Chapter 9 – Chaos Manifest
The world spun.
Or what Sonic thought was the world. It was really difficult to be sure.
Bright and colorful and flashing and shifting and spinning and changing and chaotic.
His arms and legs pinwheeled about, seeking purchase that didn't exist, solidity that could not be found. He fell. He floated. He flew.
Hard to tell.
Gravity pulled him inward, then flung him out again, like an unwilling yo-yo. Or maybe gravity was spinning too. Everything whirled by too fast.
Sonic felt nauseous. Sonic never felt nauseous.
Stop the ride I want to get off.
He closed his eyes, but it didn't help. Colors still flashed across his retinas, overwhelmed him. Inside his head, ringing like bells and pounding like drums and running down his spine like cold water. Energy flowed through the space like unchecked electricity, hot and sharp on the tongue, thrumming along his bones and crackling in his quills, pulsing in his veins, bringing with it an overwhelming rhythm of sound and emotion that tried to drown him.
Deep breath.
Two.
Focus.
Find the center, find a way to ground yourself. Like running up a loop.
He opened his eyes again. Regretted it almost immediately.
Momentum answers to you, not the other way around.
Sonic tried to control his own spin, tried to twist with it. Like going into a roll. Keeping his bearings, his point of reference.
Better, bit by bit.
His heart steadied. Slid into sync with the rhythm in his ears, in his head, his chest.
Not a bad beat, actually.
Everything still whirled around, but less frenetically. Less wildly. It was easier to see his surroundings now, though a part of him wondered if that was a good thing.
The sky was...everywhere. Up, down, all around, filled with massive forms of fish that, as he watched, warped and stretched and pulled until they were birds soaring, only to bend and curve and knot back up into fish again. No surfaces beyond strange crystalline structures that twisted and bent and bloomed around him, forming a lattice of translucent walls. No ground beneath him...or above him either. Just technicolor sky he could fall into endlessly and never come out again. It even looked hungry.
Ulp. The vertigo was back.
Steady breathing. Steady. You can do this.
"Okay," he said to himself.
Or tried to.
The void swallowed his voice. He could move his lips, could feel his throat buzz with the attempt to speak, but no sound followed. Like this nightmare place pulled it from his lungs and blew it away like scattering dust on the wind.
Well that's just rude.
The walls around him shifted. Up changed, and he spun sideways toward one of the lattice structures. He twisted around, caught it with his feet, pushed off, mesmerized briefly by the glowing after-image of his footprints on the crystal facets.
And how one of them flashed red.
What does that—
The world lurched to the side as what had been a steady if dizzying spin suddenly changed course, flinging him toward another wall. He hit it with his shoulder—no pain, no throb of old injuries, at least—watched as the crystal lit up around his hands. Another flash of red.
The spin picked up speed.
Whipped him toward yet another wall. Toward, of all things, a row of signs that proclaimed "GOAL!" in tall, red-hot letters. Burning-hot letters. Literally-on-fire letters.
Uh oh.
He reached out his hands, tried to grab something, anything, to halt his fall. Fingers scraped against crystal, lost purchase. A flash of green handprint.
The spinning slowed a bit.
Just enough.
Sonic grabbed the next crystal that passed, latched on with both hands and one foot, inches from falling into the burning wall. The false goal. Felt the heat licking at his tail.
Too close.
Avatar.
Sonic looked up sharply at the voice. Not a sound in his ears, no. Sound didn't seem to work like that here. Just a whisper, but in his head. Deep in his head.
Like it had touched his soul.
He shivered. Walking on my grave.
He pushed off of the crystal, away from the false goal, trying to angle himself like some oversized pinball toward something, anything, that seemed safer.
But now that it had started, the whispers seemed insistent on staying. On being heard. Right beneath the skin, a breath on the back of the neck. Incessant. Pushing. Watching.
Sonic tried to block them out. Tried pinning his ears back, tried covering them, tried humming to drown them out—fat lot of good when his voice didn't work here. What made it worse was that they weren't even real voices, weren't intelligible or even really audible. More like a tap on the wall or the murmur of conversation three rooms over, the feeling that someone was talking and if you could just sit in the right spot or open the door you'd actually hear what they were saying. Just an impression of a voice.
Born of Chaos.
Except when it wasn't.
Because of course every so often one phrase would float to the top and sound in his head like an echo and startle him. Cause his hand to slip and hit one of the crystals that sped things up instead of one that slowed them down, cause him to ricochet off of his target instead of passing through. He would have cursed out the voices if his own had worked. Settled for internal ranting instead.
Chosen.
He pushed on. If he was stuck here, wherever here was, at least he could try to find somewhere safer to hole up. Get his bearings. Figure out what in the name of Chaos was going on and bust out.
Find the heart of the Chaos.
One ear perked up at that.
Bend it to your will. Prove yourself.
If there was a heart to this place, maybe there were answers there. Or a solution.
A way out.
Worth a try.
He was getting the hang of this now. Gravity still didn't work right, and the walls pushed or threw him off just as often as he connected with them as the world spun like an unbalanced top, but he found that if he focused, he could angle his bounce, steer his trajectory into safer corners and aim for the crystals that would keep the spinning slow, avoid the false goals that tried to draw him in. He was still probably going to lose his lunch once he finally got out of this place, but at least he was less at its mercy.
Awaken.
Even if he had the creepiest cheer squad ever.
A web of crystal grew over the passage behind him. He kicked it in frustration, then spun as the movement sent him bouncing again.
Into an open chamber of sorts that glittered with rainbows of refracted light, emanating from a large, crystalline shape in the center. The voices in Sonic's head hissed excitedly.
Okay, yeah, that does look kind of like a heart.
The crystal almost seemed to pulse with the rhythm of the Chaos, scattering color everywhere. Beating. Like a real heart. Sonic reached out a hand to touch it. His reflection in the crystal moved in sync with his hand, fingers meeting on the smooth surface. Looked up when he did.
Met brown eyes with green.
Sonic yelped silently and yanked his hand away in surprise, spinning away from the crystal heart. The whispers in his head roared like crashing waves in protest.
Green eyes?
He hit one of the red crystals. The world spun faster. His heart thudded in his chest.
Momentum pulled him toward another set of false goal markers.
No time for weird reflections. Move!
He twisted like a cat, trying to force himself to swing sideways mid-air. Fall just past the flaming wall that crackled and spat at him.
Caught his arm a little too close for comfort.
But he made it. Pushed off of the wall and back toward the crystal heart, his only lead on an exit.
The reflections rippled in the heart's facets as he approached. They looked normal enough from here. Blue hedgehog, big eyes, red shoes. Reaching.
A handprint burned into one surface.
Burned?
He reached out and slapped his hand back over the indentation of his own gloved fingers, and tried not to look at his own reflection as he felt it this time, the crystal surface melting away under his touch. His hand sank into the surface.
He looked up again.
Green eyes looked back.
He swallowed thickly, forced himself to stay, to see.
The reflection still moved when he did. So, not some creepy horror movie reflection-monster that would eat him as soon as he turned away. Still blue, but...taller, it seemed. Bluer. And those eyes.
The crystal parted, severing the reflection. Sonic pushed through.
More crystal in layers, wrapped around something that glittered in the center. Something green. Something that had gotten Sonic into this mess in the first place.
And with more crystal came more facets, more surfaces to reflect the little blue hedgehog that crawled through the passages his hands carved. Imperfect reflections, warped and altered, like a messed-up fun-house. The taller one with green eyes. One that glittered gold. One built like a beast. One flickering and distorted. Others too small or far to see. And ahead, above, not moving in sync with the rest, one that burned with an inferno of color.
All different.
All him.
He didn't want to think about it.
Instead, Sonic pressed his hands ahead of him, trying to melt his way through before gravity could find some way to toss him back out and into danger.
As if climbing through the crystal heart wasn't probably also dangerous.
He only had the whispers to go on, after all.
The whispers, which had built to a rush like the pulse of his blood, beating inside his skull like drums. Urging him forward. Exultant. His hand cracked through the last layer and into the core.
Grabbed the gem, and knew its name.
Chaos Emerald.
Avatar.
Loud, clear, directly in his ears.
The Emerald's voice.
The world around him sped up into a whirlwind of color and light and sound, crystals and bird-fish and flaming goals all blurring together against the gaping sky. Nausea returned, and he squeezed his eyes closed against the dizziness. Energy built. Burned in his lungs, his teeth, his head.
He was going to die.
—
Sonic crashed back into his body, ears ringing, teeth humming.
Hand still outstretched.
Fingers just brushing the green gemstone.
Chaos Emerald.
It vibrated with energy under his touch, matching his heartbeat. His pulse. Sharpening his senses. A biting aftertaste on the tongue. Heat along his back. The scrape of metal against stone, almost agonizingly slow.
Time was at a standstill, like he'd never been pulled into that psychedelic hellscape.
But his wounds were healed—mostly, at least. The burns smoothed, cuts knit, new fur grown in. Energy sparked in his veins. He felt better than he'd had in days.
He could take on the world.
The Emerald flashed and vanished beneath his fingers.
Panic spiked, then abated as Sonic realized he could still feel the gemstone. Not in his hand, not physical, but there, at the edges, just beyond his touch but ready to come if he called.
When he called.
He realized the caterpillar bot was still looming over him, mid-lunge, moving sluggishly as if stuck in a dramatic slow-mo scene in a movie. Everything was, actually. Everything but Sonic.
He grinned.
And moved.
The caterpillar didn't know what hit it. Didn't even have time to react as Sonic launched himself up into the center of its dopey mechanical face and split the housing wide open with his quills. It fell to the side as he jumped past, speed and reflexes heightened, running for the caterpillar that had gotten its drills stuck in the wall just...moments ago, wasn't it? It felt like forever and a day. He split that caterpillar at the joints and ducked around the spiky spheres as they scattered, then made quick work of the bat-bots as well. He heard the groan of Mobians pulling themselves from the metallic carnage behind him, but adrenaline and elation had a firm grip, and he scaled back up the half-collapsed stairs to the top of the massive chamber and the exit he suspected lay there. It'd serve everyone better anyway if he used this fresh burst of energy to wreck what he could before it wore off.
A short race through another tunnel—lined with flame-throwers for some reason that he easily dodged—and fresh air hit him in the face like a splash of cold water. He laughed, a little hysterical.
Freedom.
The blue sky and green grass had never looked so good, and he was even happy to see the lava canals of the ruins again, neatly contained in their channels instead of flooding tunnels behind him.
He didn't even break stride as a larger machine swung into view, round like the human Robotnik's wrecker, with a pair of flamethrowers on either side and some kind of drone bot in the pilot's seat. Setting the ruins on fire, by the looks of it.
For shame.
He slid beneath it as it fired, missing him by a mile, and pushed off of a half-fallen column to crash into the broad side of the machine quills-first. Metal squealed in protest. The bot inside wrenched the controls around to try to throw Sonic off, but he only laughed as he bounced to the ground, ran in a wide half-circle, and flung himself at the damaged side again. Once, twice, thrice, cutting the machine wide open. Spilling mechanical innards across the half-burnt ground.
The flamethrowers sputtered and died. The engine followed shortly after. The machine fell to the earth with a heavy clunk, and Sonic quickly dispatched the drone before finally allowing himself to pause for a breath. Not that he needed it.
Not far away, Mobians staggered out of the tunnel exit, blinking against the sunlight. They drew up short at the sight of Sonic, a bit dirty and surrounded by machine detritus, but grinning ear to ear. Sonic merely waved, and dashed off.
He had an island to explore, after all.