presence of these "Super" Emeralds by glowing even brighter then they were, the light expanding outward until the entire shrine was engulfed. It was then that Joe Dark lifted his head up with his eye widened in complete shock as while he was busy focusing on the Emeralds a massive pillar of white light with multiple colors alternating as the main tint of the edges bursts from the ground where the two hedgehogs are and pierces the high skies above.

Glancing over his shoulders with his body trembling slightly in surprise, Joe Dark follows through all the way and glances into the center of luminous pillar to see both Sonic and Shadow floating in mid-air with their bodies now containing a flashing neon glow that replaces the most primary color. The two beings don't even take a moment to say anything to the demon in front of them before declaring to themselves "CHAOS CONTROL!" Within a split second the two hedgehogs rise diagonally towards each other and mesh together in a burst of power so strong that it releases a wide light-blue barrier of light that covers them under the disguise of a sky blue shadow. The island starts to tremble again as Joe Dark feels a million tons of pressure exuding from the slowly compressing dome of energy surrounding the hedgehogs.

He has to use all of his might to prevent himself from being blown away, and in a few seconds Joe Dark has to close his eyelids slightly as the luminosity of the swirling energy dome proves to be too much for him to bear. Various blasts of pure light shoot out from the dome, proving just how unrestrained the power contained within energy truly was at the moment. Near the end of the earth-trembling event a shockwave of pure chaos energy pushes itself into the dome and causes it to burst in a spectacular display of burning white light that encompasses far beyond the reaches of the island and releases the streams of blue electricity that represent the absolute purity of the Emeralds power across the entire island, the effects of the electricity healing all the damage done to Angel Island's environment thus far to an excruciatingly swift degree.

At the burning golden core of this energy dome the creature stretches his body out in all directions and expunges all the excess energy out through the top, creating a pillar of light similar to the one seen earlier but much, MUCH larger in scale. Finally, it all comes to an end as the light fades away to leave behind the creature that was created through this magnificent display of power. It is a sky-blue hedgehog with nine quills on its head, the bottom two on both sides having the red stripes that Shadow bore. The hedgehog's eyes were red, his chest fur was of the same texture as Shadow's but was shaped to look more like a thickened "V", and his shoes appeared to be a fusion of Sonic and Shadow's. In fact, the eyelid shut creature with the vibrant aura that shifted rapidly between all the colors of the Chaos Emeralds was pretty much exactly that, a fusion between Sonic and Shadow caused by them activating Chaos Control in unison while their bodies and minds are perfectly synchronized with the Master Emerald and the evolved Super Emeralds.

As Joe Dark floated in the air murmuring in disbelief of the creature in front of him, the spirit of the Dark King appeared behind him and recognized the unfamiliarity in his host body's troubled mind "Hahaha…So things appear to have taken a turn for the worst. Perhaps it would be for the best if we escaped while we still have a chance…" Though the Dark King tried his hardest to hammer a warning into the stuttering Joe Dark's mind, the boy of darkness grit his teeth inside of his mind and said to the hallow spirit "I am not backing down do you hear me…I'm still in control of this battle in spite of this unforeseen element!" After which the boy looked towards the glowing aura and the hedgehog it belonged to and asked in a furious rage "WHO ARE YOU?!"

The fused hedgehog opens its eyelids up and smirks, declaring in a voice that was an echoing mixture of Sonic's and Shadow's "To quote yourself, 'I am nothing more than your death manifested into a physical form', but if you must truly know my name is Shadic!" "…Shadic, is it now?" Joe Dark calms himself down, keeping up his confidence as much as he could as he closed his eyelid slightly in anger and declared to the fused hedgehog "So you think that just because you two hedgehogs fused together through some asinine means you now stand a chance against me?! I have beaten you down enough times, and I was going to leave you alive as an act of mercy…But now you have defied me for the last time Shadic, SO YOU ARE NOT LEAVING THIS ISLAND ALIVE!"

Next Time: Clash of Titans