COUNTDOWN TIL SELF-DESTRUCT: 21 MINUTES 40 SECONDS
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Why the security computer had to be here in one of the robot assembly rooms, Tails was sure he didn't need to know. The huge drop under the walkways which seperated them from falling into an old, unlit furnace way down below did nothing to calm their nerves either.
The computer was slow and the screen was cracked in several places but by Chaos did Tails put that hunk of junk through its paces. He didn't care that the thing hadn't been used for years, he wasn't going to let it beat him; he was going to make that computer work like it had never been worked before. In under a minute, Tails had hacked in and was making his way through the lines of code to find the right door.
"You guys get to Room 91," he ordered. "I'll have opened it by the time you get there."
"Which direction?" asked Amy in an instant, not wishing to waste a moment.
Tails peered at the screen and pointed to his left.
"That way," he said. The walkway they were stood on ran forward a few feet before a second pathway veered off sharply to the left towards the far wall. "See this darkened bit?" Tails then asked, pointing at the map he had brought up. "That's where Sonic is. Let me know when you have him."
"Do we meet back here?" Knuckles asked, looking around him sceptically. In answer, a rumble in the distance caused the walkways to shudder and creak, a bolt or two falling from their places and clattering down into the factory below.
"...Maybe not," Tails swallowed, suddenly finding that his feet didn't feel as stable as before.
They weren't aware that several fires had grown out of control on the floors beneath them and were endangering the structure of the building. They just assumed it was the inevitable detonation that was sending out a few warnings before it blew.
"This is E Floor, right?" Amy asked for clarification. "How long will it take to get all the way downstairs?"
"We'll worry about that after we have Sonic. Come on!" replied Knuckles, surging forward to find Room 91 and, hopefully, their missing friend at last.
- - - - -
Shade had deemed that the tiltrotor was still functioning. There was gas in the tank, the rotors weren't too sticky and moved well, the instruments were a little rusted but could probably last them until the next island, the wheels... Well, they weren't in best condition but, for now, they would have to make do. It would mean their landing could be bumpy and quite rough but it beat getting blown up and sunk any day.
From inside the cockpit, the echidna heard approaching feet and she scrambled over the seats to get to the doors of the cargo area. Charmy was already yanking them open and he collapsed into the helicopter with relief.
"Are you all here?" Shade asked hurriedly as Espio appeared behind the bee.
"Not yet," the ninja told her, pushing Charmy into the nearest seat. "The others are somewhere behind us."
Shade then noticed Vector come running up with a pale looking Ira slung across his back. She said nothing as the burly crocodile pushed him in and towards the back of the aircraft.
"I take it this thing works?" he asked Shade.
She nodded. "Needs to get outside though."
Vector eyed the aircraft doubtfully.
"It'll be hard by me'self," he admitted, "but with help, I reckon we could do it."
There was a few crashes and bangs far above their heads as parts of the factory began to fail.
"Hope they're okay," Charmy gulped, thinking of everyone else, including Sonic - wherever he was.
- - - - -
"LOOK OUT!" Silver leapt and pulled Shadow out of harm's way with his psychokinesis just as a piece of ceiling and an unfortunate bookshelf fell down and shattered against the floor.
Shadow and Omega had ascended a floor and had caught up with the others in order to help them escape just as the fires, which had got into the pipes and the chemical tubes, forced the whole place into premature demolition. Cream was coughing as thick black smoke billowed from a vent and she held Cheese tightly to her chest as he whimpered and coughed with her. Chao were sensitive to these sorts of things and she was worried he might suffer some permanent damage from his ordeal.
"Get round me!" Shadow called, thanking his fellow hedgehog by clasping his shoulder and nodding at him.
Omega took Cream and Blaze in his robotic arms and stood as close to Shadow and Silver as possible while Big wrapped his tail around on the other side, squeezing his eyes shut as heat and smoke engulphed them. In a flash of energy, Shadow had used Chaos Control to teleport them down a floor to where he and Omega had been before. It was hard to transport many people at once and he gripped his fluffy chest hard to ease the tight feeling once they had gained their bearings. "
"This way." Omega told them, lowering Cream and Blaze back to the ground.
"Let's go, Shadow," Silver said gently, taking a recovering Shadow's elbow and steering him in the right direction.
Froggy croaked warningly right before part of a wall collapsed and a fire-damaged robot could be seen sparking on the ground in front of them. There was little time for pity. Up and over the debris they went, running and flying as fast as they could go.
"Tails? Knuckles? Amy?" Blaze was crying into her communicator while waving off the heat with her free hand.
Nothing.
"Shadow, what do we do?" Cream asked, tears beginning to stream down her cheeks. "What if they don't get out?"
"They'll get out!" Shadow shouted, though whether he was sure of that or not, not even he knew. "They HAVE to get out."
Silver looked over his shoulder with worried golden eyes. "Maybe I should fly up and see-"
"Not a chance!" Shadow spat aggressively. "Get your spines out of here, you hear me?"
Silver knew better than to cross Shadow. Like with Sonic, Shadow didn't consider himself a friend of Silver's. But Sonic and Silver were hedgehogs which meant, deep down, they were like family. Very estranged family. And if the data that Omega and Shadow had found was accurate...
"Down here!" Blaze called, jumping down a staircase that had appeared on the right. The elevator beside the stair case was gone completely, the fire above having cut through the cables a while ago. With their speed and agility, the group of them were soon on Floor A and the hanger was within their reach.
- - - - -
Amy skidded to a stop just as the doors gave a piercing shriek and began rolling back to reveal the dark laboratory beyond it. It shuddered and faltered halfway though but Knuckles, his patience having dried up, seized the door with one hand and pulled it straight from the wall, chucking it away with a growl of frustration.
They had come this far and a set of doors weren't stopping them now.
The darkness of the room was of no bother to them and they barely noticed the computers around them nor the gurgling of liquids in tubes nor even the warmth of the air. Their attention was given to only one thing.
Since her first encounter with the heroic hedgehog, Amy Rose had forever since regarded the colour blue with respect and devotion, recalling how often the flash of such a colour instilled her with the greatest relief and hope.
Rarely, however, had she seen it look so small.
Sonic was often to be seen standing tall, presenting his majestic quills and his slender legs with such dignity and pride that it was an insult NOT to admire them. He would only ever roll into a ball when his body was in motion or when he was dangerously cold, uncommon as that was.
Amy, therefore, could be forgiven for not recognising the tightly curled ball of blue at first, so eager she was to find her beloved hero standing to attention with his trademark smile, the kind that set her heart aflutter.
"Sonic!" she had cried, running to his side, kneeling beside him as instinct told her that all was not well. There was no movement to signal that he had acknowledged her concern. "Sonic, we're here," Amy soothed, unable to find a part of his body to stroke for he was simply a mass of stiff, unmoving quills.
This was the highest form of a hedgehog barrier - an impenetrable armoured shield of razor spears, criss-crossing and brandished to their full, allowing nothing to get through to the soft body beneath. Not unscathed, that is.
"Sonic?" Amy's sweet voice beseeched. "What's the matter? Talk to us." No sound nor sign came from the ball. "Sonic?" She had waited so long to see him again.
Silence.
"Something's wrong." Standing at a shortened distance from the scene was Knuckles, looking on with impassive emotion, resembling ancient sentinels in the way he held himself.
While the echidna was prone to striking awe and fear in many fools that attempted intimidating him, Amy knew him well enough that there was little he could do to frighten her anymore.
"You don't say," she had commented dryly.
Knuckles was examining the metal claspings that had held Sonic and he looked very serious.
"Eggman wasn't the one to set him free of these bonds," he realised. The metal where it must have met Sonic's wrists was distorted and warped, like it had slightly begun to melt, and Knuckles could feel the faint residue of an intensely negative form of energy emitting from it. "Whatever it was that Eggman did, it made Sonic go dark. He freed himself as Dark Sonic." He glanced at Sonic sadly. "But... it doesn't look like he's moved since then."
"Why not?" Amy asked, not expecting Knuckles to know the answer as she gazed at her fiancé. It chilled her to think that he had resorted to such measures in order to escape. Actually... was it to escape? He hadn't moved from this spot so 'escape' hadn't been on his mind. Amy was now beginning to think it was an involuntary transformation. An emotional outburst and nothing more.
She had tried nudging him with her quills, the only part of her body that could feebly match up to that of Sonic's, but she had only been successful in causing him to roll half a centimeter and for a stray blue quill to prick her painfully.
"Can you pick him up?" she asked Knuckles, deciding there were no other options available right now. They couldn't afford to loiter.
Knuckles looked at the ball of knives with great reluctance; all things great and small, organic and robotic, feared the quills of Sonic the Hedgehog. Similarly, the fists of Knuckles were equally feared and, more likely than not, stood the highest chance of withstanding those quills - for a short time, anyway. His only solace was that Sonic was not moving and so the quills were unlikely to do damage without rapid momentum.
"...Ow." Knuckles hissed, taking up the ball with both hands.
It was not to say that the blue spines were any less capable of skewering the inexperienced.
Though he regretted his generosity when the first few quills began to pierce his glove and the skin underneath, Knuckles, in his pride, deemed that he was capable.
- - - - -
With all their strength, the group of Allies, having reunited on Floor A, heaved the helicopter from its place in the hanger and got it outside in the fastest time they could manage.
"Get in!" Espio cried at the doors. "We might be able to circle round and pick up the others!"
"If you know where they are in that place!" Shade grimaced. Flames could be seen licking the windows and another crash came from somewhere inside the building.
"Put it this way, we aren't leaving without them," Blaze said firmly, strapping in Cream and herself.
Omega was about to jump in when he looked up expectantly.
"Now's not the time t' star gaze!" Vector nearly laughed as he scrabbled his leathery self into the aircraft and took up a military stance over Ira's miserable curled up form. He was in a very bad way from his previous exertions.
"Sensing nearby agents," Omega suddenly announced.
- - - - -
Rouge had seen, to her delight, movement from the factory as a tiltrotor helicopter popped up in sight of her binoculers. She hadn't even waited to let anyone else know and had done something dangerous in actually flying through the darkness towards her friends, relying on echo-location more than her actual eyesight. Marine and Sticks had to high-tail it after her.
"Shadow!" she shouted, tears of relief moistening her eyes. "Omega... You're all here?"
"We haven't got long, Rouge," Blaze told her, running forward and hugging her, just as relieved. "Have you heard anything from anyone else?"
Rouge shook her head and looked around. "Where's Sonic?"
Shadow had approached her and took her gently by the arm.
"He's being rescued," he told her, moving her closer to the helicopter which Espio and Charmy were beginning to start up.
The bat, on the other hand, wasn't satisfied. "...Where's Knuckles?"
Shadow visibly winced. "Rescuing Sonic."
"He's still in there!?" Rouge shrieked, yanking her arm away and looking back at the factory in fear.
"Rouge, calm down," Shadow soothed. "He's on his way. Rouge! Listen to me! He's on his way!"
She wasn't listening to him properly but the last thing they needed was for an 'expectant' Rouge to start kicking off now. Shade popped her head out from the aircraft and tried her most gentle tones.
"Please, don't get worked up," she said, reaching out to pull her towards the craft. "Here, just let me-"
"Don't push me!" Rouge cried in fury. "I'm carrying a baby echidna and I'm extremely upset right now! Now get back in that helicopter or I'll take off my boot and shove it so far down your throat you'll be walking home with three legs, not two. WHERE THE HECK IS MY HUSBAND!?"
"We don't know!" wailed Cream, unable to take much more. "We got separated looking for Sonic!"
- - - - -
The ground shuddered again and cracks began to appear under their feet. There was no way they could try going forward.
Knuckles, still carefully holding Sonic in his arms, hurriedly searched for a window and, when finding one, ran towards it and full on head-butted it, sending shattered glass everywhere. He barely acknowledged a shard that cut his cheek.
"What are you doing?" Amy gasped, flinching away from the glass shards.
Knuckles went kicking the remaining shards away from the pane and he looked down at the ground below him, frowning but coming to a swift conclusion.
"No questions!" he told her and hopped up onto the pane. "Grab a hold."
In times such as these, the only thing they had was trust and, right now, with Sonic in his hands, Amy trusted no-one more than she trusted Knuckles the Echidna. She hoisted herself up onto the pane and wrapped her arms around his neck, holding on tightly as Knuckles, moving to hold Sonic in one hand, buried his other hand into the wall.
They began to slide down and memories came back to Knuckles of the fight at the gorge when he had caught Sonic and Tails in mid-air and had ended up bunking at Amy's house. Ironically, the echidna sighed, it was the same fist he was using now that he had used back then. And Sonic...
Knuckles looked down at the blue hedgehog. Sonic wasn't doing so good.
When they hit the ground, Knuckles accidently tightened his hold on Sonic which caused him to yelp as several quills spiked him. But with little time to complain, he and Amy turned on their heels and retreated into the trees.
"Tails?" Amy spoke into her communicator, dilegently following Knuckles. "You need to meet up with us now."
A fair way from the laboratory, the pair had chanced that they were relatively safe and Sonic was placed down upon the mossy forest floor.
"Do you have Sonic? What's the matter?" Tails' voice came quietly. "Is Sonic okay?"
Of course his first concern was Sonic. His first concern was nearly always Sonic, such was the nature of brothers as close as they were.
Respecting such a bond, Amy concluded that the young fox may be the only key into stirring Sonic back into life.
"We don't know," the female hedgehog had replied truthfully. "He's curled up into the tightest ball and he won't uncurl."
"I'm already on my way!"