(Future Honest: Now please make sure to pay attention. This chapter introduces some very important plot points that will reveal their importance in the next book... but not so much this flashback. I just felt like some background information was needed for Infinite since he's gonna have such a large role in the future.)

"I've made it this far because of my friends' support throughout the whole journey. Victory is ours!"

Sure now that both my body and soul had fully merged with the Ruby, our joined energies were completely sapped and I could no longer fight. However, that didn't mean I couldn't still having struggled to get up, I could feel myself fading in and out of Null Space. It was as if both dimensions were overlapping in my vision.

"No matter how perfect your virtual reality seems to be, it is still no match for the heartfelt bond of friends." It was Sonic talking. He glanced beside him at the Avatar. "Like us," he said. He appeared to be oblivious as to what was really going on, seeming to be blinded by his victory.

Before I could really grasp what was happening, a beam shot out from the central tower behind me. Its red light encompassed me and I felt as if I were being pulled towards this tower.

"What? No, I can still fight...!" I shouted at the beam, knowing that Eggman was behind it. However, I was pretty positive that he couldn't hear me, especially since, as soon as I had protested, I was immediately wrenched towards the tower at an even faster rate.

Before I knew it, I was inside some sort of metal chamber. Lights on the walls were glowing dark red, slowly blinking.

Suddenly a voice echoed throughout the room. Electrical feedback let me know that it was being transmitted outside whatever this was via a microphone. "To think Infinite could be defeated... I'm impressed, Sonic. That's exactly why my defeating you will be so much more fulfilling."

All of a sudden, the glow of the prototype Ruby on my chest intensified.

By now I had suspected what I was in was a large machine of some sort. It began to shake and a loud noise was heard. Immediately after this noise began, the prototype Ruby was ripped from my chest and stored in a compartment in front of a glass window before me.

"What the-?!" I heard someone exclaim. The voice from earlier resumed. It was unmistakably the voice of the Doctor then as he said, "Gotcha! The nuclear power reactor in the fortress was just a decoy. A true winner keeps his trump card out of sight until the very end!"

We must've been real close to Sonic and the Avatar then because I could hear voices coming out of Sonic's communicator from here, reporting an increase in my duplicates up to around 10,000 troops. What? I hadn't created them. Then Eggman must've been-

"What did you do, Eggman?" Sonic asked. Judging by his tone, he was not amused by what had happened.

The Doctor then laughed. "I inserted the Phantom Ruby into this Death Egg Robo," he said.

Next it was Tails who spoke. He was there too it seemed. "That can't be... That would mean the limits of the energy supply are gone, and the Ruby has become flawless."

As in... the Doctor's ultimate weapon was no longer dependent on me and my ability to fight. I was only a nuisance then. Without the Ruby... I was useless.

"A great deduction, Tails! This Death Egg Robo has become... No, I have become an ultimate and complete form that surpasses Infinite!"

No...

"You will be crushed by this perfected Death Egg Robo, and my plan will succeed just as I have predicted it!"

And then we were once more within Null Space.

After another round of fighting during which I was mostly unconscious as I struggled to recover without the Ruby after my own fight, the Death Egg Robo, powered by the Phantom Ruby prototype, was still standing. Sonic, Classic, and the Rookie had fought Eggman's machine one-by-one, as I observed through the glass window in front of me and the Ruby, but their attempts at destroying his mech had left no mark from what I could tell.

"You're quick to call it the end just like always, Eggman. However, the battle isn't over yet. We're still going to stop you!" came a shout from Sonic.

Suddenly I could hear a million voices all around us. They weren't coming from any of the heroes' communicators, but they were unmistakably the voices of their friends and fellow resistance members. They were cheering on Sonic and the Avatar.

I suddenly felt unbelievably angry. Due to the Doctor's extreme ignorance, Sonic and his allies were going to succeed. If only I hadn't squandered the last of the Ruby's energy, I could've defeated them.

However, now that I was separated from the Ruby, I was no longer blinded by my lust for the Ruby's power. I felt much better now other than feeling a bit drained. My head wasn't clouded anymore, and I could think much more clearly now.

It wasn't the defeat of Sonic and the Avatar that I longed. It was for revenge on the one who had shamed me so long ago that I truly hungered.

Suddenly I was shaken from my thoughts by a huge impact. Before I knew what was happening, the glass on the front of the chamber I was in shattered as three pairs of feet struck it at once. As the red window shattered, pieces of something glinted in the light, appearing bright red. Wait... had the Ruby shattered too when the glass broke? After all, it had been only just behind the window when the three heroes struck it.

I sighed a breath of relief as I saw the Ruby lying listless on the ground. The red pieces I had seen falling were only pieces of the window shimmering as the red glow of the chamber hit them.

The Doctor's colossal Death Egg Robo collapsed, falling to the ground. The Ruby had stopped glowing as soon as it hit the ground, no longer powering Eggman's mech or creating virtual reality clones. I fell from the post I was being tethered to by some sort of force as the Death Egg Robo lost all power.

I placed the Ruby back in my chest and attempted to use it to teleport out of there. Sadly, the prototype Ruby only flickered before going completely dim once more. I then looked to the shattered window, the only exit. Beyond it- the physical world.

As Sonic and his friends went off to celebrate their victory and see Classic off, I walked away from the mech with only slight scratches from where I had squeezed through the broken glass window. Turning back around, I observed the destroyed robot and found that the uppermost part, where Eggman's voice was heard coming from earlier, seemed to be vacant. Had he gotten away unscathed, or was he hiding elsewhere, perhaps deeper within his own creation? I didn't really care to find out. Instead, I left the scene as quickly and as silently as I could with my still-current goal of revenge remaining fresh in my mind.

Everybody in Honest's third period English class glared at her as she blissfully read the entire prologue to the Canterbury Tales aloud by herself. Honest seemed to blissfully be ignoring them as well. When the bell rang to signal the end of the period and the beginning of first lunch, Honest thought back to the past few days as she walked outside and down a long staircase. The last thing she had ate was the vanilla cake topped with strawberries that Shadow had made last night. That morning she had three cups of coffee and ran out the door. Despite not having any sustenance for what... 24 hours... Honest still felt exactly the same as how she'd feel on any other day.

In another desperate attempt to keep the unhealthy chain going, Honest steered away from the direction of the cafeteria and instead ducked into one of the math hallways.

After escaping from the Doctor's destroyed mech, I immediately aimed to enroll at Honest's school. From there it would be easy for me to get close to Shadow. However, in the meantime, I had to find a way to charge the Ruby enough to use it for any amount of time. There were many sources of energy in this world- rings, chaos emeralds, light cores- but none of these sources would supply enough energy to charge the Ruby. Rings ran out of energy just after the first use. Chaos emeralds were way too unstable to be used for any extended length of time, plus it would take two anyway to make them react and put off any energy. Light cores contained very little power, and they could only be harvested from robots. It wasn't like there were a bunch of those scurring about within the school. Instead, I must find a way to tap into a source of raw chaos energy. Unless Shadow happened to be just as eager as me to bring about his own downfall, there was only one other way this could be done, but this was completely unknown to me... then, at least.

It was February 11th, 2019, and when I was contemplating my next course of action while walking through the school's hallways, I heard a loud noise that pulled me free of my thoughts. Rounding a corner in the lower halls of the main building, I immediately discovered the source of the sudden sound.

A clock above my head informed me that it was around 11:20 am. I recognized this as approximately the time of day that students would be going to lunch. Because of this, the hallways were deadly quiet and especially empty at this hour. That, coupled with the fact that battling your foes at school was for the most part frowned upon in this society, made the events unfolding in the hallway before me particularly intriguing.

At this moment, a green hedgehog in a black leather jacket was fumbling around in the floor in a desperate attempt to both possibly elude his attacker and to put his red sunglasses back on, which had been knocked onto the tile floor at some point.

I immediately recognized who this was. My mind suddenly went back to last year. One day I went to go get a drink from one of the water fountains at school. This particular fountain was positioned at the perfect distance between my second and third period classes in order for me to access it without wasting much time. However, when I arrived and attempted to get a drink, one of the more inhibiting obstacles to me was in the way once again- Honest the Cat. She was drinking out of my water fountain. Therefore, the action I would take next in order to solve this problem should have been obvious.

"One, two, three, that's enough for me," I said, knowing that I had her.

Instead of immediately backing off, Honest just continued to drink! I used what little energy I had built up in the Ruby to break the water lines inside the fountain, flinging the two doors on the bottom open in order to reach them. Water began to spill into the floor. Honest turned around and glared at me, anger appearing as flames in her violet eyes.

"What the heck, Infinite?!" she had responded.

I stood my ground. "One of these days, you will learn to obey what I tell you."

"Huh?" Just then a green hedgehog, whom I had never seen before in my entire life, went to the now open compartment of the fountain with a screwdriver and had begun to remove copper fittings from the busted pipes and drop them in a plastic bag.

The blond cat spun around to see what the hedgehog was doing. "What are you doing?"

The bell rang afterwards, signalling that Honest had successfully made me late for class.

Like she always happened to do, perhaps simply out of impulse, the cat thought only of herself, saying, "Look! Now you've made me late for class. Good going."

Before diving headfirst down the stairs, Honest looked between me and the hedgehog who had previously been crouched in front of the water fountain but was now standing beside us.

"Maybe you should try making friends, Infinite, so you can leave me alone."

Make friends? Why would I want to do something like that? I looked at her with a confused expression. She gestured towards the mysterious, green pineapple.

"Infinite, this is Scourge. Scourge, this is Infinite. I'm sure you'll get along just fine. Now get to class." Honest then proceeded to dash down the stairs and towards her third period class, which I think was some sort of science class, but I'm not sure.

At first the green hedgehog and I had only just blinked at each other, but soon he broke the ice by laughing, subsequently revealing his saw blade-like teeth, which I won't lie kind of startled me. Who was this hedgehog?

"Do you want to go outside with me to meet someone for a match of the Fighters?" he asked.

"But don't we need to go to class?" I answered him with a question.

"Why should we? What do you have anyway?" the hedgehog who Honest had called Scourge said while looking sort of confused.

I thought for a moment. "Art."

He made a "pfft" sound. "When you see my winning strategy, you'll believe it's an art, too. Come on."

He waved me to a door nearby that led to a concrete path, along which I usually traveled on my way to lunch. I followed him, not really sure what else to do. Ever since, he has invited me on countless other excursions, such as midday trips to the library.

I considered this 'hog my friend, so I immediately became concerned when I saw him being attacked by someone in a hallway where no one else was around to help him except me. His attacker was a pink hedgehog in an orange tutu whom I guessed, based on her appearance, was a freshman or sophomore. She had a green and yellow hammer with pictures of skulls decorating its sides and large, lethal-looking steel spikes adorning its ends held above her head. She seemed to be about to bring this frightening weapon down on my ally's head.

Before I could react, this hedgehog did bring her hammer down, but Scourge jerked his head out of the way, causing it to only meet with the tile floor beside him.

"Hold still and let me squish you already!" his attacker exclaimed, sounding a tad bit off her rocker. When she lifted her hammer, I saw that it had left a hole about a foot deep in the floor.

There was no way I was going to let that happen to my friend's head.

Knowing that I would most likely regret this next move, I used what little energy I had in the Ruby up again by distorting the air above Scourge. The maniacal pink hedgehog brought her hammer down once more. This time, when her hammer struck the distortion I had formed in the air, an equal force was sent back up at her. With a loud shriek, the hedgehog girl was flung backwards at least thirty feet down the long hallway.

The green hedgehog recognized me instantly and stood up. "Woah! What did you just do?!"

In Honest's opinion, the bathroom was the best place to hide out in during lunch. Just before she could reach the bathroom connecting the three math hallways, however, she was forced to come to a halt when Rosy the Rascal suddenly flew past her head and slammed into the wall.

The first thought that came to her head was that it was unusual for someone to throw Rosy down the hallway instead of her throwing someone. Her second thought was "oh my gosh, what's happening?"

I looked down at the glowing Ruby on my chest. It slowly went dim, and I looked back up.

"This gem has the power to distort reality," I stated flatly.

He suddenly rushed over to me. "Really? That's so cool!"

I nodded. "Yeah, but it takes so much power to recharge it that it's pretty much useless 364 days of the year."

The green hedgehog brought a hand to his chin as if he were contemplating something. He suddenly looked up as if he had thought of something. "Hey! I know where you can find a bunch of energy!"

I tilted my head. "You do? Is it enough to charge my Ruby?" I asked.

He nodded fervently. "I'm sure it is! It's an unlimited source after all."

My interest increased at the mention of an "unlimited source". (And it wasn't just because my name means "unlimited".) "You know of an unlimited source of energy? Like... chaos energy?"

He nodded once more. "Yup! Have you ever heard of... the Master Emerald?"

Thank you so much for reading this chapter. I love typing in Infinite's point of view. He's so short-sighted and incredibly biased against everybody. :D If you enjoyed reading Infinite's point of view, please leave a review. See you next time!