Chapter 4: Love, Rouge
"Kit team, aggressive defence only!" Zen shouted at the top of her lungs.
The next shot escaped the circular laser plate as a full-on destructive beam, heading straight at the heavy off-road transports. Kit vehicles' Chaos siphons fizzled from the immense power. Eggman's booby-trap swallowed their shots without missing a photon.
Kit 1 reached out for the 'eject' button, but the machine imploded before the emergency signal reached his chair. It was a direct hit. Chunks of red hot metal dissipated in the street while the shockwave broke ground floor windows in adjacent buildings. The snipers on top were as baffled as the rest of the convoy.
Mojo 3 kept his cool, however, and drove back to the laser before it could charge another shot. A few puffy glue projectile followed by a standard grenade made short work of the idle cannon. The resulting bang created a hole in the wall as well as more panic in the street, the police included. Still, the cost of one operative was minuscule. Zen would have been the next target.
Sonic stood baffled on the other side of the street. The crowd by the city hall saw the event on a large screen, and it met GUN's ingenuity with applause. Even the mayor took part in in the congratulatory roar, calling the scene an amazing demonstration.
In the meantime, the saviour drove towards Zen's sensor truck. He was allowed to attach the motorcycle to the trailer and come inside. That was a third country's annual budget-worth of tech he'd just saved.
Was it really a publicity stunt? The broken windows looked real, as were the scared people behind them.
Moments later, the convoy successfully reached the large square next to city hall, joining a band of other GUN vehicles to an orchestral fanfare, streamers and camera flashes. The kids found GUN "so cool" for offering an unexpected show.
The single blue hedgehog stared at the event from afar. GUN seemed to be in a rush to leave the city despite pitching up a friendly façade. Normally, Sonic would have acted in kind. This time, a friend's life hanged in the balance and the enemy was becoming truly dangerous.
Introductory noise settled down, signalling the whole parade to move on. A crowd of excited people followed them on both sides. These people were laughing boisterously. Kids pointed at the tanks and missile launchers, took panoramic pictures and waved in front of the TV cameras.
"Ha-ha!" the mayor chortled into the microphone.
Laughter resonated from many loudspeakers in the square, slowing down, losing pitch. The culprit stopped laughing by then as he eyed other dignitaries perched on a make-shift podium on the bell tower, before turning a sour expression at technical staff.
The loudspeakers kept bustling with noise. It transformed drastically: "Muwuahahaha!"
Parade-goers looked around for the source. There were so many people, curious and amused by the next turn of events.
The snipers knew what was happening, however, and tipped security to bring the mayor to safety. Eggman's resilient craft hanged in the clouds above the city. Turbo jets were dispatched to take care of the madman. They decided to let him have a laugh before exploding into pieces during the brightest moment in GUN's history.
Eggman thought differently. He settled down to a more solemn mood before embodying the pompous evil he represented.
"Protecting our values from extinction," he mocked the mayor's accent. "Get a load of this!"
On command, dozens of pawns burst out of the surrounding buildings, flooding the square. Laughter quickly turned to tears as they began slashing through the crowd to get to the GUN units. The commotion paralysed their movement.
Little Moth gulped, seeing reinforcements get outnumbered. Pawns were nothing alone, but they just kept coming. Snipers took out a few, and foot soldiers wrecked some more, only to cry for command to allow the use of heavy weapons. GUN could not protect itself and the civilians at the same time.
Advance team had to make a decision while it still possessed units able to decide anything. The moment a pawn got close to a tank, it would start cutting it to pieces with a laser blowtorch.
They had to protect the convoy at all costs. Missile launchers popped defensive lids off their arrays, aiming at enemy concentration points. They fired resiliently, taking a blind eye on any person that could have gotten in the way. The resulting explosions sent pieces of Eggman's handiwork to fall very quickly. GUN began sweeping the area clean with plenty of munitions still at their disposal.
Eggman was waiting for it. A group of ten golden E-2000 robots swooped down onto the battlefield, able to take the heavy armaments on even terms. Their powerful shields completely negated missile attacks. At the same time, GUN's launchers had nothing of the sort to protect them from the enemy's boiling-point cannons. If the unit had no explosives to combust, the rays simply melted the crew, rendering the array useless. Tanks went down equally fast.
"Break formation. Engage all hostiles."
It looked like the tables have turned. The convoy had to join in the fight. Kit and Kat teams spread out, taking pot shots at the robots to drain their power supply. Mojo 2 hopped back to her turret, beheading two hostiles. The containment vehicle released a few hunter drones to draw enemy fire. Sensor trucks along with front motorcycle team Jojo remained close to Little Moth, though. Reinforcements or not, they had a mission to complete and were slowly sneaking away from the battlefield.
Sonic tried helping. He fought the E-2000 before, and breaking a few more went swimmingly because he could always time the hits a split second before the bot managed to enable the shield. The hedgehog noticed that GUN vehicles kept softening up the ones he was about to busy himself with, a move he appreciated greatly.
With two robots left, it looked like the victor became obvious. Sonic launched a homing attack on one while GUN blew the other to kingdom come. They would have made a high five, had the sides become less aware of the big picture.
At least, Sonic was still fully conscious. He couldn't say so about one of the off-road vehicles. The heat of battle allowed an E-1007 Heavy Egg Hammer to approach it from behind. The hedgehog waved and hopped to get the pilot to turn around, but it was no use. Having supposedly destroyed the E series robots, they all concentrated on Sonic instead.
Big mistake. The robot's hammer flattened one of the vehicles to explode into all corners of the world. The blow was hard enough to impale the hammerhead into the pavement, encouraging the metal monster to beat itself on the chest like an overgrown monkey. However, before the enemy could use the self-inflicted tremor to its advantage, Eggman's creation pulled the weapon out and swung it to topple another transport to roll upside-down, completely ignoring their siphons thanks to reflective plating. Kat team's existence hanged in the balance.
Sonic couldn't move closer to the machine without getting zapped by the reflections. He wanted them to stop shooting despite having no way to communicate. GUN did what they thought they knew best.
The towering monster approached its immobilised prey. A vicious smile adorning the face paint looked fitting for the robot's purpose, a hulk of brute force. Another member of the Kat team fell under the hammer. Only one transport remained after the smash. The hedgehog would have to play it smart if he wanted to avoid becoming a cake of flattened jelly.
It seemed like the ground was shaking from Egg Hammer's malevolence while Eggman's enemies failed to find a way to work together. At those odds, Kit 2 decided he had enough pointless shooting and flashed the transport's headlights several times at Sonic before retreating.
"Elite cowards," Sonic snorted in return.
He thought GUN had nothing good enough to throw at the bot, so they were leaving the clean-up to him. Fine. Sonic fought heavies in the past…with help from his friends because the armour would bend very little even after uncovering the weak point.
Seeing that Sonic was alone to face him, Egg Hammer flexed its electromagnetic biceps to launch a relentless windmill attack. The hammer swung in all directions, faster than ever. Sonic had nothing to lose, though, and homing-attacked the berserk robot to be bounced away by its chaotic weapon and launched into the bell tower. Sonic could now lose the hurt.
The structure's surface spiderwebbed as the hedgehog was embedded into concrete. He coughed. All the dust made it difficult to see what the robot was up to, but he knew it would lose balance soon. It was their fatal design flaw.
Rather than a clumsy oaf ready to fall, he saw an agile monster throw the hammer at the tower. The hedgehog's heart squeezed like a lemon, enabling his lightning fast reflexes.
The ground rumbled like before, only a light so bright it eclipsed Sonic's vision followed the quake. Once his eyes regained functionality, the hedgehog saw himself on the ground next to a tower broken in half by the hammer.
Heavy Egg Hammer lay in the middle of the square with its mechanical innards sparking around a hole. It wasn't an earthquake; GUN had sent ramjets to thwart Eggman's plot. The villain was nowhere in sight, so that was that.
Not a moment too soon, Sonic thought.
Frightened people started poking their heads from cracks and dark corners of ruined buildings. There were plenty of injured citizens. Emergency sirens muffled the cries.
"Tails?"
"They always have a large medical team during these shows; the people will be fine." He paused, surprised by the TV broadcast. "The mayor just promised to move your statue out of the casino to the main square. Looks like you saved the day, in his opinion."
"Gotcha!"
Sonic turned to leave. GUN looked in big enough disarray for him to safely use Chaos Control. He smiled at the hand holding the emerald to see a glass fake in its place. A card dangled on a string.
The hedgehog swore hard enough to squeeze a tear out of his pain-soaked eye when the replica fell to the ground. He would make it on foot, away from a metropolis that failed to properly recognise its heroes.
"Love, Rouge," the card had said before a sneaker pressed it into the lawn.
Yet again a short visit turned into a complete city escape. Still, the convoy couldn't have gotten far even with the roads prepared for evacuation. He was right. Kit 2 made himself known by firing a warning shot in front of Sonic's shoe. While not a real hit, the hedgehog could feel the burn for a few seconds till he decided to approach, anyway.
Red markers moved in the streets to centre on the hedgehog threat as snipers took their cue. Sonic would not be allowed to reach the convoy, which had more than enough on its hands without his meddling.
Little Moth kept eyeing the fail-safe switch that command allowed him to use. He could have pressed it to obliterate the robots and saved most of advance group B. A hunch coupled with belief in GUN's ground force kept him from panicking, though. He was glad for preserving the protocol. Other members of his team seemed proud of the way things worked out.
"Jojo team, Kit 2 needs help," Zen's sister truck on front guard, Buddha, called out.
Two motorcycles turned away in Sonic's direction. Snipers, no matter how experienced, were no match for the hero's speed and gymnastics. Jojo 1 and Jojo 2 remained by Little Moth's ride, on each end of the convoy. They had more than escort duty to think about.
"How's traffic, Zen?" Little Moth asked.
Zen had been the most useful member during the operation, in his opinion. He didn't know her real name, but it would have been nice to have a coffee together or meet up for a victory bash. Strangely, Zen wouldn't reply. Little Moth kept his eyes on the tall overpass connecting Station Square to Rail Canyon while the ear remained glued to the voice comm.
"Uh, was it something I said?"
Buddha intervened. "Zen, Mojo 3 should return to rear guard."
As she uttered those words, Mojo 3's motorcycle detached from Zen's trailer and fell on the road before engaging its self-destruct sequence. Jojo 2 fell off his vehicle from the blast, rolling on the ground disoriented, but everyone's attention leaned towards the back sensor truck.
Seconds later, Metal Sonic clawed his way to the lorry's top dressed in Mojo 3's scorched uniform. Once out, he tore the protective gear to pieces, revealing their comrade's blood underneath the coat.
Little Moth twitched from the sight. The robot must have gutted everyone in Zen's truck and now prepared to down another. He would be stopped.
"Enabling fail-safe, now!"
The pilot punched the red fail-safe button and set coordinates to Zen's GPS. So much for a blind date, he thought as he pressed "Fire."
"Rest in pieces, jerk," the agent grumbled.
Metal's eyes flashed ominously. Standing atop a vehicle within jumping distance from the lead truck, he knew exactly what was coming, and the robot would have himself disassembled if he missed getting the front seat in the most amazing light show he was out to see for the next trillion processing cycles.
A large laser beam crashed through the skies. It evaporated cumulous clouds with a mere touch, disintegrating them outward, and melted through all obstacles till it hit the ground, digging two metres into the road behind Zen's truck. As it kept charging, growing in width and intensity, the beam went faster, swallowing the back of the truck and inching towards Metal Sonic's defiant frame.
Little Moth grinned at the robot's ignorance. No machine could survive such a blast. It was their ultimate guarantee of success.
And yet, it fell short of frying Metal. The beam fizzled out without getting a chance to even scratch the robot. He jumped off the truck's molten remains, looking forward. The performance he waited for was out to begin.
Buddha gulped on air. "Alternative route, Little Moth. Go, go, go!"
Right before their eyes, the overpass was completely destroyed by the GUN satellite. The ray had charged fully, presenting enough destruction to annihilate everything it touched and forming a seemingly bottomless pit in the convoy's path. The way forward ceased to exist.
Shadow's captors had to move without hesitation. Little Moth turned as swiftly as the heavy vehicle allowed. Command had an alternative route ready in case of…unforeseen complications. They covered it in training, so it would be possible to reach the launch pad via Bullet Station.
The problem was that GUN had never fully cleaned the dusty canyons of Eggman's drones. Lacking alternatives, Little Moth's truck drove downhill. In his view, the whole operation was going there.
His heart was still pounding when command opened a secure channel.