Chapter 21: Dawn of the Twilight

Twilight Cage, near Nocturne

It took Knuckles the Echidna a few seconds of stunned disbelief before he was able to comprehend what had just transpired. The last-ditch wave of force fired by Imperator Ix had blasted him off of the Nocturne, stunning him and causing everything to go black. But now that his battered body had healed itself and he came to, he quickly discovered to his horror that he was completely weightless, pinwheeling through space at a great speed with an infinite purple void stretching out above and below him. Before the destruction of Echidnaopolis Knuckles had briefly been pulled into the zone along with former Grandmaster Kragok, but he had been too busy fighting for his life to fully take in the sight; the massive fragments of jagged rock visible miles away, the smaller hunks of rock flying about like meteors, the strange black and blue ships hopping among the plantetoids, the misty purple nebulae and the twinkling stars. Just by looking ahead he could make out the silhouette of the Nocturne citadel off in the distance, but it was completely out of reach and was growing farther away by the second.

Knuckles' first inclination was to begin panicking loudly, but his calmer and more pragmatic side was quick to kick in, a product of his tough years of isolation as Guardian. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying his utmost hardest to ignore the slightly unpleasant butterfly-inducing sensation of weightlessness. He quashed the desire to panic and he immediately began recalling that he wasn't the only one who had fallen off the fortress. When Ix unleashed his final attack, someone else had been blasted into space...

"Sh-Shade...?" he mumbled softly, twisting his waist and craning his neck to see the Nocturnus Procurator floating alongside him a couple meters away. She was limp and prone, her eyes were closed, and her black armor was dented with bits of shrapnel embedded in the material. Oh, no, please still be alive...please... thought Knuckles. "Shade! Shade!" he shouted.

Shade's eyes fluttered open, startled. Unlike Knuckles, however, she didn't require any adjusting to the new sensation of weightlessness; having lived in for years she had experienced it multiple times. Rubbing her arm where a piece of rubble had struck, she turned herself in the air and looked at Knuckles with an almost blank, indecipherable expression.

"I...you...Ix..." she stuttered, then put her head in her hands. "I betrayed Lord Ix," she said, shaking her head.

Knuckles raised an eyebrow as he slowly drifted through space. "Yeah, that guy was absolutely insane back there, so I can't really blame you. Think you're ready to ditch him for good and help me now?"

"He was my master..." replied Shade softly, half to herself. "But...I...was blind. I did not realize he wanted to take the world for himself. We've only spoken of returning to it, but we've never had enough power to transport everyone until now...and seeing Ix suddenly monologue about how he's going to conquer everything just completely caught me by surprise. I didn't expect him to react the way he did..." mumbled Shade.

"Shade, that guy is a lunatic and a power-freak," responded Knuckles calmly but with anxiety creeping into his voice. "But look, we don't really have time to worry about that right now. At the moment we're kind of flying through space without any sort of transportation, so you might've guessed I'm just a little bit concerned about our situation here..."

Shade nodded, and resolved herself to focusing on the present. "That's not a problem, Guardian. I've got one of our Warp Belts included in my suit, so if you grab my hand I should be able to teleport us out of here..."

"No. We're going back to Nocturne, and we're rescuing my friends and family first. Period."

"Going back to Nocturne would be suicide! If we return then Ix won't hesitate to kill us both!"

"I'm not worried about Ix," said Knuckles, fanning his arms and dreadlocks and propelling himself closer to Shade so that the two echidnas were a mere meter apart. "He had his chance to kill me, and he failed. I'm worried about my friends, and what Ix might do with the Master Emerald. Right now we have to get back to his fortress. Can you do that?"

Shade took a deep breath, then reached out her hand, which Knuckles promptly grabbed. "...Yes, I can. Hold on tight, Knuckles," replied Shade, tapping a button on her wrist. They were immediately engulfed in a flash of blue light which swallowed them both and faded away.

Meanwhile, back in the battle-ravaged throne room, the Imperator known as Imperator Ix hovered over what was left of his throne and the furnishings of the chamber. Several of Ix's Nocturnus lackeys were already in the process of fixing up the room, but the very sight of his throne, the symbol of his authority over his people, reduced to rubble was an infuriating thing for the power-mad ruler to bear witness to. "Blasted Guardian...insubordinate Procurator..." he muttered under his breath. Already he had swapped out his damaged armor suit to make himself more presentable, but the thought of Knuckles, a mere boy, defeating him in hand-to-hand combat made him seethe with silent rage. He had defeated the Brotherhood of Guardians and Moritori Rex when they had ended up in the Twilight Cage, so why couldn't he have defeated one lone Guardian?

"Lord Ix, I presume?" said a voice in the corner near the elevator entrance. Ix turned in midair to see Dr. Finitevus, cloak shrouding his entire body, standing in front of an opened warp ring with shimmering portal. A sinister smile etched its way onto the doctor's face when Ix growled and refuses to respond. "I bear tidings from your men on the battlefield back on Mobius, and they report that Dr. Robotnik's EggDome base has been secured and is ready to be converted into another staging area for your upcoming conquest. By the way, I see your throne room suffered quite a bit of damage," noted Finitevus. "Please don't tell me you tried to engage Knuckles in battle..."

"I did, and I won handily," spat Ix, but his halfhearted lie didn't deceive a single being in the room.

"Uh-huh. Anyway, where is the Guardian, perchance? I have need of him to further my plans."

"Floating in interstellar space with my former Procurator," stated Ix with folded arms. "And I don't feel like retrieving him at the moment."

Finitevus scowled. "I thought I told you to keep him subdued," he said with anger creeping into his voice. "What in blazes happened here?"

"I...tried to get him to join our cause," replied Ix. "I told him the Master Emerald wouldn't respond to us, that we were trapped here because we had no means to escape, and that all we wanted to was to breathe the air of Mobius again."

"I take it he wasn't deceived?"

"You could say that."

"At any rate, I hope you're ready to move activate the Master Emerald and move the fortress through a Chaos energy portal soon," said Finitevus. "But need I remind you that our plans cannot succeed without the Guardian? To restore Enerjak, I need a powerful avatar like Knuckles."

"I have no doubt he'll return for his Brotherhood friends, and when he does we'll capture him and you can do with him as you please," smiled Ix. "We'll wait just a little longer to exit the Cage, and when the Guardian returns we'll spring a little trap..."