Recursion Error
Episode 14- It's like boot camp but worse
Before today, Sorun had never before in his entire life been woken up by a trumpet.
He didn't recommend it.
It was still what he would consider morning when it happened. One moment he had been sleeping in the spare bed in Sonic's room, and the next moment he was being assault by the awful, blaring sound of a trumpet. He went from being in deep sleep to wide awake in an instant, and came out of his dreams screaming and flailing his limbs around in a confused panic before he and the sheets fell out of the bed.
Panting heavily with his heart beating rapidly in his chest, Sorun had picked himself up onto his knees with the bed sheets hanging off of him as he wildly looked around the room. He stopped right on Sonic, who was standing next to his bed and grinning at him. Sorun's eyes immediately locked onto the trumpet the hedgehog was holding in his hands, and then moved to a clock on the wall next to them. His eyes nearly bugged out of his skull when he saw the time.
"Man, it's six in the morning!" he yelled. "Why're you waking me up at six in the morning with a trumpet!? Where'd you even get a trumpet!?"
"It was in a box of my dad's old stuff," Sonic answered. He looked down at the trumpet, and then sheepishly turned his head towards the room's door. "You don't think that woke my parents up, do you?" he asked.
Sorun affixed the hedgehog with a deadpan expression. "You woke the whole neighborhood up with that thing. You woke all of Knothole up. Elias up in the castle is up and he's marching right over here because of you're being a public menace."
"Hah." Sonic's sheepish look turned nervous. "Wait, you're joking, right?"
"I'll let you figure that one out," Sorun grunted as he climbed back into the bed while pulling the sheets over his head. He'd only managed to close his eyes for five seconds in an attempt at going back to sleep before the trumpet was blasted at him again. "I'm gonna break that thing if you do that one more time!" Sorun threatened as he shot up into a sitting position, the sheets flying all the way to the other side of the room from the motion.
The trumpet was reflexively hidden behind Sonic's back as he took a step away from Sorun. "Hey, come on, this is my dad's," he said. "Don't take it out on my dad's things."
"Ugh..." Groaning tiredly, Sorun rubbed at his eyes before looking back at Sonic. "Dude, what gives?"
"It's training day!"
That held absolutely no meaning for Sorun, who responded with, "What? Nah, it's Wednesday. I think?" He blinked in confusion when he realized he hadn't been keeping track of the date. "Wait, what day is it?"
"It's Thursday," Sonic corrected, "and that means exactly what I meant: training day."
That phrase still didn't register to the teen, who shook his messy head in confusion at Sonic's words. "What is training day supposed to mean?"
"Well, you're a Freedom Fighter now," Sonic began. He placed the trumpet on the ground and hopped into the spare bed so that he was sitting next to Sorun. "But you don't really have any Freedom Fighter skills. You know, uh, coordination, teamwork, some other skills here and there." He lightly punched Sorun's shoulder. "You're not very fit, either."
"Sue me. I never played sports," Sorun grumbled under his breath. Playing video games and watching whatever suited his fancy at the time never left a lot of time for physical exercise. Sometimes even sparing time for food was dropped because of this. Probably the main reason he was underweight now that he thought about it, but he wasn't that bad. By normal humans standards he was below average at worst. And by Mobian standards he could have been an Olympic bodybuilder and he still would have come up short compared to the strength of a normal Mobian.
So, because of that, he didn't really see the point of ever physically training. Apparently Sonic wasn't seeing his point of view.
"Well it's still not good you're not trained," Sonic continued. "Normally we wouldn't let you go on missions right away without a lot of training, but we're... well, we just don't have the time, so you're just gonna have to learn off of practical experience. That being said, I asked around, and everybody's in agreement that we should probably teach you some basic things before going in so you're not... er, not..."
"Completely hopeless?" Sorun finished in a flat voice.
"Hey, no, I wouldn't go that far." Sonic lightly shoved Sorun's shoulder. "So I talked to everybody, and since everybody just happens to not be doing anything today, we all agreed to spend the day, y'know, getting you ready. So training day."
It was a shock and a half for Sorun, who never even dreamed most of the people in the Freedom Fighters would ever devote so much time for his sake. Especially considering he hadn't even formally talked with half of them still. He really did find it baffling how supportive they could be to what could be amounted to a complete stranger.
"I don't know, man. Sounds like a lotta work." Unfortunately for them Sorun wasn't so sure he wanted to take advantage of all that kindness. "You sure it's even gonna help?"
"Sure it will! It's better than nothing, right? And besides, you don't have anything else to be doing today."
He had him there. "Alriiight, fine," Sorun sighed out as he began to run his hands through his hair to stop it from sticking out everywhere. "I'll go to your Freedom Fighter boot camp. But can I get a shower first? It's been a couple days."
"Yeah, okay. I'm gonna go make us some toast for the road, and then we'll get going." By the time Sorun finished giving the hedgehog a nod of understanding, he'd already left the room. Sorun stared after him through the room's half-open door, slowly blinked his eyes a few times, and then settled back on the bed's pillow before falling back asleep shortly after.
Five minutes eventually passed, and the door to Sonic's room quietly squeaked open as the room's owner poked his head in to check on Sorun. He shook his head in disappointment the moment his eyes laid on the sleeping human, and then he walked in, grabbed the instrument off the ground, and held trumpet up to his lips before blowing through it a third time.
Once more, Sorun fell out of the bed into a screaming heap. By the time he whipped his head up to the door Sonic had already ran away.
"That's it!" A Summoned Sword appeared in Sorun's grasp as he ran towards the door. "Get your furry butt over here, I'm cutting that thing!"
Chasing Sonic had been a mistake. It was a foolhardy endeavor to begin with considering he could run circles around Sorun faster than he could think of the word "circles", but he'd been too sleep deprived to properly focus. Thankfully the human did have enough sense to give up chasing him two minutes in before trudging back to the house for that shower while angrily grumbling under his breath, but by then the damage had set in.
That left him here: standing in Freedom HQ, body freshly washed with a new set of clothes identical to his last, but so exhausted that he was practically swinging on his feet. Right now a single piece of toast was all that was keeping him going, but he wasn't so sure how long that would last him.
He just wanted to go back to sleep.
"Alright, so it's great that you all made it!" Sonic, who was standing just in front of him, had clapped his hands loudly enough that Sorun was roused awake for a good second, but already he could feel his eyes begin to close of their own volition again. "So I was thinking-"
Words started to blur away from Sorun's perception. The whole world and all his senses began to fade away, actually, and a small sigh of content left his mouth as he finally went back to sleep. This blissful rest only lasted for a few seconds until something began shaking him awake.
"Hrk- huh!? I'm up, I'm up!" His eyes flew around the room, and then looked to Sonic who was shaking him awake with a wry grin on his face. "I'm up, jeez," Sorun repeated as he slowly swiped Sonic's hand away.
He took that moment to quickly glance around the HQ. True to Sonic's word, all of the Freedom Fighters had chosen to spend their day helping Sorun with his deficiencies. Including Sonic, it was all seventeen of them- eighteen, he reminded himself, because Nicole was likely in her computer somewhere- that he'd seen on the first day of him coming here, and during his introduction speech. Some he knew and recognized at this point, others he'd yet to even speak a word to.
Well, by today that wasn't going to be true anymore. Sonic intended everybody to be spending some time with him to get him up to speed on the resistance side of things. He dreaded seeing what all those introductions he was due for entailed and how all these people would act towards him, but there was no way out of it now.
But, unfortunately, that's as far as Sorun's thoughts carried him before he fell asleep on his feet again. Sonic had been saying something to everybody, but Sorun wasn't even able to register it. He did register it when Sonic once again shook him awake.
"Dude, I said I'm up..." Sorun tiredly mumbled as he weakly slapped Sonic's hand away.
"You sure don't look it," the hedgehog disagreed. "We just went over today's schedule. You did catch all that, right?"
He sure didn't, but Sorun didn't want Sonic to know that for fear of making himself look even more incompetent than he already was. "What do you take me for? 'Course I got all that," he defended.
Sonic's eyes narrowed slightly, though a playful grin had grown on his face. "Repeat one thing I said."
"... One thing I said," Sorun echoed.
The blue hedgehog's response was slap his palm against his own face. "Alright, slight change of plan," he announced. "Sorun, you're with me first. We're gonna go for a little run and do a few laps around Knothole to wake you up before anything else."
"Are you serious?" Sorun groaned as Sonic. "It's workout in of itself just walking to this place, and now you wanna take me back to the city just to run around it?"
"Hey, cardio's important. I would know." Sorun didn't say anything in response, but he did groan some more under his breath as he was practically dragged up the steps by the hedgehog. "Besides," Sonic continued, "it'll get your blood flowing and wake you up."
"If that was true I'd already be up," Sorun complained, but otherwise didn't resist as he was dragged out of the HQ by Sonic.
"Okay, stop! Stop! I need- oh, man, I need a break..."
Well, Sonic hadn't been lying. His brand of training for Sorun had quite literally just been running. He hadn't been lying about running around Knothole, either, because that was all they did once they reached Knothole's outer perimeter. At the very least Sonic had purposely slowed himself down just so he could keep pace with Sorun as he jogged around the city, but the human could tell that doing such a thing was straining to the hedgehog from the antsy look on his face. He supposed that going so slow would be tough on somebody with super speed.
Well, tough. If they were doing this they were going at his pace.
In his defense, Sorun had managed three laps around Knothole City before he collapsed on the ground from exhaustion. That wasn't even factoring in the walk to and from Freedom HQ, so by Sorun's account he was doing pretty well all things considering. But now Sorun was on his back, muscles burning and lungs breathing so hard that they felt like they were going to pop in his chest. Sonic, who was leaning over him, looked no worse for wear.
Sonic was right about one thing, though. He was wide awake now. That wouldn't be the case for long if his heart gave out from all this exercise, but for now he couldn't go to sleep again if he tried.
"You know, uh, Sorun..." The hedgehog raised an eye ridge as he looked down at the human, and said, "Usually this kind of distance is something a child can manage."
"A Mobian child, maybe," Sorun retorted as he sat up. "You even... you even get tired from running?"
"Eh... not really," Sonic answered with a shrug.
"Oh, well good for you," Sorun said with a roll of his eyes. "Why are we doing this again?"
"Told ya. Cardio." Placing his hands on his hips, Sonic stepped closer so that he was right in front of the sitting human. "Gotta get that endurance up so you don't collapse like this right in the middle of a mission."
"Ah-huh." He saw the logic in that, but just knowing that didn't make it any easier on his burning muscles. He huffed out a breath and, with slight struggle, managed to pick himself back up to his feet. "Well, I got tons of other things to do today and my legs feel like they're gonna melt. Think we can call it here so I can move on to my next thing?"
Admittedly it was mostly just him being lazy, but the idea of him maybe conserving some strength for the day ahead did cross the teen's mind. The teenage hedgehog standing right in front of him probably had the same idea from the thoughtful look on his face, and to Sorun's relief, gave a nod.
"Yeah, alright," he said in agreement. "It's around the time Amy wanted to start your mobility training anyways, so let's go."
"Ah, great. Yeah, let's-"
"After one more lap," Sonic said quickly, a mischievous smirk on his face.
"MAN, WHAT!?"
Following behind the two female Mobians as they lead him towards Freedom HQ's little training ground, Sorun decided that, just maybe, he should think really hard about what he wanted to say before he formally introduced himself to the two. They'd exchanged some greetings before they started leading him, of course, but they hadn't actually talked yet. He mostly just wanted to make a good impression so that this training session wouldn't go any worse than what it was likely heading towards.
One was that pink hedgehog he'd took note of way back when. Amy, if he recalled. She seemed like a nice person at first glance, but he didn't have anything else to say about her otherwise.
The other one leading him was another echidna like Knuckles. Had more of a pinkish-purple-y fur color than he did, but what drew his eyes as he walked behind her was the single, artificial dreadlock at the front of her head, more cybernetic bits at the ends of the dreadlocks behind her head, and the cybernetic left arm. Sorun unfortunately didn't recall her name, but somewhere in his memory he did recall it starting with a "J". He figured that maybe asking her about the cybernetics would be a good opening, but after remembering what happened with Bunnie, he decided against it. Then he thought about just asking her name, but he didn't want to seem rude for having never learned it prior.
After swallowing the lump in his throat, he decided to go ahead and try his luck with Amy.
"So, Amy." It was right as the trio were crossing a small, wooden bridge leading over a small river did Sorun walk right next to the pink hedgehog to gain her attention. "I introduced myself in front of everybody, but Sonic and Sally wanted me to at least introduce myself personally to all the Freedom Fighters. So hey."
The way she turned her head towards him with such a surprised expression had Sorun wondering if he really was that bad with people. To his relief it was an expression of pleasant surprise, however, as a small smile shortly formed on her mouth as she looked at him. "O-oh! Um, right. I'm sorry if I looked surprised there, but you never really looked that talkative, you know?"
"I... yeah, I'm working on that," Sorun muttered in a stilted tone. "Anyways, I'm Sorun. You already knew that, but... yeah."
"Oh, okay. Well, Sorun, I'm Amy Rose."
The name was enough to make Sorun do a double take on Amy at how normal-sounding the name was. Compared to all the other names he heard that one had him at a loss. "Wow, really? Jeez, I think I knew somebody named Amy Rose in elementary school. Or, no, wait, was it Anthony?" He looked ahead and scratched the side of his face in thought. "It was A-something. Agh, can't remember." He looked back to Amy. "So, er, I heard from Tails you use a hammer? That right?"
"Mh-hm!" She gave him a bubbly nod. "Wanna see it?"
Sorun quirked an eyebrow, and then looked down at Amy's gloved but empty hands. "See it? But you don't- whoa!"
He wasn't really sure what happened. Amy had simply held her hands out, and in a small puff of smoke, a hammer appeared. An absurdly large hammer colored red and gold with a head that was almost as big as Amy's whole body. A hammer that looked so heavy that Sorun just knew he wouldn't even be able to lift it, and yet Amy was twirling it around like it was a baton.
It just wasn't fair sometimes. Why did he have to be so weak?
"That's neat," Sorun said, mildly dejected at the feat of strength he was seeing as he kept glancing from Amy's arms to his own. "I can kind of do that, too."
A Summoned Sword appeared in his hand right after he said that. It was more to just make him feel better than anything else, but he didn't even get that from the way that Amy was eyeing the sword with so much intrigue.
"Ohh, coool...!" she marveled as her green eyes looked up and down the sword. "You can grab a weapon out of nowhere like I do with my hammer, too!" she cocked her head to the side in confusion. "But how come yours is all... blue and glowy?"
"It's special," Sorun answered. His eyes wandered ahead and he saw the echidna in front of them had glanced back to look at the blue sword Sorun was holding, but she quickly turned her head back forwards when she saw Sorun looking.
Movement on the corner of his eyes drew Sorun's attention back to Amy, who was holding the head of the hammer out to him as they continued walking forwards. "I heard you got a strange power from a Chaos Emerald you and Sonic got, but I didn't think it'd be something like that. It's kind of cool!" she exclaimed. "Nobody else can just grab a weapon out of nowhere like I can. We can totally be weapon buddies!"
"Uh..." The pink hedgehog was acting a lot more jubilant than anybody else he'd met so far. It wasn't even that she was acting this way that was surprising, but that she was acting this way towards him. It left him somewhat surprised, but when he saw her slightly shake the hammer head at him, he decided to go ahead and bump the tip of his Summoned Sword against it. "Yeah, sure. Weapon buddies," he said, and then instantly regretted it when his words caused Amy's eyes to light up in glee.
"Sweet!" The hammer in Amy's hand disappeared in another puff of smoke, and right after she looked up ahead and pointed to the echidna leading them. "Oh, and that's Julie-Su. She-"
"I can introduce myself, you know," she called back to the two. Amy's mouth clamped shut at that, while Sorun passively looked between the two of them. Eventually he just shrugged and continued walking.
Around a single minute of the trio walking passed before he felt something softly jab into his sides. He looked to the right and saw that it was Amy, who was jabbing him with her elbow to gain his attention. She was nodding her head forwards towards the echidna and silently pointing at her.
Sorun, who had no idea what she was trying to say, shook his head at Amy's action. "What?"
"Go introduce yourself," she whispered. "You said you were trying to do that with everybody, right?"
He had indeed said that. Not that he wanted to, but at this juncture it was becoming more work to avoid people than to just talk. "Yeah, I'm goin'," he mumbled in response as he walked up ahead of Amy so he could go to the other Mobian's side.
As he was approaching her, Sorun had noticed that the echidna's pupils had been following him from the corner of her eyes, though she faced forwards again when he slowed to a walk by her side. Being too nervous to ask about the cybernetics he couldn't think of anything else to lead with, so he decided to just go ahead with introductions.
"So I'm-"
"Sorun, yeah, I know," she replied. "And you already know my name. Nice to meet you."
"... Yeah, same." That was more succinct than he was expecting, but he wasn't gonna complain over it. "Nice to meet you, Julie."
Her violet eyes flicked to his direction. "Su."
Sorun turned his head to her. "I seriously gotta say that every- alright." His head faced back forwards when she turned to him with a scowl. "Julie-Su. Understood."
The scowl being directed at him lessened when he said the name properly, and she faced back ahead. Sorun, in response, breathed out a small sigh and turned his head just slightly enough to get a better look at her.
"Kind of a weird name, but whatever. Everything here's weird." He found his eyes looking down towards her body so he could find something for them to talk about. "Man, I'm not seein' anything, though," he thought. "Teal boots, some weird black and teal top... pfft, she's got a utility belt. With a... gun clipped to it... waaaait a minute here..."
That was a gun. He knew guns, and while he didn't recognize the strange, double-barreled pistol that Julie-Su had holstered to her golden belt, he knew for sure that it was a gun. Which he thought were basically taboo to Freedom Fighters based on everything Sally said.
There better have been a good explanation for this.
"Hey, how come you get a gun?" Sorun asked her, his head fully turning to meet her again. She sent him a quizzical look in response, causing him to point down to her belt. "Your gun," he repeated.
"My photon gun?"
"Yeah, how come you get one?" he asked. "When I tried getting a gun Sally told me that they weren't allowed in the Freedom Fighters. So how come you get to have one?"
Julie-Su blinked at him, and then quickly understood his question and nodded at him. "Probably because I'm not officially a Freedom Fighter," she answered, causing Sorun to tilt his head back in confusion. "I'm with Knuckles and his group," she explained, "and it used to be we kept to ourselves and dealt with things up on Angel Island. But then Eggman became a problem for everybody, so he dragged us all down here to help." She glanced down at the gun. "But truth be told, echidna culture differs pretty greatly from the rest of Mobian culture. We're not exactly afraid of guns like everybody else. Some of us, anyways."
"I... see?" He didn't, not really, but he didn't feel all that compelled to ask further.
"So you really want a gun?" she asked him.
Sorun huffed. "Well, I did, but I have Summoned Swords now and those are arguably better than a gun." He rolled his eyes. "I still feel cheated, though." Felt like everybody got to have a gun but him. First the plane, now this? He honestly did feel cheated.
"I'm struggling to see how a sword is better than a gun," Julie-Su said.
"'Cause I can do this." To accentuate his point, a blue sword formed next to him. It pointed towards a nearby tree, and then shot forwards and embedded itself into it faster than a speeding arrow. "They don't really run out, either," he continued as the sword in the tree shattered, "so yeah. Shooting swords."
"They're decent." She looked mildly surprised at the display, and then faced back forwards with a small grin on her face. "Bet I could shoot one of those out of the air."
"You probably could, yeah."
She glanced back at him, and her features turned back to neutral as they continued walking.
The rest of the trip was spent in silence, though thankfully it had only lasted for a few more minutes until they arrived at the training ground. It wasn't much to Sorun's eyes: just a small clearing among all the trees. What did catch his eye, however, was that it was full of posts. Tall, wooden posts that were so numerous that they filled up the entire clearing.
Stepping forwards, Sorun reached a hand out and brushed his finger along one of the posts in the first row of posts filling the clearing. It felt like an ordinary piece of wood to him, which caused him to turn around and give the two Mobians a questioning look.
"So what are we doing here?" he asked. "And what's with all the posts?"
"We're here because we gotta get a sense for how mobile you can be," Julie-Su told him as she stopped right behind Sorun. She bent her knees slightly, breathed out, and then jumped up into the air. Far into the air. So far that she'd sailed over Sorun, done a backflip, and then landed on top of the wooden post Sorun had touched with her arms extended to each side. Smirking down at the gawking human, she continued with, "You gotta be limber enough on the battlefield to dodge anything coming towards you. You're no good to anybody in the hospital."
"It's more than just dodging, too. Just being able to keep yourself on your feet no matter what is a big part of any mission." As Amy said this, she as well performed a backflip onto the wooden post next to Julie-Su. "So get up here and show us what you got."
Well, he hoped they were ready to be disappointed, because he sure as hell didn't have any of that. He couldn't do a cartwheel, let alone a backflip. Or even jump ten feet into the air at that. He wasn't sure he could even balance on one of those posts without falling down.
But training was training. He wasn't so sure this kind of training was physically possible for him the further it went, but that's why they were doing it in the first place: to test his limits and prepare him more for going out on the field. He was just worried they were greatly overestimating those limits of his here.
"You know it's physically impossible for a normal human to jump up there, right?" The post itself was a good ten feet off the ground, but the two females were still staring down at him expectantly. "I'll, uh... find a way, then."
The teen stepped over to another post next to him, and then looked it up and down in thought. Jumping was out of the way. He might be able to jump up far enough to grab the top with his hands, but he wasn't sure he had the strength needed to pull himself up, and even if he did, there was barely enough surface area on top of the post to plant a single foot down, let along enough to support his body as he pulled himself up. So that was out.
"Could I climb it? Just, wrap my limbs around it and inch my way up?" he wondered. "No, not strong enough. Stab swords into it and use them as stairs? Not sure anybody will appreciate me damaging the training equipment. But that does give me an idea."
He narrowed his eyes in focus, and right after a Summoned Sword appeared, facing parallel to the ground and facing the left. Next to that sword and in a position above that sword formed another, this one pointing to the right. More and more swords appeared in this fashion until they formed a ladder leading up past the post.
So he climbed the ladder of Summoned Swords by their hilts. It was an extremely slow and cumbersome process, and there were multiple times he had nearly fallen off onto the ground, but eventually he reached the top and tentatively stuck his foot out to the top of the post. He realized with dread that it really was so small that his one foot barely fit on it, but he managed to successfully balance on it albeit with great difficulty as his sword ladder shattered.
"O-okay- whoo, alright..." Sorun mumbled, his entire body trembling as he struggled to maintain balance. He looked up at Julie-Su and Amy, who were both giving him rather unimpressed looks. "I did good, right?"
The look Julie-Su was giving him didn't make him feel like he did good. "I admire the ingenuity of climbing up," she said, "but that was way too slow."
"Yeah, but good job getting up!" Amy praised.
He knew she wasn't being patronizing, but Sorun still felt his shoulders slump from what Amy said. "Yeah, awesome. So what now?"
"Now we see just how mobile you can be." Right after saying this, Julie-Su backflipped once more and landed upside-down on a post behind her while balancing on a single hand, and then pushed up into the air with the one arm and landed on a single foot on a post behind that one. "I'm not expecting you to be that good immediately, so for now just try getting on another post and we'll go from there."
"Right. Easy." The black-haired human looked at the nearest wooden post behind him and gulped. "No sweat."
He said that, but there actually was a slight amount of sweat running down his face. That post was close enough, but for him it might as well have been miles away for how good his acrobatic skills were.
"Why does everybody here get to move like a professional gymnast but me?" he silently asked himself up. He'd be lying if he said he wasn't envious over the kind of acrobatics Julie-Su and Amy were displaying so casually, but he didn't know how much of that was just Mobian biology and how much of that was just them being trained resistance fighters. Probably both, now that he thought of it.
And here he was lacking both of those things.
"Alright, let's do it." There was a voice in the back of his mind screaming at him not to, but Sorun ignored it and bent the one knee balancing him on the post. "Aaand go," he thought as he jumped to the next post.
There was about a second and a half of time Sorun managed to register as he transitioned from one post to the next. A second and a half where he had focused on his goal and had attempted to stick his foot out to try and land on the post successfully.
He failed immediately when his foot slipped off, causing his face to smack right into the post before he tumbled down onto his back.
"Oh my gosh, Sorun! Are you okay!?"
He wasn't. He barely even managed to hear the panicked cry from Amy as he laid flat on his back staring up at the sky. He felt dazed, and his face burned and stung so much that it was almost numb. He did manage to perceive the pink blob that he assumed was Amy pull him up to his feet, at least. He was glad he was able to do that much.
"Where's the leak, ma'am...?" Sorun slurred as he was helped up into a sitting position.
"Oh no, he's delirious," Amy worriedly mumbled as she gently pulled the human up to his feet. She patted him a few times on the back, and more clarity appeared in Sorun's eyes as he blinked a couple of times and then held a hand to his head. "Are you okay, Sorun?"
"Agh... Sure..." His head was throbbing and his face was still burning, but at the very least there wasn't any blood when he pulled his hand back. And he didn't feel anything broken or out of place. "Alright." He dusted his hands off and walked of out Amy's grasp and to the nearest wood post. "Let's try again."
As the human began climbing another ladder made of Summoned Swords, the two Mobians cast each other worried glances before they focused back on Sorun. "You sure you're good?" Julie-Su asked. "We can take a break if you're not feeling up to it."
"Nah, it's- ohp, it's fine," Sorun breathed out as he nearly lost his balance upon stepping back onto the post. "Just gotta... focus and land on the target," he whispered to himself as he looked straight at the post he intended to jump onto to. "Alright, this time for sure."
He jumped again. On the bright side he hadn't hit his face, but unfortunately he still missed and landed right onto his stomach. Both Amy and Julie-Su winced at the human's misfortune, while Sorun himself loudly moaned in pain as his body slid off the post and fell back onto the ground.
"Alright," he groaned under his breath, "this may take more than a few tries..."
"Hah, what a loser," Rubrum laughed from his position hidden amidst the trees as he watched Sorun continually slam into post after post.
"Okay, Sorun, remember that you're gonna want to be mindful of your center of mass-"
Slam!
"Ooh, that isn't, ah..." Julie-Su sucked in air between her teeth as she tried her best to look away from the human that crumpled onto the ground.
"Guys... guys, listen." Sorun heaved out a long breath as he attempted to stand up, failed, and then sat back down while leaning against the post. "We've been at this for an hour. I think I gotta call it quits for now."
"I... think that's probably for the best," Amy agreed as she jumped off her own post and approached Sorun as soon as she landed on the ground. The echidna near them did the same. "Are you sure you're alright?"
He couldn't manage any words, but Sorun did manage to flash her a thumbs-up. It was more of an affirmation that he was still conscious than him actually being okay, but at the moment it was all he could care to give.
Sorun couldn't blame the two Mobians for at least trying. And they'd tried, too- every time he'd fallen in the past hour one or both of them would give him some hint or pointer and how to do anything he was doing better. Amy had mostly stuck to trying to fix his balance whereas Julie-Su had tried her best to help him actually make a landing.
But none of their advice had stuck for him. He'd tried his best at internalizing it all and implementing it, but after a whole hour of them trying to instruct him he hadn't made any progress whatsoever. And now all he had to show for it was a body riddled in throbbing bruises from smacking into those posts over and over.
"Sorry for wasting your time, you two," Sorun grunted as he slowly rose to his feet. At least the throbbing in his body had gone down enough that he could finally stand up, but now he had to look at two pairs of Mobian eyes staring right at him. "I know you both tried really hard, but I couldn't do it."
The echidna held a hand out to him. "No, Sorun-"
"Yeah, I suck, I know."
"Would you let me finish?" Julie-Su snapped, causing Sorun to shut his mouth and look right at her. "Look, your performance... yeah, it was pretty bad," she admitted, "but at least you're trying. I'd be more upset at you if you gave up after the first few tries."
"'More upset' implying that you're a bit upset?" Sorun asked with a raised eyebrow.
She backed up and shook her hands out in a disagreeing manner. "Hey, that's not what I'm... you're just not very good and it's a bit frustrating to watch." She looked to the side and began rubbing at her bionic arm. "I mean, really. This is basic stuff and I know people that are hopeless that manage to get the hang of this faster than you."
It was right after she said this that Amy jabbed her elbow into the echidna's side. "But," Amy said, "we think it's very admirable that you're putting effort in, and nobody is good at everything, so it's okay if you're not so good in some areas as long as you're better in others." She snapped her head to Julie-Su. "Isn't that right?"
She blinked at the pink hedgehog, and then looked back to Sorun. "Yes, completely," she agreed. "And don't say that we're wasting our time with you. We're training you because we want you to be better so you don't get hurt. We wouldn't be here if this was a waste of time."
It was practically the equivalent of being handed a participation trophy. And Sorun had received one of those in the past, and the feeling he had now was about the same one he had back then. But while he was both irritated at himself and at them for the words they were saying, he at least appreciated the effort they were going through for his sake. The kind words had helped, too. They didn't make him feel any better but they at least took some of his mind off the pain.
"Thanks," Sorun mumbled as he pushed off the wood post. "So Sonic told me that after you guys that somebody named Espio was supposed to look after me next. One of you know where he is?"
Julie-Su gave him a nod. "Yeah, he and a few of the others are a bit deeper in the woods that way. They said they'd be waiting for you around this time." She pointed towards the right side of the clearing, towards a direction that lead into the forest. "Just keep walking that way a bit and you'll find them. They're pretty hard to miss."
"Got it. Thanks." He waved the two girls off, and then began limping towards the forest.
"And don't worry!" he heard Amy call out from behind him. "You'll get the hang of this eventually! It just takes time!"
He didn't have the energy to respond.
On the bright side by now the throbbing pain in his body had turned into a dull ache, so he was able to walk normally about halfway through his trek through the forest. He was still pretty sure the bruises would still be there, but those would heal away in a few days. So it'd be fine as long as the rest of the day didn't require anything too physical.
Hopefully whatever Espio had planned wasn't too physical. Or anybody else later on for that matter.
"Which one was Espio? He was the... yeah, I never bothered," Sorun thought as he ducked under a wood branch. "Damn, but who's actually left that I don't know? There was that purple guy with the horn, those two bees, that bat... oh, that short yellow squirrel guy, too. So it's gotta be one of them, right?" He made a quiet hum. "Don't even know what the name 'Espio' means. Is it the kind of thing that fits on a bee? Nah, not really... but that probably means it is one of them. Unless it isn't." He squinted his eyes when he saw a gathering of figures in the distance past all the trees. "Well, that's them up there. Might as well ask."
Once Sorun made it through the dense brush, he made it to a section of forest where the trees were more spread out to make a more open area. There were four figures there talking among themselves, but he only knew one of them, and that was just because Knuckles had mentioned him one time. The tall crocodile Mobian Knuckles had identified at Vector was hard to miss.
The other three? Sorun didn't have a clue.
Two of them were the bees he remembered seeing. Two Mobians he was relatively sure were bees based on the black and yellow abdomens they had and the small pair of wings they were flying around with. They were short, too. Shorter than he was, which made him feel moderately more confident for once. Then he saw the large, knife-like stingers they had on their abdomens and the confidence dropped back down to zero.
The last one was the purple one with the horn he remembered seeing. Like almost everybody else he was solely going with the shoes-and-gloves combo. There wasn't much else to say about him aside from that yellow horn and the weird, coiled tail he had, and any other thoughts Sorun had were cut off when he looked over in Sorun's direction. The other three followed his gaze to look at Sorun, and all at once all four began making their way towards him.
"Hey there! Wow, what happened to you!?" The first one to make contact with him was one of the bees, this one having a boyish voice. He was flying in circles around Sorun as his amber eyes looked up and down Sorun's bruised body.
"I got beat up by some stationary wood," Sorun answered with a slump of his shoulders. The bee stopped and hovered right in front of his face, and Sorun couldn't help but squint in confusion when he saw the black, helmet-like object he had on his head with a maroon rim. "I can't tell if that's a helmet or just part of his body," he thought. "Maybe it's just a weird shell thing that looks like a helmet. Like the thing Meruem had. God, I miss anime."
"You lost a fight against wood?" Sorun looked from the bee towards the purple Mobian with the yellow horn. He stopped right in front of Sorun and crossed his arms as he regarded Sorun with his own pair of yellow eyes. "How on earth did that happen?"
"They were real tough, man. Came outta nowhere. Whole legion of 'em," Sorun answered as he turned his body to face him. "Real talk though I just failed miserably at gymnastics training."
The purple Mobian chuckled under his breath and lowered his head. "Well, it happens to the best of us. Don't feel too bad about it." He lifted his head up to meet Sorun's eyes. "Pardon my rudeness, but I believe we have yet to make introductions. It's Sorun, correct? My name is Espio."
"Oh, this is Espio. But what actually is he?" Definitely something reptilian considering he was covered in scale-like skin instead of fur. The coiled tail and black spines on his back were big hints, too, and he was fairly certain he'd seen lizards on Earth with horns. But for the life of him he couldn't remember which ones those were, so he decided to guess based on the first lizard that came to mind. "Espio the... Gecko?"
"Chameleon."
"Goddammit."
"Hah! Sorun called you a gecko," the bee Mobian laughed as he pointed at Espio.
Espio closed his eyes as a strained smile replaced the previous, easy smile. "Yes, Charmy, I heard him perfectly." He opened his eyes back to Sorun. "This one is named Charmy," he told him. "The other bee is Saffron."
"Hi!" In response, the bee gave Sorun an energetic wave. The other, more yellow bee, a female one of the same stature as Charmy, gave him a more shy wave.
"Hey." Sorun gave the two bees an unenthusiastic wave of his own and turned towards crocodile. "You're Vector, right?"
"You know it." The voice that came out of the reptile nearly had Sorun reeling. It was way rougher than he had been expecting, and loud enough to the point that he could have sworn the headphones and gold chain hanging off his neck vibrated from the volume. "What's up m'man?"
Sorun looked up at the crocodile. He was a bit taller than Sorun was. He didn't like that. "Nothin', man, nothin'," Sorun answered before turning back to Espio. "So what's in store for me today?"
There was something concerning about the way everybody's expressions had flashed from friendly and playful to almost deadly serious. The sudden change of atmosphere was so jarring, in fact, that Sorun had taken a step backwards from the sheer intensity radiating off of them all. Espio in particular.
"Yes, your training," Espio said as he reached into one of his gloves. He pulled something out that was alarmingly familiar to Sorun- a shuriken. A shuriken made of wood. "A majority of Freedom Fighters enjoy the upfront approach when it comes to enemy combatants. It's a philosophy that even many in the Chaotix share."
"Mainly Knux and Mighty," Vector mumbled under his breath.
Espio, who heard the comment, shot the crocodile a look. "Be that as it may, even they have to admit that there are times where a more stealthy approach is appropriate for the situation. They've experienced it too many times firsthand to deny it. Everybody in the Freedom Fighters has." He turned back to the human. "The point is, sometimes sneaking into the fortress full of killer machines is more advantageous than rushing in head-first. It's an approach I take a personal preference in."
"That's a shuriken," Sorun observed as he watched Espio twirl the object in his fingers. "What, you're a ninja or something?"
"It's a training shuriken," Espio corrected. "And yes, I am."
Oh. Sorun didn't have a single comeback for that except for raising his eyebrows in surprise.
"We've been made aware that your status as a human makes you more physically... limited compared to a normal Mobian," Espio continued. "There's no shame in that, but it does mean that taking the stealthy approach to operations will be extra important to somebody like you. And it's a basic skill everybody in the Freedom Fighters possesses, anyways, so all the more reason for you to learn."
"So sneaking?" Sorun summarized. "You're gonna teach me to sneak?"
"Essentially," Espio said with a nod. "We tossed around a few ideas how to go about it, but at the end we decided with..." He stopped, and then took a deep breath. "We decided to go with-"
"Hide and seek!" Charmy exclaimed as he flew between the two. "We all got to put our ideas in a hat and mine got drawn!"
Sorun blinked at the bee, and then he turned his gaze down towards Espio with a flat expression. Espio decided to look away from Sorun's glare while coughing into his gloved fist.
"It suited our purposes well enough and nobody raised any objections," he defended in a low voice. "I would have you know that my idea was much less childish."
There was a loud scoff from Vector. "Yours wasn't any better at all! You wanted to play capture the flag."
"You be quiet." He pointed at the crocodile to make him quiet, and then turned his attention back to Sorun. "So yes. Essentially we're tasking you to hide somewhere. We'll find you and, depending on how long it takes us to find you, will instruct you on how to hide better the next time around. We'll do this for the next hour."
Seemed simple enough. Hide from the Mobians. At least he wasn't getting smacked by poles this time. "Alright. Sounds easy enough. So just hide anywhere?"
"Anywhere is fine," Espio nodded. "Just don't go too far away. We'll say within two-hundred or so feet."
"Okay. What if you don't find me?"
At that, Espio smirked. "We'll find you." For whatever reason, he began to shimmer and slowly fade away. "But please try not to make it too easy for us."
And then, he disappeared. Completely. Sorun was left with his mouth hanging open wondering what just happened before he opened his mouth in clarity.
"Ohhh, because he's a chameleon and they can change colors..." he slowly mumbled. "Wow, okay, so just straight invisibility." He turned to Vector. "So can all chameleon Mobians do that?"
"As far as I know, yeah," he said with a shrug. "You're on the clock, y'know."
Sorun didn't even widen his eyes before he set off running.
"Alright. They'll never find me here."
After a bit of searching, Sorun had found a hollow log nestled between a couple of fallen trees. Just big enough for him to fit in but also hidden well enough from the other trees that the opening to the inside of the log wasn't so obvious.
So obviously he'd chosen to hide inside of the log. A content sigh whistled out from his mouth as he sat back in his spot to stare up at the canopy of leaves right above him with his hands interlocked behind his head for cushioning.
Any peace he had was interrupted when a wooden shuriken flew in from nowhere and embedded itself into the wood next to his head.
Sorun yelled out in panic, and then shot right up into a sitting position with his torso leaving the log. Immediately after a saw a shape shimmer next to him, and soon enough Espio's body was revealed to be standing on one of the fallen trees next to him. His arms were crossed and he was giving the startled human a stern look.
"Try not to choose obvious places like that when hiding from an adversary," he advised the human. "Go find somewhere else and try again."
Sighing, Sorun gave the chameleon a nod and began climbing out from the log. "Yeah, yeah..."
"Leaf man. I'll be leaf man this time."
Sorun had always been one for ghillie suits, because the idea of hiding in plain sight using a suit camouflaged to look like the surrounding nature always seemed cool in his eyes. Unfortunately he didn't have a ghillie suit on hand to use in this situation, but he did have a ton of dead branches and leaves on standby all around him.
He didn't have anything to apply much camouflage to himself, either, so he stuck as many dead branches with leave in any crevices in his clothes he could find and then crouched down in a bush full of similar leaves. It wasn't long until after he'd hidden in the bushes before he heard a small buzzing sound. Sure enough, Charmy had flown into view and was hovering right over the spot Sorun had been standing before entering the bushes.
"Hm... HM... HMM..." The human found the exaggerated hums being made by the bee strange, but he began to feel excitement well up in him despite the breath he was holding when Charmy looked in all directions, including having directly stared at his bush, before shrugging and flying off.
Slowing exhaling, Sorun allowed himself a small smile of victory in successfully hiding from Charmy. This was cut short when he felt the bush he was hiding in rustle, and he found himself looking towards the source of the rustling before stopping dead at a pair of yellow eyes staring at him through the leaves.
"Boo!"
Sorun yelled out in surprise and tumbled out of the bush, his camouflage falling off him in the process. It wasn't long after that Charmy rose out of the bush, holding his hands to his stomach and laughing at Sorun's expense as the human scowled up at him.
"Ha ha ha! Nice try, Sorun, but you made way too much noise doing that," he told him. "You gotta be quieter."
"Mh-hm, yeah," Sorun grumbled as he rose up to his feet. "Thanks for the advice."
This time he'd found a giant pile of dead leaves. A pile that, upon looking closer, Sorun realized that he could easily fit inside of. So he'd dug a small hole out of the pile with his hands- going extra carefully as to not make too much noise- and slowly crawled inside. There was still an uncomfortable amount of crinkling from the leaves he was trampling, but eventually he'd managed to fully insert himself inside the pile.
A few minutes passed, and Sorun heard footsteps slowly approach him. He couldn't see anything in the darkness of the pile, but Sorun felt his muscles tense up and heard his heart beating in his chest as he heard the footsteps stop right in front of the pile he was hiding in. His heart soon feel when all the leaves were scattered away with a quick kick, revealing that it was Espio who had found his spot.
"You left the hole you used to enter open," he told him. "Don't leave evidence of your presence next time."
Sorun's face fell into the leaves. "'Kay..."
"Okay, let's try the bush tactic again."
After some searching he'd found some more bushes. Thick, numerous bushes all bunched together all nice-like. So thick that he wouldn't even need camouflage this time as long as he hid himself well enough.
And he needed to hide himself well enough soon, because he saw Vector coming his way. The crocodile hadn't noticed him yet, but he was walking rather fast and Sorun didn't have time to find another hiding spot.
So he'd entered the bushes, going slowly as to not make too much rustling to give himself away. It was right after he finally settled in his spot that Vector appeared in his vision, stopping right in front of the bushes. He crossed his arms, looked around the area, and then settled to looking down at the spot Sorun was hiding in much to his alarm.
"Those bushes are poisonous, you know," he called out.
"AH!" Panicked, Sorun jumped right out of the bushes and began to frantically claw the leaves off of his body. He continued to do so until he heard laughter coming from the crocodile, causing Sorun to pause and slowly look towards Vector. "What!?" he yelled.
"I-I was just kidding around!" Vector laughed, pointing at Sorun with one hand while the other held his head. The human's jaw dropped in response. "I didn't actually know if you were in there! I've been making up all kinds of stuff all over the hiding spots everywhere! I didn't know you'd actually fall for it!" He sighed, and then wiped an imaginary tear away from his yellow eyes. "Seriously, though, that wasn't half-bad. Just, uh, don't fall for something like that next time around."
Fuming, Sorun gave Vector a stiff nod and stomped away from him. "I'll keep that in mind," he grumbled out through grit teeth.
He hadn't even gotten two minutes into the next round before a wooden shuriken flew into the tree next to his head. Sorun sighed, and then turned to the direction the shuriken was thrown as Espio's form materialized to reveal the chameleon clinging to the surface of a nearby tree with his limbs.
"Lower your form," he instructed the teen. "You make less noise and you won't be as noticeable."
"Yeah, but that's really rough on my knees," Sorun complained.
"Rougher than being discovered by a Badnik?"
Sorun mumbled under his breath, but otherwise didn't disagree as he watched Espio disappear once again.
"Er, uh... Sorun?"
Sighing, the human turned around from his position hidden behind the large tree he was hiding against. He didn't even react when he saw Saffron floating in the air right behind him.
"I know, I know. Too out in the open," Sorun said out as he walked past the yellow bee.
The teen about had it right there after yet another wood shuriken flew into the ground between his feet.
"Oh, come on!" Sorun exclaimed as Espio appeared standing right in front of him. "What'd I do wrong that time!?"
"Your footprints," Espio said, and then pointed behind Sorun. The teen looked behind him and then noticed the small path he'd unintentionally made when he'd trudged through a large patch of dead leaves. Face abashed, he turned back to Espio.
"Alright, I'll give you that one."
Finally, and much to Sorun's relief, they decided to call the stealth training to an end. The group of five had reconvened near where they'd originally met up, and the four Mobians decided to all turn towards the sole human of the group to give him their critique. Critique that he was sure would be very harsh and not too full of praise.
He'd never been chewed out by a bumblebee before. At the very least it would be an interesting experience.
"Well, that was kinda fun!" Charmy began, his body hovering up and down in the air as he looked to Sorun. "And you weren't too bad, Sorun! You know, near the end. All that much."
"What he's trying to say is that you have a... semi-solid grasp of the fundamentals," Espio said, shooting Charmy a glare. The bee gave him a nervous smile and floated near to Vector, causing Espio to shake his head and look back to Sorun. "You're not great. Or good by any definition of the word. I don't mean to sound demeaning in any way but I'm being perfectly honest calling you decent seems a stretch-"
"Oh, what would you know?" Vector asked with a roll of his eyes. "I don't think Mr. I'm-a-ninja-that-can-turn-invisible can judge anybody on being sneaky. What would you know, anyways?"
Espio crossed his arms in a huff. "I'd know plenty," he muttered under his breath, looking down at his shoes.
"Anyways, Sorun, don't listen to them. Ya did fine," Vector assured the human while giving him a thumbs-up. "I mean, yeah, sure, you coulda done better. Like, way better. But for your first time not so bad."
The teen exhaled. "Boy, that sure means a lot, Vector," Sorun muttered out with eyes narrowed at the crocodile. "Thanks a ton."
"No problem, pal." Whether sarcasm was lost on the crocodile or not, Sorun couldn't tell, though he suspected it was the latter given that Vector had the cheek to go and wink at him after saying that. Sorun merely scoffed while shoving his hands into his pockets.
Okay, so being a stealthy person was a million times more hard than all the movies and video games made it out to seem. He thought maybe he'd at least be decent considering he'd managed to sneak up on that Egg Pawn the one time, but living beings were evidently much harder to sneak around than robots.
It wasn't a complete failure like the mobility training, at least. It wasn't a success either since Sorun had been caught every single time and never even made it past ten minutes once he actually began hiding, but it wasn't an absolute failure. And these people were nice enough. In their own ways. Once one looked past all of their idiosyncrasies. And they'd still volunteered all this time to help him, so he felt just the tiniest bit obligated to thank them.
"Well, thanks for the help with this, you guys. Even if I am mediocre," Sorun said as he rubbed the back of his neck. "Sorry if I didn't really live up to your expectations."
"You weren't that terrible," Saffron informed him, who had chosen to float next to Charmy. "I'm sure with a little bit of practice you could be even better."
"She's not wrong," Espio said. "We need to end it here for now, but perhaps later we could work on some other things. You're not completely hopeless." He paused, and then gave Sorun a small, sincere smile. "But don't let what I said make you lose heart. You're doing fine."
"Uh... right." Sorun waved at the group of four, and then turned around to leave. "I gotta head to the next training thing, but I'll catch you guys later. I guess."
He turned around too quickly to catch all the farewells they had given them, but he heard enough to get the message. All in all, so far it could have all been worse. Could have been a million times better, too, with him actually doing well, but at least it wasn't nothing. And everybody being supportive was probably one of the only reasons he hadn't outright given up yet. But they were nice people, those Chaotix.
Sorun tried not to think too hard about the fact that he was going to abandon them all to Eggman at the end of all this.
Sitting back on the kitchen table's chair, Sorun shot Sally with an incredulous look. "Tactics? I dunno, man, tactics ain't really my thing," he admitted. "Is it really that important?"
Sally, who stood at the other end of the table, placed her hands on her hips and gave Sorun a displeased look. "Yes, Sorun, believe it or not having a plan before jumping into the fray and knowing how to react to a variety of situations can be a life saver out in the field."
He saw where she was coming from, but he wasn't too thrilled about the idea. Thinking tactically had never been his thing. Never had the mind for it. He stayed away from all those Xcom games for a reason- he just plain wasn't good at strategy, real-time or turned based. But he supposed that in real life maybe having such a skill set was at least a little important.
Didn't stop him from not wanting to learn it.
"Don't people usually just let you handle the tactical side of things, though?" Sorun asked.
"More than I'd like, yeah," Sally mumbled under her breath. "But," she continued in her normal voice, "I'd like you to at least try, so we'll go through a bunch of scenarios that are likely to happen and you tell me how you'd best deal with it."
Sorun groaned, but otherwise gave the chipmunk a nod. "Fine. Hit me."
"Alright, we'll start off easy. Just you in front of a Badnik, and the Badnik is heading right towards you with the intent to kill. What do you do?"
"I stab the robot with a Summoned Sword," Sorun answered.
"Okay." Sally nodded. "Now what if it doesn't stop?"
"I stab it with a lot of Summoned Swords." Wasn't even a question. Sword didn't work? Use more swords. Easy math.
"Sure, that works. Now let's try a different Badnik, this one with a shield. What do you do?"
"I stab it with a Summoned Sword."
Sally paused, and then gave Sorun a questioning look. "Sorun, uh... for the sake of practice let's pretend the shield blocks your swords," she tried. "What do you do then?"
Sorun rubbed his chin in thought. "Stab it with a Summoned Sword... but, like, really hard."
He got the feeling that wasn't the answer she wanted to hear when he heard Sally slap her palm against her face. "No, Sorun, that isn't-" She stopped herself and took a deep breath. "The shield is impervious to damage. No amount of stabbing will hurt it. So what do you do in response?" When Sorun gave her a blank look, she tried giving him a hint. "Try to find a different angle to your problem," she said in a helpful tone. "There's more than one ways to deal with a problem usually."
"A different ang- ohh, I get it," Sorun realized as he tilted his head back. "'Cause swords can stab at different angles, yeah. I get it. So I stab it with a Summoned Sword but differently." Simple. Why hadn't he thought of that earlier?
"That's..." A forced smile found itself on Sally's face, and she gave the human a congratulating nod. "Yes, we'll go with that. Moving on..."
"A lot of the time we encounter a lot of locked doors since, you know, we're breaking into Eggman's places all the time," Rotor said as he used a pair of pliers to move around a bundle of wires set on the lab's table. "The doors are usually electronic, but more often than not they run on a closed-circuit system that can be bypassed. The hardest part is usually just getting the panel for the door control off, but after than it's just a matter of rewiring some things here and there to close the circuit off and trick the door into opening. You get that so far?"
Scowling down at the pretend door circuit Rotor had made for him, Sorun, who was sitting next to Rotor at one of the tables in the HQ's lab, murmured something unintelligible under his breath as he moved around a wire with his own pliers. "Mm-hm, yeah." There was a small zap and the human cursed under his breath as he shook his hand.
"Great, so," Rotor continued, "you gotta be careful not to cut the power supply, because otherwise that door isn't gonna open. That said, that's not always the case: if it's something like a magnetically-locked door you either need to get to some kind of control center to open it the right way, or you really do need to cut the power to knock the magnets out. Usually you can just pry open doors like that easy enough, but like I said, that's just for magnetically-locked doors. Eight times out of ten it's the kind of door that won't open without power, so you need to bypass it. Without cutting power. Because then it won't open. Unless you're somebody like Sonic, in which cause you can just go through the door. But you're not. So you need to bypass it."
"Yeah, so... the blue wire goes to the red wire... red wire goes to the... purple... wire..."
The walrus raised his eyes ridges and looked over to Sorun. "Uh, Sorun? There is no purple wire."
"Really?" There was another zap from the circuit as it shocked Sorun again, and the human rose bleary eyes up to meet Rotor's gaze. "You sure, 'cause they all... they're all kinda lookin' purple, man..."
"How many times has that thing shocked you?"
"Ah, you know... cou-... couple..." Sorun slurred. "I can't feel anything, Rotor."
Zap!
And just like that, Sorun fell out of his chair and onto the lab's floor. Rotor stared after the fallen human, sighed, and tiredly rubbed at his face.
"This seems a bit out of my league," Sorun grunted as he lifted the weighted bar above his head. "You guys know humans aren't as strong as Mobians, right?"
It was the main reason he'd wanted to avoid strength training. It was virtually useless since everything in the world was stronger than him by default. That and he was frankly too lazy to go through the endeavor if it had such little gain in the long run. But Knuckles and Mighty hadn't seen it like that, so they'd practically forced him onto a bench press they had in the training area near the woods and started making him lift a barbell.
He was only three lifts in and he already started to feel his arms give out. And there were only five-pound weights on each end of the bar. In his defense the bar itself was heavy.
"Sounds like excuses to me, Sorun," Knuckles said while rooting around in a box of weights.
"Biology isn't a good excuse?" Sorun breathed out as he lifted the bar. "Y-you can't be serious."
He heard a loud scoff from Mighty, who was standing right behind Sorun's head and acting as a spotter. "You know, you might actually see results if you bothered to drink that protein shake I made for you."
"That thing wasn't fit for human consumption," Sorun gasped out as he lifted the bar again. He looked to the side, and then visible blanched when he saw Knuckles approaching with a large, twenty-pound weight. "Hey-hey-hey, wait, what're you thinking!?"
"Oh, come on. You're not gonna get anywhere by lifting these little things," Knuckles claimed as he began slotting the weight into the bar Sorun was holding. "Relax, you're gonna get results way faster with this one."
"Knuckles, wait-!"
Sorun's warning came out too late, as the moment Knuckles slotted the weight in the barbell fell right down onto the teens neck. With his airway constricted, the he began making loud, choking noises as his feet wildly kicked up and down the table. The Mobians were quick to lift the barbell off of Sorun, who sat gasping for breath the second the bar was lifted off of him.
"So..." Mighty hedged as he awkwardly kicked at his feet, "are me moving to the dumbbells now, or...?"
Sorun fainted on the bench press before he could formulate a sarcastic remark.
Tails was watching Sorun with a critical glare. Sorun, sitting on the pilot's seat of the Tornado, was carefully looking over the controls of the plane with an intense look of focus. Finally, he took a deep breath and looked up to the fox leaning over the plane's windshield.
"... Raw."
"It's yaw!" Tails screamed out in frustration while grabbing at his ears.
"Is this really the best way to be utilizing your time at the moment, Sorun?"
The words reached Sorun's ears, and after a few moments he paused the game, set the controller down, and looked to the holographic lynx sitting on the couch next to him. "Look, I needed a break, okay?" he said.
Nicole set down her own controller and frowned. "I believe I was supposed to be instructing you in something to broaden your skills as a Freedom Fighter."
"Hey, you didn't say anything when I came up to you and asked if you just wanted to play video games instead." When the lynx continued to frown at Sorun, he sighed, unpaused the game, and pressed a button to cause a sprite on the screen to explode. "Oh no, Nicole, your K/D ratio."
Immediately Nicole scrambled to pick her controller back up and began playing the game again. Sorun chuckled under his breath and turned back towards the screen as he began using his own controller.
Tracing the ring drawn in the ground around them in tape with his eyes, Sorun regarded the cybernetic rabbit standing across from him with an unsure expression. "Yeah, I'm not really sure hand-to-hand training's a real good fit for me," he said. "I can't really damage a robot with my bare fists. It just doesn't seem that useful."
"Sho' it's useful," Bunnie argued with a shake of her head. "What's gonna happen if ya'll ever find yerself fightin' somethin' that's not a robot, huh? Like another Mobian? Then you'll be glad I taught ya this."
"Ah, then I'll still get torn limb from limb. 'Cause I'm human." He snapped his fingers and manifested a Summon Sword that floated at his side. "And I got these things, so I don't really see the point. It's not like they run out."
"Look, ya never know when this'll become useful later on, alright?" She rose her robotic arm and made a "come hither" gesture with her finger. "Now come ovah here and try hittin' me."
With a roll of his eyes, Sorun shattered the sword and walked over towards Bunnie. "Sure, but I still have a lot of objections towards this."
When Sorun had finally walked within an arm's length of Bunnie, he attempted to hit her with his right fist. It wasn't a particularly good punch, even by his standards. He'd put practically no power behind it and barely had the willpower to even raise it to begin with. He was still shocked when, in a flash of movement, the rabbit dodged to the side and grabbed his arm, and then did something that ended up with Sorun slamming onto his back on the ground. He wasn't sure what that something was, because it had happened so fast it had all been a blur to his eyes.
"Okay, lesson... one..." Bunnie trailed off and then dropped the arm she was still holding after she looked down at Sorun's dazed face. "Uh, you alright?"
"Relatively speaking, yeah..." Sorun said with a cough. He pushed his arms on the ground to lift his body up, and then looked up at Bunnie. "What even was that?"
"Ah, uh... ah I jus' threw ya. It's a standard takedown move."
Sorun nodded in vague understanding, and then closed his eyes and flopped back onto the ground. "'Kay, gimme, like, twenty minutes here before we start again."
It was safe to say that learning CQC from a cybernetic rabbit that threw him faster than he could comprehend was a fool's errand from the get-go, because by the end of the training session he wasn't even seeing straight. But at least Bunnie had been nice enough to lead him back to the HQ and promised him she'd go slower next time.
He wasn't really sure he wanted there to be a next time.
Crick!
"Mulligan," Sorun muttered.
Crick!
"Still warming up."
Crick!
"That one was defective."
Crick!
"I'll take that one."
"I only have so many spare lockpicks, you know."
Sorun paused in his actions, and looked up from the lock he was staring at to the white bat that was sitting on the desk next to him. He didn't have much to say about her. All he learned was that her name was Rouge, and that was as far as that introduction got before she lead him into her room, gave him a set of lockpicks, and gave him some basic instructions before sitting him down at a desk to watch him unlock a lock she had on said desk for him.
She dressed weird, though. Of all the observations he had about the bat, that was probably the only one he had concerning Rouge. She had these weird high boots and pants and this weird pink and white top that only covered her front. He didn't understand how a piece of clothing could make somebody covered it fur look revealing, but it did the job of both doing that and giving Sorun a headache thinking about it. So he tried to keep his mind off it and went back to trying to pick the lock.
The lockpick he was using promptly snapped with a crick! noise, and he grumbled under his breath as he tossed the broken pick into the growing pile at his side.
"What exactly are you trying to do there?" Rouge asked. "I've never seen somebody break so many picks trying to pick a lock. And that was the simplest lock I could find, too."
Sorun slowly exhaled, and then inserted a new lockpick. "I'm trying to find the sweet spot with the lockpick and then unlock the lock with the torque wrench," he muttered. That's how it always worked in video games, and he'd broken about a million picks in those situations, too.
He really hated lockpicking.
"... What sweet spot?" Rouge asked. "It's a lock. You're supposed to lift all the tumblers into the unlock position and then use the torque wrench."
"..." That did make a ton more sense when she put it like that. "Right," Sorun muttered, and then carefully position the lockpick deeper inside the lock. "So when am I ever gonna use this again?"
Rouge rolled her eyes. "In case you ever need to open something that isn't electronically locked."
Ask a dumb question... "Ahhh, of course. And where'd you learn to do this?" he absentmindedly asked the bat as he worked the pick.
"Around. You pick up a lot of handy things in my line of work."
Sorun hummed in response. It was a somewhat vague answer, but his focus was mainly on trying not to break another lockpick before he finally managed to open the lock.
His eyes widened when he heard a series of short clicks, and when he turned the small wrench he had in the lock it twisted all the way, causing the small latch locked on top of the lock to fall away. That really was easier than finding a nonexistent sweet spot.
"Hey, I did it," Sorun announced as he removed the tools from the lock and stood up. Rouge slid off of the desk, leaned over the lock, and then gave a hum of approval while giving the human a nod.
"Hey, yeah, look at that," she said in an approving voice. "You went through five lockpicks in the process, but I'll let that slide since it's your fist time. I'll give ya a solid D."
As far as he was concerned, that was a passing grade. He'd take it. "Good enough for me. Thanks for the help."
She nodded. "Sure. Come back some other time if you want and I'll get you a lock a that isn't beginner-level." A beat passed. "But good job learning how to pick a lock. The basics of it, at least."
"Er-"
"The door's over there," she said while nodding to the door in her room.
Sorun looked to the door, back to Rouge who was looking at him with en even expression, and then the teen began to move towards the door. "Yeah. Thanks."
He left the bat's room feeling more awkward than he had entering it in the first place.
"Explosives? Seriously? You want me of all people near explosives?"
"Ah, you need not worry, Sorun. Eet is not like you are the one making ze explosifs. You are just arming zem."
Sorun's incredulous eyes flicked towards the coyote, and then flicked back to the bomb set up on the table. He'd once again been taken to a large clearing near the woods, this one full of wood panelings and tables, where Antoine had showed him what he planned on teaching the human. In this case, arming explosives.
He couldn't even believe they were letting him touch a bomb, let alone mess with one.
"Also, eet iz just a paint bomb. Not so deadly at all."
Ah, that was why.
"Okay..." Sorun stepped closer to the table so he could look at the actual bomb. It looked about what one would expect a bomb to look like: Some tubes of paint connected to one plastic brick connected to another plastic brick via a bunch of wires that were all connected via even more wires to a small, digital clock taped to the front of it all. "So we're just going over arming, right?" he questioned. "No cutting any wires or disarming or anything like that?"
"Non, we will be disarming right after ze arming." Antoine turned around and walked towards a table that held a small toolbox. "Just let me grab something before we are getting started."
"Ah-huh." While Antoine's back was turned, Sorun leaned in closer to the bomb to examine it further. "It looks simple enough," he whispered. He saw a series of three switches next to the clock's digital display, and absentmindedly flicked the topmost one in the other direction.
This was a massive mistake, as the digital display lit up to life and displayed a countdown timer going down from thirty minutes.
"Uh-oh." Alarmed, Sorun quickly flicked the switch back into its previous position. To his growing worry, the countdown wasn't affected at all, nor was it affected when he tried flicking all three of the switches in various combinations. "Uh..." He looked closer at the bomb, and then noted a blue wire going from the countdown timer to a small, plastic box taped to the rest of the bomb that had a small lightning bolt painted on it. "Okay, that's the power supply feeding the timer, and according to Rotor those are important, so... pull that to stop the bomb?"
It seemed like a logical enough bet. No power to the timer meant it couldn't count down to zero and blow up. Sorun nodded at his answered, gripped the blue wire between his thumb and index finger, and pulled the wire out from the timer.
The timer went down from twenty-nine minutes to thirty seconds.
"Ooh!" So he'd been completely wrong for some reason he couldn't fathom. He stared down at the bomb with shaking eyes, and then whirled towards Antoine who was coming back with a pair of small clippers in his hands. "Antoine, I, uh... I turned the bomb on by accident."
"Huh?" His footsteps slowed, but then the coyote shrugged and continued at his usual pace. "Eh, eet is no big issue. We will just be moving on to ze disarming right away."
"No, you don't understand-"
"Eet is fine, Sorun, I am ze expert here. I put a thirty-minute timer on ze bomb, so we are in no danger."
The human teen bit his lower lip, and then in a split-second act of self preservation turned the bomb around and walked past Antoine. "Why don't you do it first?" he suggested as he made his way towards an empty table. "I'll just watch from over here."
Antoine's eyes trailed off after him in confusion. "If you are sure," he agreed with a shrug as he stopped in front of the bomb. "Are you sure you can zee from back there?" he asked, craning his neck back look at Sorun.
"Yeah, dude! Yeah!" Sorun was in the process of turning a table on its side, flat end pointed towards Antoine and the bomb. After turning it in the correct position, Sorun crouched down behind the table and poked his head up over the top to address Antoine. "Yeah, man, it-it's fine, yeah, don't worry! Just go for it!"
"Alright, then."
Sorun grit his teeth worriedly and hid completely behind the table.
"Now Sorun, when it comes to ze disarming of explosifs, you must be mindful of all parts and which bits are connects to which bobs," Antoine instructed as he turned the bomb to face towards. "First you will want to- SACRE-!"
BOOM!
Following the explosion something wet splat against the table Sorun was using to shield himself. The human breathed out, and lifted his head up right after to survey the damage. He winced when he saw that the table, as well as the entire area around where the bomb had been, was completely drenched in pink paint. He tried searching for Antoine, and his eyes landed on a pink, Antoine-shaped form laying on the ground that was blending in completely with the paint-soaked ground.
"Uh... oh, wow," Sorun mumbled as he stepped out from the table. He sheepishly walked towards what he assumed was Antoine's body, and then stopped right in front of it as he nervously chuckled. "Welp!" he said with a clap, "that, uh... about wraps it up, I think. You okay, man?"
He got his answer when Antoine's blue eyes, the only discernible feature in the mess of pink Sorun was looking at, opened up and looked right at the human. They narrowed considerably once they locked on to Sorun's own eyes.
Sorun, flinching from the intense glare the paint-covered coyote was sending him, weakly pointed in a direction away from the paint explosion. "Yeah, I'll, uh... go get some water to clean you off," he said before quickly running off.
The last person in the whole of the Freedom Fighters that Sorun had yet to meet until now had been a shorter, golden-colored squirrel named Ray. Seemed like a nice enough guy once Sorun had met him, if not a bit jittery. They hadn't talked all that much after meeting, but Sorun suspected that was mainly due to the golden squirrel being so timid to the point he stuttered in his words. It was what he observed, anyways, so he hadn't expected a shy guy like Ray's training to be all that intensive .
He was wrong.
"You want me to climb that tree?" Sorun deadpanned as he looked up at the large oak tree the pair had stopped in front of. A very large tree. Noticeably larger than most other trees in the forest around Knothole. He couldn't even see the top. "Okay, but why?"
Ray fiddled with the small, blue jacket he had on, and then looked up at Sorun. "W-w-well, climbing's important, r-right?" he stuttered. "Y-you never know w-when you might need to climb something, and if you f-f-fell while trying or something w-worse, that would be bad."
"... Sure," Sorun agreed with a small sigh. "I've never actually climbed a tree before."
"Oh, it's e-easy!" Ray said. "Here, just do what I do."
What he did was grab onto the tree and scamper up it at a rate that Sorun would expect from a squirrel. That is to say, inhumanly fast to the point that Sorun's eyes had trouble keeping up with him before he finally stopped a quarter of the way up the tree. He hadn't even used any of the branches to climb, either. He'd just used his hands to climb up its surface.
The teen looked down at his pale, human hands. He was fairly confident his fingers couldn't cling to a tree like a squirrel's.
"Dude, I'm not a squirrel!" Sorun yelled. "I can't do that!"
"... Oh." A look of realization crossed Ray's face, and he looked down briefly before pointing to a branch close to the ground. "O-okay, just climb up one branch at a time. It's l-like a ladder."
"Ladder. Sure. A really uneven and wooden ladder." Walking forwards, Sorun looked up at the branch right above him, leaped up, and grabbed the branch with his hands. He tried pulling himself up, failed, and then planted his feet on the tree and tried pulling up while pushing against the tree and walking on its surface. This proved to be much more successful as Sorun had finally managed to make it to the top of the branch, breathing moderately heavier as he looked up at Ray.
"Hey, you're d-doing it!" The squirrel flashed him a thumbs-up. "J-just keep going a-at it like that, okay?"
Sorun nodded, and then looked towards a series of branches next to him that lead further up the tree. These branches were clustered enough together than he actually was able to use them as a ladder, and slowly but carefully his feet down on them. He pressed his weight down on them to test their integrity, and with a satisfied hum he grabbed the branches above him, and then pulled his body up while planting his feet down on any branches he passed.
"Okay. Alright, yeah, this is pretty easy," he thought as he continued climbing. "Yeah, I got this."
"That's the way!" Ray cheered as Sorun climbed past him. "Now make sure th-that you're sure of your footholds and that you don't grab any weakened or d-dead branches, because you might-"
Snap!
Ray's words were cut off when a branch snapped off the tree and fell past him. Unfortunately, said branch had been a branch Sorun had been holding on to, and following the branch was Sorun's screaming body as he fell past Ray. The squirrel looked after him in fright, but reflexively closed his eyes when he heard the human's body hit the forest ground. He slowly opened them and heavily winced when he saw Sorun lying flat on his back at the foot of the tree.
"... Sorun?" he weakly called down. "Are you okay?"
"... Ow..."
So far today he'd been battered, beaten, and electrocuted in all sorts of different ways, and while the only physical evidence of any of this was bruising all throughout his body, it still hurt. On the bright side, he only had one more training session to go through today. One more and then he was done and he could hopefully sleep all this off.
The downside was that it was with Shadow.
"Oh boy, here we go..." Sorun morosely thought as he stepped into another clearing of forest used for training. This one was was full of wooden crates stacked everywhere, though for whatever reason there were quite a few charred spots on the ground and some burned pieces of crate scattered around in some areas. In the middle of all those crates was Shadow, who had crossed his arms and was staring intensely at Sorun as he waited for him to arrive. "So how bad is this gonna get?"
He still didn't know what Shadow's deal was with him, and frankly, Sorun was too scared to ask. He couldn't hate Sorun completely- he wouldn't have made that suggestion to Sorun about a weapon otherwise. Looking back, Sorun didn't even know if there was any hate in any of the words the hedgehog has said to him. It sounded more like displeasure than anything else, and he had no idea what that meant.
It didn't help that Sorun got the impression that he was a bit of a social pariah, either. Bits and pieces of gossip he'd picked up around suggested that Shadow just wasn't a friendly guy in general, though most of this had come from Sonic. Unfriendly, but also not directly antagonistic against everybody. Kind of like Sorun himself now that he thought about it.
Well, at least they had something in common. Too bad Sorun didn't know what to make of it, or what to make of the black and red hedgehog in general.
"Hello." The greeting the dark hedgehog had given him was a lot more subdued than Sorun was expecting. He stopped right in front of Shadow, who looked Sorun's body up and down with his crimson eyes before scoffing. "You've certainly been busy."
"Yeah, it's been a rough day," Sorun agreed. "So what are we doing here in crate land? Don't tell me you're gonna have me stacking boxes or something."
Shadow shook his head. "No, nothing as inane as that." He tapped his fingers against his elbows. "You have Chaos Control."
Sorun cocked his head to the side in confusion. "I... don't know what that is." He heard it mentioned back when that Chaos Emerald had been stuck to him, but he'd never asked on what it actually was. He just knew it was something Shadow could do.
"The ability to manipulate Chaos energy."
"... I guess?" In response, Sorun made a Summoned Sword appear at his side. "I mean, if making these things counts as Chaos Control, then yeah, sure, I have Chaos Control."
Shadow cast an inquisitive look at the floating, blue sword. "Would you mind if I held that for a moment?"
Why did people keep asking to hold his sword? "Sure, here." He grabbed the sword and tossed it to Shadow, who caught it mid-air and immediately went to inspecting it. He was examining it rather thoroughly, too, with the way his eyes were scrunched in concentration as he ran a hand along the spectral sword's surface.
Finally, Shadow sighed and tossed the sword back to Sorun, who let it go so that it would float back at his side. "How did you make such a technique?" Shadow demanded. "I understand the composition of the blade, and I can even discern how much Chaos energy was used to produce it, but I can't understand how you create it."
He wasn't so sure "because I liked a certain series of video games" was going to be a satisfactory answer to Shadow, but he didn't have anything better than than the truth. The truth he really didn't want to divulge for petty, personal reasons. Vague answer it was. "I don't know what to tell you, Shadow. I absorbed a Chaos Emerald and got this power out of it. I didn't put any thought into it; it just happened." He looked to the side at the sword. "It looks like Force Edge, though, so there's that."
Shadow hummed. "And what exactly is Force Edge?"
"It's a sword from back on Earth," Sorun cryptically answered. "I always really liked it, so I guess I just... subconsciously made the power." He turned back to Shadow. "That's all I got for you."
"I see. Subconscious." Shadow closed his eyes in thought, and then opened them back to Sorun. "Well, regardless of how that power came to be, I'm the only real expert on Chaos Control around willing to help you train that power."
Sorun stiffened. He stiffened so hard that his concentration broke and the sword besides him shattered.
Oh, no. He wasn't going to have somebody walk in and tell him how to use his Summoned Swords, even if it was Shadow. It was his stolen power and he was the only one in this whole world who'd ever seen it used properly. Shadow even outright admitted he couldn't make Summoned Swords of his own, so what would he know?
"Shadow, I know how to use my Summoned Swords," Sorun told him. "I don't need help in that regard. If anything I need help in literally everything else but the Summoned Swords."
"Really?" Once again Shadow crossed his arms. "So you, a human who has never even heard of the concept of Chaos Control before today, are suddenly an expert on Chaos Control?"
"No. But I am an expert on Summoned Swords."
"How so?"
Sorun sharply inhaled. Keeping their true origins hidden really was becoming a pain for him. "Because I just know how they work, okay?" he said. "What makes you such an expert on Summoned Swords, huh? You haven't even seen them until today and you're over here tellin' me you know more about them than I do."
"I gleaned plenty from just looking at it a moment ago." After saying this, Shadow held up his right hand. Greenish-yellow energy began to crackle around his hand, and Sorun stepped back with widened eyes as a bolt of roiling green energy that was vaguely shaped like a spear formed in his hand. "This is a Chaos Spear," Shadow explained to him. "It's a basic technique of Chaos Control, and much like your Summoned Swords, it's a weapon as well as a projectile."
He turned his back to Sorun in order to face a pile of crates, and without any hesitation, Shadow threw the bolt of energy at the pile. The second it made contact the Chaos Spear exploded in a large fashion, and the whole pile of crates was practically vaporized from the release of energy.
That done, the dark hedgehog turned back to the human, who was staring wide-eyed at the spot where the crates had once been. "Compared to my Chaos Spears, your Summoned Swords are incredibly weak. They have no power behind them," he declared.
Sorun's eyes snapped back to Shadow, affronted. "That's not true at all."
"Then prove it. Throw a sword at one of those crates and prove me wrong, human."
"Alright, I will." Right as Sorun said this a Summoned Sword appeared at his side, pointed towards a crate near the back of the training area, and shot forwards towards the crate. The sword made contact, but unlike the Chaos Spear, the sword merely embedded itself into the crate's face.
Admittedly, a sword that stabbed into things was a lot less impressive than a spear that blew up now that Sorun saw it first-hand. A practically microscopic, pleased smirk formed on Shadow's face when he saw comprehension flash through the human's features.
"As I said. No power," he said. "It's not a completely useless ability since they can still cause damage, but don't presume that they are even close to the level of a Chaos Spear."
"Hm." Sorun slowly nodded. "Yeah, I guess. Hey, how many can you make?"
"What?"
"How many Chaos Spears can you make?" Sorun repeated.
Shadow furrowed his brows in confusion, but obliged the human and made another Chaos Spear in his hand. "I can only make one at a time," he answered. "Though with a Chaos Emerald, my abilities are amplified. I could make even more at once if I had one in my possession."
Interesting bit of information, but the one-at-a-time bit really had Sorun interested. He grinned. "That so?" Four Summoned Swords appeared at his sides. "You wanna guess how many of these I can fire off?"
Understanding was slowly coming to the hedgehog's eyes, causing them to narrow. "I would assume four based on the number of swords you have floating around you."
"Hah. Nope."
Sorun began firing his swords one at a time towards the crates in front of him. As he did so, however, a new sword would reappear to take the place of one that was fired, only to shoot off again soon after once the swords around it had fired. The rate at which the Summoned Swords were flying away from Sorun at such a rapid pace was almost akin to a machine gun, and it was only after ten full seconds of a rapid onslaught of swords did Sorun stop making more.
By the end, the field of crates in front of the two was filled with hundreds of Summoned Swords stabbing into crates. A second later, the hundreds of swords had shattered, though the sheer amount of small glass pops added together made it so that all of the crates were blown to pieces from the combined small explosions. Sorun was looking at the devastation with a smug smirk while Shadow's was much more subdued yet irked from the way his eyes were so narrowed.
"Yeah, sure, ya got me beat in quality," Sorun admitted as he turned to Shadow, still grinning. "But who needs quality when you can just chuck a million swords at a dude's face?"
"... I see," Shadow breathed out, voice strained. "Well, since you're so confident in your proficiency with those swords, then why not put them to the test?"
With a eyebrow raised, Sorun watched as Shadow walked further into the training area, around twenty feet away from Sorun. He stopped, and then turned back around to face the human.
"Here's what we will do: I want you to try and hit me with at least one Summoned Sword," Shadow instructed. "If you can so much as scratch me, we'll call your training with those swords complete."
Sorun's lips flattened in suspicion. That sounded almost too good. "That's it? Just hit you?"
"That's correct," Shadow confirmed with a nod. "But don't think I'll just stand here and take it. We'll treat this as a real combat situation. That is what this training is all about, after all." His strange, metal sneakers scraped against the ground as the hedgehog's stance slightly widened. "So don't come crying to me if you get hurt."
A dry chuckle left Sorun. Fight Shadow and win by scratching him with a Summoned Sword? Honestly, part of him was terrified from the prospect, but the part of him scared of Shadow was overridden by the desire to prove to him that his Summoned Swords were just as good as his Chaos Spears, if not better. The desire to correct that insult was just too great, and the idea of cutting training short by cutting him was even more enticing.
He just couldn't resist the offer. Sorun nodded.
"Okay, Shadow. I'm game." Four Summoned Swords appeared at his side. "Wellll... I've never actually done this before. But I've got the swords. Vergil's swords. If I have his swords, then I can use his moves then, right? His Spiral Swords and Storm Swords... Blistering Swords and Heavy Rain Swords... I played with them all back on Earth enough to know how they work. Since the Chaos Emerald let me get away with stealing Summoned Swords, I'll just steal the moves, too."
Might have been a bit scummy, but pride be damned. He didn't care how lame it was as long as it worked. And it wasn't like anybody on Mobius was going to be able to call him out on it.
"Why don't I start us off, then? We'll go at- three-two-one-go!"
A single sword shot off towards Shadow with as little warning as Sorun could give. The hedgehog frowned, and then lazily stepped to the side as the sword flew past him. "I'd be worried if you're already resorting to petty tricks," he said as he affixed Sorun with an unimpressed expression.
In response, more and more swords began to fire off towards Shadow. Unfortunately for Sorun, the hedgehog was dodging all of them, and even worse still he was making it look easy. No matter how many sword flew towards him Shadow would almost fluidly dodge past each and every one, whether it be just stepping around them, dodging under them, or jumping and flipping over them. And not only was he avoiding them with ease, but with each dodge he was coming closer and closer to Sorun.
"Man, he's fast. Jesus HE'S FAST!" Sorun thought as the dark hedgehog began to rapidly approach him. Eventually, Shadow decided to dodge out of the stream of sword altogether and began running at Sorun from a different angle. The swords floating next to Sorun pointed towards him and began firing in the new direction, but this proved to be a futile effort as Shadow had dodged all the way to the other end of Sorun's vision while still moving closer. He continued to zig-zag his way towards Sorun while dodging any swords thrown at him, causing Sorun to scowl in frustration. "Alright. Let's try this."
The sword stopped firing altogether, and the four next to Sorun shattered. Shadow saw this as an opportunity to rush forwards, and with interest Sorun noticed that the bottom of his shoes began emitting flames like a jet engine. The jets at the end of his shoes propelled him forwards faster than Sorun had expected, and to his bemusement the way Shadow was moving with the shoes while moving his arms in an out was reminiscent of someone ice skating.
Well, ridiculous-looking or not it was propelling him right towards Sorun just like he wanted.
Right when Shadow was nearing Sorun, the telltale bring! sound of the Summoned Swords appearing rang out. This time, however, it was eight swords. Eight swords that surrounded Sorun in a circle and pointed outwards as they all rapidly spun around Sorun's body. Shadow had nearly run right into the deadly ring of spinning swords, but he'd stopped right before making contact, and then backflipped a fair distance away much to the human's disappointment.
Sorun made a "tsk" sound as Shadow landed back on the ground. He'd almost had him that time, too. "I call this one Spiral Swords," he called out to Shadow before looking down at the Mobian's shoes. "You-you seriously have rocket shoes? For real?"
Shadow scowled he he straightened up to his full posture. "They substantially increase my mobility."
"Pfft, sure, if you don't mind looking like a figure skater when using them."
He actually looked genuinely insulted by that remark. So much that, in a movement so fast it was indiscernible to Sorun's eyes, he'd curled up into a ball and began spinning. Spinning so fast that he became a perfect black and red sphere in a move that was eerily familiar to Sorun.
"Hey, isn't that Sonic's...? Oh, he's pissed," the teen realized as Shadow's spinning body jumped up into the air, only to change directions midair and fly down directly towards Sorun. "He's going over the Spiral Swords. Well, let's see if he can dodge Blistering Swords while in the air."
Eight more swords, four at each of Sorun's sides and all perfectly lined up on top of each other, appeared and moved around in unison as their tips tracked Shadow's body. They all fired, going two at a time in pairs, at speeds that were even faster and more rapid that the normal swords Sorun fired. As the swords approached him, Shadow unrolled out of ball form and used the momentum he'd built up by twisting his body out of the paths of the swords. He'd dodged them just as they past by him, and then he briefly activated his sneakers so that the jet of flames would push him past the eight swords circling Sorun.
"Okay, he can," Sorun thought as Shadow rolled to a stop on the ground. "Aaaand Blistering Swords right into Storm Swords."
Once again, eight swords appeared in a circle. This time, however, they appeared circling around Shadow, and unlike Sorun's circle of swords they were all pointed inwards and towards Shadow. The hedgehog scowled, and then attempted to jump up and over the swords circling him. His scowl deepened when the circle of swords followed him and perfectly maintained their positions even as he jumped away and landed in a different spot.
"You can't outrun those ones," Sorun called out. "Hurry up and get scratched so I can go home already."
The eight swords spinning around Shadow began to slow down. The hedgehog had twitched his body slightly to the side, and his eyes slightly widened when he saw the swords hadn't twitched along with him. Right as the eight swords pulled backwards, he jumped in the air. After his feet left the ground the eight swords shot forwards and passed through the one spot he'd been standing previously before they all continued to fire outwards.
The hedgehog landed back on the ground, and then turned his head towards a surprised Sorun. "So, they stop tracking right when they fire off," he observed.
Sorun slumped his shoulders. "Yeah, I was really hoping you wouldn't figure that out." The swords circling protectively around Sorun all shattered at once, and more swords began firing away from him and towards Shadow as he began to back up. "None of this is working against him. He's too good. And the only thing I have left is Heavy Rain Swords, but there's no way that's gonna work! He figured Storm Swords out in like a second! Wait, hold on." As the continuous stream of swords continued to fire from the four positions at Sorun's sides, he manifested yet another sword into his hand. "Why am I limiting myself to just Vergil's moveset? Dang, it's my power now technically. Can't I just do whatever I want with it? I mean, jeez, Dante did some pretty creative stuff with them when he got his Summoned Swords in Five. And I kinda need creativity right now."
When it boiled down to their intended use, Summoned Swords were supposed to be a utilized as a utility, nothing more. Their original user in those games had used them as a tool for stunlocking and manipulating enemy positions so he could continue combination attacks; they weren't intended to be sole damage dealers. But Sorun didn't have a magic weapon to attack with, and even if he did he didn't have the strength, speed, agility, or even raw skill to use it. So Summoned Swords was all he had to fall back on.
But without that crucial piece, without the fact that he couldn't actively attack, they were little more than projectiles that had very limited and set patterns. That may be fine for fighting mindless foes, but against Shadow they were proving more and more useless, because he was either just dodging them or he was figuring out the patterns he was using and avoiding them thusly. He was too smart for these to work, and too fast to boot. They were too slow and too predictable.
Sorun needed to be unpredictable. The opposite of what he was doing right now.
Fortunately the fifth game in particular had a character just like that he could gank from.
While Shadow continued to slowly advance on Sorun while dodging the swords being flung at him, Sorun slowly began to back up as four more Summoned Swords appeared floating behind his back. "Okay, Dante. Don't fail me now."
The swords firing from Sorun's sides ceased. At the same time, the four blue swords floating at Sorun's back began to spin around like helicopter blades. They flew out from his back, all four spinning blades heading right towards Shadow. His crimson eyes widened slightly, but right as the spinning blades reached him he dodged and flipped over every single one.
That would have been the end of it, too, if the four rapidly rotating blades hadn't turned around and flew back towards Shadow. The hedgehog dodged the four swords again, but no matter how many times he dodged they would round back on him in an attempt to cut him over and over.
Grunting in frustration, Shadow clenched his hand around a newly-formed Chaos Spear and threw it just as two of the spinning swords approached him. They were close enough that when the Chaos Spear impacted it flew through both, destroying the pair of swords while exploding on the ground behind them. Realizing they could be broken, Shadow immediately whirled around with another spear in his grasp and threw it at a third sword, and then a third spear at the fourth sword.
He allowed himself a satisfied breath once the final sword was shattered. Afterwards, though, his ears perked up as he heard a whirling sound right behind him, and he spun around and slid to his knees just as four more spinning swords flew over him. He rose up to his feet, and then grit his teeth as the incensed hedgehog laid eyes on Sorun.
The human was sitting down in what looked like a lawn chair completely made of his Summoned Swords. His hands were interlaced behind his head, and he was grinning cheekily as the four rotating swords spun in a circle around him. "I can throw these things all day, you know!" he reminded Shadow as the spinning swords were flung towards him once again.
"C'mon..." Sorun thought as he watched Shadow destroy the swords with more Chaos Spears. "Ugh, he's getting mad like I wanted, but he's not actually losing focus."
That'd been his hope, at least. To throw Shadow off as much as possible that he would make the smallest slip and get cut by the sword, because unpredictability wasn't cutting it, either. The only reason he'd even bothered with the chair was for the hope that the mere sight of something so ridiculous would make him stumble just a single step.
Well, he was getting more mad, alright. But the problem was that, if anything, Shadow's focus was becoming even sharper for it. Because while he wasn't reading the Round Swords as well as he had all the other swords, he was still adapting to them well enough by destroying them.
Correction: had adapted to them. The swords were all shattered now, and Shadow had turned his burning gaze towards Sorun. The only warning Sorun got of his next move was the loud, grinding vreee! noise he heard before Shadow, once again in spinning ball form, launched right towards Sorun.
The teen looked worried at the approaching ball of destruction, but otherwise remained sitting in his lawn chair of swords as Shadow approached. Before the ball hit him, four blue swords crossing their blades in a diagonal pattern appeared right in Shadow's path, with the swords acting like a shield as the spinning ball ground into it. Unfortunately for Sorun, the momentum of the spinning hedgehog was so great that Shadow remained suspended in the air, spinning against those swords. Worse still was that the four swords acting as a shield were beginning to crack.
This time Sorun did jump out of the chair right as Shadow smashed through the four swords and crashed into the sword chair, destroying it. "This isn't working, either. Screw it, I'm using everything."
Before Sorun was even to pick himself up, Shadow was right on top of him as he ran out from the cloud of blue particles that had once been the lawn chair. When he was mere inches away from Sorun, a blue sword appeared by his side and jabbed forwards towards Shadow. He dodged away, but continued to eye the sword as, instead of flying away, it returned to Sorun's side. Three more swords appeared at Sorun's sides, and all four continually jabbed forwards at Shadow in random patterns. The hedgehog dodged all of the pointed jabs, though, and carefully watched the swords until he found an opening to approach Sorun.
Right as he moved to capitalize on this opening, however, the four swords swung out at Shadow. He flipped onto his hands and pushed himself away as the four floating swords followed and swung at him in random arcs and in random directions, and leapt away entirely when all fours swords lined up into a large sword and swung at him.
He landed on all fours a large distance away from the swords with a huff, but then froze when he noticed a large amount of blue light reflecting off the ground. His striped head looked up just in time to see twenty Summoned Swords suspended in the air above him, and all pointed directly down. He jumped just outside of the cloud of swords, and had done so just in time as all the swords rained down to impale the ground he'd been standing on right as he moved.
But, as he was sliding backwards after dodging away from the cloud, he noticed a tinge of blue light appear in his peripheral vision, and clenched his teeth upon realizing that he'd been forced to turn his back to Sorun to dodge away from the falling swords. But right as he attempted to correct this-
Slck!
- a single Summoned Sword flew right past his cheek, just barely nicking him. A nick made by the passing blade that had left an incredibly thin, red line on his tan muzzle. He slid to a stop and quickly touched the spot with his hand, and brought it to his eyes to examine. The small amount of red left on his white glove was immediately recognizable
"... Whoa, wait." All the Summoned Swords that had been summoned shattered away, and Sorun's eyes lit up with surprise as the elated teen jumped up to his feet. "Holy- I actually managed to cut him! Ha ha! Oh, man, I can't believe I did it!"
His expectations for himself had been low to begin, and while he had definitely wanted to win he'd gone into it knowing it was a long shot. But he'd actually managed to win, and it had sent such a great feeling through Sorun that he was lightly laughing at the sight.
Shadow, by contrast, looked anything but happy. In fact he'd clenched the stained glove, and then glared towards Sorun with an absolutely infuriated expression.
And then his disappeared.
Sorun wasn't exactly sure what happened. It wasn't that Shadow had moved; he'd simply disappeared from the spot he'd been standing in and had reappeared in the same moment in front of Sorun with his foot pressed against the human's chest. By the time Sorun even registered he'd been kicked, or that Shadow had even changed positions somehow, he was sent flying backwards and right into a crate.
The teen's body smashed right through the wooden box, and he ended up on his back and coughing due to the fact the wind had been knocked out of him. After a few seconds he managed to suck in a large gulp of air, and then held an hand to his aching chest as he looked up at Shadow, who was standing right above him. "Man, I thought we were done once I hit you," Sorun groaned out as he sat upwards.
The burning eyes aimed down at Sorun softened considerably when they saw the human coughing and wheezing on the ground. Shadow turned his head slightly, and then held out a helping hand to the teen. "My apologies. I... was not expecting that. You surprised me."
"I surprise you, so you kick me?" Despite his irritated tone, Sorun still took the offered hand and allowed the hedgehog to help pull him up to his feet. "What even was that?" he asked him. "You went from standing over there to kicking me."
Shadow looked back towards the spot where Sorun was gesturing to with his hand, and then looked back at him. "One of the benefits of Chaos Control is that I can momentarily stop time," he explained. "It's a rather strenuous ability compared to my others. But you cut me, so-"
"You can stop time?" The angered tone was gone from Sorun completely, and Shadow could only look in confusion as the teen eyed him with awe. "Dude, I thought that was just teleporting, but that's even better! Why didn't you lead with time stop if you can do that!? I never would have beat you if you used it!"
"I was... holding back for your sake," Shadow uneasily answered as he stepped back. "And I can teleport. I just chose not to."
The teen's eyes only widened even further. Time stop, teleporting... Shadow really did have a lot of amazing abilities. The kind of abilities Sorun would have taken a hundred times over for Summoned Swords. The kind of abilities he wasn't even sure were physically possible like a lot of other things he'd seen, but apparently Chaos energy worked miracles.
But even so, he had to wonder how he'd even beat Shadow. Then he registered what had been said and shot Shadow an incredulous look.
"Holding back? You flipping and spinning all over the place was holding back?" Sorun gasped out. "Man, I barely managed to nick you with all that alone! It took everything I had just to do that much!"
"Well, I didn't want to make it too easy for you. That said, it wasn't even my intention to get hit in the first place." Shadow rose his fingers to brush the wound on his cheek. There was a small, green glow that left the tip of his gloved fingers, and when he removed them the small scratch was gone entirely. "I'm truly sorry for the kick. I was out of line. I just... I really wasn't expecting you to land a hit on me, and I reacted too rashly."
Sorun breathed out, and then shoved his hands into his pockets while looking away. "Yeah, well, I guess I didn't really help all that much," he muttered. "I, uh... I kept taunting you because I was trying to get you to make a mistake, so it's mostly my fault you were so mad."
"I still should have had more self control than that." He glanced towards Sorun. "It was a good effort, but I'd advise against such a strategy in the future, Sorun. Robots aren't ones to be affected that much by taunting, and it's a waste of energy that's better spent in the fight against anybody else." He lowered his head and sighed. "That won't stop a certain someone from trying, though."
"Sonic?" Sorun guessed.
Shadow nodded. "Yes, him."
He wasn't surprised in the slightest. "Hey, speaking of which. That Spin Dash move. Isn't that technically Sonic's move you're copying?"
Shadow's face immediately picked up from the ground, and he looked almost insulted at what the teen had said. "The Faker can claim he devised it first," he said, "but I'm still the older one. If anything, he's copying me."
"How old are you, anyways?"
"That is something you needn't worry about." Shadow blinked. "Perhaps another time."
Sorun shrugged, but otherwise didn't press the issue. Shadow's age wasn't nearly a pressing issue as what he had told Sorun.
He'd held back. Severely, if he really was handicapping himself by not using all of those abilities of his. Come to think of it he hadn't so much as thrown a Chaos Spear directly at Sorun, but he doubted Shadow had intended to grievously harm him during a single training session. He couldn't hold that against him. He could hold the kick against him, but from how Shadow looked almost embarrassed over the kick, Sorun assumed it genuinely was an accident.
But still. He was happy he won, but he didn't know how much that victory meant if Shadow had been holding back. And he wanted to know.
"So when you say you were holding back," Sorun began, "how much were you holding back?"
Shadow looked back to him with surprise. "Less than you're probably thinking," he informed him, which brightened Sorun's mood. "Just because I was holding back on my powers doesn't mean I didn't put in considerable effort into dodging all of your attacks." A beat passed, and he crossed his arms. "You're... quite adept at controlling those swords," he noticed. "More than I would have expected considering how you only acquired the ability a short time ago. I'd go as far as to say you're a natural at handling them."
Chuckling, Sorun bashfully looked to the side as he rubbed the back of his neck. It almost sounded like praise, and something like that was one of the last things he expected from somebody as stern-sounding as Shadow. "Ah, well, I had some pretty good reference material."
"I don't know if I would be so pleased over a single scratch."
Sorun's face fell as he looked back towards Shadow, though his face picked back up when he saw the small smirk on the hedgehog's face. "Yeah, yeah. Do I get the Shadow Stamp of Approval, then?"
"As far as going into live combat with those swords? You should be fine," Shadow said with a nod. "As long as you're with somebody and nothing unexpected pops up, those swords should service you well enough."
"Oh, cool." That was a relief. Sorun had been left wondering how much a single scratch really amounted to, but apparently against somebody like Shadow a single scratch went a long way. Even if he had to pour maximum effort into inflicting such a minor wound. A minor wound he apparently could heal in an instant.
Well, he never saw Egg Pawns display a level of agility even near Shadow's, so maybe he had a point in that he would be fine. At the very least Shadow sounded like he knew what he was talking about, and Sorun was more willing to trust him than trust his own logic which over the course of his stay on Mobius had been spotty at best.
"Tell me one thing, though," Shadow requested, with said request rousing Sorun from his own thoughts. "How do you manage to manipulate those swords like that?" he asked. "One pattern in particular, the one where you protected yourself by surrounding yourself in swords, caught my eye. I just wonder how you're able to move all of them without physically touching them."
How he managed to move the Summoned Swords around? Great question- Sorun wasn't so sure of it himself. "I dunno, they just kind of do what I want," he answered. "I think it and, oh, they go do it."
"I see." A look of thoughtfulness crossed Shadow's face, and he fully turned away from the human. "As agreed, I'll let you go now," he said. "You've given me much to think about, and I'm sure you'd rather be somewhere else right now. Should you ever need more help with your abilities, you know where to find me."
"Er, sure thing." Sorun almost gave a nod to Shadow, but stopped himself when he realized the hedgehog wouldn't see it. "See you later then, I guess."
Still nothing from the black and red hedgehog, who looked deep in thought. Sorun decided to leave it at that and left the training area.
Finally, it was dusk. The signal of the end of the day that also signaled the end to all this hellish training Sorun had been subjected to throughout the entire day. A day that was ending with him leaning against the cobblestone wall at the bottom on Freedom HQ's hill that the door was connected to.
It was a day that had gone about as well as he expected. That is to say, it went terribly. But his mind was less occupied on everything he failed at- because he knew he'd be terrible at all that from the get-go- and more focused on the one aspect of training he expected to go well. And while he had technically passed it, it was anything but well.
Sorun wasn't very confident about his Summoned Swords after his bout with Shadow.
They were intended for utility as opposed to direct offense, he understood that. But that was in-game logic, where he could throw dozen's of swords at an enemy's face and not have it affected in the slightest just because it barely even whittled its health bar. But this was the real world, where so much as a single sword going through somebody's face would be more than enough to deal with them. He'd hoped that difference alone made up for the fact Summoned Swords weren't designed to be a sole source of offense.
Shadow proved that woefully wrong.
Bombard him with swords? He'd been too fast.
Try to use complex but set patterns against him? Shadow had dissected them all in the heat of the moment and avoided them all.
Try to trip him up with unpredictability? Shadow was too adaptable.
Try to falter him with taunts? It wasn't exactly ineffective if the kick said anything, but the hedgehog's discipline made it so that any results of such an endeavor were practically negligible if not detrimental.
In the end, the human teen only won because Sorun had given up and had just decided to throw everything he had at Shadow all at once, and even then he probably only landed that scratch due to the sheer dumb luck of accidentally forcing Shadow to turn his back to him for a second. He hadn't even planned for that- it had been a happy accident. One he had capitalized on, sure, but that wasn't exactly a strategy he could rely on in the future.
Sorun didn't doubt that the swords would be effective against the cumbersome robots he'd seen thus far. Shadow even lead credence to the fact they'd be usable against them. Anything beyond them, though? Anything stronger than basic fodder? Sorun wasn't so sure. Not when at his absolute best Sorun had only managed a single scratch against Shadow, and that was with a Shadow that was holding back for his sake. And while he didn't know where to put Shadow when using him as a benchmark to gauge the rest of the Freedom Fighters, Sorun had enough sense to know that he likely couldn't beat any of them with just Summoned Swords, either. People like Knuckles or Mighty would probably just punch his swords away. Sonic? Sorun wouldn't even pretend at thinking he could ever hit him with a sword- he was just too damn fast. The rest of them? He was sure they'd find ways around them. So what did that say for any foes they were going up against?
They weren't enough is what it said. What happened if he ran into something and couldn't beat it with Summoned Swords alone? Sorun couldn't imagine what they could possibly be, but there had to be enemies of such power if the Freedom Fighters were at the losing front of this war. Enemies roughly equal to them in power on Eggman's side; it couldn't just be through sheer numbers the fat man was winning, Egg Fleet or no. What would happen if Sorun had to fight one of those adversaries? What if somebody wasn't there to help him? He'd likely die in a situation like that.
"Power... I need more power..."
He shook his head. That kind of thinking hadn't done Vergil any good, the game character whose power the Chaos Emerald had given him. It'd lead him to a ruinous fate, even if he did become somewhat redeemed at the dead-end of the series. It wouldn't do Sorun any good, either, seeing as every new power he got from an Emerald would cost him twelve years of life. And at that point he'd be playing right into Aurora and Athair's wishes.
No. He'd find some other way. He didn't know what way, but he'd find it.
But that was for later. He was just so done with today and wanted to go to sleep. He couldn't go just yet, though, because Sonic wanted to go home with him and Sorun was too weak to refuse. And even if he tried walking back on his own Sonic would just catch up anyways.
Soon, though. Soon he'd be able to go to sleep, forget about today, and hope it wouldn't haunt his dreams in place of all his other nightmares.
"Sorry for taking so long!" The door to the HQ burst open and Sonic walked out, closing the door behind him. "Had something to talk about with Tails. So..." He stopped in front of Sorun, and scanned his green eyes up and down the teen's body. "You had quite a day, huh?"
Rolling his eyes, Sorun pushed off the wall and began the familiar walk back to Knothole. Sonic was walking right besides him. "That's one way to describe it," Sorun replied. "My way is a lot more explicit, but we'll go with that. Yes. I've had 'quite a day', Sonic."
"So how'd it go?"
Dryly chuckling, Sorun rose his hands up to count off his fingers. "Well, I failed in just about everything everybody tried training me in. I came out of Shadow's training alright, but that was more of an outlier than anything else." He extended his fingers as he began counting. "I got no physical aptitude whatsoever compared to you guys, I can't get flying down, I can't sneak for jack, tactics are way over my head, and I'm pretty sure the electronics in the lab are conspiring to kill me for some reason. Also, I blew Antoine up. He's fine by the way." He looked away from Sonic. "Pretty sure, at least," he whispered.
"Well, you passed Shadow's training. That's a plus, right?" When Sorun looked back to the blue hedgehog, he saw a supportive smile dominating his features. "I actually overheard him tell Rouge he was impressed with you. That's the highest possible praise you could have gotten out of anybody considering how high his standards are."
"Yeah, I got one pass out of I don't even know how many fails. Woo-hoo." There'd been the lockpicking, too, now that he thought on it, but he didn't know if breaking all those picks to open a single lock even counted as a success. He remained quiet on the subject.
"You don't gotta be so hard on yourself, you know." Sonic stepped closer to Sorun and gave him a friendly jab with his elbow. "Nobody's expecting you to get any of this stuff immediately. I mean, we've all been doing this since we were kids. Of course we'd look so good when we've been doing all this practically our whole lives."
He had a point, but it wasn't enough to get Sorun spirits up. "Yeah, I know, but I don't have years to gradually learn everything like you guys with the whole Eggman problem." He looked down at his bruised body. "And I really don't think I can do another training day like this. I'm barely staying awake here."
"Look, you're trying, and while it's not great progress, it's progress. You're doing the best you can, so you shouldn't worry about it," Sonic reasoned. "Besides, we're probably not gonna be able to do something like this again anyways. There's missions we all gotta run, but most of the time there's somebody around. It'd go a long way if you could just ask somebody every once in awhile for help in something."
Sorun doubted he would unless he was bored enough at first, but as long as he didn't have to run through a literal gauntlet like today and it was just little one-off sessions, the idea sounded appealing enough. Surely it would be better on his body considering he wouldn't spend an entire day on it. And he did need the help.
"I'll think about it." They'd be brief thoughts, but they'd be sincere ones.
"Great. Any hey, you finally met everybody!" Sonic gave Sorun not just one, but two thumbs-ups. "I heard people talking, just so you know. Everybody was pretty pleased to meet you. Only had great things to say, and they're all happy you're trying."
"Mm-hm."
"So what do you think of them?"
"They're fine enough, I guess." Considering the bleak future ahead of them he was trying very hard to not grow attached to any of them, so he was void of any serious compliments towards any of the Freedom Fighters. "I don't have any problems with them."
"So... what you're saying is that you don't dislike their company..."
Oh, he saw were this was going. It was another attempt by Sonic to goad him into friendship. Sorun wasn't having it. "You think your mom'll make her pancakes tonight?" Sorun suddenly asked. "I could really go for those pancakes."
Sonic's mouth froze, and then he rose an eye-ridge in confusion. "Pancakes? At night?" he asked. "Really?"
"Come on, man, after the day I had?" He wasn't even joking; he really wanted those pancakes. He was starving for anything, really, but the pancakes made by that woman were out of this world.
Sonic blinked, and slowly made a smirk with his mouth. "Gee, I dunno, Sorun." He interlocked his fingers behind his quills. "Pancakes at night? Sounds kind of like a friend-only kind of dinner. If we were friends that'd totally be okay, buuuuut...!"
"I'll pass then."
Sonic's arms fell limply to his side, and he regarded Sorun with a frown. "Seriously, Sorun? Still? After all this?"
"I already told you. We're not friends," Sorun said. His eyes remained locked forwards, but when no response from Sonic came he looked over to him and saw an alarming mixture of a sad frown but determined eyes. "You're really not gonna give up on this, are you?"
"Not until you tell me what's bugging you so I can help."
"It's not happening, Sonic." He'd already tried, after all. It hadn't gone so well for his heart. "I just wanna focus on getting the rest of these Emeralds."
"Okay." With a huff, Sonic crossed his arms. "Be that way, then."
"I will."
"Fine."
"Fine."
"Swell."
"I'm not playing this game."
He huffed even further, but remained silent right after. Sorun allowed himself a small, victorious smirk as he looked forward to enjoying the rest of the walk home in peace. Too bad that he passed out from exhaustion halfway there, forcing Sonic to carry him the rest of the way back before he deposited him in the spare bed.
A/N- Jeez, so I planned out the whole "training chapter that also served as a little introductory to the rest of the characters" chapter to give Sorun some development and to introduce everybody who hasn't been introduced at once so I didn't have to bother with it later and move right into the development, but it ended up taking way longer than I thought it would. Well, that and to show off the limits of Summoned Swords, which basically amounts to "they're good, but in Sonic World they ain't that good".
On another note, I've decided to take on a semi-active role down here in the Author's Notes section in regards to Stardown, who's been a real big support to the story, who asked about the inclusion of the rabbit child and her weird blob pet named after coagulated milk in the story. Short answer is that they were in the OG Archie universe I'm working in, so I don't see why I wouldn't. As for the fact I'm adding Sonic characters that weren't in the OG Archie universe, I'm not naming names, but at the same time it's not really that many. There's one character from the games exclusively in particular I'm adding in that may be a bit iffy, but for what I have planned I have to put that character in. But those are long-term goals that'll be set up in the short-term.
Answering questions in the A/N isn't really something I've done before, but I'm trying new things with this story so I'm open to answer any questions I see in reviews from anybody in a non-spoiler fashion if I so choose. Just throwin' that out there.
That's all, I out.
