The moment lasted exactly four seconds.
Four perfect, crystalline seconds of Marcus Webb and Sonic the Hedgehog floating in the sky above Angel Island, fists bumped, auras blazing, sharing a genuine moment of connection that transcended edginess and rivalry and the fundamental absurdity of Marcus's entire existence.
Then the Death Egg exploded again.
Not the same explosion as before. The wreckage of the station, which had been settling into a comfortably dead pile of scrap metal, suddenly detonated from within — a directed blast, shaped and focused, blowing outward from the core in a column of fire and debris that punched through the rubble like a fist through wet cardboard.
And from the column of fire, rising on emergency thrusters that screamed with the effort of keeping something very large and very heavy airborne, came Robotnik.
Not in the Giant Eggman Robo. That was still buried in the wreckage. No, Robotnik had apparently had a backup plan inside his backup plan — a smaller, sleeker escape vehicle that looked like a cross between his classic Egg Mobile and something designed by a military contractor with a grudge against aesthetics. It was angular, armored, bristling with weapons, and painted in Robotnik's signature red and yellow.
And clutched in its mechanical underbelly, held in a containment field that crackled with stolen energy, was the Master Emerald.
Marcus stared.
Sonic stared.
Knuckles, on the ground below, did not stare. Knuckles SCREAMED.
"THE MASTER EMERALD! HE HAS THE MASTER EMERALD! HOW DOES HE STILL HAVE THE MASTER EMERALD?!"
Marcus's brain raced. The mech. When the Giant Eggman Robo had toppled and the Master Emerald had "tumbled free," Knuckles had grabbed it. Marcus had seen him grab it. Knuckles had been holding it. They had run through the collapsing Death Egg with Knuckles clutching the Emerald to his chest.
But Knuckles was now standing on the ground, arms empty, staring at the ascending escape craft with the expression of someone who had just realized they'd been pickpocketed by a three-hundred-pound dictator in an egg-shaped hovercraft.
"An illusion," Super Infinite murmured, and the realization hit him like a punch to the gut.
The Phantom Ruby. During the collapse. The chaos. The confusion. Robotnik must have had a drone swap the real Emerald for a Phantom Ruby residual — one of the fake constructs that the Ruby left behind like energy afterimages. Knuckles grabbed the fake. Robotnik kept the real one.
The Phantom Ruby's own power was used against us.
MY power was used against us.
Because the Phantom Ruby leaves traces. Echoes. And Robotnik — genius, brilliant, evil Robotnik — figured out how to exploit those echoes in the middle of a collapsing space station while being defeated.
The man is infuriating.
"He used the Ruby's residual energy to create a decoy," Infinite said, his voice tight with a anger that was, for once, entirely genuine. "The Emerald Knuckles recovered was a phantom. A shadow of the real thing. Robotnik has been one step ahead since the moment we entered the Death Egg."
Knuckles' face went through a rapid series of expressions — confusion, realization, fury, more fury, peak fury, and finally a calm that was somehow more terrifying than the fury because it was the calm of someone who had made a very specific decision about how the next few minutes of their life were going to go.
"I'm going after him," Knuckles said.
It wasn't a request. It wasn't a suggestion. It was a statement of fact, delivered with the same certainty as "the sun rises in the east" or "water is wet."
Sonic — still in Hyper form, still shimmering with prismatic energy — floated down to Knuckles' level. "Knux, he's heading for SPACE. You can't just—"
"Watch me."
Knuckles' fists clenched. The air around him began to vibrate. Marcus could feel it — a resonance, deep and primal, the frequency of the Master Emerald itself echoing through its Guardian even at a distance. The connection between Knuckles and the Emerald wasn't physical. It was metaphysical. Spiritual. The kind of bond that didn't care about little inconveniences like "the Emerald is currently being stolen by a fat man in a rocket ship."
The Super Emeralds in Sonic's possession responded. Seven gems blazed simultaneously, their light pulsing in sync with the distant Master Emerald's energy, and three of them — the red, the cyan, and the green — detached from Sonic's orbit and drifted toward Knuckles.
"Hey—" Sonic started.
The Super Emeralds reached Knuckles and began to orbit him. The echidna closed his eyes. His fists unclenched. And then, with a flash of light so bright that Marcus's Super form eyes watered behind his mask, Knuckles transformed.
Hyper Knuckles.
His red fur shifted to a shimmering, pulsating pink that cycled through shades of rose and magenta. His dreadlocks rose, floating weightlessly around his head. His eyes, when they opened, were the pure, brilliant white of concentrated Chaos energy. An aura erupted around him — different from Sonic's rainbow shimmer or Infinite's crimson blaze, Knuckles' aura was a steady, thrumming pulse of power that felt less like energy and more like the heartbeat of the planet itself.
Hyper Knuckles rose off the ground.
He didn't fly the way Infinite flew — graceful and dramatic. He rose with the unstoppable, no-nonsense determination of a being who had decided that gravity was optional and wasn't interested in discussing it further.
"I'm getting my Emerald back," Hyper Knuckles said.
Marcus looked at Knuckles. Crimson aura met rose-pink aura. Two super forms, two sources of power, one shared objective.
"Then let's not keep the doctor waiting."
That was almost normal. Almost. "Let's not keep the doctor waiting" is a perfectly reasonable thing to say before chasing a villain into space. My mouth is being unusually cooperative. Maybe the Super form stabilizes my speech patterns. Maybe—
"After all... the sky is merely the floor of a higher battlefield, and we have been fighting on the ground for far too long."
Never mind.
Sonic — still Hyper, still shimmering — looked between the two of them. "You guys sure? Space is no joke. Even in super forms, the energy drain—"
"The hedgehog worries," Infinite observed, and the Dante energy crept back into his voice. "How unlike him."
Sonic's competitive grin returned. "Worried? Me? Nah. Just making sure you two know what you're getting into. Because if you mess this up, I'M gonna have to come save you, and I'll never let you live it down."
"Your concern is noted and dismissed."
"That's more like it." Sonic crossed his arms, his Hyper form flickering as two of his remaining Super Emeralds adjusted to the reduced set. "Go get that Emerald. I'll handle things down here — the island still needs stabilizing, and someone has to clean up the Badnik mess."
He looked at Knuckles. Something passed between them — an understanding, a trust, the kind of wordless communication that existed between two people who had fought side by side long enough that words were redundant.
"Bring it home, Knux."
Knuckles nodded.
Then he looked up.
Robotnik's escape craft was already a speck against the sky, climbing rapidly, its thrusters burning hot enough to leave a visible trail of exhaust against the blue. It was heading for orbit — for one of Robotnik's satellite bases, presumably, where the dictator could regroup, rebuild, and use the Master Emerald at his leisure.
Knuckles shot upward like a pink missile.
Marcus followed.
The ascent was unlike anything Marcus had ever experienced — in either life. The ground fell away beneath them with terrifying speed, Angel Island shrinking from a landscape to a shape to a dot in the space of seconds. The air thinned, grew cold, and then simply stopped being there at all, replaced by the vast, silent, infinite emptiness of space.
Marcus had never been to space.
The realization hit him as the last wisps of atmosphere fell away and the world became black and stars and the curved blue edge of Mobius below. He was in SPACE. He was in ACTUAL SPACE. He was a dead mozzarella stick victim in a jackal's body in a super form floating in the vacuum of space above a cartoon planet chasing a dictator who had stolen a magic rock.
If his life were a resume, this would be the part that made the interviewer put down the paper and stare at him.
The Phantom Ruby was keeping him alive. Its reality-warping field extended around his body in a skin-tight envelope, maintaining pressure and temperature and breathable atmosphere in a pocket of denied vacuum. It did this casually, automatically, the way a human body maintained heartbeat and breathing — essential background processes that didn't require conscious thought.
I'm in space. I'm actually in space. And the only reason I'm not dead is that my magic rock has decided that "vacuum of space" is a suggestion it doesn't have to follow. I am alive because the Phantom Ruby said "no" to the void of space itself.
That's the most on-brand thing the Ruby has ever done.
Ahead of them, Robotnik's escape craft was accelerating, its thrusters at maximum burn, the Master Emerald's stolen energy augmenting its speed. The craft was pulling away — Robotnik was fast, and fear was an excellent motivator for engineering performance.
Hyper Knuckles pulled ahead, his Guardian connection to the Master Emerald acting as a beacon, a compass, an unbreakable thread that pointed always toward the gem regardless of distance or speed. He flew with single-minded determination, his pink aura blazing against the backdrop of stars, leaving a trail of rose-colored light across the void.
Marcus kept pace. His crimson aura burned beside Knuckles' pink, two streaks of color cutting across the darkness of space like comets with an attitude problem.
And then the music started.
Marcus didn't understand it at first. Sound didn't travel in space — there was no medium for it, no air molecules to vibrate, no mechanism by which auditory information could reach his ears. And yet, somehow, he heard it.
Guitar.
A single, clean guitar note, ringing out across the void with impossible clarity.
Then another. And another. Building into a riff that Marcus recognized with the immediate, visceral certainty of someone hearing a song they loved.
"Find Your Flame" from Sonic Frontiers.
The song was PLAYING.
Not from any speaker. Not from any device. It was playing from the PHANTOM RUBY ITSELF, the gem in his chest vibrating at frequencies that generated audible sound waves within his reality-warped atmospheric envelope. The Ruby was providing a SOUNDTRACK.
Because of COURSE it was.
Because the Phantom Ruby was nothing if not theatrical, and a chase scene through space deserved music.
The guitar riff built. Drums kicked in — heavy, driving, the kind of beat that made your heart sync to its rhythm involuntarily. The bass dropped. And then the vocals:
"Find your flame — find your flame — going higher and higher and HIGHER—"
Marcus wanted to groan. He wanted to object. He wanted to tell the Phantom Ruby that providing background music for a space chase was not a normal thing for a magical gemstone to do and that no self-respecting interdimensional artifact should be functioning as a glorified MP3 player.
But the song was REALLY good.
And it fit PERFECTLY.
The driving beat matched their velocity. The soaring vocals matched the visual of two super-powered beings streaking across the stars. The lyrics — about pushing beyond limits, reaching higher, finding your inner fire — were so perfectly appropriate for the situation that Marcus suspected the Phantom Ruby had either planned this or was the most dramatically intelligent rock in the multiverse.
"Your gem is playing music," Knuckles observed, his voice carrying through the shared envelope of warped atmosphere that the Ruby maintained between them.
"I'm aware."
"Can you make it stop?"
Marcus considered this.
"No."
He actually could. Probably. The Phantom Ruby responded to his will, theoretically, and if he concentrated hard enough, he could probably convince it to stop providing a soundtrack. But deep down, in the part of himself that was slowly merging with Infinite's persona, in the part that had enjoyed saying "Jackpot" and "Now I'm motivated," in the part that was finding it increasingly difficult to tell where Marcus ended and the edge began...
He didn't want it to stop.
The music was awesome.
I'm losing myself to the cool. I'm becoming the edge. And I'm doing it to a Sonic Frontiers soundtrack in space. This is either my greatest moment or my last moment as Marcus Webb and I genuinely cannot tell which.
Robotnik's craft was ahead of them — closer now, the gap narrowing as Hyper Knuckles' connection to the Master Emerald pulled him forward with increasing urgency. The dictator's vessel was fast, but it was mechanical, bound by thrust-to-weight ratios and fuel consumption and all the mundane physical laws that Super and Hyper forms casually ignored.
They were gaining.
The music swelled.
"Find your flame — FIND YOUR FLAME—"
Robotnik noticed them. The craft's rear sensors detected two super-powered beings closing in at astronomical speed, and the doctor responded with his typical blend of panic and over-engineering.
Weapons deployed from the craft's hull — missile racks, laser turrets, mine dispensers, and several things that Marcus couldn't identify but which looked distinctly unfriendly. A barrage of fire erupted from the fleeing vessel, filling the space between them with a lethal constellation of projectiles, beams, and explosives.
Hyper Knuckles plowed through them.
He didn't dodge. He didn't weave. He flew in a straight line, and everything that hit him bounced off his aura like pebbles off a tank. Missiles detonated against his energy field and achieved nothing. Lasers bent around his form, unable to find purchase. Mines exploded prematurely, their proximity sensors overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of Chaos energy radiating from the echidna.
Marcus took a different approach.
The Phantom Ruby, still playing "Find Your Flame" at concert volume, extended his crimson aura forward in a wedge shape — a plow of warped reality that swept through the weapons fire like a snowplow through fresh powder. Missiles entered the aura and forgot they were missiles. Lasers entered the aura and forgot they were coherent. Mines entered the aura and forgot they existed.
Everything the Phantom Ruby touched, it denied. And in the denial, the weapons became nothing — not destroyed, not deflected, but simply REVOKED, their existence retroactively cancelled by a gem that had strong opinions about what should and shouldn't be real.
They punched through the barrage and closed on Robotnik's craft.
"STAY BACK!" Robotnik's voice crackled over a frequency that the craft was broadcasting in all directions — the panicked transmissions of a man who had stolen something very valuable and was discovering that the owners were very fast and very angry. "THE MASTER EMERALD IS MINE! I CLAIMED IT! FINDERS KEEPERS!"
"FINDERS KEEPERS?!" Knuckles roared, his Hyper form flickering with the intensity of his anger. "YOU STOLE IT FROM MY ISLAND! FROM MY FAMILY'S SACRED TRUST! THERE IS NO 'FINDERS KEEPERS' IN GUARDIAN LAW!"
"IS 'GUARDIAN LAW' EVEN A REAL THING?!"
"IT IS NOW!"
Marcus drew alongside the craft, matching its speed, his crimson aura casting red light across its hull. He could see the Master Emerald through the containment field on the vessel's underside — green and brilliant and pulsing with an energy that the Phantom Ruby responded to with harmonic yearning.
The two gems wanted to be near each other. Marcus could feel it — the Ruby's eagerness, its desire to interact with the Emerald, to establish a resonance between denial and order, between what was and what could be. It was like two magnets being held apart, straining toward each other with invisible force.
"Doctor," Super Infinite said, his voice carrying through the vacuum via the Phantom Ruby's atmospheric projection, "you have approximately thirty seconds to release the Emerald before I release it for you."
That was almost reasonable. Almost like a normal ultimatum. "Give it back or I'll take it" is basically what I said, just with slightly more dramatic phrasing. I'm improving. Slowly. Glacially. But improving.
"THIRTY SECONDS?!" Robotnik sputtered. "YOU CAN'T GIVE ME AN ULTIMATUM! I'M THE ONE WITH THE—"
"Twenty-five."
"—the MASTER EMERALD! I have ALL the power here! You should be negotiating with ME! I should be setting the terms! This is MY—"
"Twenty."
"STOP COUNTING!"
"Fifteen."
Robotnik slammed his fists on his console. Alarms blared inside the craft. New weapons systems deployed — heavier ones, the kind that Robotnik kept in reserve for genuinely dangerous situations. A massive cannon extended from the craft's dorsal surface, its barrel the size of a car, crackling with stolen Master Emerald energy.
"YOU WANT THE EMERALD?! FINE! HAVE SOME!"
The cannon fired.
A beam of concentrated Master Emerald energy — green, brilliant, devastating — lanced through space directly at Super Infinite. It was the same type of energy that powered Hyper forms and Super forms and every major miracle in the Sonic universe, weaponized and focused into a destructive lance that could have punched through a planet's crust.
Marcus raised one hand.
The Phantom Ruby screamed.
Not in pain. In DEFIANCE. The gem in his chest blazed with an intensity that temporarily outshone Knuckles' Hyper aura, projecting a wall of crimson energy that met the Master Emerald beam head-on.
Green met red.
Order met denial.
And the music changed.
"Find Your Flame" faded. The guitar softened, the drums quieted, and for a single heartbeat, there was silence — silence in space, silence in the void, silence that lasted exactly long enough for Marcus to think oh no what's it going to play next—
"FIST BUMP."
The opening riff of Sonic Forces' theme song exploded from the Phantom Ruby with the enthusiasm of a sound system that had been waiting its entire existence for this exact moment. The upbeat, energetic, impossibly catchy melody filled Marcus's atmospheric envelope with a wall of sound that was completely inappropriate for a life-or-death beam struggle in the vacuum of space and absolutely perfect for it at the same time.
"Together we can show the world what we can do—"
THE PHANTOM RUBY IS PLAYING "FIST BUMP." IT'S PLAYING THE SONIC FORCES THEME SONG. THE GAME THAT INFINITE IS FROM. THE GAME WHERE INFINITE WAS THE VILLAIN. AND THE RUBY IS PLAYING ITS HERO THEME. WHILE I'M FIGHTING THE ACTUAL VILLAIN. THE IRONY IS SO THICK YOU COULD CUT IT WITH ONE OF THOSE PHANTOM RUBY ENERGY BLADES.
The beam struggle intensified. Green pushed against red, red pushed against green, the point of contact between them becoming a miniature star that radiated energy in every direction. Space itself warped around the collision — stars bent, the distant curve of Mobius shimmered, and the fabric of reality developed visible stress fractures that looked like cracks in an eggshell.
"You and me together — we can light the darkest day—"
Knuckles appeared on the other side of the craft. While Marcus held Robotnik's attention with the beam clash, the echidna had circled around, using the distraction to approach the containment field from below.
Hyper Knuckles reached the Master Emerald.
He placed both hands on the containment field.
And PUSHED.
The field shattered. Not gradually, not in stages — it broke all at once, the containment technology overwhelmed by the direct intervention of the one being on Mobius who had a spiritual connection to the Emerald itself. Knuckles' hands closed around the Master Emerald, and the gem RESPONDED — blazing to life with an intensity that tripled Knuckles' Hyper aura, the bond between Guardian and Emerald reasserting itself with the force of a natural law being re-established.
"NOOOOO!" Robotnik screamed as the Master Emerald was ripped from his craft. The cannon's beam sputtered and died, its power source removed. The craft itself lurched, its systems failing, emergency power kicking in as the primary energy feed was severed.
Marcus lowered his hand. The crimson barrier faded. He floated in space, chest-Ruby pulsing, aura blazing, watching Knuckles cradle the Master Emerald like the world's most precious and ridiculously oversized baby.
"Ten seconds to spare," Super Infinite said.
I said I'd give him thirty seconds. I gave him thirty seconds. I actually followed through on my own ultimatum. This is the first time my edgy declaration has been chronologically accurate. I'm weirdly proud of this.
"YOU HAVEN'T WON!" Robotnik's craft was spiraling now, its engines damaged, its systems failing, but the doctor's voice still carried with the desperate defiance of a man who refused to acknowledge defeat even when defeat was actively sitting on his chest. "I'LL BE BACK! I'M ALWAYS BACK! YOU CAN'T—"
The craft's main engine exploded.
Robotnik ejected — a small, egg-shaped escape pod rocketing away from the disintegrating vessel, propelled by a single thruster that pointed its trajectory toward the distant speck of a satellite base. He was alive. He was escaping. And he was already, no doubt, planning his next scheme.
Marcus watched the escape pod shrink into the distance and decided to let it go. Robotnik always came back. That was the nature of the story. The villain survived to fight another day, and the heroes let him go because the alternative was a line that heroes didn't cross.
Besides, they had what they came for.
The Master Emerald blazed in Knuckles' hands, its green light mixing with his pink aura and Marcus's crimson to create a tricolor display that would have been visible from the planet's surface. Three sources of power — Chaos, Super Chaos, and Phantom Ruby — coexisting in the void of space, painting the darkness with colors that the stars themselves couldn't match.
Knuckles looked at Marcus.
The echidna's Hyper form was beginning to fade — the strain of maintaining it in space, away from the Super Emeralds' proximity, was taking its toll. His pink aura flickered, dimmed, steadied, flickered again.
"We need to get back," Knuckles said, his voice carrying the particular tightness of someone who was running on fumes and knew it.
Marcus nodded. He extended his crimson aura, wrapping it around both Knuckles and the Master Emerald, creating a shared bubble of warped space that would maintain atmosphere and pressure during their descent.
And the music changed again.
"Fist Bump" faded out with a final, triumphant chord.
There was a pause.
A beat.
And then—
Bass. Deep, thrumming, ominous bass. A heartbeat rhythm that pulsed in sync with the Phantom Ruby's glow. Electronic undertones that crackled with static and menace. A building, mounting tension that coiled like a snake preparing to strike.
Marcus recognized it with the immediate, visceral certainty of someone hearing a song that had been memed into his DNA.
No.
The bass built.
No no no.
The drums kicked in.
Please no.
And then the vocals dropped.
"I'm not weak—"
Infinite's theme.
The Phantom Ruby was playing INFINITE'S THEME SONG.
FROM SONIC FORCES.
THE SONG THAT WAS SPECIFICALLY WRITTEN TO BE THE THEME MUSIC OF THE CHARACTER MARCUS WAS CURRENTLY INHABITING.
THE SONG THAT CONTAINED THE LYRICS "I'M THE TALLEST OF MOUNTAINS, I AM THE ROUGHEST OF WAVES" AND "NO, I'M NOT WEAK" AND "INFINITE" REPEATED WITH THE DESPERATE INSISTENCE OF SOMEONE WHO NEEDED TO HEAR THEMSELVES SAY IT.
THE EDGIEST SONG IN THE ENTIRE SONIC FRANCHISE.
AND IT WAS PLAYING.
RIGHT NOW.
IN SPACE.
WHILE HE FLOATED IN A SUPER FORM.
WITH A CHEST CRYSTAL.
AND A BILLOWING COAT.
"I'm not weak—"
"STOP," Marcus hissed at the Phantom Ruby, breaking character for the first time in his entire Mobian existence. The word came out raw and unfiltered, without edgy embellishment, without dramatic resonance — just pure, uncut Marcus Webb begging his chest gem to stop playing his villain theme song during what should have been a triumphant moment.
The Phantom Ruby did not stop.
If anything, it got LOUDER.
"I'M NOT WEAK! I'm not weak—"
"I SAID STOP!"
"I'M THE TALLEST OF MOUNTAINS—"
"PLEASE!"
"I AM THE ROUGHEST OF WAVES—"
Knuckles stared at him. "Are you... arguing with your gem?"
"THIS GEM," Marcus snarled, completely abandoning the edgy persona in a moment of genuine, desperate frustration, "IS THE MOST DRAMATIC PIECE OF CRYSTALLIZED NONSENSE IN THE HISTORY OF—"
The Phantom Ruby hit the chorus.
"INFINITE—"
The word exploded from the gem with the force of a stadium concert's PA system. It reverberated through Marcus's atmospheric bubble, through his chest, through his BONES, the sound so loud and so perfectly timed that it synchronized with a pulse of crimson energy from his aura that was visible from the PLANET'S SURFACE.
"INFINITE—"
Another pulse. Brighter. Bigger. The aura flaring in time with the music like the world's most dramatic light show.
"INFINITE—"
Knuckles was staring at him with an expression that somehow combined bewilderment, amusement, concern, and the specific kind of secondhand embarrassment that only came from watching someone else's magical artifact publicly humiliate them.
"Is it... playing YOUR theme song?" Knuckles asked slowly.
Marcus's mask hid his face, which was currently contorted into an expression of pure, undiluted mortification. Behind the black surface, his eyes were squeezed shut, his teeth were clenched, and his face was burning with a blush so intense that his crimson Super form fur was actually getting REDDER.
"I don't want to talk about it," he managed, and even THAT came out sounding like a dramatic declaration of stoic suffering rather than the embarrassed plea for mercy that it actually was.
"I'M NOT WEAK—"
"It's kind of catchy," Knuckles offered.
"I WILL DROP YOU."
"Dropping the guy who's holding the Master Emerald seems counterproductive."
"I WILL DROP YOU AND THEN CATCH YOU AND THEN DROP YOU AGAIN."
"That's not very 'infinite' of you."
Marcus turned to look at Knuckles. The echidna's Hyper form had faded entirely now — he was back to normal Knuckles, red fur and all, holding the Master Emerald and being supported entirely by Infinite's crimson aura bubble. And he was GRINNING. Not his usual serious-Guardian expression. An actual, genuine grin that looked almost alien on Knuckles' typically stoic face.
"You're messing with me," Marcus said, and the words came out almost — ALMOST — normal. "You're actually messing with me right now."
"You made me question my entire life philosophy in a forest," Knuckles said. "Consider this payback."
"I AM THE ROUGHEST OF WAVES—"
Marcus groaned. Not an edgy groan. Not a "the weight of existence is unbearable" groan. A real, human, this-is-so-embarrassing-I-want-to-die-AGAIN groan.
And then — because the universe had a sense of comedic timing that bordered on the malicious — his Super form chose this exact moment to begin powering down.
The crimson glow dimmed. The aura contracted. The Phantom Ruby, still embedded in his chest, pulsed once, twice, and then — with the reluctant energy of a child being told to turn off the TV — stopped playing "Infinite."
The silence that followed was the loudest silence Marcus had ever experienced.
His fur faded from crimson back to black. His mask shifted from black back to silver. The Phantom Ruby, still in his chest, dimmed to its normal pulsing glow and then, with a sensation that felt distinctly like a gemstone version of a satisfied sigh, detached from his sternum and drifted back to his hand.
He was normal Infinite again.
Regular, non-super, standard-edition edgelord.
And he was now falling.
Because they were still in the upper atmosphere.
And his flight had just turned off.
"Oh," Marcus said.
"Yeah," Knuckles said.
They fell.
Marcus had approximately four seconds of freefall during which his life — both lives — flashed before his eyes before the Phantom Ruby, apparently having milked the dramatic tension for all it was worth, reactivated just enough to slow their descent to something survivable.
They drifted down through the atmosphere in a controlled fall, wrapped in a crackling, sputtering, barely-functional field of Phantom Ruby energy that was clearly operating on fumes. The ruby pulsed weakly, like a phone on one percent battery, doing the absolute minimum necessary to keep them alive.
"Your gem has a flair for the dramatic," Knuckles observed, watching the ground slowly approach.
"You have no idea," Infinite said, and for once, the edgy delivery was entirely appropriate.
They landed on Angel Island.
"Landed" was generous. They "arrived at the ground in an uncontrolled manner" would have been more accurate. Marcus hit the grass, rolled, bounced off a rock, and came to rest on his back, staring up at the sky that they'd just fallen through, with the Phantom Ruby sitting on his chest like a smug cat.
Knuckles landed on his feet, because Knuckles always landed on his feet, because Knuckles was a Guardian and Guardians didn't do something as undignified as tumbling across the grass like a furry bowling ball.
The Master Emerald hit the ground beside them, its weight cratering the earth, its green glow steady and strong. Safe. Home.
Angel Island shuddered. The ground trembled. And then, slowly, majestically, the island began to rise. The Master Emerald's power, restored to its rightful place, reasserted its hold on the floating landmass, and Angel Island climbed back into the sky where it belonged.
Marcus lay on his back and watched the world ascend around him. Trees straightening. Waterfalls adjusting their flow. The damaged landscape beginning its long, slow recovery from fire and invasion and the general indignity of having a space station crash on it.
Sonic appeared. He was still shimmering slightly with residual Hyper energy, but had mostly powered down, his blue fur reasserting itself as the prismatic effect faded.
"You made it!" the hedgehog said, sliding to a stop beside them. "I saw the whole thing from down here — the beam clash, the chase, Knuckles grabbing the Emerald—"
He paused.
"Was there MUSIC?"
Marcus closed his eyes.
"No."
"Because it REALLY looked like there was music. Like, I could almost HEAR it. Something about not being weak?"
"There was no music. Nothing happened. We retrieved the Emerald. That is all."
Knuckles opened his mouth to contradict this.
Marcus fixed him with a look — even lying on his back, even without the Super form, even with his coat pooled around him in a decidedly un-dramatic puddle of fabric, the look carried enough weight to give the echidna pause.
"There. Was. No. Music."
Knuckles looked at him. Looked at Sonic. Looked at the Phantom Ruby, which was pulsing innocently in Marcus's hand like a gemstone that had never in its existence provided unauthorized background music during a space battle.
"No music," Knuckles confirmed, and the corner of his mouth twitched in a way that Marcus recognized as the echidna equivalent of barely suppressed laughter.
Sonic looked between them, clearly sensing that he was missing something, but ultimately shrugged. "Okay. Cool. No music. Anyway — chili dogs?"
Marcus lay on the grass of a floating island, surrounded by the aftermath of a space battle, holding a magical gemstone that had a better taste in music than him, and stared at the perfect blue sky above.
"...Chili dogs would be acceptable."
Acceptable. Everything is always "acceptable." Never "yes please" or "I would love one" or "thank God, I'm starving." Always "acceptable." As if I'm a king granting permission for a peasant to serve me food that I desperately want.
I am so tired.
I am so, so tired.
But also...
He looked at the Phantom Ruby in his hand. It pulsed back at him. Innocently. Sweetly. As though it hadn't just played three different songs during a space battle without his consent, dragged him through a transformation sequence he didn't know he could undergo, embedded itself in his chest, and then dumped him out of the upper atmosphere when it ran out of juice.
...I have a Super form.
I can fly in space.
I fought a giant robot and won.
I chased a villain through the void and retrieved a cosmic artifact.
And my magical gemstone plays boss fight music.
This is either the coolest or the dumbest thing that has ever happened to anyone, and the fact that I can't tell the difference is probably the most honest thing about my situation.
He tucked the Phantom Ruby into his belt. It went willingly, settling into its compartment with the satisfied energy of a pet that had been on a very exciting walk.
Marcus got up. Dusted himself off. His coat, crumpled and grass-stained, rearranged itself around his shoulders and immediately began billowing.
They were on a floating island. Rising through the atmosphere. Above the clouds.
There was wind up here.
ACTUAL wind.
And the coat was billowing IN it.
For the first time since arriving on Mobius, his coat was billowing due to genuine, legitimate, meteorologically sound WIND.
Marcus almost laughed.
Almost.
"Hmph."
They walked toward the edge of the island, where the Chaotix were waiting with food and first aid and the kind of enthusiastic debrief that involved a lot of shouting from Vector and a lot of quiet analysis from Espio and a lot of completely irrelevant questions from Charmy.
And somewhere, far below, in a small hut in Knothole Village, Sally Acorn was staring at energy readings from NICOLE that showed two super-form signatures engaging Robotnik's craft in low orbit, accompanied by a third energy pattern that NICOLE had classified as "ANOMALOUS AUDIO PHENOMENON — UNKNOWN ORIGIN."
Sally looked at the reading.
She looked at her board.
She wrote:
"He generates MUSIC now?"
And below it:
"Was it always there? Is the music part of his power? Does the Phantom Ruby communicate through SOUND? Is the music a message? A code? A signal to someone? WHO IS HE SIGNALING?"
She pinned the note to the board.
The board was running out of wall space.
She looked at NICOLE.
"NICOLE, I need you to analyze the audio phenomenon. Cross-reference with known musical structures, communication protocols, and — just in case — check if it matches any existing songs from any database we have access to."
"Searching," NICOLE replied. Then, after a pause: "No matches found, Sally. The audio phenomenon does not correspond to any known musical composition."
Of course it doesn't. Because it's HIS music. Music that exists only for him. Music from wherever he came from. Music from a place "beyond comprehension."
She wrote that down too.
The conspiracy board groaned under the weight of new material.
The coat billowed.
The Ruby pulsed.
And Marcus Webb, formerly dead, currently edgy, recently super, rode a floating island through the sky and ate a chili dog and tried very, very hard not to think about the fact that his magical chest gem had a Spotify premium subscription and zero respect for his dignity.
To be continued.