Sonic really wished he didn't have to fight the psychics again.

The first time he entered the Arena and met his competitors, the two small boys hadn't been the ones he worried about. He was learning the hard way that appearances could be deceiving. It should have occurred to him straight away how odd it was that a couple of children had entered a tournament to fight against an evil sorcerer, an intelligent adult male gorilla and a professional bounty hunter in a suit of power armour that could fire homing missiles, with perfectly relaxed confidence in their ability to win at least some of the battles. He had assumed they were insane, maybe desperate, possibly a combination of the two, like himself. He was a little uncomfortable at being put in the same match as them for the first band of competitions. While he was glad that his prayers had been answered and he would not be fighting against the female bounty hunter who kept giving him a murderous look, he didn't want his first act in his newly embarked quest to win back his people's freedom, dignity and respect by becoming an intergalactic arena champion, to be assaulting an underage child who had somehow sneaked his name into the entrant list. He was more likely to end up in an even worse prison than the one he was trying to free himself from.

Then he had learned – the hard way - about the spontaneous manifestation of psychic powers in certain children following contact with a hostile alien race. The knowledge had almost cost him the tournament, but fortunately the child in the red and blue baseball cap had gone after the blonde young man in the green uniform with the sword, who knew about the psychic powers and was already prepared. After they had been dealt with, it was down to just Sonic and the swordsman, and Sonic at least had enough prior experience of people trying to stab him with swords to know how to fight back.

Psychic children... if he had told Classic Sonic about this... if he had known at the time... if any of them had ever known... I don't suppose there's anything we could have actually done about it. Even if Classic Sonic had prior knowledge of the enemy's tactical decisions, an enemy who could read your mind would know immediately if you possessed such knowledge, would change their tactics accordingly... as they had probably done anyway, once Classic Sonic began pre-empting the enemy's moves. Nintendo still outnumbered them and they weren't complete idiots. And now he was up against their tactical mastermind, their other one, the boy with the blonde hair and the haunted eyes who Sonic hadn't realised was also psychic. Nobody else was in the ring with them this time, they were down to the quarter-finals, the boy had finally defeated the terrifying armoured bounty hunter while Sonic was still battling the disconcertingly weird two-dimensional shadow-creature who kept beeping shrilly at him while walking forwards in a slow, jerky motion as though time passed differently for him.

Don't jump in the air, remembered Sonic, don't put too much distance between yourself and a psychic. Their preferred power to use in battle was elemental blasts, mostly fire and lightning. Start running, close the distance, smack him before he has time to think. Watch out, he can still swing that baseball bat really hard, he's probably using some kind of telekinesis. Don't look directly into the eyes but if you see them start glowing yellow, run like hell. No, don't fall off that platform, you can jump it if means you don't fall. Watch out for that lightning bolt...

The boy's shriek stopped Sonic inches away from barrelling right into him, hopefully knocking him off the platform. He had fallen to his knees and was clutching his head, his fingers digging into the sides of his temples. He was screaming something almost unintelligible at the top of his voice. Sonic knew enough about psychics to understand that sometimes they went a bit crazy and lost control over their powers, that it left them vulnerable but they became unpredictable, often dangerous, sometimes tried to unleash all their power at once, and that you didn't want to be standing near them when it happened. He wasn't sure whether to take the boy down now while he was distracted or run for it. It occurred to him that this might be serious, beyond the realms of things that were expected to happen in the course of the competition, that the boy's life might be in danger or he might be about to accidentally kill someone for real.

"You okay there?" whispered Sonic. If the kid was in real danger, he had an opportunity to say so; he could clearly still speak. If he wasn't, he would interpret it as a taunt, he would lose his temper like any other kid, then they could get back to the real fight.

The boy's eyes snapped open. He lowered his arms almost robotically and stared straight at Sonic, his mouth opened in a vaguely startled expression as though he, too, had no idea what was happening to him. The eyes were bright yellow, both pupils and irises. Sonic turned to run. The boy put a hand calmly on his shoulder.

"I think it's coming for you," he whispered in an authoritative tone.

"What is?"

"I dunno," he admitted, "It's just there and it's asking after you and I don't like it and I want it to go away."

"Well, ask it what it wants with me and I'll tell it to shove off for you," said Sonic.

The boy leaned closer to the hedgehog and whispered into his ear. He was shaking as much as his voice was, "The stars don't twinkle, the moon doesn't shine. Birds don't sing, the wind doesn't blow... to the pure body, to the perfect existence..."

A chill ran down Modern Sonic's spine.

"Do you at least know where the song came from?" he asked.

"The stars," replied the boy, "I was trying to call them down for a Starstorm but they weren't there... well, they were there, but they weren't in the right place, and there were the wrong number of them, I don't think they were the same stars... and there were these three eyes looking at me..."

"Eyes?"

"There were only two in the sky but I could see a third, and it told me not to say about the third, but I think you were the one who needed to know, because it's... after... you..."

Before Sonic could say anything else, the boy collapsed in his arms. He yelled for the medic. He wasn't sure what would happen in the event that a competitor had to forfeit, he had a vague idea that there were robots of various power levels who could be used as stand-ins, and he wasn't sure he cared. There were about to be better things to worry about.