The sun was ready to sink beneath the bleeding sky and still no sign of a single chaos emerald. This did not set well with Knuckles, champion of Angel Island. He who never lost the master emerald lost it to a chaos control that Eggman and Sonic caused with their squabble. If it were not for Sonic's recklessness in making the doctor slip up, he would never have failed the island.
He swore his father several years ago to never let the majestic gem fall into the wrong hands. Unwilling to become its protector, his father pushed him into becoming the ultimate guardian.
Not bad many would say? Young Knuckles thought so as well eight thousand years ago as a tiny echidna. But throughout his training, starting from the age of three, he came to know fighting, strategizing against enemies, and specialized guardian moves but was a stranger to fun and games. Abandoned at ten years of age because he finished his training, he had no one to look up to, no one to tell him that he was loved. His training would have begun at the age of ten and ended in his twentieth year had his father not been so strict.
Wanting to make his father proud of him, even though Locke was dead, Knuckles did all in his power to never leave the emerald's side. If he slept, the shrine was his bed. When the need to scavenge for food rose, the bushes next to the shrine were his rations.
The emerald became his companion, a constant reminder of his disappeared father. Never to know the secret behind Locke's vanishing, he had to keep moving along the river of life.
Sensing the amount of wasted hours caused through sitting and lingering in the past, Knuckles stiffened up and resumed his hunt. If it becomes too dark, he must find shelter. Perhaps the hollowed tree he passed would make adequate nighttime quarters.
The darkness was closing in and Knuckles continued to move. He will rest later. So long as energy stayed in his muscles, he will not give up on the return trip home.
Ten more feet away from his initial footing, Knuckles checked every corner of his surroundings. Nothing like an emerald showed up, not even behind the most twisted branches. Maybe if he backtracked he could see if his guardian senses missed anything. He was trained to sense chaos energy after all, even use it if really stuck. It has been so long however. Most of his knowledge on the chaos force was forgotten.
A twig snapped into two separate clean pieces. It was proof that he was not alone in the silent forest. Turning around, dragging his dreadlocks through the air, the tough echidna was prepared for the fight to the bitter death. "Alright, who's there? You had better come on out," each word flowed under his hot breath longing for water.
A response was absent and the echidna did not like it. He barked, "What's the matter? Are you yellow?" A challenging smirk crawled over his face, "If you tell me who you are, I might not hurt you."
A sudden, but expected, increase in the moving branches eventually produced a dark figure. Everything about this stranger was covered with black. It wore a black cape and a dark suite that perfectly fitted around its figure. The figure that he beheld was a woman. What business she had here, he had to find out.