SONIC THE HEDGEHOG: VELOCITY'S END
A fanfiction by Mythick Voices
Chapter 8
The mobian fox motored furiously through the air as fast as his tails would carry both him and Amy, whose left arm he held firmly with both hands. The pink hedgehog's green eyes widened as she saw the columns of smoke and fire rising from Julayla Memorial Garden. Eggnatius' monstrous contraption, unhindered by Mighty and Ray's interference, was pressing toward the vicinity of the school and castle. The maniacal inventor seemed unperturbed by the fact he'd lost more than half his forces in the assault.
Tails lowered Amy to the street, then retrieved the holo-lynx's datapad from the clamp at his belt. "Alright Nicole! Now, the Grinder's got some kind of shield stopping artillery from penetrating it! There's gotta be a way to bring it down!"
Tapping into control of the nanites around Eggnatius, Nicole scanned the robot for structural weaknesses and power sources. The blueprints she collated determined operational control stemmed from the cockpit. This clear, windowed module consisted of the pilot's chair with ejection seat mechanism, voice broadcasting system, throttle control, status dashboard, and overhead HUD. The grinder bars had a secondary throttle, giving Capuchini control over their speed, power, and positional height. Similarly, the HUD gave Eggnatius access to the organ pipes, allowing him to blast music at lethal decibel levels, or to fire homing torpedoes into the enemy. Powering all of these systems was an unknown engine of immense chaotic energy, located directly beneath the inventor's seat.
"Can't seem to f-find a way to lower the shields remotely or *krzzzzzzzzzzt* hack his systems," the holo-lynx reported, "but whatever's powering that ugly thing is directly beneath the cockpit! If you can get to that, there's a good bet it'll lose juice!"
"Right!" Tails nodded affirmatively. He looked at Amy. "I don't see Mighty or Ray, so you might be on your own. Do you think you can get close enough to get to the cockpit and shut it down?"
Rose tilted her head, first left, then right, releasing the tension in her neck with a loud pop as she prepared for battle. "Oh I've been ready to break some eggs!"
Capuchini's insane shrieks and cackles stopped as he saw the small pink hedgehog run up in front of the Organ Grinder. He pulled back on the throttle, momentarily halting the machine's ravenous advance.
"Have you come to swear fealty to the Machine God, little one?"
"I think your Machine God might have a few loose screws if he thought this plan was ever gonna succeed!" Amy shouted up at the inventor in reply. "Don't you know how many crazy badnicks we've trounced before you? This one's gonna be no different!"
"Why don't you mobians ever understand?!" Eggnatius screamed angrily. "Your lives are fragile! Brief! Emotional basket-cases with limited perspectives and no way to upgrade your core sytems! Why would you want to endure life through such a tragic and pathetic lens?!"
"Because a life spent not being able to think for ourselves or loving anyone is a cold, terrible life! We might not live forever, sure, but that just makes the here and now more important than you'll ever know!"
The Organ Grinder's immense pipes blared a deep, flatulent sound. "The here and now?! What good is living for the here and now when it's over in an instant?! Every moment of the present constantly striving to become the future?! That future is a future of metal! Of machines!"
"Forget it!" Tails shouted. "Insanity can't be reasoned with, Amy!"
The pink hedgehog gripped her Piko-Piko Hammer tightly. "Don't say I didn't give him a chance after I crack that Egg's shell with this!"
Without another word, Amy Rose dash-boosted herself forward in a mighty, salmon-colored blur, smashing through the crowd of Iron Monks engaging with the Acorn militia directly in front of her. The few robians that remained met a similar end, exploding into sparks and scrap metal as she whirled her hammer in place around and around like a spinning top. But she wasn't done yet. Using the added momentum she gathered from the hammer's torque, the hedgehog propellered herself up out of the reach of the monks and high into the air. In a sparkling burst of heart-shaped lights, Amy flew forward toward the Organ Grinder.
Defensively, Eggnatius launched another volley of missiles from within the pipes. These were not directed at a barricade or building, but at Amy herself. Just as the missiles converged about to strike her, she tucked her arms to her sides, rotated her torso, and performed a trick action. Both she and the hammer blinked out of position in a back star maneuver, repositioning her in the air faster than the torpedoes were able to adjust. She whipped the Piko-Piko Hammer fiercely downward, hurling it directly through the line of rockets and straight into the Organ Grinder itself. Because Eggnatius' device did not interpret the hammer as a projectile weapon shell, it passed through the red hex shield unimpeded, slamming into the machine just below the cockpit where Capuchini was sitting.
"You little hedge beast!" the inventor shrieked, using the Grinder's gigantic metal arms to pry the hammer from the site of impact. Just as Amy hit the ground landing on her feet, Eggnatius held the hammer high up in the air and with each gigantic robotic arm, pulled downward until the weapon snapped in two with an explosion of purple, pink, and red tiny heart-shaped particulate.
Rose gasped as her favorite weapon broke like a brittle twig in autumn. "Ok… now we might have a little problem," she whispered. "Tails!"
"Oh, would you hurry up!" Jack Rabbit hissed to Avery as the bear gingerly laid Mighty and Ray down at his feet.
"Miles said we had ta bring 'em back in one piece!" the grizzly reminded his commander. "I'm just tryin' ta make sure we don't lose any pieces!"
"Just get the Globe Posts set up so we can get back to Anti-Mobius before anyone gets wise to our lil' plot, alright?!"
As Avery began to setup the teleporter, Jack pulled out his handheld communicator and started sending an encrypted message to the other members of the Squad, announcing the success of his mission, and that he and Avery were on their way back to HQ. He nearly dropped the communicator when he heard a familiar voice behind him shout, "The Sand Blasters! So you're behind all this!"
The hare spun around to find himself staring at an angry fox, a mirror image of Miles, not yellow in color, but orange. "T-Tails Prower! Fancy runnin' into you here! Love to chat and catch up, but we're on a schedule, so…"
"You shut that mechanical organ down right now, or I'll feed you both to it!" the fox snarled, his twin-tails spinning behind him menacingly.
"You've got it wrong, Shrimp!" Jack retorted. "We ain't got nothin' to do with ol' Roly Poly over there! I swear on my one good eye!"
"Then what—" Tails stopped mid-sentence as Avery stood up behind Jack, his towering form revealing the unconscious bodies of Mighty and Ray by his feet. Jack followed the fox's gaze while his hand slowly inched toward the stun revolver clipped into the holster at his hip.
"You're tryna kidnap my friends!" Prower fumed.
"That's a bit of an oversimplification of the plan, but more or less, yeah, we're kidnappin' yer friends," Avery nodded.
Jack heaved a heavy sigh. "Avery, if you don't shut that big, loud pie-hole of yers, I'm gonna shoot the claws off yer paws!"
"Then I hate to disappoint you both, but you're going to have to cancel those plans! I'm not letting you take Mighty and Ray anywhere!"
The clashing Acorn and Iron forces seemed to freeze as time slowed to an imperceptible crawl, each second stretching on for minutes. Jack's hand glided slowly across his waist, the tip of his index finger popping open the button on his holster in a singular, rehearsed movement. The stun-gun left its sheath, the mechanism built into the holster firing, releasing a small burst of pressurized air that launched the weapon directly into the rabbit's palm. Jack's arm came up to fire at the fox and depressed the trigger.
The captain of the Sand Blasters emptied what remained of the stun revolver's moon clip, but hit nothing but air. The energy projectiles from the revolver traveled at around 1,000 feet per second; using the accumulated force generated from the spin of his twin-tails, Tails Prower accelerated forward at more than double the speed of sound. Dancing past the shells with beyond-feline grace, the young mobian launched into a vicious ballet of savage tail slashes, punches and kicks.
To a normal observer, all of this happened in the span of a single second, an explosion of color, electrical energy, and blustery wind. Jack, though handy with a pistol, was not gifted with exceptional speed. From his perspective, at the same moment he fired his revolver at Tails, the flurry of blows collided with his face, legs and abdomen. His vision went white hot with stars, and he felt as if the Earth's gravity did a barrel roll around him. An incredible amount of force sent his body rag-dolling into a stack of crates against the side of the building, the stun-gun clattering noisily to the cobblestone.
Avery roared and swung one of the Globe Posts at the fox, narrowly missing his head. Tails spin-jumped upward, clipping the bear's jaw and whipping the grizzly's head back as he launched into the air. Avery stumbled backward, clutching out in front of him, then tripped over the other Globe Post and toppled over like a falling tree. Just at that moment, the datapad clipped to his belt crackled.
"Tails! Amy needs help!" Nicole reported.
"I'm a little busy!" the fox shouted in reply, turning back around just in time to see Jack staggering back to his feet.
"The Organ Grinder's about to advance on Acorn Castle, and Eggnatius destroyed Amy's hammer! We've got no way to stop it or shut it down!"
"Seems like yer friends are in trouble," Jack snickered, shaking the dizziness from his head. "Well that's a darn shame, ain't it! Guess you're gonna have to make a decision, Double-butt! Save Mighty and Ray—or save Amy and Mobotropolis!"
Tails hovered in place, snarling, beginning to panic as Rabbit helped Avery back up to his feet. Jack then recovered his revolver and aimed it at the fox once more.
"The Globe Posts, Avery! I've got this runt!"
"Dammit!" Tails muttered. "Nicole, get Amy and pull back to Acorn Keep! We'll have to yield the western side of the city to the monks for now!"
"But Tails, if we do that, he'll have control over the Lake of Rings. He could use the rings to superpower his troops. Or even worse! I don't even want to think about *krrrrrrrrrrrrt* w-w-what he might do the Chao!"
"I don't know what to do, Nicole!" the fox cried.
"Of course you don't, flyboy!" Jack teased mercilessly. "You're just the sidekick! You'll always be the sidekick! You're not leader material, and you never will be! So why don't you just be a good little fox, do what your AI tells you, and go stop that death organ on wheels!"
"I…I…I…" the fox stammered, looking from Jack to Avery then to where Mighty and Ray lay fallen.
Then, at that exact moment, when absolutely all seemed lost and hopeless, the team communication channel bleeped, and a long-awaited voice sounded through, clear and decisively:
"Hope you don't mind me crashing the party and clashing with armies, 'cause this is way past cool!"
About a minute earlier, Sonic the Hedgehog returned to Mercia from Camelot. Snottingham Castle was now quiet, save for the steady soft droning of crickets and the occasional raven somewhere tearing across the heavens above. Stars twinkled without a care in the world above in a cloudless sky as the sun began to slip beneath the western horizon. The Blue Blur took a deep breath, savoring the crisp, cool, evening air as it hit his lungs. He still felt a great deal of power coursing through his body from all the rings he'd absorbed. His muscles itched with electricity. His mind felt sharp. Focused. Alert. He hadn't felt this way in days. Weeks even. He almost wished the Grandmaster Mordred Hood would come back for a second round.
The hedgehog tightened the laces on his shoes. He had to get back to Mobotropolis. He'd learned much, and he finally had a working operating theory about how they might save Sally Acorn. That was one big piece of the puzzle resolved. Two pieces remained: locate the cache of Ancients knowledge, and track down Sally's current whereabouts. The sooner he got started on both, the sooner things could get back to normal. And that was what Sonic desperately wanted most of all right now: normality.
To add to that, all the running around Sonic had been doing also meant he'd had time to do a lot of thinking—even if it was at high speed. Though he knew the way he'd been treating his friends was necessary, he still regretted it deeply. How he'd abandoned Tails and thrust the role of leader of the remaining Freedom Fighters onto him. How he'd ignored Amy's attempts to mend his wounds, both physical and mental, after everything that had happened during the Super Genesis Wave. Even his absence during the rebuilding and political restructuring of Mobotropolis. He had many amends to make, but they'd have to wait. With Sally's life potentially hanging in the balance, all bets were off. Until that was resolved, it was game on.
Sonic's feet turned 90 degrees westward as a series of electrical impulses built up along the ground beneath his sneakers. It took less than 10 seconds for the hedgehog to traverse the distance back to Mobotropolis. The light and color shifted and brightened from dusk to day around him as he shot like a sonic boom backward across multiple time zones in the span of only moments. He saw the large billowing plumes of smoke rising from his city and dropped out of warp pace above the bluffs, surveying the action in front of him. His mouth hung agape as he spied the giant rolling monstrosity swiftly closing on Acorn Castle. Squinting his eyes, he noticed some familiar rogues dashing across the city he hadn't seen in so long he'd nearly forgotten they'd existed. Regardless, he knew it wasn't coincidence.
"The world almost ends, and these guys still haven't had enough!" the hedgehog growled. He balled himself up, then accelerated into the city. He made his first stop at the Science Center on the west side of the city where the Acorn Evacuation Plan he'd helped design mandated the Council be taken during an assault should the castle be breached. There, he found his uncle, who swiftly informed him of mobian defense against the Organ Grinder, and of Rosemary providing leadership at the hospital for the wounded Acorn soldiers.
"It has a shield, my boy!" Charles told him. "So they can't shoot it! They were going to ask Nicole to find its weak spot! But you've got to hurry! I'm not sure your friends can hold out much longer against Eggnatius and his monks!"
"I'll take care of it, unc!" the Blue Blur promised. "After this is all over, I'll meet you back here at the Science Center. I have a favor to ask you, and I need your technical expertise. Do you have a handheld communicator tuned to Acorn Frequency?"
Charles tossed his datapad to Sonic. The hedgehog didn't wait for it to reach him. In a flash, both he, and the communicator, vanished from sight in a gust of wind and lightning.
End of chapter eight…
