SONIC THE HEDGEHOG: VELOCITY'S END
A fanfiction by Mythick Voices
Chapter 7
In the final seconds of the enemy charge, Prower accelerated his twin tails into a furious spinning blur. As the Iron Monks front line collided with the Acorn military, Tails unleashed a furious combination of vicious slashes, cutting clean through all of the metallic assailants in front of him. Having spent so many years by Sonic's side, the young fox himself had become a master of momentum in his own right. Utilizing the torque generated by the lateral motion of his whirring tails, he performed a 360 spin, his tails acting like a razor-sharp lash. Cutting through metal like a hot knife through butter, Miles danced from attack-to-attack, pirouetting over his enemies and sliding acrobatically between their legs.
As Tails whipped up a storm of debris from the force of his Tails, Mighty shot through the dusty dervish like a diamond bullet. The few of Eggnatius' men at the fore of the line were vaporized instantaneously, as the equivalent of an MK-23 atomic projectile fired from an Iowa-class battleship exploded into their ranks at the speed of sound. Mighty let out a deafening war cry as he decelerated, picking up a roboticized rhinoceros monk and lifting it high above his head. With a grunt, the armadillo heaved the robian into the air like a football, the monk spiraling helplessly away with an artificial scream.
Ray swooped down from above and lightly grabbed onto jettisoned rhinoceros to increase his own acceleration, as a skateboarder might grab onto the back of a moving truck to pull them along. At the apex of the flight, he released his grasp, spread his patagium, and entered a slow glide, releasing several small grenades clipped onto a bandolier slung across his chest. These fell into the swelling mass of robed robo-monks, exploding moments later into glitching craters of burned nanites, scrap metal, and singed linen.
The Acorn militia was well-trained, but weary. Their line held initially, and despite many losses, they gave nary an inch. When the first wave of enemies routed, Eggnatius Capuchini advanced the Organ Grinder forward toward the heroes.
"Now that you've been softened up by my underlings, you shall become fertilizer for the garden of metal I will sow here!"
"This guy sure loves broadcasting his plans!" Tails shouted, curling himself into a ball and launching himself into the air to avoid the swing of a large, iron flail. With a seasoned gymnast's grace, the fox uncurled himself in mid-air and dashed forward in an orange blur. From this maneuver, he shot downward, leap-frogging from head to hooded head, smashing the monks with his pointed shoes as he went.
"Let 'im rant!" Mighty shouted back over the noise of combat. He curled his fist into a ball and buried it directly in the metal chest of the monk in front of him. Like a cannonball, his hand ripped clear through to the other side, closing tightly on the power cell it was now holding. The energy core ruptured instantly in the armadillo's hand. "More talking means less fighting!"
There was a loud, otherworldly scream from the Organ Grinder. With a hiss, the church organ style pipes began to thrum and steam. From within each tube, a rocket shell equipped with a rudimentary fire-and-forget targeting system shot high up into the air. Tails, Mighty, and Ray watched in horror as each rocket turned in the sky to face the Acorn Army park barricades. Then the engine turbines kicked in, and the missiles sped toward them.
"Ray! Tails! Launch me!" Mighty bellowed.
The flying squirrel and the fox swooped down from the sky, each grabbing Mighty by one arm. With the combined speed of both aerial acrobats, the trio quickly reached breakneck speed. As the missiles converged and sped toward the earth, the armadillo curled himself into a ball. Tails and Ray released his arms at just the right moment. Mighty spun at meteoric speed down through the air, his shell like a tungsten bomb ripping through the spread of missiles in a chain combo of napalm and molten cobalt. The Acorn militia below covered their eyes from the bright flash as wave of intense heat hit them. Mighty impacted with the ground, skidding 20-30 meters before coming to rest, a shallow trench through the ground left in his wake.
Eggnatius, completely enraged, shrieked to the second wave of his forces to engage. The Acorn artillery released another volley of heavy fire, again meeting with failure against the Organ Grinder's forcefield.
"We have got to find a way to take that shield down!" Mighty panted, finally breaking a sweat.
Tails helicoptered nervously about a yard above his head. "Can you and Ray hold the line? If I can go get Nicole, maybe the holo-lynx could use her technology or nanites to locate a weak spot in the machine!"
The armadillo nodded confidently. "You bet I can," he assured the fox. "This guy might be a bad egg, but Eggman he for sure isn't! We'll find a way to keep him occupied! Just go get the AI!"
From their hiding place, Jack Rabbit and Avery the Bear watched the orange fox tailspin away from the battle, leaving the armadillo and his flying squirrel ally to content with the Organ Grinder.
"The coward's retreatin'!" Avery chuckled with a mocking sneer.
"This could be our chance!" hissed Jack. "You got the Globe Posts?"
Among the Sand Blasters, the grizzly was known for toting his beloved bazooka into most battles. It was a large, heavy device that stored a variety of forms of ammunition, everything from rockets to electrically-charged netting. For this mission, the bear had forsaken this for a pair of two, long, red cylinders which he'd strapped to his back. Unfastening the buckle that kept them secured in place, Avery pulled the posts over his broad shoulders, setting each one down upon the ground in front of them in the alleyway.
"Alright, we're gonna have to do this real quick like! Before the Acorn Army has a chance to notice us and figure out what's going on, got it?!" Rabbit whispered to his partner in crime.
"Got it, boss!" the bear assured him. "Smash and grab. Without the smash."
"Right," Jack rolled his eyes, pulling out the stun gun Miles had provided him. If the subject of Avery's notoriety was his penchant for explosives and demolitions, Jack's was his facility with pistols and small arms. He was, bar none, the best shot in Sand Blast city and, he reckoned, any city beyond it for at least a thousand miles. Each of the New Suppression Squad team members had been outfitted with weapons or devices specifically suited to their task and the mobians they were pursuing. Rabbit could confidently shoot the wings off a fly from fifty feet away with the sun in his one good eye. He was fairly sure he could hit a fox and a squirrel that were almost as big as he was, even in the midst of combat. All they had to do was wait for just the right moment…
Mighty hammer-dropped down into a small throng of mecha-monks that exploded in a crackle of electric sparks and smoke. Without hesitation, he charged his acceleration for two seconds, then launched forward into a spin-dash. He propelled himself through a column of Iron Monks, knocking them away like bowling pins. But as he did this, one of the Organ Grinder's powerful metal arms swung down and smashed into the armadillo's curled shell, sending Mighty flying backwards into the line of his own troops.
"Mighty!" Ray exclaimed, altering course mid-air to ascertain the fate of his friend.
The Acorn militia into which the armadillo had been swatted back were worse off than Mighty himself. The black and red armadillo slowly hobbled to his feet, a pained-but-angry look on his face, while several of the guardsmen had been knocked completely unconscious, pulled away by their comrades. Mighty cracked his knuckles, pulling his gloves tightly up his wrists.
"You're seriously making this vacation turn out to be a real downer!" the armadillo roared.
"Swear you will serve the Machine God!" Eggnatius continued to lecture through his megaphone, his war mech rolling ever and ever closer to the barricades even as his men perished in droves. "Serve him, and you will be spared! Reborn! Reshaped into absolute, glorious metal truth!"
"The next thing I'm gonna reshape is that speaker cone of yours!" the armadillo shouted, dusting himself off before running back into combat. He was too focused dodging, kicking, and punching his way through the endless tide of robed robians to notice the rabbit with the eyepatch shimmying up the side of a rain gutter and onto the nearby library roof.
A hurricane of wind trailing at his back, Tails sped through the empty halls of Acorn Castle calling out for Amy and Nicole. With each passing second, a feeling of dread and panic crept into the fox's heart. The malaise he was experiencing wasn't just because he'd left his friends behind to deal with this new fanatical menace. It was because, as he raced to find his teammates, he found it difficult remembering why he was trying to find them and why he'd disengaged from the fight. It was like the last five minutes of his life had become a blurry soup of non-sequential events. Almost as if someone else was borrowing his brain to plan a different schedule elsewhere.
Tails found Amy in Naugus' former office lying on the floor, curled up in a fetal position and shaking. His eyes bulged. "Amy?! What happened?!"
"I swear… I d-di-urrrrrrrrrrrr-dn't do anything, Miles! All she *krzzzzzzzzzt* did was t-tou—thirteen million, nine hundred and fifty-four thousand, nine hundr—touch my control in-in-interface…" the holo-lynx said, her datapad malfunctioning severely as she spoke.
"Nicole!" Tails gasped, looking to the AI who sat with her arms tucked around her knees atop her display pad where Amy had apparently dropped it. "What's wrong with your system?"
"I… I don't kn-know Miles… I'm really scared! Is Amy OK?"
Tails knelt beside the pink hedgehog and shook her shoulder. Turning her over from her side, he found her pupils incredibly dilated, her eyes wide with shock.
"My brain! There's something wrong with my mind, Tails!" Amy moaned with despair.
"Whaddya mean?" the fox said fearfully. "Can you tell me what happened?"
"After your mom got what she needed, I… I went to pick up Nicole's transmitter to bring her down to the battlefront, and then… I…" Amy tried to put into words what had happened. Flashes. Remnants. Half-remembered fragments of shadows of a memory… or perhaps a world… a different time, even, that wasn't hers. Like watching the biographical film of the life of a twin you didn't know you had. It had all poured through her brain at once like grains of sand through a sieve until all that remained were jewel-like sparkles that burned her consciousness if she tried to focus upon them.
"That sounds real bad," Tails admitted, "but right now, I'm afraid we've actually got bigger problems. Literally bigger problems. We need to see if Nicole can locate a weak spot on the Organ Grinder so Mighty, Ray and I can destroy it! Nicole, do you think you're up for that?"
The holo-lynx's long black ears twitched as she calculated every probabilistic scenario that would prevent her from accomplishing the task in just under a second. A series of numbers flashed in a blinding vertical scroll within the emerald green of her eyes. "Odds are high that I can, even with these annoying glitches," she assured Tails.
"How 'bout it, Amy?" the orange fox put his hand on Amy's shoulder as he helped the hedgehog back to her feet. "You good to swing that mallet around a few times for us? I think it would really hammer home the fact we don't welcome freaks in Mobotropolis who come in bad faith."
A wicked, hungry smile spread across Rose's face as thoughts of worry were replaced by thoughts of violence. "If I'd had to wait any longer to use my hammer today, Tails, I was going to make a Tornado pancake with it to teach you a lesson!"
One of the giant mechanical arms of the Organ Grinder slammed into the ground, sending large chunks of cobblestone and soil spurting high up into the air in a geyser of debris. It narrowly missed Mighty, but the impact tremor was enough to knock the armadillo out of a spin-dash, sending him tumbling along the ground. Attempting to distract Eggnatius, Ray swooped in, hoping to drop some more grenades down the church organ pipes atop the slow-rolling monstrosity. But just as he was going to do so, the Organ Grinder began to trumpet deafening hymnal music from within the pipes. Immense soundwaves rippled out and into the sky above the vehicle, battering Ray with pain and disorienting his sense of flight. This caused him to miss his target, dropping the grenades haphazardly as he crash-landed into the ground.
A handful of Iron Monks took the opportunity to dive on top of Mighty, who did not take kindly to the extra weight. He crouched low to the ground, pressing both of his gloved hands against the stone, took a deep breath in, then channeled all the strength he had left. Eggnatius Capuchini's gaze remained fixed on the spot where the armadillo had fallen, screaming for his henchmen to pile on as much metallic weight as they could to pin down the enemy while he lined up a death shot.
"Stop him! Show that apostate armadillo the depths of your faith! Bodies of flesh and bone are prehistoric compared to the superiority of the modern machine!"
With all his might, Mighty spin-jumped into the air, sending his would-be captors scattering in all directions. "I've had enough of this petulant priest! Ray, I'm gonna need your help to—"
It struck the armadillo like a bolt of Sonic's lightning, vibrating his entire shell from the top of his head to his tailbone. Mighty's muscles locked up as around a million volts of paralyzingly hot energy shot through every sinew and fiber of his body. All his momentum and strength was immediately sapped, his vision a blinding sea of sparkling white. His fingers, toes, shell and nose—everything completely numb and nonresponsive.
"Bullseye!" whooped Jack Rabbit from his secret vantage point atop the library roof, hidden amongst the landscaped foliage. "Like shooting fish in a barrel!"
"I don't see how shooting an armadillo with a stun gun through a couple hundred feet of metal zealots is anything like shooting fish in a barrel, but you're the boss," Avery replied.
"Would you just do your job, and go bring the armadillo back here?! Preferably before he wakes up! Miles didn't say how long this thing would knock 'em out for!"
"On it, boss!" Avery nodded enthusiastically, jumping off the side of the roof and sliding down the rail to the street.
"One down, one to go!" Jack smirked, giving his eyepatch a single tap.
Ray groaned, clutching his skull in agony. The sound wave attack from the church pipes made his brain feel like jelly, a horrid sensation outshone only by the nausea that overtook him as he'd been catapulted back to the earth. The flying squirrel heaved, vomiting twice before regaining his balance, rubbing his eyes and looking at the battlefield in front of him.
The Organ Grinder had begun to rip through the first barricade wall, spraying stone, metal, wood and warped nanites through the spiked roller bars and out the back side of the vehicle. The front line of the Acorn militia had completely shattered by this point, and plumes of smoke were now rising from within the coliseum as more of the mobian forces became overwhelmed. But what filled Ray with absolute shock and horror both was the grizzly bear that seemed to pop up out of nowhere, now lugging Mighty off the field toward the Mobotropolis Library.
"Huh?! W-wait! Mighty!" the flying squirrel called out, trying to climb to his feet.
"Y'know, I really thought you were gonna be the difficult one, with all yer flyin' and flippin' around," Jack Rabbit laughed.
Ray turned his head to find the Sand Blaster captain sitting on a supply crate about fifteen feet away, rolling his stun-revolver's barrel down the length of his bandage-wrapped forearm.
"You!" Ray growled angrily. "Is this attack your doing?"
Rabbit watched the chaos and carnage ensuing in the background for a few moments, taking a few shots at stray robian monks heading in their direction. "Oh this? Nah, we had nothing to do with this musical maniac. This whole thing kinda just worked out in our favor."
Ray was keenly aware of Jack Rabbit's skill with a pistol. At this range, there was virtually no maneuver or boost of speed that would see him safely evade any shot the hare took. Unless he could close the distance in the blink of an eye or a strong gust of wind hit them both at just the right angle, at fifteen feet away he was completely helpless. He dared not move a muscle. "Then why are you here, Jack? Still sour after how much better Mighty was at leading the Sand Blasters than you'll ever be?"
The Rabbit snorted and spat cowboy style on the ground beside him. "Puh-lease, Ray," he smirked. "True, Mighty may be hard as a rock, but he's dumb as one too. What good is power when you don't even know how to apply it properly?"
"What do you want with us?" the flying squirrel asked. "We'll never join the Sand Blasters again. You'd have to kill us both first!"
"Oh, don't worry yer precious lil' head, Ray, there'll be time for killin' and all that. But first, we've got a much more important use for the two of you. Just you wait and see what we've got in store for you and all your friends! Pain and suffering of the likes of which I've never seen! And I've seen some stuff, Ray!" The Rabbit aimed his stun-revolver at the flying squirrel. "Y'know, in another universe, we mighta been friends. Comrades, even. Protecting and ruling our city like no other city before it! But then you guys betrayed us. Abandoned us. And that's just something I just can't forgive."
And with that, Jack Rabbit depressed the trigger on his revolver.
End of chapter seven