The world slowly drifted back into existence, a hazy dark void distinguished from unconsciousness only by the whirling sensation in his head.
"Ah, you're back. I was waiting for you to wake up."
Deja vu . . .
Shadow tried to force his eyes open, his breath hitching.
"Wake up, Shadow . . . "
It might have just been the dizziness, but the sickly-sweet purple murmur seemed to be making him queasy. He gave up trying to see his surroundings, still only half-conscious and just wanting the whole world to go away.
"Shaaaaaadoooow . . . "
A jolt of tingling energy shot into him without warning. His eyes flew open as his brain fizzled back into more or less functioning. What had—
"I need you awake," scolded Fio's voice, as another tiny wave of Chaos whispered into Shadow's body. "Just enough to keep you conscious, now."
Shadow licked his dry lips, summoning up enough energy to turn his head. His eyes widened; the ground all around him was littered with rubble, great chunks of concrete and drywall and broken metal. This was . . . this was what was left of G.U.N. headquarters . . .
He sat bolt upright, his heart pounding. Maria and the others! They—
As abruptly as his body had gone stiff with fear, it went weak with relief—they were still all right. The children were huddled under a little cave formed by two mangled support beams and a layer of rubble. Some of them were still clutching books and papers they must have been holding when the building started to come down, the scholarly items pitiful against the surrounding destruction. Meanwhile Vanilla stood before them, arms spread wide, one side of her face nastily bruised, but with an expression of grim fury etched in place of her usual loving smile. Hell itself would have to get past her before it harmed the young ones.
"Of course they're still alive," scoffed Fio, as Shadow involuntarily put out one hand to steady himself. "And you know why."
Shadow turned towards the voice, his eyes blazing, but the words died on his lips. His insides went instantly and dreadfully cold; the harshly chiseled head looming above him was that of the dragon Silver had killed. There was no mistaking it.
"You can't be . . . " whispered Shadow breathlessly. "That form was killed."
"Oh . . . was it?" Fiolet tilted his head as if his memory failed him. "Hmm. My apologies. I begin to lose track."
So, then. Either Tails or the ancient document had speculated wrong. There was no restriction on re-using forms after all. There was no limit to the number of times Fiolet could come back, no way to finish him.
They were doomed.
"Don't go passing out on me again," warned Fiolet, watching the life drain out of Shadow's eyes. "The better you cooperate, the sooner it will be over. I do recall you're immortal, but I can at least make their deaths quick and painless." He jerked his head back to where Vanilla was still guarding the children.
Shadow bit his lip, weighing his options. Everything inside him yearned to get up and tear this monster to pieces, channel his hate into power, somehow overcome the invincible with sheer force of fury—and yet he realized, dully, that it was futile. He could barely bring himself to move; the Chaos energy really was just barely enough to keep him conscious. It was infuriating, excruciating, to want so much and be capable of so little. His limbs felt leaden and out of joint, and hopelessness and exhaustion combined to drag his eyelids down, pleading for him to close his eyes and not watch the world crumbling around him.
But even if there was only one future ahead, there were still several ways to get to it. Setting his teeth, Shadow pushed himself to his feet.
"You take me first."
"You are immortal. I could not 'take' you either way, nor do I intend to give you that satisfaction."
"See if I give a damn what you in—"
Fiolet gave an impatient snort, knocking Shadow backwards again.
"Cooperate," he warned, glaring him down. "Or I'll see to it that your little friends suffer even more on their way out."
Shadow swallowed, a tinge of red creeping along the edges of his vision, his ears starting to register the soft, rapid thumping of blood. Digging his fingers into the crushed concrete beneath him, he began to sit up again.
"I am not bluffing." Fiolet took a step back, his long reptilian tail snaking towards the young ones' shelter. "Stay where you are, or I break one of their necks."
The long tail flicked idly, and the top blew off the mound of rubble. The children barely made it out intact; Vanilla, eyes grim, began trying to get them to a safe distance. Fiolet's tail flicked again, this time slashing along the ground directly in their path.
"You are not going anywhere," he said coldly, sparing a glance over his shoulder.
The red had washed completely over Shadow's vision by now, and the blood was a steady roar in his ears. Fury replaced all else for a moment, even reason; he would have thrown himself forward, probably would have had someone's death on his conscience, if there had not been a distraction.
"Leave her alone!" came a squeal of rage, and a small dark form hurtled to strike at Fiolet's head. The dragon pulled back, startled, and shook its head violently, drawing back its neck to squint at its tiny assailant. Shadow blinked through the flickering haze of crimson, some distant corner of his mind still sane enough to wonder what Bokkun was doing here. The little robot seemed beyond all reason; he threw himself ineffectually against the dragon's leathery hide, flailing his tiny fists furiously.
"One of your friends?" asked Fiolet, raising an eyebrow. Shaking Bokkun off, he flicked him casually to the ground with one clawed forefoot and brought it down. A snapping crunch; even as sparks gushed from beneath Fiolet's claws he was already turning back to Shadow, his head tilted as if to say "next?"
Shadow didn't move. Something new had happened; his eyes had cooled back to a clear, sane gaze, focused on something just behind the dragon. Glancing back, Fiolet gave a low hum of fascination.
The others had arrived. Coming by ones and twos, loping from the distance and dropping from the sky, assembling silently in a ring around the wreckage of G.U.N. HQ, they waited for the moment to attack.
Sonic stepped forward, and Shadow gave him a slight nod, indicating the signal to start was his.
"You have to go through us to get at them." The usually boisterous voice was quiet. "All of us."
"And for what?" Fiolet snorted, blowing a small puff of flame from between his teeth. "You don't have any defenses, no special attacks, no invincibility—you are all exhausted. You can do nothing but throw yourselves at death."
"Then that's what we're gonna do." Sonic spread his hands. "Even if it makes no difference, we at least have to know we tried. We die before the kids do. We fall before the world does."
Fiolet stood silently for a moment, turning his head to gaze at the grim circle around him. Not a sound was made, and yet barely out of the range of hearing, a persistent current was rising: feet found purchase, muscles tightened, breaths slowed and deepened in a steady fluttering out-of-step murmur. Last thoughts whispered back and forth, last glances passed swiftly between resigned eyes. Steadily the tension mounted, until that one breathless moment when time itself seemed to teeter on the brink and the world seemed to wait for the onslought to begin—
Sonic's hand was already rising to give the signal when Fiolet disappeared.
No warning beforehand. He simply tossed back his head and seemed to collapse in on himself. For a moment the perilous silence still hung in the air; then it crashed apart into a torrent of angry cries, shouts of disbelief and confusion.
"Fight me now!" roared Fiolet's voice, cutting through the babble and sweeping icy-cold silence in its wake. "Bring all your powers and your anger and your noble desperation, pit them against what you cannot see!"
The cold shock faded, and a panicked quiver of activity bubbled up after it. Mobians turned in place, ventured forward into the rubble, straining eyes, straining ears, tense and poised for disaster. Nothing, nothing—the voice had come from thin air—
Shadow's head snapped back suddenly. It was the softest of sounds, yet it seemed to pierce straight through to the very center of his brain: the tiny, plaintive whine of wings.
"Look out!" he shouted—but it was already too far gone. Maria was pressed back against a shattered concrete slab, shaking, a tattered book still clutched uselessly in her arms, her eyes already wide with terror and fixed on something just before her. The soft shrill whine of wings grew suddenly deafening.
"First to the innocent," murmured Fiolet, and in that final thousandth of a second that roars upon you just before "too late" Shadow felt everything break around him.
The millisecond whispered by. It was a sheer blind mindless reflex of fear; Maria lashed out with the book she was clutching and slammed it against the concrete.
If hell didn't split open on the spot, it wasn't for lack of trying. The air itself seemed to explode into a monstrous scream of raging agony as a massive column of purple flame thundered upwards into the sky. The scream seemed to keep rising, higher and higher and more and more tortured on into infinity, the fire billowed out into a roiling mass of dancing purple tongues—All was a blur, action without knowledge, stumbling through the searing heat, searching, names being screamed above the continuing overarching scream drowning out all—
—And the wash of heat ended, some blurry euphoric sense of something accomplished, someone was bellowing "Get out of the fire! They're safe! GET OUT OF THE FIRE!", some others were stumbling out of the shimmering curtain of purple, they were all blindly dragging each other away to safety—dear god, it was still screaming, one long unbroken vibrating ear-slicing note—and then they all found themselves flung helter-skelter on a nearby hillside, unable to do any more than gasp for breath.
It seemed like an eternity before the scream finally, finally dwindled away. Even when it did it felt like the echoes would continue till the end of time. The column of purple flame raged on, twisting into the sky higher than the eye could follow, flapping and bending upon itself into ghostly hints of gruesome figures that disappeared as soon as they came.
Slowly they all began to sit up, to breathe normally again. Some were burned, some seemingly in shock, but they were none of them dead. Sonic gazed silently at the dancing pillar of hellfire in the distance.
"What was that?" he asked softly.
Beside him Knuckles shook his head, grim-faced.
"Something different happened," said Amy shakily, looking up from where she had her arms wrapped around Vanilla and Cream simultaneously. "That's not the usual way Fio dies."
"But why?"
They watched the column of flame in silence for a moment. Suddenly Tails' eyes widened, and he dove like a lunatic to snatch up one of the books, which had somehow been dragged by Marine through all previous and only discarded now. Pawing through the pages so fast they tore beneath his fingers, he yanked out a folded sheet of paper and somehow essayed to unfold it. It was a photocopy of the original picture of the ancient document; Tails stared at it for a moment, his hands shaking, his eyes roving rapidly over the lines of text. A light suddenly dawned in his eyes, and abruptly he began to laugh, sounding more than a little unhinged. Excusably so.
"Tails? What is it?" Sonic raised an eyebrow apprehensively, half-fearing the news was insanity-inducingly bad.
"Future passive!" gasped Tails, sitting down and raking his hands across his head. "Future passive! That's why we couldn't figure out how to translate it!"
"What?"
"Fio will be killed by a blameless maiden!"
Silence as this news sank in.
"So . . . it's over." Knuckles sounded as if saying it increased the risk of it not being true.
"It's over!" Tails finally managed to steady himself out, more or less. "It's actually over!"
"Like, for sure?" Even the usually optimistic Sonic didn't dare hope too much. Tails opened his mouth to insist, but Blaze spoke up first.
"The fire's dying."
It was. The top of the column had already sunk within sight, and the flames seemed to be slowing, growing sluggish and heavy. As the Mobians watched, the final tongue of purple twisted upon itself, flickered, and died.
The group seemed to let out a collective breath, waiting for the new reality to take root. Somebody in the back gave a muffled whoop. Several answering cheers bubbled up, timidly at first, but eventually gaining strength until the hillside rang with exhausted but eternally grateful celebration.
Off to one side though, it was quiet. Shadow's fingers tangled through unkempt blond hair as he murmured softly into the top of Maria's head, murmured something he didn't understand himself anymore, wishing he could somehow do something more than just be there for her. She was still trembling—or maybe that was him, maybe it was both of them—and despite her best efforts she was sobbing muffledly into his shoulder. He lost track of how many times he'd told her it was all right, told her Fio had been pure evil and there was no guilt in his death, told her the world would have fallen to its doom if not for her. She knew all that, surely—and yet she still could not stand up to the knowledge that she had killed a sentient creature.
And at that, it was still blood on innocent hands. Victory tasted bittersweet at best.