Chapter 9

They marched for more than a week after the fight at the farm. The food was running low, but they were assured to be close to their destination.

"I am completely certain." Knuckles said. "Either today or tomorrow you will see boulders dotting the landscape and-"

"Boulders kind of like those?" Someone pointed out.

"Exactly. We stop at the boulders." Knuckles said. The pace of the march picked up, suddenly eager to walk so that they could stop doing so. When they finally reached them, they found a fox boy sitting there, staring at them.

"Hi." Knuckles said. "We're not trying to invade." The fox kept looking at him confusedly. "I'm an echidna." Knuckles said.

"I'd figured that out." The fox said. Knuckles noted that his accent was rather soft for the area. "But I was waiting for you to explain why you've got an army with you if you're 'not trying to invade'." Knuckles was about to reply when Sonic cut him off.

"Can I try? Okay, so…"

"…Tails." The fox identified himself as.

"Tails, would you believe that, through no real fault of our own, a bunch of kids just happened to end up too far on the wrong side of the law, and our only real obvious option was to follow mister charisma here, who decided to give us all guns?"

"Is that a guitar on your back."

"Yeah, but…"

"And that green hedgehog, he plays drums."

"Why…"

"You're the rebels?"

"Like we could have hid it."

"You guys are awesome."

"How would you know?"

"I mean, you were listed as disabling five Enforcers without weapons, so I thought you were just thugs but, you're not."

"Comforting."

"Excuse me," Knuckles interjected. "It's good to know about our wider audience, but we would really appreciate it if you could help assure the townsfolk about the whole not invading them idea."

"They won't listen."

"What about your parents?"

"Look, nobody would. I'm a mutant." To emphasize the point, Tails pulled up his two namesakes from behind him.

"Oh dear." Knuckles said.

"Exactly. So I'd find some other way to convince them." Getting up off the rock, the boy turned around and walked away up North.

"Okay, everyone start packing the weapons. When we're done we'll have lunch." Knuckles said. Everyone listened.

Tails took a draught from his canteen when he reached his home in the Mounds. It was a bit of a walk from the rock to his home, but the solitude was worth it. Even after he had gotten the fence up, it only reminded him constantly of how hated he was. Maybe the women who let him have scraps were nice, but they only did it out of pity. Oh, and the hedgehog woman was always nice, but she was too busy trying to make a living to bother with him. He was pondering what to begin working on when someone came running through the mounds yelling:

"Mobians. Flying robots. Flying robots… shooting Mobians." He stopped when he realized only Tails was there "Oh". He said and turned to run off. Tails stood there a few seconds, before realizing that he should be doing something. Scrambling to open the larger gate, he then went back to a large object, covered in some canvas material he had found in the Mounds. He threw the covering off with a single messy sweep, far enough away to be safe. He plugged in the now-uncovered machine's back-up engine, and pushed the more stable, unfinished one away. Time was of the essence. Climbing into the cockpit, he began the start up process.

"Engine on? Check. Wing coordination? Check. Pilot ready for takeoff?" He put on a pair of goggles and gulped. "no" He turned on the propeller and prayed that he had gotten the sequence for lifting off right. The machine began moving forward, on the straight away he had spent months preparing. He hadn't had much else better to do. He checked the speedometer; He was almost at flight speed. As the needle passed over that point he pulled back the controls and waited for the machine to lift. It jerked up once. Twice. One the third time it finally lifted off the ground completely. And didn't fall. Tails grinned. Of course it worked.

As a fox ran to the village to tell the news he heard a roar behind him. He turned to see a four winged machine fly out of the Mounds, with Tails sticking out of the back. Looney.

The Robotnik watched as his Corvus units darted around the rock formation shooting at the rebels. He hated the thought of having to see them die, but if he could not watch the act then he had no right ordering it. Then one of the Corvus units stopped functioning. There was no reason he could think of; the units had all been charged before they were released, a few kilometers away, and the rebels had appeared to have been unarmed when he attacked. He cycled through video feeds until he saw the impossible: a flying object. The unit projecting the footage was promptly disabled.

Knuckles glanced up as he crawled along the ground. The flying robots were still distracted by the other machine, which had even bigger guns than them. He should have known about the flying robots. They made sense, as rapidly deployed assassins, but obviously they hadn't been considered viable to hunt him. He reached one of the cases and opened it.

"The flight mechanisms would have massive energy requirements, almost too much for those small bodies" He heard someone say. It was Sonia. "And that coupled with a larger computer to handle all the calculations required for the flight, means they would have to…" A radio in the case began to hiss.

"Hey, someone else has one of these." A voice said from it. Knuckles grabbed it and yelled in.

"Tails? Is that you in that thing?"

"Aye. Cool, isn't it."

"Could you do a favor and try aiming once in a while?"

"Hey, this is my first time. Look, I'm spotting this brown thing over the hill, maybe one or two kilometers off by rough triangulation. Anyways, I think it's being used as a nodule to network these robots…"

"Could someone go trash it?" Knuckles yelled.

"I'll go. Two kilos doesn't sound bad." Sonic said as he ran past, grabbing a gun and a cartridge.

"Well yes, theoretically with the proper-"

"Shut up, keep shooting." Knuckles said to the radio.

Tails twisted his plane around one of the robots as it tried to adjust and fire at him. The attempt was too much for the robot's balancing devices and it started to fall from the sky. He saw another come in front of him, and he pushed down the firing stud on the plane's joystick. High caliber bullets spat out from the plane's twin machine guns, and tore the unfortunate device to pieces. Tails smiled to himself. These were the work of a supposed genius?

Sonic crested the hill and saw what had to be the machine they had mentioned. With one last effort he began to make his way down to it. He had put all his effort into the run, and it had exhausted him. But he had to stop the Robotnik's machines before they could kill someone. As he got closer, an out-jut on the brown lump of metal swiveled towards him. He barely ducked before the turret fired. He began running around it as the machine's turrets spat lead at him. I can't do this forever. Wedging his tracer against his elbow, Sonic pointed inward at the machine and fired blindly, trying to keep running. And then the machine's firing stopped. Sonic looked at the brown device. There were only a few patches of holes in it, but he at least had the time to close in. As he got closer to the device, he could make out where the flying robots attached, and where the main computers were. Pointing the tracer up, he used the rest of his ammo clip to make sure it was shut down.

Thud

Sonic turned to look at what had made the noise. One of the flying robots had fallen on the hill and lazily rolled down. He was luckier than he had already thought.

Sonic panted as he made it back to the rocks they had come from.

"That was fast." Knuckles said.

"I like to run." Sonic replied. "Is everyone alright?" Knuckles shook his head. Pointing behind him, he showed Sonic a kid lying dead on the grass.

It was a solemn procession that entered the town. None of the freedom fighters spoke, respecting others' silence, and struggling with the meaning of their first death. They were led by town's folk to the grave yard, and were given the tools to bury their fallen comrade.

Sonic stood apart from the people who had known the dead kid, watching the makeshift funeral, with kids as the audience, kids as the gravediggers, even a kid as the speaker. The town's minister had offered to lead, but the kid's friends insisted that he would have wanted a Masionic funeral. Sonia and Manic were with their brother.

"It's my fault." Sonic said. "I said we should do the concert, that's what led us into this mess. I don't even know who he is." Manic shifted uneasily.

"His name was Sam. A gangster, in case you thought otherwise. Very good kid, very religious; only did what he needed to for his younger brother, never tried to hurt anybody. Let me escape a couple times. Also had good reflexes, not one to get hit. I can tell ya' he died taking that bullet for someone else."

"Sonic, you can't blame yourself." Sonia said. "The Robotnik was probably ready to attack at anytime. He would have done it no matter what we chose. He's the one that's choosing to kill. Not you." Sonic ignored his sister.

"What about you?" He asked Knuckles. "Why aren't you saying something for him?"

"Do you really think they'd let me?" Knuckles said. On the far side of the onlookers, Yona watched Amy stand stone-faced, leaning on her hammer.

"You're taking it well." Yona said.

"There's going to be more." Was Amy's reply. "The fighting won't stop, and we can't do anything about it."

The rest of that day slogged to an end in a blur. Eventually, the freedom fighters forced themselves to retire to the grassy mounds to the village's west.

"What do we tell Tails?" someone asked.

"We tell him he saved our lives. We don't need to burden him too." They all lay wondering what tomorrow would bring.

When Tails had been able to land the plane, he had gone euphoric. It had worked. It all had worked exactly as he planned it to. He had put together machines before, put none of them had worked exactly as he wanted to. Invariably something might go wrong, such as a piece of code repeating itself in his miniature robot, or the color not working on his viewer. It took forever for the wind crank to charge anything, because he couldn't put it high enough, and the energy collecting panel had been broken by a large rock. But the plane, the ridiculously complicated twenty different system do-one-thing-wrong-and-you-die plane, that worked. Exactly as he… Tails sighed. It had been the backup source. Anything worked if it was involved. He could tie two sticks to it and say that it made food, and it probably would. Going to the side of the plane, he took out the back up source and put it on the ground. Picking up his main hope for the plane's power source, he went back to work putting it together.

The Robotnik rubbed his forehead.

"They destroyed them." Draggo said simply.

"Yes, but how? They were unarmed when I attacked."

"Maybe it has something to do with the giant flying thing shooting at them."

"There was no way they could have built that. They didn't have the resources, they didn't have the time, and they couldn't have moved it with them. Someone already in the area must have built it."

"Well that settles it then. The North built it, and you didn't notice."

"Why?" Draggo's eyebrows rose.

"Did you seriously ask why the North, as in the hate-anyone-not-a-fox-God-help-you-if-your-Mobian North, would secretly have a machine to counter your robots, and use it to help out rebels?"

"I was hoping that wouldn't be the answer. Very well then. It seems they will have to play their part in helping the world soon."

Author Note: To make things clear: Mobius and the North are somewhat based of England and Scotland respectively, but not to the point where I look silly talking about things I have no actual clue about. This is because there are hedgehogs and foxes in Great Britain.