Silver Sonic definitely hadn't forgotten Tails (they were still within close proximity of one another, after all), but it was clear the fox was low on the totem pole of annoyances--until that swing of those twin tails came. There was little the robot could do to avoid it, and ridiculously heavy and sturdy as it was, let it not be said that Tails didn't have some power in the two neckties on his butt. While it didn't jostle Silver Sonic away from where it stood, the impact buckled the robot at its knees, dropping it closer to the ground and sending further bursts at Ace from its gunhand way off target.

It didn't seem to like that. Or Tails. Or Tails' tails. This possibility could have been derived from how its big right, conventionally-fingered hand flashed out to grab at said tails with an iron grip. It was abruptly clear that the machine was by no means a slowpoke when it had to get down and dirty in hand-to-hand faceoffs. And were that little snatch successful, well...

Rule number one of launching an ambush: don't let the person or villainous spined robot know you're launching an ambush. Until then Teck had been neglected, but when he made it apparent he was jumping in, Silver Sonic would take appropriate action, by which this meant rising from where it was crouching and swinging the two-tailed fox like a tennis racket right off the ground in order to send the kid's whole body smashing into the speeding, rolling porcupine with sudden, literally Herculean might, as if the robot were playing the world's cruelest game of baseball.

Bulky and slow on its feet Silver Sonic II may have been, but it was not stupid, and it was becoming more and more evident with each passing second that it was very tough, and very, very strong.

Then, a bad situation got worse. The cave openings not far from Ace, Teck and Tails began to crawl with robots—And not the good kind of easily-destructible robots Rock and friends were fighting. No, as skewed and unfair as it was, Rock, Jam, Toby and Kyle had pretty much wiped the floor with the fragile, traditional machines thrown at them, and were free to move forward. Tails and friends instead had the march of the freakin' penguins, in nigh-indestructible zombie robot form, coming at them.

But—They weren't attacking. For once, good fortune shone on them, as the machines took a fairly reasonable berth around the fighting group, rolling, scuttling, and rumbling their way into the ocean with their varied, mismatched forms of locomotion.

It was just that time of day. Eggman was deploying the forces to attack Central City again, and it so happened that their battle was near the path. Fortunately, Eggman seemed confident in Silver Sonic's ability to handle the trio on his own...

"You imps!" roared a grating, distorted voice from... somewhere. "Tails! Who are these... bums scratching up my shiny Silver Sonic?! That orange guy doesn't even look like a real hedgehog! Why didn't you bring Sonic?! I'll tell you right now, I would NOT have knowingly sullied such an excellent creation's reputation like this by pitting it against these... these... lesser mook friends of yours! WHERE'S SONIC?!"

And Teck thought he talked a lot.

Although Ace did make for a handy distraction, Silver Sonic II wasn't about to let itself get caught off-guard by the serval and his forehead-denting ways again. When it turned its head at the sound of that yell and found a speedy blue rock glowing its way toward the robot like a little jagged rocket, it reacted immediately. How so? Well, it was still holding Tails' two namesakes for one, so the fox would once again find himself used like a tennis racket to bat away an incoming projectile, though this time a much smaller one. As soon as the threat had been dispensed with, it seemed to grow bored with Tails, at which point it would mercifully "drop" the fox, if dropping him was the same thing as, you know, launching him at the ocean like a football.

The gunhand rose and began thundering again. At first it aimed for the rocks, the bright yellow plasma disintegrating the chaos-charged things in mid-flight, but it could put up a much higher rate of fire than Ace and his on-the-spot projectiles could, and it wouldn't take long before the serval would once again find himself in the path of trouble.

The second to last bird robot bounced out of the arcing path of Rock's speeding, hooking fist, flying in no less than three separate directions. The final one found itself seized out of the air by his two hands, and literally broken across his knee, and discarded unceremoniously. Rather unlike Jam, he wasn't showing off; his movements were quite short, quick, and economical, but plain brutal.

With the threats eliminated, the white primate lunged forward into a run and charged through the underbrush, zipping around trees and through bushes, taking high, tromping steps to avoid tripping on roots, and hopping over low, fallen branches. A hill curved up almost vertically into a sort of natural wall in front of them, but in appropriate fashion, he ran straight up the incline as fast as his legs could muster, and launched into the air.

He had to kind of... kick and squabble ungracefully in midair to make sure he moved forward enough to not fall right back down the incline, but he managed to instead land on top, and keep going forward. (Sonic, he wasn't.) They didn't have much farther to go, though, because just past that point, the trees gave way to a huge clearing, filled with bright lights.

The stony ground fell off sharply. Rock stopped and stooped at its edge, and surveyed.

They were at the center of the island, and it was basically a gigantic, circular pit. Sinking farther than the height of the cliffs they had scaled to get up there, it appeared to go well below ocean level, yet it was hard to tell precisely how far down the nearly mile-wide chasm went, because it was filled on all sides with machinery, steam, smoke, and glaring, orange artificial lights. Gigantic pipes wound and coiled around like components of some sort of oversized heat sinks, and smokestacks jutted unevenly from metal structures, all shades of grey and reddish brown, decorated with yellow and black striped caution strips here and there around doors and hazardous equipment, and the occasional revolving yellow strobe. Catwalks criss-crossed the structures, power lines were strewn erratically, and flying, propeller-driven sentries, adorned with red gumball lights, fluttered and puttered about their patrols, while small, jet-powered aircraft circled like buzzards overhead. Sounds like heavy pistons chugging permeated the air, along with puffs and hisses of escaping vapors, and a nasty, sulfuric stench hung heavily.

The entire pit was full on all sides of things like this, stair-stepping downward steeply into the abyss in such a way that there wasn't really any natural rock left visible—Just an overgrowth of filthy industrial mess, from stacks, to open-topped chemical tanks, to boilers and turbines. There seemed to be something in the center, somewhere toward the bottom, but it was hard to make out; from the looks of the dim, reddish glow that flickered across all the lower structures, there may well have been lava somewhere in the smokey depths, too.