Chapter 5: Vertical Escalation
The city fell silent, entranced by the nuclear explosion tearing through the firmament. GUN soldiers held fire and raised their heads expectantly. The most powerful weapon at the garrison's disposal had to lay waste to the beast, alien to everything they stood for. The improbable would yield to their control.
Tails hoped so, too. It bore little difference from the GUN mechs that tried to kill him, Cream and Cheese – just another threat impossible to reason with.
His heart squeezed when he saw a silhouette appear from within the fireball. The explosion was still alive, pulsing its all-devouring flames outward, but it was not enough to contain the monster.
Cream shook in his embrace. Tears flowed from her sealed eyelids as she hugged him tighter. Her mouth drooped open, giving way to a sound, a voice that was not hers. Tails watched in shock as the unconscious rabbit spoke without moving her lips.
"I saw you. You are blind."
Cheese had seen it happen before. There was no way of waking her from this spell via regular means and the Chao knew he was powerless. He called out to Tails to act.
"Chao!"
Tails only looked at Cheese wide-eyed. He was at his wit's end. At the same time, Cream moved her arms up his sides, slowly, steadily, with innate confidence. The pain that has been trying to splinter his body subsided wherever she touched. Once her hands reached up to his face, he felt the gashes seal, giving him the sensation he has been yearning for since he left the Mystic Ruins – relief. Tails closed his eyes to the soothing sound of her voice.
"No more fighting. No more sadness."
Her fingertips trickled down to his hand, past the edge of his glove. They coaxed him to relax his muscles, a kinder stroke following every ounce of tension escaping him. It felt like a dream, in which she was already whispering sweet nothings into his ear, her moist lips tickling at the rim while her intoxicating breath melted away his inhibitions.
Tails opened his eyes to bask in the image of the angel caressing his worries away. He saw nothing of the sort. Cream was there, saliva dripping from her gaping mouth. In the back of his head, he heard a voice begging him to drift back into the darkness, where he could be happy.
It was wrong. It was fake. This whole time, it was trying to make him let go of the Chaos Emerald. When Tails tensed his grip instead, the entity that possessed Cream returned the gesture by placing her hands on his neck, right where Vanilla did.
"Do you SEE?!" it shrieked from her throat.
The pains she had healed moments ago returned with renewed force; the double scars on his face popped open into fresh wounds, disorienting him further. He gasped for air, unable to comprehend how the little rabbit could exert this much force.
"What are you?" Tails asked, not really expecting a reply. He already had his back pinned against the beetle, one arm desperately trying to make some distance between him and Cream. He didn't have it in him to hurt Cream even if she was just a puppet now.
Whatever had come over her seemed glad by his address.
"I am all of you."
With that, it was done speaking. The squeeze mounted in force and Tails felt like his neck was going to snap before he would suffocate. Still, the minute exchange was the chance he needed to get himself together.
"My emerald friend disagrees!"
He let go of her arms and thrust the Chaos Emerald to her chest. It glowed much brighter than during the encounter with Vanilla. The same could be said about Cream's reaction. She let go of Tails and attempted to block the emerald with both hands.
A flame was born wherever the emerald touched. Actually, it did not touch Cream; the flame stood in the way and the more Tails pressed on, the brighter it became.
Tails was angry it had come to this, but his voice brimmed with sadness as he spoke, "Whoever you think you are, we will fight you and we will beat you. Get out of my friend while you still can."
The skin on her palms cracked from the heat. The flame hissed as moisture dripped on it. Cream's well-being didn't matter to the entity bent on disarming Tails. The fox had no clue on how far he could take his bluff, how much suffering he would allow Cream to go through before cracking himself. In the back of his head, he knew the entity was only toying with him, pulling on his heartstrings to test his reaction.
"I see your fear. I see your LIES."
Cream stopped fighting the emerald and instead focused on Tails' hands. If the Chaos inside the gem refused to bow to the entity's will, Tails' flesh and blood would easily bend. There was no teasing or slow burning this time; the enemy knew where to strike to make the fox cry out.
Arms shaking, he managed to bring the emerald to her chest. The process began, and it quickly became apparent that she didn't have the strength to break his limbs anymore, albeit the entity persisted inside Cream.
"Truth is relative, and so are you. Now, Cheese!"
The Chao jumped on top of Cream's head with the force he reserved for his enemies. The jolt was enough for her torso to hit against the sharp edge of the emerald, leaving a red stain.
Cream's body grew limp in Tails' arms. He didn't have anything to treat the wounds he inflicted on her. The Chaos Emerald only made it worse. Rather than soothe the colour between the cracks in her palms, it widened them. Tails made sure to put it away in his attempts of returning her to consciousness.
The shadow looming above Station Square paid no heed to his plight. A beam of negative energy as deep as a moonless night tore through the fallout enveloping its form to vanquish Tails' hopes of getting out of the city alive. The airport was blown to smithereens, leaving nothing but dust at the bottom of an enormous crater. The entire city felt the tremors. It didn't stand a chance against such power.
Tails set his sights in the direction of the Mystic Ruins. The dust storm had crawled up to the city's outskirts, about to flood the streets and conceal the many hazards roaming them.
Looking below, he saw other survivors, pierced by bullets, writhing under the effects of the acid cloud. Neither threat stopped them. They converged upon the train station as long as they had a limb to carry on.
The beetle Tails, Cream and Cheese were floating on huffed out smoke as it shorted out. The same happened to the other drones in the vicinity, spreading away from the airport and affecting circuitry that was still running.
"EMP," Tails whispered. Cream was beginning to wake up, a sign he took as his cue to get a move on.
His singed tails provided much weaker lift than he had wanted them to. He barely made it to the nearest rooftop. The building was likely to collapse soon, so he needed Cream to compensate for his weakness.
She cried when she saw what had happened to her. It struck a tone she wished to be as far away from as possible. Hand injuries, stains on her dress, she didn't want to be aware of them. The intense physical pain paled in comparison to the emotional shock she experienced.
"Tails…am I-am I really?" she began, transfixed by the harsh change to her delicate rabbit hands.
He ignored her.
She demanded an answer. She wanted him to say anything at all because his silence was the punishment she did not deserve. Cheese took a step back from her friend; she was going to hug him and hurt herself more by accident if he caught her attention in the slightest.
All Tails wanted was to give her a fleeting hope. She was better off not having her suspicions confirmed.
The fox gazed down into the increasingly obscured streets to check on how GUN troops were faring against a relentless force emboldened by the EMP that cleared its path forwards.
Pilots stuck in Big Foot robots in residential areas were mauled by the few survivors crafty enough to avoid the acid. The rest of the GUN garrison had a trick up its sleeve.
"No way."
A dome of crimson light rose up from the train station. Its grid widened to cover several districts, pushing back all hostiles and annihilating any of them too slow to get out of the way. GUN patrols cheered in their walkers at the change in the balance of power, protected from the city's savage denizens, the acid and the EMP. An electric outline of Eggman's smiling face scrolled high on the dome's outer rim. It was mocking the enemy as it towered above those under the dome's protection.
They stopped being discrete about forging alliances, Tails thought.
GUN were the least of his worries. A glowing red sphere big enough to be seen from outer space was bound to attract more attention than the soldiers asked for. The shadow didn't take long to cast its menace on those seeking to challenge its dominance.
Tails approached Cream, sulking on the edge of the roof, and sat down next to her. She leaned her head on his shoulder, timid as ever. The lump in her throat made it difficult to speak, so she let the tears speak for her instead. Tails hugged the miserable rabbit in a way that he felt shouldn't make her wounds worse and found himself looking at the dome. It was a mesmerising sight.
"I am all of you," he whispered to himself. He saw the GUN troops, their misplaced joy and laughter in the middle of a ruined city, surrounded by enemies that wouldn't fall to anything they could throw.
The low-pitched sound of a train horn distracted him from the thought. It was time. The armoured train has arrived.
It ploughed through civilian trains, clearing away anything on its way to the station. A bright red shell lined with hardened black steel, a set of horns on its sides and a pair of menacing eyes facing forward.
The train was so wide it took up tracks going in both directions and even that wasn't enough to accommodate it; the train rammed right through the entrance, widening the gap to suit its shape.
Cream fidgeted on the spot, enticed from her sorrows by the arrival. "Is that an Eggman train?"
"Yes, and our ticket out of here."
"Chao Chao!"
Cream picked up Cheese and twirled, happy to have a beacon to show her the way. "That's right, Cheese! We're going to visit Mr Sonic!"
A brush of her innate optimism was encouraging, but they needed an invitation if they were expecting to board the train. Judging by the commotion under the dome, the soldiers weren't too concerned about the events happening outside despite having an enormous glowing target marker on their collective back. They were preoccupied with loading cargo onto the transport.
GUN must have been sure they were the ones handling the invitations. The shadow thought otherwise.
The dust storm was beginning to edge up to the skyscraper layer of the city. If they wanted to avoid being overwhelmed, the trio had to act quickly.
"Your goggles, Tails," Cream said, about to remove them.
"It's a gift. I'll need you to help me navigate this cloud until we're at the dome. My tails…have seen worse."
She nodded. Her scorched hands were a fitting pair to his namesakes. Albeit it hurt to move her fingers, she held off the tears in anticipation of the reward that would make everything all right again, as she expected from a hero like Sonic.
The shadow fired its beam at the dome. Rather than eat into the force field or shatter it, the attack made it grow brighter, so bright the dust storm had no effect on its glow in the eye of a remote outsider. Before too long, the dome started expanding. The shadow wasn't trying to destroy it; it was giving the sphere more energy, more than GUN had on offer and much more than it could handle. Like the city, the barrier went out of control.
The train station garrison didn't seem to react to it until something off caught Tails' interest. All of the Big Foot pilots exited their cockpits, much to the discontent of some of their peers on the ground. What followed was a scaled preamble to the destruction that reduced Station Square to ruins.
Eggman's shield, like everything else the villain concocted, had a fatal flaw that endangered what little remained of GUN's forces. The energy exhumed by the shadow seeped through the dome's cracks, turning the enclosure into a greenhouse that accelerated the mental deterioration of those stuck inside.
The hand that attempted to shut the dome down fell sooner than its owner could cock their gun. Trying to exit the enclosure was suicide. Staying inside boded an incomparably worse fate.
A few soldiers, seeing the gruesome transformation their comrades were undergoing, elected the first option. They burned the moment they touched the shield, but that didn't stop them from running into it time and time again after being forcefully repelled until they stopped moving, finally consumed by the fire.
Tails didn't have his tools to examine the energies up close, but if the soldiers' sacrifice was anything to come by, the Chaos Emerald in his hand was key.
With the sky freed of gunfire and the lone extreme threat focused on taking down an army, one clever fox and his friends could approach the train station undisturbed. The dust storm made breathing difficult and ever harsher winds risked thrusting them into the force field, but it was a walk in the park compared to what they have already been through.
Cream gave Tails a final boost with Thunder Shoot, propelling him towards the dome, a Chaos Emerald ready to do its job.
Just as he approached the garish power structure, the emerald reacted in its vicinity. Tails aimed the pointy end down and hoped for the best, surprised when he stopped with a clink. Albeit the emerald had lit up like a flare, the dome amplified by the shadow's ray didn't cave.
Tails could barely stop himself without planting face-first into the dome. He poked the emerald against it another time to the same effect; it wouldn't crack.
"Huh? Why?" Tails huffed. Whenever he thought he put a scratch in it, the next time he attacked the dome with the emerald, it was like brand new. A mere touch could crush the resistance of those tainted by the shadow's influence.
He looked up to the sky and couldn't see anything because the dust storm had already swallowed the horizon. Though, he knew the reason of his failure was still there. An entity powerful enough to bring down a metropolis in a matter of hours clearly outmatched the Chaos Emerald in Tails' possession.
Cream and Cheese joined him.
"Do you need any help, Tails?"
He didn't turn around, still tinkering with the emerald. "No, I'm just about-"
"Blind?"
Tails stopped. "What…did you say?"
"Deaf?"
There was an angry snort before he clutched the emerald, about to smash whomever stood behind him. It was just Cream and Cheese. They were both trying to tell him something, pointing fingers and looking agitated about it.
The voice continued, getting more apparent that it didn't belong to Cream with every word. It was coming from the dome. "Hollow! False! Do you SEE?"
When he turned his head to the dome again, it was but a hair away from his face. There was no end to its expansion.
"Look out, Tails!"
"Chao!"
Author's note: Eggman! GUN! Domed!
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