Meanwhile, inside the command center...

"What the—"

*BANG BANG BANG.*

"GAAAGH."

Dr. Eggman was having a bad day. His console, now heavily dented under the brunt of his big, bony, white-gloved fists, looked all the sadder for it. Hurriedly, the plump madman went about flailing his spindly, spidery limbs, typing, manipulating controls, flipping switches, flipping switches—oh the switches being flipped—but to no avail. His screen was nothing but static. And, the emergency escape launch function? Not working. The big red button (literally) just blinked and made a sour honking noise to indicate an error.

"This isn't Sonic's doing," he mumbled and grunted as he hopped out of his chair, ducked down, and popped a panel loose from the footboard of the console, and proceeded to very awkwardly try to crawl inside and access the mess of wires within from behind. He made it about halfway in, leaving his tight-pantsed aft section jutting out, skinny legs kicking, and shiny built-in boots scuffing against the metal floor. Eventually, there was a sort of squidgy strrrrreeetch noise, and a low pop like a mouth being removed from the top of a glass bottle, and he vanished inside the huge computer.

"It has to be one of his too-smart-for-their-own-good friends," he muttered breathlessly, with a cough or two from having to squeeze himself so thin. "Tails. Tails? No! Not Tails. He isn't devious enough for something like this."

Inside, he crawled through the narrow space, sat upright, and produced a little flashlight from somewhere in his jacket, turned it on, and popped it in his big, gleaming-toothed mouth.

*Click, clack, pop. Bzzt. K'click, pop.*

His intimate knowledge of everything he designed was what allowed him to work so quickly; within seconds, he had reconfigured his displays such that they were wired directly into the video feeds, rather than going through any kind of computer, which had apparently already been compromised by the virus.

"Mrrbe Shrdow," he slurred to himself, flashlight still in his maw. He spat it with a p'too and started to worm his way back out of the crawlspace. "No! Shadow isn't smart enough. Someone... someone..."

He huffed and puffed, and pulled himself upright back in the control room again, on his knees at first, and looked at the screen. There were at least a hundred little camera views on that gigantic display, but one of them had a ragtag band of miscreants climbing right past it, straight up his ship's leg.

His mustache sagged and the corners of his mouth frowned sharply.

"... Huh," he deadpanned flatly.

...

"A bunch of NOBODIES?!" he erupted as he launched to his feet and leered across the console, hands tightly gripping its edges. He quickly calmed, however. "Eh! Whatever! They're getting massacred, anyway. They'll never get in."

He ducked back down and weaseled back into his little crawlspace again.

"Need to fix this before..." *grunt* "Sonic shows up..."

Geoff was fortunate to be one of the few with a proper defense. The threatening propellers of the enemy were only a small nuisance against whatever thick layer of rock he engulfed himself in. It didn't stop the spinning pieces of metal to chip away at the crystal though, bringing a high enough sense of unease for him to finish off whatever robot decided to kamikaze too close. Pike-like-fists were his friend right now, whether they managed to pierce or smash the robots. A single, dismantled, bent propeller eventually flung from one of his victims and dug a crevice across his rock-covered face, only causing him to hastily dash forward before something worse happened.

He still visibly flinched (even though his features were obscured by the crystal) at the injuries his allies sustained upon their approach to the leg, feeling almost guilty about his protection. Yet this was no time to be idle and tend to wounds; it would only be a matter of time before the UFO base decided to make up its mind and actually launch, and Geoff would sooner prefer the high safety of the ship itself than being literally cooked and obliterated under the presence of the ignition that could occur above.

Coming in behind some of the others, he began the treacherous climb up the leg. He idly wondered why everything they did always seemed to end in another ascent.


Clear on the opposite side of where the majority of group was climbing, a path of robotic wreckage led up to Shadow, approaching a much less crowded leg of the base. Perhaps it was for the sake of not being hindered by the others on his ascent, or maybe he just believed it was not too strategic (or wise) to have everyone crowded on one ladder, but the hedgehog was making his own scaling-of-the-HQ in a completely different area.

In leaps and bounds Shadow climbed, seeming to find the peg-by-peg system too unnecessary when he could put dozens of feet below him at a time.

“HrrgghgAARGH,” Coop roared as he tumbled onto a catwalk. He faced up to one of the lines of egg pawns that shuffled and squirmed awkwardly on the spindly metal spine, and — arm across his face — charged elbow first into the front of the line.

The first Egg Pawn in line actually seemed surprised by Coop's ballsiness and flinched back a step in alarm, bumping into his cohorts. When the eagle ran into it full force, the whole row jostled, bumped, and tilted in odd directions, struggling to stay upright. Soon, it became a bizarre push-fight, like some sort of inversion of tug-of-war, with the gang of big, fat robots pushing at each others' backs in an awkward combat conga line against the big, burly bird.

Coop, slowed, but not deterred, grunted and shifted the force to the arm with the better shoulder. As he dropped pressure for a moment—he expected to be, and very probably was, rushed against by the egg pawns. He dug his heels into the metal catwalk, the metal ribs in his soles biting into the factory-warped metal grille. He emitted another animal roar and bowed his back into pushing the robots, lowering his center of gravity further and further until he was in a position to...

He grabbed the underside of the first one and put his full force into heaving it up and off the catwalk, like an irate customer flipping a back-alley bookie’s table. He followed this with another forward into the heart of the defence conga.

"NnghNYAH!"

Whoosh!

The Egg Pawn let out a bizarre cry as it tumbled off into the abyss of cityscape in a flapping mess of metal limbs. And then the next. And the next. Left, right, left, right—hefty robots tumbled haplessly to their doom, grinding and flipping and flailing off one after another by the raw power of muscle and leverage.

Coop's Man Card was officially issued its lifetime membership stamp that day.

Elsewhere, atop a nearby building, a pair of figures stood backlit to completely black silhouettes by the glare of a huge, animated LED billboard behind them. While Eggman Enterprises Brand Superior Mustache Conditioner's childlike, super-deformed, but conspicuously-Eggman-like mascot danced about in front of a field of rainbows and stars in the background, they stood staring up at the uncomfortably close battle.

"Ready?" whispered the taller one, holding out a hand.

Though the second figure's quiet "Mm" of assent was swallowed up in a cacophony of clanging metal and battlecries, the shorter of the pair stepped up next to the taller, taking firm grasp of his extended hand, as her head dipped briskly forward in a single, succinct nod.

The two vanished from view in a flash. An instantaneous streak of bluish light, barely visible, immediately drew a line in the sky from where they started all the way to the underside of the ship, and vanished just as quickly. There the two reappeared, but only in the loosest sense of the word; their presence was little more than faint distortion, like heatwaves at the end of a highway, almost entirely imperceptible on the dark, shadowed, equipment-cluttered underside of the command center where they inexplicably stood upside down, defying gravity.

"They're really goin' for it this time," observed the taller one through a seemingly impressed statement spoken in an entirely unimpressed tone.

"Yeah, well," the other responded somewhat tersely through an invisible frown. "I was getting pretty tired of waiting for an invitation inside, too."

An ambiguous blurring around the region of the second figure's arm gestured pointlessly to the one-eagle wrecking ball.

"Another minute, and that'd have been me."

"You wanna help that bad?" he questioned, arched brow invisible, but audible in his tone.

"'Help?'" The smaller figure snorted derisively. "It isn't a matter of wanting to help. It's -- Well, just look at 'em. They need us."

"Maybe," he mumbled. "Too bad for them, huh. It'd be simpler if they just lost now."

“Well don’t use it yet—you want to die out here? Come on.”

Coop grabbed for Desmond’s arm and made to stride the length of the catwalk to one of the sealed doors that bordered it on either side. Upon reaching it, he hurriedly pulled out a length of something long and thin and red. It was tacky and woven and looked like a very thin, very long piece of bungee cord. The door was sealed with four locks, which were made manifest on the outer portion of the structure by four very large panel installations into the door’s surface, beneath which could be seen chunky cogs and gigantic rack gears.

He stuck his hand half-way into the door and hissed quietly as his palm got wedged between the door and the lock cover.

“You,” he said to the ferret.

“Can you get your hand in here? Wrap this around that—“ he pointed a gigantic sausage finger at one of the huge, toothed bars visible underneath the plate that kept the locks in place while the door was offline.

“Wrap this around all four of them,” he gestured to the door, unspooling more of the waxy yarn and clipping off four pieces, all about 2-3 feet long, with a pair of heavy shears he removed from somewhere on his person. He removed a piece of metal that looked like a spark plug from another mysterious pocket, and began unscrewing part of it.

Geoff regretted going up the peg-ladder fully suited in rock. It would be a challenge for anyone to try to keep a steady grip on the leg with their hands covered in a couple of inches of stone, especially at the haste he was climbing, not to mention the weight dragging him down. Not wishing to be the accused if someone below him managed to find a clump of crystal falling in a direct path to their cranium, he waited till he was on the catwalks to shed the stuff.

Kicking away the residue of his own ability with a tired grunt, the hedgehog was surprised to find the catwalk...

...empty. Coop had cleaned-house well enough to provide a straight, clear path.

With relative ease, he jogged forward towards the door that was now their target, glad to know he would be given a few moments rest if need be. Yet he knew all this trouble of just getting inside the ship was only the beginning. He doubted Eggman would assume no one would ever make it to the interior. Chances were a whole new array of robots and other weaponry were lying in wait for their eventual entrance.

Geoff was nearly to the door when he came to abrupt halt, eying a bright, green flash that had just occurred on one of the branching catwalks.

However, it faded a moment later, revealing Shadow marching forward, his weapon hanging from his hand, his eyes inquisitive as he examined Coop, Desmond, and whoever else was around the closed entryway to the base.

It seemed the black hedgehog had opted for "barreling straight through" instead of "throwing everything out of the way" with his method of approach. Many a corpse of Egg Pawns lay wasted behind him on the catwalk, various robotic limbs hanging off the skinny walkway, other random bits of metal scattered about.

Now something flashed in his eyes as he approached. Probably annoyance, knowing him, but it actually appeared to be impatience. Heck, more than likely it was both.

"Are we making progress?" he asked in a tone that seemed to say if this doesn't open in the next five seconds, I'm doing it myself.

“Hold on,” said Coop. He shoved the bundled ends of the strange, waxy yarm into a tube at the end of the spark-plug device, and crushed the metal tube around the cord—the metal there was pre-notched and made out of flimsy aluminum, and bent easily to pinch the cord.

Coop pulled a metal pin out of the other end with a snap and dropped the tube.

“Cover your eyes,” he said.

The spark plug thing bounced off the catwalk. It rolled a bit. Then the yarn exploded.

There was an ear-splitting BANG as all four lengths of the strange yarn disappeared in a blinding flash, leaving heavy black scores in the metal of the door where they touched against it. Inside the door, underneath the metal plates, the four bars that had been tied with the stuff were all cleanly severed. The heavy hooks they had been supporting rolled awkwardly off their mount points and fell into the recess of the door with the sound of someone kicking a garbage can down a well.

The door opened.

“Come on,” he grunted, and hurried up into the command center.