act 2, as promised. tensions are rising and everything's going to shit, as per usual.
XXIV.
infinity (inˈfinədē)
[noun]
the state of being infinite; unlimited.
Shadow stared into his palms. He couldn't stop shaking.
Perfect Chaos wouldn't let up.
"Tails," he asked, softly. "I don't understand—what is Sonic doing? What did he do?"
The speaker of his ear piece crackled. "He went—he went into the Null Space."
And his heart sunk. An anchor, chained to his foot, dragging him down, sunlight slipping from his fingers. Down he went, the air pulled from his lungs, until he hit rock bottom.
"… He what?"
Had to get him out. Had to save him. Had to—
Chaos screeched, and its tone alone sent hard reverberations along the surrounding buildings. Shadow lost his balance from the mere force of it. He felt blind fury course through him; this needed to be done because his time was being wasted. Every second out here was another second Sonic spent in there.
A scream tore from him, angry, bloody, animalistic, all at once, and he felt pain ripple through him as he burst up into the sky again, raw energy surging around his body as if he were set ablaze. His rocket skates fired him toward Perfect Chaos, and he pushed his palms down to gain more speed with his own small blasts of energy. When he was level with Chaos' eyes, he stopped in place; revved up into a spindash; launched forward.
He felt himself submerged into sparkling, bubbling water, and he felt himself ram into something hard but pliable—Chaos' brain. For a fleeting moment, Shadow thought, maybe that actually did some damage. Maybe that would be enough.
But then Chaos screamed back at him, and he was sent flying backwards. The last thing he saw was a blinding, glaring red light overtake him entirely before he slipped away.
She was stuck. Stuck, in a labyrinth of crimson walls, crimson floors, that extended endlessly into nothing she could ever come to perceive. She was trapped, trapped, with no way out.
Amy lifted her head and struggled to get a gulp of air down. The ground was sticky beneath her hands, leeching into the fabric of her gloves. It smelled rancid, and shone a deep red, and she tried not to think too much about the implications of that. Instead, gradually, she pulled herself to her feet, her mouth twisted into a grimace, as she looked around and grasped for her lost bearings.
Endless corridors, endless, never-ending, and bleeding red. Amy took in a shuddering gasp. Where—where was she—
"Amy!"
She turned and spun around, too scared to diverge far from where she had woken up. Scared of getting lost, losing her place, letting her ambitions get out of hand. She needed to get back, she knew that, faithfully, but to what? Where had she been before this? All she knew was that this place—the infinite red—was wrong; she wasn't supposed to be here. She just needed to get back.
"Amy! Please!"
Her heartrate skyrocketed. That voice—it was—it sounded like—
"Knuckles?!" she cried, spinning, and the whole world was spinning around her, and she couldn't tell if she was standing in place anymore. It felt like her surroundings were constantly shifting, the labyrinth was being manipulated, its passages constantly remolding just to toy with her. Amy struggled to get ahold of herself. "Knuckles, where are you?"
"Hurry!" he called, and she needed to find him, needed to save him, but she couldn't identify the source of his voice. He sounded like he was at the end of every endless hallway, hidden away in the crimson red. "Amy, please!"
She ran, because she didn't know what else to do. She sprinted down a pathway and hoped it would lead her to where she needed to be; to Knuckles. She ran, and her chest burned, and her bones ached, and she wished so deeply that she was doing the right thing. This was what she had to do, right?
The corridor never seemed to stop, and she felt tears rising in her eyes. Twist and turn came after twist and turn, and Knuckles sounded like maybe he was drawing closer, and yet he never appeared. She ran and ran, and it felt like hours, days, weeks passed by with no luck. There was no end. She just ran.
The ground grew stickier, suctioning to the soles of her boots with each stride. The hallway began to condense, almost imperceptibly at first, but then it was suddenly so suffocating, so narrow, so red. The walls were dripping, and she felt the red coat her, felt it drown her. Her boots began to sink down further with each step like she was running on quick sand and she couldn't get out, couldn't get out, couldn't get out.
"Knuckles!" she screamed again, but she couldn't hear him anymore.
Red poured over her, blood poured over her, consumed her, and she couldn't breathe at all anymore, no matter how much she wrenched her body and struggled, and then—
Amy opened her eyes to the harsh bite of the wind against her face. For a minute she persisted in her thrashing, feeling just as stuck despite the newly blinding sunlight overlooking her, and it took time for the fog to clear in her mind.
She was staring at the back of Tails' head, buckled into the passenger's seat of the Tornado, a wispon clutched in her hand.
And they were nosediving down to the dark rapids of Perfect Chaos filling the streets of Station Square.
She couldn't breathe again, but this time it was for entirely different reasons.
"Tails!" she yelled, leaning forward to jostle his shoulders. He was unconscious. Had she been unconscious too? What had that even been? "Tails, wake up!"
He wouldn't, and the Tornado was dropping too fast, and she braced herself for the worst, her grip trembling against his shoulders.
Tails' head shot up with a hard gasp. He glanced around frantically, and then on what seemed like pure instinct, pulled back as hard as he could on the Tornado's joystick. The plane complained at his severity but complied, adjusting their trajectory to take them back up into the sky before they hit the water. Amy's hands didn't leave his shoulders for a moment.
"Are you okay?" she asked him shakily.
Tails shook, too. "I-I don't—I'm sorry, I don't know what happened. I think I'm okay now."
Part of her wanted to swallow her words, because surely she was just delusional, but she also desperately had to know, so: "Did you see that too? It was almost like this… nightmare. I felt like I couldn't get out."
"… Yes. Everything was red, and I could see Infinite—" Tails' voice began to wobble, so he caught his voice and paused to deliberate. "So, we both had some sort of vision that knocked us out. The Phantom Ruby can cast illusions, so it's not totally farfetched."
Amy rubbed her eyes. "You think that was Infinite's doing? I thought he…" Previous matters came back to her in pieces. The Null Space, Gadget falling into the water, Sonic's conversation with Tails. And Shadow, exploding with power, throwing himself at Perfect Chaos before—before nothing. She shook her head, eyeing the raging god that the Tornado continued to idly circle. "Infinite is in the Null Space now. I think those visions were caused by Chaos."
"Well that's no good," Tails remarked, an unsettled tone in his voice, and then he pressed at his ear piece. "Hey, Shadow? Do you copy? Shadow! Silver? Anybody?!"
The world did not breathe inside of the Null Space. The world and the Null did not even coexist. They were fragmented cliffsides on opposing ends of an ocean of wrath, kept apart like doomed lovers that were never supposed to meet.
Sonic wondered, briefly, if the Null Space was all a ruse. If he was actually just stranded in outer space.
It was similar in a way. Air sapped from his lungs as he stepped inside, and it was dark in here—infinitely black and cavernous. But it was different from space, in that there were no stars, no planets, nothing. The only other sights to behold were these alien glimpses of purple and red, warping through the dark emptiness like ruptures in reality; glitches. And he was standing, not floating. Sonic stared down at his feet to see a platform of violet-red cubes flickering beneath him. When he stepped forward, another small platform appeared upon contact, like a hidden floor that prevented him from drifting down into the endless chasm of black below.
He fought for another breath. Oxygen still streamed through the Null Space, but it was minimal. The main thing he could feel keeping his blood pumping was actually the Chaos energy contained within himself. It made his skin feel tight, like his veins were thickening with the exertion of trying to stay alive in a place that so clearly aimed to kill everything in its path.
Behind him, the exit remained. It was inverted from what the portal had looked like in the dome: bright white, flaring up angrily. It spat out metal and shrapnel, and it was then that Sonic noticed the broken pieces of destroyed badniks drifting around in here. They had been sucked into the Null as well, torn apart.
"You feel it too, don't you?"
He looked forward. Infinite was facing him, waiting for him, not too far away. They stood and stared and neither of them moved.
Sonic tried to parse the meaning of Infinite's words, pulling his lips into a half-scowl. He felt the oppressive energy in here, the darkness. He felt the constant scorch in his lungs, the deprivation of air. And he felt—he felt the Null, almost as if it were a living being, scraping at his flesh, begging to rip him apart and devour him whole.
Looking down at himself, he was mildly surprised by the vibrant glow of his fur. Sonic always glowed, of course, when he went Super. That was a given. But it was different in here; he was like a beacon in here.
And—and he could feel it. How rapidly his heart beat at his ribs, like he was on some sort of high. He felt… stronger in here. Limitless. The power of the Chaos Emeralds yawned against his flesh and bone imprisonment, like it would all gush out of him if he wasn't careful enough. It was like they were working overtime, like he would burn out twice as quickly as he usually did when he went Super. The Null was siphoning all the energy right out of him.
Infinite chuckled lowly. "I know you feel it. How much better it feels in here. You look so vivid, Sonic! So lively."
Better was a subjective word. He clenched his jaw and soared forward. Infinite was ready; he drew out his red scimitar again, and Sonic had to veer out of the way to avoid getting his throat slit. Sonic bounced back for more distance, and they kept on staring, waiting.
"It feels good, right?" Infinite probed. "This is a domain of untampered, unwavering negative Chaos energy. It enriches the soul just like positive energy—just like the emeralds. But this—this is so much better. It's understandable, why the Phantom Ruby wanted it so direly."
Sonic moved forward in a flash of gold, landing an uppercut beneath Infinite's jaw. He felt a spike of satisfaction to see the silver mask come flying off his face. It spun through the not-quite-air and landed near the entrance of the Null Space.
He looked back, smirking, to take in Infinite's dastardly face. One eye gold, one eye blue. His white locks were loose and wild. He looked so much more mortal this way. Infinite snarled and shoved him back with a pulse of red, but Sonic caught himself after tumbling a ways away, skidding against the nonexistent ground.
Infinite smiled. Sonic had never seen any sort of expression on his face before. Sonic had never seen his face at all before now. It verged on jarring. Somehow, despite Infinite's blatant expressions, his emotions, all on display—there was an essence of inhumanity to him; a base, animalistic fire to him.
"Isn't it nice, to feel like a god?"
"I'm not a—" Sonic stammered defensively. He took a step back. "I'm not like you."
"I beg to differ. We aren't all that different."
"We are nothing alike," Sonic seethed, his voice breaking in his anger from the mere suggestion.
"We are two unmatched superpowers. And we are both independent in that regard." Infinite then leered, predatorily, "And we are both alone."
Sonic hesitated, and he pondered this. He thought about how he left everyone behind, asking Tails to take care of them for him. Because Sonic, in the end, could never be what he wanted himself to be. He wanted to prove fate wrong—prove that he was strong enough to triumph over evil, again and again, that he could fight for Mobius to his dying breath.
And he would. But… was he strong enough to win? That was another question entirely. Even now, his false arm painted a different color, ridden of others' control, it still hung from his shoulder like a heavy, permanent reminder of Infinite's ceaseless hold on him.
He was sick of it. It made him sick, knowing he would die before Infinite. He was tired of letting him win, letting him get away. Sonic would kill Infinite if it was the last thing he did, and he wouldn't let him lay a finger on anyone else.
He swallowed, though his mouth felt like cotton. Infinite's words branded through him. Alone. "Okay, I'll give you that," he shot back dryly. He slowly brought up his fists in preparation.
Infinite laughed to himself, and the Phantom Ruby glared dangerously. It was unnerving. "So that's how this is going to go, then?" He stalked closer, and Sonic shuddered. A selfish part of himself wanted to run away, back to the rest of reality, away from the Null. He squashed that feeling instantly. This was the place to stop Infinite—where he could bring no real harm to anybody, where the violence could be contained.
Sonic stood his ground, even as he felt the Null drain away at his energy, tediously, spitefully. "… What do you mean?"
"We'll fight in here, you and I, two unmatched powers. To the very end. And then you'll die in here, alone."
"I'll take you down with me."
He could hear the cruel enjoyment in Infinite's voice as he replied, "Oh, no. I will not perish in the Null. That's not how this works. The Phantom Ruby will thrive in the Null Space, and I will kill you, if I must, to ensure that."
Gadget didn't have much time to think as he fell. One slam from a water tendril left him completely disoriented; it knocked the wind out of him, and it disabled any kind of reaction he could've hoped to procure. He was falling faster than he could think, before he could remember his grappling hook, before he could even cry for help.
But, still, he was taken by surprise to plunge into the rapids and realize how hot it was. He felt like he'd be boiled alive if he stayed under too long, but by the time he began to scramble after his senses, the current was already bashing into him, shoving him around like he was nothing. He tried to swim up to the surface but the water was too strong, and it twisted him around so aggressively that he quickly lost sight of which way was up or down. The water scalded him, and it was so dark, and red energy blazed through the water erratically.
The need for air pounded in his head.
Grasping urgently at his wrist, Gadget tried to trigger the grappling hook. He couldn't tell which direction was out—he could hardly see anything more than a foot ahead of him through the dark waters—but it was his only chance. His fingers found the switch, and he nearly pressed it—but then the current slammed him down and his vision dulled upon the back of his skull ramming against concrete.
He went limp, and let the water carry him, too dazed to do much else.
Vaguely, through his glazed eyes, Gadget thought he saw a gleam of turquoise up above, though it was hard to make out. And not a minute later, blinding red light consumed his vision, and he was gone anyways.
He woke up in his old dorm room. The one he'd sought refuge in, back at the start of it all. Back when he didn't know what ever happened to Zero after he disappeared. Back when all he had were a few college buddies to cower with inside abandoned dormitories, and they would just sit in there, and ration their food, and wait to be found and maimed until, inevitably, they were found and maimed.
It was clean in here. And empty. Some tiny, mute voice in the back of his head whispered a memory of this—some other bad dream he'd had a long time ago, with bleeding walls and Egg Pawns and Zero, telling him to stop, stop running, stop—but he shook the feeling off. Gadget almost would have smiled. There was a thin, fragile comfort to this room. It rung with times of denial, times of brutal peace, that he longed for in a way he knew wasn't right to long for.
A figure appeared in the doorway.
Gadget lurched upright, but he stopped himself from getting closer. It was—he didn't really know who it was. It was a man he loved, a long time ago. And it was a man who conquered the planet alongside a dictator and an army of robots.
The jackal's eyes were watery. He wasn't wearing the mask, though he cradled it in his hands. He was emotive, something Gadget hadn't witnessed on him in a long while.
He tried to say something, but couldn't find his voice. It lodged itself in his throat.
"This is all your fault," Infinite, Zero, Infinite told him, his voice teetering and failing. "You did this."
Gadget shook his head and rose up from his bed. Reality felt temporary and curtained in oblivion; he hadn't even realized he was sitting on his old bed until he was already standing up. Out of the corner of his eye, the walls flickered red. The wrongness of the scene scratched at the back of his mind but he was already giving in.
"No," he whispered, inching closer. "No, I wouldn't—I'll save you, Zero. I love you, and you know I would save you if I could, but I just—"
"Stop it."
Gadget realized, as Zero, Infinite, Zero began to shake all over, that there was no Phantom Ruby embedded in his chest.
"No, you're a coward. You couldn't save me, and now—now I'm a monster."
There was no Phantom Ruby embedded in his chest, because blood was gushing from his chest in its place. When had he started bleeding? Why was he bleeding?
Gadget's heart leapt in his throat, and he was suddenly by his side, running his hands all over him, trying to stop it, trying to save it, even as the blood continued to spill. Infinite, Zero, paled. He sucked in a disjointed breath, sinking to the ground, and Gadget tried to touch, hold, support him, but he was falling apart in his arms. Too much blood. Too much blood. Gadget was already coated in it.
"No, no, please, please don't—I'm sorry, I'm sorry—"
"This is all your fault!"
Gadget sobbed, the words piercing through him, as Zero, as Infinite, collapsed fully to the ground and Gadget tried, unsuccessfully, to follow him down. Too much blood.
"This is all your fault! All your fault! All your fault!"
All your fault.
All your fault.
All your—
All—
(Stop running, Gadget.)
He sputtered for air. There were hands on him, and he was freezing, and he didn't know where he was, so he threw his arms out and tried to scramble away.
Slowly, timidly, everything else returned to him. First touch—water soaked through his fur, hands clutching his chest—then taste—salt and iron on his tongue—then smell—rot in the air, rot and dust—then hearing—hey, hey, Gadget, it's just me—and finally, vision.
He blinked rapidly and sat up on his palms. He was soaked, but he was out of the water, and sunlight peered through the cracks in the mostly caved-in ceiling over their heads. Silver backed away slowly from him, wide-eyed, like he was trying to give him some needed space. Gadget tried to regulate his breathing.
"What—" he choked. Gadget coughed up some water and cleared his throat as he shivered. "What was that? What happened?"
Silver's look of concern intensified. "You fell to the water and I went to save you. There was some… shockwave of red energy and I think it knocked us out. Or maybe you drowned before it hit you, I don't know. But you're awake now, so you're all good."
"Shockwave?"
Silver nodded uneasily. "I would've drowned too, I think, but I was in midair when it hit. Had some weird, scary nightmare, but I snapped out of it as soon as I hit the water—it didn't last more than a few seconds. Then I found you, and got us up here to safety."
Gadget acknowledged him with a frail smile. "Thank you. I… I had a weird, scary nightmare too. I think." He grimaced at the thought of red walls, of Zero. "Is everyone else okay?"
"Yeah." Silver then addressed his ear piece by announcing, "Gadget's awake, guys. We're alright."
"Good to hear," Tails replied. "… Shadow's still M.I.A. We need to find him and make sure he's alright."
"We will," Silver vowed. To Gadget he said, "We'll need to be more careful about how we attack Chaos from now on. That one blow did a number on all of us."
Silver straightened out then, and moved over to Gadget with an extended hand. He acquiesced against his fatigue and was helped onto his feet. The two exchanged a look of mutual understanding, and moved toward the opening in the wall where Silver had likely flown them inside. Chaos continued its incursion through the streets. The Tornado drifted around overhead, anticipatory.
Silver sighed, leaning against crumbled drywall. "They found the Null Space portal in the dome. It's getting bigger, apparently. Sonic went into it… to finish off Infinite."
It felt like Gadget just had the wind knocked out of him yet again. Like he was falling through the sky, disoriented, stunned, breathless, down into a murky ocean of red.
"Finish off?"
Silver observed him with something unreadable in his eyes.
Gadget swallowed thickly and shook his head. He gripped at the hilt of the electric wispon fastened onto his belt. "No, no no no—there's gotta be another way. We still have time. Zero can still—"
"Hey." Silver grabbed onto his shoulders, steadying him, keeping him still, forcing him to meet his eyes. "Calm down. Sonic will handle it because he—he just will. I've been in the Null Space before and it's not pretty. I barely lasted a few minutes. If Sonic and Infinite are… even still alive, it's because they have the Chaos Emeralds and the Phantom Ruby. You can't go in there, Gadget."
But he—but he—
Dammit. No.
Gadget extracted himself away from Silver and stared at him with a hard-edged fire in his eyes. "I have to go after them. I—I have to try."
"It's suicide. I can't let you."
"Please," Gadget implored, a stoked furnace in his chest. Smoke poured from him in dark plumes of exhaustion, of relentlessness. It was a feeling he was far from accustomed to, but it felt good. Invigorating. It felt like enough. "I have to try."
Silver hesitated, working his jaw, but a look of concession overtook him. He said nothing else. Gadget watched him, and recognizing this, nodded at him as a sign of thanks. And then he plunged out into the open air, and launched his grappling hook to swing toward the dome.
His world wove itself back together in threads of scarlet. His mind tingled, releasing itself from the cusp of a deep, heavy slumber. There had been death, carnage, and—so much red—
"—adow!"
Shadow sat up. His back complained and Chaos energy scraped under his skin with an ecstasy that almost set him entirely aflame. The water god bowed overhead, and he quickly realized he was too puny for it to even notice him. He had been a nuisance batted out of its way, reduced to a splatter on a broken rooftop.
Except he wasn't. He was still breathing, still in one piece. And how was that, exactly?
"Shadow! Where are you? Do you copy?!"
He took in some air and stretched his sore muscles. Frankly, the memory of being knocked to the ground was fuzzy and he wasn't sure how it had happened. How long had he been out? And that—that nightmare, it had been so vivid. It left an ill feeling to dwell in his stomach.
Exhaling, Shadow flicked his communicator on. "I'm here. I'm fine."
"Oh thank Chaos," Tails said automatically, out of what sounded like pure relief. The irony of his sentiment was not lost on any of them. "You got knocked out too? We think Perfect Chaos did that somehow, when you struck its head. We're gonna need a different approach to avoid letting that happen again."
Shadow grunted and stood up. His spine would not appreciate this later, but he would survive, so it was inconsequential. "How is everyone else doing?"
"Silver said he found Gadget only a few minutes ago. They're okay," Amy responded. There was a long pause, and Shadow wasn't sure if it was because that was honestly the only information those two had, or if there was graver news to follow. He balled up his fists and watched Chaos thrash in the sky at the circling plane up above. Dread thudded around his system. He had heard other people talking before he had been incapacitated—even Sonic?—but he had been too busy dodging Chaos' attacks to have listened very closely. He frowned and tried to recall and then frowned some more as he started to put things together.
Amy spoke more quietly when she began again. "… Sonic went after Infinite into the—"
"Dammit." Shadow turned swiftly away from Chaos and faced the dome that was a little ways behind him. A few panels of tinted windows were collapsing inward, as if being sucked into a vacuum. Fragments of Sonic's conversation with Tails over the comms came back to him.
Wasting time, wasting time. Shadow shook his head and broke into a jog as he ran in the direction of the dome.
As if she could read his mind, Amy snapped, "Shadow, wait."
He kept running. Leapt off when he reached the edge and then kept going even further, kept pushing himself as his rocket skates kicked into high gear to help him stay in the air.
"Shadow." That was Tails. "Don't—"
"He needs my help," rumbled thoughtlessly from Shadow's mouth.
"We need your help."
And that made his heart stutter. He stopped in place, and gold light fizzled in his palms, and the engines in his skates whined as they strained to keep him afloat. Shadow kept his eyes locked on the dome, though his ears swiveled attentively to the distant cries of Perfect Chaos behind him.
Tails seemed to take a moment to pick up the pieces of his unwinding voice, the dismal lilt on his tongue. He pressed out, like he had to choke it out of himself, "We have a job to do, Shadow. Sonic did what he thought was best, and… we need to do the same. You need to help us stop Perfect Chaos. We need to do our part."
Shadow squeezed his eyes shut. Fuck.
"Please."
Tails, in the same way that his older brother was palpably aware of the moral scales, always followed closely in his footsteps of purposeful righteousness. In his rightness. In his golden heart. And this time was no different.
"Okay," Shadow said, looking over his shoulder back at Perfect Chaos. "We do our job first."
Emblazoned in a warm, bitter yet mirthful sort of feeling that bounced around in his chest, Shadow released another small burst of Chaos energy from his palms to fire himself back to the fight at hand. He soared through the sky with vivacity, with a beating desire to end this quickly. Such was warranted; he had a fiancé to save from a black hole, after all.
A few things just needed to be put in order to make that happen. As he flew back, he told Amy and Tails to keep doing what they had been doing and distract Chaos. Promptly, he watched the Tornado sweep down lower to wreath its neck, a shark cornering its prey, twisting about to avoid its tendrils of burning water that swung through the air haphazardly. And then he asked if Silver and Gadget could hear them, what they were doing.
It took a while for the response to come. Silver spoke slow and careful: "Y-Yeah. We're good. Hold on."
"We need you two," Shadow insisted, but he didn't slow in his path. He would end this right now, with or without their help. Nothing else would get in his way.
In a smooth, practiced motion, he bounded upward with another condensed Chaos Blast, and then another, ricocheting himself back and forth as he got closer to Perfect Chaos. He flicked his wrist out to command twice as many Chaos Spears than before to launch in its direction.
So close to its face, he had no time to react to the spire of reddened water that gushed out of seemingly nowhere toward him, shoving him away. But he only flailed through the air for a second before green light embraced him and he was suddenly frozen. Silver rose up to his right, wearing an assuring smile.
"I gotcha," Silver told him, creasing his brows a little bit. "You okay?"
After a beat Shadow was released from his psychokinetic hold, and he caught himself with his own rocket skates. They hovered side by side, exchanging a look of studious concern that shot between them like a tennis ball.
"Yes," Shadow nodded. He glanced around. "Where's the kid?"
Silver winced. "… About that: he went to the portal."
"What? Are you—why did you let him?!"
They were cut off by a monstrous roar of Perfect Chaos as it flung a current of water to tear through the air between them. They each swerved out of the way, and then retreated to a rooftop that could provide some momentary reprieve while they discussed. Shadow dug his nails into his palms and thought to himself, sourly, I should've been the one to go.
"Look—" Silver started as they touched down onto cracked cement, holding his hands up amicably. "I just… I saw the look on his face. If any of us were gonna go after them, I think it had to be him."
"You've been in there!" Shadow said, bristling, and he felt dizzy. He felt useless. "You told us how it would've killed you. How is he supposed to survive in there when he isn't even a Chaos user?"
"It's not about that," Silver asserted, and his eyes were watery. He looked tired. Shadow probably did, too. "I know what it most likely means. And I could tell that he did too. It's not about survival anymore, man, it's about doing what we can to prevent the end of the world. We both know he cares about Infinite, or whatever he used to be—and—and maybe that's the answer. Maybe he can change things, somehow."
Shadow tried to form more words but he fell mute, moving his jaw and trying to swallow the pain in his throat. He tried to swallow everything but it was so hard. It was so hard.
"Hey, guys!" Tails called out. Exhaustion seeped through his voice, through the static of the communicator. "C'mon. We gotta finish this."
Shadow combed his fingers through his quills and inhaled the damp air and shook the heaviness from himself. Shook out his thoughts that strayed out every which way. "I know. You keep doing what you're doing."
He absently rubbed at his bare wrists, unshackled from his inhibitor rings, and ran through all their options. Brute force wouldn't do much here, and Chaos energy had demonstrated mixed results earlier. But—but the Chaos Lances had done something, no matter how insignificant, and maybe he just needed to add more pressure. If he could overwhelm it, knock some sense into it…
Looking back at Silver, Shadow said, "I need you to throw me as hard as you can to the brain. It can't be expecting me and I move too slowly on my own. I have a theory I want to test."
"Can I hear it?"
Shadow shrugged, and felt the scowl on his face oscillating as he fought between the rage, the sorrow in his head, and he faced Perfect Chaos. Silver was already beginning to grip him with his powers, anyway, though his eyes were pinned expectantly on Shadow.
"Just a hunch," Shadow huffed. "It's being controlled by the Phantom Ruby. We still don't really know what the ruby is, but it was strong enough to shatter the Master Emerald. It tore right through its energy and took over completely. That Chaos energy isn't gone—that's why Perfect Chaos is here. It's just a different kind of energy, and I'm hoping I can change it back."
"So what can I do?"
"Just throw me."
So he did. Turquoise overwhelmed him and then he was a shooting star streaming through the sky. Shadow sucked in a deep breath of air, and he felt his own reserve of energy swell up into his chest, felt it smoldering. As he got closer to Perfect Chaos, he kept on urging it to build up faster, and he felt the rest of his body start to shut down as it directed all its attention to his energy signature. The blood flow to his limbs and his head began to taper off, and a stark coldness slowly wafted through him. There was nothing but burning hot determination at his heart, ready to combust. Shadow became blinded in gold light.
He plunged, once more, through Chaos' head, and his momentum did not cease until he crashed into the puffy membrane drifting inside. Shadow felt his power solidify and harden, and then he let it all go.
"Chaos Blast!"
Raw energy swathed everything in sight, and as it escaped his lungs he felt so unbearably cold, so emptied of all his strength. Every last rivulet of his energy spilled out of him and into Chaos. Gray mottled his vision as he fell. He struggled to process what followed.
Warmth found him again in the form of teal light, and then there were amber eyes on him and several voices in his ear. Comfort found him and Shadow let himself sink to the ground. His head pounded and his body yearned and yearned for life, for air, for the steady rhythm of survival.
Amidst his haze, all the voices were lost on him in a garbled amalgamation of sound. Shadow laid still on concrete and watched Perfect Chaos cry out helplessly as it began to collapse. He watched the angry veins of red flashing through the god secede and fade, watched it drain from Chaos like droplets trailing down an unclogged sink. Chaos shrunk gradually, tenderly, groaning as a wounded creature slowly coming to its senses, and despite its pain, a sense of peace seemed to return to it.
Perhaps that warm, bitter feeling Shadow had felt earlier was hope.
The flooding, as well, started to evaporate. Chaos was amorphous as its fight fled out of its pores in soft ripples, as it forfeited, as it found itself again. The process was long and slow and yet it still wasn't over; Shadow knew there was more to come. Chaos had been ridden of the Phantom Ruby's hold because Shadow fed it a stockpile of his own positive Chaos energy, but the threat of the Null Space still lurked nearby.
Why did the hope have to feel so bitter?
Shadow gasped, and he felt his body failing him, felt it suffocating as his energy wrestled to return quickly enough, to breathe life back into him, but it was too cold, and he was too tired. A numbing dullness overtook him before he ever became cohesive enough to understand what Silver and Tails and Amy were saying to him.
everything comes to a head in the next chapter; stay tuned :)
