Recursion Error

Episode 44- Air cancel the fat man


He'd done it.

The madman had done it.

He blew it all up.

"I WAS ONLY GONE FOR A FEW HOURS, WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED!?"

Sorun knew that the possibility of Eggman using his fleet of ships to bomb out Knothole existed; the man outright flaunted the fact that option was at his disposal to Sorun's face. And Sorun had always felt dread knowing that at any moment an armada of flying ships would just appear over Knothole and carpet-bomb the whole place. He knew it, but he'd been operating under the assumption that as long as he was quick enough and killed the Doctor that this fate could be avoided entirely and become a moot point.

Well, apparently, he hadn't been fast enough.

Eggman destroyed Knothole.

Everything was gone. Homes and other structures were completely leveled into unrecognizable, burning heaps. He couldn't even see the castle anymore- that was just gone, debris and all. The entire city was in this state. Destroyed beyond all recognition. Reduced to an uninhabitable wasteland.

Sorun stumbled through the burning streets in a daze, his mind swirling in an incomprehensible turmoil as he looked around at all the devastation around him. Feelings of shock, confusion, and devastation assaulting him to such a high degree he could barely even see straight as he kept moving through Knothole's ruins.

There was one silver lining, though. One that was probably the only reason he wasn't breaking down from the sight of all this. It was a detail Sorun himself was surprised he'd noticed, but once he had he'd begun examining the burning surroundings further to confirm that small detail.

There were no bodies.

It was the one thing he'd been dreading to see above everything else. Corpses as a result of the bombing. Mangled, burning cadavers that wouldn't even look like the people they used to be. Or, even worse, bodies that he would recognize. Bodies of his friends. The Freedom Fighters' bodies. All mangled and torn apart into twisted messes that Sorun would have to go find to confirm if they'd survived or not. And Sorun wasn't very confident he'd be able to go through with such a gruesome task like that. He didn't think he'd be able to handle seeing Sonic's or Sally's or Antoine's or anybody else's dead bodies, torn apart and mutilated from the explosions of the bombs, their faces eternally set into expressions of pain and horror from seeing their home being bombed to oblivion right before they died.

Except... he saw none of that. There wasn't a single body to be found. Not of the Freedom Fighters, or any of the citizens, the royal forces, nobody. Not a single one. He'd say that the place was a ghost town, but due to the state of things, Sorun didn't think he could call Knothole a town anymore. At first he'd been horrified and assumed the bombing had been so bad that there weren't even any intact bodies, but when he'd looked around some more, using his Bringer Claws to sift through some of the wreckage, he saw that he was mistaken. There weren't even pieces of anybody lying around. No bodies, no parts, not even any scorch marks resembling the shape of somebody being incinerated from the bombs.

The only conclusion Sorun could come to was that nobody had died in the bombing. They were all taken.

It made sense, the more Sorun thought on it. Robotnik was the kind of guy that'd want to gloat about his victory over everybody. What he'd do with them afterwards... well, frankly, Sorun didn't want to think about how horrible that prospect was. But the point was everybody was alive- at least it seemed like they were alive. Captured, most likely, but alive.

Probably the only thing keeping Sorun going by now was that one single hope.

"This... must be where they held the wedding..." That's what Sorun thought when he stumbled into... whatever this could even be called. Some large venue covered in ashes. There were a few scraps of burnt, white cloth clinging onto tables that were half-burnt to oblivion, a few chairs standing amidst giant piles of dark ash, and a small stage - what used to be a small stage, anyways - and the remains of an altar in front. Really, with how little remained, he could have been completely wrong.

Clack!

Sorun froze when he felt the tip of his foot hit something mid-step. He looked down to see what he'd made contact with, but he couldn't make it out from all the ash and debris covering it. He lifted his foot up to brush aside some of the fine debris, and then shook it off a bit to help reveal the item. His breathing cut out in a choked gasp when he saw what was under all the ash.

"Oh shit." It was hard not to recognize Nicole's handheld body, even when it was buried under all of that darkened ash. He was less worried about how dirty it was, however, and more with what the state of the AI living in it was, so he'd bent down immediately and began to dig through the ash to get to it. "Oh no no no wait wait hold on..."

Frantically, he'd dug out the handheld from the ashes and held it up to inspect it. The handheld was already opened and, thankfully, all the buttons seemed intact and the screen remained uncracked. Aside from all the ash staining it, the handheld seemed completely okay. It was off, though. The screen was dark. Nicole wasn't there, and Sorun didn't know how to force her on or if she was even okay-

The screen turned on.

"... Uh..." Sorun couldn't even utter words. He could barely even think straight, let alone articulate words. The relief he felt seeing the screen turn on was overshadowed by the sheer devastation all around him.

"... Hello, Sorun." The voice that came from the handheld, Nicole's voice, was unusually calm. Calm, but at the same time she sounded despondent. "I am in need of your assistance."

"N-Nicole, I, I don't, what..." Sorun shook his own head to try and think clearer. "What happened?" he asked, wanting to at least start with that.

She didn't answer him. Instead, a small lens on the handheld's screen began emitting a large, rectangular beam of light upwards. Sorun looked up at the light, widening his eyes when he saw what it was: a holographic projection, floating right there in the air above them. Being displayed on the projection was an otherwise relatively un-exploded Knothole. That was, until bombs and munition shells began to rain down on the town.

"Dr. Robotnik's Egg Fleet had suddenly appeared without warning. They... simply unloaded their ordinance upon all of Knothole," Nicole explained. "It was too fast for anybody to do anything. Nothing was spared."

Sorun grimaced at the sight of all the bombs raining down on the homes in the recording, and with a shuddering breath, asked, "And... the people...?"

The holographic projection changed. It was a different angle, in a different location. And what was being displayed in the image had Sorun pause in absolute disbelief at what he saw.

He thought he was looking at a robot at first. One of Robotnik's Badniks, one that stood about five or six times taller than Sorun himself. It looked similar to an Egg Pawn: same red and black coloring, same round main body, same large hands and feet connected by spindly, metal limbs, complete with spikes. The weapons were odd, with the left hand having some strange, circular red and silver shield with a star connected to the back of it and the right one, to Sorun's disdain, was wielding that brown, checkered wrecking ball and chain he'd had the misfortune of encountering once like it was some kind of flail.

But then he got to the head, and the head was most certainly nothing like an Egg Pawn's. It wasn't the head of a robot- it was a helmet. A helmet that for some godforsaken reason had a orange, metal mustache bolted to the front of it, but Sorun knew it was a helmet. He knew it was a helmet because its face was a transparent, blue-tinted visor. And inside of that visor he saw Dr. Robotnik himself, wearing that demented smile of his.

It wasn't a robot. It was a... mechanized suit of some sorts. A mech suit.

There were people on the projection fighting Eggman and his mech suit. Freedom Fighters. It was... going exceptionally poorly. Every so often Eggman's mech suit would simply point at somebody, and a yellow beam of energy would fire out, envelop the poor victim, and, to Sorun's shock, they'd completely disappear. Just like that.

He saw Bunnie flying in through the air towards the mech suit, wearing a torn and tarnished wedding gown. She'd been vaporized by one of the yellow beams before she'd even come close. Mighty and Knuckles were there, trying to grab at and physically strike at the suit. They did absolutely no damage. They were vaporized, too.

Sonic was there, too, but not even he could do anything. He didn't get to see the full fight, there were moments where the recording would fizzle out and cut to a new angle, but Sorun got the gist. He also saw that in addition to the laser and the weapons the mech had on hand, the thing even had missile pods on the back of each shoulder. Between all the missiles, lasers, the weapons, and the fact that mech moved deceptively fast and was apparently horrifically strong and ludicrously durable if Knuckles and Mighty not being able to even scratch the thing said anything, Sonic couldn't beat it. The most he'd managed to do was damage the shield by making a dent in the center of it after flying in from out of the camera's view moving at absurd speeds.

But he'd still been beaten. Bashed around by the shield. Smacked around by that flail. Grazed by yellow laser beams fired out from openings at the back of the mech's hands and blown up by missiles. He didn't seem too badly hurt, and Sorun attributed that solely to the billion-ring durability thing Sonic possessed, but apparently even that couldn't hold up to that kind of assault. That suit of Eggman's beat him down like it was nothing.

He felt anger seeing it. Anger that he'd never felt before, that Sorun himself was surprised at feeling. An emotion that was so intense that it was completely foreign to him. His face seemed calm, though he was lightly quavering, and his irises and pupils had constricted to pinpricks at the sight and were rapidly shaking along with his eyes. Every single time he saw Sonic get hurt by the mech made another spurt of pure rage go through Sorun, and his mind began to unravel into a jumbled mess of furious mutterings as he watched on.

"Sorun," Nicole's voice had called out, soft but still gloomy, "please do not grip the handheld so tightly. You'll hurt yourself."

Nicole's voice brought Sorun back. The shaking ceased, his thoughts returned to normal, and his eyes dilated back to their normal size. He looked down at Nicole's handheld, blinking once when he saw that his fingers were gripping on tightly enough that the knuckles were white. "Sorry, Nicole," he muttered to her before looking back up at the hologram.

Predictably, Sonic had lost. His defeated form had been picked up by one of the mech's hands. Sonic struggled, and based on how long it was going on Sorun assumed Eggman was giving some hammed-up victory speech to the defeated hedgehog, but without the projection having any volume, it was hard to tell. It hardly mattered, though, as the end result was the same. Sonic was vaporized by a yellow beam of energy like everybody else had been, and meanwhile all around Knothole continued to be relentlessly pounded by the fleet of floating ships above until all that was left were smoldering ruins.

The projection cut out right there. Sorun took a deep inhale, something that failed to calm him down even the slightest amount, and looked down towards the handheld he held in his hands. "S-so that... that suit or whatever Robotnik was in, it... it vaporized everyone?" He gulped. "Did-did they-?"

"They remain alive, if that is what you are wondering," Nicole interrupted. Sorun felt himself breath out in relief, though he still looked to Nicole for answers. "I am familiar with that technology he was using. It was not a weapon. It was teleportation. He simply used that device to transport anybody struck by it. I was dropped and lost in all the fighting."

"Transport?" Sorun repeated. "So everyone-"

"The entire population of Knothole was captured by Dr. Robotnik using that teleportation beam, yes," Nicole confirmed. "I believe it would be reasonable to assume they were all taken to New Megaopolis."

"Of course they were," Sorun sighed out. It was a weight off his shoulders. The complete annihilation of Knothole was still crushing him, but knowing everybody was alive was a small comfort. Small, as he wasn't sure how good alive was if they were all captured and being held there of all places.

A silent beat passed of Sorun continuing to silently stand there, in the ashen ruins of what had once been a wedding ceremony inside of what used to be a small city, holding his AI friend in his hands. Eventually Nicole chose to speak up. "Sorun, we must rescue them."

"Oh, rescue them? From the most dangerous city in the entire world run by the same guy that just bombed out Knothole? That place? We're gonna rescue everybody from that place? The two of us?" A disbelieving, broken chuckle left Sorun. "You gotta be kidding me. You just showed me a video of him personally beating everybody including Sonic and you're saying we're gonna march right up to that and go save everybody?"

"Sorun-"

"Argh, I know, I know he have to!" he yelled out. The Earthling began pacing around, nervously and erratically, as he began to rapidly mutter out his thoughts. "I-I mean we have to, there's nobody else, there's literally nobody else that can go and save them, and who knows what's gonna happen to them if we do nothing, we-we just have to, there's no other way."

"Sorun-"

"But you're asking us to walk into impossible odds here, and we- what are we supposed to do, Nicole, I can't just walk up into New Megaopolis and fight off everything in that city, and, and-" he began to hyperventilate from sheer panic, "- oh my god, Nicole, I can't, this isn't, I can't-"

"Sorun!"

There was a flash of light, cubes swirled in front of Sorun, and before he knew it Nicole's holo-lynx body was gripping him by the shoulders and staring the panicking human straight in the eyes. He didn't know what got him to stop: her sudden appearance, the physical contact, or the grim expression she wore, but regardless, she had gotten Sorun to pause and focus on her.

"I know this is bad, but I need you right now," she said, firmly squeezing down on Sorun's shoulders to get the point across. "I realize the odds are massively against us, and I realize that us two being the only able-bodied Freedom Fighters available to rescue all of Knothole from Dr. Robotnik is far from ideal and that we are severely under-equipped to carry out such an undertaking, but we have. No. Choice. I have a plan, but I cannot do this without you. So please calm down."

Another shuddering breath left Sorun. He looked down away from Nicole's eyes. "I'm so scared, Nicole," he whispered out.

"I know. I am, too," she said, hands still on his shoulders. "But I'm more scared of what's going to happen to our friends and everybody that lived in Knothole. So we need to do this."

"Our?" Sorun repeated, before then slowly shaking his head. "Yeah. Our."

The hands on his shoulders and the body connected to them disappeared. Sorun looked up at the empty space, looked down at the small lit-up computer in his hands, and sighed. He then found the closest, most intact-looking chair, approached and sat down in it, and then finally addressed Nicole after setting her down in his lap.

"Alright. Alright... so what is this plan of yours and what do you need me to do?"


"Ladies, gentlemen, and Mobians of all ages!"

Once upon a time this storage space used to be little more than a larger-than-average silo connected to the city's power grid via all the devices hanging off of the ceiling. That was a product of a bygone-idea, though, and by now the building had expanded. "Expansion" may have been a generous word, though, as the building itself was still a silo. But bigger, wider. More spacious.

The main purpose remained the same, though, and that was to house the aforementioned devices from earlier: pods. Perfectly spherical, transparent pods with a blue tinge hanging off of metal stalks suspended from the ceiling, like giant, artificial grape vines. And inside of each of these pods was a Mobian.

All of them were in varying states of grief and despair. It wasn't hard to imagine why, seeing as they'd all just seen their home be completely annihilated before they were all abducted by the same man that was currently leering at them from the end of a small walkway jutting out of the wall of the silo, high enough towards the ceiling that it was near the pods. Some of the captured Mobians were harshly glaring towards the round man, others were pressing themselves against the glass-esque walls of the pods to try and reach out towards family members and friends near them, while others were breaking down entirely. Mostly the children.

"I'd apologize for the cramped accommodations, but if you can see it past all the tears I've made some expansions since I first planned this all out," Eggman continued, walking towards near the end of the walkway before stopping and leaning on the side railings. "I've had so much free time on my hands, you see, that I've busied myself renovating all sorts of locations around my city. I saw you all were doing the same thing in Knothole! Eh, you know, before I blew it up, anyways."

A muffled banging drew Eggman's attention to two particular bunches of the grape-like pods. There was one section that contained the entirety of the Chaotix, all of which were glaring at him with the exception of Mighty and Knuckles, who were attempting to punch through the material trapping them. On the other side of them, on a different bunch of pods, was the Freedom Fighters, who were mostly all also glaring at him, except for Amy, who was trying to pound her way out of the pod with her hammer. Nobody was able to do any damage and free themselves, though. Not even a crack was made.

"Don't even bother. I triple-reinforced those Egg Grapes in preparation for all of this. There's very little in this entire world that could break those things," Eggman commented, his eyes staying on the pods containing the Chaotix for a bit before he focused on the bunch containing the Freedom Fighters. He looked up, making a low chortle when he saw Sally standing in her pod and staring down at him in utter contempt. "Oh, don't give me that look, princess. You all knew this was a long time coming." He looked a bit to the side. His smile grew wider when he saw Antoine and Bunnie, both facing each other and pressing their palms against the glass with distraught looks on their faces. "And my, my, my, to think I carried this out during a wedding of all days. I couldn't have had better timing."

"Don't talk about them like that!"

Robotnik's head snapped down towards a pod that was a bit lower than theirs. In that pod was a lone hedgehog Mobian, sitting down with his arms crossed as he glowered towards the Doctor with a deep frown on his face. Failing to contain some of his laughter, Eggman leaned off the railing and walked to the other side of the walkway only to them lean over the other railing while addressing Sonic.

"Oh-ho-ho, Sonic, come now. I'm just having a bit of fun. How are you doing, by the way? I know that enhanced durability of yours gained from all those Power Rings you absorbed in the past took the brunt of the beating, but you're still looking a bit sore over there," he said.

Sonic's scowl deepened. "I'm sore over a lot more things than that, Eggman."

"Is it because of the wedding? I'm being completely serious, I didn't even plan for that. It was a happy accident."

"You call ruining their wedding a happy-" Sonic cut himself off and shook his head. "No! I'm sore because you destroyed Knothole!"

"Huh. Yes, I suppose that would put a damper on your mood, wouldn't it?" Eggman completely ignored the angered snarl Sonic made at him, instead choosing to look around at the grape-like pods all around him. "Huh. You know, I'm not seeing that human lad Sorun in any of these Egg Grapes." He turned around to look at the end of the walkway, towards the short Overlander in a green jacket manning a small console at the end. "Snively, did you happen to see him while you were going around zapping Mobians in that battle suit you wound up wrecking?"

"No, sir, I didn't," Snively answered, a displeased look on his face. "Believe me, I would have taken my time with him if I had."

"You would have had the rug pulled out from under you if a bunch of little furry resistance fighters is all it took to destroy that battle suit I lent you," Robotnik muttered under his breath before turning back to Sonic. "Let me guess. He didn't go to your friends' wedding?"

Eyes still narrowed in anger, Sonic turned his head away from him. "I'm not sayin' anything to you."

"I think I know what happened," Eggman said. "Dear old Sorun wanted to go round up the last remaining Chaos Emeralds to amass more powers for his arsenal, and didn't want to waste time going to a meaningless little shindig, which just so happened to be when I attacked Knothole? Am I about right?" Utter silence on Sonic's part, though he did flinch, causing Eggman to hum. "Your silence says it all," he said. "Can't say I'm too surprised. The boy does seem unusually pragmatic like that, especially for his age. And I can't say I blame him for not wanting to attend a wedding by people he hates."

Sonic angrily stirred. "He doesn't hate-"

"Did you know," Eggman interrupted, "that way back when, around when he acquired his first Emerald, I reached out to him?" That got Sonic's attention, along with the rest of the Freedom Fighters and Chaotix who were now staring at him with widened eyes. "So he never told you, then. Strange. I knew of his circumstances through special means and thought to win him over to my side. I really thought it was a sure thing, too. A human taken from another zone by, from his perspective, strange animal monsters? I would have thought he'd leap at the first opportunity to jump ship and join somebody whose kind was related to his. I even tried spicing the deal up by lying and saying I'd find him a way home."

By now Sonic was shaking in rage at the news. Some of the Freedom Fighter and Chaotix had paused, too, mixtures of surprise, shock, and disbelief flowing into their features as they continued listening to the Doctor. Sonic, through all the anger and shock, looked sad under it all. Saddened to hear that the false possibility of going back to his zone had been dangled in front of Sorun, knowing full-well how much something like that meant to the Earthling.

"But, to my complete bafflement, he refused my offer," Eggman said, causing everybody who cared enough to listen to freeze. "Went on and on about for as much as he hated you all, he hated me even more and refused to work with me and went into all other sorts of tripe. I never could figure out what goes through the boy's head that he refused me. Why he'd choose to suffer alongside all of you when he could have joined me at the drop of a hat. Why he chose to stay with people he utterly detested..." Eggman shook his head. "I just don't understand why he made that choice."

Sonic's arms went limp by his side as his entire form seemed to deflate. "Sorun..."

"I'll give him one thing, though. He's got something none of you animals possess. Something few Overlanders and humans possess that almost no Mobian can ever have. A drive to see things through to the end," he said. "I saw some real potential in him. More than my good-for-nothing and failure of a schemer nephew over there, at least." The dirty glare briefly sent to him by Snively completely unaffected Robotnik. "He's not very high in the brains department, sure, but he has some real grit. But oh well. If he wants to waste his life allying himself with your lot, that's his foolish choice. Ah, well. He can serve another purpose at least."

"What...? What are you talking about?" Sonic demanded, looking back up towards the Doctor.

Eggman, in response, rolled his hand around while sighing. "You know, this whole thing happening right now? Me destroying Knothole and trapping you all in these Egg Grapes? It was supposed to happen months ago," he explained. "In fact, I was getting ready to commit to the whole thing, but then, but then! I acquired the Chaos Emeralds."

"You mean you stole the Emeralds." Eggman lazily looked upwards when he heard Sally address him. "You took the gray Chaos Emerald that was being held in Castle Acorn at the time! You had whatever you sent to retrieve it murder Hershey and a handful of guardsmen just to get it!"

"Yeah, and how did you even get all the other ones, anyways?" Sonic asked. "Last we checked the other six Emeralds were supposed to be locked away in the Special Zone with that Feist guy. Now that zone doesn't even exist anymore. What'd you do?"

"Hmph!" Eggman made a loud huff and turned his head to the side. "I'm Dr. Robotnik, you nimrods. Nothing's above me when it come to getting what I want. And I wouldn't want to bore you with the details." He faced back towards Sonic. "With the Emeralds, I concluded that a... change of strategy, as it were, was in order. So the plan was put on halt, and you all know the rest. I'd used my Emeralds to power up production of my forces, you all slowly took them back, summoned the brat, yadda yadda. And admittedly it was fun, taking over the whole world, bending the Kingdom of Acorn and the Overlanders to their knees only to then see them crawl their way back up to power and push me back to my city. It was a blast, really. But the fun's dried up." Eggman slumped over the railing, still looking towards Sonic as he ran a hand over his mustached face. "We've done this time and time again, Sonic. Gone through the same hoops, run through the same loops, the whole shebang. We've come back and forth again and again, and it's just gone droll. Especially after what we went through, because that? The two near-ultimates of both spectrums? That was the peak of our game, Sonic. It doesn't get any better than that." He sighed deeply, and then used his arms to push off the railing. "So we're done. It's game over. I'm ending things. I'm ending you, your resistance, and the entire kingdom right here before I build my forces back up to take over the world. Again. Originally I was going to spare you from this so I could see you flounder around trying to uselessly overthrow me after I finally pulled the curtain on all your friends and family, but now that the act's grown stale, Sonic, I've decided to just leave that spot to Sorun. He'll give me a bit more entertainment at least before I put him through the same thing I'm about to do to all of you." His leering smile returned, wide enough to show teeth. "Oh, but don't worry, Sonic. You'll still always be my favorite nemesis. So just for that, you get to watch as I drain the life out of every single Mobian here before I finally get to you."


"Are you serious? That's your plan? That's what you've been working on this entire time!?"

It seemed ludicrous even by this world's standards. It had to be true, though- it was coming from Nicole of all people, and he didn't know anybody that would make a lie like this in the situation they were in. It didn't make it sound any less insane, though.

"Yes, that is indeed the plan," Nicole plainly stated, the handheld still resting in Sorun's lap.

The Earthling made a small groan and rubbed at his forehead. "Why does he even have something like that just lying around...?" he mumbled. "So this whole time you've been making programs and adjustments and all that, this whole time, just for something like this?"

"Do you doubt me, Sorun?"

He shook his head. "No, of course not, it's you and you're amazing, so of course it'll work, it's just..." He cut himself off, sighed, and then continued speaking. "Okay, it at least solves the problem of where to send everyone after we rescue 'em. There's still the actual problem of actually rescuing them, though," he said. "We don't know where in the city they are, what kind of resistance we're gonna be fighting, if that big mech suit's gonna be there or not, and you need- you need, what, a connection to the network, you said?"

"Yes, any stable accessway so that I can make my way through the Egg Network should suffice."

"Okay, so adding that on top of everything else... what do you suppose we do?"

"We'll have to improvise."

Sorun's mind went completely silent for a few moments after he'd heard that. He'd gone as far as to look forwards with a blank look on his face, after which he looked back down at Nicole once his thoughts resumed. "That's not a plan," he said.

"We have no time to formulate anything past that with everyone's lives on the line, nor do we have any available data as to what we'll be encountering," she reasoned. "Ergo, we will have to work with what we have."

As much as he didn't like what he was hearing, she was right. It really was do or die, and the longer they waited, the worse off they were. There wasn't any time to plan. "... Guess we got no other option. Let's do it," Sorun finally said in agreement. He reached into his pocket, felt around for a bit, and then held out the Chaos energy radar gifted to him by Tails. He stared down at it briefly, and then sighed as he reared his arm back.

"Sorry for wasting your time again, Tails," Sorun thought as he threw the radar away. Nicole then took the radar's place in his pocket, after which he stood up off the chair. One manifestation of Yamato later and a portal was cut in the space in front of him.

And then, not wasting a moment longer, Sorun jumped through.


"Well, I think that's enough words said between enemies. It's been a good game, all, but it's time we ended things." Eggman walked away from the railing and began walking towards the end of the walkway, where Snively and the terminal was. "I think a little demonstration of things to come is in order, to get you all good and terrified." He nodded towards Snively. "Do it."

Wordlessly, Snively began to tap away at the console. A long, robotic arm reached down from the ceiling and grabbed at one of the pods. Cries of protest and outrage were heard as the pod was disconnected from the main branch and brought right in front of Eggman, who did little else but smile at the occupant of the pod as he leaned against the railing.

"Charmy Bee!" Eggman exclaimed as he pointed at the pod. "Haven't I already..."


If there was an upside, it was that Sorun had the foresight to stick to the rooftops in New Megaopolis. Surprisingly, most of the robot patrols were relegated down to the streets and alleyways. And he supposed that traversing by rooftop may have been a challenge for some, especially from how spread out some of these buildings were, but he could teleport. And fly. Traveling via rooftop was trivial to him.

He knew this city used to be New York in the old world, but traversing through it now he saw almost no architecture that was familiar to him. Granted he'd only ever seen the city through screens from movies and games, but even then nothing here screamed "New York" at him. A result of all the buildings having been replaced by these tall, metal ones, he supposed.

The Statue of Liberty was still there, though. Somehow. Half-sunk into the river at the edge of the city and eroded to hell, but it was there. So there was that.

"Ugh, this is getting us nowhere," Sorun grumbled under his breath as he stopped on a rooftop. All around him were nothing but metal buildings. A whole city full of nearly identical-looking metal buildings. "They could all be in any one of these places and we don't have time to search 'em all."

"Are there any buildings with any identifiable features?" Nicole's voice asked from inside his pocket.

"No, nothing. There's-" Sorun stopped when he turned around, his eyes focusing in on one structure in particular. It was a large silo-like building out in the distance, connected to another building by what looked like a small, enclosed walkway. What really caught Sorun's interest was the words "Egg Vineyard" stenciled on the side of the silo in red, along with a red drawing of Eggman's face right below it.

"Egg Vineyard?" Sorun thought. "Why does that sound so familiar? Wait..."


"This was all just because I found a shell-like artifact while raiding and destroying some lost, ancient civilization I found in a hidden valley in down the way in the lower continent. Inhabitants seemed like a cheerful bunch. I put them all in Egg Grapes and harvested their life energy for fuel before destroying their home and putting an oil refinery there."


"Eggman said he destroyed some lost civilization for this thing. Mentioned grapes or something."


Sorun's eyes narrowed in the direction of the silo. "I have a sneaking suspicion..."


White energy began to race down the robotic arm holding the Egg Grape that Charmy was trapped inside of. The Doctor and his nephew watched on in sadistic glee as the energy came closer and closer to the pod, while the bee inside looked on in a mixture of defiance and slight fear. Those in the other pods were mainly just looking on in horror as the white energy came closer, with members of the Chaotix and Freedom Fighters calling out his name while uselessly banging on the surface of their pods.

Before the energy had reached the pod, though, something had happened that drew everybody's attention. A thin, blue line instantly appeared on the wall of the silo, opposite of the walkway both Eggman and Snively stood on. Line upon blue line was cut into the wall, a few at first, and then ten.

A blue form crashed through the wall that had been cut by the blue lines. It streaked through the air, propelled by two spectral wings as it shot straight towards the arm holding Charmy's pod. Right before the white energy had reached the pod, the winged form flew by the pod, after which a blue line appeared on the mechanical hand holding the pod.

The hand fell away, having been separated by the cut made into it. Charmy's pod had been spared from the energy that had been threateningly close to it, though now the bee was screaming as his pod began to fall down towards the ground. It had only dropped a few feet, though, as a blue, clawed hand had reached out and grabbed the pod before it dropped too far.

The pod's sudden stop had made Charmy slam into the rounded wall of the pod, causing him to elicit a small grunt. He recovered quickly, a hand reaching up to rub at his sore head as he looked up at what had caught him. His hand fell limply to his side, and his eyes widened along with everybody else's when he saw what was holding him.

The arm holding Charmy and the Egg Grape he was in was a long, feathered, spectral arm attached to the back of the Earthling that was currently dangling above Charmy's position. A second blue, feathered arm was holding onto a stalk of Egg Grapes to keep himself aloft, while his left hand held an empty black scabbard and his right a katana. Sorun's eyes, however, were focused out in front of him, where he was level with Eggman and Snively who were both still standing on the walkway and staring wide-eyed at him.

"Haven't you done enough to him already?" Sorun asked the both of them in a quiet, hollow voice. He didn't give them the time to answer, as dozens of blue, spectral swords instantly appeared all around them.

To Sorun's surprise, though, Eggman was quick on his feet. Quicker than any man his size had a right to be. Probably from all the adrenaline that began pumping through his system when he realized he was about to get skewered by swords. He hadn't even said a word; he'd simply grabbed Snively and began sprinting down the walkway towards the silo's wall. Sorun had tried hitting him with the Summoned Swords, but to his frustration, Eggman had been too quick. The door on the silo's wall was closed behind Eggman, with the spectral swords sticking right into it.

Making an annoyed "tsk" sound, Sorun willed the Bringer Claw to lift up Charmy and the pod. It was set down on the vine of Egg Grapes containing the Chaotix, in a position so that it was wedged between the other pods and wouldn't fall away. Sorun's Bringer Claws then pulled him up against the pod, the teen landing in a small crouch as the arms disappeared.

"All this for orange juice..." Sorun sighed to himself. "... Hey, Charmy," Sorun softly greeted. He sheathed Yamato and looked to the side at the bee Mobian who was pressing himself against the pod's surface as he looked at Sorun. "I really panicked when I went back to Knothole and saw the place, you know? I thought you all got turned into Mobian jerky. Don't scare me like that."

"S-Sorun...!" Charmy's voice began to waver. Some tears began to fall down his face, happy, relieved tears, though his mouth kept changing from a smile to a worried expression. "Eggman, he... he almost...!"

"I know, Charmy, I know." Sorun reached his free hand out and placed it on the pod, over where one of Charmy's hands was. "I'm not gonna let him hurt you or anybody else, alright? It's gonna be fine. Don't worry."

"I'm reading a port access nearby, Sorun." Sorun removed his hand from the pod and reached into his pocket, bringing out Nicole's handheld. "Plug me in there. Hurry!"

Blinking, Sorun squinted at the walkway Eggman and Snively had been on prior, towards the end where the console was. "You mean that dinky little middle-of-nowhere co-"

"I already told you I just need a stable accessway!"

"Alright, I'm on it!" Straightening up a bit at Nicole's raised voice, Sorun Tricked to the console he'd been looking at. A Bringer Claw briefly appeared to rip the front plate off to reveal the electronics within, where he saw a cable with a port that matched the slot on the handheld's underside. He set the handheld down and plugged the port in. "So how long are you gonna need?" Sorun asked.

"As long as I need to do what is necessary."

"That... tells me nothing, but alright, I'll do what I can." Sorun turned around, and then looked back towards Nicole. "I'll come get the handheld before we all leave."

He left Nicole behind after teleporting away once more, this time towards the bunch of Egg Grapes that held the Freedom Fighters. He appeared kneeling down on one knee in the middle of the grouping of pods, with him kneeling down on the one Sonic was kept in specifically. The teen immediately felt all eyes on him, making him lower his head a bit.

"... Hi, guys," he said. "So... this is lookin' pretty bad, huh?"

"Sorun!" Looking to the side, Sorun spotted Tails trapped in an Egg Grape next to him. "You're here! How'd you find us!?"

"... Dumb luck and a halfway decent memory, mostly." He took a quick glance around. It didn't take him much looking to confirm that every single person that had been inside of Knothole was here, something that twisted at something in his gut. From all the civilians that lived there, to a few familiar faces he recognized at a second glance, to even the entirety of Sally's royal family all being bunched together on a single bunch of Egg Grapes nearby.

And then there were the Chaotix and Freedom Fighters. For some reason the intense looks they were giving him affected him more than everybody looking at him. He would have figured having the entire city's population focused solely on him would have done something to his nerves, but given the situation... he felt oddly calm. But the looks the Freedom Fighters and Chaotix were giving him disrupted that. He wasn't sure why.

Sorun took another glance to his side, spotting Antoine and Bunnie. He winced slightly and turned away, and then looked up. Sally was above him, staring down at him like everybody else. The same was said for Sonic, who was below Sorun's feet.

"So, uh... Sorun," Sonic started. He seemed like one of the most relieved-looking persons in there, but there was something else behind his tone of voice and the way he was looking at Sorun. From all the mixed emotions showing on Sonic's face, though, Sorun couldn't tell what was on his mind. "Er... glad you're here and everything, but what now?"

"Mm." Sorun looked forwards. "Don't worry too much about it, Sonic. I have a plan." He paused. "Well... Nicole has a plan. I'm just the guy following it."

"A plan?" Sorun looked up at Sally. "She has a plan?" she asked him.

The Earthling nodded. "Yeah. It's a pretty crazy plan, but it's better than anything I have. Which is nothing."

"Does that plan involve getting us all out of these grape things?"

"Erm... yeah. Eventually." He shook the sheathed sword held in his left hand. "Yamato should be able to cut everybody out of those easy enough."

Sally blinked in confusion. "Sorun, what do you mean 'eventually'? We need to get out of these things now!"

"Yeah... about that..." Sorun slowly inhaled and looked back forwards. "So here's the thing. Nicole's... she's handling it."

"Handing it?" Sonic parroted. "Handling it how?"

Slowly, Sorun reached up and scratched at his cheek. "I think she'll be mad if I spoil the surprise. Nicole's been planning it for a while now. But don't worry. She's doing something that'll fix this, but she needs time to finish it. And I really doubt Robotnik's gonna just sit around for us while we wait. Case in point..."

A loud, hydraulic hissing noise drew all eyes in the room downwards. A circular aperture down on the ground began to open up, and flying out from the aperture was something that made Sorun give out a low sigh. The mech suit from the video Nicole had shown him. The one that beat everyone. He'd already managed to get into it and pilot it here.

As the opening on the floor closed back up as the mech flew up via jet rockets on the underside of its feet, Sonic let out a loud gasp and began banging on the pod he was in. "Sorun! Sorun, that thing's bad news! You gotta get us all out so we can leave!"

"It's too late for that, Sonic, and Nicole still needs more time," Sorun denied with a shake of his head. "Besides, he'll just use that teleporter beam he has on you all again if I try that. Don't have a choice. Gotta beat it here and now."

"Then at least let us out so we can help you fight it!"

Sorun frowned at the mech suit that was slowly flying up to his position. "Nicole showed me what happened when you all tried fighting it, Sonic. None of you can even hurt it."

"What, and you can!?"

"Yes, because I'm the one with the magic sword that cuts through everything!" Sorun exclaimed, looking back down at Sonic. "Look, I get this is a bad idea, alright, I get it! But there's nothing else I can do! He's just gonna teleport you all again if you try helping me, and I don't want to risk losing you somewhere I can't find you!"

"You can't just fight that thing by yourself!" Sonic yelled at him.

"It's... not ideal, no." Breathing in a deep sigh, Sorun stood up to his feet. "Listen, everyone. I'm going to get you all out of here. If something bad happens to me, though, well... I got a backup plan. No matter what happens, you're all getting out of here." He wrapped the fingers of his right hand around the katana's handle and slid it out of the sheath. "Just hold on, alright? It's gonna be fine. I promise."

He heard everybody begin to call his name out. For the most part he ignored them, choosing instead to look up. He Tricked up to the highest point he could see, at the top of one of the metal grapevines near the ceiling. Once appearing there, Sorun turned around just in time to see the round mech suit floating right across from him, Eggman's own face just barely visible past the visor on the mech's head.

Sorun spun his sword around once, and then pointed it at the mech.

"I've come to retrieve my friends. You can't have them." He took a quick glance around the large room before focusing back on Robotnik. "I'm taking the rest of Knothole back, too, while I'm at it."

"Oh, is that right? Just you and your special sword there?" Eggman asked, voice projected out from the suit he was inside of. "I'll applaud your temerity, Sorun. It's up there with some of the best. It really is. But I think-"

Sorun slowly sheathed his sword, and blue arcs of electricity began to dance along the black scabbard.

"- you've gone a bit far with this one. You are aware I defeated the entirety of the Freedom Fighter with this wonderful machine of mine, correct? Sonic included? With nary a scratch save for the dent on my shield, I might add! And you think that you, with all your powers and your little sword pulled from a storybook, have any chance of-"

A sphere of warped space enveloping the mech suit shut Eggman right up. A myriad of blue slashes assaulted the mech before the warped space dispersed, leaving it floating in the air. Sorun frowned at the sight, slowly pulling Yamato back out of its sheath as he gazed at the mech. He'd done damage- he saw multiple deep scratches over the front of the mech's round body. But that's all he saw.

"Judgement Cut should've cut that thing to pieces," Sorun thought to himself. "The hell's going on here? It shouldn't matter what that suit is made of; Yamato's ability to separate is absolute. It can cut space-time. So how is that thing still in one piece?"

Eggman, or rather, the mech he was inside of, looked down at its frontal half where it had been wounded with the scratches made from Sorun's Judgement Cut. He stared for a few seconds, huffed, and then looked back at Sorun. "Okay. So the sword can cut me. I'll give you that much."

"... What exactly did you do to make that mech resistant to the Yamato?" Sorun questioned him. "That shouldn't be possible."

"Oh-ho-ho! Surprised, are you? Well, Sorun, I'll confess one thing to you: this battle suit I'm using has seen some design improvements since when I first planned this scheme of mine out." The mech suit fanned its arms out to the side. "Formally introducing to everybody present: the Egg Beater!" The arms lowered to the suit's sides. "Mark Two."

"Mark Two?" Sorun repeated.

"Admittedly most of the improvements were some software patches to improve performance and a few new features here and there, though there was one single addition I think you'll specifically appreciate, Sorun." A small seam in the chest of the mech suit appeared. The chest opened up like a pair of cabinet doors, folding outwards to reveal what was inside of the chest cavity.

Sorun felt his grip on his katana tighten when he saw what was inside of the mech.

It was a Chaos Emerald. A gray one. It was locked right into the chest of the mech, with multiple cables attaching the Emerald to the robot it was embedded inside of. The teen was only allowed a single glance, though, as the chest cavity closed right back up and the seam disappeared, leaving behind the floating, slightly-scratched mech that was right in front of Sorun.

"That's right. It's a Chaos Emerald," Eggman confirmed, voice smug. "This puppy can practically run forever with this bad boy powering it. Why, with all of this Chaos energy running through the Egg Beater Mark Two, it's practically invincible, too! Not even that freakishly strong armadillo over there could harm this battle suit with the added durability afforded to me by the energy provided by the Chaos Emerald."

"So he's powering the suit with a Chaos Emerald... and the energy provided by it gave it a huge defense buff. Kind of like what Sonic got with all those Power Rings..." Sorun thought. "If all that Chaos energy powering the mech is the reason why it's resistant to Yamato..." His eyes widened in realization. "Oh, that's why I couldn't cut them out of me... was wondering about that..."

Well, that was incredibly bad if that was the case. He hadn't had any illusions that it'd be as easy as him performing a Judgement Cut or two and that would be the end of it. He didn't think it was going to be this bad, though. He was going to have to fight Eggman and his mech suit for real here if he was going to save everybody. The only saving grace he saw was that it wasn't entirely resistant to Yamato. He could perform damage on it; that was more than anybody else who fought the mech could say they could do. He'd have to chip away at it, but Sorun saw that it was possible.

He just didn't know what would give out first: the mech, or Sorun's own body.

"This isn't good at all..." His hands tightly gripped around the empty scabbard he held in one hand and the katana in the other. He felt slight trembles in his body as he realized that there was a very high chance he'd die right here fighting this thing. He felt more afraid for all the others, though, and what would happen to them if he were to die right here fighting this thing. "Alright... this is the real deal. You're not gonna get any help for this one, Sorun. This isn't like every other time you fought something where it was so weak it was easy or where it was so strong you needed help from others to take it down. You gotta kill this thing on your own. Everybody's depending on it. They'll all die if you lose here, so don't fuck it up. Kinda nerve-wracking, though... knowing everybody in Knothole and all my friends are gonna have to watch this..."

Sorun took a deep breath to help steady himself as best as he could. Do or die time, then.

"... You know, sometimes I think about how unlucky these guys were to get a useless nobody like me when they opened that portal to Earth up all those months ago," Sorun said. The Bringer Claws appeared, folded over his shoulders. "Don't get me wrong. I'm glad they didn't get some psychopath that would of have used the powers they got out of the Emeralds to kill everybody. Because there's people back where I'm from that would have done that. Out of spite for trapping them in this world or 'cause of the power trip or whatever the reason. I guess that's why I can't be too surprised at all the things you do, Eggman. Humans, we're... kinda weird like that, aren't we? Though I can't say there's many people back home whose standards are as bad as yours. Then again, you're not really passing the bar by a very high margin, and in other areas you fall way below it." The Bringer Claws rose up off of Sorun's shoulders. "I'm glad they didn't get somebody like that. I'm not so happy they got somebody as bad as me. Some useless idiot that's never made a good decision in his entire life. Some worthless guy who shafted all his friends for stupid reasons. It just keeps going over in my head again and again. Like a circle." One of the Bringer Claws clenched into a fist, and was then grabbed by the other. "I guess, in the end... we're both pretty terrible people, Robotnik. I'd like to say I'm a bit better, though, since I never enslaved anybody."

The Bringer Claw cracked the other's knuckles. The sound reverberated throughout the entire room, making everybody, even Eggman to an extent, flinch from the sound.

"I don't really know. I'm just rambling at this point." The other Bringer Claw clenched and had its knuckles cracked by the other one, making everybody flinch again. "Useless or not, though, I'm taking everybody here back if it's the last thing I do."

"Oh, is that right?" Eggman asked. "And where exactly do you plan on bringing all these Mobians once you've rescued them from me? In case you've forgotten, I destroyed their only home in this world."

"Who knows? Guess we'll have to see what happens."

"Hmph." The arms and legs on the mech suit slowly shifted into a more battle-ready stance. "It's a nice fantasy, Sorun, but that's all it is: a fantasy," Eggman claimed. "Here's the reality of the situation: you're outmatched and outclassed. Now, I can't just go and teleport you into an Egg Grape as you are since you'll just cut your way out with the katana. So I'm going to use this battle suit to beat you within an inch of your life in front of all your friends here so you're too battered to even lift a finger. Then I'll teleport you into an Egg Grape and suck the very life out of you. Why, with all that Chaos energy running in you from the Emeralds, you alone could probably power my empire for decades! And after that I'll activate the rest of the Egg Grapes, and harvest the lifeforce of every single Mobian here to fuel my empire even further. And it is only after I've drained the life out of every single person here and see the hope drain from his eyes will I finally end that meddlesome hedgehog down there once and for all."

"..." Sorun's eyes narrowed in the direction of the mech suit. The Bringer Claws fanned out to his sides, spectral claws slowly flexing and at the ready. "Try it."

And then, without waiting a moment longer, Sorun Tricked right in front of the mech midair and sliced his katana downwards on the dented shield that had been moved to protect the mech's body.


Dr. Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik

The Nefarious Mastermind


White sparks flew out from the point the katana's blade made contact with the round, dented shield, the sword's power of separation struggling to cut through the shield. It proved unable to do so, as before any real damage could be applied the robotic arm holding the shield had pushed Sorun away. His body had flown through the air for a brief period before he Tricked and appeared on top of a grouping of the spherical pods. He looked up at the flying mech in front of him, staring intently as he saw the wrecking ball in its right hand be swung towards him.

Right before the wrecking ball swung into Sorun, he'd Tricked to the left by a few meters on a different pod to avoid it. The ball swung right past him, after which one of his Bringer Claws extended outwards and clamped down on the chain the ball was attached to. The ball snapped to a stop, its momentum swinging it around back towards Sorun, who willed the second Bringer Claw to reach out and catch it in its claws before it could hit him. And then, with the chain being held right in front of him, Sorun swung his sword down on one of the links.

Just like the shield, the sword didn't cut through. It just emitted white sparks as its edge struggled against cutting the link.

"The chain too, huh...?" Sorun mumbled out. He glanced to the side at the mech the chain was attached to, focusing in on the shield and the deep gash in it his sword had made. "Tch... what absolute hax."

The teen released his hold on the chain, and then willed the Bringer Claw holding onto the wrecking ball to throw it back towards the mech. The throw was successful, as the ball had hit the suit head-on, though, of course, it had done absolutely no damage. It had knocked it back a bit though and seemed to disorient Eggman for just a second, which is when Sorun Tricked.

And then Tricked again.

And again.

Over and over Sorun would teleport all around the mech, so many times that it appeared like he was in multiple places at once. He'd only stop briefly to slash at a random part of the mech suit, and then he would resume repeatedly and rapidly Tricking all around the mech in order to confuse and disorient the pilot. Deep cuts began to form all around its body as Sorun continued doing this, and even though Eggman had gone as far as to try and swing the mech's arms at him, they caught nothing but air as Sorun continued to teleport all around it and Robotnik.

"Well, it's resistant, but not outright immune to Yamato's separation power. I just gotta keep chipping away at it." Sorun performed a final Trick, this time going back on top of one of the grape-like pods surrounding the room they were in. He briefly tasted a coppery taste in his mouth, frowning a bit at the sensation. "Problem is my body's falling to pieces here and I can't keep up a prolonged fight. I can't even feel pain anymore, so that'll actually work with me here, but... I don't know how long it can go before it fails completely. Especially if I keep spamming my powers like this."

A loud whirring sound drew Sorun's attention towards the mech. He saw the two gray missile pods on the back of the mech's shoulders move slightly. Two silver tubes that Sorun recognized as missiles slid out of each pod, four in total, jets of fire spraying out behind them as they launched towards Sorun, who quickly panicked at the sight of them. Fearing that the shockwave from the missiles' explosion would harm those in the pods near him if he simply dodged, the teen willed Summoned Swords to appear next to the missiles and impale them. A set of four swords impaled each missile before they'd even come close to Sorun, causing the jets of flame at the end of each missile to fizzle out. They each harmlessly impacted the pods around Sorun, none of them detonating as the inert weapons fell down to ground floor.

Sighing a bit in relief at the disabled missiles, Sorun glanced back up at the floating mech. He narrowed his eyes a bit, and then began to Trick again, going lower and lower towards the ground floor of the massive room they were it, away from the pods. The teen managed to teleport onto the ground floor just as the mech reached his position, still hovering just above Sorun with the thrusters under its feet. The round, robotic suit lifted both of its arms up, fists both pointed towards Sorun. He saw small, yellow lights in openings on top of both of the wrists and, upon seeing them, Tricked away by a few meters, with two yellow beams firing out from the wrists right after he'd teleported. They struck the position Sorun had been previously standing on, while the human himself was far away from the impact zone, hands around his sheathed katana. He slid Yamato out and back into the scabbard in one motion, and Eggman let out a loud grunt through the mech's speakers when the suit was caught in the middle of another Judgement Cut, adding in dozens of more scratches along the machine's surface.

"Erghh...! Quit moving around like that!" Robotnik growled out. He continued to furiously mash down on multiple buttons in the control seat of the mech, forcing it to continually aim and fire its wrist lasers at Sorun, but every time he'd do so Sorun would just Trick to a different area on the floor to avoid it entirely. He was rocked around in his seat after the mech suffered through another Judgement Cut, causing him to practically smash his fist down on a second button. "Snively! This nuisance is proving more problematic than I anticipated. Send over Metal Sonic to help smooth things over."


In a building nearby to the storage silo both Sorun and Dr. Robotnik were fighting in, a blue, metallic form flew through dark, dimly-lit hallways towards that very destination. The Badnik modeled after Sonic's very visage flew closer and closer towards the battle with but one objective programmed into it: to assist in the fight and detainment of the sword-wielding combatant currently in conflict with its creator. And it had every intention of fulfilling that order.

At least it did until it'd rounded a corner, saw something red blur into its visual sensors, and then heard a loud screech of metal assault its audio sensors as critical damage indicators began flashing in its vision.

Completely stopped in place, Metal Sonic looked down at its chest. The straight blade of a long sword was piercing right through its torso and out its back, through the thruster that propelled it forwards. When it looked up, it saw the end of the sword being held by a figure concealed by a red, hooded cloak, who held both the sword and the robot impaled to it aloft with a single hand.

"No interfering," Rubrum said, swinging his sword to the side. Metal Sonic's body slid right off the blade, crashing to the ground in a roll before stopping on its back. The damage to its body had been catastrophic enough that it could barely move its head enough to see Rubrum walk up to it, sword resting on his shoulder.

He kept walking past the Badnik's body, though right before that he'd kicked Metal's head hard enough that it was whipped to the side, with the sound of multiple gears and sprockets snapping resulting from the kick.

"Tch. Worthless scrap," Rubrum mumbled out as he continued moving away. It was the last thing Metal Sonic's audio receptors were able to pick up before its body went offline completely.


"What do you mean Metal Sonic isn't responding!?" Eggman roared out. When the suit he was in was shaken around due to being assaulted by another Judgement Cut, he continued with, "Then just send me whatever reinforcements we do have! Hurry!"

Light pants began to exit from Sorun's mouth as he stared up at the mech suit floating above him, its surface marred in multiple scratches and cuts suffered from the Yamato. The teen himself didn't know if he was faring any better. On the outside he was without a wound, but he didn't know what the state of his body on the inside was like. Impossible to know without a sense of pain to tell him, but pain or no, the fight was starting to become exhausting for him. Not overly so, for now at least, but enough that he was getting worried.

That worry was multiplied tenfold when Sorun saw multiple hidden panels in the walls nearby begin to open up. Green shapes began to fly out from the panels. Flying robots that Sorun instantly recognized as the Egg Flappers he'd fought on occasion. He stared unblinking as around a hundred of the machines began to surround him, floating in the formation of a long pillar all around him. He was completely closed into the formation of flying Badniks, all hundred of them aiming the laser cannons on their undersides right at him.

"Well, Sorun, I'll give you this much. You did better than anybody else did against my Egg Beater. It's over now, though," Robotnik called out. His flying mech suit continued to hover far above the ground floor of the room, far enough that he saw Sorun and the squadron of a hundred Egg Flappers surrounding him on all sides. "You're through. Completely surrounded and outnumbered. So be a good boy, put down the sword, and go inside of an Egg Grape to save yourself any further embarrassment."

Ignoring Eggman completely, he slowly spun around while looking around at all the flying, plane-shaped Badniks surrounding him. He made a small hum, blinking in acknowledgement to all the robots before stopping in the direction that Eggman's mech suit was in. "Hm... they're kind of close. Aren't they?" He slid the tip of Yamato into its sheath. "Eggman?"

"Hm...?" The head barely visible past the mech's head visor leaned in closer as Sorun fully sheathed the katana. "Just what are you doing?"

Sorun didn't answer. He instead took his right hand off of Yamato's handle, holding the sword completely with his left by the scabbard. He spread his feet out slightly, bringing the sheathed sword down to his waist as he closed his eyes and took a deep, calming breath. He slowly exhaled, the hundred robots continuing to surround him with charged weapons as Eggman and all the captured Mobians of Knothole looked on.

And then he'd opened his eyes, and at the same time a ring of raw power began to emanate out from his body.

The more Chaos-sensitive Mobians watching the fight, such as Sonic and Knuckles, were immediately sent reeling to the back of their pods from the sheer weight of the power that they sensed building up from the bottom of the room, all pouring out from the katana held in Sorun's hand. Surrounding him was a perfectly circular ring of blue energy, almost invisible save for the glowing blue border on the ground and the swirling, shifting blue clouds of energy on the ring's walls. Sorun stood at the center of the ring, while the ring itself was wide enough that it encapsulated all hundred of the Egg Flappers that were surrounding him.

Sorun took another deep breath as his right hand slowly reached for the Yamato's handle. "You're going down..."

"What is this? What are you doing!?" Eggman's mech suit was just outside of the range of the barely-visible, blue circle surrounding Sorun, though he'd piloted the suit to fly back a bit further just to be sure. "Don't just float there gawking!" he yelled down at the robots surrounding Sorun. "Open fire!"

It was too late, though. Before even the first Egg Flapper managed to discharge its laser, Sorun's hand gripped around Yamato's handle. The entire sword briefly flashed a solid blue the instant the teen firmly gripped it.

And then he disappeared.

To most outside observers, time itself came to a standstill. Inside the circle of power there was a slash. A slash that appeared so quickly it seemed to just materialize in the air, as if by nothing. A slash that was so intense the air it cut through was warped, as if space itself had been cut apart. Dozens and dozens more of these slashes appeared in the span of milliseconds inside the frozen time, with multiple blue, phantom outlines of Sorun's body appearing and disappearing within the ring. By the end the phantom images converged back to the center of the ring, forming into Sorun, who was kneeling down on the ground with one knee while holding Yamato and its scabbard at a vertical angle. All around him was a world frozen in time, surrounded by a ring of power and the hundreds of lines segmenting space all around him completely localized in the ring.

Slowly, Sorun began to insert Yamato into its sheath. As he did so the lines of cut space began to slowly converge in on themselves, as if the cut space was knitting back together. It was only when he fully sheathed the sword with a loud clink did three things happen simultaneously: time resumed at its normal pace, and all the cut segments of space completely disappeared, with a few pieces of cut space resembling shattered glass falling down and disappearing. And then the hundred Egg Flappers that had been surrounding him were instantly cut apart to pieces.

Judgement Cut End was what Sorun considered to be the final, ultimate move of the Yamato's, one he'd been striving to figure out ever since he'd acquired the sword. In the games the sword originated from it was known as a "screen clearer" move- as in, any enemy that was visible on the screen when the move was performed was outright killed, if not heavily wounded in the case of the stronger ones. Even on bosses the move would remove entire chunks of the health bar. It was a potent offensive ability indeed.

Recreating the move in reality had been tricky for Sorun, but after some practice in secret away from the others he'd figured it out. The move involved using Yamato's power of absolute separation to separate time itself from it and its user for a brief time, and then cut away space itself inside a predetermined area whose range was dictated by how much Chaos energy Sorun's body would allow to output from the sword. Anything within that circle would be cut apart completely. Not from being cut by the sword, but from the space they occupied being cut by Yamato. It was a cutting ability so absolute there was no defense against it, done at a speed only possible due to time being cut away that hundreds of slashes could be performed before one could even blink.

Really the only limits were that Sorun's body, incompatible with Chaos energy as it was, made it so that Judgement Cut End's absolute range was around ten meters in diameter, and that the ability itself needed some few seconds to fully charge. Sorun considered that the cutting ability of Judgement Cut End more than outweighed the downsides.

Sorun fully stood up to his feet, the blue power that had been radiating around him dispersing completely after his sword had been sheathed. Vestiges of the energy in the form of blue electricity sparking around his body had briefly appeared before vanishing entirely. All around him the cut-apart Egg Flappers fell down to the ground in cut-apart heaps, every single one having been completely sliced apart into unrecognizable bits. A veritable rain of scrap metal fell all around him as Sorun glanced around, searching for where Eggman and the mech suit was.

And then a missile had cut right through the curtain of raining scrap metal, causing Sorun to dramatically widen his eyes and Trick straight upwards. Even so he'd seen the missile too late, and hadn't teleported upwards quite far enough. The missile directly impacted the ground he'd been standing on, the shockwave from the missile blasting outwards and pushing Sorun out, the teen grunting in the process. Even worse was that the shockwave had flung an exorbitant amount of metal shards towards Sorun as a result of the missile's explosion as he was tossed backwards.

Due to his sense of pain being completely dulled, Sorun wasn't entirely sure what happened. He was tumbling over and over through the air and towards the ceiling, though there were multiple points he felt muffled 'thuds' impact his body. Where those points were, though, he couldn't tell, nor could he tell how serious the impacts were. He'd been hit with something- that's all he knew. That was all he could process before he'd made it to near the ceiling, where his body impacted with one of the Egg Grapes. He bounced off of it, fell down, and rolled across the spherical surface of multiple pods before finally sliding to a stop. Sorun coughed once, and then shakily got up to his feet as he glanced upwards at where he hit.

The first thing he'd noticed was that there were streaks of blood along the surface of the pods. He looked down, noticing that there were multiple bits of metal shrapnel that had been blown into him sticking out of his torso. The undershirt he wore under his blue coat was too dark for him too see how bad the bleeding was, but when he touched his hand near where some of the shards were poking out of his body, it had been stained completely red when he brought it out.

The second thing he noticed was that the vision in his right eye was completely blind for some reason.

Confused, Sorun held up his right hand towards his right eye. He felt that there was a stream of blood leaking down his face, a heavy amount. And when he felt around his eye, he felt, to his shock, what seemed to be a long shard of jagged metal. When he looked towards the side, at his own reflection that he could barely make out on the surface of one of the Egg Grapes, he immediately understood what happened and felt a pit drop in his stomach.

"Oh. That ain't good."

One of the pieces of shrapnel that'd been blasted at him had gone straight through his right eye. He couldn't even see if there was any of it left, as the metal shard had gone through the whole socket. He even heard some of the captive Mobians around him gasp out in shock at the sight, though Sorun was less concerned about those and more on his lost eye. Even when Dr. Robotnik and his mech suit floated up to the center of the room, the jets propelling the suit around Sorun's level, the teen continued to hold his hand up to his obliterated eye as he stared at his reflection.

"Oh-ho-ho! Whoops! I didn't mean to hurt you that badly, Sorun," Eggman called out. "It's your own fault for not submitting when I'm the clear winner here, though. And I suppose, in the end, a lost appendage or two isn't going to matter much when I'm just going to convert you into fuel by the end of the day. So hurry up and concede so I can get this show on the road. You've dinged my battle suit up enough as it is."

Sorun never turned towards Eggman, or even made any motion that said he was acknowledging him. He was still staring towards his reflection.

"Really? Oh, for the..." The missile pod on the mech's right shoulder whirred to life. "Here. Maybe another one of these will wake you up."

A missile fired out from a pod and streaked towards Sorun, who continued standing still at his reflection. Not even the sound of the missile screaming towards him, or the sound of some of the Mobians and Freedom Fighters shouting his name, roused him from this state.

And then, just before the missile hit him, his left Bringer Claw snapped upwards and grabbed the shaft of the missile, stopping it in place.

"... Whatever. It's just an eye." Finally, Sorun turned towards Eggman as the Bringer Claw holding the missile crushed it, rendering it inert. Despite the bloodied shard sticking out of his face, his overall expression was overly calm and blank. "I only need the one."

"Theeere we are." The crushed missile was roughly tossed towards the mech, who simply batted it away harmlessly with its shield. "Still got a bit of fight in you, eh? You would have went far if you'd just joined me, Sorun."

Instead of responding to Eggman, the teen Tricked right in front of the mech and slashed at it with Yamato.

Predictably, he'd defended himself with the mech's shield, with Sorun adding another deep gash into the dish's surface. Sorun Tricked around the backside of the mech to try and cut behind it, though, to his surprise, Eggman seemed to have anticipated this and whirled the round mech around. Fast. Startling fast. Fast enough that, in the time it took for Sorun to swing the katana while the mech's back was turned, it whirled completely around in a one-eighty and defended itself with the shield once again. He'd tried Tricking under it, though his Bringer Claws were forced to fly him backwards when Eggman had responded by having the mech kick at him.

He'd tried again and again to get a hit in on Eggman's suit with his katana. To his credit, once in a while Sorun would manage to get one single cut in. They were seldom delivered, though, especially compared to the rate he'd been damaging the robotic armor at the beginning of the fight. He wasn't able to Trick as often, wanting to conserve his strength to try and prolong the fight. His swings were getting incrementally slower and slower. The loss of half of his sight and depth perception was throwing Sorun off, too, making him outright miss some sword strikes.

Eggman, on the other hand, only seemed to be moving faster somehow. That mech suit of his was moving faster than Sorun himself despite its size, and the fact they were fighting in the air seemed to only benefit it further while hindering Sorun. It'd defend itself with the shield too fast for Sorun to counter, or it'd kick and punch at him and he'd be forced to either Trick away or have his Bringer Claws fly him to a safer location. There'd been a few times where he'd had to Trick away just to avoid getting shot at by one of the built-in laser guns on the mech's wrists, and doing that repeatedly was beginning to become taxing to Sorun.

Judgement Cuts weren't working anymore, either. Eggman seemed to have begun to recognize when Sorun was about to perform them, and then adjust accordingly by flying away before getting enveloped in the bubble of warped space. No matter how hard Sorun tried, he kept dodging the Judgement Cuts.

"Getting slower!" Eggman mockingly called out. "I think it's time we brought this to a close!"

The flail with the wrecking ball on its end was extended out from the mech's right hand. It started swinging that around along with the shield and kicking with its legs. It was one more thing for Sorun to keep track of, who was already reaching his limit with how much the robotic suit was pressuring him. At this point Sorun could barely get any hits in, either because the shield kept blocking him, or he had to dodge a kick or the wrecking ball being swung at him. He was too afraid of trying to grab at the ball, too, with his previous experience from the factory. When it'd struck with such force that it'd destroyed his Bringer Claw completely. And he needed them to stay in the air to save on Tricking so much.

He thought of grabbing the chain like he'd done during the beginning of the fight, especially after the wings narrowly pushed him away from the ball hitting him, but he was too worried about Eggman using the mech to resist him if he tried doing that again. He didn't know how much strength its arms had compared to the Bringer Claws, but he wouldn't be surprised to learn it was greater. And he still needed them to fly around with the mech just to keep up.

"None of this is working," Sorun thought after Tricking to the other side of the mech. This proved to help him very little, as Eggman had turned around and resumed his attacks so much that Sorun didn't even get a second's break. "The sword's the only thing that can even hurt it, but he's throwing so much at me that I'm not getting opportunities to cut the suit. The Bringer Claws and Trickster is only good for mobility and dodging at this point, and Summoned Swords are practically worthless except for taking out the missiles. He learned Judgement Cut's timing and is dodging it. Judgement Cut End has too long of a windup, and he already saw it, so that won't work... I'm gonna have to pull that out at this rate." The Bringer Claws harshly flapped and dragged Sorun's body to the side to avoid the wrecking ball being flung at him. "I'm already juggling too many powers as it is, though... don't know how long I could handle adding it on top of everything else... but with how this is going, don't think it's gonna matter if-"

Sorun's own thoughts were cut off when he was forced to Trick to the side when the ball and chain was swung at him again. What happened next, though, was that Eggman had the mech position it's shield in front of the chain it held. The chain bended around the edge of the shield, changing its trajectory and causing the ball to veer around and sail right back towards Sorun.

Unfortunately for Sorun, the wrecking ball approaching him was on a bad angle. His right side, which was completely blind at the loss of his eye. And so, with his focus solely squared on the floating mech in front of him, he was unable to perceive the wrecking ball approaching him from the right side until it was visible in the peripheral of his left eye. By then it was too late.

He'd tried avoiding it. The Bringer Claws attempting to fly him away, and he'd avoided getting hit directly because of it, but he'd still been tagged by the checkered wrecking ball. There was a loud, wet squelch! sound as a result of the hit, and Sorun felt a dull impact somewhere on his body. The force of the hit was strong enough that he was thrown completely backwards, near towards the ceiling where all the bunches of Egg Grapes were.

Once again he found himself bouncing across the rounded surfaces of the pods. The hit had broken his concentration and caused the Bringer Claws to disappear, so they couldn't help reorient himself. He'd at least managed to catch himself with his left hand, both it and the bottom of his feet sliding along the pods until he'd slid to a halt. It was only when he stopped moving completely did Sorun breath out a single sigh, lightly panting from the exhaustion of the fight. He stood up to his feet, rather easily after he noticed his body felt a bit lighter than usual, and then reached his right hand out.

Only... nothing happened.

Blinking his one eye in confusion, Sorun tried reaching his hand out once more. Again, nothing happened. He turned his head out to the right side so he could see what the problem was, and then froze immediately when he saw what it was.

His right arm all the way up to the shoulder was completely gone. Not even the sleeve from the coat was there anymore, having been torn completely off when the wrecking ball had hit him. All that remained was an empty shoulder socket that was gushing a stream of blood.

"Oh. That... really ain't good..." Sorun thought, still staring towards the missing arm in surprise.

He couldn't hear much besides his own shallow breathing and the sound of the blood from his wound splashing onto the pod he was standing on. He faintly made out people calling out his name, forcing his eye to glance out to the side. He caught the shocked and horrified faces on all the Freedom Fighters and Chaotix staring at him, and seeing those faces caused a twinge of guilt to flash in Sorun as he looked at the wound. "Well, could be worse. 'Least I can't even feel this. I don't wanna think about how it'd look for them if that wasn't the case..."

Eggman and the robotic suit he was in had flown right in front of the grouping of pods Sorun stood on top of, though the teen was more focused on the missing arm than the mech. Even after he began speaking Sorun didn't bother to turn towards him.

"Er, Sorun... this is going kind of far. Wouldn't want to prematurely end this by accidentally having you bleed out in the middle of the fight," Eggman said. "How about we end it right here, huh? I think we all get the point, but you've lost."

"You know... Honey put a lot of effort into this coat." It was only then did Sorun turn his face back towards the mech, his expression still mainly impassive and his voice calm and even. It seemed to unnerve Eggman by the way his mustache, visible from beyond the mech's visor, seemed to straighten out in shock. "She's gonna kill me for wrecking this thing. Guess I can't blame her. She's got a real screw loose, but the stuff she makes is premium. I'll never tell this to her face, but I really appreciate the effort she goes through for me." He blinked his eye and began to glance around. "Oh, wait, I guess she'd be here somewhere, wouldn't she? Man, she better not have heard that..."

"How are you doing this?"

"... Hm?" Sorun focused back on Robotnik. "Doing what?"

"This! Acting so... nonchalant!" he exclaimed, forcing the mech to wildly gesture towards Sorun. "You lost an arm and an eye! You should be rolling around screaming in agony, not worrying about the stupid coat! Nobody has the kind of mental fortitude needed to just completely ignore wounds like that the way you're doing, so how are you doing it!?"

"I dunno." Sorun shrugged. "Maybe I'm more scared of what you're gonna do to all these people than the wounds. You ever think about that?" That wasn't the real reason, of course, but it brought Sorun a bit of satisfaction seeing Eggman flounder like this. And he needed the breather.

"Hrrgh... fine, don't tell me. It doesn't matter," Eggman claimed. "You can't fight me after losing your sword arm, Sorun. It's over."

"Lost an arm? What do you mean?" The right Bringer Claw appeared over Sorun's back. "I have spares."

After speaking, something odd began to happen to the Bringer Claw. It began to shrink down and reform slightly, while at the same time the base of the blue, spectral arm began to move forwards. By the time it was done slightly shifting its shape and position, the Bringer Claw had perfectly fit itself over where Sorun's arm used to be. In its place was a blue, transparent arm, one with claws for fingers and spectral feather sticking out of the forearm. Sorun held the spectral arm up to his face, experimentally flexing the arm's clawed fingers before nodding in satisfaction and lowering it.

"There, see? Good as new. Sorta." The Yamato was re-summoned in Sorun's left hand, after which he grabbed the handle with his spectral hand an unsheathed it. He rose an eyebrow in surprise when he willed the arm to experimentally lift the sword up and down, and then had it spin the sword around a few times in a wheel too fast for his eye to perceive before he caught it. "Huh. Can't actually feel anything with this thing, but... it's way more dexterous than my regular arm. Maybe I can run with this after all.

"Still... this isn't good at all. I already have to worry about my body giving out from overusing my powers. Now I gotta worry about bleeding to death from all these wounds I have," Sorun continued to think. "My flight ability's gonna be completely crippled now, too, since I need to use the right Bringer Claw to compensate for the missing arm. Shit... I'm really running out of time here. Don't know how much longer I can keep going..."

"You're seriously still dead-set on fighting me? Really?" Eggman sounded exasperated at the prospect, even the mech slumping over in weariness. Beyond that, though, he sounded almost confused at Sorun's actions. "I don't understand it, Sorun. Why? Why them? Why are you fighting so hard for them? It doesn't make sense."

"Ohhhh, Eggman. All this time and you still don't get it?" Sorun began to slowly walk closer to the floating mech, leaving behind bloodied footprints in his wake. "All that intelligence and no wisdom to spend it on. See where it gets you? Shoulda balanced your stats."

"Quit talking nonsense and answer the question!" Eggman yelled out.

"You'd be able to see it for yourself if you didn't have the wisdom of a brick, Robotnik. How you can simultaneously be the smartest and most moronic person in the world is beyond me," Sorun said. "It took me months of living with all these people to finally see it. They have something somebody like you will never have." He pointed his spectral hand at Robotnik. "What you lack... is this!"

He stuck both of his thumbs behind his back after de-summoning Yamato. At the same time a number of Summoned Swords appeared behind Sorun, all positioned in a way so that they made a distinct shape: a heart. A large, blue heart that was floating behind Sorun's back. It quickly dissipated, after which Sorun lowered his real and spectral arms back to his sides.

"... Heart?" Eggman said, tone disbelieving. "You must be joking."

"'Fraid not, Robotnik. It honestly scared me seeing how strong all these guys are, especially compared to me, but after a while I finally saw why. They all have more heart in them than I've ever seen in anybody else." Yamato was re-summoned in his hands. Sorun held Yamato's blade up at a horizontal angle after unsheathing it, gazing into his warped reflection in the blade. "Strength, true strength... is all about fighting to protect what's important. That's what it means. But you... a heartless guy like you would never get something like that. You threw away any chance you ever had of making bonds of your own and understanding what heart really means when you fell to hedonism and tried to take over the world!" Sorun pointed the tip of the katana at Eggman. "No wonder you have no true power of your own and have to rely on machines for everything!"

The jets on the bottom of the Egg Beater's feet roared to life. It flew straight towards Sorun, who remained rooted to the spot as he watched the mech approach. The left Bringer Claw flashed to life and extended forwards, grabbing the mech's right shoulder to help slow its advancement. The right one mimicking Sorun's lost arm and holding the Yamato flashed out at the same time, clashing with the edge of the shield held in the mech's hand. It was set in a deadlock, the mech floating just above the pods while Sorun stared deeply into Eggman's spectacles past the visor on the large helmet he was staring at.

"I won't allow you to harm a single one," Sorun intoned in a deadly-serious tone. "Not one."

"All for a bunch of animals that ruined your life!?"

"They only did it because you ruined theirs!"

A metallic grinding sound was heard as the spectral arm holding the katana, in conjunction with the larger, winged arm holding the robot suit at bay, began to push it back. It was with a final burst of effort that Sorun pushed the mech back far enough that it tumbled backwards through the air. He even went through the trouble of firing off a few Summoned Swords to push it back even further, even if they wouldn't do any damage.

But then something strange had happened.

Eggman's mech suit bounced in the air a little bit when it was hit by the Summoned Swords.

"... What?" Sorun blinked in confusion as he stared out at the mech. It reoriented itself in the air quickly enough, and past the helmet's visor Sorun could see that even Eggman looked a bit confused at what just happened. "There's no way the Summoned Swords hit hard enough to bounce it in the air like that. It's way too heavy. That's not even factoring in the Emerald protecting it. So why did-" His single eye widened as memories began to surface. "Hold on just a second here...!"


Curiously, however, each and every single sword that had struck the robot propelled it high enough that it made up from the amount it dropped down before the swords hit it. Even as the eight swords hit Metal, it was still the same place in the air as it had been before the swords hit it due to the small amount of lift afforded by being struck by the swords.

"... Huh?" Sorun scrunched his brows in confusion. "The swords, they..."


With a mechanical growl, the wolf tore its face out of the ground, its red eye flashing as it noticed movement to the side. Sorun was still approaching with his katana held out to his side, and in anticipation, the wolf opened its mouth to try and howl at him. Right before it could, though, twenty Summoned Swords appeared over it and began raining down and impaling themselves into the robot's backside.

While this was happening, Sorun kept up his approach, noticing with some interest the wolf was jittering in place and struggling to open its mouth to try and howl at him as it was pelted with swords.

"Huh."


"Have I been using them wrong the entire time?" Sorun wondered to himself. A single Summoned Sword appeared next to him, causing Sorun to cast a contemplative look at it. "If these really mimic Vergil's Summoned Swords... in the games, they had functions outside of just pelting enemies with minimal damage at a long range. Their primary function was to manipulate enemy positions to open them up to combos. Continually firing swords at enemies knocked into the air would juggle them and keep them stalled in the air for aerial combos. Back then, with Metal Sonic... that's what they did. I didn't get it back then, but the same thing happened when I shot the mech just now..." He looked back towards the floating mech suit. "Is it possible... that the Summoned Swords don't follow normal logic, but follow the games' logic...? I guess it wouldn't be the most 'out there' thing Chaos energy has done for me, but... I need to see."

The Summoned Sword next to Sorun shattered. At the same time, eight Summoned Swords began spinning around Eggman's mech suit in a ring, all eight swords pointed towards him.

"An enemy struck by Storm Swords was automatically lifted into the air in the games. If I'm really right about this, then something similar should happen here."

"What is this? Your paltry little phantom blades or whatever you call them?" Eggman asked, chuckling at the end of his sentence as he glanced around at the swords surrounding him. "Oh, come on, Sorun, these aren't going to do anything to me!" he continued as the swords stopped spinning. "If that oh-so-powerful katana of yours is having a hard time wounding my suit, then what do you think- huh!?"

The eight swords flew forwards and simultaneously struck the round mech. Of course, they'd all shattered on impact and left no lasting damage on the mech. What happened next, however, was that the mech was flipped on its back and lifted a few feet above its position by a seemingly invisible force, as if something had pulled on its chest and lifted it.

"Well, whaddya know?" Capitalizing on the moment, Sorun Tricked right above the mech, sword held up above his head. "How'd I not see this sooner?"

He sliced downwards. With the strength of the spectral arm behind the strike, the mech was sent shooting downwards towards the ground. The jets on its feet caught it, though, halting its momentum and maintaining its position in the air. By then Sorun had already Tricked onto its back.

"Blistering Swords deal exorbitant damage compared to normally firing off Summoned Swords." Four swords appeared at each of Sorun's sides, all aimed towards a small joint connecting the mech's left missile pod to its shoulder. They rapidly fired off in pairs, all striking the joint in the same spot. He tilted his head in approval when he noticed the joint dent horribly from the swords' assault. "Now that's some damage."

His left Bringer Claw extended out and grabbed the missile pod. To his satisfaction the pod was easily torn off, and, with it disconnected from the Emerald inside of the mech, Sorun was able to easily crush the pod and toss the remains away onto the ground below.

When Sorun noticed the mech's hands reaching up to its back to try and grab at him, Sorun Tricked back up to the pods near the ceiling. He'd barely appeared there before he saw the mech flying directly towards him, Eggman wasting no time. Sorun responded by impassively staring at the approaching mech as twenty spectral swords appeared up in the air right in front of him, pointing downwards.

It was right when the mech entered the range of the swords did Sorun will them to fall down. As such, they'd all fallen down on the mech and, of course, had all shattered. However, from the moment the first sword made contact with the mech, the swords' effect had activated. The mech seemed to freeze right there in the air, still slowly moving and jittering in place, as if struggling against something, but still going slowly enough that Sorun was able to calmly step to its side as it remained frozen to the spot.

"Enemies hit by Heavy Rain Swords get stunlocked."

"What is this? Why won't the controls respond to me!?" Eggman roared out. "What have you done, Sorun!?"

"Couldn't tell ya." His spectral right arm swung the katana out, the cutting power of the sword behind the strength of the arm proving sufficient at removing the right missile pod. "You feeling accepting of your loss yet?"

"Not... happening...!"

"Hey, your choice." Sorun sheathed Yamato. "Now stay right where you are..."

The wide, blue circle from earlier reappeared and spread out from Sorun. He slowly exhaled again as he prepared to initiate another Judgement Cut End, with Eggman's mech frozen in the air and right next to him. He slowly reached his hand out to the sword's handle-

Movement suddenly returned to the mech's body, causing Sorun to widen his eye in surprise. Its shield struck out towards him too fast to counter, forcing his left Bringer Claw to guard him as best it could. He was still sent flying away after the hit, right towards the nearest wall. He was spinning around too harshly for him to get an accurate reading of where to Trick to to avoid hitting the wall, so he'd instinctually done the next best thing: Sorun had his left Bringer Claw hit the wall as hard as it could to halt his momentum as much as possible.

It mostly worked. The spectral fist had punched a deep crater into the metal wall, and the force of the hit had lowered the teen's speed enough that he didn't outright splatter against the crater when he hit it. He'd still hit it, though, and although he couldn't feel anything, he was fairly certain he'd heard some things in him crack.

"Right... getting stalled in place by Heavy Rain Swords doesn't last that long... I forgot..." Sorun felt himself tumble out of the freshly-made crater in the wall. He would have fallen down entirely if the cuff of his left boot didn't catch on a random piece of jagged metal jutting out of the wall, making it so that Sorun's back hit the wall and he was left hanging there, upside-down. "Why the hell does this gotta be so hard? It's such bullshit..."

His spectral arm still managed to hold onto Yamato, even if it was slowly slipping from his grasp with his arms hanging downwards. He didn't know where he'd dropped the scabbard, but seeing as it could be re-summoned, Sorun didn't care that much. He did care about the copious amounts of blood dripping down his body and over his face. About the fact his body was feeling weaker and weaker, and he was beginning to feel his senses grow duller over time. Tired, too. He was getting tired to the point he felt his one working eye fluttering open and shut repeatedly.

But then something reached Sorun's ears that caused him to open the eye widely. His own name. He heard his own name being shouted by a myriad of different of voices. It was hard to see from his vision being halved and now slightly blurred from the damage he'd sustained, but he could make it out good enough. People in the pods were shouting out his name. Everybody in the bunches of pods containing the Freedom Fighters and Chaotix. He saw some people in the bunch containing the royal family calling his name out, too, Elias among them. Others Mobians he knew spread out among the pods, and even some he didn't know, were calling out to him, too. It made Sorun groan out in an exhausted fashion.

"Gah... this is really fuckin' embarrassing. I didn't ask for a damn pep rally." He looked up at his boot and the piece of metal it was hooked on. "Doubt I'm gonna make it through this. If by some miracle I do I'm gonna deny I ever heard them doing this. I'll say I went deaf or something." His arms twitched. "Gotta save 'em all before I do that, though. Alright. Guess I better use it."

Before Sorun managed to even attempt to free himself, a loud whirring sound drowned out the names of all the Mobians calling his name. He couldn't do anything when a giant, mechanical hand grabbed him, tore him off of the wall, and then slammed him back into it while keeping a firm grip on his torso. He coughed out once, blood splashing onto the chrome hand holding him in place as he looked upwards.

"Hah... hah... it's all over now, Sorun." The Doctor certainly looked like he'd seen better days. His mustache was a frazzled mess at this point, and though the visor made it hard to see, Sorun could see massive beads of sweat beading down the sides of Eggman's face. The round, blue-tinted glasses hid his eyes, but Sorun didn't even need to see them to see how worn-out he was. "No magic sword's gonna get you out of this one. Concede. Concede right now and I won't squeeze down and leave you a crippled, agonized mess before I put you in an Egg Grape."

"... As tempting as that sounds," Sorun said, "I'm going to have to deny that request. I don't really want to."

The hand holding him squeezed down slightly. He heard bones creak.

"I'm serious, Sorun. You're done. Beaten. Look at yourself- you already look like you have one foot in the grave. Don't make this any harder than it needs to be and just give up already."

Eggman sounded desperate. It wasn't wholly clear, but it was there. In his voice. In the slightly panicky tone he had and the way his voice wavered ever-so-slightly. It was enough to give Sorun a bit more confidence.

"Yeah. I guess you did beat me." Small sparks of blue electricity began arcing over Sorun's body. "But what about the second one?"

"Huh? The second one...?"

As Eggman repeated Sorun's question in a confused manner, something appeared behind the mech suit. The Doctor had only noticed its presence by the shadow it cast on the wall, but by then it had been too late for him to properly react. Two Bringer Claws, a completely separate set from the one Sorun had, extended outwards from behind the mech suit and clamped down on the hand holding Sorun in place. It pried the hand open, freeing Sorun and allowing him to Trick forwards, right in front of the mech's helmet-head. A helmet-head Sorun proceeded to punch with his left Bringer Claw.

The mech was sent spiraling away, Eggman screaming in confusion and rage alongside with it. Sorun, instead of pursing it, teleported onto the surface of a nearby Egg Grape just as the mech managed to reorient itself in front of him.

Something else teleported alongside Sorun.

By all appearances, the thing that had Tricked right next to Sorun seemed to be... Sorun himself. Something that looked exactly like Sorun, clothes and all, save for the fact it was blue and completely transparent in the same way as the Summoned Swords and Bringer Claws were. A spectral Sorun, which even featured its own set of Bringer Claws and a spectral Yamato held in its two normal arms.

"Doppelganger. It's the power I got from the fifth Chaos Emerald," Sorun muttered out. A few more arcs of blue electricity sparked around his body, the same happening to the spectral double standing right besides him. "It can do everything I can do. Have fun with that."

Both Sorun and the Doppelganger began Tricking from pod-to-pod in different directions, both heading right towards Eggman. The mech was aiming its wrists in two directions at once, continually shifting its aim as if its pilot couldn't decide on who to fire on. It was too late to make a decision, though, as by then both of its opponents had appeared in front of it.

Eggman's first attempt was to raise his wrecking ball flail up. Twenty spectral swords falling from above and freezing him in place stopped the round, robotic suit in its tracks, opening up for Sorun and the Doppelganger to attack it. The Doppelganger began to madly slash at the mech's chest with its spectral Yamato, preoccupying it. Sorun himself had gone to the left side of the mech's body, where the shield was. He began cutting at the joint connecting the shield to the mech's left hand with his Yamato, while both his left Bringer Claw and both of the Doppelganger's Bringer Claws began pulling away at it. This proved successful, as the combination of Sorun cutting away at it and the efforts of the three Bringer Claws managed to pry the shield completely off. Sorun immediately tossed the shield down to ground level, and then Tricked away to the top of a nearby pod.

Sorun whirled towards the direction of the mech after teleporting, panting harshly as he watched it and his Doppelganger fight. Blood was now continually streaming out of his mouth and nose, his wounds were still leaking blood, and even his functioning eye was leaking blood out of it. The blood vessels had burst, too, causing Sorun's white sclera to dye completely red. By now his vision was a red, blurry mess, but he was still able to see well enough to see the fight happening in front of him.

"Well, I talk a big game, but... in actuality, Doppelganger isn't that great a power." Sorun Tricked to another pod to avoid a stray laser that had been fired out from the mech in an attempt to blast the spectral Sorun fighting it. "It's true that Doppelganger possesses all of my abilities, but it doesn't possess my durability. One or two good hits and it disappears completely, and it takes a lot for me to make that thing. It doesn't even have any autonomous movement of its own. I have to consciously control its movements just like I do with the Bringer Claws, and it's hard enough focusing on the fight here without splitting my attention completely in half between two bodies."

He coughed uncontrollably a couple of times, blood splashing out of his mouth each time. He sighed out in frustration, his grip on Yamato's handle tightening as he watched the fight.

"It's really draining to keep the Doppelganger up, too... so I need to end this quickly." His head perked up slightly. "I got an idea. C'mon, you fat bastard... swing it already..."

The Doppelganger floated back from Eggman and the mech suit, held aloft by the Bringer Claws acting as wings on its back. Summoned Swords continued to appear at its sides and fire towards the mech, shattering against its surface to no effect, but seemingly making Eggman more and more angry by the second. The mech began to swing its right arm around, the chained wrecking ball spinning 'round and 'round faster and faster. The Doppelganger, however, remained hovering in place, simply continuing to fire swords at the mech.

Eventually, the mech tossed the ball straight at the Doppelganger. The Doppelganger, on the other hand, made no move to Trick out of the way, or even dodge in any way. It only continued to float in place and fire out Summoned Swords, so when the wrecking ball came, it impacted the spectral clone directly, killing it and dispersing it into a cloud of blue energy.

Right behind the Doppelganger, hiding behind its body and wings, however, had been a portal cut open by the true Sorun and Yamato.

The wrecking ball flew right through the portal, appearing through a second one that was right next to Sorun. His left Bringer Claw instantly snapped forwards, grabbing at the chain of the wrecking ball while he himself turned towards the portal.

"Alright..." Sorun gripped Yamato's handle with his flesh and spectral hands and lifted it up. "Let's see if this works."

He sliced downwards, closing both portals simultaneously. The chain connecting the wrecking ball to the mech, due to having been crossing through the portals at the time, had been severed completely upon the two holes in space closing back together. The chain Sorun's left Bringer Claw held went slack, the ball at the end drooping downwards. He willed the spectral hand to to begin spinning it around by rotating its wrist as he turned back towards the mech, which was currently holding its severed chain up to the helmet's visor for Robotnik to see.

Without a single word, Sorun's Bringer Claw threw the severed wrecking ball towards the mech. Eggman didn't seem to have been too distracted by his lost weapon, as the jets on the mech's feet brightened in intensity and lifted the robotic suit high enough for the thrown wrecking ball to miss it entirely and embed itself in the wall it had impacted.

Moving upwards to avoid the wrecking ball Sorun had thrown also made it so that the mech couldn't dodge the new cloud of floating swords that had spawned just above it and rained down in the same breath.

Eggman released another frustrated shout when the mech was frozen mid-air again from the swords impacting it. Another set of eight swords began rotating around it at the same time, and they'd converged just as the freezing effect of the Heavy Rain Swords wore off. The mech was flipped onto its back again and lifted up into the air, and at the same time blue sparks arced over Sorun's body as another Doppelganger was summoned.

A spurt of blood splashed out from Sorun's wounds, mouth, nose, and eye upon the Doppelganger being summoned, and for a split second he'd blacked out. He managed to keep himself awake, widening his eye in effort while biting down on his own teeth. He willed the Doppelganger to Trick under the mech, where it proceeded to fire a continuous stream of Summoned Swords at the mech. Each sword that impacted the mech kept it aloft in the air, prompting the real Sorun to Trick up to to mech, just above it. Yamato was sheathed and held at his side.

"If the Summoned Swords follow the logic of the games... then this should, too..."


"Air canceling? What's that?"

"You don't know what air canceling is? The fuck kinda third-rate gamer are you?" A loud scoff exited Sorun as he leaned back on his bed, game controller lazily held in his hand as he glanced at the other human teen sitting down next to him.

"Eh, fuck off, I'm first-rate just like you," David exclaimed, turning his head to meet Sorun's glare. "Besides," he continued with a small grin, "wouldn't it be two-bit? Y'know, like those classic 8-bit and 6-bit games?"

Sorun's expression turned flat. "... Never make that joke around me again."

"Pssh, you're no fun." Waving his hand at Sorun, David turned back towards the TV monitor sitting in front of them. "Anyways, oh mighty wizard, what's this hip air canceling tech you're talking about?"

Rolling his eyes, Sorun gripped his controller with both hands and turned back towards the TV and the video game it was displaying. The game in question? Devil May Cry Four. And currently displayed on the screen was a white-haired player character donning a tri-tailed blue coat and a katana.

"Canceling is when you interrupted a character's attacks and animations. The most common way to do something like this is usually by jumping, so it's mostly referred to as jump canceling or air canceling," Sorun began. "Vergil has this thing where some of his abilities can cancel. It's useful for prematurely ending attacks mid-combo so you can set yourself up for something else. So, for example, if you're doing a multi-hit combo you can interrupt it halfway using canceling to do something else, or do the first half of that same combo over again. There's also some repositioning stuff you can pull off to zip around mid-combo without having to chase the enemies that get knocked away by the combos."

David made a confused groan as he rubbed tiredly at the side of his face. "Ain't he got the teleport for that, though?"

"Looks more fluid and stylish using canceling instead of spamming the teleport, plus this helps to extend your combos. But that's the thing with Vergil: his Tricking power can cancel."

Sorun's fingers pressed down on the controller. The game character on the screen slid backwards, hands on the katana with the screen locked onto a nearby enemy. A shambling, scarecrow-looking monster nearby Vergil. He slid the sword out and back inside of the scabbard in one quick motion as the enemy scarecrow was consumed by a Judgement Cut.

More buttons were pressed. Vergil performed a Trick and teleported a few inches into the air, his hands still on the sword. Once again a Judgement Cut was performed, not even a second after the first one. Again and again he would repeat the cycle of making a Judgement Cut, Tricking up by a few inches, and then doing it again and again. Sorun watched on with a focused look. David just looked one part amazed and one part puzzled.

"Uh... I ain't getting it, m'man..." David mumbled out, his eyes practically glued to the screen.

"Usually Vergil can only do a limited number of consecutive Judgement Cuts, but if you Trick like this it cancels it out," Sorun explained. "It also makes use of Just-Frame Judgement Cut- which is, if you release the button to charge Judgement Cut at just the right frame Vergil'll do the Judgement Cut instantly without the big animation, which shaves some time off. Does a bit more damage, too. So you use Trick to air cancel his Just-Frame Judgement Cut, and because he ends the Trick in the same position you can chain 'em together to bypass the Judgement Cut limit and pretty much just do it forever until you mess the timing up. Which I never do, so hey."

"Whoa... so it's, like... the Infinite-Frame Judgement Cut..." David said in awe, eyes widened and shining like he'd just witnessed perfection itself. It was wiped off immediately when his expression turned back to normal as his head snapped to Sorun. "Dude, how do you even figure stuff like this out?"

"It's just a mastery of the mechanics," Sorun said with a shrug, still chaining the Judgement Cuts and air cancels together on the enemy on-screen. "And it's not unique enough to give it its own name like the 'Infinite-Frame Judgement Cut'. It's... just combining air canceling with Judgement Cut. The Just-Frame version, but whatever, same difference."

"Ah-huh, yeah, sure." David nodded in an unconvinced manner, and then glanced down at his watch. "Ah, shoot, it's gettin' kinda late actually, Sor'. It's been an experience, but I gotta book it."

"Why do you always say that?" Sorun asked as he watched David hop off the bed, having paused the game. "'It's been an experience.' What does that even mean?"

Halfway through the doorway to Sorun's room already, David turned back towards him and flashed a smile. "It means a real man can only become a true man through the experiences he shares with others."

Sorun's face scrunched in confusion. "But wouldn't a real man already- that doesn't- what- that's stupid."

"Well, a man oughta be a little stupid." David ducked out of the doorway. "Gotta go, seeya later!"

"... You aped that last one from the guy in 'Yakuza Two'!" Sorun yelled after him.

"Yeah, well he was a smart guy!" David yelled back, voice trailing off due to the distance between them.

Shaking his head at the doorway, Sorun grumbled unintelligible mutterings under his breath. He turned back towards the TV, unpaused the game, and resumed playing it.


"You're finished if this actually works, Robotnik..."

Sorun was in position. The mech was vulnerable, still being juggled in the air by the Summoned Swords being shot by the Doppelganger under it. He was there, just above the mech with Yamato sheathed at his side. All that was left was to try and execute the technique he'd learned from playing those games.

He made one Judgement Cut. It hit Eggman's mech suit right in the center of its chest. At the same time it connected, he'd Tricked a few inches into the air.

There was some sensation Sorun felt doing so. Something that clicked in him, mentally. He tried performing another Judgement Cut in response to the sensation he received. Sorun was almost surprised when he saw another Judgement Cut cut deeper into the mech, but seeing him perform a second Judgement Cut after air canceling himself confirmed it.

That single confirmation was all the motivation he needed to keep going.

Sorun continued doing it. While the Doppelganger below continued to juggle the mech with Summoned Swords, Sorun would air cancel into his Judgement Cut. Over and over and over again. The result was that he would continually teleport slightly higher and higher each time, performing a Judgement Cut at each interval. It was a rapid process, rapid to the point that there was almost no conceivable break to the Judgement Cuts rending the mech's chest apart.

It was doing significant damage, too. Splinters of metal was shredded off more and more each time. At first it was enough that Sorun saw the electronics underneath the metal shell protecting it, further fueling his motivation to keep the combo going. But then, the further he went, he saw it. Rays of blinding white light that began to bleed through some of the cuts his Judgement Cuts were making on the mech's chest.

"S-stop it! Stop it this instant!" Eggman screamed out. "This isn't fair! You're just using the same move over and over!"

He'd concede to the Doctor's point. It was a really cheap strategy, and Sorun would wager that he probably looked ridiculous doing it. He didn't much care seeing as it was going to end in his win at this rate.

"Getting... harder to stay awake here..." The edges of Sorun's red, blurred vision were becoming blacker and blacker. Moving was getting to be a struggle, and Sorun's mind was beginning to swim from the exhaustion. He kept pushing on, though, going as far as to fire his own Summoned Swords into the gaps in the mech's chest made by the Judgement Cuts. "Keep concentrating... just a bit more here..."

By now the white light bleeding out of the suit's chest was overly obvious. It was almost drowned out, though, by the blue light of the dozens of swords stabbing into the mech's chest, between all the wiring and electronics. Sorun ceased the Judgement Cuts immediately after seeing this, keeping his left hand around Yamato and its scabbard while he held his spectral right hand out. "I remember that at the end of some basic combos Vergil would throw out a single Summoned Sword that would lift an enemy up in the air. Dunno if that skill translated, but... I put a bunch of them into that thing. And if I get enough of them together I can detonate them. Just like I showed Shadow once."

Sorun pressed his spectral thumb and middle finger together.

Snap!

It was a snap loud enough that it would have reverberated throughout the entire room if it weren't for the fact all the Summoned Swords sticking out of the mech's chest exploded all at once, drowning the snap out. The explosion, in addition to exposing the machine's chest ever further, lifted it straight upwards towards Sorun. The teen slammed his spectral right arm down, with the mech flying right into its path at the same time. Metal crunching and snapping was heard as the blue hand invaded the chest and rooted around towards its center.

The hand clamped around something. Sorun reacted to this by having his arm heft the giant mech suit over him, the spectral hand's fingers clamping down tightly on the item it had grabbed inside of the mech.

"JackPOT!"

The arm was swiftly swung downwards. The result of this was that the mech was thrown down towards the ground, Eggman screaming all the way. Sorun's spectral right arm had been torn out of the mech's chest in the process, a gray, shining gem held in its hand.

Sorun didn't even have the time to appreciate the prize before the arm fizzled out of existence around the same time he heard the loud THUD! of the mech hitting the ground floor. Then he fell down along with the Emerald.

Staying awake was becoming a struggle. He was momentarily blacking out more and more frequently, even as Sorun fell towards the ground. Merely breathing was becoming hard for him. He managed to recognize the approaching ground, fortunately, and scraped up enough power to perform a small Trick right before he hit. This resulted in him Tricking directly onto the ground and rolling to a stop, just faintly hearing the Chaos Emerald plink against the ground somewhere near him.

"Okay... okay, alright..." Shakily, Sorun rose up to his feet. He gazed upwards towards the fallen Egg Beater, which laid right in front of him. The jets on the bottom of its feet were off. In fact, it seemed to be completely disabled based on the fact that it wasn't even moving at all. "Tearing out the Emerald must've disabled it. Fuckin' finally." The Bringer Claw mimicking Sorun's right arm reappeared. "Alright... how's Eggman doing...?"

He stumbled forwards. Yamato was torn free from its scabbard, which was then tossed aside. Sorun heard the wood scabbard clatter against the metal ground, but paid it no mind as he Tricked up onto the top of the mech lying flat on its back.

Sorun saw Eggman immediately. The helmet to the mech suit had been lost somewhere, revealing the Doctor all the way down to his shoulders. He was sweating intensely now. Fear and intense panic was written across his panting face, with the Doctor looking down into the mech as his hands continued to fiddle with the dead controls. Sorun briefly noted that his blue-tinted eyeglasses had been knocked away at some point, and even with his poor vision, he could make out his eyes. Beady little things. Red irises and black sclera instead of the normal white most everyone else had. They looked genuinely afraid.

Eventually, Eggman froze and looked up at the figure standing over him. He shrunk backwards, ginger mustache withering at the sight and his breath escaping him when he saw Sorun. Clothes torn, shredded, and drenched in blood to the point it was mostly dyed red. A missing right arm, replaced with a blue, spectral replica holding a katana. A paler-than-usual face streaked in blood, with black hair matted in blood sticking to it. An obliterated right eye with a metal shard sticking out from the eye socket, resembling a horn. A functioning left eye, completely bloodshot and hatefully looking down at Dr. Robotnik.

It looked like a demon was staring him down.

"You have... really freaky eyes..."

They were the only words Sorun bothered uttering before he held the Yamato up in preparation of chopping Eggman's head off.

Eggman shrieked, genuinely shrieked in fright, and hit a button. The mech underneath Sorun rumbled, enough that the exhausted teen lost his balance and fell off completely. The upper half of the mech's round torso separated completely, revealing a set of jets on its underside keeping the upper half Eggman was sitting in afloat. It floated upwards, with Eggman himself pulling upwards on a throttle stick so tightly it threatened to snap out of the control console he was using.

The floating chair he was in rattled when Sorun Tricked onto it. He maintained that baleful glare at Eggman with his one eye, the left hand holding onto the edge of the escape chair while the right one still held Yamato. He actually slashed at the Doctor in an attempt to cut him. He'd missed. It'd been by mere millimeters, the tip of the sword just missing Robotnik's neck, but it got the point across. Eggman responding by hitting another button as the chair floated higher and higher.

Beep!

It was a small noise, but just loud enough for Sorun to hear. And he had enough lucidity to understand just what it meant. He looked downwards, at what remained of the mech where he'd heard the beep originate from, and then glanced back up at Eggman. He had the gall to actually grin at the teen, even if that grin was shaky and still fear-filled, but the absolute hatred Sorun felt at seeing that smirk was overpowered by his sense of self-preservation.

So he Tricked. He teleported far away from the chair. Due to his waning power he wasn't able to go far, so when the remains of the mech suit exploded, Sorun, once again, was sent barreling upwards. He didn't make a single sound when his body hit an Egg Grape, and continued to remain silent as he slid off of it. He showed signs of consciousness when his right spectral hand flashed out and stabbed Yamato into the pod directly below the one he hit that Sorun fell past, the hand keeping a grip on the sword's handle to keep Sorun aloft above the ground. He breathed in deeply, shaking his head to keep himself awake as he craned his head backwards.

The mech suit itself was completely gone. Blown up and little more than an unrecognizable hunk of metal. Eggman was still in the floating chair that had separated from the mech's main body, flying towards a hatch in the wall nearby that had opened up. Their eyes met briefly, though Eggman didn't even say a single word. Sorun couldn't even place the expression on his face. They'd just simply looked at each other for a single second before Eggman flew the floating chair through the hatch. It closed behind him, and that was that. He was gone.

Sorun sighed. He'd wanted to kill him. Ironically, for him, at least, it was a secondary objective compared to saving everybody here and getting them out, but it still would have been nice to cross him out while he was at it. Or at least take his nephew's life as a consolation prize.

Oh, well. At least he still had enough energy to move around for a bit longer. He could still save everybody. He wasn't so sure about himself.

"What an ordeal..." Sorun muttered out, turning back to the pod and the sword stabbed into it. "Be a Freedom Fighter, they said... it'll be fun, they said..." he continued muttering as he placed his left hand on the pod. He pushed slightly, and before he knew it the sword was pulled free, and he was sent falling backwards.

Sorun gazed up at all the Egg Grapes holding every citizen of what was once Knothole as he fell down. It was with great effort he channeled Chaos energy into Yamato, the silver blade of the katana glowing blue. He slashed out with the blade as he fell, over and over. Blue lines of energy appeared over every single Egg Grape, only for the lines to then fade to reveal a clean seam running through the pods.

And then, the pods all fell apart from the lines cutting through them. Just like that, all the captive Mobians were freed and began dropping to the ground along with Sorun. Unlike them, though, he couldn't survive a fall like that, especially in his current position, so he was forced to Trick again right before he hit the floor.

He stumbled a bit as a result of the Trick. A blue light reached his peripheral once he caught his footing. Sorun looked towards it, seeing his spectral double standing right besides him. "Go and get Nicole's handheld and the Chaos Emerald, would you?" Sorun asked, voice low and exhausted. "I gotta finish up here."

The sound of the shards from the pods he cut apart clinking loudly against the ground behind him reached Sorun's ears, followed by another noise. Cheering. Sounds of happiness. He turned around to see everybody, hundreds of Mobians, all standing behind him. Most were looking around for their friends or hugging loved ones and family members. Most of them just looked happy to be out of those pods. Sorun had found himself glancing upwards to make sure he'd cut apart all the pods, and when he was satisfied at seeing them all cut apart, he glanced back down.

There was one group that didn't look to be as jubilant as the rest of the town. Sorun had the misfortune of looking down directly at them. The Freedom Fighters were all staring directly at him, and they looked anything but happy. His vision was too compromised to tell how they looked exactly, and he'd turned away too quickly to figure it out. He didn't want to see their faces. He didn't have time to think on it. He just wanted to finish this.

Something dropped down in front of him. Sorun blinked once in surprise, seeing the Doppelganger holding the gray Chaos Emerald in its left hand and Nicole's handheld body in its right. His left Bringer Claw manifested and grabbed the Emerald, while Sorun's real left hand gripped Nicole's handheld. The Doppelganger disappeared as a result, though Sorun paid this no mind as he looked down at the handheld's screen display.

A set of coordinates was being displayed on the handheld's green screen. There was no other sign of life or Nicole. Just the set of numbers staring Sorun in the face. He breathed out, and then lowered the handheld to his side.

"Guess she managed to pull it off. Good on you, Nicole. Knew you could do it." His blue fingers ran over the blood-soaked handle as the sword was risen up. "All I need to do is open a portal up here... that's all I need..."

Blue power, faint and barely even visible, gathered around the edge of the katana. Sorun attempted to cut a hole in space with it. The sword's tip in front of Sorun, seemingly struggling against an invisible force as the spectral arm holding the katana shook. Before he could do anything further an uncontrollable fit of coughs wracked Sorun's body. The sword was lowered as he bent forwards, coughing more and more blood onto the ground in front of him. His vision darkened more.

"Sorun..."

He just barely managed to feel a hand land on his left shoulder. He knew it was Sally right away from the brown fur on the hand and the voice. He turned his head to her, stopping in surprise when he saw her face. There was such a mixture of conflicting emotions on her face that he couldn't quite pick out a single one. She just looked... sad. So downcast to the point Sorun felt bad just looking at her. There was even the threat of tears showing up from the way her eyes were glistening. "Sorun, you... you need to stop moving-"

"I still have one thing I must do," Sorun denied. "I'll stop after."

She didn't seem to like his answer. The grip on his shoulder tightened, as she began shaking. "No, Sorun, you- you can't keep going. Not with those wounds..." Sally shook her head when Sorun didn't react to her. "Sorun, just please-"

"Do you... have a better alternative for getting everyone out from here...?" Sorun slowly asked, still out of breath. When Sally froze and continued looking at him, he said, "Robotnik and his robots are... they're all still out there. We've time, but... not much." He looked down at Yamato. "You all could... probably fight your way out, but there'd be casualties with the... the hundreds of non-fighters back there. Civilians. Children. I can get us all out instantly with this."

"But-!"

Sorun lifted his bloodied left index finger and held it above Sally's lips. "I don't want to hear it." He stabbed Yamato into the air in front of him after brushing Sally's hand off. "Just help me by leading everyone through the portal once I open it."

He didn't wait to hear her response. His focus was solely on the Yamato, and opening a portal wide enough for hundreds of people to get through. Tired after tired breath rattled out of him as he poured more power into the blade, power that was only making his condition even worse the further he went. He saw a blue seam appear in front of him, a hole being torn open through the sword's power, but it wasn't enough.

"Come on... just a bit more..." He couldn't even feel his extremities anymore. He heard his own heartbeat growing fainter by the second. But Sorun pressed on, putting his all into opening this one single portal as he intensely focused on the coordinates he saw written on the handheld. "Just one... more... thing..."

With a final push, Sorun tore the sword through the air in front of him. As a result, a wide portal was opened up. The biggest Sorun had ever opened- it was almost as wide as the room itself that they were all in. A portal leading to that place Nicole had described to him.

"... It's your new home." Sorun glanced back at Sally, who was staring wide-eyed at the portal. He held Yamato in front of her eyes, which somehow widened even further when she saw the silver blade crumbling and disintegrating away. "I can't keep it up forever," he said. "I'm really... counting on you here, Sally..."

"... Right." To her credit, she'd steeled herself quickly enough. She cast one last, worried glance at Sorun before she'd turned to the others and began shouting out orders to them. Sorun would have laughed if he had the energy. As it was he was barely standing on his feet.

"She can handle getting everyone through." Sorun turned towards the portal. "Guess I get to see with my own eyes what Nicole whipped up for everybody..."


If somebody told Sorun that there was an entire city's worth of nanites Eggman was just sitting on the entire time and doing nothing with... well, he probably would have believed them, because he'd seen crazier in this world. Far be it from him to think a giant pool of microscopic machines capable of mimicking any form of matter whose function was virtually limitless would be useful for anything. But it was there. He never did anything with it for some reason. But it was there.

Sorun didn't know the details. Nicole had been scarce with them due to time constraints. It was during this big adventure the Freedom Fighters had, before he showed up and before the incident with Eggman getting all the Chaos Emeralds. Something something nanite city, something something an AI called A.D.A.M. that was dead now. Whatever happened happened, and now there was an entire city of nanites in the middle of Northamer just... sitting there. Alive and fully functional, but without anything operating it. Inert, basically. And while Eggman still technically had control of it, he'd never utilized it in any fashion.

Maybe he just didn't want to mess around with nanites anymore. From what he got from Nicole that A.D.A.M. AI was a creation of his that went rogue, and things had went extraordinarily bad for both the Freedom Fighters and Eggman. Sorun couldn't say he blamed him if that was true.

Well... the prospect of a nanite city had interested Nicole for whatever reason. So she'd divulged to Sorun right before he'd went to go save everybody from Eggman that she'd been working on various software and firmware programs all this time so she could basically upload herself into the city to fully take control of all the nanites. He didn't know the exact details when it came to the technical side of it. Just that it was incredibly complex, even for somebody of her caliber. But she'd told him she was confident she could do it. She just needed time, which she'd gotten, and then a way into the Egg Network so she could cut through it via the digital world, go to the nanite city, and then cut it off from the network so she could have it to herself. Sorun couldn't really understand past that.

It was meant to be a surprise, and she'd apparently been planning on letting Sorun in on it early so he could help her get into the network without anyone knowing, though Knothole being bombed out had tossed that plan out the window. She'd told him she'd simply wanted to give all the Mobians a new home, since Knothole was kind of cramped as it was and didn't really compare to the home they all used to have. She'd told him the Kingdom of Acorn used to have a proper city called Mobotropolis, back before Robotnik - the first one - did his coup, took it over, and renamed it Robotropolis. But then that city had been destroyed entirely due to circumstances Sorun wasn't clear on. Nicole saw the nanite city nobody was using (something Sorun could still hardly believe) and saw an opportunity to give the Mobians back a proper city instead of the makeshift one in Knothole.

She was nice like that.

Unfortunately the bombing curbed her scheme, so she'd thought up a new plan on the spot: Sorun would bring them to New Megaopolis, where he'd then plug her into an accessway so she could get into the Egg Network. She'd work on the nanite city and fix things up so that everybody would have a home to go to once Sorun rescued everybody, since Knothole was a smoldering crater now and officially a no-go. Sorun, quite simply, would free everybody and then use the Yamato to make a portal to take everybody there. Everybody saved, nanite city and new home acquired, all would be well.

Of course it hadn't gone quite that simply; Sorun was fairly certain him getting maimed fighting Eggman in a mech suit wasn't part of her plan, but the plan itself called for a lot of improvisation. He didn't care much since he was dying anyways, and it wasn't like he could feel it. And the important part was that he got everybody out of there and to the city.

And what a city it was. Maybe not a "city" city in terms of size, more like a large town than anything, but still big enough to fit the hundreds and hundreds of residents in it with room to spare. Sorun couldn't see much since he hadn't gone much further than just outside the portal leading into the city. He'd transported everybody into what looked like a small park that was in the city Nicole made, near a small lake. Nearby he saw more structures: paved sidewalks, lightposts, off-white huts near the size of small houses nestled between trees in neat rows, she'd even thrown in some fancy archways. Fake, all of it. Everything from the houses to the trees were made of nanites. But it looked real and smelled real, and he wagered it probably felt real. Either way she'd actually done it. Nicole had made a whole city.

Everybody who Sorun had gotten through the portal (more he'd just made the portal while Sally and the rest of the Freedom Fighters lead everyone through) was going around and marveling at the city, everybody in various states of disbelief and wonder. Sorun was more or less standing on his lonesome, having finished looking around. Still missing body parts. Still on the verge of blacking out. Not bleeding as much, which was... probably a bad sign.

"Nicole really goes all-out on her surprises, huh? Man... never heard of anybody making a whole city as a gift before. This world's wild." He glanced downwards at the left Bringer Claw holding the gray Emerald, the gem now stained with his own blood. He'd bent down to gently lay Nicole's handheld down on the ground, and then reached up to grab the bloodied Emerald as the Bringer Claw disappeared. "Probably a bad idea to do this while I'm bleeding out here... eh, fuck it."

He gripped the gray gem with his real and spectral hands. Sparks of energy arced around his arms, the Emerald was converted to pure Chaos energy that was absorbed into his body through his arms, and that was that. He, of course, hadn't felt a thing. He did feel magnitudes more tired, however, if that was even possible. He wasn't even able to keep up the Bringer Claw mimicking his right arm anymore, so that had disappeared. But otherwise there was no change with him.

"Well... so much for that..."

"Sorun...?"

He looked up at the voice that called his name. All the blue invading his red-tinted vision and the voice immediately identified the speaker as Sonic. He was standing right in front of Sorun and looked even worse off than Sally had when she'd approached him by a wide margin. A grief-stricken look was set on his face as he looked at the Earthling, eyes wide with tears freely falling from them. More than that, he looked scared.

It was almost enough to make Sorun laugh. He'd never seen Sonic scared before. At the same time, he wasn't too surprised it took somebody falling apart and near-death like Sorun was right now to draw that kind of expression out of him. It was just like Sonic.

"Hi, Sonic..." Sorun quietly greeted. He glanced down at his torso, at the metal shards and shrapnel still sticking into him, and looked back up at the crying hedgehog. "It seems I... overdid it a little bit..."

"S-Sorun, I don't- you- I don't know w-what I'm supposed..." Sonic took a step forwards. He seemed to be at a loss for words, tears still streaming from his eyes. "I-I-I'm so sorry I couldn't- I should've- you need a doctor-"

His distressed, sorrowful ramblings were cut off completely when Sorun poked Sonic's forehead with a bloodied finger.

"I promised everything would be okay, didn't I?" Sorun asked, voice barely above a whisper.

A small hiccup left Sonic as he attempted to choke back his tears. "Th-this isn't okay. You're not okay..."

Sorun couldn't help it. He'd actually smiled at Sonic out of sheer bemusement. "You're seriously crying... over a loser like me...?" He began to tilt backwards. His finger left Sonic's forehead, leaving behind a single string of thick blood that broke and fell against Sonic's face. "You really are lame..."

That was as far as he could go. Sorun collapsed onto his back right after finishing speaking. He faintly heard panicked voices calling after him, but by then he'd closed his eye completely. He lost consciousness the moment everything went black.


A/N- The whole "I've come to retrieve my friends" line sounds cool until you realize Sorun's just straight-ripping Vergil's lines from the games since emulating his favorite video game character is one of the only ways he can cope living in this really wacky nightmare world.

Took us like 600k words to get here, but we finally got the first boss fight in the story. So yay for that.