Knuckles' head pounded and he deeply didn't want to open his eyes. Had no interest at all in discovering what fight was next to fight, what threat was next to face. He opened them anyway. What other option was there?
He swallowed back a moan at the aching brightness of the lights and kept them open. Another metal ceiling instead of sky was above him once again. Before he could process the thought that they'd successfully fled what has clearly been an ambush, it became obvious that they hadn't.
In a blur of motion that made Knuckles' head spin more than it was already doing, the hedgehog was standing over him.
"Fair warning," he said. "Don't start anything you don't want me to finish."
Knuckles considered this. A threat instead of an attack and the hedgehog looked almost as dishevelled and fed up as he himself felt.
He rolled out from under him and tumbled to the floor and onto his feet, stepping back two short steps to put striking distance between them and holding his ground there. It placed the hedgehog silhouetted against the light which made Knuckles' head pound further but that couldn't be helped. He needed enough distance to watch the fox and the two humans as well as the hedgehog.
"Start something?" Knuckles edged sideways. The fox and the humans shuffled away as well, keeping their distance, allowing him to claim the defensible corner position, while the hedgehog maintained the higher ground. "Start something?"" Knuckles repeated. "I'd had my feet on this world for three seconds, hedgehog, when you attacked me!"
"Oh and you want to pretend you don't know why that was?" The hedgehog's voice had flashed into instant, baffling fury. Blue fire lightning-cracked along his spines, making Knuckles pull energy of his own around himself in instinctive reaction.
There was only one thing a rogue chaos user could want from him after all and Knuckles' hand reached back, towards the bag of chaos emeralds which should have been at his shoulder. His mind caught up with his body a split second later as he realised it had closed on empty air.
Shock, through panic, to anger of his own took milliseconds.
"Give. Them. Back."
The hedgehog had the gall to look actually amused. A glittering, dangerous grin.
"Me? Sorry to disappoint, buddy. Whatever you were toting, Robotnik took 'em when he high-tailed it outta here and left you to have your little nap on the blacktop."
A second wave of horrified shock swept up and over Knuckles and he found himself shaking his head.
"No… No he wouldn't have. He… he had the chance before and he didn't…" Realisation came like a cresting wave dragging him under as it broke over his head. "He was waiting until I had them all."
"You stood right there and watched while he stole my rings." There was no sympathy to be had from the hedgehog. "You run with thieves you're gonna get robbed." His expression hardened further. "Oh wait. It's not just thieves. It's kidnappers and killers you ran with, right?"
The pounding headache tore at Knuckles' attention from one direction. The shocky panic that refused to settle dragged at it from the other. The question refused to make sense.
"What?" He put a hand up to shade his eyes from the painful light, even knowing it risked obscuring the hedgehog's attack if it came.
"Sonic." The male human had spoken. Had approached the hedgehog. "This guy… he couldn't have been any older than you when that happened."
Knuckles felt although he was floundering just under the surface of a conversation that was flowing away without him. He fought to get his head above the surface.
"When what happened?" he demanded.
The hedgehog whirled his attention back to Knuckles.
"When you lot tried to kidnap me and killed-" he fumbled the word, began again. "as good as killed Longclaw!"
The first protest was out of Knuckles' mouth before thought had intervened.
"They wouldn't..."
"Right." For a split second the hedgehog looked almost understanding through the anger. "And Robotnik wouldn't rob you."
Sick horror rose in Knuckles' gut but it was more than the hedgehog's words, because there was something worse coming. Something that had been worse then and was worse now and put the lie to his denials because he'd seen it and known it. The warriors had been afraid of the hedgehog child, Tikal had been angry at what they'd tried to do about it, and bad thing – the monster – was that fear and fury conjured into chaotic life of its own.
And it was coming under the door. Pooling and rising. Something that was almost echidna-shaped but twisted and distorted into weird disturbing proportions.
Something in Knuckles' reaction had caught the hedgehog's attention because he followed his terrified gaze then turned back to him to add grimly, "And you don't run with monsters without getting eaten."
"It won't care whether we're on the same side," Knuckles forced out between breaths that he was trying desperately to keep anything approaching under control.
"I figured." The hedgehog had turned at least partly in the creature's direction. He looked poised to spring at it and Knuckles stared at him. Couldn't he feel it? It was taking Knuckles everything he had not to smash down the wall behind them and flee as far and as fast as he could from the thing.
The fox was hustling the two humans away from the door and the looming creature before touching down beside the hedgehog, who glanced back over his shoulder at Knuckles.
"Well? You want to start or shall I just go ahead?" Challenge danced in his eyes and chaos light danced in his spines.
Knuckles took a shaking breath and gritted his teeth. He reached out to that same flickering unseen world. He was weary and afraid and a world away from where he should be but at this level the distance meant little. Somewhere the Master Emerald was out there, even if he wasn't and its touch was courage and warmth and strength.
The chaos emeralds circled his awareness too, but one touch was enough to make him baulk, flinching away from something cold. Oily and sharp and hard.
The feeling joined the roiling horror of the monster deep in his gut, a visceral wrongness. But he couldn't help it now. He opened eyes he hadn't realised he'd closed to glare at the creature. Found the hedgehog at his side looking at him quizzically.
"Up for this are you?" he said and the doubt in his voice was enough to drive send Knuckles flying into the attack in answer.
He flung himself bodily against the creature, intending to tackle it back through the door. To buy them some space. The door burst open under their combined weight – the creature was solid enough to hit at any rate.
And then it wasn't and Knuckles was falling through it to sprawl on the corridor floor. Water that wasn't water rose around him, colder than any real water could be and still flow, and he couldn't move or breathe or think.
Abruptly he hit the floor again, knocking breath back into his body in a painful gasp.
The hedgehog whipped past overhead as Knuckles rolled onto his back. Spray as hard and sharp as knives took chunks out of the corridor wall, missed the hedgehog, then swept around back at him. Dizzy and hasty, Knuckles curled and twisted, snatched enough energy to wrap around himself. Felt the not-water flash into spray as it hit his spines.
A claw bigger than his head reformed and was sheared off at the wrist by the fox barrelling straight through, a second one blasted into vapour by the hedgehog - nothing more in the moment than a blur of blue light.
He landed in a crouch beside Knuckles, dragged him to his feet as he stood himself and surveyed the re-forming creature.
"Open to suggestions for not just spending all day going 'splash bang splash bang'." He looked from Knuckles to Tails.
"Well? It's your lot's monster, and Tails – you've fought it before. Ideas? Quickly?"
Knuckles made himself look back at the thing. He shook his head.
"Before today I'd seen it exactly once. And it..." killed my friends while I watched and snivelled about it then ran away. He shook his head, left the sentence unfinished.
The fox was already talking, filling the gap.
"We never found a way. Only ever just kept it distracted, kept it busy. Eventually it always went. It doesn't behave like a real thing!" he went on. "Not like a solid thing or a liquid thing. It can alter its own viscosity – at will. On purpose or by reflex or both – I've been trying for years to find something that can stop it."
"I know what can stop it," Knuckles said. "I just… don't know how".
He'd undone the 'how'. In his stupid, selfish desire to escape his exile, he'd undone the 'how'. Freed the monster. Undone everything Tikal had done to keep the world safe from it.
His stomach lurched, bright glittering warning shooting up and down his spine at a disturbance that shook even the Master Emerald.
"And Robotnik has them."
"Okay," the hedgehog said. "That bit we can deal- what's it doing?"
The monster's head had snapped round. Knuckles shivered.
"It knows as well."
Faster than it had re-formed, it collapsed again, pooling and thinning and disappearing into the floor.
"See," the fox said as the others stared. "It can alter its structure so much it can just fade away through stuff. Where do you even start?"
"Where's it gone more to the point?" asked the hedgehog. "I mean I'd love to see Eggman get a visit but..."
Knuckles was shaking his head, the hedgehog had no idea. "He has the chaos emeralds. He.. What if he can…"
He put his head in his hands, too appalled to finish. "This is my fault."
The hedgehog ignored this.
"How sure are you that thing has gone to Robotnik and not on a rampage we have to do something about right now?"
"I'm sure."
"Okay. So we've got a sec. Start explaining."
Knuckles raised his head. "Explaining?"
"We get you don't know everything that's going on," the fox jumped in, cutting off the hedgehog who'd started to say something impatient. "I don't know everything that's going on, neither does Sonic. But we know different bits. Right? So we should compare? See what we can work out?"
The hedgehog glanced at the fox and his expression softened a little.
"I suppose that makes sense."
Knuckles nodded. "Alright."
"Great! So first things – I'm Tails, this is Sonic and we don't even know who you are."
"Knuckles."
The male human spoke up.
"Right. Are we good here then? I need to go check that thing didn't cause any damage elsewhere in town. We happy about who's in league with Robotnik and who'd not are we? Know who the good guys are?"
Knuckles stared back at the hedgehog.
"Why does this place call you the Blue Devil?"
The hedgehog – Sonic – laughed. "For kicks and giggles and to fleece tourists if they do still."
Knuckles frowned. The laughter had been too instant to be feigned.
"I'll let you explain that one." Both human's left and Knuckles made himself look back at Sonic.
"I saw pictures of the damage..."
Sonic shrugged. "Yeah. There was… an incident? S'all good now."
"Oh."
"Eggman sell you that as the real deal? Evil hedgehog on the loose?"
"Did you have a reason to think a blue hedgehog was a problem?" Tails had interrupted before Knuckles could come up with an answer that wasn't simply an embarrassing admission of being duped.
The hedgehog leaped on the idea.
"Yeah. Let's hear that. What's was your echidnas' problem with me?"
"I don't know."
Sonic scoffed.
"I don't!" Knuckles insisted. "I knew there was a blue hedgehog. Tikal said he – you – were… I think she meant you could use chaos energy."
"The whole superspeedyglowy thing, yeah?"
Knuckles frowned, unable to tell if the hedgehog was taking this seriously.
"Yes. I don't know if they knew anyone who wasn't an echidna who could. I didn't know." He shrugged. "But there's lots of things I don't know about it. I was there to learn."
"Well it kinda seems like it bothered them big time that a hedgehog had it, because they weren't messing about when they came for me!"
Tails had retrieved a backpack and pulled out a device with a small screen which he tapped at.
"Did you know about this?"
He turned the screen round to display a photograph. A dirty and cracked mural on an algae crusted wall. Torrchlight reflect from it obscuring some of the pattern but it was recognisable. A blue hedgehog and a huge clawed machine faced each other across the Master Emerald which dominated the centre of the picture, isolated and unguarded.
He nodded. "Not then. I was too little to be allowed in those parts of the shrine. Even experienced Guardians can be misled by prophecy. No one would tell half-trained children about it. But later. In the books Tikal left with me, there was a copy of the picture."
"Prophecy?" Sonic looked unconvinced but Knuckles nodded.
"That mural has been there since centuries before you were born. What else would you call it?"
"So what's it mean?"
"It's… The layout is about tipping points. Choosing a side. But the Guardian is missing from the picture. That's a bad thing. A warning."
His audience of two looked baffled and Knuckles couldn't blame them. He sighed.
"I don't know. Not really. I think the night the warriors went after you was the same night Tikal came for me and said we had to leave. Take the emeralds away. She was upset. Something bad had happened. Was going to happen. Both. That's when the monster came. I never saw her again so I'm still that half-trained child and I don't have the faintest idea what it really means."
"So Sonic escaped to Earth and you escaped to the mushroom planet?"
"Yes. Tikal went back."
Tails nodded. "And she must have stopped the monster somehow because it only turned up again recently."
"Because of me," Knuckles admitted. "She must have used the chaos emeralds to seal it away. And I started taking them. I didn't know."
He stopped. That wasn't the whole truth after all.
"I knew there was something bad there. I'd stopped. And then Robotnik came. He said you'd trapped him there?"
"Yup," the hedgehog agreed readily. "I took offence at him wanting to chop me up for parts to see what I ran on. Didn't mean to drop him in anyone's lap. Longclaw thought that place was empty."
Knuckles nodded. "It was, before I got there I think. Of people anyway. Robotnik had been alone before he found me. He said he just wanted to go home and I thought I was used to wanting to go home and not going but… It was stupid of me."
He looked back at the picture.
"Who showed you this? Did they know what Tikal did? That she got me away?"
Tails' eyes widened and Sonic made a face which Knuckles couldn't begin to interpret.
"Knuckles…" Tails' voice had turned strangely quiet. "I found that in a ruined settlement… It… It looks like… People think… There don't seem to have been any echidna survivors from that night."
Disbelief so strong it was almost blinding and deafening, froze Knuckles to the spot, hand still outstretched to the picture.
But he could see in his mind's eye the bodies on the ground, darkness and fire and the sound of rushing water and screaming voices and the temptation of denial could not be sustained or hidden behind.
He lowered his hand, forced his voice to remain under control.
"I see. Do you have any more questions? I have to find the chaos emeralds. I have to stop the creature. I have to go back. I am out of time for talking."
"We'll help," Tails said with Sonic adding "Yep" almost before the sentence was finished.
"This is not your problem."
Tails scowled. "Was my prob when that thing was attacking the villages back home, still my prob now I've followed it here."
"Your not-buddy egg-man snatched my rings and invaded my home again," Sonic said. "He's my problem for as long as he keeps making himself my problem. We're helping."
Knuckles looked at the two of them and found he lacked the energy to contest their choice.
"Alright."