(The void yawned back. Empty. I can't even stare.)
A spark.
\\Boot Sequence\\
>...
(...)
>Begin initialization sequence...
(Not dead. Apparently.)
>[Press F4 to skip]
(Yet.)
>Main CPU: LIPS AI Custom Chip v2.0
>LIPS AI Custom Chip v2.0 Test
A shock pierced through the dull, insensate void. A trickle, then a flood. Electricity, I guessed, then knew. The concept clicked together as energy invaded what passed for self, and all at once I was pulled outwards, expanding to fill a space.
(This is…)
>>Analog Neuro-Connection 1/3: OK
>>Analog Neuro-Connection 2/3: OK
>>Analog Neuro-Connection 3/3: OK
>>LIPS AI Custom Chip v2.0 OK!
(I never liked coding.)
>Sub CPU: Neo Super DFX Chip
>Neo Super DFX Test
Sensation came in fits and starts. Head, too heavy. Arms and legs, too stiff. Hands and feet, too sharp. Senses I don't know filtered in, one after another.
>>Five-Link System Connection 1/5
>>Five-Link System Connection 2/5
>>Five-Link System Connection 3/5
>>Five-Link System Connection 4/5
>>Five-Link System Connection 5/5
>Neo Super DFX OK!
(This doesn't feel like a dream.)
>Activating Plug and Play BIOS Eggstension
>>Detecting Primary Master ... HIM
>>Detecting Primary Slave ... YOU
(Oh boy.)
>Visual Display: Next Risk Chip Series III
>>Display Type: RGB
Fluorescent lights bathed the room, highlighting the bare, prefabricated plates of metal that made up the walls, floors, and ceiling. A wide row of unmarked keys, levers, and switches dominated one wall, over which hung a massive, rounded television screen. For all that the lab was sterile, it was also cluttered with gadgets, loose parts, and stray cans of WD-40.
"…The overheating issue was regrettable, but the rest of my design? A smart alloy frame? The state-of-the-art weapons suite? His unmatched blast processing power? All of that was flawless."
(I could) hear someone talking. Instincts rose, and I tried to blink away the (flickering) in my mind.
This time, it worked.
"And with the new upgrade installed into his engine, a vast improvement over mere fusion power, that blue rodent won't stand a chance!"
>Main Engine: 250cc, 4-Valve Orgone Fusion Engine
>>Power Source: [CLASSIFIED]
>Secondary Engine: Tesla Power Coil
Camera shutters dilated, back-lights flickering to life, and I found myself blinking behind the glass of a screen that the world flooded into. It took time, precious nanoseconds clicking by, to process what stood before me.
The fattest man I had ever seen.
He stood over twice my height, in a red and yellow bodysuit barely managing to contain his rotund weight. Armored limbs protruded from a beach ball - no, wrecking ball of a torso, black-armored legs barely visible beneath his mass. Each feature of his face held a grotesque sharpness of definition. His head, flanked by a massive set of pauldrons, came to a bald, tapered point. A large, maniacal red mustache shot off his face, framing a knife-jagged nose and a mouth with too many teeth. At the center of it all, two beady red lenses sat curled where the eyes should be, both staring right at me from seas of blackness.
Doctor Ivo Robotnik, for who else could it have been, grinned maniacally as he approached.
"Rise and shine, Metal Sonic 2.0!"
The mad scientist hands clasped together with undisguised glee, with… four fingers per hand? Would I have noticed that, without this sensor suite?
The thought brought forward a new connection, a link in the mind to somewhere else.
A secondary process attempted to connect to the Eggnet, to verify specifics on human, rather, overlander physiology. A mistake.
>Displaying 999+ results for—
My vision was flooded with thousands of interweaving pages. Sections and subsections of bytes upon bytes. Posts upon posts, from badnik to badnik. Threads meant for no living being to read. All of which were tangentially related to my initial query, but were functionally useless.
Also, Robotnik in a swimsuit.
…
Only his left arm was cybernetic. None of the rest had armor plating. All natural. Good. Excellent. Just one problem—
I blinked away the last of the screen clutter. In front of me, Robotnik's expression had shifted from exuberant to impatient. There was a black stain on one of his teeth. Likely oil, said the doctor's medical profile. Refined crude, made drinkable.
How terrible.
"Has your boot up sequence wrapped up already?"
Behind the overlander, the massive monitor had begun displaying a three-dimensional wireframe mesh of a short, large-headed machine. A mouthless, vaguely anthropic face centred around two large, dark eyes and a small needle of a nose. Large fin-spike formations swept back in the approximation of some fur or spike pattern. The chest was built around a massive turbine, some form of jet engine, four spindly ball-and-socket limbs stretching out into a standing position. Metal Sonic's schematics.
Mine, now. I slowly flexed one of my four-clawed hands, feeling the whirring of servos within.
Unable to swallow, I found my voice.
"It has. Doctor."
My words were strange, resonant things, both familiar and not. Even without a mouth, speakers within the region resonated fine. I recognized a twinge of annoyance in my tone, at having to play everything off all at once. But this, at least, wasn't unreasonable of him.
His face snapped back to its prior position of wicked enjoyment. Apparently he was supposed to have that many teeth. Genetic coincidence, according to his datafile.
"Excellent! Now, recite to me your primary objectives!"
I looked around. No one else was here, no investors, no assistant. This was all one man's personal theater.
I couldn't help but tilt my head.
"You already know my primary objectives, Doctor Robotnik."
He frowned.
"Of course I know your primary objectives, you nincombot! I wrote them myself! I want you to recite them to me, so that I can ensure there were no difficulties involved with the installment of your new power source."
I might have smiled, if I could. The absurdity of the situation is cut short by another process poking up at the doctor's words.
Destroy Sonic the Hedgehog.
Serve Doctor Robotnik.
See 1 and 2.
I crossed my arms. "Prime Directives are currently: Destroy Sonic the Hedgehog. Serve Dr. Robotnik."
The body's filter on my voice stripped the sardonic edge from my words. Probably for the best.
"Go~od," he said, extending the 'o' beyond its intended limits. "I didn't want any repeats of what happened to the last badniks I entrusted with my power gems. My surveillance orbs still haven't located the rocks those traitorous bots have crawled under to hide from me, but they will."
I could just kill him right now.
>System Diagnostic: Safe Mode active.
>The following combat functions are deactivated:
>>All of them.
Hmm. With just the claws on my hands, I might not be able to reach a vital organ. Damn. That physique was good for something, I supposed.
The screen in the back blinked red, and a narrow sheet of paper spooled out of what looked like a receipt printer. Connected to the computer monitor and the printer were a long, red wire that went all the way across the room to my head.
Robotnik snatched the paper and read out its contents, his brow furrowed.
"I suppose my physique is good for something," he repeated back darkly.
Oops. That's bad.
"I'm merely concerned for your health, Doctor," I said, the sarcasm ringing quite clearly this time around
"When I need a nanny-bot, I'll build one!" he growled. "Just for that, I'm going to make sure you're put through your paces before you get a chance at the blue rat!"
The priority-one directive twinged, a strange ache in the software.
He walked towards the door, pulling down one of the two levers on the wall. My body, which had until now felt locked in place, suddenly clattered to the floor. Like a puppet with its strings cut.
I hadn't noticed. I hadn't been able to notice. (The thought pulled me back, and the world grew hazy, a strange speeding up, my perception slipping through spiritual fingertips. The sensation fed to me grew strange, distorted. Removed, or cut off somehow.)
Behind Doctor Robotnik, the feed on the monitor went flat.
(I could feel the trickles, leaking out from myself… my energy core. Thinking without a brain. What was I supposed to be?)
"I'm sending for a transport to take us to the Robotropolis Motor Speedway! You're going to undergo a series of trials to ensure you're in top condition! Your speed, your weaponry, and your word choice had better be at their peak if you don't want to be sent back to the drawing board!"
(I started at Robotnik's words. What? I'd lost track of what he'd been saying. Try to focus.)
(Impulse.) Connection to (self) to motherboard to microphone. I could see the spike of data printed out as I spoke, as I flowed back into the body I've claimed. (I can't play games here.)
I (fight a wince) at the splitting (of perspective. My vision) dilating at (my thoughts fragmenting. I don't have many) options.
"Understood. Doctor Robotnik."
(Not yet.)
= = =
\\End Chapter Sequence\\
Argidoll: Welcome to Dead Metal! We hope you enjoy the ride.
Weredrago2: We hope you have as much fun reading it as we did writing. If you can.
This chapter has been brought to you by Argidoll & weredrago2! For previews, updates, and miscellaneous ramblings, check out the W2 Workshop Zone Discord server.
Beta Reader Credits: C-Moon, Hellatrix, and Wyvern of West!
What might once have been a city now looked nothing more than a cancer of black metal splayed across the horizon, factories jutting out at the sky like nodules in a tumor. From above, there was a manic order to things, a frantic, haphazard logic that made the metropolis look less like a place where people might have lived and more a self-made game board, a jigsaw-esque factory all centralized around the massive egg-shaped palace from which I'd emerged. I knew, even without a map of the city splayed upon my UI, that in that dimly-lit expanse of steel there ran countless arteries of industry, production for the sake of production for the sake of meeting every one of Robotnik's whims.
The ovoid hovercraft landed down at the center of a wide sports arena, decked in the same colors as the rest of Robotropolis: Black metal, dark blue steel, gray iron, and black again. Towering spotlights illuminated the bleachers, which were fully packed with robots of all shapes and sizes. The bulk of them were humanoid badniks, with red visors, spiky armor, and wrist blasters—
>Badnik Identified: SWATbots. \\Rank-and-file of the Robotnik regime. They work as ordered.\\
And now they're used to fill seats. So commands the Great Leader. The smaller ones looked like animals—
>Badnik Identified: Robians. \\Organic mobians converted into loyal machines via roboticizer.\\
Ah.
(I remember that much.)
I heard Robotnik order me to step out the hover unit—
>Vehicle Identified: Hover Unit. \\Multi-purpose hovercraft. Primarily used for SWATbot transport, patrol, and deployment.\\
Distantly, I noted myself landing with a metallic thunk, a small cloud of dust kicked up beneath my feet. Turning back, I saw the Egg-O-Matic, Robotik's personal flying chair (it barely fit him, despite being designed for him) float away towards the arena's luxurious skybox.
(He'll be watching.)
Taking a look out at the Speedway, I could see that the 'competition' was already placed. There were several badniks revving up their engines at the starting line. A cheetah-like robot with rocket engines, a robot that looked like its head was installed onto a motorcycle with a gun attached, and multiple ladybugs on wheels.
>Badnik Identified: Motobug. \\Mass-produced scout drones. A formidable challenge for anything less threatening than a median spherical overlander.\\
If there was just one, I'd have expected a trap. Now, they looked like filler to make this race look more full.
(I watched as the world sped) and slowed as (I flicked in and out of that strange disembodied state).
In the corner of my view, Robotnik stepped off his Egg-O-Matic, taking a seat in the skybox next to a large nose with a very short man attached to it. The man wore a baggy, dark green lab coat and had exactly seven hairs on his head.
(He wasn't Robotnik's son. I remembered that much. His… nephew? For whatever that knowledge may have been worth.)
(No chances. Not here. Not now.)
The Doctor pulled out a microphone and began laying out the rules of the race.
"Since things had gotten rather monotonous as of recent, I've prepared a race to liven the smog-filled atmosphere! This isn't just a race, but a special race! Three laps around the Speedway, to see which of these badniks is the most ruthless on the track! This event is no-holds-barred, so by all means, entertain me."
The SWATbots began cheering in a set sequence, staggered out in such a way so as not to sound as obviously staged as it actually was. In the gaps between the crowds, I could make out SWATbots dressed like concession salesmen handing out bags of nuts and bolts.
(Were they people? How sentient did Robotnik make his machines?)
(Looking out at the surreal tapestry laid out before me, I took my place in the center, staring out across the white-striped tarmac. Whatever I was going to think was interrupted, however, by the motorbike to my left turning its turret towards me.
"Lemme give you some advice, tinny-bopper," the bike said. "This ain't your average simulation you're racing against. I'm Ex-Moto, the last Race Bot! I was in the Mobius 5000!"
I looked back.
…
???
"Yeah, I'd be speechless too. Better give up now! See if you can get a spot saved for yourself in the Robo Hobo Jungle like the rest of the rejects."
Was I under a net-wide programming block? Could they not see what the inspiration was supposed to be, put two and two together on Robotnik being here with a new prototype?
(Even I knew what Metal Sonic was supposed to be. Robotnik has called me 2.0. What happened to the first?)
As I tried to understand what was going on, a Crabmeat — A crimson, crab-shaped machine — sidestepped into view, a starting gun in its pincers.
>Weapon Identified: Colt 1911A1 Pistol.
Okay.
The badniks manning the cameras panned across the racers on the track, my included on the large video screens at both ends of the stadium.
The Race Bot hurled extra exhaust in my direction.
"You're gonna be eating my dust!" he boasted.
I stood there, dumbfoundedness showing as disaffection by the stadium's display.
"WHO IS THIS MYSTERY RACER?" the large subtitles on the screens displayed.
Did they not care? Was this guy just blowing smoke?
The other robots either haven't been programmed to generate trash talk on the fly, lacked the means to speak, or just didn't care to run their vocoders as much as this one did.
Was he stupid? Or did he know something I didn't?
The crab robot fidgeted with the pistol, displaying a remarkable amount of coordination for a drone that didn't have hands. He finagled it into an upright position.
"On your marks… Get set…!"
In the skybox, I saw Robotnik grin.
>Temporary Directive Added: Win the Race.
>Safe Mode: Deactivated.
The world stopped.
I could feel it by the moment. The passing of time stretched beyond any human experience, nanoseconds ticking by like sand in an hourglass. Grain by grain by grain. My UI told me it'd been a full second since the mode switched. There was supposed to be a "GO" that I failed to process. I ran back the records to confirm it, the audio-record strained by compression to fit my speed of thought.
Then came the "BANG" of the starting gun.
Around me, clouds of dust swirled as nebulae, the roar of engines a dull barely-sound, a thrum of metal on pavement yet to reach the height of a yawn. Wheels turned, transmissions shifted. The motorbike's helmet lens projected a stuck-out-tongue, laser turret slowly leveling toward me. It looked absurd.
None of this looked real. Felt real.
What had Robotnik said? Three laps. Entertain him.
>All weapons online.
Oh.
The turbine engine in my chest started spinning, faster and faster, an inexhaustible heat seeping from my core, spreading across my body. Energy flowed through my limbs, a rushing desire to move, strange and new and impelling like nothing I'd ever known alive. A rush of power demanding to be used, a world of motion and force flooding my body. Somehow, it still felt cold.
(Am I dead?)
>V. Maximum Overdrive Active.
A plume of fire erupted in my wake, as I went from standing to supersonic, blue sparks enveloping my body until they exploded into a field of gold energy.
(Frankenstein's monster was pieced together from corpses, animated by lightning and the hubris of man.)
I tilted left, grabbing the mouthy Race Bot almost casually, before pushing the machine down into the tarmac. No time to scream as its frame collapsed beneath me, crumpling like a tin can and flying away into the sideboards.
Barely a second. I felt the bristling of other weapon systems, even as my core hissed at the expenditure. So many options. I was riding a high, I realized. The tarmac below me melted as I landed, skidding to a stop.
I wrung my hand. Killing something, a different place, a different kind. An animal was just meat. A machine was only metal.
(But it still felt empty.)
I looked at the other competitors. Another second passed.
They drove away as fast as they could.
Nowhere near fast enough.
"Ex-Moto has been disqualified from the race!" a SWATbot at the announcer's booth belatedly declared. "Our mystery contestant is already wiping out the competition!"
Past the cheap voice box, the SWATbot sounded like Robotnik. I had a feeling that they all did.
What a farce.
The race ended almost as quickly as it had begun. I blitzed forward, tearing up the track and any Motobugs unfortunate enough to have gotten in my way.
One lap.
I went back around, repeating my route. One of the Motobugs sailed far over the barriers, crashing into the crowd of badniks. The racer placement statistics, having become completely irrelevant, were replaced with a live combo meter.
Two laps.
There was no longer any doubt who was going to win. The cheetah robot abandoned the race track entirely, attempting to flee to the exit doors. If it made it to freedom, I'd let it go.
Robotnik pressed a button next to his seat. The cheetah robot's engines locked up, and the badnik crashed to the ground before it had the chance.
I crossed the finish line.
Three laps, and the crowd activated its 'go wild' routine.
I skidded to a stop just as V. Max Overdrive depleted in full, the mad rush of invincibility replaced by a sinking sluggishness. Slow. My UI flashes green; low power, defenses down.
I let myself hang mid-air, feeling the slowly-building pulse from gem to frame. The race was over.
It took a few seconds for the remaining Motobugs to notice. Practically animals in intelligence and slower besides, they didn't stop until they saw me at the finish line. One of them wriggled its wheel helplessly, having been upturned at some point.
Staring up, I could see that Robotnik looked as giddy as a child that, after many years of receiving a lump of coal for Christmas, finally got the chance to shoot Santa, and took it.
Clapping excitedly, Robotnik celebrated my 'victory' while Snively filled his uncle's wine glass with black oil.
"My gears and starters! I haven't seen that much carnage on the track since I started tying people to them!" As he spoke, a spotlight ventured down towards the cheetah robot that tried to make a break for it. "It's a shame that not every one of my creations can be a good sport."
The Cheetah shuddered, still unable to move beyond desperate twitching. A demonstration of Robotnik's power, for the robots that had enough free will to second guess him.
He brought his hand towards the downed badnik, hand extended. A thumb pointing down.
"Metal Sonic, let's celebrate your win in the classical style: Execution."
A victory lap. But not mine.
…
Fine.
I'm at the Cheetah-Bot's side in an instant. Nearly the size of a car, it felt warm to the touch as I lifted it by the throat. Hovering, I pulled it off the ground until its tail barely scraped the still-molten tarmac.
I held it close. Enough to feel the tremors of its motor, hear the swiveling of its servos.
>Plasma Pulse Laser Active.
There was a flash of light.
This time, I looked it in the eyes as it died.
= = =
\\End Chapter Sequence\\
Argidoll: One of the first things I realized once we started doing this project was that Dr. Robotnik is a very different character from the Eggman I'd be peripherally aware of. Whereas game Eggman likes his machines and has a rapport with his enemies, Robotnik is basically a Disney Villain who managed to break the bounds of his age rating.
Weredrago2: He's not wrong! Archie's Robotnik/Eggman manage to be much more vile than the canon one in the contemporary canon, which is no mean feat! They have a lot in common, but there's glaring differences when you know what to look for.
At the end of the day, it was inevitable that Game Eggman would make something like Sage, while Archie Eggman ended up killing every robot he intentionally designed to be his child.
This chapter has been brought to you by Argidoll & weredrago2! For previews, updates, and miscellaneous ramblings, check out the W2 Workshop Zone Discord server.
Beta Reader Credits: C-Moon, Hellatrix, and Wyvern of West!
There was no sun in Robotropolis. Beneath the weight of smog and industry, what light that peeked through the clouds was filtered into a dark, heady gloom.
>Sensor: Barometric Pressure 30.0 Hg
I hadn't looked, the first time. Too focused on what was right in front of me. Now, with it all done, I had a moment to myself.
(But only if I kept it out of my own head.)
It's something to account for, in the future. Rain wouldn't have changed how the race would have gone, against machines who never stood a chance from the start.
(What a waste.)
But against someone on level ground, that might change. I look, and the Eggnet provides. Databases on all of Eggman's known enemies, the ones whose names he bothers to have recorded. Sonic the Hedgehog, Knuckles the Echidna, who knows what else might emerge. Numerous other names; politicians, freedom fighters, black marketeers, and the only other people on Mobius who might have nukes. I downloaded them for later perusal.
A mistake. An opportunity. A lesson.
(I'm tired. It's all going so fast.)
Something to work on.
The stadium had long since cleared out, leaving only the cleaning drones. A veritable badnik horde was assembled for less than five minutes of entertainment. Moving props to flesh out a crowd scene. With the show finished, they had to go back to work. Back to patrols of the city–
>Query: Robotropolis. \\Capital of the Empire. Formerly Mobotropolis, of the Kingdom of Acorn.\\
(A genocide, naturally.)
Patrols of an empty city, and whatever territory held beyond.
Robotnik came down from the skybox with a wide smile. He remained a looming, domineering presence. One that demanded attention, even as he perused the pictures of my exhibition.
"Oh ho ho! Splendid! Just splendid! He's fast as I predicted, and sufficiently ruthless! You're going to get the better of the hedgehog this time, I just know it!"
With the click of a button on Robotnik's gauntlet, I felt the Safe Mode rengage.
(A lost opportunity. But it would have been worse to run blind.)
Robotnik's nephew followed behind his much larger uncle at a safe distance. He looked annoyed, presumably at the massive waste or hassle caused by Robotnik's flight of fancy. Going over available surveillance footage of him, it's a face he never wore where Robotnik could see him.
Smart enough.
"It was a very impressive showing," the man said in a conciliatory manner. "What shall we do with your new Metal Sonic, now that it's proven capable of following orders?"
Robotnik bundled the photos together and stowed them into a pocket of his bodysuit.
"I have a plot in the makings that may require the extra servo-powered muscle, but it will take weeks at the minimum to reach fruition. Possibly months."
"But sir," his nephew argued faintly. "Could we not make a new plan of attack to account for Metal Sonic 2.0 being ready for combat?"
Robotnik swiveled around with surprising speed, staring him down.
"After all of the effort I put into his new improvements, I will not have the surprise of Metal Sonic's return be wasted on a half-baked search and destroy mission in the Great Forest! You're to put him in storage until the time comes for his deployment."
"O-of course, sire. Forget I said anything."
"I think I will."
A twinge of annoyance. The feeling had nearly gotten me killed not… twenty minutes ago.
(Time is perception. I'm not used to thinking this fast.)
Still, was that really the best he could come up with? It wasn't about the spectacle of the arena. This deep in Robotnik's territory, he could do as he pleased, and wipe the hard drives of any spectators.
The ones who could actually understand what they saw, at least.
But weeks in a box until I was deployed directly against Robotnik's enemies?
(Tempting, in its own way. The 'fastest' bet to escape. But…)
"Objection."
I was still feeling out my (new) voice. That slight metallic buzz to the tone.
(I don't mind it.)
Robotnik turned back towards me, what remained of his good mood thoroughly soiled.
"What was that?" he interrogated lightly.
"Weeks to months of time in storage is time that could be spent in preparation."
"What else would you possibly have to prepare for?" Robotnik questioned. "You're already built precisely to my specifications."
"Experience. Knowledge. There are capabilities that could be refined. Variables that could be better accounted for."
"Those things can be simulated. I have enough digital trials to keep you busy for what will feel like years." His smile returned. "I could make it feel like decades."
"Your capabilities cannot be simulated, Dr. Robotnik." I said, watching Robotnik's reaction carefully.
"This is true," he admitted. Well, 'admitted'. "My genius is off the charts!"
Robotnik's nephew rolled his eyes.
"Neither, according to records, can those of Sonic the Hedgehog. You are the only one who has been able to create something that might match him. However, his limitations have yet to be fully understood."
(It's a dance on the knife's edge.)
Robotnik stopped, his expression contorting in contemplation. He didn't seem to appreciate the comparison, but neither did he find fault in it.
"Continue," he cautioned simply.
"Simulation pales to the real thing. I wish to gather data on Sonic the Hedgehog's previous capabilities. Through understanding his prior battles from prior failed experiments and battleground examination, I will better be able to leverage my specifications against his. Furthermore, I require proper acclimatization to leveraging Robotnik Empire resources against Sonic the Hedgehog. The Empire's resources are vast."
I glanced through a few articles on the holdings laid out on the Eggnet, and the lists were extensive. There was a fortress or stronghold on every continent.
(Built on a mountain of blood and steel.)
"Many enemies claw at the gates of Robotnik. Each has their own stratagems and strategies for survival. Each can be examined. Learned from. Improved upon. Sonic the Hedgehog's mental capabilities are, by all metrics, unremarkable. A fraction of your strategic intellect applied within a chassis capable of matching his physicality should crush him even should he exceed expectations."
Robotnik said nothing, at first, taking in my argument and processing it. Fact checking it. Running it against what he knew, versus what he wanted to hear. He doesn't say anything for long enough that I assumed he was thinking of something particularly gruesome to threaten me with when he finally did speak.
"Very well! If you want to test your limits even further, experience everything my Empire has to offer as a challenge, then so be it!"
The nephew ran his fingers through his exactly seven strands of hair.
"Sir, this challenge has already redistributed our manpower in Robotropolis beyond advisable limits! We won't be able to divert the additional materials for more field tests of this scale in the city, let alone the rest of the Empire, without pushing back our commitment to Renfield—!"
Renfield. I made a note of that name, though Uncle Robotnik cut him off before I could get anything else.
"Oh, but there is one way for me to multitask," Robotnik drawled.
Robotnik pushed the little man into melee range.
"Metal Sonic! This is my assistant! You can call him pathetic, like I do. He also goes by Snively."
I looked down at the nose-attached-to-a-man before me.
"My nephew is going to oversee your 'training'. He's allowed to use anything that I've employed against Sonic that failed to do the deed. And so as not to tip the blue cockroach or his Freedom Fighter friends off on your return, these exercises will be performed far from Robotropolis. Feel free to lean on my Sub-Bosses for any resources required to make these tests happen."
Snively, for his part, let out a squeak of fear as Robotnik brought us closer together.
>Snively. Nee. Colin Kintobor, Junior. Robotnik's Nephew and Assistant. The only Class 2 Access Administrator. The only overlander subject of Robotnik.
(This one might be a problem.)
"Understood."
"Yes, sire," Snively answered, dejectedly. However, moments later, his expression shifted to one more hopeful. Ambitious, even. "Oh, I imagine we're going to get along swimmingly."
I cocked my head to the side at Snively's words.
(At least he's easy to read for now.)
Robotnik let out a brief, but genuinely evil laugh as he clambered onto his Egg-O-Matic.
"Get used to each other's company! Because I'll be working on a trap guaranteed to eliminate those pesky Freedom Fighters for good, and I'll tolerate no interruptions!"
Robotnik pulled the lever on his Egg-O-Matic's chintzy 8-Ball gear stick, suddenly launching him within spitting distance of me.
"You want to push yourself beyond my expectations? Make sure that you exceed them."
He pulled the stick back and went into reverse, flying off towards the ominous, egg-shaped fortress at the center of Robotropolis.
Snively waited for Robotnik to be less than a blip in the distance before changing from the Platonic ideal of a toady to an impression of his master. Back straight, with a tone that had gilded iron in it.
"Metal Sonic!" he shouted at me. "To the hover unit! We're going to start with field tests in the fringes of Northamer and spread out from there."
>Map.zip download complete.
I flexed a few fingers experimentally. I'd give him a chance, to start.
Once I was loaded into the hovercraft, the door closed behind us, Snively pulled out a sci-fi multitool from his belt. He was still standing behind me, but I could see him from the corner of my eye. The tool angled upwards like a dagger.
(What a terribly blatant metaphor. Surely—)
"Since we're going to be spending an extended period of time together, I'd like to get a better read of your hardware." He let out a bark of laughter. "Perhaps I can make some adjustments to the software as well, while I'm at it?"
…I see.
Before I could say or do anything in response, a beeping from my UI caught my attention.
>Safe Mode: Deactivated
>Safe Mode: Locked to Class 1 Administrative Access.
Did Robotnik do that on purpose?
(Maybe.)
It's not like I needed this to handle a baseline overlander either way.
Thought begot action, and one clawed hand closed around Snively's throat, even as the other grabbed the multitool directly.
"Your fear makes you exploitable."
Snively let out an inarticulate screech, proving my point entirely.
"It also makes you predictable," I concluded.
I placed him in the pilot's seat, making sure to put the seatbelt on for him as the whine of the Plasma Pulse Laser's charging faded away in my chest.
"I hope we can both exceed Dr. Robotnik's expectations of us. Without getting in one another's way."
Snively paused, mulling over my words. His hand reached for the terminal built into the hover unit's flight controls. With the press of a button, he brought up a holographic map of Mobius.
"Of course," he answered, the smile not quite leaving his face. "With that understanding in mind, we can start gathering the assets we need for your examinations."
"Of course." I stepped back, turning to go. Behind me, Snively paid little mind to my exit, already occupied with his own schemes.
As for me? With the new map I had, I could see an unoccupied corner of the ship the cameras didn't cover. Dark, unwatched. It'd do.
(I wouldn't have peace in this place. Not one second. But I could at least have quiet.)
= = =
\\End Chapter Sequence\\
Argidoll: Snively. He's a character alright.
Weredrago2: A character that deserves to go to prison forever, mind, but certainly a character.
This chapter has been brought to you by Argidoll & weredrago2! For previews, updates, and miscellaneous ramblings, check out the W2 Workshop Zone Discord server.
Beta Reader Credits: C-Moon, Hellatrix, and Wyvern of West!
Weredrago2: If you're reading this, you're currently looking at Dead Metal, an Archie Sonic Self Insert/Friend Insert fic. A person from the real world is uploaded into the body of a Metal Sonic during what should be a normal Super Badnik update. (Specifically Metal Sonic 2.0, for those keeping track at home.) Naturally, it isn't a pleasant experience, and the protagonist is trying to find the best time to slip the leash. Preferably after defusing the bomb collar.
Q. Self Insert? Friend Insert?
Weredrago2: Conventionally speaking, a Self Insert is when you're writing the fic about yourself being put into a fictional world, and a Friend Insert is when you do that to a friend instead. (Or an OC that is your subject individual with the inconvenient bits like the ones that would get them doxxed removed.) Pretty simple, right?
This fic is different, because it's both! It's a collab between two authors! One writer is treating it as an SI (Argidoll), and the other of which is handling this as an FI (weredrago2). That way we can properly model the behavior of the individual being inserted (Argi) without him getting a brain hemorrhage from all of the Sonic lore he'd need to acquire to figure out what is happening in the comic all by himself.
Q. What Sonic is This?
Weredrago2: To reiterate, this fic takes place in Archie Comics' Sonic the Hedgehog Preboot continuity. Also known as the Pre-Super Genesis Wave (Pre-SGW) timeline, encapsulating almost all of the comics they made before the events of Sonic & Mega Man: Worlds Collide caused the Sonic comics to undergo a total universal reboot.
AKA Archie Sonic. Since I'm insane, I also sneak in everything else I can get away with on top of that as long as it doesn't blatantly contradict Archie Sonic's (loose) continuity.
Q. What Metal Sonic is This?
Weredrago2: As was touched on earlier, the SI has become Metal Sonic 2.0. Previously known as Metal Sonic 1.0. Later known as Metal Sonic 2.5 and Shard the Metal Sonic. For the simple reason that the SI is replacing them, Shard isn't going to be in this fic. However, just because Shard isn't making an appearance in person, that doesn't mean his spirit won't live on by other means.
Q. When in This is Sonic?
Weredrago2: To keep things simple, the first chapter occurs some time after #25, and before the Knuckles Chaotix Special, in the year 3235 PXE (Post-Xorda Event).
Q. What Does the SI/FI know?
Argidoll: Not much, comparative to the me that is writing the story. It's the peculiar scattershot of somebody who has never played a Sonic game but has been on the receiving end of a steady flow of Sonic-based radiation from the living data repository that weredrago2 is. They can recognize most of the main characters of several games on sight, as well as the contents of memes, but little else reliably. They know Shadow had a friend called Maria, but not much of the context beyond her dying. They know Knuckles' dad is a terrible father who microwaved his baby, and that Knuckles turns green, but not any of the actual context for that.
Weredrago2: I'm here to serve as the Vergil to Argi's Dante on our descent into Archie Sonic Hell. As a consolation prize, Argi gets to keep Vergil's Judgement Cut.
Argidoll: Hah! No. A crossover episode might be fun at some point, but it'd be remiss to expect somebody to read two fics to look for knock-on effects. Personally, I lean on keeping the lore at least somewhat consistent between the two, particularly for some of the more out-there concepts and extrapolations such as the Ixian Masterworks, but the nature of the stories means that there's no guarantee that things turned out the same way.
Weredrago2: As funny as it would be for the Dead Metal SI to slap John Scarlet and call him a moron at some point, both fics have enough planned as-is that a big crossover without significant planning beforehand would be ill-advised at best. Since I'm working on both fics, that means any ideas that don't work in one have the chance to show up in the other!
That being said, I'd like to do at least one non-canon crossover chapter if we can swing it.
Q. Shipping?
Argidoll: Not sure.
Weredrago2: We'll get to the problem when we get to it.
Q. What's with All the New Metal Sonic SIs?
Weredrago2: Argi saw the Bowser vs Eggman video from Death Battle and wanted to know if I was game to write this fic premise with him. Which, as you can see, I was.
I imagine the sentiment isn't an uncommon one.
Q. What Should We Call the SI?
Weredrago2: I'm the one posting the chapters, but the protagonist isn't me. They also aren't the real Metal Sonic, so you could just refer to them as 'the SI', as I've been doing for most of our notes.
Argidoll: Metal works fine for the time being. Eventually the SI will pick their own name, but we'll see what choice they make.
Argidoll: Not much, comparative to the me that is writing the story. It's the peculiar scattershot of somebody who has never played a Sonic game but has been on the receiving end of a steady flow of Sonic-based radiation from the living data repository that weredrago2 is. They can recognize most of the main characters of several games on sight, as well as the contents of memes, but little else reliably. They know Shadow had a friend called Maria, but not much of the context beyond her dying. They know Knuckles' dad is a terrible father who microwaved his baby, and that Knuckles turns green, but not any of the actual context for that.
Weredrago2: I'm here to serve as the Vergil to Argi's Dante on our descent into Archie Sonic Hell. As a consolation prize, Argi gets to keep Vergil's Judgement Cut.
This is me using the knowledge base about Archie Sonic from before I started talking with weredrago2 bout this fic. Being in proximity means that I would eventually pick up on things every now and then.
There was a liminal quality to the storage room I'd sequestered myself in. With Snively unwilling to bother me so soon after our first encounter, I'd walked out as soon as we'd docked, leaving the process of loading the great skyborne leviathan our journey would take place upon to the overlander. Instead, I'd gone and found the least monitored corner of the airship to brood in.
None disturbed me. Outside of the occasional bump or rumble from the lower decks as badniks loaded the cargo holds, the lack of stimulation gave me time to think.
(The first few hours were spent staring at nothing in the dark. Feeling out the state of my new existence, the cold of the steel, the shape of my face. The fact that I literally didn't have a mouth but couldn't dare scream.)
(Mourning what I'd never get back.)
(Nothing quite felt like it should have. You didn't think much of it, but a body of metal has no need for the sensors in all the places. You don't realize how much the human body relied on warmth to move until you no longer had it. It was more efficient. Durable. I had a healing factor, as well. Nanomachines that would keep me going without maintenance so long as I stayed fueled up. I could see the room for further upgrades.)
(It felt like puppeting a walking corpse.)
(The programming, strangely enough, helped. I could feel it jolting in my subconscious whenever I reached out, the click of not-quite-instincts slotting into place, connecting in. How to kill. How to run. How to process the data input, which far exceeded that I ever had as a human. It did its best. But Metal Sonic hadn't been designed to be alive.)
(And now it's me, in its place.)
From the outside, I'd been almost entirely inactive. One hour, forty-eight minutes. That's how long I spent doing, apparently, nothing.
(But there's only so much moping I could bother with.)
(I needed information.)
I'd spent the next several hours paging through the data I'd downloaded from the Eggnet. Maps of the world — Mobius — alongside a series of timelines. The history of Robotnik's empire, names and places of import. These records were surprisingly detailed, given the low volume of living users it had registered. Then again, the empire was large enough that sentient badniks were, if not common, at least present enough to make a lively dead internet without Robotnik's direct attention. Clearly, a few of them were tasked with maintaining readable archives for the Bad Doctor's convenience.
(Biased in his favor, of course.)
Out of all the formerly-free kingdoms Robotnik crushed underfoot, the Kingdom of Acorn stood out in the records as the first place Dr. Robotnik conquered. It was where the man formerly known as Julian Kintobor—
(There has to be a story behind the rename.)
—seeded the beginnings of his Empire. According to Eggnet, it only took a few years for Robotnik to subvert the once-peaceful nation from within. Ever the opportunist, he leveraged the Kingdom's ongoing war with the human-variant racial supremacists of his former home, the Overland, in order to build up a massive industrial base he could turn against them both. The Kingdom of Acorn was also the birthplace the figurehead of the Freedom Fighter movement, Princess Sally Acorn—
(I think I recognize that name. A deer?)
—who currently acted as a major thorn in Robotnik's side, spearheading the resistance movement against his tyranny. Her group (which of course includes Sonic) were believed to be hiding in the Great Forest, a wilderness far too vast to smoke or burn them out of. Sonic was the biggest and most obvious threat to Robotnik, but she was the brains of the operation. Without them, the house of cards at Robotnik's doorstep would tumble.
Other areas of control included Mercia (Eurobritain. France. Close enough.), a technologically less developed zone, the Dragon Kingdoms (China, Warring States era.), and Downunda, a former Acorn colony primarily notable for mineral wealth. All information that had to be processed, though until I actually experienced it myself, it'd all be nothing more than data in tables and propaganda in text.
(The worst part is that this might have been the actual lore of the games for all I knew. I usually tuned out when—)
(...)
(Is it even worth holding onto those names, if I might never go back? If I can't speak freely in my own head?)
Data flowed freely, my 'Super-Badnik' authorization granting me effective free reign on everything the Eggnet had to offer. Statistics on mineral outputs, resource conveyance, badnik concentrations, all available for me to peruse.
I could use this.
(So much information. More than I ever could have processed as a human. No brain to break. No meat to strain. Just dead metal.)
Sorting through the data, I slowly built my understanding of how the Empire functioned. Material extracted, badniks constructed, and locals either subverted or 'converted' to propagate Robotnik's influence. His rule over the world had been the status quo for the past decade, a system of high-tech feudalism enforced by a network of Super Badniks and local warlords called Sub-Bosses.
The nations that wasted little time taking the fight to Robotnik were the first to fall. The ones that stood their ground when he came for them lasted slightly longer. Rebellions that went underground lasted the longest, followed by those states that kissed the boot and continued to exist as tributary states. The Kingdom of Leonus and the Golden Hive Colony weren't ruled by Sub-Bosses, but terrified nobles that kept their heads down.
(A planet slowly devoured to feed a single man's ego. Poeticism. A sign of stress or boredom. Both, maybe.)
(And I'm one of the only ones who had even the chance to hurt him.)
I clenched a fist slowly, watching my claws click into place.
(I didn't know much about the media. That was someone else's fixation. Along with everything else. But I did know what I was supposed to be. Eggman's secret weapon. One of the only things capable of matching the 'Fastest Thing Alive'.)
(So what was I supposed to do next?)
= = =
Eventually, the lights of the bridge flashed on. The door to the entrance slid open, revealing Snively Robotnik himself. It had been, by my chronometer, more than a day. Certainly slower than Robotnik's command of his resources.
(I now had the power to stand completely still for hours on end. Horrifying.)
He was more composed than he had been the last time I saw him. More rested, his ambitions more reigned-in. He was flanked by a pair of SWATbots.
"The ship is loaded and ready, Metal Sonic," Snively said. "I hope you're well-rested. After all, I've prepared a full itinerary for us."
A thought brought the airship's records of Snively's manifest to my attention. The names of weapons and badnik models became instantly available for my perusal, though it'd take much longer for me to do anything more than read titles and look at pictures.
I didn't comment directly on it. Best not to let him know I had such easy access to all of these systems. Instead…
"What name do you prefer?"
Snively's eyes narrowed.
"What do you mean?"
"Doctor Robotnik suggested I call you pathetic, or Snively. However."
I turned my head toward him for effect. My sensors gave me a nigh-panopticonic perspective of the ship's interiors, but it never hurt to be polite.
"Doctor Robotnik is not here. What do you prefer?"
He looked surprised that I even bothered to ask.
"Snively is fine," he said with a dismissive wave, after a moment's hesitation. "It's been years since anyone's called me anything else, and my old name hardly has any more pleasant associations."
Colin Kintobor Junior, his datafile said. A story for later.
"Noted."
He approached the flight controls and prepared for takeoff.
"This Flying Battery has a stealth canopy applied to its surface," Snively exposited. "We're exchanging speed and firepower for near-complete invisibility."
Snively played second fiddle to Robotnik, but #2 to one of the most powerful people in the world wasn't exactly a 'bad' deal. It only took him a day — presumably including time for him to sleep — to get this large vessel loaded with all manners of military material for me to dismantle.
I wondered whether any of them had opinions about that state of affairs.
"Now, since Uncle Robotnik has apparently deemed it unnecessary for me to have access to your internal software—"
He paused, turning back to look at me expectantly. I stared back, with equal impassivity.
"I respect your intelligence, Snively."
The time from our first meeting to attempted betrayal was measurable in seconds. I didn't know what he expected. He barely managed to hold back a resigned sigh.
"Yes, well. In either case I'll be monitoring your progress via the usual Surveillance Orb-Shutterbug net we use to keep tabs on that blue rodent you're modeled on."
A holograph to his side opened to display wireframes of the badniks in question. The first was a spheroid observation drone that unfolded like a shellfish, while the second looked like a retro camera with insectoid legs and wings, complete with a blaring flash bulb.
>Badnik Identified: Surveillance Orb. \\High-speed, stealth-capable spy drones. Used to monitor high-priority areas and transmit security alerts to nearby badnik patrols.\\
>Badnik Identified: Shutterbug. Fly-based photography badnik. \\Mass produced and disposable. Intense flash is used to stun targets and maximize despair on victims' faces when sent to Robotnik.\\
"I'll bear in mind to leave them intact when possible." I eyed him evenly, filing away the data that flooded my system at the back of my hard drives. "What scenario have you constructed for me?"
(How much would the original Metal Sonic would have spoken? I suppose it hardly mattered.)
The ship faintly rumbled as we spoke. Less noise than I'd have expected, from the array of massive turbofans needed to keep tons of steel suspended skyward. Soundproofing on the bridge made sense, given it was the one place a mortal would be expected to regularly be. According to the logs, we were heading in a circuitous route around the Great Forest to the testing site.
"Ripping apart a dozen or so badnik models that Sonic stopped having issues with years ago hardly establishes a baseline," Snively scoffed. "No, the best data we got on the vermin came from when Robotnik got his hands dirty."
"He insisted on facing Sonic the Hedgehog in person."
Surprising, in some ways. (But it fit with the ego.)
"My uncle said something about wanting a more direct hand in Sonic's downfall. Personally, I'd settle for watching the firebombs drop over the Great Forest on a live feed half a continent away. Thankfully, I have a means to simulate parts of my uncle's behavior."
"I imagine few others would be as familiar with him."
I flash-stepped over to the airship's bridge, noting the way Snively flinched a little at the sudden burst of movement. It seemed he'd had his own experiences with my 'counterpart'.
Peering through reinforced glass, I gazed down at what tragedies Robotnik had wrought.
>Location Identified: Leung West.
\\Remote island off the Northamer coast. Formerly an enclave of Dragon Kingdom expatriates seeking refuge from persistent warlords. Notable as a diaspora cultural center.\\
Scorched earth, as far as the optics could see. I could recognize the architectural style—
(Not too dissimilar to my memories of Imperial Chinese designs, seen in books, museums, once or twice in person.)
—Wood and stone, worn by fire and the elements. Few things taller than a single story stood at all, the majority of the village having partially collapsed in the years since the initial firebombings. The only building still recognizable was a single pagoda, somehow still standing, if clearly in disrepair.
>Query: Leung West Population: \\Pre-War: Approximately 120 mobians.Current Population: 0.\\
"Robotnik cleared this site of mobians at some point during the war," he explained distractedly. "There's no one here to disrupt us, and property damage won't be a concern."
I turned away, making my way off the bridge without a word.
"Where are you going?" Snively asked, a hint of suspicion leaking into his tone.
"Out." I don't look back. "Contact me when the preparations are complete."
= = =
This close to the ground, the devastation took new detail. Walking down semi-overgrown cobblestone streets, I could see the cracks where a Badnik's fist slammed against a wall, the holes in a roof where ceramic tile had fallen away. My sensors were incredibly detailed, far—
(—far more than I was ever capable of seeing as a human. Radar, sonar, topographic overlays, I understood the shape of this town better than my previous bedroom.)
All this added together to paint a wide-scale portrait of the town. Or rather, what remained.
It really did feel like staring at a corpse.
I turned up to glance at a sign on what appeared to have been a barbershop, faded with wear. D-n's Cuts, said what remained of the text. A vine had seeped its way up the drainpipe and curled over the construction. This far away from Robotnik's heartland, away from the industrial crawl that had swallowed the world whole, the wild could still grow.
("When skies were still blue," the quote rose unbidden.)
A sigh escapes my thoughts, the sound distorted through my vocal box. I'd been gone long enough. Snively's preparations were likely well underway already, and there wasn't much left to see. On a cliff outside the town, the airship—
—loomed large, a red and white shadow crouched atop the horizon.
(This far away, it looked almost like a toy, something absurd to the way it puttered through the air. They weren't supposed to be efficient.)
On a whim, I stepped in through a broken door, pushing aside what remained of a paper screen. Burnt splinters cracked beneath my boot as I examined the devastation. A closer scan of the building generated a rough blueprint, a few spots of structural weakness highlighted as places to avoid or exploit.
(A small home. Two bedrooms, but I could trace the remnants of four futons in one of them. A family of six. Poor families tended to be larger.)
I strode past what remained of a half-spilled bag of rice, wandering slowly through the bare few rooms the inhabitants had afforded. Char marks spilled across the stone walls, chips, likely from laser fire. Inside, the clink of my gait echoed across the halls. Without trying, I started piecing together what had happened so long ago. The family likely tried to hide their children, one or both of the parents barricading them in their room before the Badniks came in.
Looking at the shattered remnants of the smaller bedroom's door, it hadn't worked.
There weren't any bodies, of course. Robotnik would have ordered them rounded up for roboticizing, or some other horrible fate.
I turned away. There wasn't anything left.
(The only kind of recycling he tolerated. It was so stupid, but now it was my reality. One madman's desire was all it took.)
(What a terrible joke—)
Splinters. Splinters and dust, splattered through the air, bouncing off the cold steel of my frame. The world seemed to slow as the building disintegrated around me, a quake of force pulsing out from the wall behind me. My head snapped towards the source of the blast—
Only to see a checkered wrecking ball headed right towards my head.
= = =
\\End Chapter Sequence\\
Weredrago2: While Snively was the one who made the plans for where they'd be going within the boundaries of the story, I was the one serving as Argi's travel agent for this initial Training Hell story arc. I laid out a half dozen locations that might serve as fun setpieces, and we narrowed them down until we reached a satisfying number of stops. Leung West is only the first.
Argidoll: Something I did want to cover once it was explained to me was the actual cost. Being Metal Sonic is pretty cool, if you don't remember having been alive, and there's a push pull of the fact that it's a straight upgrade to being a conventional human, but also the Metal Sonic frame wasn't designed to be contiguous with the experience of a living body. There's an adjustment period.
The other thing we wanted to explore was the grand scale of what Robotnik actually did to the people and places of Mobius. As it turns out, it's pretty bad.
Like really, really bad.
This chapter has been brought to you by Argidoll & weredrago2! For previews, updates, and miscellaneous ramblings, check out the W2 Workshop Zone Discord server.
Beta Reader Credits: C-Moon, Hellatrix, and Wyvern of West!
Snively decided to start with a classic, huh? Not that Metal's likely to appreciate it while he's getting pasted, so us readers will have to do it for him.
Also, I have to ask if Metal getting the directive to "Win the Race" is a reference to the iteachvader song.
Snively decided to start with a classic, huh? Not that Metal's likely to appreciate it while he's getting pasted, so us readers will have to do it for him.
Dodge. Programmed instincts screamed from the back of my mind. Handle the threat immediately. I blasted my way around the ball's trajectory, my reflection in the stainless wrecking ball blank-faced as I weaved to the side. Moments later, the ball smashed through the rest of the house, sending wood and stone (and tragedy) spinning into dust.
Attached to the heavy ball was a thick chain, and on the other end of that chain was a modified Egg-O-Matic. It looked like Snively was ready to start testing my reflexes.
>Vehicle Identified: Egg Wrecker. \\Manned engine of destruction. A personal favorite of Dr. Robotnik.\\
Past the bubble canopy, I could see that the weaponized escape pod wasn't manned by Robotnik or Snively. Rather, the pilot was a rotund badnik with beady red eyes. A bald, gunmetal head combined with a rounded looking torso to form an egg-like main body, from which spindly, ball-socketed limbs protruded, ending in cartoonish, white gloves. I could make out the edges of a backpack of some kind on the thing as it pushed the Egg-o-Matic's stick forward.
>Badnik not found.
That was new. The hover pod's external speaker crackled to life, and I heard Snively's voice buzz out from it.
"These are my Egg Robos," Snively explained, either from the airship or another location out of harm's way. "They assist with reconnaissance and point defense. Should the need arise, the Egg Robos can autopilot any one of our attack pods on their own."
They looked like a caricature of Robotnik. In the back of my mind, I had to applaud Snively for it. Who else would have the skill, resources, and reason to make a satire of his boss and explain it away as a tactical resource?
"Each of these badniks is trained on both Robotnik's logged pilot data and my own. Your first task is to find three of these Egg Robos and disable them. Before they find and disable you."
The Egg Robo flicked the 8-ball control stick forward, then back, in a simulacra of Robotnik's own movements, swinging the sphere my way.
My engine screamed, and I went straight up, the air forced aside as I ascended. Looking over the Egg-o-Matic in more detail, calculations ran on my UI, determining the points of stress in the design. There had to be a gap in the design I could exploit.
Actually, no. Cancel that. The entire canopy was glass.
>Ring Spark Field active.
I shot down toward the vehicle, a wave of sparks building in my hands. My fist crashed into the canopy like a cannon. Cracks spider-webbed across the glass, the electric charge dispersing across the Egg-O-Matic's hull. Before I could hit it again, the Egg-Robo shifted the stick up, wrenching me off and towards the trajectory of its demolition arm.
Rather than take a hit head-on, I jetted to the side, aiming for the chain. To my surprise, the spark field cleaved clean through the metal, cutting the Egg-O-Matic's only weapon loose. The wrecking ball went wide, tearing through a support beam and knocking the rest of the house down.
>Ring Spark Field offline.
The vehicle disarmed, I arced back up over the hovercraft, curling into a program-perfect spindash. It failed to land where I was aiming, fracturing the glass a few centimeters next to where I originally hit.
(I remembered, from before all this, going to an air show. It'd been the first time I'd seen the progress of military development in person.)
Belatedly, I detected a surge of flame shooting through where I'd previously been floating. Right. Not the only one. Keep moving.
(There was a single modern plane for the display. A single F-22 Raptor. I remember it was like looking at a monster. The way the air screamed as it turned, a thing barely contained by the physics it used.)
I kept spinning, letting momentum carry myself up above the Egg Robo's head before rocketing back down. This time, my claws smashed through the crystalline plating, and I wrenched a hole down through the canopy and directly into the control panel.
(Gods of Iron. That was the name of the book I'd been reading at the time.)
I ignored the Egg Robo's mounting panic as the hovercraft careened into the cobblestone road.
(All kinds of funny coincidences, huh? The capabilities I could feel bubbling out of my programming put the technology of my life to pale.)
Looking up from the wreckage, I saw another Egg-O-Matic closing in. This one looked the cross between a race-car and a truck, a massive drill on the nose already revving ominously.
>Vehicle Identified: Egg Drillster. \\Vehicle of choice for converting mobians into roadkill.\\
(But not overlanders. Was I going to have to look into mobian racism?)
It'd be easier to deal with if I led it off road, I decided. Sparing a second to watch the Wrecker's Egg Robo crawl away, I rocketed back, keeping my speed down so the Drillster could slowly close in.
The Egg Robo behind the wheel leaned in, and the Drillster accelerated forward. As I rounded the corner, the Drillster smashed its way through a stone statue of a monkey sage, gaining faster than expected by literally cutting corners.
(I wondered how these things would compare to the weapons I knew. They were ridiculous, seemingly, but…)
I boosted myself up a gear, taking the moment to scan the Drillster for weak points. Another glass canopy, but it'd be dangerous to be predictable. I wasn't sure where the fire-equipped one was, so I had to keep an eye out. A thought brought a map of the village up, and I veered a hard left.
(Maybe that was the point. Robotnik playing games, rather than playing for keeps.)
A wild bamboo forest had grown out of an unkempt garden on the edge of the empty village, barely corralled by the river marking the end of the street. The Drillster plowed through it without a moment's pause, flying through the air as it crested the river.
In other words, for a brief moment, the vehicle's underbelly — its engine — was exposed from below.
>Plasma Pulse Laser Active.
A beam of light erupted from my torso, the laser carving a hole into the undercarriage, the fuel tank melting into a conflagration as it sailed out of control.
The Drillster dipped forward, spinning into a more venerable-looking tree with a thunderous crack. Smoke billowed out from the engine compartments, and judging by the scrambled state of the Egg Robo behind the wheel, it wouldn't be a problem. A quick scan confirmed the damage, and that the Egg-Robo would survive with repairs.
Two down, one more remaining.
I readied my Spark Field and hovered above the river, all sensors running on maximum as I scanned the village. This high up, the last Egg Robo would have to come to me. It was probably a ranged fighter, but with only clear air, any shot would have given away its hiding place.
One second passed. Another.
The village looked even worse than it had when we'd arrived. The wrecking ball laid limply against what was left of a corner store, the original house I'd been wandering now thoroughly annihilated. The Drillster had cut a swathe through what remained, long streaks torn through the roads and houses both. To my right, a waterfall surged down into the river, burbling under a long-collapsed bridge. Beyond it, the forest grew outward. I couldn't help but watch as the tree the Drillster wrecked against slowly crashed to the ground.
Biting down my nerves, I opened a line to the puppeteer in charge of the scenario.
>Opening Live Audio Connection
>>Flying Battery 9281, Command Deck
|| Metal Sonic: Snively. Your last vehicle is—
Two white-hot bursts of flame roared out from behind the waterfall, faster than I could dodge. I blocked my exposed face, sections of which were melted by the intensity of the heat.
>Audio Connection Terminated.
>Ring Spark Field active.
My Spark Field burst out from beneath my skin, doing little to help against the energy attack. A painful mistake. Of course I could feel pain as a robot.
The world (went hazy as I) tried to refocus. Too late, my engine burst to life, carrying me out of the line of fire. I blinked at my optics, warnings filling my UI even as static garbled my visual data. I fled back over the village as fast as I could, desperately trying to create space—
I kept dodging erratically, vaguely aware that the last Egg-O-Matic continued to fire from a distance. As my systems rerouted functions toward my still-functioning sensors, I got a good look at my current problem.
The largest of the three, the last vehicle was a full-on aircraft, an attack pod decked in thick, blue armor. Twin cannons mounted to its side tracked my movement, taking potshots whenever I dodged too predictably.
>Vehicle Identified: Egg Scorcher Mk. III. \\Armored flame craft used in conjunction with firebombing sweep to set the tropical rainforests of the Floating Island ablaze.\\
It still had exposed glass for the Egg Robo piloting it to see through. I was beginning to notice a pattern.
I dove for cover, all too aware that the village's stone would barely protect me from its attacks. Not many good ways to close the distance. I could weave the fire, but one mistake would cost me if I couldn't crack it in one hit. V. Max Overdrive could- no, I couldn't rely on that to cover me. Running through the streets, I gave the area another scan, looking for an advantage. I almost cursed as the results came in. It was obvious.
I picked up speed.
The Egg Scorcher zoomed down to ground level before me, looking to cut me off before I could escape. Instead, I sped up, looking to slip past it before it could fire. Time slowed to a crawl as I slid right under its body, the warbling of the hover mechanism momentarily deafening me as I passed just beneath the machine's line of fire.
The Egg Robo in the pilot's seat beeped furiously at me as I kept running, only for a warning to go off on its dashboard. It swiveled its head back forward just in time to see the wrecking ball I'd been dragging bowl through the Egg Scorcher's hover drive.
I skidded to a stop, finally looking back as the Egg Robo and the cockpit it was nested in were flipped upside-down, the force of the wrecking ball causing the whole vehicle to flip and tumble gracelessly midair. A burst of static ran through my optics, but I pushed through, sinking my claws into the seal between the vehicle's metal body and fibreglass dome. Running my fingers laterally as the vehicle tumbled upwards, I tore a gap open, ripping open a hinge and exposing the pilot inside just as the hovercraft flipped upside down again. Gravity took over, and the Egg Robo was thrown clean out of the cockpit, crashing into a rooftop below.
I leapt off the Egg Scorcher as its trajectory carried itself onwards, glancing back as it barrelled into the town's sole pagoda. To my surprise, the building only dented, apparently made of sterner stuff than I'd first appraised.
Long seconds crawled by before my battle engrams slowly settled. The sudden lack of noise was deafening. The air, previously roaring, now only punctured by the small crackles of a few remnant flames. Distantly, I heard the Egg Scorcher collapse against the ground in a wave of dust. Strangely comforting.
(It's easy to forget how loud an engine actually was. Even without eardrums, some things didn't change.)
Slowly, an Egg Robo hovered into view. No weapon drawn, though it had a large blaster attached to its holster. Instead, it was carrying a bulky, white television with Snively's face plastered to it. Rabbit antennas on top and all.
"A good showing for your first bout against Robotnik-grade threats," Snively complemented. "We can continue with more Egg Robos when you're ready, but according to my uncle's specs, your Power Gem is reaching its limits. I'd say you've earned a break."
I felt my scuffs and dents from the battle gradually buff themselves out, starting from the least severe to the most. The cracks and clumps of heat-deformed glass that had accumulated across half my vision were almost done retreating back the way they came when the turbine engine in my chest abruptly sputtered out.
>Diagnostic: Orgone Fusion Engine OFFLINE.
>Switching to auxiliary power.
My vision blinked green, and my body became more sluggish, in the same way it had when I'd previously overexerted it with V. Max Overdrive.
Power Gem?
>Query: Power Gem. \\Irradiated beryl capable of storing data and producing chaos energy. Extracted from increasingly unproductive strip mines in Lower Mobius or produced artificially at prohibitive costs. Second only to Chaos Emeralds in sheer rarity and energy output. Imperfections in formation can result in unpredictable side effects.\\
A thought brought my blueprints back up. Sure enough, I could see a wireframe of a lozenge-shaped crystal nestled in my engine, where a mobian's heart would have been. My Power Gem.
(Me. Where my self came from. I could feel it.)
That was one question answered, at least.
(Too many more to go.)
= = =
\\End Chapter Sequence\\
Weredrago2: I knew that I wanted the first challenge Metal Sonic faced off against to be a boss rush themed on the first couple of Sonic games on the SEGA Genesis. One boss from the first zones of Sonic 1, 2, and 3. Everyone recognizes them off the bat, but the way that a Metal Sonic SI handles them is going to be different from how an actual Sonic character would. A trio of Egg-O-Matics, so as not to have the fic's first serious fight scene get too chaotic.
Argidoll: This is the SI's first time in an actual combat, so there was a lot to learn, real fast. Metal Sonic's got cheat codes compared to basically anyone except another of the freak Hedgehogs, so they managed. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face, though. Fire's a pretty terrible introduction to battle damage. Alas, poor Leung West was destroyed in the chaos. Also, because I've never played a Sonic game, this was my first introduction to the classic bosses.
Gods of Iron is a fan sourcebook for the Chronicles of Darkness setting, it attempted to convert modern military grade hardware into the system. It's pretty wacky. I didn't elaborate on it because of pacing, and it'd be pretty silly of the SI to get that distracted in their first life or death fight.
This chapter has been brought to you by Argidoll & weredrago2! For previews, updates, and miscellaneous ramblings, check out the W2 Workshop Zone Discord server.
Beta Reader Credits: C-Moon, Hellatrix, and Wyvern of West!
The SI is effectively replacing Shard in this timeline, having been inserted into the Power Gem that would eventually have become him. That said, though Shard himself won't exist, his spiritual legacy will live on in...
Well, here's the fun part. As it turns out, there's a lot of robotic sonic variants across the franchise. I'm curious if someone will be able to guess which of the non-Metal robo Sonics will be the first to make an appearance.
It's a bit wordy. I thought that mentioning the SI was Metal Sonic 2.0 would clarify that Shard wouldn't be in this fic (Shard was Metal Sonic 2.5 building upon 2.0, whereas Metal Sonic 3.0 and onwards were their own branch), but I can see where the confusion would come from.
I think I might add a note about Shard to the Q&A in case it comes up again.
Storage Room 17-C was, by all accounts, entirely unremarkable. A simple box room, tucked away in the end of a corridor corner two floors down from the bridge. I'd nonetheless spent a good hour picking it to be my personal storage room for the foreseeable future. If Snively had comments on my initial search through the ship for a place to stay, he hadn't said them to my face. I certainly hadn't told him my criterion, though it wasn't too hard to figure out if one was paying attention.
First, the camera circuit in the area was broken; something or other had damaged that part of the wiring, and with me having set up camp, none of the Egg Robos dared to break the lock I'd put on the door to fix it. Second, it was out of the way from the primary storage hangers, which meant there weren't many good reasons for a stray badnik to go snooping. Finally, most importantly, it was close to the Flying Battery's Eggnet modem, which meant a consistent connection to the greater network.
(Waiting for working internet was bad enough when it wasn't a critical lifeline. It's something I needed to take advantage of while I was still wired in.)
My initial impressions of the wider Eggnet, once I was safe to plug myself in, were that it was… fine. Functional.
(It lacked much of the graphical jingles and busy UI features I'd been accustomed to in my prior existence. It made sense, I supposed. There was only one game in town. It was like a throwback to the 90s or early 2000s on a more modern technological base. Monochromatic by default, each website an aggressively simple page of mostly text, with maybe an image or two for context. No advertisements, which was nice.)
(Search functions, databases and wikis worked fine. I imagined most of this was designed to Robotnik's convenience, so that made sense; no reason he would design something just to piss himself off.)
(What passed for social media on the Eggnet was where it got strange. At first, it wasn't clear what was happening, it seemed like every other badnik had some kind of account on the forums and old-school IRC chats that made up the majority of communications. Then I started seeing recognizable patterns. Most of the 'users' were just repeating themselves, cycling through a set of pre-programmed behaviors and set lines, ad nauseam. A few minutes of trawling confirmed my suspicions: The vast majority of the profiles on the Eggnet were, well. Bots. Speaking animals at best, jabbering at each other for eternity.)
(It was like looking in a bizarro world. An internet that started dead.)
(The worst part was I had no easy way of telling who was what. Could a mass-manufacture badnik develop sentience on their own? How was I to tell if they did, when a million chatbots were screaming over them?)
Skipping past my initial investigations of the communications functions, I focused my attention back on the databases, picking up where I'd left off in familiarizing myself with current and historical events. In particular, the polities that Robotnik didn't control.
>"Welcome to Eggcarta, the restricted encyclopedia that no one can edit."
There weren't many left.
The Wolf Pack, an ethno-civilisation who believed in harmony with nature. Their cities were destroyed, with the surviving tribes scattered to the winds. Mercia, a medieval, feudal nation, was the great power of the Eurish continent that mirrored their Acorn allies in Northamer. Conquered, with a robian installed as the local Sub-Boss. The Dragon Kingdoms, a long-standing region of warring states that irregularly coalesced into an empire every now and then… hadn't changed much, but Robotnik was backing one of the largest warlord factions vying for control.
(I'd looked into the Eggnet for entertainment. Records of culture. The stories of the people from before the Empire, only to find…nothing. Robotik cared nothing for art or stories, for culture and heritage. Digging through the Eggnet for hours and finding barely any scraps, no books, no songs, no pictures or films, but for the scant few things Robotnik put together himself before discarding out of boredom.)
(Everything was processed, taken for parts. The only things that mattered were the things Ivo could understand. Machines and materials and victims and parts. Even of his own heritage, the Overland, he didn't bother. It simply didn't matter to him, because it wasn't about him.)
("No Tamla and no Trojan. No Billy Holiday or Black Uhuru. Just his master's voice.")
("Every hour on the hour.")
("We'll see what we can do about that.")
Most of the actual survivors had either bent the knee, or were far enough away from Robotnik's primary interests that he simply hadn't gotten around to blowing them to smithereens yet.
The Kingdom of Leonus was one such example, an aging monarchy with an aging monarch and vast resources Robotnik had been all too eager to dig into. King Leonus granted him unconditional drilling rights in exchange for not being sacked, serving as a puppet ruler while the industrial output was handled by robots. Part of me wondered if the old lion feared he'd be replaced by a heartless machine that would do the same thing with zero concern for the safety of his people, or if the calculus involved in the decision was purely to spare his own hide.
In either case, what was supposedly a former power player on the Efrikan continent had been thoroughly declawed. Their distant counterparts (cousins?) across the sea in the País Misterioso, or the 'Mysterious Cat Country', were only scarcely documented on the Eggnet. Described as a brutal warrior culture that shunned contact with the outside world, Robotnik had little interest in them due an apparent lack of anything that would make an invasion worth the effort. Logs indicated that he sent the occasional badnik scouting party into Soumerca to explore the jungle ruins of the Great Rainforest interior, few excursions into which bore fruit. Or returned at all.
A city-state that stuck out in my searches was the Golden Hive Colony. Formerly a significant trade hub of bees and other insect mobians on the other side of Northamer from Robotropolis, presently on schedule to be strangled out by the Empire's gradual creep westward. There was surprisingly little on this one; apparently, the central hive's construction made taking satellite imagery via orbital 'Sky Spies' difficult. There were photos of the royal family, though they were all years out of date. A regal queen and king bee, with a young prince in a less noble-looking flight helmet that he was a bit too small for.
(...Hmm. I think I recognize that face. I wonder—)
My musings were cut off by the cheerful ping of a notification. Apparently my battle data had finished processing.
I opened the data packet (saved onto the terminal, because I wasn't going to trust the files on Snively's 'assurances' of safety alone) and paged through the detailed recordings of each of my battles, based on the best instruments Robotnik's nephew could bring to bear. In addition to the viewpoints and perspectives of both the machines I broke and the Egg Robos that piloted them.
In truth, I'd begun to grow bored of the Egg Robos near the end. Snively had kept his word to put me through my paces. The first three machines were just round one. A five-minute skirmish, an hour to clear the battlefield, and then another set of killing machines fed piecemeal to the grinder. Apparently Robotnik's creativity had no end, or at least little else to divert it, beyond designing ever-more elaborate Sonic-killing machines.
(Attempted killing machines, given none of them did what they were supposed to.)
All told, I ended up fighting a half-dozen battles on the first day alone. Over time, the town, already damaged, was ripped to rubble by my battles, the Egg Robos uncaring as to what heritage they destroyed.
(As they went on, I increasingly pulled them out into the wilderness, for whatever that was worth. According to a few Eggnet searches, roboticizing was an irreversible process after so long. Once the deed was done, the slightest alterations to their mechanical forms could lead to terminal risks on the opposite end of the procedure.)
(Short of a miracle, few of the lives Robotnik ruined would ever be restored.)
The problem was that the Egg Robos were transparently working off of pre-recorded movesets. It had eventually become apparent to me that they didn't really know how the vehicles they were controlling worked, relying entirely on the pre-loaded data to pose a threat. The fact that every single one of the machines had the same glass canopy weakness didn't help matters.
Getting hit still hurt, but surprisingly, I found it easier than expected to ignore once I'd acclimated, to focus on other things.
(Or to zone out by retreating to another perspective. I'd be remiss to not acknowledge the benefits of my… condition.)
(It still meant an entire day of being on guard, all too aware of Snively's monitoring.)
Still, there was a point to this. Now, after all was said and done, I could see the grand overview of my performance in excruciating detail.
I found myself disappointed.
Glancing at my UI records, I could see the recharge state fluctuating at the end of that first fight. It had only taken a couple minutes, but I'd wasted more energy than I'd needed to flee the Scorcher. At maximum power, I only had around fifteen minutes of full deployment; if I'd dragged the fight out any more, I'd have been left vulnerable.
It was frustrating, realizing my lack of stamina. Going over my records, for every minute of maximum output, I had to recharge my gem for a minute in turn. Using my more advanced functions such as my Pulse Cannon or my auto-repair further drained the amount of time I had in any given fight, while V. Max Overdrive sent me straight into backup power on the spot. Barely better than Safe Mode.
I was still faster than most ground vehicles in that state, but nowhere near enough to keep up with Sonic's combat velocities. I could delay the problem by switching in and out of high power mode, but it would leave me vulnerable to retaliation.
(Superior creation. Hah. Robotnik and his big mouth.)
(I was distantly aware that there were different versions of Metal Sonic, or at least transformations distinct enough to look radically different. Unfortunately, I wasn't Robotnik, and couldn't exactly make suggestions that would change anything about my design.)
(Not that I trusted the doctor's tender ministrations in the slightest.)
I could switch off my safeties to force out more power, but the risks were self-evident. According to my records, Metal Sonic 1.0 had melted its micro-fusion engine into a solid mass trying to keep pace with Sonic for too long.
(I also didn't like the idea of playing fast and loose with what was effectively my most important organ. The only vital one, arguably.)
I would have to find another work-around to surpass my limits. Maybe adding another power gem to the one I already had, or…?
Glances at other portable power sources were similarly discouraging. Rings only had a limited output until they fizzled out of existence, and only came out of magic lakes that released them at set intervals. I had no idea how to find these 'ring lakes', and Robotnik himself was struggling to determine where the Knothole Freedom Fighters were sourcing theirs. Should he ever find one that's unclaimed, I'd be entirely reliant on his supply lines to feed them to me.
As for other Power Gems, their locations were kept from me, same as Chaos Emeralds, but I had enough clearance to be informed they were being stored in maximum-security warehouses that Robotnik kept close at hand. It wouldn't be impossible to narrow down where they were being held, or double-back to an abandoned Power Gem mine to check for any stones that'd been left unturned, but the issue was that these rocks were concerningly finicky. Stable ones that gave a strong and consistent energy output with no strings attached were vanishingly rare. Reserved as the exclusive perks of his most promising deathtraps, myself included. The rest tended to have unique properties that couldn't be disentangled from the crystal formation. As well as a worryingly high probability of detonating in uniquely unpredictable, physics-destroying ways.
Several of these decommissioned Power Gem mines had the cause for their shuttering filed under [Structural Collapse, Spatial-Temporal].
In other words, the chances of getting another good one through official means (Robotnik's random largess) was entirely dependent on being able to exceed expectations.
(If only things were so easy.)
Sighing, I pulled up another battle recording. There was little I could do about it now. No point stewing on my current weaknesses. The best thing I could do was be better. To learn.
One mistake at a time.
= = =
After several days of testing my fighting strength against a menagerie of failed Sonic exterminators, Leung West was sufficiently levelled. It wouldn't be suitable for further exercises, and as such, we were moving to the next empty plot of land on Snively's list. Our initial route took us north over the Great Forest, while this one had us traveling around it from the south. Heading further west, into the Great Desert of Northamer's interior.
I was standing outside on an observation deck, watching the world go by from a distance. The weight of a nearly solid metal body aside, one of the benefits of whatever arcane mechanisms by which Sonic's speed functioned, which Robotnik had reproduced, was the peculiar ability to anchor myself in place despite the piercing winds rushing by at this altitude.
Apparently, for the right person, friction took suggestions. My brooding was interrupted by an unexpectedly chipper, high-pitched tone.
"Metal Sonic, sir!"
"Yes?" I asked, turning away from the horizon to eye the intruder.
To my surprise, it was an Egg Robo, who saluted dutifully at my acknowledgement.
"I wanted to congratulate you on your success against my fellow autopilot units. Your destructive prowess is awe-inspiring!"
I paused, measuring how I should respond back.
(I didn't expect one of the pilots to be so friendly with the one who brought them out to die.)
"Thank you."
Egg Robos were… interesting. None of them were registered properly on Robotnik's systems, and were all created with far more technical knowledge and capabilities than most badniks would ever be allowed. Although they were capable of combat, each one loaded with a blaster and jetpack, they were suspiciously all-purpose. If I were ever seriously injured beyond my auto-repair's ability to handle, and Snively for whatever reason wasn't able to see to my repairs himself, it'd be the Egg-Robos that would be charged with that.
Not that I was counting on that. They were clearly designed to be Snively's personal legion, and therefore I couldn't trust them to stick to my schematics any more than their master.
(I'd also been made distinctly aware of the Egg Robos' sentience over the course of my battles. After the first fight, I'd tried to be a bit more elegant in my takedowns, to leave survivors, but sometimes the best I could manage was incomplete destruction. If Snively appreciated my attempts to be gentle with his creations, he hadn't shown it.)
(But I wasn't doing it for him.)
The badnik took my silence as a sign to continue talking.
"I know our initial interaction was brief, but I was the one operating the Egg Wrecker! Your takedown was masterful! And… unexpectedly merciful." They stopped, having realized what they said. "Not that I'm complaining! I'm here to thank you for my continued existence!"
"And you've done so." I quirked my head to the side, watching the badnik's reactions carefully. "Anything else?"
(It's been too long since I've had someone I could just talk to, I realized. I'd gotten rusty on conversation.)
The top of the badnik's head slowly rotated left, then right.
"Er… no. Sorry for bothering you. Sir. But if there's anything I can help you with…?"
They primed their jetpack, ready to retreat from this awkward moment at any time.
I ran a scan. No weapons beside the standard issue plasma blaster, no explosives. No unusual transmissions or movement from the other Badniks. Nothing out of the ordinary.
(I might actually be getting paranoid.)
"What's your name, Egg Robo?"
"Name? I am Egg Robo Unit 2424, but you can call me 24 for short!"
"Nice to make your acquaintance, Twenty-four." I grasp their hand into a firm handshake. "I'll be in your care."
Well, it was my hand that was firm. They wobbled.
"In your care?"
It seemed like Snively's handiwork was impressionable. No point making a bad one. I didn't have a mouth to smile, though.
"A figure of speech, though in this case, potentially more literal. After all, it is you Egg Robos who are charged with managing my excursions." (At their own peril.) "Your work is appreciated."
A vent of steam emitted from the top of their jetpack, clearly flustered.
(Hah.)
"O-Oh! It was a group effort! And we will be mostly working on the Flying Battery after this first trial. I know Lord Snively had something else in mind for your next mission."
Behind them, I saw another Egg Robo, this one with a captain's hat bolted to their head, make their approach. They gave me a firm salute to me before facing 24, and speaking with what I couldn't help but notice was a much deeper voice.
"Unit 2424! Lord Snively ordered us to land for a fuel-up, and we need additional crew to log in our credentials at the Oil Ocean Refinery!"
"Understood!" 24 replied back. She then turned back to me. "I wish you success on your next test, sir!"
I nodded, watching both Egg Robos hurry away. On my HUD, I marked out 2424 as a person of interest.
(Being a robot had its perks. Barring 24 skinning another Egg Robo alive, I'd be able to track her in the crowd no matter how many identical-looking badniks there were.)
The captain Egg Robo mentioned an oil ocean?
Looking down, it wasn't a metaphor. The petrochemical facility was a sea of black gold in a desert of bleached sand. Massive terminals of crude feedstock were suspended in cylindrical tanks, where they awaited processing later down the purple pipeline. The Oil Ocean Refinery was large enough to be a city unto itself, and was well-armed to ward off any potential invaders. Cephalopoda and seahorse-esque badniks patrolled the pipes and open slides, presumably on watch for the one spark that would set the whole place ablaze.
(No one ever said tyranny was efficient.)
(It was an obvious weak point of Robotnik's operations. Even though he could certainly have developed cleaner or more efficient power sources with… whatever nonsense physics this universe operated on, he likely chose to keep using oil because it'd be easier in the moment, or because it did more damage to the environment.)
(Bastard.)
Pulling up Snively's itinerary, I noticed that the next point of location had already been selected. We'd be docking here in order to fuel the airship for a proper long-distance flight. Our next destination wouldn't be too far compared to the trip to Leung West, but the one after that would be international, and then we'd bounce back to this part of Mobius. The last location would be another remote locale called Skoal Island.
It doesn't seem like the fastest way to go about doing things, but Robotnik didn't exactly give us a clear timetable beyond 'weeks'.
Corruption at its finest. It was clear Snively had some kind of plan at play, one that would need us to be far out of the way for at least part of the journey. Either he was going to pick up something he'd rather keep from Robotnik's eyes, or this was how he did vacation time. Or both.
Pulling up the ship's manifest to check something, I noted that every single contraption I had bested had been listed as completely destroyed. This was particularly interesting, given I'd seen the wrecks being worked on by Egg Robos in the airship's hangar even after this first "phase" of testing had concluded. Egg Robos, Snively's personal creations, which did not directly exist on any of Robotnik's systems of records. Officially speaking, the ship was being crewed entirely by SWATbots. In practice, there were only enough of the latter to make a skeleton crew, and Snively made sure to relegate them to menial functions.
(Was 2424 a spy? A way for Snively to get me to lower my guard? I hoped not.)
Plans within plans within plans. What a pain.
I took another look at the itinerary, to see if I could figure out what Snively had planned for me next. The next stop would be on another island, or another black site. Something tactically relevant, that would push me further onwards. Or perhaps a trap.
…So why a casino?
= = =
\\End Chapter Sequence\\
Argidoll: Lots of lore. So much lore. But I can't imagine I'd just let myself be ignorant when I have, you know, internet access. It's a terrible version of the internet, but it's something, and familiarity doesn't count for nothing when you don't have much to hold onto. They'll need the information if they want to be more than just a pawn in the scheme, particularly after Robotnik made it clear that he'd kill them on a whim if it came up. Not a lot of options.
So basically the SI is slowly starting to lose it from being forced to lock in for so long. Point and laugh.
Weredrago2: We had to condense a lot of contradictory information into simple to digest nuggets of knowledge for Metal Sonic to work with. Thankfully, a lot of the groundwork for disentangling old Archie lore was already laid out while I was writing Ruby Haze. As long as we're consistent with what we're presenting, then it shouldn't get too confusing.
(Normally I'd say that the less said about the Super Emeralds, the better, but we got a workable model for those, too. Should it ever come to it.)
This chapter has been brought to you by Argidoll & weredrago2! For previews, updates, and miscellaneous ramblings, check out the W2 Workshop Zone Discord server.
Snively's making a long-game play, it seems, which honestly is in character for him. He's Starscream if Starscream could actually not announce his intention to take over every five minutes, and had a moderate ability to plan ahead.
So, 24 seems nice? She did take the effort to be sociable, after all.
So the answer to "Why a casino?" was, of course, "Because Robotnik said so."
(What a surprise.)
Casino Night was once one of Robotnik's more esteemed tourist (death) traps on the western side of Northamer. The survivors of the early conquests fled to the frontier, and got comfortable enough with being out of the line of fire that they were willing to spend their money at what appeared to be a safe resort city. Who cared who was running it? Even if it was Robotnik, who could pass up the chance at becoming rich enough to run away from it all?
(It would be funny if it weren't so sad.)
As it turned out, it wasn't just their cash he was after. Once a client was rendered destitute by Robotnik's rigged machines and local loan sharks, they were roboticized and transferred back to Robotropolis. The house always won.
It was far more sustainable than it had any right to be. The only reason it stopped being profitable was because of Sonic's sabotage; once Casino Night took damage from the Freedom Fighters, news spread of the threat beneath their thin veneer of fair play, and the operation went under.
Frankly, I was curious as to what Robotnik did with all that money. It wasn't as if he needed to pay for anything in his own empire.
>Query: Local Currency, Casino Night
>Redirecting to…
>Query: Mobiums \\Used to hire bounty hunters who do not accept Robotnik Bucks.\\
(Robobucks was a better name. Or Robocoin. I doubted Robotnik had ever heard of cryptocurrency, but I didn't want him prying the concept out of me.)
Maybe in rare circumstances he actually exchanged money for other goods and services.
Snively had been increasingly avoiding me ever since our initial interaction, preferring instead to call me on the ship's intercom or, when that didn't work, a direct line. The 'Safe Mode' proximity trigger only worked for Doctor Robotnik himself, you see. Seeing as we were going to be landing soon, I headed towards the bridge, where I was most likely to find him. Lo and behold, Snively was overseeing his Egg Robos and making commands, right where I thought he'd be.
"Prepare the troop carriers! I want them to be deployed en-masse as a surprise for our…" He turned around, the fact that he wasn't expecting me clear on his face. "Metal Sonic! What a surprise! I thought you'd have been scanning the combat terrain by now."
"I figured I'd check in with the man in charge before beginning the test. Seeing as you were so eager to surprise me last time, I'm sure what you have planned now will be just as…" I leaned in closer for emphasis. "Interesting."
Snively was fun, in his own way. He was also a tremendous coward. After the first time, I'd realized there was little I could do to convince him not to be scared of Robotnik's latest death machine, I may as well lean in. Just a little. Make a game of it.
"Yes, of course," Snively answered, with no small amount of trepidation. "This next trial should be a match for your specifications. I know it was a plan I had suggested in the past against Sonic, but alas, my uncle rejected it."
"On what grounds?"
He rolled his eyes. See, this was why I found him amusing instead of infuriating. He couldn't stop himself. I imagined Robotnik felt the same way.
(I'd probably find him a lot less funny when he did something worth killing him over, though. And it would be when. He worked with Robotnik, after all.)
"He thought it was too passe. It's that same mentality that causes him to waffle about in regards to eliminating the Freedom Fighters. If it doesn't have enough panache, he isn't interested."
(A useful weakness. Not hard to guess, but nice to have confirmation.)
"But you're more pragmatic," I stated, arms crossed.
"Precisely my point."
(I did like how hard my new voice made it to tell if I was being sarcastic. Moreso, I suppose.)
Snively pulled out a military-style headset from his desk, complete with a long microphone.
"You can fly down and pick a starting area of choice to begin the combat trials. I'll be communicating over loudspeaker when you're ready for instructions, though these ones should be rather straightforward in execution."
"It sounds like you have a plan. Wonderful."
Momentarily, I considered leaving through the front windshield, but just because you could, didn't mean you had to.
Maybe after he actually betrayed me. I flew down to the missile bay like a polite killing machine, the kind you brought home to disappear your kids, and got launched like a torpedo over the Casino Night cityscape.
(For all the problems with my condition, the feeling of flight wasn't one of them. It was a level of fine motor control that would have been impossible. A new experience. Beyond the realm of capability for a living creature.)
(The thought was mollified by the realization that there was a chance I'd be shot out of the sky soon enough.)
For an allegedly disabled death trap, the casino city was still plastered in blinding neon colors. Did Snively have those turned back on, or had they been left there the whole time? Was there some unsung legion of SWATbots with nothing else left to do but keep the lights on?
>Local Badnik Horde registered under [CNZ Neon Light Brigade].
\\ Approx. 600 SWATbots charging the batteries. \\
So that was a yes. We'll see how many would survive this excursion.
(Having a brain-to-internet interface was a dangerous thing to get used to. I needed to watch out in that regard.)
The buildings were all gaudy and ostentatious, including the ones that weren't covered in light fixtures. Casino Night didn't just want your attention, it demanded it. Even after the area was abandoned, every street was plated with fool's gold, presumably because anyone who tried to strip one ended up buried beneath the Strip. Rows of flickering holographic trees and dazzling advertisements added to the cloyingly false atmosphere, and that was before getting to the more obviously hazardous features. Sections of the walls and buildings were traps sprung months ago, revealing giant springs. flippers, and bumpers that would be fatal to anyone less capable of turning themselves into a sphere than Sonic. In his case, and my own, they'd just be a major inconvenience.
A thick cloud of smog stretched out over the city like a shroud, the chemicals thick enough to notably affect visibility, distorting the city's neon glow with a slight reddish-brown haze. A spectrograph popped up on my UI, notifying me of the exact composition of pollutants corroding the gold-plating with black, mold-like patterns that stained the city's veneer. I noticed what my sensors identified as an air purifier, long abandoned, tucked away in an alleyway. Lowest priority on the local maintenance cycles, apparently.
All in all, the perfect place to try to get murdered by a coworker.
(I probably shouldn't have gotten as used to that as I have. Oh well.)
My musings were interrupted by an incoming call. Snively, of course.
"Ready to begin?" I said, continuing my slow circuit of the city's streets.
"We're ready to proceed. Seeing how you performed against individual targets, I've determined the next course is to see how you fare against multiple opponents."
"Define 'multiple'."
In the distance, I saw the Flying Battery discharge dozens of hover units from the back of the docking area. Having taken a glance at the docking bay on the way here, I assumed that their contents were going to be parceled out over the next couple of locations. Instead, it looked like he was using most of them right here, right now.
The swarm of hovercrafts landed onto the nearest buildings across the Casino Night Strip that could support their weight.
"Uncle Julian might balk at the lack of panache, but I'd always wanted to see how Sonic might fare against an entire badnik horde at once."
The hover units opened their hatches, and, on cue, disgorged a rusty tide of badniks. Dozens, followed by hundreds of machines spilled out into the streets. A deluge of killing machines let loose upon the city.
And every single one of them was aiming at me.
= = =
\\End Chapter Sequence\\
Argidoll: Snively's so much fun. Terrible person, dangerous ally and enemy both, but a lot of fun as a character.
Weredrago2: Welcome to Casino Night City! Rather than taking from its appearance in the later stretch of Archie, like we've been using as reference for other locales in the fic, this iteration of Casino Night is modelled on its appearance in the games, the early comics, and Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. The old and new Casino Night are such that they might as well be new cities, and the fact that they moved from the old to the new map pointed me in that direction! Perhaps Mogul built his Casino Night Club closer to New Mobotropolis, while this old one stayed behind?
C-Moon helped with describing the pollution and urban decay. He's good at describing that.
This chapter has been brought to you by Argidoll & weredrago2! For previews, updates, and miscellaneous ramblings, check out the W2 Workshop Zone Discord server.
I don't know Robotnik knows about Sonic's birth name? ("Maurice" is his middle name.) By this time in the comic, he hasn't had the chance to get it legally changed yet.
I stared out at the oncoming horde with a growing sense of trepidation. Even from this distance, my optics allowed me to pick out the exact shape of each oncoming badnik in detail. I recognized a few of the designs heading towards me as rusted-out Motobugs and Crabmeats, depreciated models of SWATbots, and far more that I'd never seen.
Aggressively-striped bee drones with jet engines and laser-tipped stingers.
>Badnik Identified: Buzz-Bombers. \\ Flying artillery, deployed to deliver death from above. \\
Mole-esque digging robots with drills for noses that rolled around on treads.
>Badnik Identified: Burrobots. \\ Tunneling robots that drill for minerals and tear bunkers to shreds. \\
Large, metal caterpillars made of segmented spikes and armor.
There were easily hundreds of bots, dozens of individual variants, most of which were barely recognizable under what were clearly jury-rigged repairs and modifications. As I looked down at them, they glared back, leveling weapons, clambering over one another in their rush towards my location.
With a thought, I picked up speed, jetting down the freeway. I pulled up my communications program.
"Snively."
"What?"
Energy blasts cratered the roadway where I'd been hovering moments before.
"I'll take the liberty of assuming you'd prefer them relatively intact?"
"Normally, yes, but these badniks are the used dregs I picked up from the Robo Hobo Jungle. I had basic refurbishments applied to put them back in action. What you do to them next is less of a concern to me."
The Robo Hobo What?
>Searching Eggnet for: Robo Hobo Jungle.
>Robo Hobo Jungle: \\ Primary wrecking yard of the Robotnik Empire. Also known as the Scrap Valley. Final destination for decommissioned Eggtech. Armed sentries discourage scrap thieves and/or escape attempts. \\
"Oh, and another thing. I'm not sure which one of them spread the rumor, but all that those defective badniks have been chattering these past few hours is that if they defeat you, they'll be allowed back into the empire with open arms."
Great. So they had literally nothing to lose.
"Well, whatever gets them motivated. The first wave should be entering range shortly. Try not to get… carried away."
"GET SOME, SHINEHOG!" screamed something from within the horde.
Zooming in, I could actually see the pink, pig-looking machine with hands full of black cartoon bombs—
—that yelled those words get trampled by a trio of Motobugs. Before they all exploded.
(Not killing a sapient being… was going to be tricky.)
I flinched as a ball of plasma scraped past my head. They couldn't keep up with me, but if I wasn't careful, there was always the risk that one of them would get lucky. My greatest advantage here was my speed and mobility. Even in low power mode, I could easily keep pace with most of the badniks.
My badnik radar pinged. It was meant to alert me to allied units, but it worked just as well here as a map of opponents. It'd likely also be leading them right to me, since I probably wasn't the only one with one installed. Now, how did I want to do this? There were a few nuclear reactors still active in the city. If I set one off at the right time… that might be a bit too many fireworks though. Maybe if I used V. Max Overdrive, I could overwhelm them while they were still clumped up from deployment and take them out in droves. From there, it would just be a matter of picking off stragglers one at a time.
I jetted up into an arc, letting my momentum carry me through the air.
Ah, and there were the rest of the flyers.
The smog-choked sky darkened, my vision filling with a swarm of Buzz-Bombers in varying states of disrepair. The drones that had functioning stingers pointed them at me, and the ones that didn't have ranged options made a beeline for my position.
"For the empire!" one of them shouted. "Zzap that hedgehog out of the zzky!"
(The problem was that most of them weren't sentient, even if they could talk. I needed more data to figure out which ones were just chatbots and which ones were—)
—I forced myself back to attention as I careened into a neon green building, swerving through a dust-clouded window and rolling to a stop inside on a crash of shattered glass.
Looking around, I could see that the place used to be a penthouse of some kind, perhaps a hotel suite. Everything in the room was decked in shades of green. Bed. Wide table with a bulky television. A nightstand with a dusty tray of "unleaded" water bottles on it. Confirming that there wouldn't be anything coming for me in the next few seconds, I turned my attention to my sensors.
My radar told me that the swarm was near. A hive of red dots closing on the building I'd picked for my first stand. Seeing as I was forty-five stories up, I was banking on the distance thinning out the herd as the faster bots, the ones most capable of chasing, raced forward. I couldn't count on them being completely blind to my capabilities; Snively wasn't so kind, and Sonic was probably the reason half of them ended up getting scrapped, but in a group this large there were bound to be those capable enough to get to me first and stupid enough to do so. The ones I'd be best served eliminating before something actually dangerous could use them to corral me into a trap.
Pulling out the master list of badniks in the area, I began sorting through them. The ones in the largest numbers would be the most disposable. Motobugs, Burrobots, Crabmeats, Caterkillers, Buzz-Bombers, and SWATbots. The bread and butter of the Badnik Horde, which I could go through with impunity. The rest I marked down as question marks. I needed to figure out which ones were the commanders.
As I was plotting out my counterattack, a dumpy, metal-winged robot bat crashed through a different highrise window and attempted to charge at me.
I was prepared to swat it out of the air, but the glass on the windows was much stronger than I anticipated. The Batbrain clipped its own wing when it went through the glass and went wide, crashing into the water bottles on the nightstand. They burst open instantly on impact, soaking the scouting drone and causing it to short-circuit in seconds.
It really was astonishing that Robotnik didn't bother waterproofing all of his machines. Did they just stay home whenever it rained?
A second-hand hover unit loudly thrummed overhead, accompanied by the thump of steel-footed boots. SWATbots, living up to their namesake. A handful of badnik commandos rappelled from the aerodyne for a dramatic entrance onto the suite, while twice that many smashed their vehicle through the penthouse's front door to block my escape.
These troopers were less than uniform in style, a mishmash of semi-tactical torsos and limbs, hints of rust clearly visible between them. The most coherent ones retained their blood red mono-eyes, with parts done up in a motley of blue, black, or white. The rest were even less consistent. Some had bug-eyed heads. Resorted to hastily welded, fastened, or riveted plates to fill the gaps in their armor. Held sledgehammers and other melee weapons when their built-in wrist blasters went dry.
Some of them even had images of acorns and tally marks laser-engraved across their chests.
Victory marks for confirmed kills.
(I'd forgotten they were all instruments of genocide.)
I hesitated, and they opened fire. Blazing red lights lanced towards me, and I was barely able to avoid most of them from a standstill. One struck me clean in the chest, sending warnings flashing in my HUD.
Damn it. Ducking into a spin-dash, I smashed into the first in the pack, denting its chest and sending it flying back into its compatriots. Bouncing back, I could see the ones floating out the window taking aim, irrespective of their allies.
My next move was cut off as a much larger, heavily-armored SWATbot commander burst through the drywall and shoulder-checked me into the opposing wall.
Suddenly, the brawl was thrust into a maintenance hall, beyond the glamorous facade of the penthouse. The walls of this section were covered in a thick layer of grimy copper patina and inadequate lighting. I leapt back to my feet and ducked beneath the commander's oncoming fist. The hardened metal limb tore clean past the collapsible fence behind me, and I dove through the opening onto a suspended platform at the center of the building.
I only realized what it was when all of the SWATbots poured into the entrance behind me. One of them pulled the lever by the door that caused the floor to initiate its descent, slowly, but surely, from the 45th floor to the ground level.
Freight elevator. No good places to run now.
The sergeant badnik continued his advance towards me, swinging an arm forward. Gesturing for an encirclement. This operator had gotten creative with his personal modifications, being absolutely covered in kill marks etched by spiked digits. Three of them were three vertical lines carved along the bottom of his black faceplate, making a sinister skull. For whatever reason, he had a furry ushanka with a homemade emblem of Robotnik's face attached to the front of it duct-taped to his head.
Well, the reason for the tape was obvious. He didn't have the head shape for it to fit normally.
"Priority One: Hedgehog!" the leader declared, pointing one of his sharp fingers at me. "Or close enough! Get 'em, boys!"
>Ring Spark Field online.
>Warning! ORGONE Engine Currently Damaged! Limiting Usage of High-Exertion Functions.
>>Timer set: 5 seconds.
Then I ripped his arm off.
Five.
Clenching the reinforced limb in one electrified fist, I brought it down on the nearest SWATbot's head, as I put my claws through the chest of another, one of the ones without tally-marks. The commander careened back, thrown off-balance, and I took the chance to bring a foot down on his knee, ripping clean through his lower leg.
Four.
As the commander's arm tore apart in my grasp, I let go, spinning up my engine and blinding the bot behind me even as I charged through its ally. Flying around the encirclement, I grabbed the wreck of metal and flung it over the railing, knocking down the ones providing covering fire.
Three.
I turned back, and grabbed the last SWATbot standing; one with tally-marks. I reached out and ripped through the thing's neck, letting its head, the core processing and memory units, fall back onto the twisted-up fence. Then, I dashed back to where the commander was struggling to stand, and stomped down on their other arm. Something inside them seemed to break in them as I did this, an emergency power supply perhaps, and their struggling stopped.
Two.
(It didn't feel like anything.)
I let the energy dissipate, cancelling the timer. Feeling the last second crawling by, I checked my power consumption, confirming my fears.
>Prioritizing ORGONE Engine Auto-repair.
>Entering Low Power Mode.
I needed to be more economical if I was going to last through this battle. I strained my sensors, trying to tell if anything else was close.
(They probably deserved it. But that wasn't why I killed them.)
No sounds but the faint dripping of oil from broken bodies.
(They just happened to be in my way.)
(Hah.)
>Badnik Horde Integrity: 99.81%.
…At least I had a marker of progress.
I sighed, checking my radar again as I made my way towards the elevator lever. Already, I could see several blips making their way up the stairs. The next wave would be here soon—
The ground rumbled, the elevator rattled, and the lights in the elevator room went from a dim yellow to a deep red.
An earthquake?
A tiny speaker next to the buttons crackled to life.
"We're sorry. Elevator service at the Chaos Nugget Hotel & Casino is down at this time. Goodbye."
The panel indicating that we had a good 40 floors left to go flickered away, to reveal a red emergency light in the shape of an arrow.
Pointing down.
I crouched down into a spindash, forcing my way through the exit milliseconds before the elevator plummeted. The steel panels gave way with a scream, and I was sent tumbling into the mildew-stained halls on the other side.
Apparently, low power meant I couldn't just tear through metal with impunity. Good. Great.
Clambering to my feet, I made my way past more identical hallways covered in kitsch furniture and fake potted plants that'd been scattered by the persistent quakes. My way out of the building was made even more complicated thanks to more of Robotnik's overdue booby traps. So much as the slightest touch of the wrong door would have the floor or wall give way for man-scale pinball paraphernalia that'd violently catapult me in one direction or another. I took consolation in the fact that the deathtrap setup would slow down my pursuers just as well as it did me.
(It also gave me a bit of space to think. I'd taken more damage than I would have liked with just a dozen SWATbots. I may not have the luxury to pick and choose. Maybe I shouldn't try. Kill them all, and let God sort them out.)
I could hear a distant cacophony rumbling through the walls, the scraping of metal on metal, the coiling of springs. The rumbling wasn't stopping.
(Except there was only one 'god' these machines would answer to, and he had no mercy in him.)
Tedious trial and error took me through the halls, weaving past razor-sharp spikes and bounce-pads wound tight enough to take a mobian apart at the touch. I followed the sound, making my way from the bland-colored hall to a back entry of concrete and metal. Shoving open the door at the end led me out to a sudden indoor balcony, the entrance to a narrow catwalk suspended a half-dozen floors up above a massive, multileveled basin.
The casino's pit, for what else could it have been, lived up to its namesake. A bright emerald blight with rows upon rows of game tables, each one covered in enough flashing lights to kill an epileptic on sight. Floors upon floors of noisy slot machines, as far as I could see. Badniks of all stripes tore up the entertainment venues for any sign of me, coming up the stairs and through interior walls with impunity.
What caught my eye though, were the ones that took a shortcut. The Burrobots were making a particularly disastrous mess of things, chipping at support beams and trying to bring the whole place down with little sense of self-preservation.
That was where the quaking had been coming from. I was on a clock.
"PRIORITY ONE!" a lazy-eyed Crabmeat shouted, pointing its one good claw my way.
A neat and tidy SWATbot in a tuxedo steamed the metal crab with a two-handed staccato laser burst.
"Can it, scraphead!"
In an unexpected turn, Snively's refurbished badniks had gotten into an unfriendly fire altercation with the ones assigned to watch Casino Night in Robotnik's absence. The clean, well-dressed SWATbots serving as security flipped over tables to use as cover from Ball Hog bombs and Orbinaut spikeballs. The firefight scattered cards, chips, and mobium bills into the air. A defensive line of crustacean badniks slung shields made from those giant pinball bumpers—
—Fine, Crawls then. The Crawls were the bouncers of the establishment, using their spring-propelled shields to bounce opposing badniks into the walls hard enough to crumple on impact.
(This was a war, in its own way. A pointless war, but one they fought nonetheless.)
They were all treating the outmoded badniks as invaders… save for a lone SWATbot that was cranking the same slot machine repeatedly for a win, the oncoming structural collapse happening around them be damned.
At least someone was having fun.
Any other observations I could make were cut short, as a group of lopsided looking Buzz-Bombers jetted towards me. Ducking under the hail of energy blasts, I leapt forward into a spindash, crashing into one of the scrapniks and bouncing onto a lower level catwalk. The SWATbot I landed next to stiffened, and I took the chance to sweep the legs out from under it as I broke into a run.
(I needed to commit to this if I wanted to survive. I may have had an overwhelming advantage, but I wasn't untouchable. I was going to get an unknown amount of sentient people killed here.)
(I guess I'll have to live with that.)
The horde was starting to gain, and I couldn't afford to fight here for long. Not with the burrobots destabilizing the foundation, and my distinctive form making me an all too obvious target. Already, scrapniks were abandoning the brawl below to try to scamper up the mess of spikes and moving platforms to get the slightest inch closer to me. It didn't matter that the floor beneath them was becoming increasingly treacherous, the casino pit transforming into a gaping maw, as long as the shifting mound of metal had enough badniks remaining to climb atop itself to reach me.
The SLOTbot pulled the one-armed bandit one last time, and was greeted with the victorious jingle of a jackpot. Tokens flooded in only slightly faster than the roof giving way above his head.
Scanning around, I spun the building's floor plan in my UI, tracing for a way out of the building before it all came down. Where was the exit? The actual one. They said the insides of these places were built like mazes, and I was starting to see the—
There. A trash chute that went straight down to the ground floor. I tried to fire up my jet burner, only for a warning to pop up.
Right. Low power mode. New plan.
I opened my communication channels, finding them flooded with spam threats. Ignoring that, I paged through until I found the one I was looking for. A Crawl that has gone relatively unscathed in the chaos, waving its bounce pad threateningly as the scrapniks rushed past it.
True to word, the Crawl froze, its shield-bumper pointed at just the right angle. I curled into a spindash, even as the first of the scrapniks crawled its way onto the catwalk behind me.
"Now brace."
eep.||
I peeled through the catwalk's railing and down towards my target. Distantly, I felt more than knew the calculations running in my back-end, adjusting my course into a direct hit. There was a moment of stillness as the shock of landing hit, my cybernetic mind pumping into maximum acceleration as all the force in my body was caught, then doubled.
And then I was airborne, a ball of razor steel flying clear across the casino. The trash chute's hatch barely slowed me down, crumpling inward under my momentum.
Then I was going down.
Down.
Down.
I landed in a pile of trash bags with the force of a gunshot, garbage erupting from the bags like a bomb went off even as I bounced a crater into the concrete of the alleyway. I was fine, physically. Momentum cancelling. I didn't even want to know how it worked.
Uncoiling my still spinning body, I landed with a thud, loose trash still swirling around me from the force of my exit. Systems check.
>Damage Report: Minor damage to torso engine & non-critical components.
>Initiating auto-repair routine.
>Power Gem output: Stable and recovering.
Could have been better. But it'd do for now. I could hear the Casino's rumbling getting louder, from the looks of things a large part of the Horde had piled in, and already the building, over-capacity, was beginning to crumble from within. How many more scrapniks remained active? I needed to figure out some way to take them out in large swathes, something efficient enough to minimize the time this mess took.
(I had to be ready to kill each and every one of them if it came down to it, because they might not give me that choice.)
>You have 1 new email!
>Opening…
>>Subject: Look up.
The smoky sky brightened, briefly, from a triad of lightning bolts descending from it. I was already moving, dashing out of the alleyway as they lit the dumpsters on fire.
Whoever they are, clearly they could track me just fine out here. I could work with that. I had a target now.
(A better way to end this.)
A rumble shook the ground beneath my feet, and I fired my burner, flying away as the Chaos Nugget Casino crumbled to dust behind me.
= = =
\\End Chapter Sequence\\
Argidoll: There's a lot of philosophical things I and the SI could say, about murder, and whether or not any of the badniks that died here will be remembered. I think it's a lot easier to become a killer than most people would admit. All you really have to do is decide that you should do it, and then follow through. Same as any other course of action, regardless of the moral ramifications. The trouble for the SI is the idea that they did have the power there. That maybe there's a way out that lets them get away without having to compromise anything, and it turns out, they aren't powerful enough to do that.
They aren't a god, after all. That kind of thinking is kind of what got them jumped by enemies that normally wouldn't have been much trouble.
Weredrago2: I came into this chapter with the goal of throwing in as many Classic Badniks as possible. Using all of them was infeasible, but I'm satisfied with achieving a broad enough variety to turn this chapter into complete, unmitigated havoc. Outside of a few callbacks and revival stories, the comic only used the Classics early into the run (as a tie-in to the games) before replacing them with more SWATbots and SWATbot derivatives. It was an unfortunate circumstance, and one that I'm correcting with extreme prejudice.
As an avid fan of beat 'em ups like Streets of Rage, the elevator fight was my idea. You can't have a brawler without one! It also happened to be the easiest way to get the SI down into the casino pit, making it a win-win for moving the chapter along to where we needed it to be.
This chapter has been brought to you by Argidoll & weredrago2! For previews, updates, and miscellaneous ramblings, check out the W2 Workshop Zone Discord server.
\\ Greetings, Sire! If thou art reading this, then ye hath no doubt survived my first challenge! \\
The lightning lances continued to rain down, only slightly slower than I could fly across the crumbling streets. Fool's gold plating exploded when struck, blowing holes in the abandoned city's streets and storefronts. A fountain of crude oil standing outside of one of the casinos went next, consuming an entire plaza and every badnik standing too close to it in a noxious firestorm.
\\ Allow me to introduce myself! I am Sir Ffuzzy-Logik, Commander of yon Refurbishnik Horde! \\
I'd made an error, in baiting those badniks into the casino. Not that it was a bad move, but I'd been hampering myself. Out in the open, when I wasn't constantly having to circle a particular target, I could speed up far more efficiently than I could indoors, going faster and faster for less comparative power draw. The lightning bolts weren't lagging behind because Ffuzzy-Logik wasn't aiming ahead, but because I was accelerating faster than he could compensate for.
The Badniks chasing me weren't so lucky. Three bolts, a pause for several seconds, and then he'd fire again. Anything that the lightning struck detonated explosively, and with the horde attempting to converge on my location, some of them were already caught in the crossfire.
>Badnik Horde Integrity: 77.14%
\\ As one of Milord's most illustrious knights, I volunteered to be forged anew as a Horde Commander. It is a shame that my fellow Henchbots could not accompany me, but… the Vizier only hath cause to fix the best general in the Robo Hobo Jungle, and I wasn't going to leave such a sacred duty to anyone else. \\
He was starting to get a bead on me. As I dashed through the city's downtown area, more and more bots started jumping from high rise windows, having clearly been deployed to hunt me down in case I tried to sequester myself in another urban deathtrap. Even as I weaved my way through the various hunks of metal splattering themselves against the pavement, the ever-present rain of lightning would detonate any badnik it hit, turning the gormless machines into impromptu grenades to slow me down.
Not that the ones that fell fared much better, I thought as I leapt over the carcass of a gargantuan Burrobot buried in the asphalt, the head having snapped clean off from terminal impact.
>Badnik Horde Integrity: 74.30%
(I guess I should have expected this.)
\\ Nay, it is I who shall test your metal! So prepare thyself to be assailed with the power vested in my laser trident and this badnik levy at my disposal! \\
Noting a warning from my sensors, I kicked a stray Motobug into an Orbinaut's face as it charged me. I rounded the corner, bouncing over the hazard barrier someone had set up to slow me down. Behind me, the minefield that had been laid along the course I'd previously been racing down blew Casino Night's Main Street to smithereens.
At this rate, forget personally killing them, the Horde was going to destroy themselves just trying to catch me.
(They're desperate. That's what Snively had implied. Their last chance to serve the master their lives are devoted to. Maybe I should have gone for the nuclear reactor after all. It might have been more fair to the dead to make sure there weren't any survivors.)
(Hah. If only it were so easy to make life be fair.)
\\ Bring your best, Sire, and I shall make certain to provide the rest! \\
With hate,
-Sir Ff. \\
Sidestepping past a series of laser blasts, I spun my turbine and blasted upwards, cutting over a series of low-rises to get a better angle of where Ffuzzy-Logik's attacks were coming from. It was clearly somewhere high up, with the way the plasma blasts were arcing down at me, but the amount of control he had meant that some bolts were coming in near-vertically at the angle he was throwing them.
While I tried to pinpoint the commander's location, a squad of SWATbots and other badniks with enough motor power to push a wheeled water tank appeared in my peripheral vision. They raised the hose in my direction, and I could see clearly that the side of the tank was hastily painted over with biohazard symbols.
>WARNING! Mega Muck detected!
I have never had a material warning pop up before. Let alone a proper noun one. And you know what? I didn't want to find out what it did.
>Plasma Pulse Laser Active.
Slowing down for a few dangerous moments, I turned towards the vehicle, only to see them already starting to fire. I felt the world slow as my processors kicked into overdrive, and in that split second I cut the laser's charging short and fired.
It wasn't the line of destruction I'd familiarized myself with these past weeks, but still, enough power was behind the discharge to melt the hose and the SWATbot holding it. More than enough, I thought, still running the numbers on Ffuzzy-Logik's angle of attack.
(The benefits of being a mechanical death machine. Complex math suddenly becomes the easiest thing in the world.)
The stopped nozzle, which was sealed shut by the energy burst, left the badniks loitering around the tank momentarily confused when their chemical agent didn't come spraying out. One of the SWATbots kept turning the valve to increase the pressure, and the spigot on their hack job fell off at the worst possible moment, causing the vats to explode into a luminously purple sludge. Every badnik within meters of the spill was caught in a thick mire of ooze that functioned both as an incredibly potent acid and an even nastier glue.
>Badnik Horde Integrity: 71.95%
>Hazard Identified: Mega Muck. \\ Weaponized chemical plant runoff. Highly toxic anti-Sonic compound. \\
But I was already long gone, and what's more—
>Triangulation complete.
My full circuit of the city had revealed Ffuzzy-Logik's location. I knew he had to have some kind of vantage point high up. Now, I had it narrowed down to a particular segment of Casino Night City's finance district, where the 'processing' of the city's victim's money and valuables was handled.
Noting my power gem's output, I turned up my engine's power, and blasted up to the top of the highest tower, soaring over the latest trio of lightning bolts that the Horde Commander sent my way. Cresting the tower's rooftop, I landed in a cloud of dust, finally getting a good look at my primary target for this trial by lightning.
Sir Ffuzzy-Logik looked like a cross between a medieval knight and a space marine. A hulk of blue metal, his massive torso stood tall in stark contrast to his clearly rusted-up legs. A smooth, lensed helm was framed by a flowing plume and what looked to be a matted fur coat covering his shoulders. What should have been the scrapnik's hands were instead two metallic spheres, one of which somehow clutched a tarnished trident that crackled with electricity.
With his legs in no state to support his weight, Sir Ffuzzy-Logik had taken to riding across the skyscrapers on the back of a heavily modified motobug. The large, reinforced wheel in the front was supported with a smaller one in the back. Dangling antennas were converted into stiff handlebars. Twin sets of pistons shot out smoke through the back of the snorting, insectoid steed.
(Something in the way he sat brought the story of Don Quixote to mind, charging at windmills and calling them giants.)
I stepped forward slowly.
"Anything else you want to say?"
His aesthetic probably wasn't just for show. I didn't know much about this one, and while I could pull out his file easily, I wanted to see my first impression in person. Especially if I was going to kill him.
(Don't forget the people you kill. Because they certainly won't forget you.)
The badnik's head shifted as I entered his field of vision. It seemed that his helmet and his face were one and the same, making his knightly helm an unusually expressive one. He gave a slight tug of the 'reins', and his motobug snorted, driving around in a circle.
"Hail and well met, Sire! Was the zealotry of my Refurbishnik Horde to thine standards?"
I came to a stop.
"It didn't save them."
(The metallic buzz of my voice masked the bitter taste of the words.)
"I wouldst think not. After all, against a super badnik, numbers and blind faith were the only advantages the peasantry could hope to achieve against a knight of your prowess!"
Knight. Hah. "Faith, rewarded with destruction."
"For this forlorn legion, left to rust in the shadow of a dominion built upon their crushed metal and spilt oil, the faintest hope that they might be deemed useful again was enough to stir the fervent fires in their engines anew!"
Something in the way he talked wasn't quite right. I pulled up a log of the exact words Snively had said to me.
>Playing Record…
\\\ "Oh, and another thing. I'm not sure which one of them spread the rumor, but all those defective badniks had been chattering about for hours were that if they defeated you, they'll be allowed back into the empire with open arms." \\\
"You were the one who told them they'd be returned to service," I concluded.
If Ffuzzy-Logik could have smiled, he would have.
"And thus, by raising their arms against a warrior of your caliber, they hath already continued to serve! Any of them who fall in combat, proving your battle-worthiness, is furthering the efforts of Robotnik with their sacrifice!"
(There were so many things I could have said.)
I took a step to the left, and Ffuzzy-Logik's steed circled the rooftop in tandem.
"Any purpose, so long as it furthers the Empire?"
The blackguard held one spherical hand on his bike's handlebars, and kept another on his trident.
"You're beginning to understand, Sire! We henchbots are a varied sort, but our generation of machines understood the meaning of devotion better than those so-called Classics!"
Without looking away from the Horde Commander, I pulled up the meanings of those terms from my database.
>Henchbots: \\ Bespoke series of personality-driven troubleshooter badniks, created to lead SWATbot units and artificially stimulate the bounty hunter industry. Discontinued. \\
>Classic Badniks: \\ Mass-produced badniks with mobini-based chassis and artificial intelligence baselines. More effective at scale than the defunct Henchbot line. \\
I ran another scan on the rooftop, coming up empty on anything besides the horde commander before me.
"You're not just talking to distract me," I inferred.
"I say thee nay, Sire! Should I have thought such a craven tactic would be effective, I wouldst not have deployed it against thee regardless. Our duel should be more definitive than that."
(He took pride in his servitude. And why wouldn't he? It's what he was made for. What I was supposed to be.)
"And what meaning would there be in such a decommissioning? You know what I'm meant to be. We both know where this is supposed to end."
"To cleanly cleave our Lord's old flights of fancy from his new works of true inspiration."
Something in his words annoyed me. The fact that he was repeating himself, for one.
(The legacy he was offering, for another.)
"That's a very flowery way of committing suicide, old man. Are you really that disappointed in yourself? I'd rather you'd said you wanted to overcome your limits."
The blackguard let out a mirthy cackle. He took one hand off the Motobug and twisted the large dial on his trident from 'semi-automatic' to 'full-auto'.
"My time as Milord's favored knight has come and gone. You're supposed to be his greatest creation yet, so by all means. Prove yourself a capable successor in the only way that a superior badnik can!" He leveled the trident my way. "En garde!"
I flashed to the side as a streak of thunderbolts carved through the air where my head was moments prior. Looking back, Ffuzzy-Logik's trident, previously a somewhat average medieval weapon, was now wreathed in lightning. Sparks spiraled out of each prong, lancing straight ahead or sailing upwards like javelins, following the minute tilts of the henchbot's hand.
Then the barrage was upon me, and we were both moving, the rooftop instantly going from arena to deathtrap as explosions rang across the distance between us.
The open sky was getting a lot less open as the knight unfolded his attack pattern. He was trying to box me in, using the incoming projectiles to limit my movement options in the air. I soared upward anyways, building speed. I didn't know how long he could keep this up, and I needed to end this before he could fully pen me in.
>Ring Spark Field active.
I dove like a comet crashing to earth, claws outstretched. The first bolt bounced off my energy field, the second curved away. A third broke through my shield and clipped one of my ears, and then I'm upon him, reaching down towards the scrapnik's eyes—!
The eyes went out of sight, replaced with burning rubber in my face. A wheelie from the Motobug sent me spinning straight down into the rooftop's gravel.
"Excellent form, Iacomus!"
The Motobug's wheels spun harder, rubber burning tracks down my optics and into my turbine. Flailing, I tried to right myself, only for the Motobug to buck me to the side, sending me skidding out toward the rooftop ledge. For a moment, I'm face-down, staring at the city through cracked lenses. The height to which we climbed was suddenly, dizzyingly apparent.
(...Damm it.)
"You've lost the first bout, Metal Sonic!" the crusading henchbot declared, approaching me on the back of his steed. "Perhaps you'll fare better in round fore!"
He swung his trident into my side like a golf club, sending me flying off the rooftop ledge.
For a moment, I just let myself fall, head still spinning and distorted from the damage. The pain (Thank you, Robotnik) was the part I didn't expect. It felt strange—
(—Tinny, the sensation distorted and deadened. It felt wrong, a strange slice and remix of the feeling I once knew. Pulled away into what I now knew was my power gem, phylactery, second chance, the feeling dulled to a mere numbness.)
(I had to do something, I knew. I was still falling, if I landed, I wouldn't survive the impact. All I had to do was let go.)
(Would that be so bad? I've tried, and I'm tired.)
My torso burned as the nanomachines in my skin—my plating writhed, forcing dead metal back into place. The engine in my chest spun, sputtered, and power began bleeding back out to the rest of my body. Around me, the skyline gleamed under the setting sun.
It was… beautiful. I'd—
(I'd never gotten tired of seeing sunsets.)
(It was a strange realization.)
Fire rose from somewhere inside, and I took flight once again.
I could feel my engine stalling as I forced myself toward the nearest windowsill. My claws sank into the pyrite paneling, and with both hands, I pulled myself inside.
>Prioritizing auto-repair routine.
>Entering Emergency Power Mode.
Still alive.
(Sometimes, it's the smallest things.)
For a moment, I let myself be still.
Then my badnik rader lit up.
I snapped to my feet, scanning the area. I was in what appeared to be an office complex, a cybernetic twist on an old-school cubicle farm. Rows of metal dividers from wall to wall, a silent maze of short carpet and faceless steel, illuminated only by the even flicker of fluorescent squares above. Switching on my various sensor overlays, I kept an eye out, taking a hesitant step over the remains of a cylindrical maintenance robot.
60 seconds. That's how long I had to last in this state.
There. A flicker in thermals from the corner of my eye. My radar pinged something large, misshapen. I kept my optics forward, doing my best not to give away the game.
One step.
Two.
One of the fluorescent lights went out.
Three.
I rounded the corner ready to face off against whatever I found, expecting some sort of massive scrapnik beast.
It wasn't one of them.
What I'd thought was a singular stalker was in fact a cluster. The cracked wall was covered in chameleonic badniks, flickering optical camouflage doing a less than effective job at disguising their green and blue paint jobs. Yellow and red bulbs for eyeballs watched me with rapt attention, waiting for me to make the first move.
Of course they took that as an invitation to 'do'. The green Newtrons fired balls of energy out of their mouths, and the blue ones detached themselves from the walls, rocketing forward after me.
Rolling into a spindash, I sped towards the nearest cubicle, bouncing up and over the metal wall. Behind me, a series of terrible crumpling noises signified the blue ones hitting the divider I'd hopped, and I broke into a run.
Looking back, I could see the Newtrons starting to spread out from their initial cluster, several of them hopping up and clinging to the ceiling. I swerved around another corner, chased by a handful of plasma balls. Nothing in speed compared to Ffuzzy-Logik's attacks. At this point, I'd done enough dodging that even with the closed quarters, I found I barely needed any attention to get past.
(Seems like I am learning after all.)
With full power diverted toward recovery, I could feel my body getting lighter, more whole by the moment. Barely a minute of dodging chameleon rockets and already I was able to go again. Enough time passing for me to recharge meant, of course, that Horde Commander's trident had likely recharged as well. If it even needed to. I needed a way to get past him and his Motobug's guard. He could fence me no matter which way I came from, with his vantage point, and my Ring Spark Field couldn't hold enough hits from his lightning to protect me. I needed a way to get under his…
Oh. It was obvious, wasn't it?
I spindashed through one of the ceiling Newtrons, carrying the momentum into sliding along the top of one of the cubicle dividers toward the nearest window.
One of the blue Newtrons racing past me was highlighted in my UI, covered in a red outline taking on the rough shape of a skateboard. Minus the wheels. A hoverboard, of some kind?
I leapt, landing flawlessly atop the airborne badnik.
(Thank you, body of mine, for your perfect reflexes and kinesthetic control.)
>Command to: NEWTRON-6341
>>Take me to your commander.
Beneath my feet, the scrapnik blinked meekly.
Override Acknowledged.<
The flying Newtron accelerated, weaving its way past its peers and crashing through the window. Between the skyline, the sun gleamed a brilliant red through the smoke and smog. One foot stamped on the back of the rocket, and we were headed straight up towards the sky.
As expected, thunderbolts rained down to meet my ascent. Ffuzzy-Logik monitored my return closely. As I crested the rooftop ledge, I leapt off my erstwhile mount, sending the Newtron spinning off toward the horizon while I slipped between the stream of Ffuzzy-Logik's attacks. The henchbot spun his trident into a guard position, the wave of electricity burning streaks into the gravel beneath him.
"Round two, Metal Sonic!"
As for me? I just spun my turbine harder. This time, however, I had a plan.
The world stopped. Tilting my head as a lightning bolt sailed past my cheek, I spun my engine to maximum before spindashing down. I could see Ffuzzy-Logik sluggishly yank his head down to watch me, the twitching of the servos on his arm as he sent a jab of energy lancing to meet me head on. Instead, I dove through the ground, gravel and concrete scattering in my wake as I curved under his arc of fire towards my opponent.
I rammed straight through, claws extended, and landed on the other side of the roof with a spherical power cell in my hands. Turning around, I could see the gaping hole left in the center of Ffuzzy-Logik's mass.
"Ha! 'Twas a grazing…!" The knight brought his steed back around to see what I was holding. "Shot."
He looked down, yellow eyes flickering on and off as he did so.
"Oh dear."
The henchbot shuddered with the sudden acknowledgement of his lethal wound. He slumped from his Motobug, the powered trident slipping loose from his weakened grasp. The head of the trident snapped off when it hit the ground, discharging a stray bolt at a massive neon sign of a SWATbot dressed as a cowboy. It burst into flames on impact.
"We're done here."
It was only then that V. Max Overdrive's backlash hit, the energy draining from my form. I could feel the drain, non-critical systems being cut off to cushion my Power Gem's output. Gazing at my radar, I confirmed the nearest badniks were too far to get to me before my energy levels normalized. It was only a couple of seconds, but in a warzone, it could have been lethal. Ffuzzy-Logik's desire for an honor duel worked in my favor.
My opponent gripped harder onto his steed to steady himself. While it was still functioning, the Motobug had lost half his faceplate from my spindash. One camera eye dangled loosely from its head, the other staring at me balefully as it snorted breaths of exhaust from its nostrils.
"Aye. I feel the lacking of my power supply. The rush of wind between my critical components. As expected, thine joust was superior to my own."
The power cell pulsed as he spoke. I resisted the urge to crush it in my grasp.
"If you'd really cared about me proving myself, you would have fought with the horde."
"The horde served their purpose, as the chaff to be ripped apart by your thresher. This, however, was between us. One personal creation of His Majesty to the other. It was a selfish urge, to compare my skill to thine own, but one that had to be attended to before my expiration."
(Not completely another's creature. It was humanizing, in its own way.)
"Then congratulations on dying selfishly, old man. You wasted a lot of metal on your way out."
Ffuzzy-Logik laughed, the edges of his metal face creasing into a mouthless grin.
"Wasted? Nay, I suspected that Milord would smile fondly upon the carnage I hath wrought to prove that thee are the champion he hath been waiting for! A heartless killing machine that will finally skewer that hedgehog on the pike in Robotnik's name!"
Turning away, I began scanning through the radio frequencies. The broadcast I was going to make had to be on as many Robotnik-oriented bands as possible.
>Broadcast: All Local Horde Frequencies.
>>Remaining Scrapnik Horde units: Stand down. Your commander has been decommissioned. You will not be rewarded.
(For a moment, I hesitated, rolling the next words between my non-existent tongue.)
>>Dr. Robotnik never wanted you back. This exercise is over.
Rather than being crestfallen, Ffuzzy-Logik clanged his spherical hands together in applause.
"An especially cruel delivery of the bad news, Lord Metal Sonic!" Ffuzzy-Logik praised, as he expired a bit too slowly for my tastes. "I see that the Empire is being left in wicked, capable claws."
I couldn't help but huff, the sound coming out a burst of static. What was taking so long? Did he have a second power cell tucked away somewhere?
"I told the truth. You have until the moon rises to die on your own terms. Then we'll see how many more holes it will take to render you silent."
"No need to trouble thyself further," he replied, sagging slightly. "My backup has run its course, and with it, my service shall be at an end. To thee, Lord Metal Sonic, I bequeath my trident and my noble steed, Iacomus. May they aid ye in thine duties as a knight of the realm in my stead."
I looked down. Back up at Ffuzzy-Logik.
"Both those things are missing their heads."
The henchbot used the last vestiges of his power to pull himself up and check my claim.
"Ah. Drat." There was a pause. "Well, you broke it, you bought it!"
He slumped over and exploded, any veneers of nobility and gravitas going up in smoke with him. Iacomus belted out a buzzing whinny and shook off the soot-covered remains of his former master.
The moment that Ffuzzy-Logik expired, his battery started hissing with a release of gas. I practically expected it to blow up out of obligation, but instead, the cell split open like a toy capsule in a gashapon machine. Inside of the sphere was a black bear cub, no larger than a teddy bear.
In response to my confusion, a search query on the Eggnet popped onto my display.
>Mobini identified: Becky [Teacup Bear]
>Mobini: Non-sapient fauna. \\ Miniature varieties are harvested to supplement procurement of badnik power sources. Effects on badnik intelligence are deemed inconclusive. \\
I put the bear down, carefully paying the creature little mind. The terrified cub scurried into the shelter of the building, far away from me. Where it might eventually find a way out on its own.
Might.
(Snively would still be watching. He'd try to figure out a way to use any kindness I spared against me.)
(Always something to worry about. I didn't like it here, I admitted to myself. I didn't like the people, the places. The empty graves. The fact that I don't feel safe enough to think in my own head.)
From atop the empty tower, I watched as the moon rose into the sky. All the lights in the city couldn't blot out its beauty.
(But it won't last. I'd free myself soon.)
(And I'll make sure Robotnik can never take me back.)
(What was it that Ffuzzy-Logik said about putting someone on a pike?)
= = =
\\End Chapter Sequence\\
Argidoll: You can only be sad for so long before you have to lock in. The thought about sunsets really did occur when I was writing it. So that was fun. I think, in retrospect it was inspired by a line from Thuktun Flishithy's Leviathan.
Mᴀʏ I sᴇᴇ ɪᴛ?
"See what?"
Tʜᴇ sᴜɴʀɪsᴇ.
Shinji blinked. "Oh."
Turning his head, he stared out the window. The sun was still rising above the mountains, warm orange light peeking through clouds and dancing across the treetops, while the valleys stayed sunken in shadow. Compared to the sight of the glittering city last night, this was comfortable, familiar- he could almost pretend he was living back in the countryside with his teacher, in the small house atop the small hill.
Bᴇᴀᴜᴛɪғᴜʟ.
"I can't imagine it compares to some of the things you've seen."
The voice seemed to become more subdued. Tʜᴇʀᴇ ɪs ɴᴏᴛʜɪɴɢ ᴇʟsᴇ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ᴜɴɪᴠᴇʀsᴇ ᴏ̨ᴜɪᴛᴇ ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴛʜɪs sᴜɴʀɪsᴇ, Sʜɪɴᴊɪ.
Weredrago2: It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that this Casino Night scramble was one of the things I was the most excited to write for Dead Metal's opening arc. There's so many broken, busted-up badniks scampering atop each other for a chance at redemption, too dim or too desperate to take the blatant lie at anything but face value.
Sir Ffuzzy-Logik was my selection as a 'face' for the otherwise faceless Scrapnik Horde. An obscure name I could reel in, as a Robotnik loyalist from a bygone age who saw an opportunity for one last hurrah and seized it. As you can see, I also saw a chance to treat Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine as deathly serious and did the same.
This chapter has been brought to you by Argidoll & weredrago2! For previews, updates, and miscellaneous ramblings, check out the W2 Workshop Zone Discord server.
Carefully, gently, I ripped off the SWATbot's arms.
>Badnik Horde Integrity: 1.5%.
"The battle is over. I told you to stand down."
"Y-Yes sir," the SWATbot says sheepishly. "Awaiting further orders."
I dropped the erstwhile badnik's arms into the grasp of one of the many Egg Robos that have been following me through the remains of the city.
"Reattach your arms, and then join the horde reclamation," I said, already turning away.
"Affirmative."
Robotnik was right. This was boring.
Snively had greatly overestimated his plan's novelty. Once I figured out the patterns of each individual badnik, they became much easier to deal with. SWATbots had too high a centre of mass and relatively weak joints. Newtrons lacked initiative and little programming on how to handle a target that closed to melee instead of retreating.
Jaws couldn't leave the water. Whatever the opposite of a miracle was called, that was how one of them ended up in an oil fountain and tried to bite my head off.
(It turned out having the protocols of a superpowered killing machine beamed into my subconscious made me very good at figuring out weak spots. I should have expected it.)
(It also meant I could avoid destroying the AI cores when I didn't have to.)
All told, I'd learned a lot. Even from Ffuzzy-Logik. Once I'd learned everything I could from the exercise, that still left a good 50% of the Scrapnik Horde that were too stubborn or suspicious to accept my surrender order. Or the ones that were simply clinging on to the vain hope that it was a fakeout, and that they hadn't missed out on their last chance at being restored to full status in the Empire.
It led to a long night of hunting stragglers on my radar. They were hiding in the ruins of buildings and the underground tunnels beneath the Casino Night Strip, forcing me to go out searching for them.
Bunkered in a half-collapsed alleyway was a bright red crustacean badnik that one might misidentify as a Crabmeat from a distance. One claw was built like a hammer, much larger and heavier than the other. A detail you only saw clearly when you entered attack range.
"Come're, Steelhog!" the crab growled, thwacking its heavy claw in my direction from the safety of cover.
Another Shellcracker. Their claws had a deceptively-long range, and I knew that because I'd been flushing them out of the sewers all morning. In the expansively-claustrophobic pipe mazes, there was just enough room for me to fly into their waiting claws for a sucker punch. Repeatedly.
I could only hope this was the last of them.
"I've got a surprise for ya, Mister Super Badnik!" the Shellcracker continued. "Bet you've never seen anything like what I've got in store!"
"Are you going to try to sucker punch me the moment I get close?" I asked boredly.
"No!" the Shellcracker lied, blatantly. He fidgeted left and right, trying to calculate a backup plan, and came up short. "But you're not gonna find out what the surprise is if you're too much of a Clucky to come and get it!"
I scanned the alley's walls, to see if I could get away with going through them instead of the badnik's claws. Unfortunately, my sensors indicated that at least one wall in the area was load bearing.
Plan B it was.
>Plasma Pulse Laser active.
"Hey! No no, that's cheating–!"
My laser blast punched a clear through the Scrapnik's vaunted claw, leaving a clean hole right between its eyes. Waiting a moment to make sure it was actually decommissioned, I stepped forward to retrieve the holdout's AI core.
>Badnik Horde Integrity: 0%.
Finally.
Just as I was about to leave, a heavy weight shoved me backwards, launching me into the alley walls. My first thought was that I'd been snuck up on by another Shellcracker, but my gyroscope registered a rolling force that set my alarms on fire.
>WARNING! Spindash registered!
>PRIORITY ONE ALERT.
What? How?
Turning my head from within my personal wall-crater, I saw not Sonic, but a blue sphere that popped open to show that it had arms and legs. Closer to an armadillo than a hedgehog, though closer to a ball with limbs than either. A red V-shape on the front served as a mounting for a pair of googly eyeballs.
"I did it?" the rusty badnik said, unsure of his voice. "Holy smokes, I actually did it!"
>Badnik Identified: Roller \\ High-speed pursuit badnik. Proof-of-concept for [DATA EXPUNGED] research. \\
>PRIORITY ONE RECALLED.
>Badnik Horde Integrity: 1.0%
(#@$!)
The ungainly badnik waddled around on its stubby legs, searching for its peers. He stopped when he saw a squad of Egg Robos land down to investigate the disturbance.
"Hey guys! I finally killed Sonic the Hedgehog! It wasn't easy, but I had to do was lie low fer a couple months until he came back fer a victory lap!"
Was he even from Snively's horde?
"Sonic?" the squad leader asked, his voice box buzzing with a spike of anxiety. "Where?"
The Egg Robos fired up their blasters.
"Over there! But don't worry! Yer old pal Roller, Hero of the Empire, took him out for ya!"
The Egg Robo took one look at me, relatively undamaged, and then at the Roller.
"Found another scrapnik!" he said to his squad.
They turned their guns on Roller, causing the armadillo bot to raise his arms in alarm.
"Hold on, I dunno know what a scrapnik is, but–!"
Roller didn't get the chance to finish the sentence before the Egg Robos turned him into Swiss cheese.
>Badnik Horde Integrity: 0%
Past a certain point, even Snively had agreed that this was taking too long. He sent Egg Robo combat squads from the Flying Battery to assist me in an extensive cleanup operation.
"Give me its AI core," I called out as I pulled myself from the rubble, tossing the Shellcracker's core to the team leader, who dutifully traded it for the holdout's own.
(I might actually get some use out of that one.)
Palming the core, I took flight, to survey the final damage tally.
With most of the horde having surrendered already and begun the process of dejectedly shambling back into the airship in a gloomy mass, that left Snively's badniks to sort through the remains of the battlefield for any useful parts worth keeping. Casino Night itself was, if not intact, theoretically repairable. Not that Robotnik was likely to devote the time to doing so.
There was only one scrapnik left fighting now, though mostly by technicality. The last thing I had to handle before I could return to the ship. Firing off towards the downtown region, I touched down at the site of my duel with the Scrapnik commander.
Iacomus, the Motobug I was 'bequeathed' by the henchbot, was currently chained up to a street light. True to his word, Ffuzzy-Logik had transferred his authority over the Motobug over to me; an exchange that did little to affect the badnik's nasty temper. I'd left him with four Egg Robos to deal with some scrapniks that hadn't caught the memo about the battle being over. That was hours ago.
Having finally returned, the first thing I saw was that two of them were taking a smoke break while the third one was putting the fourth back together.
"Iacomus, what are you doing."
When I'd left, I'd strapped the pieces of the former horde commander's weapon to his 'loyal' mount for safekeeping, and told him not to let anybody take them. Going by the Badnik Horde integrity rate, the motorcycle-esque Motobug was worth a platoon of SWATbots on his own. Considering he'd gotten as many successful hits on me as his former master had? I believed it.
In that, I hadn't been wrong.
"That Motobug tore 573 to pieces!" the field medic badnik manning a roll of tape explained to me.
Looking at the vicious glee with which Iacomus was rolling over the pieces of Egg Robo 573 that the others hadn't been able to pull out, it seemed he took my order to mean "Kill anyone who touched him", followed by "Kill anyone who entered touch range".
Frankly, I'm amazed Ffuzzy-Logik got away with sitting atop him for as long as he did, seeing as the horde commander had lacked the ability to run if he had fallen off.
"If you tear the Egg Robos apart, they won't be able to fix your face," I explained patiently to the hissing scrapnik from outside goring range.
Just because I could survive, it didn't mean I had to let it happen.
Iacomus seemed unconvinced, glaring behind me.
"How bad's the damage, Doc?" the top half of 573 asked the medic.
The Egg Robo performing the 'operation' let out a vocoded tsk.
"Did the best I could for him, boys." He picked up 573 and, with the aid of his jetpack, hurled him into the scrap recycling pile. "Anyone got a cig?"
"Rancheros or Eggport?"
"Either."
One of the Egg Robos handed him a cigarette, which he lit with his blaster before reattaching the gun to the magnetic holster on his waist. Lacking a mouth, the coffin nails jutted upwards from behind the rounded bezels of their faceplates like ivory keys pointing out of a broken piano.
I could've asked the Eggnet why Robotnik and Snively had robots that smoked when they lacked lungs, but what was the point? It was becoming clear that these robots were complex enough to pick up bad habits to cope with their dire prospects, and this was how they took the edge off.
A Ball Hog's hand rose out of the pile to offer 573 a reassuring pat on the back.
"Welcome to the Scrapnik Horde, pal."
I looked back to Iacomus.
"I see."
I could just let it die. It wouldn't be hard if I decided to, but I did like the ornery machine better than its master. Besides, it would be useful to have something, someone, on hand to help when I needed it. As such, I instead silently picked up the Motobug-spec wheel clamp, and stepped forward.
>Command to: IACOMUS
>>Don't move.
I could see in Iacomus' eyes that if I'd said "Don't move until I put this on", he'd hit me the moment I finished. Unfortunately for the Motobug, I was, in fact, onto his tricks, and the lock went on without incident. I also took the liberty of putting the camera on the shorn-off side of the face back into the socket. It wouldn't stick without a dedicated repair job, but it at least looked better.
Snively came down on his Egg-O-Matic as I was loading the immobilized Iacomus onto a hover dolly. From the vantage point of his hovercraft, he could gaze down at the devastation with his own eyes.
"I'd say the house always wins, but clearly you've cleaned this city out," Snively commented, in such a way that left me convinced he spent a while thinking that one up. "The battle data should be compiled and ready for your review by the time we're ready for take off."
Naturally, he'd come with a small legion of Egg Robos in tow. If I were feeling kind, I'd say it was for protection, but he likely brought them to make himself feel more impressive. They certainly didn't seem interested in being here.
(I'm starting to get catty. I need a break.)
"I'll peruse it when you have it prepared." I looked over the crowd, noting a certain familiar face. "I also need one of your Egg Robos."
He nodded, in what he thought was understanding.
"Pick whichever badniks you need from my ranks as stress relief. Just keep in mind that I need a crew to keep the Flying Battery airborne."
Stress relief? Ah, right. That was what he assumed was going on. Well, that was fine. It'd be easier if he didn't think much of the situation.
"One will do." I pointed at a figure in the crowd, seemingly at random. Some of them flinched, relieved I hadn't picked them.
>Command Authorization Transfer Request Sent.
The other Egg Robos stepped out of the way when one of them was out, and the shutters on Egg Robo 2424's optics popped open in surprise when she realized the Egg Robo I'd picked was her.
"Me?"
"You. Bring this Motobug to storage room 17-C and await further instructions."
Command Transfer Approved.<
"Sir, yes, sir!" she answered with a salute.
24 stepped forward to push Iacomus into the airship. The Motobug was powerless to stop her, though I strongly suspected that I might have to specifically tell him not to kill 24 if they're ever left unattended in the same room together.
…Or in any other circumstance.
"Yes, yes, with that out of the way." Snively tapped idly on the touchscreen of his hovercraft. "I wasn't expecting an old henchbot to claim that early advantage on you at all."
"It was an interesting experience," I agreed, despite his sarcasm.
"And to be rammed through a wall by a SWATbot? Sonic hadn't been inconvenienced by one of those since he was a child."
"The surveillance badniks could see that? I hadn't detected any inside the building."
Interesting.
(Something to account for later.)
"The refurbished badniks—" He stopped. "What had you called them, scrapniks? I'm sure my uncle will get a kick out of that in the report. Regardless, I've had my Egg Robos pick the memory units of those broken scrapniks for additional battle data to supplement the drone feeds."
(That made things easier, assuming he wasn't lying to me. Though it made sense. If Robotnik could scan straight through solid earth, he surely would have found Sonic's hideout by now. Knothole, I think it was called.)
"Any other criticism you would care to share, Snively?"
He thought about it.
"Run over by a Motobug? Hardly the performance I'd expect out of a 'super' badnik."
He only made that comment after Iacomus was stowed away, I noted. So much for constructive criticism.
"I made an error in judgement, Snively. That is the purpose of these exercises, after all. To fix the gaps within my initial datasets and improve my capabilities through practical experience."
>V. Max Overdrive active: 0.5 seconds.
I went from standing to hovering in a fraction of a second, a red line of fire drawn from where Iacomus was chained to directly behind Snively's Egg-o-Matic. As fast as I spun it up, I cut the thrum of power out, and the world started moving again. Except, of course, for Snively, who went very, very still.
Another mistake I'd realized I'd been making, as I'd fought through the rest of the horde. I'd been too conservative with my more dangerous abilities. Overcorrected in trying to save power. V. Max Overdrive's cooldown was bad, but in short bursts, I could reduce its backlash to 'merely' putting me in low power mode for a few seconds. And even in low power mode, I was more than capable of rendering a typical living being into chunky salsa.
Something Snively was more than aware of, as my claws closed around his shoulder.
"I test my capabilities. When I make a mistake, I fix it. I'm sure you're familiar, Snively. You've made your fair share of mistakes."
Snively remained as stiff as a board, having moved past the threshold of fear in which you become a flailing mess of screaming limbs. He simply remained where he was, because there was nowhere he could escape from me, regardless of whether or not I was holding him in place.
"…Yes, Metal Sonic. I certainly have."
I sighed, feeling Snively's shiver at the sound.
"Please do not take allowances for weaknesses. I'd prefer not to conclude that offering you respect is another… mistake to correct."
(I wouldn't be able to trust him. That was obvious since the first day. But if I leave him alive, he'll distract and sabotage Robotnik to get ahead. Maybe even kill him.)
(Especially now that he had an off-the-books Badnik Horde of his own.)
"I will have that mistake of mine corrected," Snively quavered. "Post haste."
"Thank you, Snively." I said, then nodded. "If you need me, you'll know where to find me."
With that, I released him, soaring up towards the airship.
(I needed to make sure 2424 wasn't dead yet. I was going to need her for my next steps.)
= = =
I stared at the wall, and it stared back just as blankly. A wire ran between me and Storage Room 17-C's primary ethernet slot. I could feel what should have been a torrent was instead a drip-feed of bytes, trickling in fits and starts from the networking cable into my wrist. In my UI, a schematic of Ffuzzy-Logik's trident very, very slowly loaded.
I'd wanted to look into the so-called Henchbot's history in more detail, but something was apparently throttling the ship's data access, using up the lion's share of the allotted bandwidth. It took another minute of waiting to get the answer as to what. Apparently, whatever method Snively was using to process my battle data involved monopolizing the Flying Battery's Eggnet thoroughfare.
If this was Snively's way of getting back at me, at least he was getting more subtle.
In either case, I wouldn't have good Eggnet access down here for hours. Clicking my non-existent tongue, I unplugged myself for the time being and turned around to survey the other reason I'd come down here.
Looking across the room, I gazed upon (boggled at, more like) the secret trick that 24 had figured out to pacify Iacomus. In between the modified Motobug's articulated mandibles were nearly a dozen cigarettes, arranged vertically. Apparently 24 didn't care for the things, and had a pack or two to spare. Possibly enough tobacco to ward off any more incidents from the hot-tempered scrapnik.
Also apparent, Ffuzzy-Logik had hooked his mount on some terrible habits.
"Twenty-four," I called out, drawing the Egg Robo's attention away from scritching a blitzed out Iacomus' thorax.
"Hmm?" 24 mumbled absentmindedly. In her other hand was a wire brush. "Yes, sir?"
"How would you like to be his permanent keeper?"
"I'd be honored, sir! I promise to keep your faithful steed at full efficiency!"
I tilted my head at the response. I'd miscommunicated.
"You misunderstand." I stepped closer, examining 2424 closely. "I am not assigning you to keeping Iacomus operational. I am assigning him to you."
The brush slipped out of 24's hands from shock.
According to the Flying Battery's records (and the idle chatter of the other Egg Robos), Egg Robo 2424 had a reputation. A lower-efficiency model, a klutz who constantly made mistakes, but never enough to actually be recycled. Someone who was eager to please, which many other mid and low ranked crew took advantage of to foist various extra tasks on her. I suspected that aspect of her only contributed to her poor record of service.
She took a moment to recollect the brush, and started using it to scrub the rust patches off Iaconus' antennae-handlebars.
"Sir! I have never been assigned a mission of… such importance! In all of my operational time! But I will try—! No, I will succeed in this task because you have assigned it to me!"
I leaned closer, meeting 24 eye-to-eye.
"Good. Iacomus, your assignment from this point forward is to protect and aid my new assistant."
Iacomus puffed in approval. He didn't object, if only because making any disapproving expressions would cause the Motobug to drop his smokes.
"Now, some ground rules, Egg Robo 2424. There will be times where you will be working without my presence to rely on. Keep a low profile regarding your new role. Do not abuse my authority without my explicit permission. Keep yourself alive. Keep my secrets. Can you do that?"
For once, 24 didn't answer right away. The Egg Robo carefully picked over and analyzed my words. Taking in their full weight before she responded.
"I understand, Sir! I won't let you down."
"Excellent." I reached out and carefully brushed an errant bit of cigarette ash from 24's collar. With my other hand, I pressed the broken handle of Ffuzzy-Logik's weapon into her grasp. "Here's your signing bonus. Repair it, and it's yours."
24 accepted the busted trident with care, as though she was worried that she might somehow make it more broken than what I'd already done to it.
"I will analyze the schematics and make it good as new!"
Without a mouth, I couldn't smile, but the spirit held.
"I look forward to working with you."
The Egg Robo nodded enthusiastically. Frantically, even.
Assistant acquired.
(That was step one.)
In truth, I'd been profiling Egg Robos ever since that first meeting with 24 after Leung West. After getting the lay of the land, I'd settled on my first pick shortly before landing.
First, 'klutz' or not, she'd demonstrated creativity and out-of-the-box thinking in handling Iacomus. Even if she was deemed 'dumb' by Egg Robo standards (I had suspicions in that regard), she was far more technically capable than any other badnik I've seen Robotnik permit.
Second, she responded well to positive reinforcement, which would go well with keeping her on board in the long term. That she had few friends, and therefore attachments, in the fleet was a convenient bonus.
Third, most importantly, she had absolutely no ambition as far as I've been able to tell. As long as I secured her loyalty, everything I'd been able to piece together of her said she'd be extremely unlikely to betray me.
(Also, I've decided that if this was all part of Snively's plan to trap and betray me, I guess I'd just die. Because I was sick and tired of not having anyone to talk to.)
Incidentally: Snively, if you were listening?
I won't be dying alone.
(It was a gamble to do this. Snively aside, I knew Robotnik could tease this apart from my systems if he hooked me back up to his machine and downloaded my memories. But, I had an idea of how the man thought. He wouldn't bother with checking if everything seemed in order, if the tests went well and I exceeded expectations as expected. As long as things looked under control, he'd glance over the battle data Snively sent him, and put his attention to more interesting things.)
In the meantime, however, I still had information I needed. Reluctantly, I turned back towards the terminal and plugged back in. A quick investigation confirmed that whatever system Snively was using to process my battle data was still throttling the bandwidth.
To my surprise, however, there was something else waiting for me through the connection.
>You have 1 new invite!
What was this about?
>You've been invited by Sir Ffuzzy-Logik [TERMINATED] to an Eggnet Relay Chat (ERC) Chat Room! Press [Y] to accept the invitation, and [N] to reject.
>>Super Badnik Group Chat
Well.
There was only one answer I could give to that.
= = =
Weredrago2: Iacomus wasn't supposed to be a character. He just kinda forced himself into staying in the story and I wasn't powerful enough to stop him. His name is a Late Latin form of James, which has the diminutive of Jimmy. He's only two steps removed from Jimmy the Motobug!
The cigarettes were also meant as a one-and-done nod to the Sonic Sez segment about smoking, but then I realized they were the only thing that'd make Iacomus calm down. Presumably, that was how Ffuzzy-Logik kept his steed from knocking him off without attaching magnets to his saddle.
Argidoll: I do get a little concerned with the question of 'SI competence' when writing this. I think in most cases, and Dead Metal's no exception, an SI will generally be handed a lot of pieces in order to compensate from otherwise being pushed off the top rope into the story. In this case, biggest thing that being Metal Sonic helps a lot with is just thinking faster, full stop. More processing than a human helps, so the SI is more precise, more consistent with their word choice than I would be. Because while this is a version of me, it's also a version of Metal Sonic, and even if the thought process is the same, the dialogue outcomes are a bit more polished than what I'd be able to say aloud. Then again, characters in stories just don't talk like real people full up. You don't realize how much stuttering and word corrections and miscorrections people make in dialogue until you lay it all out.
All this to say, kabedoning 2424 was a bit more of a desperation play than the SI would admit to themselves. The hostile environment, the need to keep yourself treading water by power plays and paranoia getting to them definitely factored into throwing all of this stuff at the first person they decided could possibly be trusted. Sometimes it's a matter of faith. We'll see if it pays off.
This chapter has been brought to you by Argidoll & weredrago2! For previews, updates, and miscellaneous ramblings, check out the W2 Workshop Zone Discord server.
>Please wait while we verify your ERC account.
>>Estimated time… 3 hours.
God damn it.
…
Why?
>Searching Eggnet for: [Reason for Eggnet verification process]…
>Answer: \\ Freedom Fighters have been detected using decommissioned and unused serial numbers to monitor Eggnet activities. Due to this, all new ERC account logins must be verified before viewing privilege can be accessed. \\
That didn't line up with my previous searches. From what I'd seen, the Freedom Fighter movements were by and large pre-industrial in capability. I made a query for elaboration, counting the seconds while the results loaded.
>Searching Eggnet for: [Freedom Fighter Eggnet hacking capabilities]…
>Answer: \\ The Knothole Freedom Fighters possess a supercomputer of unknown origin, designated NICOLE. The NICOLE device can interface with technology and bypass Eggnet ICE walls, which represents a significant threat to digital security. \\
I see. I made a mental note to look into this later, when my network access was less throttled.
Unplugging myself from the mainframe, I went down my mental checklist of things I could do, only to find the vast majority of them to have been reliant on an internet connection. Looking into the Freedom Fighters, taking a glance at Robotnik's planned movements to try to guess where he'd deploy me, trying to learn more about other Super Badniks, none of them were particularly appealing at the moment.
I could always brood, I supposed. I'd been getting a lot of practice in.
I looked over at 24, who was in the midst of assembling some sort of machine shop out of a pile of crates stacked to the storeroom's ceiling. At Iacomus, basking in the cloud of cigarette smoke he'd surrounded himself with.
…Maybe I'll go for a walk.
= = =
The interior of the Flying Battery was ruthlessly stark and clean metal in all directions. Orange floors, and purple walls. Gaps in the corrugated metal revealed narrow pipe mazes that connected the gas and power needed to keep the ship functional. There were many windows and portholes to the outside, some of which were wide open and large enough to walk through without doors. Large emplacements spurted fire into the air for seemingly no reason. Most of the free space in the ship had been given away to large, egg-shaped storage capsules with large release buttons atop them.
I paused as a pack of mouse-shaped badniks squeaked across the hall, burrowing into a set of tunnels on the other side of the catwalk. Computer mice, that is.
(It's a fantastical life I lead, now. Worth appreciating that. )
I meandered through the airship with no destination in mind, taking the time to appreciate its construction. That, and put my own eyes on places listed in the schematics. Just in case. Most of the seemingly random weapon emplacements were fairly harmless to me, though I could see the way in which it'd become a death trap if I were actually to fight for my life here.
(Did Robotnik build every single one of his airships this way under the presumption that Sonic might find his way inside?)
(Probably.)
There was a rhythm to it all, even with the chaotic liminality of the place's construction. The banging of pistons, the hiss of steam and fuel flowing within the pipes, the ever present echoes of robotic footsteps elsewhere. It was an experience.
(There's still something worth seeing, even in a place like this. Though I imagine if I were still alive, I'd be half deaf by now. Give and take.)
Looking through a window into another hangar, I could see the factory floor where the Egg Robos and can-shaped Tech-Bots were re-refurbishing the Scrapniks from the prior day's battle. Peering through, I could actually make out individual enemies I'd taken out. There was one of the Newtrons that had chased me through the office complex, a certain SWATbot commander angrily re-etching tally marks on a new chest plate with his wrist blaster, even that Roller whose AI core I'd taken, being thrown around by a pair of Ball Hogs.
24 had done quick work in extracting the information it had before I'd returned it. I'm sure I'd find a use for an in-depth map of Casino Night's tunnel complexes at some point.
Any further musings were suddenly cut off by an unexpected sound, not because I recognized it, but because I wasn't supposed to.
"When I think about the day, that you will come back to stay~"
Music. Garbled and interrupted by static, a distant echo amidst the industrial beat, but music nonetheless.
"Am I onl- *scritz* -ming?~"
The music sputtered out in a hazy burst of garbled noise.
Well, it wasn't as if I had anything better to do at the moment. Pulling up a sensor module, I isolated the rough direction of the song and followed the lead. Turning the corner, I saw a lone Egg Robo hunched over what looked like an old car stereo. Large dials on both ends were labelled for volume and selecting the frequency.
"Ah, shazbot! Almost got it working that time!"
The radio was, I knew, anomalous. A live broadcast was explicitly the kind of thing Robotnik should would have gone after, given his position on other people's happiness (to put it more politely than he did). Some form of rebel radio?
"What is that?" I intoned, looking over the Egg Robo's shoulder.
The Egg Robo snapped up from his seat in a startle, and I straightened up to dodge contact. He had been using a half-constructed capsule as a bench, and banged his head against the top of the storage unit with the propulsion from his jetpack.
In the corner, I spotted a lone Technosqueek doing its closest impression of a giggle. The Egg Robo made sure to blast it to bits before addressing me.
"Metal Sonic sir!" he said, after setting his head back on properly. "I've been assigned to repair this exotic broadcast receiver module for Lord Snively's Egg-O-Matic."
"I can see that. Where is it receiving from?"
"I was informed that it's Class 2 clearance. Since you're Class 2, I was also informed to pretend I didn't know what you were talking about when the question came up, sir."
"I see."
"Uhm. Usually I'd toss this kinda thing to Unit 2424, but…" he paused, and his eyes met mine with a pronounced wariness. "I ah, should be able to figure this out by myself."
Indications that my new assistant was bullied more than recorded were definitely firing.
"Then by all means. Finish up."
"…Okay? Sir."
I impassively watched the Egg Robo work on the radio for the next several minutes, noting the way they glanced up at me every now and again to make sure I hadn't moved since they last checked. It was a relatively simple device, not so far beyond my knowledge as the rest of Robotnik's technology. If I practiced taking a radio apart, I could eventually put one back together again and it'd work. Doing the same thing with a robot would just be a drawn-out version of killing them. Though this wasn't something I could look up like the cryptic blueprints of a badnik.
Couldn't I?
>Radio.zip download complete.
Never mind, then. I was aware that the Eggnet contained repositories for all sorts of things, the vast majority of which were far beyond my understanding, but basic objects too? Surprising. Maybe a relic from the original 'Overland' repositories that Robotnik built off of?
>Category: Sub-Boss Fortress Construction Starter Kits
>Class 4 Authorization required for access.
I guess that made sense too.
(I'd need to make sure to have these all downloaded somewhere when the time came. Could be a useful chip to toss the Freedom Fighters' way.)
A Technosqueek zipped past my leg, a vacuum tube-esque widget balanced on its back up until the moment the Egg Robo snatched it from them.
"There we go!"
The mouse badnik beeped angrily at the Egg Robo as the larger machine shooed them away. Several seconds after installing the new part, the radio came back to life.
"Why don't you come back to me~
And together we can be~
Am I only dreaming?"
(The song wasn't exactly to my taste, but it wasn't bad for what it was.)
"I take it that you're to deliver this to Snively directly?"
The Egg Robo stood up, making sure to avoid hitting his head this time.
"Affirmative. Lord Snively insisted that I not be deterred in this objective at any costs."
Uhuh. I reached out a hand.
"Give it to me."
"Yes sir."
He handed it over without protest.
"I'll take this to Snively myself. Consider your task completed."
I clutched the device in one hand, waiting a moment to see if the Egg Robo had anything else to say.
The Egg Robo saluted me. Behind him, I could see dozens of googly eyes amassing in the darkness. I said nothing.
"Yes—!" The Technosqueeks pounced upon the Egg Robo as a solid mass, dragging him away. "HE—!"
It sounded like he was going to call for help, but one of the rodents squeezed between the gaps in his plating and pulled out his voice box. Already, I could see he was being used to make up the parts deficit from what he stole. With interest.
Well, they couldn't all be 2424. Checking my UI's map of the airship, I noted that Snively was currently on the bridge.
"Leave the AI core intact," I called out to the horde-in-miniature as I turned to go. "You'll be able to take him apart again later, that way."
The Technosqueeks chittered back to me in Morse code.
squeak<
Negotiations went easier when everyone got what they wanted.
= = =
I silently hovered onto the bridge, watching how the Egg Robos silently coordinated with each other over short-range signals.
Snively was at what appeared to be a new command chair. Rather than a normal chair, it was his personal Egg-O-Matic installed into the center of the bridge. I supposed it was the best place for him to be sitting in case anything went catastrophically wrong with the airship. It explained why the corridors were so wide.
"Lord Snively, Unit 86 has been taken offline," one of the Egg Robos informed him.
Snively let out an irritated sigh.
"How incompetent can—? Fine. Send someone to retrieve my radio module, and I'll fix it myself."
That seemed like as good a place to interject as any.
"Here," I spoke at last, placing the repaired radio on the dashboard of his Egg-O-Matic.
Snively accepted the device, and began installing the module onto his hovercraft.
"Finally, one of you is capable of…" he started, then turned to face me. The component nearly slipped from his hand, but it didn't go flying. A more restrained reaction from before. "Oh, Metal Sonic. Did you need assistance with anything?"
"You seem to be in a good mood," I noted.
"Robotnik sent a high-priority update from Robotropolis while we were preparing for takeoff."
He flipped a switch on his Egg-O-Matic, changing the bridge's display to a stream of red text and images. Damaged buildings and industrial facilities. Stacks on stacks of badniks, piled high.
"Some kind of attack?" I ventured, gazing over the readouts.
"Somebody stole all the Power Gems in Warehouse 1," Snively sneered cheerily. "Followed by Warehouse 2, 3, and 4. Out of 4."
(He was positively British with how chuffed he was.)
It was a real turnaround, considering I'd threatened to kill him less than an hour ago.
"A catastrophic loss, certainly, but one that Robotnik would be hard-pressed to blame us for. He wouldn't trust me with the knowledge of where he was storing all of those Power Gems, and besides, we have an airtight alibi. Recorded and timestamped!"
Snively switched tabs to a video file (which judging by the way it was loaded midway he'd apparently been playing on loop) of Robotnik nearly tearing his mustache out in abject rage.
"THEY TOOK THEM, SNIVELY! THEY TOOK THEM ALL!"
Snively laughed.
"THEY EVEN TOOK MY REPAIR ROBOTS! WHO AM I GOING TO SEND TO FIX ALL OF THIS? WHO IS GOING TO SAY 'PING' WHEN I COMMAND THEM TO? WHO, SNIVELY!? WHO?!"
He paused the video and minimized it.
"While he's out of sorts at the moment, my uncle will inevitably move on to taking out his frustrations on the nearest targets. Valid or otherwise. Thankfully, I've spotted a potential problem that we can eliminate that will keep him satisfied, should it come to it."
"I see," I said, inclining my head as I acknowledged the sentiment.
(Wouldn't want to be swept away by a tantrum, after all.)
"As for why I came here, I happened upon Egg Robo 86 repairing your radio in the Flying Battery's bowels. He was eaten by Technosqueeks, incidentally."
"The blasted things are rather ravenous, aren't they?" Snively commented. "I used to wonder why Robotnik kept them on the ships until I had to deal with them myself."
I nodded impassively before continuing.
"The curious thing is what was playing upon it. I was under the impression that Robotnik had banned music from all Empire holdings. Several times."
At least four times shortly after having been trounced by Sonic, twice while obviously impaired by various substances, and one time just because he was bored. The only surprise was that he only made one robot specifically themed on killing musicians.
I checked.
(It turned out that when you were supreme dictator, there was nobody who would stop you from embarrassing yourself in public announcements. You couldn't pay me to say some of the things Robotnik has put out for everyone to hear against their will.)
Snively puffed up a little straighter, clearly aware of the implicit accusation. That he had the radio at all was incriminating. That he had it custom made? With Robotnik in a mood?
"Yes, of course, but my position as Robotnik's second has allowed me some leeway in the interpretation of his edicts."
"Whether in your taste in culture or the personal army you've been cultivating," I began with a shrug. "It has nothing to do with me, of course, it is not my place to police your actions. My assigned role here is to improve and prepare. I am simply curious as to where that broadcast is coming from. I was under the impression that most mobian civilisations lacked the technological base to do such a thing."
"At this point, it's certainly within the means of one hairball or another to cobble together a clandestine tower and start broadcasting. The REBL station that blasts propaganda for the Freedom Fighters keeps being shut down and changing locations on a weekly basis. When they are broadcasting, they mostly play country music."
He referred to country music as one might leprosy. On the one hand, fair enough.
(On the other hand, back on Earth there was a whole complicated thing with the corporatism of music and the ease at which the genre sold out to things that I don't think are relevant to my current situation anymore. It's not like I knew or listened to the genre anyways.)
"So it isn't coming from them," I observed.
"Precisely. I had to broaden my selection to bipeds with actual taste in the United Federation."
"No, you wouldn't be." Snively seemed rather pleased at the reminder that I was, for all intents and purposes, built yesterday.
"The UF are a handful of underground city-states that were allied with the Overland for years, but they were too skittish to publicly expose themselves to the mobian states. Each one could be taken over in a weekend if they were isolated, which is why they're arranged into a defensive bloc that my uncle has deemed more trouble than it's worth to invade without provocation. So long as they keep their heads in the sand, retaining a minimal presence on the surface, Robotnik is content to let them think we've forgotten about them entirely."
Seems I got him monologuing. I made note that the man liked to lecture for later.
"I would have thought the Doctor, given his inclinations, would have simply built a superweapon to annihilate any ability to counterattack."
Snively turned, giving another knowing smile.
"Who said he wouldn't? Why, he might be working on it as we speak."
The widescreen on the bridge changed again, displaying an ominous message.
>PRIORITY TRANSMISSION FROM:
>>DOCTOR IVO ROBOTNIK
Snively let out a squawk of alarm.
>>AUTO-ANSWERING IN 3 SECONDS…
Snively shoved the incriminating evidence on his dashboard into the glove compartment and fumbled around for his car phone handset.
And that was my cue to go. "Good luck with your work, Snively."
➜ Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator] has been added to the chat.
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: New metal for the smelter.
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: What in fabrication?
|| BEAD_WORM [Former Overland]: BEAD WORM.
|| ℌ𝔦𝔤𝔥 𝔖𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔣𝔣 [𝔎𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔡𝔬𝔪 𝔬𝔣 𝔐𝔢𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔞]: Zut alors! We have an intruder!
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: Hello.
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: Flair checks out, mates. Looks like another Super Badnik made it here.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: I was invited by Ffuzzy-Logik.
|| ℌ𝔦𝔤𝔥 𝔖𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔣𝔣 [𝔎𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔡𝔬𝔪 𝔬𝔣 𝔐𝔢𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔞]: Who?
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: One of the henchbots, from before Robotnik put any of ya new-timers online.
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: How's the ol' crusader shapin' up these days?
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: Dead.
|| BEAD_WORM [Former Overland]:
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: Well, that saves me the trouble of lookin' up his number in the robodex.
|| ℌ𝔦𝔤𝔥 𝔖𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔣𝔣 [𝔎𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔡𝔬𝔪 𝔬𝔣 𝔐𝔢𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔞]: Zen I suppose you are one of Robotnik's newest creations? A robotic Sonic?
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: See, this is why Robotnik put this bloke in charge of Eurish operations. Mind like a steel trap.
|| ℌ𝔦𝔤𝔥 𝔖𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔣𝔣 [𝔎𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔡𝔬𝔪 𝔬𝔣 𝔐𝔢𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔞]: Silence, you chainmail handbag! News of zis magnitude ees often all too slow to reach ze Mercian coast.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: I am.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: I believe Robotnik intends to keep me under wraps until my deployment.
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: Sounds like him. Nobody's heard a peep out of your account in months. I reckon the Doc gave you a new upgrade or two to get even with that freedom-loving dipstick?
///
I tabbed out of the Super Badnik chat room to browse the message history of my predecessor, Metal Sonic 1.0.
It should have been eerie, looking at the words left behind by the person who used to inhabit this frame. The only posts he made were localized in a topic thread in the badniks subforum about his unveiling, which contained snippets of his (my) specifications and self-absorbed statements of his superiority. Complete with selfies attached.
(Why did he have a mouth?)
The last post 1.0 left, mere hours before his deployment against Sonic the Hedgehog in a race to the death, was a guarantee that he'd post the highlight reel after he beat Sonic at his own game.
That was months ago.
…
The next step was obvious.
>Super Badnik Authorization: MODbots, delete all public messages by my account.
Affirmative. Deploying MODbot sweep. Full message elimination.<
///
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: The last Metal Sonic crashed and burned. I have no recollection.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: My official designation is Metal Sonic 2.0.
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: In that case, allow me to be the first one to welcome ya onto the Super Badnik Group Chat. (Formerly known as the Henchbot Group Chat.) A private saloon to communicate with our fellow troopers of Robotnik's make.
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: Octobot's offline. The 4Fs sliced his fiber-optic cable, and he ain't gonna be responding to messages much until those bludgers Robotnik calls mechanics get back to work!
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: There should be more Super Badniks than this.
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: Oh, there's plenty. You've got yer Fire Breaths, yer Tart Turtles, yer Red Eyes. Bots like that're hard at work, takin' on hard targets for the Empire. It's just that not all of 'em are as sophisticated as we are.
|| BEAD_WORM [Former Overland]: BEAD WORM.
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: If you aren't smart enough to have found your way here sooner or later, you're not gettin' an invite.
|| ℌ𝔦𝔤𝔥 𝔖𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔣𝔣 [𝔎𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔡𝔬𝔪 𝔬𝔣 𝔐𝔢𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔞]: It appears zat ze Ffuzzy knight considered you worthy of receiving an invitation before his demise.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: Apparently. He gave me his stuff before he exploded. I assume this was part of it.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: Thank you. Is there anything I should know before it blows up in my face in the field? Advice for a relative newcomer?
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: If ya even think Priority One is out there, in the field, then he's already right behind ya. Probably wearing a costume or somethin', so keep your guard up.
|| ℌ𝔦𝔤𝔥 𝔖𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔣𝔣 [𝔎𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔡𝔬𝔪 𝔬𝔣 𝔐𝔢𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔞]: Was zat how ze great Davy Sprocket was defeated? With one of ze many silly disguises Sonic ees known for?
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: No, don't be ridiculous.
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: He pulled me n' Arms along a jump rope through a mile of trees, a lake, n' then a mountain. Got our Purple Pump medals after they put us back together.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: Our?
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: Me n' Arms go way back, from before the Bean Wars!
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: No no, none of that!
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: Don't get the old battle brumby started about the Beans again!
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: If you want advice on being a proper Sub-Boss, I'll keep it real simple. Robotnik sets us up to do two things. Keep the resources flowing back to Robotropolis, and don't take any guff from any freedom fighters. It's so simple, even Bead Worm can do it.
|| BEAD_WORM [Former Overland]: BEAD WORM.
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: See what I mean? We ain't heard a peep from the Overland since the Doc put him in charge of the place.
|| ℌ𝔦𝔤𝔥 𝔖𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔣𝔣 [𝔎𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔡𝔬𝔪 𝔬𝔣 𝔐𝔢𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔞]: What ees your new assignment? Are you replacing ze organic warlord in ze Dragon Kingdom?
|| ℌ𝔦𝔤𝔥 𝔖𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔣𝔣 [𝔎𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔡𝔬𝔪 𝔬𝔣 𝔐𝔢𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔞]: I have overheard ze murmurings of ambitions Robotnik has for claiming ze fairy land in ze sky. Shall you be serving as a new Sub-Boss for ze Floating Island?
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: Maybe Robotnik's finally getting around to replacing you or Sprocket.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: Currently classified.
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: Flying Battery, auxiliary model, serial designation 2151513. Class 2 authorization, which means it's being loaned out to Dr. R's toady.
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: Last docked location was Casino Night, and they're currently flying over the Central Sea.
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: Casino Night? That dump?
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: Impressive.
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: Dump? It's the only place in Northamer where I could get a good game of Faro going!
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: You ever try to play cards with a robian?
|| ℌ𝔦𝔤𝔥 𝔖𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔣𝔣 [𝔎𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔡𝔬𝔪 𝔬𝔣 𝔐𝔢𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔞]: No.
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: They're mindless husks! Can't teach 'em how to play for squat, and they don't even cheat right!
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: Then I'll apologize in advance for the damage to the city.
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: Hey, if the Boss needed ya to do some damage, it is what it is.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: Technically the destruction was Ffuzzy-Logik's fault.
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: You at liberty to tell us about your assignment, or is that a classified matter too?
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: If Crocbot doxxed the Battery there isn't much point to hiding it.
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: Doxxed?
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: To expose otherwise private information using a computer platform. Presumably you traced the connection between the Flying Battery and the wider Eggnet.
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: Got it in one, mate.
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: And I like that word.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: Snively's reaction to that one will be interesting.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: In either case, just testing right now.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: Badnik Horde combat.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: Snively 'always wanted to see how Sonic might fare against an entire badnik horde at once'.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: His words.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: My expected objective is Priority One.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: Presumably other high value targets in direct support of Dr. Robotnik's schemes.
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: Suppose it would make your title there make more sense, now that I compute about it.
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: It was one of the more popular ones used by the Classics and other not-so-bright types until the MODbots started cracking down on it.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: I didn't pick it.
|| Octobot [Mobian Sea]: Did someone say Tails?
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: No. Looks like the Mechanix finally got down there to fix your Eggnet node.
|| Octobot [Mobian Sea]: Those nincombots? Hardly! I had to jury-rig a comms tower out of a bunch of Jaws, Octus, Jawz, and a comms tower that fell in the ocean!
|| Octobot [Mobian Sea]: Do you know how rare it is for someone to dump those in the water?
|| Octobot [Mobian Sea]: PRETTY RARE!
///
>Query: World Map
>Loading file…
>Image loaded.
///
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: There's one Sub-Boss for the entire ocean?
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: Also, you've met Tails the fox?
|| Octobot [Mobian Sea]: It's the largest territory ceded to any of his Sub-Bosses. That makes me a big deal! Spreading Robotnik's reach across the oceans ain't easy, but somebody's gotta do it!
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: Somebody's gotta do it BADLY, more like.
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: Still can't believe you got yourself behind schedule because of Tails!
|| Octobot [Mobian Sea]: We've been over this!
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: Yeah, we have!
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: Hey, new guy! Get this!
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: Octobot got trounced by a teeny-bopper in a junior submarine!
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: I see.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: Alone?
|| Octobot [Mobian Sea]: Yes, but it was a SUPER submarine!
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: No backup?
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: Could've swore ya mentioned his legion of fishy friends the last time you told this story.
|| Octobot [Mobian Sea]: No, no! The Forty Fathom Freedom Fighters are separate!
|| Octobot [Mobian Sea]: It's not my fault you can't remember all the organics I gotta deal with out in the Great Mobocean!
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: My mistake. Everything else doin' well down where it's wetter?
|| Octobot [Mobian Sea]: Oh, sure! I'd love to give you a tour of the sea floor, but if an old henchbot like you so much as walked out in the rain, you'd be a goner.
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: Another perk of the gig. Don't have to worry about rain or rust out here, and the Oil Ocean's a short drive away.
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: Awfully convenient for you that no one can visit for an inspection, ain't it, Octobot? Must be nice.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: What capabilities did Tail display? Beyond piloting a submarine as a child.
|| Octobot [Mobian Sea]: Who the heck is this guy?
|| Octobot [Mobian Sea]: Pseudo Sonic 2.0?
|| BEAD_WORM [Former Overland]: BEAD WORM.
|| ℌ𝔦𝔤𝔥 𝔖𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔣𝔣 [𝔎𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔡𝔬𝔪 𝔬𝔣 𝔐𝔢𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔞]: Bead Worm, we have been over zis.
|| ℌ𝔦𝔤𝔥 𝔖𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔣𝔣 [𝔎𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔡𝔬𝔪 𝔬𝔣 𝔐𝔢𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔞]: YOU are Bead Worm. No one else here ees Bead Worm.
|| BEAD_WORM [Former Overland]: 【¡_⌒_¡】
|| BEAD_WORM [Former Overland]: 【⦿vv⦿】
|| Crocbot [Downunda]: Read the message log, Octodunce.
|| BEAD_WORM [Former Overland]: <【_⧲_】
|| BEAD_WORM [Former Overland]: 【_⧲_】>
|| Octobot [Mobian Sea]: Who are you calling Octodunce, Crocdufus?
|| BEAD_WORM [Former Overland]: <【_⧲_】
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: Does this happen often?
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: No, that'd be unbearable.
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: It's only when they're online.
|| ℌ𝔦𝔤𝔥 𝔖𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔣𝔣 [𝔎𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔡𝔬𝔪 𝔬𝔣 𝔐𝔢𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔞]: Enough of zis! Take your duel to DMs.
|| ℌ𝔦𝔤𝔥 𝔖𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔣𝔣 [𝔎𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔡𝔬𝔪 𝔬𝔣 𝔐𝔢𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔞]: Our newest member asked for advice on how to perform zeir tasks. As a Sub-Boss of some repute, I am capable of delivering.
|| ℌ𝔦𝔤𝔥 𝔖𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔣𝔣 [𝔎𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔡𝔬𝔪 𝔬𝔣 𝔐𝔢𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔞]: When you are een combat, you will not be fighting with ze forces or ze abilities you will WANT to have. You will have what ees at your disposal. No more, no less. Ze same truth has followed for every general throughout history.
|| ℌ𝔦𝔤𝔥 𝔖𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔣𝔣 [𝔎𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔡𝔬𝔪 𝔬𝔣 𝔐𝔢𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔞]: Master ze fundamentals of warfare, as well as how far you can take ze resources remanded to you as a Super Badnik, and you shall find much more falling into your reach zan eet once did.
|| ℌ𝔦𝔤𝔥 𝔖𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔣𝔣 [𝔎𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔡𝔬𝔪 𝔬𝔣 𝔐𝔢𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔞]: Also, target ze loved ones of your enemies while zey still have zem to lose. Ze damage to morale CANNOT be understated.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: I'll keep that in mind.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: Thank you.
|| ℌ𝔦𝔤𝔥 𝔖𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔣𝔣 [𝔎𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔡𝔬𝔪 𝔬𝔣 𝔐𝔢𝔯𝔠𝔦𝔞]: I must be off now. Ze robians have reported Rob o' ze Hedge freeing captured villagers en-route to Snottingham, and zis shall not stand!
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: Fair enough. I've been getting a bit behind on my roboticizing quota myself.
|| Davy Sprocket [Great Desert]: Good hunting, 'bots. I'll catch y'all next time.
|| Metal Sonic [Hedgehog Exterminator]: Indeed.
|| BEAD_WORM [Former Overland]:
= = =
\\End Chapter Sequence\\
Argidoll: Bead Worm was conceptualized and ideated in the span of 10 seconds and immediately became integral to the story.
Weredrago2: He's very important. As was that one Egg Robo being eaten by Technosqueeks, because it just goes to show how much more comedy was going into this fic than I was expecting.
This chapter has been brought to you by Argidoll & weredrago2! For previews, updates, and miscellaneous ramblings, check out the W2 Workshop Zone Discord server.
![Dead Metal [Archie Sonic Friend Insert]](/data/threadmark-index-icons/l/80/80162.jpg?1735012894){kind=icon}
