Edited November 22
All canon characters belong to Sega.
Reincarnate
Chapter 7: The Way You Were
Shadow sits tensely in the Tornado. They've flown way past Station Square in hot pursuit of Robotnik, but so far have come up with a blank as to where he might have gone. Knuckles had dryly pointed out that he might have turned at some point, but since they had no idea which way that might have been Tails had decided to keep flying straight. Right now fields are melting away beneath them as they approach mountains, and Amy, even though they could be heading straight towards danger, looks like she's getting tired. Shadow is far from sleepy; his adrenaline is still rushing from the encounter in Station Square.
Their true adversary is very much invisible – this much is certain. But how is that possible? What is the thing? These and many more questions like them have been buzzing around in Shadow's head for the duration of the flight, which has carried them into darkness lit only by the lights of Tails' plane.
A sudden pressure on his shoulder makes him glance around. Amy has finally dropped off and is leaning against him. He blinks, wondering if he should wake her up or just let her sleep.
It confuses him that he would even consider just letting her stay there. Normally he'd have been annoyed and pushed whoever it was off, maybe roughly enough to wake them. But he doesn't mind her being there, and he doesn't know why that is.
When he had first met Amy on Prison Island, his first impression had been: "She's pretty stupid." This was justified for she had been unable to distinguish him from Sonic at a distance of maybe five feet. Sonic is blue. He is – had been – black. It really doesn't strike him as difficult to see the difference.
But Amy hadn't been the only one to confuse the two of them, so it may just be people in general who are kind of dumb and certainly gullible. But it had come in handy then, he had to admit.
The point is that Amy has changed a bit, or at least he thinks she does. She isn't squealing and fawning over Sonic, her alleged "hero", for one thing, and she also has been showing some bravery. Even when Amy had convinced him to fight the Biolizard, she hadn't necessarily been brave. She was staying while the others fought, and while she did help them indirectly by convincing Shadow to come to their aid, she had in truth done very little. But not an hour ago she was fighting off the robots, even while caught by one. He isn't familiar enough with her old personality to be sure, but he's wiling to bet that she would have been yelling for help, maybe not even fighting at all, if she was the same girl she had been on ARK.
Maybe it's the fact that he doesn't see Amy the same way as he had before that lets him tolerate her dozing against him.
Sonic glances back at them from the cockpit and starts at the sight. Shadow pretends that he didn't notice (he was looking to the side), but he can see Sonic stare at them for a second out of the corner of his eye. The blue hedgehog turns away and faces front again, tapping the side of the Tornado with renewed gusto and a tense hand. Shadow notes this curiously – what does he have to be tense about?
"Hey," Tails says, his voice laced with excitement and a little nervousness. "Look down there – see the lights?"
Shadow cranes his neck and looks out. Sure enough, glowing in the darkness of the mountains are several lights. He squints and peers down at them – a dark shape obscures one every so often. He guesses these are robots.
He turns and nudges Amy, who stirs but doesn't wake. Oh, for Pete's sake…he shakes her shoulder with his free hand, and she blinks groggily and groans softly.
"It looks like we've reached the doctor's base," he tells her, and for the first time she seems to notice that she's leaning on him. She straightens quickly.
"Sorry about that," she says, "We've reached his base?"
"Look at the lights," Shadow says, and she leans forward, looking down for a minute before sitting back again. Knuckles is looking down over the side of the Tornado curiously, his fists already tensing as if he's anticipating the fighting they'll be doing to get in and reach Robotnik.
"Whew," Amy says, taking a deep breath. "Guess we'll have to fight our way through, huh?"
Shadow nods, and Sonic asks, "Have a good nap back there, Amy?"
She frowns at his sarcastic tone, replying, "It was great. Bet you wish you could fall asleep in moments of tension."
Sonic scoffs but doesn't respond, staring moodily ahead at their destination. Amy shrugs as best she can, given the cramped conditions of the Tornado, and Tails starts to descend. He hovers some ways above the ground as he did before, and they jump out. Amy manages not to fall this time – a good thing, since she'd be landing on rock and not sand – and they turn towards the lights, which look a lot bigger and more menacing from the ground.
Sonic turns and looks at them all, still wearing that carefree grin which Shadow is beginning to find especially irritating. Who smiles before plunging nose-first into danger? It strikes him as foolhardy and rather arrogant to act so casual about this endeavor.
"All ready?" he asks, and when there's no sign of dissent he leads them forward at a jog towards the base.
Almost immediately they're intercepted by a horde of robots. Shadow hears Amy groan in frustration, but she whips out her hammer. He blinks – where did it come from, anyway? He pushes the thought from his mind and lays into one of the robots. A loud clang and an indignant, off-key beep sound from the right, where Amy has smashed a robot with her hammer.
Too bad she can't homing attack – the hammer, though powerful, isn't very efficient. It takes so much time to fully demolish a robot and then move on to the next. But she handles herself all right, reducing two more bots to a pile of metal rubble.
Tails joins the fray, blasting the larger robots to pieces with the guns on his Tornado. Sonic is taking down several, with a sort of furious concentration. Whatever got him in a bad mood, at least he's taking it out on the robots and not the rest of his companions. A robot flies past him and smashes to bits when it collides with a rock wall, and Knuckles moves on to the next enemy.
"They keep coming," Tails calls from his lofty position in the Tornado. "We should start moving forward otherwise we'll be in this same spot for ages."
They advance slowly, in something of a straight line, taking out the numerous bots on the way. What the ones in front (Shadow and Sonic) miss, the others destroy. They don't have much work to do – the two hedgehogs up front manage to demolish almost every single enemy they come up against.
In time they gain a considerable amount of ground and have half their minds on how to get into the fortress.
"Where are the robots coming from?" Sonic yells over the screeching sound of metal being torn. Tails scans the rock walls, squinting in the bright lights of the fortress.
"I can't tell," he says at length, "But they're slowing down."
It's true – instead of an endless stream of metal adversaries, only a few new ones attack, and then only in spurts. They're taken care of quickly, and the group stands in front of what looks like a solid rock wall. They look up, down, and all across the wall, but see nothing that would indicate a door.
"Great," Knuckles says peevishly, and smashes a small crater in the wall with his fist. A metallic clang echoes throughout the area.
"That's a classic," Tails says with a frown.
"Tell me about it," Amy mutters. "The same thing's happened in every mystery movie I've watched. The enemy hides behind a disguised door."
"It's too easy," Knuckles says suspiciously. "I could break through this wall if I wanted to – there should be more defenses. And why did the robots stop coming?"
"Good point," Shadow says darkly, running a hand along the wall, "They could be waiting inside."
Discussion is cut off as a shadow descends on the group. They all turn to the side slowly and stare up into the blank face of an enormous robot, of the same kind Robotnik dropped on them in Station Square.
"Another one?" Sonic asks with a grin. "What a waste of metal."
"I've got it," Knuckles says, and while he pulverizes the robot, which does take a while given its size, the others stay well away from its hammer. Meanwhile, Tails fiddles with the controls on the Tornado, and a bright blue beam that hums eerily. As the robot to the side of them is finally demolished completely, courtesy of Knuckles' fists, Tails directs the beam at the wall and sweeps it across. Rather than doing any damage, as Shadow suspected it might, it appears to be something of a scan.
"I can't detect anything behind the door," the kitsune says, scratching one ear. "There's either nothing there or it's a really thick door."
"I'll bet on the second one," Shadow says darkly. "The doctor always has plenty of robots everywhere."
"Why do you call him a doctor?" Sonic asks with a roll of his eyes. "The guy's a giant, egotistical egg."
"He can be brilliant, in his way," Shadow says calmly. "His inventions are some of the best I've seen. It's the fact that he uses them for evil that takes away from his genius."
"What genius?" Sonic mutters, but drops the subject. Amy comes to stand by Shadow and bites her lip as she examines the wall.
"Should we try to get through it?" she asks doubtfully. "Maybe we should look for the entrance the robots used instead. He'd be expecting us to go through this door."
"That's a good idea," Shadow acknowledges, and she beams, twirling her hammer.
"Well?" she asks, the question directed at Sonic. The blue hero shrugs, jogging impatiently in place. Tails clanks closer to them.
"I agree with Amy," he says slowly. "This entrance is just too obvious – he's probably just waiting for us to blast our way through, and then he'll launch a surprise attack. The robots came in two steady streams for a while, so there are probably two entrances on either side of this door, if we can find them."
"So get in two groups," Sonic says, "And let's get this over with. How about…me, Tails, and Amy will look around the left, and Shadow and Knuckles look around on the right?"
Shadow feels a twinge of annoyance at the suggestion – he wouldn't mind working with Amy. But then, the pink hedgehog is probably thrilled that her hero chose her for his group, so he doesn't say anything. He and Knuckles jog off towards the right, and he hears the other three move off in the opposite direction.
He shouldn't care about which group Amy's in – it's inconsequential in comparison to the job they have right now. But he's still annoyed…why is that?
On the other side of the wall, Amy is every bit as confused as he is.