The largest aircraft continued to hover low over the forest, heading towards Robotropolis. Its thousands of N-ethyl packs turned the whole underbelly of the ship a fluorescent green and tainted the air with an oily, thick smell.
Inside the ship, Ivo Nikolos straightened in mid stride, his laser eyes brightening to a hot red.
Sonic.
He was here. And he was talking.
The hedgehog's snide, teenage, Mobian voice echoed through Ivo's mind.
The blood that remained in his body boiled. He clenched his metal jaw.
Ivo turned around in the dimly lit hall and strode towards the nearest window. He could see it all in his mind's eye from the feed that the combots sent him, but he wanted to see from above as well.
Robotnik clasped onto the railing of the screened overlook. He stared down at his train of Mobian specimens and their combot escorts below, in the dark.
There was one tiny divot in the miles-long train. A disturbance. The combots were piling up in almost a perfect circle around a few of the carts, as if they could not get through.
"My planet's gonna be free, Robotnik!" Sonic's voice shouted over at least twelve different feeds, the words synced on them all, rising over the chaos of the struggling combots. "You hear me? My planet and every Mobian on it 'sgonna be free!"
Robotnik stared at the dot on the line of carts. His blood cooled.
That's all it was. A single, small divot.
Stupid little rodent.
He was going to destroy Sonic. He was going to make that hedgehog boy pay through his teeth for continually popping up and causing these little divots. He was sick of Sonic.
—let him make his stupid little divots—he did not have a chance. It was pathetic.
Ivo Nikolos turned on his speaker, concentrating on the individual combot feeds coming into his mind.
