Okay... so... Meph's hurt... and the fight still goes on.
In this chapter... we learn a bit (or maybe a lot... I dunno... you decide...) of Dark's origins and how that ties to Shadow and Mephiles...
Please... have fun :D
"You hear that?"
"What?" Rae twitched her ears, then shook her head. "Depends… what did you hear?"
"I heard a scream like Mephiles' in the direction of the park…" Rouge turned her head in that direction and perked her ears forward. Being a bat, she had extraordinary hearing, a very useful skill for a GUN agent. She often kept what she heard to herself unless it was crucial to share it. This seemed like one of those times.
"Naw… I didn't really hear it… my ears are messing up today…" Rae shook her head as Jak sat down and stared in the same direction as Rouge. "But, Shadow said that they'd be at the museum…"
"But it's possible they had to leave…" Rouge reasoned. She frowned. "That sounded like Mephiles was hurt…"
"Ya sure?"
"Positive…"
"Then I guess we go that way…" Rae nodded.
"I dunno if you should come…" Rouge suggested. "I mean… at how things are going… it might be dangerous… and you have Jak to think about…"
"We'll manage…" Rae picked up Jak and pulled her phone out of one of her tails. "The way I see it… I'm half an idiot, because I'm actually half blonde…" She pulled back a few hair tuft strands and Rouge saw a light shading of fair-haired coloring in the middle of the clumps, covered by the black hair. "And idiots don't get killed… so I have half a chance… plus… I've gotten out of many tight spots before without even a bruise…" She let the hair fall back into place and slid her phone open. "Plus… I'm eighteen now… I'm legally not a kid anymore, though I still act like one…" A few taps and several quick button pushes later, she slid it shut and pocketed it back in her tails. "Just had to let Mom know where I'm at…" She added.
"You're eighteen now?"
"Yep, as of June 12th. Spent all of the night before and the early hours at Disney Land with my classmates and friends… it was Grad Nite…"
"It's summer now… so, you've graduated…"
"Yep. I'm a certified High School Graduate. So I'm sure I'm smart enough to help you guys out…" Rae grinned. "After all… I was there during the last time Dark went after Shadow. Fight didn't last long, because Dark fell in the water, and drowned with Mephy… but that means I know about that weakness… and I don't think he noticed me being there…"
"So… you're saying…"
"That I know one way to beat him. I'm sure Shadow and Meph know, too… and now you do… I don't think he'll expect that."
"I see…" Rouge mused. "So, it seems like you know more about things then what you let on, right?"
"Yep… there are things I know that everyone thinks it's still a secret from me. I figure stuff out before I'm told it, too… I just kinda like to play dumb sometimes so people won't bug me… My friends and family know otherwise."
"Anything else I don't know? Like, maybe… do you have a faster way to run? Because if not… you might get left behind…"
"Can only run as fast as I can… but if you do leave me… I'll catch up."
"What about Jak?"
"I'll carry him if I have to. In fact… I will…"
"Okay… let's get going…"
"Ah-kay!"
Mephiles inhaled sharply, holding his breath as he forced himself to focus on more pressing matters.
For one thing… Dark wasn't going to let up, even if Mephiles' ankle was broken…
But… there was no way he could see that told him just how he was going to keep fighting with a busted ankle.
And, as fast as his healing was… it was nowhere as fast as he needed it to be right now.
In short… he was royally screwed.
But, he still had to try…
Dark's eyes widened in surprise as Mephiles exhaled quickly then held his breath again, letting go of his injury, and bracing his hands to the ground beside. He shifted his weight away from his ankle and slowly pushed up from the ground, yelping under his breath as pain flared up from all places he had been hit.
Bracing one hand to the ground, he kept his other to his side, wincing when he touched a bruised spot.
Unable to stand up completely, he simply glared up at Dark, narrowing his eyes and baring his teeth weakly, trying to ignore the pain as he shivered at Dark's feet.
"If I'm as weak as you say… why are you having a problem keeping me down..?" He breathed.
"Because you're stubborn…" Dark lifted his hand and swung it at Mephiles, who took the full force of the smack to the face. He fell back and brought his hands to his face, gritting his teeth. From the sting, he could easily guess that Dark had scratched him with all five claws.
Now that he thought about it, he considered that maybe their claws were either sharp enough to burn… or that there was maybe a small amount of venom in them… whatever the reason… it burned all the same.
"Leave him alone!" Shadow barked. "What did he ever do to you? If you wanna be mad at anyone… be mad at me! I'm the one who sealed you away ten years ago, right?"
"Ah, but see, Shadow…" Dark snickered, obviously finding something to be quite ironic. "For that, I must be sure to thank you before I kill you…"
"Wait. Thank me? For what?"
"If you hadn't sealed Mephy Boy, I would have never been forced into existence. Part of the reason I exist is because of you…"
"You're lying!" Mephiles shook his head, hand still to his face. "You were always there! You took over-"
"When we were sealed in that Scepter." Dark finished for him, absolutely enjoying the shocked looks from both hedgehogs. "When poor Mephy was too traumatized by the combined experience of both what he saw after his creation, and what you, Shadow, did to him… he began losing his grip on reality. Haunted and plagued by these two memories, with 'eternal' darkness all around as a constant reminder… he began falling apart at the mind. That's how I was created…"
"Liar! You were there the whole time!" Mephiles looked a bit frantic now, as if he was starting to doubt what he knew about it.
"Had I not taken action… there might have been other 'split sides'… but I was the first and to date, only one who was made. All of his inner hatred, which scared and confused him, formed me before he even knew I was there. I fed off of his fears, paranoia, hatred… everything negative that ran through his mind had a hand in creating me. Before he knew it, I began experimenting with what I could do, and with that… I found one of my favorite skills… warping his mind…"
Mephiles was silent, unable to come up with a counter for this. Dark saw this and continued, smirking.
"I twisted his thoughts, bent his memories of his then short life, and tweaked even his personality. I shaped him into the very Mephy that broke from the Scepter. Remember that stare? That was me behind that… The insane edge to his voice? Me… Every bit of that was from me… and he was merely a puppet to all of this. Sure… he was there… but barely… he was vaguely aware of it all… but it was much like a comatose state…"
Mephiles shifted his gaze downward, eyes wide and shimmering as it started to make sense to him. Something deep within him told him that what he was hearing was the truth. And… he had nothing to contradict that.
"He only started to regain control about the time we were inside your head. In fact… it was when we were split… You had ended up with me, and he had been pushed into control completely, though he retained all the memories of the whole mess… He simply thought he had been personality flopped with you, and assume the same had happened to you… He was only half right…"
It's starting to make sense now… Mephiles told himself, shaking his head slowly as he took this all in. I was the good one the whole time! But… if he's right… then… Shadow created him by accident..?
"Once put back into our right places, Mephy ended up keeping full control over me without even knowing it. I manage to slip a few times, during his little nightmares… visions really when you boil it down… I was the one who bit your hand… but he forced my back without even knowing it." Dark grinned wickedly and pulled the red Emerald out of his quills, tossing it from hand to hand without even looking. "It wasn't till he caught sight of this Emerald that allowed me to make a full resurface. See… Mephy Boy has a weird reaction to certain Emeralds… his reaction to this one is instant insanity. If he stares at it long enough… he begins to lose himself as the Emerald's energy drives him mad… But… for some reason, he can't touch this one without feeling pain… as you saw earlier… I blame it on our Chaos Energy… it's too unstable really, due to the lab experiments… But, as I'm simply… or at least was… an extension of him… I seem to have no problem touching this…
"However… because of his tendency to lose control when he loses himself… It concerns me overall… During those times… I'm not able to do anything, and it's almost like another mind takes over… but it read out as him… so that was him during that little feral attack a few days ago… Which means that there's more to him then I give him credit for…"
"Why are you telling me this?" Shadow raised an eyebrow skeptically.
Dark stared for a moment, and then laughed harshly, forming a large orb in his hands and holding it above his head with one.
"It doesn't really matter! I'm going to kill you anyway!"
"No!"
Dark paused, turning his attention to Mephiles, who was breathing heavily, eyes livid and narrowed, sharp teeth bared, claws out and digging into the ground as he braced himself, keeping his weight off of his hurt foot.
"You are not going to touch him! Not now, not ever!" He seethed, his eyes flaring up a bright glow of violet.
Then, in a surprising display of anger, Mephiles gained his own Chaos glow around his body, much like Shadow's red one, but somewhat flame like in manner. Pieces flickered off him as he readied himself to spring, claws digging up dirt as he did.
With a hint of unease, Dark quipped: "See? This is exactly what I'm talking about…"
Without another word, Mephiles leapt at him in a flash of purple light. In a blink he had Dark on the ground, and was now biting into his arm, Dark's eyes widening in surprise.
Mephiles shook his head forcefully, slapping his clawed hands into Dark's face, scoring several scratches on his identical pale muzzle. Dark hissed under his breath, and tried to push him off. The feral hedgehog let go of the demon's arm and snapped at his ear, biting into it and tearing a piece off, spitting it out before clamping his teeth onto Dark's wrist.
Dark screamed and kicked him off forcefully, flinging Mephiles several feet away, knocking his head sharply into a tree trunk. The glow disappeared and he lifted his head before losing consciousness from the strike to the head.
Dark got up, growling dangerously as he clamped a hand to his ear. Mephiles had bitten just past the crystals and torn the tip completely off. He pulled his hand back and stared at the palm, eyes widening at the larger then he had expected amount of blood before narrowing them at the unconscious hedgehog.
"For that, I'm going to break every bone in your body before I kill you!" He seethed, clamping his hand back to his ear and alighting his other hand with his Chaos energy.
Mephiles started to regain consciousness again… slowly, but still. A few blinks and he brought his hand to where he had hit his head. He glanced down wearily, and spotted blood on his other hand, on his fingertips. Eyes widened and he looked up at Dark, seeing the scratches on the enraged demon face.
His tongue touched his teeth and he started to spit out some fur and slivers of crystals, and what he could swear tasted like blood.
"What did I just do..?" He spat some it into his hand, seeing that the fur was the same color as his, and had no doubt where the crystals were from. But, still… what did he just do?
He looked up again and decided, from the way Dark was glaring at him, charging his hand up for a strike of some kind, that whatever happened… it probably didn't help him out too much…
And it just keeps getting worse for him...
Well... I hope the source of Mephiles' "feral freakouts" was explained well enough for you. If not... I can try to make it clearer.
Hope you like this chapter. :D