Miles hadn't been idle while he'd waited for his liberation from Madworld.
Far from it, he'd spent every waking moment - which was every moment in a world where sleep was optional - improving his designs, prototyping, optimising, and expanding on his fledgling skills as a blacksmith to produce the best possible equipment for the Creams and himself while he waited for rescue. His armour was reinforced with plates he'd salvaged from a dozen heavy shields - most of them scavenged from the depths of the catacombs. His weapons had been tinkered with and refined until he'd been finally satisfied with the result, and he'd even managed to produce one weapon so perfectly suited for mobians that it almost surpassed his Prism in sheer power despite its deceptive simplicity.
In short, he had set out to handle anything that Madworld might still manage to throw at him.
Which possibly made the fact that he was being thwarted by his own world's Chaos Emeralds all the more galling. The Prism scraped across the back of the giant's neck, leaving a line of glittering rainbow sparkling on its unbroken skin before the blade slipped away and his attempted surprise attack achieved nothing more than his own collision with the outsider's unyielding skull.
"Tails?!" Sonic stared up, open mouthed.
"Sonic!" Miles hurled himself up and backwards as the monster whipped its head around to the new "threat", almost bisecting him with a mouth tentacle. "I'm here to help!"
"Tails, he's too strong! You've gotta get out of here!"
Sonic zipped closer to the monster, waving frantically. The outsider's forehead eye opened, blazing with blinding light as it glared down at his hero. Miles pulled out his paint gun and fired, splattering blazing paint directly across its cornea. The giant rumbled in irritation as it was momentarily blinded, but a blazing beam of energy lanced out all the same, barely missing his hero as it went off on a wild angle that carved the Mushroom Hill zone in two.
Well, he didn't think that hurt it, but small victories, right? Miles flew down the front of its chest, rainbow sparks crackling off his blade as he trailed the Prism across its flesh, futilely searching for any weak point. Even finding out it was ticklish would be something.
Nothing. Even the exposed veins, chaos emeralds peeking from their surface, might as well have been chiseled out of solid stone, or something harder given how effortlessly the blade of light cut through solid rock. But if he couldn't cut the chaos emeralds out of its flesh, perhaps he could pry them out? Miles glanced at the monster's hands as he slipped his pickaxe free. It didn't seem much inclined to use them as more than weapons platforms for its eyes at the moment, and he was too low for its mouth tentacles to reach. Now was the time. He swung his pick up at the red emerald, trying to find some chink to tear it free, but to no avail. Maybe if he used something thinn-
A wet splat sounded from behind Miles' neck He barely had time to turn his head far enough to catch a glimpse of a glistening wet tongue trailing dozens of feet through the air before he was torn off the outsider's chest and sent spinning helplessly down to the ground in an uncontrolled spin. Miles was faintly aware of eyeballs launching down towards him at rapid speeds when a shining blue sphere slammed into him from below. He slammed into a cluster of oversized mushrooms at incredible speed, crushed beneath the weight of the living projectile that struck him.
"Hey, Sonic. Long time no see." Miles grinned, head still spinning.
"That's my line!" Sonic winked, hopping off his prone sidekick. "Hey! You got big, little buddy!"
Miles blinked, standing up. It was true. Since he'd started growing over the last few months he now stood almost as tall as the blue hero, even if his boots did add an inch or so.
"So what's the plan, Tails?" Sonic stared at him expectantly.
"Uh… plan?"
Miles glanced up at the hulking menace above, surveying the area with alien dispassion. It had essentially already won, plunging his home into the same purgatory of negative entropy as Madworld, feasting upon the endless chaos that was embedded into its very body. An apocalypse made flesh, embodying hopelessness as it tried to kill them out of the same idle malice shared by all the outsiders he'd faced.
Yet Sonic was as full of confidence as ever. As though losing had never even crossed his mind. Body trembling slightly not with fear but with boundless energy, just waiting to race off and achieve the impossible even as he stood, waiting for Miles to speak.
And Miles smiled, echoing his hero's expression as he held out a gauntleted hand.
"I do have a plan."
"What do we do now?"
The pink hedgehog leaned against a scorched wall panel, taking advantage of the momentary respite from the badnik hordes to catch her breath. Another tremor shook through the corridor, sending clouds of dust tumbling from the roof.
"We need to keep moving, find the exit." Reason grunted, adjusting her load with a tail as she peered around a corner at another corridor full of spikes, automatic tesla sentries and worse The Master Emerald was too large to squeeze into her hammerspace, and far too large to be able to comfortably carry even after she'd broken the chair part over an eggdrone's head.
"What about the portal?" Amy arched an eyebrow at her.
"We should escape first, staying here is impractical." Another tremor. Reason shook dust from her ears.
"Impractical." There was an uncharacteristically hard edge to Amy's voice.
"... Yes." Reason frowned. She supposed she couldn't fault Amy for still being angry, even if improvisational neurosurgery had been the most pragmatic solution to deal with the hedgehog's "bipolar" state. Or… more bipolar than usual, at least. "At this rate the island may well fall apart before I can repair the generator."
"Ugh. Fine." Amy adjusted her grip on her hammer as an alarm sounded in the distance. "I just don't-"
A bolt of energy burst against the wall above her ear. She ducked down beneath a shower of sparks as a mechanised insect hovered out from a nearby ceiling hatch, cannons humming.
"Break's over, let's go!"
Where did Eggman even manage to get all these robots? Reason huffed as she ran, metal shrapnel bouncing off her fur as one machine after another met its demise beneath Amy's brutal swings. Or build such a big maze in such a short time? Another tremor shook through the halls of crystal and metal. They'd been getting louder and more frequent over the last few minutes. This last one was loud enough it almost sounded like it was coming from- Reason's eyes widened.
"Amy, look out!" Reason barely managed to grab her arm as the wall in front of them exploded, fragments of stone and steel crashing into the opposite wall hard enough to leave deep gouges in its metallic surface. A shape loomed from the billowing clouds of dust, strolling through the opening before the now familiar figure stood before them, an eyebrow raised above a violet eye.
"Knuckles!" Amy cried out in relief, letting her hammer drop slightly.
"Oh, hey you two." Knuckles raised a mitt. "I was just coming to rescue my-" He cleared his throat, fanning dust away from his mouth. "Uh, you guys."
"Thanks, Knuckles." Amy stared at him half-lidded. "Is Sonic still fighting that monster?"
Knuckles nodded, heaving a hunk of rubble down the corridor to pulverise a drone unfortunate enough to catch up to them. "He was when I left him. Come on, let's get you somewhere safer."
Reason noticed his eyes flick back to the jewel she carried when he said it. Knuckles always had been the simplest of her former charges to understand.
"We'll need to meet up with Sonic as soon as possible." She only slightly reluctantly allowed him to take the giant stone from her grasp. "Hastur is too powerful to deal with in its Chaos state. We'll need to get out of here and come up with a plan to deal with him."
"Plan?" Knuckles smirked, holding the Master Emerald aloft in one oversized mitt. The jewel shrank down to fit perfectly in its master's palm before winking into his hammerspace. His smirk turned into a grin. "Since when did I need one of those? Let's go save Sonic, you two."
He turned and ran, and Reason, misgivings gnawing at her stomach, followed after.
