Chapter 3: Tunnel Thoughts
They thought it all made sense. Nothing but man made destruction machines could have caused all the damage they saw. Slowly, one by one, the team entered the dark opening in the tunnel. They could feel the breath of darkness engulfing their bodies in its formless existence. Shadows took Sonic, then Tails and then – the rest of the group.
The blue hedgehog didn't seem to stop for the unknown. He simply went forth while continuously touching the wall, making sure he doesn't lose the right and, to his luck, the only way.
In an imaginable amount of time he understood the uselessness such a lead posed as and went back with an embarrassed smile, cunningly forged into a cocky grin that no one except his inflated ego could see.
Knuckles came in handy at that moment. With a single punch planted in the wall, a fireball was placed on it, lighting up the part of the cave they were in.
"A hundred and one uses for Knuckles! Use number sixty-seven: lamp," Sonic exclaimed with a snicker finishing his friend's temper jar in mortal delight.
Knuckles took a few steps towards his funny friend and got ready to supposedly place another light post near him.
"Use sixty-nine: Sonic smasher!" he shouted, presenting his fist to Sonic's face.
The hedgehog lost balance for a moment and fell onto the ground, hitting his head against the wall.
Knuckles looked satisfied. Sonic, on the other hand, did not.
"I always thought you sucked at math," he said in a nonchalant tone, rubbing his aching cheek.
Luckily, Knuckles let that last insult go without a generous compensation. He knew Sonic's problems with education all too well and didn't want to exploit that. He was saving the juicy facts for later.
"Echo!" the echidna exclaimed randomly.
A second later the cave was full of voices awaken by Knuckles' call. Each passed the message to the next, letting the chain lengthen and grow in all directions. It amused the furries for the first few seconds, as the noise didn't seem to stop, but awe soon turned to fear when pebbles started to crumble out of the ceiling. Firstly, bits no bigger than sand grains fell, followed by small pebbles and finalized with a few melon-sized rocks that could inflict a heavy amount of physical damage upon impact.
Tails sighed and told his friends to refrain from repeating such mistakes.
However, not everyone agreed with him. A sudden blaze of wind followed by an ear-splitting growl shook their senses like a tidal wave, followed by a large amount of rocks, too energetic to act as a ceiling. On top of that, light began retreating from the newly found tunnel.
Hard nuggets were coming closer to the floor in a salvo of perilous falls. An invisible maze was ready to crush anyone in the path of its walls under construction.
Rouge was the only one acquainted with being in such places, but even she could not stay calm when a large boulder fell down right behind her. The bat looked around to see a ton of rock resting on the spot she was standing on just a few seconds ago.
"Ha-ha...That...could have been me," she spoke nervously, taking a short breather leaning on the rock.
Later, it was figured that she was wrong. "Close" had to be redefined. Her sharp hearing let her receive warning signals coming from a stone, ready to fall on Tails, smashing his body into the ground and turning him into a mixture of bone, flesh and soil in the possible outcome.
Rouge tackled him, bruising his ankles against the ground, but pushing him away from a free one-way ticket to Shadowland.
"Ugh, thanks," he said, as delirious as Rouge was at first.
Meanwhile, Sonic played a game of hide and seek with the falling stones, hoping that he was not going to be dubbed 'it'.
Knuckles, unable to hold a graceful balance, but obliviously safe from smaller, football-sized projectiles, was being continuously sent down to lie down. He always attempted to arise, because most slugs were comparatively safe for his head.
Death was merciful this time and spread its wings above the search party, leaving them in different levels of torment, but alive. The terror stopped just as it began, in silence.
Knuckles fixed another 'light bulb' on the wall with his fists to check if anyone besides his earthed dignity was hurt. Nobody had any serious injuries, except Sonic, who had won a swelling bump on his noggin.
"And Knuckles, I don't think it's a good idea to punch the wall," the young fox said as he cleaned the dirt off his tails.
"I suppose you can see in the dark," Knuckles snapped back, overestimating the safety in his actions.
As if to approve Tails' words, an enormous iron plate fell down near the entrance to the tunnel. The surroundings began responding to vibration again with more bombs thrown in random directions.
This time nature could not outsmart them.
Sonic started twirling and swirling in place, which led to the forming of a twister. The vortex of speeding organic matter, created safely above other visible life forms, sucked in all of the falling rocks and once they stopped falling, let them all out. Unfortunately for the team, all of them were launched at the cave's entrance, increasing the blockage.
A hit was heard and light came out of the floor, thanks to Knuckles. The echidna looked around, but saw nothing fall on anyone in the premises, assuring himself of the technique's effectiveness.
"Good job, lamp boy!" Sonic mocked.
Knuckles ignored his loyal friend once again and after walking a few feet, repeated the process.
"How big is this place?" Tails asked, looking at Rouge.
The bat looked into the darkness intensely, "I don't see the other end from here."
The trip had lasted for over thirty minutes when drops of moisture were heard coming from the tunnel's depths. Sonic ran into the darkness to investigate, but a loud splash ended his short stroll.
"Help! I can't swim! Help!" he screamed while hitting an unknown amount of fluid with his palms mercilessly.
Tails ran to help his friend without a second thought, while Rouge, who saw the situation Sonic was in, remained calm on the outside, chuckling inside her mind.
Knuckles' fiery lights approached the hedgehog's location in a few moments to reveal him sitting in a puddle of liquid up to his chest. The danger level was not high, but that did not stop him from scaring the life out of his buddy, Tails, who had just managed to pull his scared friend out of the watery grave.
"Thanks, Tails!"
"You're welcome," Tails said while smiling weakly as he was squeezing the wetness out of his tails.
Something else troubled the juvenile genius. A strange smell was coming from his fur. He had not encountered it for a while, but a flashback of a gas leak he had come across after a plane's test flight explained the situation.
Then, another misfortune fell on the blue hedgehog's shoulders. Knuckles managed to get to the other side of the puddle with one leap to join the two with Rouge, landing beside them. Knuckles lit the premises again, since his other fireballs had already vanished. With some light available, he noticed that Sonic's quills were sprung up a lot more than usual. They were almost straight.
Meanwhile, Tails noted that Sonic's wet fur was touching a metal slab fixed into the rock.
"Ermm…Sonic?" Tails broke the silence.
"What?" Sonic replied with a question, still touching the metal block.
"You might want to move away from that wall. I think it makes a few...thousand volts go through your...isooctane-covered body," Tails reasoned with discomfort growing inside him, which reached climax when he noticed that his fur was also showing reaction similar to Sonic's.
"Oh, okay," the hero agreed verbally without realizing the common sense in Tails' words.
Alas, common sense was a moment too late. After attaching themselves to the surface, gasoline droplets left by the hedgehog's fur slid inside a small opening leading to a bunch of wires connected with a switch. The switch appeared to be the only thing keeping an enormous amount of power under control just by parting the main wires. However, the tiny opening in-between the copper cables disappeared thanks to a certain bluish hedgehog. Moisture short-circuited the system, silently welding the ends together, but not secretly enough to fool the anthromorphs' acute hearing.
"You know, this water thing smells funny," Knuckles said, expressing his thoughts while sniffing the air.
"It's not water, dense-head! It's gas!" Rouge exclaimed half-shocked, half-annoyed.
As if scared of her shouting, ignition ran from behind the metal slab and sparks were sent flying on the puddle's surface.
Sonic's eyes widened, as Tails' words had finally gotten an almost immediate reaction. The hedgehog knew that sparks plus fossil fuel were equal to an explosion. The sight of Rouge running away with Knuckles instinctively following the mental leader was enough of a hint for his next action.
Sonic got in a running stance just to be knocked down by Tails to a neighboring hole in the ground. An irritating metal thud was heard as the couple landed. The culprit and savior thought they were safe in what appeared to be an empty gas tank gully that now acted as a temporary fire shelter.
At that time, a small snake of fire crept down the wall into an area, where concentration of the combustible element was enough for a life-threatening situation Fire broke out and a blazing inferno spread along the tunnel at high speed, burning everything unprepared within its reach, disregarding any life forms.
The two could feel flames passing less than an inch above them. A measly part of an inch separated them from the cold Destroyer's grasp.
As thought, fire did not return after it left the small region the two could see. However, it did not escape without a trail of destruction. Colossal amounts of oxygen were taken away from the beings, who happened to be ill-timed enough, and replaced with noxious fumes, resembling car exhaust gasses. One enemy's retreat brought more, invisible, untouchable, but just as cruel, sparing no one.
"Now that was close!" Sonic exclaimed with mixed emotions in his voice.
The hedgehog was happy to be alive, excited about the despicable surroundings and discontent with 'dirty', 'smelly' air. Smog had always been limiting his speed and acting as the harshest of barriers, giving Eggman free odds against the blue mutant.
Tails coughed a bit in response and proposed an immediate evacuation to wherever the tunnel led to, as long as salvation had more oxygen and less carbon dioxide.
Guided by dim sparks of electricity the fox could see Sonic's grilled rear. If it weren't for the fox's mood, the situation of a half-roast hedgehog might have been laugh-worthy.
Hastily moving along the cave's turns, the unfortunate creatures didn't last long, as the oxygen supply became too little to keep their abilities in line with their wishes.
Tails cursed the moment, in which Sonic taught him not to put 'useless' safety-ensuring devices like gas masks and fire extinguishers into his luggage collection whenever leaving home. After all, the genius used to be a lot less extreme with risks before he met Sonic.
It might have been a choked-up end for the two heroes, but fate left a light on in their tunnel. The electrocution seemed to have shaken the lighting alive.
Tails could hear the dear fragrance of lamps buzzing and smell mesmerizing rust he longed for, coming from the light's direction.
Once the duo scuttled closer, the surroundings changed in their view. They saw a thick metal door crushed out of its reinforced-steel frames and smashed into the rock floor.
Tails had almost gasped at the sight. His mental Newton calculator ran out of zeros to show the number resembling the amount of force needed to accomplish such an amazing feat. The fire was unable to cause such damage in his opinion. An ashy Knuckles that acted as a shield for a mint-condition Rouge didn't have the months of time needed to punch such a heavy metal contraption out.
"Was this door like that when you guys got here?"
"Yeah. Knucklehead might have not saved my pricey clothes so… effectively if it weren't for that," Rouge responded, taking her time to pat the burned Knuckles on the unharmed back.
The echidna's silence was not a good sign. His brain might have gotten through a state of boiling in the tremendous heat. The permanent damage caused to the nerve tissue may not have killed him, but his validity for most mental activities could have suffered greatly.
"Owgh," platypus's cousin moaned. "My head hurts," he complained, blinking rapidly to soothe his eyes that he had hurt due to staring at the lovely flames.
Meanwhile, Sonic was acquainting himself with their new place of residence.
"Echo!" the degenerated son of intelligence shouted.
Echoes didn't seem to be friendly in that district. His intimidation turned into a silent growl and scream combination coming from an unknown location, but there were no satisfying results of forged response.
This time, they have gotten themselves into a relatively safe situation under a huge illuminated metal dome. The positive side was that the space was empty. Besides for a shiny red hangar door with a huge "3" on top and a hole in the middle, disregarding the knocked-off entrance, the place looked untouched by harm.
Numbered doors with a total of five that had menacing G.U.N. logos on each did not make a pleasant sight. Though, Tails could appreciate the laboratory-resembling surroundings. Yet, one thing puzzled him: why was the metal construction the size of a football field empty? There was only one way to find out.
"Sonic, could you go over to one of those doors and…" Tails explained obliviously to his listener's obliviousness of him doing so.
The turquoise one saved himself time on listening and gathered as much air as he could in his lungs to precede an eardrum-ringing manifestation of hunger for adventure.
"Echo-o!"
This time a giant was waiting to answer his call. "Echo" sounded from door to door, floor to ceiling, lamp to lamp.
"Slow echo," Sonic ingeniously remarked, pleased with finally getting a free conversation with his own sounds.
However, it was not a humorous matter. His playful ways have toyed around with the sound detectors hidden in various parts of the complex. All of them have also had speakers to reproduce the sound and activate a peril that none of them expected to see.
Sonic's exclamation lasted for a few more seconds until silence began roaming in the premises. It was then chased away by a loud clanking noise of the disfigured entrance door being replaced with a "fresh" one that was bigger. Their way out was blocked twice now.
"Something tells me you shouldn't have done…" Tails started explaining again.
An interruption ripped his words away. The half-sphere's middle began glowing red in the company of sirens wailing everywhere around them. Used to warn citizens before a nuclear attack or storm, the horrible noise irritated their ears while the ground was shaking below their feet.
It was the prologue to a high-tech defensive system springing into complete combat stance. All hangar doors except the damaged "number three" rose to the very top. The darkness behind each of them retreated, as illumination was turned on inside, revealing whatever an exclamation had triggered.
"Looks like G.U.N want to play," Sonic's adventure-hungry person announced.
Tails gulped.
Rouge patted Knuckles' shoulder and smiled.
Knuckles didn't consciously feel that he was going to be used as a shield yet again.