Back From The Brink

A joyous, celebratory gush of curling steam from among a face positively alight with vicious triumph. It was all Cryax could do to stop another throttling blast of laughter from skittering up his cavernous throat. Sonic vanished promptly beneath a searing fireball of molten plasma, his silhouette flickering out of life against the hellfire that was eating away at centuries of granite buildup. The heat haze could have turned the cave into another dimension, some sinister corner of the Universe where demons danced amid the solar coronas and delighted in the spurts of cosmic gore. Cryax himself managed to tone down the glare in his eyes to avoid them fusing on him, but the spectacle meant little to him. All that mattered was the ease, the sureness, of his victory.

The light from the blast faded in tombstone silence. The curtain of grey steam wafted aside to show a hollow crater, a space about 2 metres across, the place that would have been a certain hedgehog's grave.

Immediately, the giant machine was suspicious. The strength of his attack had been calculated with a primal bloodlust that betrayed his mechanical heritage. It would have strong enough to torch the rock, certainly, and set Sonic's flesh ablaze on his bones. There would have been no blood, any fluid or soft tissue would have simply disintegrated in the heat. But at the very least he would have expected to see the charred scraps of the hedgehog's skeleton, perhaps a few rags of muscle clinging defiantly to the bone…. Cryax abruptly shook his head, toned up his night vision, readied both fists again. His macabre tendencies, for which he could thank his designer at a later date, needed to be put aside. All he knew was, he was staring at an empty crater. And if there was no corpse, then the hedgehog was alive. This fight wasn't finished…

Somewhere in a secluded corner of the cave, crouched under the protective shell of shadows, the would-be victim of Cryax's onslaught was still trying to come to terms with his situation. First of all, it appeared that he was barely alive, after being on the receiving end of just a couple of blows. Secondly, apart from a growing wound on the shoulder joint of his right arm, Cryax himself, he seemed to be in perfect shape. And finally, he appeared to have been rescued from certain oblivion by the one person he had spent years deriding.

"No kidding…. You did that?"

Tails gazed down at the prone body of a badly beaten Sonic and shrugged.

"Well, Knuckles wasn't in a fit state and… well, I was pretty much the only one who could move fast enough."

"You're talking about being fast…."

Tails couldn't help but loose a glowing smile. His plan had worked perfectly, but only by the thinnest of margins. At the last minute, he had dived in at some astonishing speed, much too fast for Cryax to be prepared for, and snatched Sonic out of the way of the blast! In the glare of the shot Cryax had been unable to clearly see the rescue, and now all of his surviving opponents were not only recuperating and re-gathering their strength, but were, temporarily at least, beyond his sight. They had the darkness, and of course a certain element of faster-than-sound surprise, on their side.

Feeling strength seep back into his arms at last, Sonic struggled onto one elbow and shot Tails a familiar sneer of condescension.

"Not bad, little buddy. Maybe not quite as flash as I'd have liked, but…"

"Yeah, I think he's recovered," came a familiar grunt from somewhere to Sonic's left, "the one thing that never suffers is his ego."

Sonic managed to inch himself around to see a pair of narrowed purple eyes, radiating wild disapproval, and a set of snarling white teeth.

"Good to see you too Red…"

Knuckles sighed and shook his head, setting his dreadlocks in giddy motion.

"Don't call me that. Don't forget, you're the one who had to be rescued."

Sonic cast an eye along Knuckle's emerging face and noted, with a mocking raise of one eyebrow, the numerous wounds now scarring the echidna's muzzle.

"You didn't look as if you were performing spectacularly well yourself."

"I had him where I wanted him…"

"Sure, under his boot last time I checked…."

From out of the gloom there came a sharp staccato series of clicking bones as Knuckles re-clenched his enormous fists.

"Sonic, I'm warning you…"

Tails rolled his eyes and stepped amid the boiling combatants. Why he was acting increasingly as the mediator these days was beyond him, but he suspected that had Sonic and Knuckles not first met swapping punches with one another things might have been running more smoothly some 5 years later.

"Guys, chill. Remember, we still have a bad-guy left to bash."

At last Sonic looked pleased.

"You only had to say so…"

"Wait, Sonic!"

before he could charge back to the battle Sonic found a thick, heavily built arm, dusted with red fur, barring his way. Knuckles cast him a stony amethyst glare from the dark.

"We've already learned that charging in head-on doesn't work…."

"Look who's talking bruise-boy!"

Knuckles managed to swallow the impulse to strangle his friend and continued,

"This is going to call for a less overt approach. Let's not forget, spotting anything in the dark is a chore, even for one of Robotnik's psychopathic death-machines. It's time to give this creep a good and thorough pasting…."

This was getting unsettling. Which was a particular cause for worry for a machine that technically wasn't supposed to get unsettled. Cryax let another footstep drop slowly, taking great care not to disturb the rotting debris and rubble beneath him. For an eight-foot, heavily armed android he could be remarkably stealthy when he wanted to be. And now he was hunting. Instincts of robotic blasphemy screamed through whatever glass and plastic substitute he had for veins, hotter than the plasma in his weapons. He was hunting now, and he was not going to be robbed of his blood again.

"This isn't like you Sonic… cowering and hiding… more like a rat than a cool-as-ice hedgehog, wouldn't you agree?"

When this bait failed to yield an over-confident blur of spikes and fists, Cryax felt a soft shudder run through the cogs and motors of his being. It could have been the machine equivalent of frustration or anger. The urge to rend bone, slit flesh, drag out the screams as blood rose in the throat… another violent head-shake from Cryax. These whispers of lust for violence were snaking around his robotic brain like red-hot wires, choking a mechanical intellect with emotional confusion. He knew what he had to do. Re-establish the empire, resurrect the legacies of Robotnik, suppress all life on Mobius, kill the Freedom Fighters. Kill Sonic. Break him. Slowly. Relish ever howl for mercy, every drop of blood, every…. This time Cryax actually roared. Only softly. A miniscule escape of gas and a briefer-than-brief flare of bloody light in his shining eyes. But it betrayed a moment of collapse. His own mind seemed to be working against him, his muscles, which had seemed so perfectly designed when he was pummelling Knuckles and Sonic, were decaying away from his control. He was under attack from his own body, under attack by an urge to kill, a hatred for the light, that did not belong….

This was as good a time as any to press home an assault at last.

As Cryax grappled with his wanton thoughts, he became aware of a sudden pulse of life, a flicker of activity lighting the heads-up-display through which he saw his world. An attacker. Life. Life that needed to go… no, gain control. Once again, Cryax found himself battling against a mind that seemed to be growing steadily hotter, more alive. Disgustingly, hatefully, wrongfully alive.

It was this that left him so unprepared as, with a flurry of double-tails and trailing fur, Tails chose that moment to bury a kick into the side of his skull! Cryax wheeled with a violent roar and tired to catch the fox, but he was gone the next second, hovering just beyond his reach in the gloom, striking with hard and rapid kicks aimed at his face and head. Cryax's mad swipes failed to catch the darting ball of fur.

"Stay still, damn you!"

Tails did not obey. He had the advantage here. But he needed to make more of an impact, not dart about like a shrinking violet, or his stamina would let him down like it had Knuckles and Sonic. He made a lunge forward, arms locking around Cryax's skull. Suddenly, the robot's HUD was black, filled by Tails' body. Then the blows came, hammering against the skull like the blows of a insistent infant. They weren't that damaging, but they came fast. Fast enough to be irritating in the extreme. Cryax bellowed again and made a made swipe with his gigantic arms which Tails dodged nimbly. Then, with a supreme feat of coordination, Tails wheeled from his somersault off Cryax's skull and delivered powerful spinning swipe with each of his double-tails, both of them suddenly becoming harder than iron as they tore across Cryax's face. The impact sent a deep fissure skirting along the android's pristine features. Cryax loosed another roar and punched like a maniac; this was unacceptable. The fox would pay for this outrage. But before the hail of wild blows could find their mark Tails had backed away, retreating to the floor, crouched in low stance and gathered for a dodge.

"Enough!"

Finally buckling under the force of his own mounting rage, Cryax lunged forward, one fist hurtling towards Tails like a meteor. Tails whipped away to the left, but Cryax had been expecting evasion. In his fury he swept his elbow in a strike that caught Tails near his right hip, sending him spinning gracelessly to the floor. As he scrambled to right himself, Cryax threw out one palm and loosed a dazzling bolt of fiery plasma at the retreating fox. It buried itself into Tails' back and threw him savagely against the rock, harsh basalt finally wiping his grin from his face in the most brutal way possible. Finally, Cryax allowed himself another laugh and plodded towards his prey, readying another shot. His brain was boiling over now, enough murderous thoughts stewing inside it to let him unleash all of his rage at once.

"You aren't smiling anymore, infidel…"

"Nor you!"

The cry did not come from Tails. But Cryax realized that a moment too late. He buckled and crumpled sideways with a jerk of motion as Knuckles' fist smashed into his right cheek, widening the ugly scar that Tails had opened. Cryax was looking homicidal, his eyes lighting to solar intensity in his rage, as he turned to see a revitalised echidna flexing his muscles before him.

"Die when I say so, lowlife!"

Cryax lashed out with another blow, this time hasty and uncoordinated, which Knuckles' side-stepped. The next thing Cryax felt was a punishing melee of punches landing sporadically along his chest and back as Knuckles vaulted over him, fists blazing, and retreated to a safe distance. Tails watched from his spot, apparently forgotten by the rampant android, and gathered himself for his next turn. It was working. The team-based, hit-and-run approach seemed to be chiselling away at the robot's strength. But what seemed to be helping them even more was that, for all his meticulous construction, Cryax seemed to be rapidly losing focus. His movements were becoming sluggish and confused, as if his body were in growing pain, and in his rising anger he was also losing vital concentration and technique. The heroes needed to act on this advantage and down the robot quickly, before it floored any of them again. Cryax lumbered forward with another strike, slamming both fists furiously into the place where Knuckles stood. Had been standing. This time even the bruised echidna had been able to out-manoeuvre his struggling foe. Cryax struggled, snarling evilly, back to a standing position. His voice was becoming even more gruff and strained, his volcanic anger failing to subside.

"Stop it… don't mock me!"

Cryax should really have anticipated what came next, but in his wild state he was not thinking clearly. By the time he felt the ball of blue energy hammering into his chest, he was already pinned against the cave wall, nursing a growing dent and hissing with all the venom of an angry serpent. Sonic stared out at him from his newly occupied floor space, flanked on either side by Tails and Knuckles. All three of them had now taken their share of the beatings Cryax had doled out. But all three were also smiling. Their smiles only added to the growing torrent of fury that was building, crumbling and reforming inside the robot's tortured gut. Sonic, on the other had, was once more having the time of his life.

"You're losing your touch, junk-heap. I thought we were getting a run for our money!"

Cryax could almost have been frothing at his iron gums as he hefted his hulking body back into a standing position. Hot steam gushed like a waterfall from his square teeth, now knotting together with hatred.

"You can't win… this ends…. END!"

Another charge, this time with Cryax bringing his head whistling down through the air to hammer into the rock as Sonic dodged. This was a bad move; burying his face in the stone left Cryax's wounds widening, his vision blurred, his senses impaired…. And the tempest of his anger rising with every second.

"Not losing your cool are you?"

The response, as Cryax turned a beaten and bludgeoned face to his laughing adversary, was a roar of such wild, horrifying purity that it was almost beyond his mechanical voice-box to conjure it. One of his eyes was cracked, sparks popping from the gash that had been made by the rock. But the one that remained blazed with more intensity than an exploding star. As impossible as it was, as terrifyingly unreal as it seemed, Cryax had lost his mind. One instinct erupted now from under the rotting and re-rotting pile of coded instructions in his head; the urge to kill.

The robot moved so swiftly that even Sonic had trouble dodging. A scissor-kick to the jaw barely fazed Cryax as he stamped with enough force to shatter the floor, the shockwaves sending Sonic spinning backwards to safety. But this time, Cryax was too furious to pursue his target. On the edge of his field of vision, Cryax glimpsed a fresh target, closer, ripe for crushing. With a banshee shriek he lashed out with an elbow-barge that caught Knuckles under the chin, hurled him sideways, re-engaged him at last. Another punch whistled forward, threatening to cleave his skull, but this time Knuckles was ready. He caught the brunt of the force in one cupped hand and drove the other into Cryax's lower stomach. Then, knowing of the hell that would follow, he rolled deftly to one side as Cryax retaliated with a knee that blew another crater out of the cave wall. Tails, by and by, hovered close behind his opponent's head, just beyond sight, ready to make another quick hit. He swooped low, aiming for the base of the neck with another sweep of his tails, but he underestimated the frenzy that now gripped his foe. The last he heard as an iron hand battered against his skull was Cryax's maddened wail, caught in the burning of his own eyes.

"He's on the ropes guys! Keep it up!"

"Didn't need a reminder Sonic…."

With Cryax still reeling under the impact of his own degenerating mind, Knuckles dived in with another arching right-hook that crumpled the plates on the android's left cheek, throwing it shoulder-first to the floor. At last, the rampaging machine was off his feet, vulnerable! Following up this devastating turn of tide, Sonic flashed into life in an almost invisible Spin Attack, a sliver of blue energy in the darkness that sliced cleanly into the robot's prone form, shredding the metal in a shower of orange sparks, then bounced away. His work was done; where there had once been a pristine sheet of metal there was now an almighty gash splitting Cryax's chest from his lower jaw to his hip in a jagged diagonal line. Sparks popped like fireworks at tiny intervals. As if struggling to comprehend his own damage, Cryax gingerly ran a massive hand across his wound, disbelief lighting across his face. Sonic, being Sonic, felt that a quip was in order.

"I think you're going to need a few stitches Cryax!"

In the circumstances, it was possibly the worst thing anybody could have said to an angry, rapidly maddening robotic powerhouse that was toting enough power in its fingers alone to demolish mountains. But Sonic had never been noted for his tact.

Cryax righted himself so quickly that he hardly seemed to move in normal dimensions. The group scattered at random, spreading themselves out, presenting their adversary with as many potential targets as possible. Such sophisticated tactics were lost on Cryax however, who simply swung his fist at the nearest convenient target, in this case Knuckles. The second one-two strike caught Knuckles under the ribs, winding him as he hit the floor. Noticing vaguely among the final scraps of his brain that Sonic was approaching from over his shoulder, Cryax spun like a tornado with a kick that swept the speeding hedgehog out of his way like litter in a gale, his sheer momentum carrying him back around with a plasma-charged haymaker that pummelled a waiting Tails in the chest in a flash of searing golden fire. He wasn't thinking anymore. All he saw was life, intruding on him for every angle, and his mind was overloading with infinite ways to eradicate it. Another wild shoulder-barge failed to catch Knuckles, and the sensation of Tails wrapping a series of kicks around his skull would have been enough to tip the psychotic droid over the edge at last. One roar and a colossal expulsion of energy later and Sonic, who had been moving in for a last-chance surprise attack, was lost against a fireball of yellow plasma that erupted from Cryax's outstretched hand. A furious howl behind him told him that his haphazard kicks had downed Knuckles. Which left only the fox, who a mere heartbeat later was choking in Cryax's triumphant grip, the life being squeezed out of his chest through his ears as the android drew his defeated prey close. His one good eye was blinking rapidly on and off, pulsing lines of dirty neon dashing across it.

In an organic being, it could very easily have been a twitch.

Cryax's insidious steamy breath filled Tails' fogging vision as he kicked and struggled vainly in a grip that could have crushed the stone of the cave itself to a mere powder. As every breath left him, so was his will to continue. He was suffocating, the darkness pressing in on him, leaving only the flickering luminescence of Cryax's surviving eye.

"The sea will turn black,

We machines, we are back….."

There was a peculiar, high-pitched quality to the robot's voice as it recited its insane ballad again. Were the faintest traces of a mad giggle slithering into that wire-lined throat? Tails could not have cared, but in his animalistic degeneration his opponent could have cared little more. His fingers tightened, hydraulic pistons driving their weight relentlessly into Tails' windpipe. The singular light of that mad eye hovered before him, multiplied and swarmed like some monstrous mechanised aurora. After all his adventures, after all the hope that had bubbled through his body when Cryax had been downed at last, his life was going to end here, underground and festering among the toys of a forgotten lunatic. It was enough on its own to make him wish it were all over….

Had that been a noise? Cryax's senses, now blaring at him in red-alert like a hail of shooting stars, had been picking up the slightest heartbeat, the fall of a drop of sweat, with his anger shooting into uncharted territory. His sensors were blasphemously alive again; more life. Unhindered, unspoilt life, coming his way, from further up the cave. It would have to go. Tails would not trouble him now, as long as he kept his grip true. Pivoting slowly where he stood to gaze up the cavern, Cryax's roving stare lighted on the warm, pulsating body of another target, picking its way cautiously over the rubble and debris that littered the floor. The telescopic lenses in his surviving eye homed in at once, scanning this intruder, assessing every facet of its emerging surface. Details snailed out from the dark towards his vision. A baggy white t-shirt. Combat trousers. Scuff-toed, thick soled trainers that were making the interloper's tread so light. And in one hand…. Cryax's mental activity ground momentarily, fatally, to a halt as it recognised what appeared to be a cousin, a being of metal and plastic…. A weapon, lodged in the crook of one arm.

"Show me…."

It did. In the crack of fire and thunder that lit up the cave, Cryax just had time to catch sight of a pair of glittering emerald eyes and a drooping fringe of hanging locks, coated with pink fur, before a red-hot bolt of iron buried itself mercilessly into the ghastly wound that covered his chest. In seconds a blitz of the arrow-headed projectiles were pounding against him, their onslaught sending him stumbling backwards, the shockwaves slackening every one of his synthesised muscles. It was all the distraction Tails needed as he crawled, stricken and breathless, from Cryax's grip. He looked up sweat-faced and panting at his rescuer, now framed in the light that accompanied each blast from her weapon. Tails smiled to himself. It was only Amy's exemplary marksmanship that had kept him out of the firing line.

"Cutting it a little fine, aren't you?"

The pink hedgehog shouldered her crossbow with a casual swing of her arm and shrugged.

"If you wanted, I could have just let him get on with it."

"Duly noted."

A set of white teeth leapt out from the dark as Amy smiled wryly back at him.

"Now," she sighed, with the business-like air of someone who was indulging in some light housework, "let's get this job done with, shall we?"

Digging crossbow bolts out of the crevices in his deformed body, catching horrible glimpses of the advancing Freedom Fighters with his one remaining eye, Cryax's already fervent mind was on the point of ripping itself apart. Piling itself on top of his impossible defeat, on the disastrous state that his wounded shell was now in, were repeated tidal waves of cold, artificial nausea, the mental spasms that had caused his fighting technique to slide downhill so rapidly now throwing themselves at his psyche with renewed vigour. Every spare glance caused them to up their intensity, shredding through every instinct that told him to carry on with his fight, to think rationally and clearly. He was cocooned within a drowning pool of his own anguish now, sinking like a stone; hideous life, polluting life, all around him, crawling through his bodily wounds, corrupting the perfection of his construction. Sensors throbbed all around his skull like a migraine, begging to be turned off, for the lights to go out, for the heat to cool, for it all to just go away! And as he looked up to see Sonic, Knuckles, Amy and Tails closing in on him, ready to finally bury their killing blows into his tormented body, he knew that he would be unable to stand it. He needed to get away. That was all there was to do now. To run.

"I have endured this game long enough, infidels…" he croaked, pain and stress tangible within his broken voice.

"Save it," Sonic growled, planting one foot triumphantly before him as Cryax squirmed, "we're finishing this."

"You will finish nothing!"

One iron-finished hand, heating and glowing as the plasma gathered at its tip, raised itself under jerking control to face the heroes.

"This will not be the last you hear of me," Cryax intoned, hatred lacing every venomous pulse of his steamy breath, "just be aware, Freedom Fighters, that you have a new name to fear.

Now Cryax wakes,

Let Mobius quake!"

Before even Sonic could dive on him, Cryax had swept one hand deftly into the gloom behind him and loosed the blast. Age-old stone fragmeneted and parted against a curtain of solar-heat, the glare filled the cave, driving back the darkness with such vigour and violence that all within were, temporarily, blinded. All sight was lost as the demon fires plunged onward, the cries of Cryax plummeting into silence.