Green and his men, for their part, had been deathly silent throughout the melee, and this continued to be the case even through the maniacal little freak of nature's synthesized marveling in atrocities. Maybe they'd seen this sort of thing before and were too used to it to display any outward emotion or reaction, or perhaps they merely kept their feelings very well-hidden, perhaps due in part to the boon that was the robotic poker face. But despite this, small, subtle gestures--a headshake here and there, a clenching and unclenching of a fist--implied much more than any words might have.

And if one listened carefully, they might hear the real general mutter quietly, "Wasn't worth it then and it still isn't."

Though the troops still seemed geared for a tussle, as the last clone lingered behind the aqua-blue wall of gel, they still had enough of their senses in the wake of battle lust and could listen to reason. The Capsule Troopers made for the teleporter, big weapons swinging around in their hands, rubber soles thudding against the floor due their sheer weight as they hurried along behind the hedgehog guy who had become impressively angry and destructive in short order.

Green eyed the clone carefully. "Imitation is only fifty percent of the creative process. Good luck finding the other half."

He turned and hurried toward where the others were gathering.

A flash and a roar later, and the party quickly found itself aboard a Chimera airship somewhere over the ocean. Evacuation alerts were already sounding.

Rock didn't hear the last thing Jam said to him. He already knew, though.

The already-tight turn became all the narrower as the underside of the fighter lit up with the flare of rocketry. A twist into a steep ascent took the small ship straight over the central spire of the ancient-looking machinery; a slam of the throttle forward gave it that kick in the pants that launched it straight up the "barrel" of the cannon.

The room behind it was intensely white. Seven had fallen silent. Perhaps he was watching, aghast or intrigued or just plain uncertain of what was unfolding. Did Rock even know for sure if it'd work? What was "it" anyway?

The fighter passed through the ionized field at the beginning of the barrel that contained the atmosphere of the cannon. Rock pressed the button on his flight stick; an explosion quaked behind without delay, muted by the void of space. Rock slammed the multidirectional throttle to the right and stomped the right rudder pedal; his body responded violently to the inertial change by thudding to the left against its restraints as the fighter blasted and torqued its way to the right to escape the barrel through one of the giant, fluted openings, into empty space.

It seemed to be a completely moot maneuver.

Electricity flashed up the length of the enormous, machinery-laden, tunnel-like barrel of the ship. It moved like a jacob's ladder out of control, arcing, lashing its way up in strobing patterns for just a split second. Jam's necklace around Rock's neck flashed—just a blip of life in response. Then, everything turned white.

It was silent as the Typhaon was engulfed in something akin to a solar flare. The entire planet below seemed to shimmer and glow, one immense aurora blazing across the entire atmosphere from hemisphere to hemisphere, tracing visible patterns and ripples across the magnetosphere, ballooning in ribbons from the top of the world that curled down and spread thin across its equator, lighting it up such that even through the terror of it all shone some sort of beauty.

Rock couldn't see it from where he was; there was just brightness, the rattling of the fighter, and the blare of alarms going off in the cockpit. And, there was Seven's voice in his head, one final time, fading.

"That really shouldn't have worked and you know it."

"Just shut up," breathed Rock with one last sigh behind his gleaming visor as the alerts fell silent, the fighter's electronics fried, the engine forcibly exploded behind him, the canopy cracked and shattered, and electricity spat, danced, arced, and sparked all around him. For a moment, he felt weightlessness; for an instant, he thought he actually saw the stars again; for a very long time after, he saw nor felt anything.





Why am I always by myself out here in the end?

Sorry I keep doing this to you, Laylee.

The airship the party landed on went dark and silent. All the alarms stopped, bulbs and fluorescent rods burst violently as all of the lights went out, the consoles spat sparks and foul-smelling smoke, the engines stopped and wound down with a quiet cry, and the only thing anyone could see by was the glow of the night sky's aurora through the windscreens of the bridge. The sensation of weight slowly began to leave them as gravity took hold of the airship and began to pull it toward the dark surface of the ocean below. They had seconds to figure out something to do.

"None of us will survive if this thing hits the water period," said Green hurriedly. The ship would probably hit terminal velocity long before the earth said hello. "If we're going down we need to have a way to at the very least slow our own--"

Green watched the hedgehog smash through the bridge's windscreen, culminating in a gust of air that sounded less like wind and more like certain doom. He shrugged to the others. "Okay." It was a first step, at least, though not the last one--he was still trying to think of how to take that one.

"That guy is bananas," blurted Zesty as they hurried to the new exit. He glanced back at Jam. "Oop"

"I don't like bananas," said Slaw. "It's too easy for them to turn mushy. Like things that have fallen from a great height--"

"SHUT UP AND GO!"

The Capsule Troopers raced out the new opening, bustling into the night sky, big rocket boosters thooming like missiles in the darkness to help their way down to the deck. Magnet paused before leaving, turning to Jam and offering a rather untimely, curtly bow, gesturing to the new leak in the bridge. "Ladies first."

Green quite literally grabbed him and threw him out the hole. "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH"

"Hurry," he said if Jam was not already doing so, far too impassive and collected for someone who was standing on an enormous object that was moments from leaving a pretty big dent in a planet's ocean.

The airship struck the sea, groaning, contorting and becoming misshapen under the sheer force of its own weight so suddenly decelerating in the water. Foam sprayed skyward with a booming roar, glowing green in the aurora's light, while waves rolled out, then back in, the fearsome undertow sucking under anything that had the misfortune of landing anywhere near the swift-sinking vessel. It was therefore fortunate that for every non-flyer present, there were a few more who could fly, making the escape far less a watery grave than it otherwise could have been.

This sort of sudden, catastrophic failure was the story the globe over. At once, every city in the night went dark, and every city on the planet's sunny side fell silent. Electronics blacked out, computer-regulated cars sputtered and died, most aircraft were forced into sudden emergency landings no matter where they were, assembly lines stopped as if frozen in time, and every indoor space was washed over by the gloom of shade and murmuring confusion. Every Chimera airship dropped straight out of the sky, wherever it was, to catastrophic effect on the territories they patrolled and protected just seconds before the event.

The lights were out for good. It was the least of the United Federation's concerns, though. Central City had become nothing but a blanket of smoke and dust, under which lay an urban metropolis turned smoldering tomb. Empire City fared no better. But, over on South Island, at Spring City, life was... intact, as much as any place could be in this crotch-kicked world. A Chimera airship had made its impromptu dry dock smack in the downtown area, causing untold damage and spreading fires, while other aircraft crashed, and just about every little thing seemed to go wrong, but the fact of the matter was they were just that: little things. The people of Spring City may have had a burning, half-crushed metropolis, but at least it was still a metropolis, and not a barbeque pit of humanity.

A price had been paid to ensure that meager (or daresay "comparative") safety—not that anyone would know what had transpired in the UF or anywhere else for a long, long time, if ever. With most transportation crippled and communication nonexistent, the world was left to its own confusion, to question and wonder, and to pick up the charred pieces. Of course, that was before the first bulk of the Typhaon's city-scaled wreckage would make atmosphere and begin to break up. But, everyone had a couple weeks to start to feel safe and get their bearings before The Worst Year Ever: Part 2 would begin to beat the planet and all its inhabitants while they were still down.

Many would say it was truly better to have fallen down in pain than be held down with chain, however. As this was the story of how Seven, G.U.N., Chimera, and the Eggman Empire all met their end, it meant an old, contested, oprressed world had suddenly gained new freedom by burning down the metaphorical jailhouse with everyone still in it. While it was a harsh way to be liberated from the old rhythm of government conspiracies, deranged megalomaniacs, and the reckless heroes who made sport of both, it was liberation nonetheless, and a new beginning.