Far above in the darkened skies over Mobius, the ARK moved for the first time of its own volition since its arrival days before. The old derelict shifted in orbit towards its designated target, massive machinery twisting and coiling as the cone-shaped cannon began to open up in deadly bloom. Deep within the heart of the colony, the lights upon the four globes spun faster and faster, seemingly in tune with Tails' panic as he typed away frantically, desperately trying to do something, anything. Yet his attempts bore no fruit, the Eclipse Cannon having already finished charging its primary and secondary energy cycles as it rapidly approached the final firing sequence. Behind and in the Cyclone, Cosmo watched worriedly, still ignorant to the peril her unborn child was in.
"Shadow," asked Rouge, "can't you do anything to help them?" The bat indicated over to where the kitsune stabbed buttons erratically beside Eggman, who had joined his fellow genius in aid, yet the pair still making no impact. The black hedgehog, however, seemed stunned for the first time since… Well, ever, as far as the jewel thief could remember. Eyes narrowing after no response was forthcoming, she marched over to his side, leveling her face with one of the ultimate life form's triangular ears. "SHADOW!"
The hedgehog suddenly snapped alert, his face swiveling as his red eyes paused on hers. Then, without a word, he strode forward and around the console chair. Pushing aside Ivo and Miles, gloved fingers began typing with crisp precision in place of frantic jabs. "The cannon's energy levels are already near critical level," said Shadow, "Safeguards won't let you use the killswitch now, and even if you bypassed them the discharge would probably blow up both us and half the colony."
"There's got to be something we can do!" Tails practically yelled, his unwounded namesake waving about wildly, its injured counterpart competing by performing some limp twitches. "I- I can't give up! I refuse to!"
"I didn't tell you to," the ultimate life form responded, surprisingly and almost chilling calm considering what he'd just learned about his birth. Still, this was also the same person who had decided and later attempted to carry out killing an innocent girl almost as casually as one might pick out produce at the grocery. "The firing coordinates have not yet been reached. If you're fast, you might still be able to alter the trajectory."
The kitsune paused for a heartbeat, his mathematical mind trying to beat rampant emotions into submission and restore rational order. Then quick as Sonic might've been, sped back to his place at the console and hammered away at the controls. Eggman joined him on the other side, and with Shadow still pointing out flaws and advantages they could use in the software. Between the three of them, the impossible became feasible: The ARK began to stray from its originally set course.
Yet would it be enough? Outside, the Eclipse Cannon had fully opened, huge arcs of electricity leaping from the metal pylons to the central focusing rod, lights bursting with blinding radiance up the weapon of mass destruction. As the energy was forced into the tip, a ball of sheer power formed and grew to half the size of the colony, and with a final roar burst out as beam of focused blue light.
The azure streak blazed across the heavens, rings of energy igniting and burning off from it as it tore through each layer of the atmosphere. The top of the sea steamed as the light rushed past, straight as an arrow as it skimmed only a few thousand feet above the water, before finally passing back up through the atmosphere and into space beyond.
All this they watched from the central control room, yet Tails dared not release his breath until the last of the deadly beam passed into the abyss beyond Mobias. It had been close, but they'd managed to avoid hitting the planet at all, managing to turn the space colony somewhere around sixty to seventy degrees before firing, skimming the atmosphere but not actually hitting any non-gaseous mass. Though he would have missed his house and what precious things lay still there, he really didn't want to hit some other population center or even fire it into the ocean. He'd no idea the cannon was capable of in side effects alone; doing irreparable damage to the crust, erupting volcanoes, or causing who knew what else global calamities.
Now that the danger had passed, and the adrenaline began to release its iron clasps, Tails took a moment of careful reflection. Why had the cannon suddenly fired? And why at his house? Had Mephiles changed his mind and tried to destroy the kitsune's unborn child anyway? Or was he, as always, prodding people into a certain course of foreseeable action that matched his desires? This latest scenario seemed the most likely, yet Tails found that he once again had no way to go against it; only to keep acting as peril dictated and hope that things would work out for the best as they had last time he'd dealt with this weaver of fates.
Soberly staring at the screen, Eggman's heroic counterpart wracked his brain for ideas on where to go from here. When one finally came, he didn't care for it much, but saw little else to do at the moment.
"Something's out of place," said Tails, pressing a key several more times as he zoomed in on the region he was looking at before. "Look here, below the cannon's core. The flood gates that ran the rivers of coolant through the area have all been drained, opening up this large chamber below. That's too sudden to be coincidental- It's a good possibility something important or at least relevant is down there. I'm going to go check it out."
"And what, leave us behind?" said Eggman mockingly, already having slipped back into his normal, jeering self. "Real hard to keep up with you in an iron suit, tin man."
The kitsune smiled back at the Doctor almost sincerely, the grin of a man with a deck of aces up each sleeve. "Not everything has to be a contest, Eggman."
"Oh, but it does!" he exclaimed. "A race to the cannon's core then… Hmm, why does that sound familiar?"
Below and to the side, it was Rouge this time who grinned. "At least you're not rushing there to fix your own mistake this time Doctor."
Ivo deflated a little, his hairless brows forming an ugly knot. Bruising his ego seemed to be becoming a running gag for the day.
Meanwhile, Tails had finished mounting the Cyclone, and was gently settling back into his seat. Making a few short configurations, he turned the walker around and took a few steps back toward the walkway before looking back to his Cosmo. "Do you trust me?" he asked both simply and innocuously.
The seedrian blinked. "Of… Course." She returned, a tad thrown off by the question, her curiosity quickly climbing.
His grin going all the wider, the kitsune yanked back on the control yoke before shoving it forward, the Cyclone responding by taking a leap of faith and plummeting off the platform, Cosmo letting out a shriek of surprise before they dropped through the data streams and were soon swallowed by the darkness even farther beneath.
Back up above, the remaining member of the group all peered over the edge. "Well…" said Eggman after a second, "I don't know about you two, but I'm walking; hordes of GUN bots, lava monsters, and escaped experiments be damned."
"Um… yeah." Said Rouge, her wit for once robbed of her. "I'll do that too."
Shadow was already heading back down the walkway, quietly laughing. "Just like old times, huh?"
Already far below, still falling like a metal boulder, Tails was laughing with childish joy as the wind rustled through his fur and whipped around his bangs. A look back sobered him up though from the seedrian's distress, and with the flip of a toggle the mecha began to whine. The legs pulled back up, splitting into their base components as the wings reformed on either side. In only a handful of seconds, the relocated engine burst back to life, the walker having completed its transformation back into plane form.
As the now reborn Tornado 3 leveled off into a looping spiral around the descending crystal and metal rod that was the Eclipse Cannon's center, the kitsune switched on the auto-pilot as they continued downward, turning to face the plant girl. "I would have flown by myself down this way last time," he said, "but the goal was to get the Master Emerald to the core, not just reach it."
Cosmo's look of confusion made his ears droop. "Tails, I don't even know half of what just happened in the last five minutes," she said. "I know it's not your intention to keep me in the dark, but I- I'm lost. Between those records about creating Shadow-san and you suddenly panicking…"
The kitsune understood her bafflement. He still wasn't sure of the significance of the Black Arms or Mephiles' tampering with the timeline, but could still help her in one regard. "Someone tried to target our house with the Eclipse Cannon," he said simply, turning back to the Tornado's controls.
"What?" said the seedrian struck with shock, her eyes dilating slightly.
"It's alright now," he continued quickly. "We averted the blast; it fired off into space. Theoretically, it'll probably be a long time before it hits anything, and that anything's most likely to be a star. Still, something's going on down near the cannon core, and I'll bet Mephiles has something to do with it, if he's not already there."
Cosmo's eyes widened slightly instead this time. "But… If he is… What do we do when we find him?"
Tails blinked. He hadn't considered that. Quite like the last time he'd faced his doppelganger in fact, he'd spent his whole time just chasing the fiend and never once thought about what he'd do upon catching up. Was that how his evil twin was manipulating him? Getting him to act before thinking?
The kitsune shook his head free of the 'What ifs'. It hadn't been a minute earlier he'd had these same thoughts. Like Shadow before him had discovered, he was not only realizing but applying the knowledge that brooding would solve none of his problems. And like Sonic, he would just keep living the way he always had, regardless of other's attempts to direct him.
The rest of the way down, Tails and Cosmo remained mostly quiet, the only sound the hum of the Tornado's engine. The walls began to change as they went lower and lower, cracks and webbing appearing across the metal, and a strange organic residue growing on the cannon's spire. Eventually the hole widened out, the plane circling into a wide chamber of rainbow-hewn walls. The cannon core was present; a massive fleshy sac overgrown with strange pseudopods that ended in a jagged funnel above the iron-wrought replica of the Master Emerald's shrine.
All of this was alien to both Cosmo and Tails. The fox himself had never actually entered the core, working to help his friends from higher up during the fall of the ARK. From the diagnostics, however, he knew of at least one thing that had changed. For the center of the great room had once held a large, disc-shaped pool of water, fed on either side by two rivers of coolant flowing from somewhere higher up in the colony. Now, though, it had been replaced by an open chasm; the streams connecting to it run dry.
The kitsune circled around once, taking in all that he saw. Then, with a dramatic swerve, dived down into the hole. Great lengths of pipes and tubing ran down the shaft all around them as they sped downward, illuminated in the total dark only by the lights emitted from the Tornado's console and HUD. The air was dank, thick with moisture, matting the kitsune's fur. It only got colder as they traveled ever deeper, and Tails found himself shivering.
A light finally came into view in the distance, Tails reflexively pulling back on the brakes. As it loomed closer, he activated the transformation control, the Tornado spinning into walker mode as it became the Cyclone. There was a jolt as the engine switched directions from behind to below, the momentum splaying the fox and seedrian across the front of their cockpits. Recovering, they looked around and found the shaft had expanded five times in width, the air so humid that a chill fog blanketed almost everything. Iron-wrought plumbing snaked across the walls, a single platform rising up from below proving to be the source of illumination from the strip lights running around its perimeter. Around it, the darkness still went somehow farther down, continuing its seemingly impossible descent.
The Cyclone touched down hard on the platform, despite the booster's efforts. Both passengers remained seated this time, still looking around with confusion. Even Tails was not sure where they were, the ARK's maps had said relatively nothing about what lay below the cannon's core.
The sound of metal grinding on metal drew the attention of the two lovers with snaps of the head to the foggy air above. It didn't take much for Tails to realize they were not alone, aiming his weaponry towards the source of the noise, hearing his heart beat in his ears as he waited otherwise silently for an enemy to show itself.
He got his wish.
A waterfall of thick ooze fell down a few yards away, splattering the area around it with blue sludge. The Cyclone jumped back, it weapons trained as the stuff quivered restlessly. The kitsune's stomach turned as he watched it twist about, objects within the blob shifting about like organs. He saw huge rods of metal in the shape of bones twist about, connecting together into a twisted skeleton. Six jewel gleamed darkly in the framework, their sickening luster unmistakable for the fakes they were. Around the metal cartilage a nightmare formed, all long, gangly limbs growing from the and pulling it up from the floor, tentacles growing from the mass, a long scorpid tail growing from the back with huge fins. And in the front, a mask of iron bobbed to the front; a robotic face with two massive green eyes aligned vertically and three more trailing off on the side. It split open wide, filled with metal teeth the size of daggers, and Artificial Chaos let loose a terrifying roar.
Instinct took over. Tails shifted the Cyclone away, blue bursts of energy launching from the muzzle over Cosmo's head and crashing into the enormous machine-horror. The blasts did virtually nothing, blowing off a few chunks of the ooze which quickly reformed. The artificial god responded in kind, the tentacles on its back growing to enormous proportions and lancing out to impale the mecha. The walker went to jump again, but wasn't as fast, two of the speeding appendages slashing along the side, leaving huge gouges on it.
At the peak of the jump, the kitsune activated the boosters, buying him a moment's reprieve. At least, so he thought. Instead, the oozing abomination let out another roar, its eight eyes crackling with power as they all fired beams of destructive power in random directions. One of the central eyes might have vaporized half the mecha and its occupants on the spot, had a glimmering green shield once again deflected the deadly eye lasers.
Tails dropped the mecha down and turned back to Cosmo, finding the plant girl standing up in her seat, her hands extended to either side. The shield then expanded, thinning out and enveloping the vehicle in a warmly glowing shield. Artificial Chaos made let out a low choke of flapping gunk, what the fox took to be a growl of suspicion and annoyance, its tentacles retreating as it studied them. The mechanic, however, was not going to let the opportunity so easily go to waste, opening up his volkan cannon as the Cyclone began side-stepping in a strafing run.
Again the energized particles peppered the asymmetrical form of Chaos' clone, the attack once more showing no visible impact on the monster, its wounds closing as quickly as they formed. Steam hissed between the iron sheets of its mouth, and the behemoth crouched low on its many legs before hurling itself upward, intending to brings its bulk down in full force upon those that opposed it. The blue ooze struck Cosmo's shield with the force of a train, sending the Cyclone spinning like a pinball across half the platform.
"Why doesn't anything work?" shouted Tails in frustration, urging his mecha to its feet as the shield faded, Artificial Chaos already preparing for another attack. "Sonic said he defeated the real Chaos 6 by smashing its core… But this thing doesn't even have one! Just that hideous fa-"
Simultaneous struck with insight and another laser from the robotic ooze's eyes, Tails blinked as the Cyclone shuddered; smoke billowing out from the gouges on its side. Throwing the walker into a run, he narrowly dodge the stab from the creature's freakishly long tail, carefully tagging its face with his painting laser. A single blue blast shot from the Cyclone's blaster, streaking in circles before smashing into the Robot's upper eye. Artificial Chaos let out another mighty roar, this one of anger and fury, its remaining seven sensors tracking the mecha as it turned around to attempt another shot.
The amorphous form of the gigantic form shifted, its face pulling back into the thick mass as its metal framework once again shifted and realigned. The innumerable limbs pulled back into a central mass, leaving only a massive blob the size of a cottage. Suddenly, bright pinpricks of light appeared on its shifting, twitchy edges, growing in number more and more until it looked like a aquatic Christmas tree. Each spark suddenly blew outward then, hundred on miniature lances going in a three hundred and sixty degree sphere of directions.
Cosmo threw up another shield of emerald light, but she was already tired from the last, only able to produce a small barrier that covered the upper half of the cyclone. A dozen tiny spears pierced through the Cyclone's legs, yet the mecha still somehow stood, not even buckling as they withdrew and pulled back into the central mass. And for a moment, there was silence.
The bulk of Artificial Chaos twitched, its mechanical face coming to the fore and emerging as it peered about, looking for the ruined corpses of its foes. Instead, it was met with a second blast of blue energy, it lower primary eye blown out. Tails smiled victoriously as the abomination let out a shriek, its form twisting out of control as tentacles burst out and around, thrashing insanely. Yet his triumph was shortlived, as the metal face detonated, the whole mass of the ooze blowing apart in a violet wave of semi-solid shower whose force alone threw the Cyclone once again across the platform. Shrapnel flew everywhere with the force of the detonation, a limb containing one of the artificial emeralds blowing clean through one of the legs, the walker finally tumbling as it skidded across the platform, spinning toward the edge.
As the abyss neared, two forms jumped free from the plane/walker hybrid just before it the engine finally gave in with a whine, the front half of the Cyclone exploding in a final, glorious blaze, giving a final burst that threw the mecha off the platform and down into the descending shaft surrounding the floor. Cosmo, dazed, struggled to her knees, instantly panicking when she didn't see Tails. The seedrian ran for the edge where his creation had fallen, pulling her head over and shrieking "Tails!" upon finding him dangling from a pipe a few feet below.
The kitsune, to his credit, managed to smile, though his peril was quite dire. His tail still damaged, he could not fly back to safety, and he could quite obviously not hold on forever. Cosmo put her hand down to help, but it remained out of reach, still at least a good two feet above his current grip. He closed his eyes a moment to think, but the sound of another explosion caused them to open wide.
Above and around them, the scenery hadn't taken too well to the battle. Pipelines sheered in half by eye beams were falling apart, chunks of metal finally succumbing to rust and age with a final push over the edge. Something potent must have been going through one of them, as a tangled mess of plumbing had blown off the wall, debris falling right toward them. It was Tails' turn, now, to scream his love's name, adding "MOVE!" right after.
She looked up with a fright, paralyzed by panic, her hands held up as a energy shield thinner than cheese appeared meekly above. The wreckage tore through it like paper, miraculously missing the seedrian as pieces smashed into the ground around her. Tails, however, was not so lucky – a pipe connecting directly with his head and sending his world spinning into black as he himself spun downward, falling into darkness as somewhere above a girl screamed his name.