Speedy's note: Sorry for the wait, guys. Wasn't home to publish this chapter on time. Originally, it was supposed to be much longer, but I decided to make two chapters out of the wall of text it became at the end.
Broken Confidences
Finding the messed-up hangar uncomfortable to stay in and the empty house kind of boring, Sonic strolled back outside shortly after his arrival. The day was sunny and the breeze from the sea not yet too cold to enjoy. He considered taking another little run just to pass the time, but then he opted for a relaxing little nap in the sun in front of the house instead.
Kipped against the treads of the small stairway with closed eyes, enjoying the warm beams of sun on his fur, Sonic was just beginning to doze off when a shadow fell on him.
His green eyes blinked open and he squinted up at the familiar red echidna in front of him. "You're standing in my sun, you know?"
"Is that all you have to say? 'You're standing in my sun'? After everything you did?" There was a deep growl in Knuckles' voice, something tight, terse and downright threatening, but before Sonic had adjusted to it, the echidna's large hands had gripped him hard by the shoulders and jerked him to his feet.
"Hey!", Sonic complained, starting to struggle against the unfortunately quite successful attempt at manhandling him.
"This is not the time for heys," Knuckles growled without letting go of him; instead, he drew the hedgehog so close their noses almost touched. "Just tell me why you did it."
"Did what?" Something about the utter ire in Knuckles' eyes was close to frightening, moreso even because Sonic had never really seen this. Angry Knuckles, yes. But not like this.
"Damn, hedgehog, I saw you! And I know you saw me, too," the echidna fumed. "So stop denying!"
Sonic coughed as he was shaken roughly. "I… have no idea what you're even talking about!" Mentally, he tried to go through the last times he'd seen the red echidna, trying to work out what he could have done back then that would still piss him off now, but he came up blank.
The fact that the Emerald guardian was still holding onto him as if he'd get ready to strangle him didn't improve the thought process either.
Knuckles grimly shook his head. "Maybe I'll have to help your memory out a little then…"
Before Sonic had the chance to try understanding what he meant by that, he was lifted off his feet as if weighing nothing and thrown against the wall of the house a couple meters behind him. His quills instinctively stiffened right before the impact and he slid down the wall relatively unharmed, but with his breath knocked out of him, and still very confused.
Knuckles stood unmoving, watching him slowly crawl back to his feet. Sonic tried in vain to read in the dark amethyst of the eyes focused on him, but there was too much in them to get through. Knuckles' entire stance was hard, as was his face and also his eyes bore the expression. He was infuriated, although Sonic didn't understand what he had done to haved caused it. And yet, there was something underlying in the look of his eyes, something… hurt?
"Man, Knuckles, what -?"
The echidna slowly walked over to him, watching him with sharp, narrowed eyes. "I trusted you, all these years. I saved your life. You saved mine. I gave you my friendship. And you – turned around on me." Knuckles' fists were still clenched at his sides and Sonic noticed a second too late he was in reach.
When the echidna's namesakes smashed into his jaw, the hedgehog was lucky he'd not been hit with the spikes on them, but just plain fist. Still, it felt like the impact of a comet. Sonic was thrown to the side by the blow, colorful stars exploding behind his forehead and washing through the rest of his skull in a dizzying spiral as he crashed against the wall of the water pond next to the house.
Head pounding wildly, Sonic needed a moment until he managed to crawl to all fours. He warily glanced up at Knuckles. The red echidna stood next to him, watching him spit out a bit of blood, but he didn't move from his stand.
And nothing of this made sense. Sonic really would have liked to know why he was getting a beating today. "Whatever you're thinking, you're wrong…"
Knuckles ground his teeth. "At least admit it… Traitor!"
Sonic pulled himself up, using the wall of the pond for support. "Then tell me what you're accusing me of!"
A snort. "You stole the Master Emerald!"
Sonic blinked, taken aback for a little moment. Then annoyance hit. "Of course, it's the shiny stone again. Isn't it always –"
A second later the hedgehog could tell this comment, at this time, had not been exactly wise. He was however so much expecting it by now that he managed to dodge the next uppercut so he didn't score a full hit again but Knuckles' fist just grazed by the side of his skull.
It hurt a lot nonetheless.
Down on the floor the third time in less than a minute, Sonic noticed with another short glance at the echidna he was in so far lucky Knuckles, unlike Shadow for example, didn't seem intent on punching or kicking an opponent while down. A remarkable notion given his temper at the moment….
"Knuckles, try to calm down and we can talk –"
"I don't do 'talk' with alikes of you. It's not my job talking to traitors." The red echidna glared down on him. "Tell me where the Emerald is and I'll come back for the why and for you later."
Sonic again crawled to his feet, wary eyes on Knuckles. This was ridiculous, and he was starting to get pretty ticked off as well. "Listen, Knuckles. I haven't seen your Emerald in months!"
"Liar!" The guardian's spiked fist once more charged at Sonic, but the hedgehog was expecting it by now. Deciding he was more than sick of playing punching bag for Knuckles and his problems, Sonic dived away, felling the echidna with a well-aimed kick into the hollow of the knee as he passed him.
"Okay, fine! You want a fight? I'll give you a fight! It's not the first time I punch your lights out because you got something wrong!" Sonic stood upright, fisting his own hands as he watched Knuckles quickly get back to his feet.
Had he been angry before, now the echidna's violet eyes were blazing. "Good! Trust me, when I'm ready with you you'll not only tell me what you did with the Master Emerald, but be begging for me to finish it!"
"Beginning scan…"
The giant gemstone placed in the center of the laboratory was throwing its green light into the room around it, shifting the color values from the blues that dominated the entire base towards mint. The powerful radiation interfered with the optical sensory, causing spouts of static and flickers that increased in a frequency he had not yet managed to analyze to an intensity where it almost whited out the signal reaching his Next Risk Chip Series 3 Model graphics processor cores.
In spite of the interference, he didn't mind the radiation. Quite the opposite even. The way it bristled against the blue metal tektite of his outer armor was promising. If Unit E-S02 would have been able to put on a crazed grin, he would have adapted it by now. The way things were, he did not, but the red optics remained fixed on the gem in front of him.
The Master Emerald. The Master of the seven Chaos Emeralds. The most powerful object on the planet. He could feel this power, close to overloading his sensory, but it wasn't enough. It was never enough. Would never be.
Unit E-S02 was intent on having even more power to himself. More power, worthy of the mightiest invention his creator Dr. Ivo Robotnik, more commonly known by the name of 'Eggman', had ever created. Created in the image of his greatest foe, put into existence for the sole purpose of defeating him. His creator kept failing at his plans, but E-S02, codename 'Metal Sonic', meant to get ahead of him. He would, once and for all, defeat Sonic. He would prove to the world that he was the real Sonic.
He had been close once. Too close. But even after his humiliating defeat, after having been dumped and almost forgotten before picked up and overhauled by Dr. Robotnik again, Metal Sonic didn't consider a change of plans. He certainly was the best of his creator's robots. Unlike the usual badniks, his AI wasn't based on simple algorithms. The series of robots that left Robotnik's assemblies every day acted based on their programming. It was basically a principle of action and reaction. They did what their routines made them do, and if they encountered something, they reacted to it, according to their priority programming.
Metal Sonic was different. His AI had never been designed to simply react to something with two or three options. He had been given actual intelligence, artificial life and will, and was able to plot his own strategies and plans, adjust his actions. Out of all the robots Dr. Robotnik had created in his life, Metal Sonic was the only one that learned, and therefore the only one that would ever be capable of destroying Sonic.
And he had learned a lot. He'd watched his master through years of recurring failure, up to the point where he'd taken over his position to finally rid the world of his loathsome biological copy. He had not succeeded, but he had not failed, either. Deep down in his systems' subroutines, even after he'd been almost destroyed and reprogrammed to be another obedient robot slave, Metal Sonic's mind remained waiting, with all the data he'd gained over time.
Even as he was working for Robotnik again, he gathered more data, better data. He had improved his hardware until he was fully independent of Robotnik's bases. Without his master's noticing, he'd searched for a base of his own and finally tracked it down underneath the sea near the city of Soleanna, in form of a laboratory abandoned long ago. Forgotten by history and well hidden under the surface of the ocean, but full of advanced technology for his own use.
Now, with his own headquarters and no longer kept from putting his plans into action by idiotic schemes his creator came up with, Metal Sonic was finally able to begin to pursue the next steps of his plan. He had improved his cloaking device, fitted himself with hundreds of nano holograms that allowed him to take on the form of his hated biological counterpart perfectly, down to the structure of skin, fur and quills. Unless someone touched him, nothing indicated the polished metal underneath. This perfection of his disguise would soon come to take on a core role of his scheme.
Of course, it was already coming to use at the current state of his plan. In disguise, he'd been able to obtain the Master Emerald and get his hands on data he would require later and that had been unavailable from his creator's databases. Unfortunately, also the data he had acquired didn't completely enable him to carry out his plans to the full yet.
He would need to initiate the second stage of his plan soon.
"Scan completed," the voice of Aquatic Base's computer system informed him.
Metal Sonic didn't need to move from his stand to immediately download the results to his internal memory. Now there was nothing about the energetic properties of the Master Emerald he didn't know. Out of the three important objectives he'd had for it, one was served now. His final plan wouldn't require the gemstone itself. First of all, it would be bait for his enemies.
And then, the perfect, final trap for his greatest foe.
