Chapter 21: Rose Among Thorns

The robots kept coming. They varied in shapes and sizes. Some even varied in color, having a little bit of paint on them. None of them were a match for the hammer of justice. At least, that's what Amy Rose told Robotnik as he kept sending them out.

She had gone to the shadow of Angel Island, where Dr. Robonik's new lair was being built. She didn't want him to be successful in building it, so she charged in with her hammer high above her head. She was facing the robot guards for now but was also slowly making her way into the lair's foundation.

It was a long and narrow hallway leading to an intersection of equally long and narrow hallways in the shape of an X. The hallways met at a large circular area with a room between each hallway for the different robotics and technology Robotnik would be working on. Upstairs, which had not yet been built, was Robotnik's living area: his bedroom, his kitchen, his living room.

Amy made her way down the hallway, but to her surprise, it was filled to the brim with traps. The first one she saw was a set of spikes that almost fell on her head the moment she set foot in the building. However, it made quite a bit of noise and was easily dodged.

Having escaped the first attempt on her life, she feared the others. "Well…" she told herself. "This is Robotnik I'm dealing with, not some clever villain." She shouldered her hammer and continued to walk down the steel-rimmed hall.

.

"How did you survive, Mr. Sonic?" Cream was literally bouncing beside him as he walked. "What happened out there?"

"Chaos got a hold of me," Sonic began to explain. "It blasted me with some odd red power. That's probably what you heard. When it happened again, I shielded with my arms and what I could quickly muster from the emerald. So, my communicator broke in pieces. I was knocked to the ground with the earth on top of me. I can only assume that Chaos thought I was dead, so it left. That's when I got up and heard you all talking about how I was 'gone.' I knew I had to find you all." He didn't really mean all of them, they both knew. Knuckles had lost that privilege, if he had even wanted it. "And I've been running around frantically since."

.

Amy was running away frantically. A spiked wall was coming at her at full speed down the passageway. This is insane! Since when is Eggman so ingenious? She sped up her run. She had been running all her life before the incident, but she hadn't run since. She tried to pick up speed, but she was becoming tired. I can't keep this up… I have to find a way out. She started searching around for just a small dent in the wall, something she could squeeze in to avoid the spikes that were coming ever closer.

Suddenly, she thought of something. "Eggman isn't clever at all! He's actually rather stupid!" She smiled and stopped running, turning to face the blades. She readied herself, then jumped up on one of the spikes' smooth sides, holding on to the others around it. She rode the wall down the hallway, until reaching the end, which held only a door.

She sprung off the spike and ran at the door with her hammer, knocking it down and running through to the center room.

"Well, well, well…" a voice growled. "If it isn't Amy Rose!"

"Plan's over, Eggman!" she held out her hammer to him.

He turned to meet her gaze. "What do you want with me, Amy?"

"The usual… You to stop terrorizing animals with robots!"

"Now, now. We both know that's not true."

"What do you mean?"

"I know what you're truly after…"

.

"What is Chaos after?" Cream asked.

"Life energy… that's all we know." He looked at his emerald he held. "Say, Cream… don't you have an emerald?"

She held up the green one.

"Strange… Chaos is obviously not after the emeralds. But why? Wouldn't that be another thing it could absorb?"

"What it absorbs has to have life energy. Chaos emeralds are not alive."

"Good thinking, Cream! That must be it!" Sonic looked around where they were going, searching for any trace of Amy. "I guess Chaos was just after us because we were in its way… But now… it can roam anywhere… I wonder where it is…"

"I don't want to know…" Cream shuddered.

.

"I know the truth, Amy Rose. You're trying to fill a void. A void that, frankly, cannot be filled," Robotnik's tone was sarcastic, sneering. He even laughed. "Whatever will you do without someone to annoy? Find someone else, that's what!"

"You don't know what you're talking about!" Amy lied, trying to hold back tears.

"Face it, Amy! You don't know what to do with yourself."

"Shut up!" She swung her hammer.

"Smashing my robots, breaking and entering, running off on your own… Please…" Robotnik shook his head. "I can read you like an open robotics manual."

"Oh yeah?" Amy blinked away tears. "Read this, Eggman!" She ran at him and swung, but he easily dodged such an obvious move.

"You end up alone, Amy, just like you've always feared. Funny how Sonic was the glue that kept you little rodents together."

"You don't have the right to say his name, Robotnik! You're just a cruel, stupid, evil old man!" The tears finally left her eyes. "And what about you? Aren't you just as angry?" she tried, starting to smirk through her tears. "Angry that you weren't the one to finish him off?" Amy's heart twisted as she said the words, but she knew they would affect Eggman.

They did. "You've got a lot of nerve!"

"You're building this lair of traps and thorns… but there's no one to come through and try to stop you… no one but little ol' me! And you hate that!" She tightened her grip on her hammer. "You hate that Sonic was too clever for you! You hate that I'm too clever for you! You're a failure, Eggman! You always will be!"

Robotnik growled and picked up a remote. "Robots! Destroy her!"

Robots came at Amy from all angles, but she was ready with her trusty hammer. One by one they were hit down. One by one they were smashed to pieces or hit into each other. One by one Amy got through them all, and she walked angrily toward Robotnik.

.

"I wonder what Eggman's up to…" Sonic thought aloud.

"Dr. Robotnik?" Cream said. "I haven't seen him lately."

"He's probably still building pieces of junk."

Cream giggled. She loved having Sonic back. The days, even with the rest of the gang, had been so dark, so gloomy, without him.

"Speak of the devil…" Sonic pointed ahead of them. There were a bunch of robots, but to their surprise, most of them seemed smashed and on the ground. Then, they saw why. "Amy!" Sonic gasped. "She's holding her own against Eggman!" He watched as her steady walk turned into a jog, then a run, then a sprint. She jumped up and pounded him with her hammer.

"Oh, and another little present for you… since I know you love the emeralds so much!" she lifted up her red chaos emerald and it shined, causing the hammer in her hand to ignite. She spun it around her, causing Robotnik to fly off, on fire, into the distance. "That'll teach you, Eggman!"

Sonic and Cream had gotten close enough by now to see the half-finished building and Amy kicking robots aside to walk away.

"Until next time, Eggman…" she sighed. "In the meantime…"

"…you can relax, Ames," Amy recognized that nickname. She snapped around and her eyes grew wide. "Yeah, it's me. Just don't—"

Amy ran to him and squeezed him tight, tears running from her eyes like waterfalls. "Sonic! Sonic! Oh, Sonic! I can't believe this!"

"—crush me…" Sonic finished, strained. He shrugged and returned her hug.

"Oh, Sonic! How? Why? When?" She finally pulled away and wiped her eyes. But she quickly hugged him again. "I thought… I thought…"

"I know." He returned this second hug. "But I'm fine. I promise."

"What about Chaos? Is it destroyed?" she asked him, pulling away again.

Sonic shook his head, turning serious. "No… not in the least."

"What's going to happen to Mobius if it's on the loose?"

"I don't know. That's what we have to find out… once we get everyone back together."

"So… how do we find the others?" Cream spoke up.

"I… don't know…" Amy stated with regret.

Sonic put his hands on his hips, "We'll have to just keep moving… searching everywhere for anyone we can find. We'll get the group back together. We have to… before this Chaos can be dispelled."

"Actually…" Amy started, "I may have an idea of where to find Tails."