The Titan Wakes
Not many people saw the world like this. It seemed as if Sonic were seeing all of it at once, a never-ending river of colour that streamed past him in time to the roar of the blood in his ears, the landscape warping and bending for miles behind him in the wind of his passage. When he ran like this, Sonic became a passenger in his own body. Unfazed by fatigue, drawing off the power-charges of adrenalin now blasting through every cell of his being, he felt like he could run forever. Eyes picked out in sharp detail only the obstacles that might impede his progress. He dodged nimbly around a cluster of trees, barely even breaking a sweat. The rest of existence was a mere blur, a stain against the mind of the fastest thing alive.
And the best part was, Tails could never match him like this.
"Come on Tails, you aren't going easy on me are you?"
Amid Sonic's frantic howls of derision, an orange streak buzzed through the curtains of cloud miles overhead, getting lower every second to draw off ever decreasing reserves of energy. Tails' teeth were set into an iron grid, the long hair of his distinctive fringe matted with sweat against his face. From out of a mind that was presently a red-hot particle of concentration, Tails picked out mixed feelings of puzzlement and fury. He was flying as fast as his body would allow him, he must have hit the hundreds of miles an hour somewhere during the first lap and maintained it ever since. But his body was now felt like it was breaking apart under the strain of keeping up with Sonic. Sonic seemed impervious to the pain or tiredness that mere mortals felt running at this speed and over these distances. As he drew lower over the green smear that was now a small forest, Sonic's ringing overture of insults pierced through the wall of ache.
"Would it help if I stopped and took a nap?"
Sonic's jeers were all it took for Tails to twist his agonised lips into a smile and put on a spurt of acceleration that send needles of hot lead running in his twin tails. Sonic might slow down for him, if it meant that he could stop and wallow in his superior speed, but Tails was growing tired of being treated like a child. He would earn this respect at last. With a laugh that just managed to stave off his cries of pain, he shot forward with a new determination, drawing ever closer to the twisting blue series of after-images snaking along the earth below.
As he saw his friend drop closer, Sonic took a second to go over his progress. He knew he was on the third lap. He had passed the Stone Tower barely 10 seconds ago, meaning that he was almost at the end. Below him the grass was becoming thicker and lusher, the trees around him gradually gaining height and number as they crowded in on civilisation. Which meant that after another half-minute or so he would cross the finishing line outside the Freedom Fighter base and win! But he would have to get tough. Tails was now putting on an uncommon burst of speed and was almost drawing level with his opponent far below. Almost, but not quite. Sonic had been reserving his final trick for just such an eventuality. With his legs now becoming a blur of motion underneath him, Sonic consciously urged his muscles into a massive kick of acceleration. Putting real effort into his strides, Sonic tore across the crowding forest like a missile, battered by g-forces and nearly ripped apart under his own momentum. He didn't regret it however. He was only now beginning to tire slightly, and the end was nearly in sight. With Tails still tossing furiously in his wake, Sonic bent his head and charged. Barely another 15 seconds, he reckoned, and he would win.
It was at this point that, with all his available energy focussed on the race, Sonic was taken off guard. The ground beneath his hammering feet quaked faintly. Then, in a sudden shriek of rending earth and rock, it tore violently open underneath him, as if some unknown fault line had been disturbed. The sudden jerk and wretch of the rock below him took Sonic totally by surprise. Tumbling into the air as he leapt to avoid the break, he ended up somersaulting nimbly overhead, twisting so that he landed feet-first, but crucially, halted. In the intervening blink of an eye, Tails had screamed overhead, stripping some nearby plants of their leaves. Feeling the slipstream of Tails' flight whip through his spikes, Sonic turned to check on his friend and called loudly after him.
"Hey, not fair! I didn't see that quake coming!"
Tails pivoted gracefully where he stood, his whole body shuddering with exhaustion, but still smiling wildly.
"Sure, it's only fair when you're the fastest thing alive!"
Sonic growled in the direction of his friend, clenching each fist in irritation. A hero's pride could only take so much.
"Hey, if I hadn't stopped…."
At that moment, the ground began to shred itself again, this time not far to Sonic's right. He stared at the freshly-created ridge of rock next to him.
"What the…"
With a creak and a groan the ground had split again, this time at Sonic's feet. He skipped easily out of the way, but it was enough to unnerve him, and to persuade Tails to drop from his precarious height and take a closer look. The drone of his tails stopped abruptly as his feet met soft turf.
"I didn't think we got tremors around here…"
"I think you're right," Sonic mused, becoming vaguely aware of a series of thunderous rumblings and smashes somewhere underneath them, "but supposing this wasn't a tremor?"
"Trouble?"
A piercing shaft of golden light accompanied by the shriek of more breaking rocks seemed to tell its own story. Something monstrously powerful was taking place not far below them, and Sonic's overactive imagination, already starved of the action and danger it required to function, was leaping swiftly to its own conclusions.
"Let's assume, just for a second, that Porker's little expedition isn't going as routinely as planned, shall we?"
Tails would have disagreed, were it not for the sudden almighty ripping noise as more rock sliced itself apart just between his ankles.
"If Porker has, for some reason, managed to get himself caught in the jaws of one of Egg-Belly's death traps, it sounds like an excuse for us to party! It's all going on downstairs…."
Years ago, such a statement would have had Tails shrinking. Now, numbed by years of near-death adventure, he simply cocked his head and grinned.
"I could vouch for that. Now just give me an entrance and we'll get this show on the road…."
The robot's fist could be said to feel like iron, but this would be a stupid simile. It was iron. Pound upon pound of it, reinforced, powered by pure bloodlust, hammering like an express train into Knuckles' stomach. The impact caught him even as he lunged and tossed him like a doll into the air. Knuckles barely managed to catch himself and recover his balance in time to land clumsily in a crouched stance, bleary eyed and winded, with a freshly-activated powerhouse bearing down on him in a blaze of coldly shining fury. Rolling in time to dodge a punch that shattered the rock floor, Knuckles righted himself and launched a wild right hook that caught the android on the side of the head. The impact shook the robot to its neck, but the blow appeared to have done minimal damage. Another furious kick to the jaw didn't appear to have much effect. The giant staggered back a few feet, but its mammoth arms were sawing through the air past Knuckles' face a second later as it sent off an effortless barrage of swinging punches. Knuckles bobbed and wove beneath each before glimpsing a momentary weak spot, an opening in the wall of metallic limbs. He darted forward and planted his fist, with a blow that could cleave stone, squarely into the robot's chest. Shockwaves of hurt shuddered up his arm, the bones of his hand leapt into flaming pain, he felt the grimace grip his face. Surely, this hit would have counted? Apparently not. Behind squinted eyes, Knuckles was suddenly battered by a furious piston-kick to the stomach that sent him sprawling on his back across the dirt of the cave floor. The android rose from an iron-stanced crouch, braced against the brunt of Knuckles' bone-shredding punches, unnerved, to its feet.
"Don't play games with me, intruder. Is this seriously all you can offer me?"
Knuckles hid a slight tremble in his confidence behind a toothy growl.
"I'm just warming up, rust-bucket."
There was no time to trade further insults. The next thing Knuckles felt was a blast of searing heat and pain cannoning into him, catching him under the jaw and burying him in the cave wall several metres away. Amid the fading glow and dispersing explosion of rock, the machine lowered one outstretched hand. Fresh smoke curled around the energy launchers clustered at its palm, shrouded in a fading glow.
"So am I."
It had taken barely seconds to track down the entrance into the catacombs themselves. Tails had easily been able to distinguish the faded line of the tunnels, the bulges in the earth as they rose closer to the surface, and with mere seconds of super-sonic scouting over the surrounding countryside Sonic had found the clues he needed. The freshly carved presence, beaten out of the rock, of a legendary pair of fists that had left their mark only minutes before. The signs of Knuckles' presence were as definite as the rock he had shattered. And within the depthless darkness that the heroes could see within, the sounds of hectic battle, the pounding of fists against fists, of bodies against merciless rock, were unmistakeable. Not only was there a fight in progress somewhere in there, but Sonic's gut told him that it wasn't going well for the side of good. In which case, it was time he re-tipped the balance in their favour. He turned briefly to Tails, who was casting an apprehensive stare into a bank of featureless gloom, occasionally broken by sharp pangs of light.
"Ready to rumble, little buddy?"
Tails smiled. As inappropriate as the nickname seemed considering his age, he never tired of Sonic referring to him as his 'little buddy'. It reminded him of the mentor that Sonic had been for years, and the comrade he would always be.
"After you."
It took monumental effort for Knuckles to drag his battered body out of the sizeable crater that the robot's energy blast had created. His chest was scarred by innumerable burns, his gloves already beginning to redden as blood leaked into the fabric. He ignored the fresh cut that was shedding crimson fluid over his muzzle and tensed himself again. The robot was as fresh as ever, but Knuckles hadn't kicked into high-gear. Not yet. With a bestial roar he charged at the machine, expecting another defensive strike. He slid nimbly beneath an elbow that would have broken most of his ribs and drove his fists in rapid succession into the robot's unguarded underside. The colossus rocked where it stood and sent a massive fist whirling down for another strike, but Knuckles' reflexes were back on form now. He swept back out of the way of the punch and drove another hit into the small of the robot's back, again leaning all of his weight into the blow. He felt the metal buckle beneath his hand, but to his despair the android was, as ever, unshaken. Knuckles narrowly avoided a back-hander that could have obliterated his skull and made one last ditch effort to find some chink in his opponent's armour. Dragging one thick arm almost to the floor, he propelled himself upwards in a kick designed to scythe into the base of the robot's neck. A strike like that would have crippled an organic opponent. But the robot appeared to shrug the aside the kick with little more than a mechanical leer and a hiss of escaping steam that could have been a laugh.
"Unimpressive…"
In his horror at his sudden powerlessness Knuckles was oblivious. The outside world dripped away like tar, leaving a yawning void in which there only existed him, broken, bloodied and scared beyond his wits, and his opponent, pristine, muscular and laughing into his freshly opened wounds. He could almost have screamed as a suffocating grip closed around his ankle, bones shrinking beneath its metal skin, and carried him through space for a few eternal seconds before smashing him into the stone floor, burying him face-first into a callous stone grave.
Almost, but the will had left him with his defeat. There was only the darkness now. And the laughter.
"Sonic, you aren't slowing down are you?"
For once in his life, Tails was keeping pace with Sonic without straining his body to oblivion. Sonic himself had slowed to a trot as he skipped among the rocks and debris, and his pace seemed more hesitant than usual.
"It's this light…" he muttered, "if I shift into Sonic-speed in here I'll probably crash."
Tails allowed himself a chuckle.
"Not just taking your time to get to the action?"
A resounding crash pierced through where the silence should have been, a noise that carried with it all the blood and crushed marrow of a desperate duel to the death. Sonic grinned out of the dusk, his emerald eyes shining with the spark of excitement that would stay there to adventure's end.
"If it's action you want Tails…"
Porker could scarcely believe what he was seeing. Knuckles hadn't just been beaten, he had been thrashed, effortlessly dispatched at the hands of this awesome combatant. The echidna is question was currently groaning in agony as the sinister android ruthlessly pressed a gigantic foot into the small of his back, slowly plunging Knuckles' deeper into a puddle of his own blood, a soup of ruin and rock, in which Knuckles himself was coughing and spluttering, the picture of helplessness. The sight of this fearsome hero reduced to a shadow of his old glory by one of Robotnik's forgotten terrors was enough to send cold dread tumbling into Porker's bowels. This couldn't be happening. But the incessant wail of the broken Echidna as he writhed under the robot's boot reminded him of this terrible reality.
"I have to say, I'm disappointed," chimed the machine, sending a spike of steam rushing to the floor and Knuckles' prone body, "my data banks are filled to bursting with warnings about you. The mighty Knuckles the Echidna, the warrior who obliterated the Death Egg all those years ago, champion of the Floating Island. Clearly, my creator overestimated you. But then again, I was equipped to fight, not to lounge behind a desk and grow fat. True leaders must lead from the front…."
"Great, a lecture…." Knuckles coughed miserably, "I can see you've inherited Robotnik's speech skills. Doesn't bode well for your criminal career."
The robot smiled, and applied another ounce of pressure. Knuckles felt his spine warp, ready to give way.
"Remember where you are speaking from, infidel. How poetic," he added, an emerald flicker entering the blaze of his eyes, "the first casualty of the new world order dies beneath the heel of the new master of all life. Now that does bode well…."
The robot had already mentioned the fact that his databases were filled to the brim with information on the Freedom Fighters. He was well aware of Sonic the Hedgehog and the legends that surrounded his speed. He was more than prepared to deal with a fighter that could move at Mach 1. The great problem, of course, is that spotting a faster-than-sound Super Spin Attack in the dark, even for the world's most perfectly designed killing machine, is decidedly difficult.
The robot felt the punishing, metal shredding impact of the attack against its shoulder first. Then it heard the distinctive sneer from the dark.
"Hands off my buddies rusty. Now let's see you face up to a real fight."
The distraction was just long enough. Knuckles crawled dejectedly from beneath his tormentor as the giant moved his attention to the blue hedgehog that was glaring indignantly out of the gloom at him with two shining green irises. Another smile gripped its hollow lips, the piercing light of its eyes filled with enough hate and malice to turn its shell to flesh.
"Excellent. Two funerals in one day. I am doing well….."
