Sonic the Hedgehog had been ready for a fight.
Not just ready—he'd been prepared. He'd done the mental math. He'd run the scenarios. He'd even workshopped a few one-liners on the way over, testing them against the wind resistance at Mach 2 to see which ones had the best comedic timing at terminal velocity. He had a whole bit planned for when Shadow inevitably showed up and started being Shadow about the whole Mr. Tinker situation.
Because Shadow was always being Shadow about things.
That was just what Shadow did. He showed up. He crossed his arms. He said something edgy. He threatened violence against someone who probably didn't deserve it. Sonic made a quip. Shadow scowled. They fought, or they didn't, and then Shadow Chaos Controlled away to go brood on a cliff somewhere while Rouge sighed and followed him like a very patient, very glamorous babysitter.
It was routine. It was comfortable. It was the natural order of things, as immutable and reliable as gravity, or Eggman building robots shaped like himself, or Knuckles being tricked by the same lie twice.
So when Sonic arrived at the village—skidding to a dramatic halt in the town square, sneakers kicking up a satisfying arc of dust, one finger raised and mouth already open to deliver the first of his prepared zingers—and found Mr. Tinker completely unthreatened, happily carving a wooden Chao for a delighted child, with no Shadow in sight...
Sonic's brain experienced an error it had never encountered before.
He stood there. Finger raised. Mouth open. Dust settling around him in a slowly dissipating cloud of anticlimactic particles.
"...Huh," he said.
Mr. Tinker looked up from his carving. The portly man's magnificent mustache—which was definitely Eggman's mustache, the same mustache that had adorned the face of a man who had enslaved entire ecosystems and once tried to crack the planet in half like an egg, which was probably where the name came from if you thought about it—twitched with a warm, grandfatherly smile.
"Oh! Hello there, young hedgehog!" Mr. Tinker said cheerfully, holding up his half-finished Chao carving. "Would you like a toy? I just started this one, but I could make you something special! A little airplane, perhaps? You look like a boy who likes airplanes."
Sonic's mouth closed. His finger lowered. His entire prepared bit—seven jokes, three callbacks, one devastating pun about "pointing fingers"—evaporated like morning dew on a loop-de-loop.
"I... uh..." Sonic scratched the back of his head. "Wasn't there a black hedgehog up on that roof a minute ago? Kinda edgy? Red stripes? Looked like he was about to deliver a monologue about the necessity of preemptive violence?"
Mr. Tinker blinked his kind, vacant eyes. "Oh, him! Yes, he was up there for a while. Pointing at me, I think? I waved!" He chuckled warmly. "Then he stopped pointing, and he and that lovely bat lady flew away. Very nice couple, those two."
"They're not a—" Sonic started automatically, and then stopped, because for some reason correcting the romantic assumptions of an amnesiac war criminal felt like it should be lower on his priority list right now. "Wait. He just... left?"
"Flew right off! Whoosh!" Mr. Tinker made a little zooming gesture with his carving knife, which several nearby children found delightful and Sonic found deeply disorienting. "Didn't even say goodbye. But the bat lady winked at me on her way out, so I think they were just passing through."
Sonic stared at Mr. Tinker.
Mr. Tinker smiled at Sonic.
A child tugged on Mr. Tinker's apron and asked for a wooden train.
The universe continued to function normally around the hedgehog-shaped hole of confusion standing in the middle of the village square.
"...Huh," Sonic said again.
He found Shadow three miles outside the village.
Or rather, Shadow let him catch up, which was a distinction that mattered because no one found Shadow unless Shadow wanted to be found. The Ultimate Lifeform was standing—arms crossed, naturally, because the universe had apparently course-corrected on that front—at the edge of a grassy ridge overlooking the road between villages. Rouge was perched on a nearby boulder, legs crossed, examining her nails with the elaborate disinterest of someone who was actually paying attention to everything.
Sonic skidded to a halt a few meters away, sneakers leaving twin trails of scorched grass. "Okay," he said, pointing at Shadow with significantly less dramatic flair than Shadow's earlier rooftop performance. "What gives?"
Shadow's red eyes—and Marcus, behind those eyes, felt a weird thrill at the fact that they were his red eyes now—shifted toward Sonic with practiced indifference.
"You'll need to be more specific," Marcus said, in Shadow's voice, with Shadow's cadence. He'd been practicing. The trick to sounding like Shadow, he'd discovered, was to speak as though every word cost you money and you were on a budget. Clipped. Efficient. Every syllable earning its place.
"Mr. Tinker!" Sonic threw his arms wide, gesturing back toward the village. "You were up there on the roof doing your whole..." He struck a pose that was, Marcus had to admit, a devastatingly accurate parody of the pointing stance. "...thing! And then you just bailed? No threats? No 'he's too dangerous to live' speech? No dramatic confrontation where I have to talk you down from doing something extreme while making it look effortless?"
Marcus looked at Sonic.
Really looked at him.
And for the first time since waking up in this body, Marcus felt something other than frustration or confusion about his situation. He felt something almost like... pity.
Because this was IDW Sonic. And seeing him up close, in person, in three-dimensional, living, breathing reality... was both better and worse than Marcus had expected.
Better, because Sonic was still Sonic. The quills. The sneakers. The cocky grin. The energy—God, the energy. Sonic radiated kinetic potential like a coiled spring wrapped in blue fur and attitude. Even standing still, he seemed to vibrate at a frequency just above normal reality, as though the universe itself couldn't quite keep up with him and had stopped trying.
Worse, because Marcus could see the IDW writing in him. It was subtle, but it was there—a slight exaggeration in his expressions, a trying-too-hard quality to his casualness, a sense that his confidence was performed rather than innate. Game Sonic was cocky because he'd earned it, because he'd saved the world enough times that swagger was just what happened when you moved that fast. IDW Sonic was cocky because the script told him to be, and the difference was the uncanny valley between a natural smile and a photograph of a smile.
But underneath all of that—underneath the IDW veneer, underneath the writing that didn't quite understand him—Sonic was still in there. Marcus could feel it. The real Sonic. The one who ran toward danger because standing still felt like dying. The one who believed in second chances not because he was naive but because he'd seen them work. The one who'd looked at a world full of monsters and madmen and robot armies and thought, Yeah, I can fix this. Hold my chili dog.
I can work with this, Marcus thought. I can bring that Sonic out. I just need to...
He uncrossed his arms. This was deliberate. Shadow uncrossing his arms was the equivalent of a normal person removing a suit of armor—it was a gesture of openness, of willingness to engage, and it was so rare that both Sonic and Rouge visibly reacted to it.
Sonic's eyebrows went up. Rouge's nail file paused mid-stroke.
"Mr. Tinker is not Eggman," Marcus said.
"Yeah, I know that, that's what I was coming to tell you before you—"
"I know you know." Marcus cut him off, and the interruption landed with enough quiet weight that Sonic actually shut his mouth, which Marcus suspected was a minor miracle in any continuity. "That's why I left. There was nothing to do there. The man has no memories of being Eggman. He poses no threat. Antagonizing him would have been pointless and cruel."
Sonic stared at him.
Marcus stared back.
The wind blew between them, carrying the scent of grass and distant machinery and whatever perfume Rouge was wearing that seemed to permeate a three-mile radius.
"Who are you," Sonic said flatly, "and what have you done with Shadow?"
"I am Shadow."
"Shadow would've given me a twenty-minute speech about how I'm too soft and naïve and how threats need to be eliminated before they materialize. Shadow would've called me a fool at least three times. Shadow would've done the thing." Sonic wiggled his fingers in a vague gesture that apparently represented Shadow's entire behavioral portfolio.
Marcus felt a flash of irritation—not at Sonic, but at the writing that had reduced Shadow to such a predictable caricature that Sonic could describe his behavior like a script.
"Then maybe," Marcus said, very carefully, "you don't know Shadow as well as you think."
Another silence. Longer this time. Heavier.
Sonic's expression shifted. The performative cockiness dimmed, just slightly, and something real flickered behind his green eyes—curiosity, maybe. Or recognition. The faintest spark of the Sonic who'd stood on the ARK and watched Shadow fall toward Earth and felt something break inside him.
"...Huh," Sonic said, for the third time that day.
Rouge chose this moment to hop off her boulder with a graceful, wing-assisted descent that involved entirely too much physics-defying bounce for Marcus's concentration. She landed between them with a click of heeled boots, her hands on her hips—her wide, wide hips—and looked between the two hedgehogs with the expression of a woman who had been managing difficult men for so long that it had become her primary hobby.
"Well, this is fun," she said dryly. "Two hedgehogs having a moment. Should I get a camera? A therapist? Both?"
"Rouge," Marcus said.
"Shadow," Rouge replied, matching his tone exactly.
"We should be moving. The war with Eggman's forces might be over, but there are still remnants scattered across multiple regions. Badniks operating on residual programming. Cities that need help rebuilding. We're wasting time."
He turned to Sonic.
"What's your plan?"
Sonic blinked. "My... plan?"
"Your plan. After this village, where are you going? What are you doing? You're not just wandering, are you?"
The slight hesitation before Sonic answered told Marcus everything he needed to know.
Sonic was just wandering. Because that's what IDW Sonic did in the early issues—he just wandered from location to location, stumbling into problems like a blue pinball bouncing between bumpers, reacting to crises rather than anticipating them. No strategy. No coordination. No communication with his allies about where he was going or why.
Game Sonic wandered too, but Game Sonic's wandering had purpose—the wind called him, adventure was his compass, and his instincts invariably guided him to where he needed to be. It was romantic. It was heroic. It was Sonic.
IDW Sonic's wandering was just... aimless. A narrative convenience that allowed the writers to move him from plot point to plot point without having to justify why a seasoned hero with a network of allies and a genius best friend was operating like a solo freelancer with no cell phone.
"I'm doing my thing," Sonic said, which was exactly the non-answer Marcus had expected. "You know. Running around. Helping people. Being Sonic."
"Being Sonic," Marcus repeated.
"Yeah. Being Sonic. It's what I do. I run, I find trouble, I fix trouble, I keep running. It's a whole lifestyle."
"And the Badnik forces regrouping in the hill regions to the north?"
Sonic's confident expression flickered. "The... what?"
"The Badnik forces. Regrouping. In the hills to the north. Multiple squads of Moto Bugs and Buzz Bombers operating on Eggman's last broadcast commands, terrorizing the villages between here and Riverside." Marcus paused. "You didn't know about that."
"I... was going to get to that."
"When?"
"When I got there, Shadow. That's how it works. I run in a direction, and problems show up, and I solve them. I don't need a plan. Plans are for people who can't improvise."
This. This right here. This was what drove Marcus crazy about IDW's characterization of Sonic.
Game Sonic did improvise. Game Sonic was, in fact, one of the greatest improvisational fighters and problem-solvers in gaming history. But Game Sonic's improvisation wasn't born from a lack of awareness—it was born from an excess of it. Game Sonic could afford to wing it because his speed allowed him to process, adapt, and react faster than any plan could account for. He wasn't ignoring preparation; he was operating beyond its necessity.
IDW Sonic treated improvisation like a philosophy instead of a skill. He didn't wing it because he was so fast that planning was redundant—he winged it because that was his brand, and the writers confused "carefree" with "careless."
Marcus was going to fix that.
"Sonic," he said. "You liberated an entire army of resistance fighters during the war. You coordinated assaults on multiple Eggman strongholds simultaneously. You worked with Knuckles, with Amy, with Silver, with the Avatar—" He caught himself. The Avatar was a Forces thing. Did IDW reference the Avatar? He couldn't remember. He pivoted smoothly. "You're not some random drifter who trips over problems. You're the fastest thing alive, and you just helped win a war. Act like it."
Sonic's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
"Did you just... give me a pep talk?"
"I gave you a tactical assessment."
"That was a pep talk. Rouge, was that a pep talk?"
Rouge, who had been watching this exchange with an expression of escalating delight, placed one gloved hand over her heart. "That was absolutely a pep talk. I'm going to cry. My little Shadow, all grown up, giving motivational speeches—"
"It was a tactical assessment," Marcus said firmly. "And we're done discussing it. Sonic. The hill villages. North. Badnik remnants. Are you going, or am I?"
Sonic looked at him for a long moment.
And then—slowly, like sunrise breaking over a landscape that had been dark for too long—Sonic grinned.
Not the IDW grin. Not the performed, scripted, trying-too-hard grin that had been plastered across his face since the first issue.
A real grin. The grin that Marcus remembered from the games—lopsided, cocky, warm, alive. The grin of a hedgehog who had just been reminded of something he'd forgotten, or maybe something he'd been written to forget, and was now reclaiming it in real-time.
"You know what, Shads?" Sonic said, bouncing on his heels. "I think I am going. And I think you're coming with me."
"Don't call me that."
"Too late, already said it, no take-backs, it's canon now. Come on!" Sonic crouched into a runner's stance, energy crackling around him like static electricity given physical form. "Race you there?"
"This isn't a—"
Sonic was gone. A blue streak, a sonic boom, a trail of displaced air and scattered leaves and one very ruffled bat who grabbed her ears to keep them from flapping.
Marcus closed his eyes.
He's still Sonic, he thought. Underneath all the bad writing, he's still Sonic. I just need to keep reminding him.
He opened his eyes. He looked at Rouge.
Rouge looked at him. She was smiling. Not the smirk—the smile. The real one. The one that did something complicated and warm to the chaos energy inside his chest.
"That was sweet," she said.
"It was tactical."
"It was sweet."
"Rouge."
"Shadow."
"Are you coming?"
Her smile widened. She stepped closer—closer—until she was in his space again, close enough that the heat of her radiated against his chest, close enough that he could see the individual lashes framing those teal eyes, close enough that her absolutely impossible figure entered his peripheral vision like a landscape entering the frame of a camera and he had to actively, consciously, deliberately keep his gaze locked on her face.
"Always," she said.
And then she launched herself skyward with a powerful downstroke of her wings, her silhouette framed against the sun for one brief, devastating moment before she angled north and soared after Sonic's fading contrail.
Marcus stood alone on the ridge for approximately two seconds.
I am the Ultimate Lifeform, he reminded himself. I have fought gods. I have survived reentry. I have Chaos Control. I will not be distracted by—
He activated his hover shoes and rocketed north.
The Moto Bugs were exactly where Marcus had known they would be.
He'd known because he remembered. Not Shadow's memories—those were there too, buried deep in his subconscious like files in a hard drive he hadn't fully accessed yet—but Marcus's memories. His encyclopedic, obsessive, twenty-six-years-of-fandom knowledge of Sonic the Hedgehog in all his forms, all his continuities, all his adventures.
He knew the IDW timeline. He knew what was coming. He knew the Moto Bugs were the opening act—the first sign that Eggman's war machine, while defeated, hadn't been dismantled. Scattered Badnik forces, operating on their last received orders, continuing to patrol and terrorize and attack long after the war that created them had ended.
In the original IDW run, this had been a relatively low-stakes sequence. Sonic shows up, smashes some robots, makes some quips, moves on. It was setup. Prologue. The mechanical equivalent of a cold open before the title card.
But Marcus—Shadow—was here now. And he intended to make it mean something.
They found the first cluster of Moto Bugs in a narrow valley between two of the larger hills, about four miles north of the ridge. A dozen of the ladybug-shaped robots were rolling in a loose formation along the valley floor, their simple programming driving them forward on an endless patrol route toward a cluster of farming settlements visible in the distance.
Sonic was already there.
He'd arrived first, obviously—he was faster on the ground than Shadow was in the air, and Marcus wasn't about to engage in a speed competition that he (as Shadow) would lose. The blue hedgehog was perched on a boulder at the valley's entrance, legs dangling, watching the Moto Bugs approach with the casual interest of a cat watching a line of ants.
"Twelve," Sonic reported as Marcus and Rouge arrived. "Standard Moto Bug configuration. No modifications, no upgrades. Easy pickings." He cracked his knuckles. "Watch and learn, Shads."
"Don't call me—"
Sonic launched himself at the Moto Bugs.
And he was—Marcus had to admit it—he was good. Even filtered through IDW's writing, even softened by a characterization that didn't fully grasp his depth, Sonic the Hedgehog in combat was a thing of beauty. He moved like water given velocity, like thought given form, each attack flowing into the next with a fluidity that made the individual motions invisible—you didn't see the spin dash, you saw the result of the spin dash. Moto Bug parts fountaining into the air. A flash of blue. Another explosion of shrapnel. Two more, three more, Sonic bouncing between them like a pinball made of righteous fury and excellent hair product.
He took out eight of the twelve in roughly four seconds.
The remaining four, their rudimentary survival programming kicking in too late, attempted to scatter.
Marcus moved.
He didn't think about it. He didn't plan it. His body—Shadow's body, with its century of combat experience encoded into every fiber—simply acted. One moment he was standing at the valley's entrance; the next he was among the fleeing Moto Bugs, and the moment after that, the Moto Bugs were no longer fleeing because they were no longer anything.
He took the first one with a Chaos Spear—a lance of golden energy that materialized in his palm and struck the robot dead center, detonating it into a shower of sparks and twisted metal. The second he caught with a spinning axe kick that cleaved it clean in half, each piece tumbling in opposite directions trailing wires and coolant. The third he grabbed by its antenna, swung it into the fourth with enough force to reduce both to a compressed cube of scrap metal, and released the resultant debris with a contemptuous flick of his wrist.
It took less than two seconds.
Marcus stood among the wreckage, smoke curling around his hover shoes, chaos energy still crackling faintly along his fingertips. The inhibitor rings on his wrists hummed with contained power, warm and heavy and satisfying.
That felt incredible.
That felt more incredible than anything Marcus had ever experienced in his entire human life. Not just the speed, not just the power—the precision. The knowledge that his body was a weapon and he was its master. The certainty that between the chaos energy in his veins and the skill in his muscles, there was nothing in this world he couldn't face.
He understood, in that moment, why Shadow was the way he was. Not the IDW version—the real Shadow, the game Shadow. The one who'd been created to be the Ultimate Lifeform and had spent fifty years trying to figure out what that meant. It wasn't arrogance. It wasn't edginess. It was the simple, overwhelming truth that when you were this powerful, the hardest thing in the world wasn't fighting—it was finding reasons not to.
Maria had given him that reason.
And now Marcus—carrying Maria's memory like a torch in the darkness of Shadow's soul—understood why it mattered.
"Okay," Sonic said, appearing beside him in a blur of blue. He was staring at the compressed cube of Moto Bug. "Okay, that was pretty cool. I'm not going to say it was cooler than what I did, because we both know that's physically impossible, but it was... adjacent. Cool-adjacent."
"Hmph." Marcus crossed his arms. But the corners of his mouth twitched, just slightly, in a way that Shadow almost never allowed and that meant more than a full smile from anyone else.
Sonic caught it. His green eyes widened fractionally. "Did you just almost smile?"
"No."
"You did. You almost smiled. Rouge! Rouge, did you see—"
"I saw," Rouge called from above, circling lazily on a thermal updraft with her wings spread wide, her silhouette against the sky managing to be simultaneously majestic and deeply distracting due to the aerodynamic impossibility of her proportions achieving stable flight. "I have photographic evidence. It's going in the scrapbook."
"There is no scrapbook," Marcus said.
"There is absolutely a scrapbook," Rouge said, descending in a slow spiral that gave Marcus entirely too much time to observe the physics-defying interplay between gravity and her figure. She landed beside him with that characteristic click of boots, and her hand found his arm—casual, proprietary, warm—and rested there as though it belonged. "I started it after the ARK. Page one is you unconscious in a GUN medical bay. It's adorable. You're drooling."
"I don't drool."
"The photographic evidence suggests otherwise."
Sonic was watching this exchange with an expression that Marcus could only describe as delighted bewilderment, like a man witnessing a nature documentary about a species he'd thought was extinct.
"You two are weird," Sonic said. "Good weird. Definitely good weird. But weird."
Marcus turned to face Sonic fully, gently—but not too gently, because Shadow didn't do gently—disengaging his arm from Rouge's grip.
"There are more settlements ahead," he said. "The farming communities in the eastern valley. The port town on the coast. The mountain village near the old ruins." He paused. "I know you were going to hit them all eventually. But 'eventually' isn't good enough when people are in danger. We need to be systematic."
"Systematic," Sonic repeated, and for a moment Marcus braced for pushback, for the IDW Sonic who resisted structure like a cat resisted bathwater.
But Sonic surprised him.
"Yeah," Sonic said slowly. "Yeah, okay. Systematic. I can do systematic." He rubbed the back of his head. "Tails has been bugging me about setting up some kind of communication network between the settlements. Coordination, supply lines, that kind of stuff. I've been... I dunno, I figured I'd get to it."
"Get to it now," Marcus said. "Call Tails. Call Amy. Call Knuckles if you can get him off his island." Though knowing Knuckles, he'd leave the Master Emerald unguarded to help, and then be surprised when someone tried to steal it. Again. "You have allies, Sonic. You have a team. The war proved that. Stop acting like you're the only one who can make a difference and start acting like the leader they already think you are."
The words hung in the air between them. Heavy. True. Uncomfortably earnest for a conversation between two hedgehogs standing in a field of robot debris.
Sonic looked at him for a long time.
"You know," Sonic said quietly, "you've never talked to me like this before."
"Like what?"
"Like you actually give a damn."
Marcus held his gaze. "I've always given a damn. I just—" hadn't been written to show it. He caught himself, redirecting. "—haven't always been good at showing it."
Another silence. The wind picked up, carrying the distant sounds of birdsong and the faint mechanical buzzing of more Badniks somewhere over the next hill. More work to do. More people to protect. More of this broken world to fix, one village, one robot, one conversation at a time.
"Alright," Sonic said. He clapped his hands together, and the sound was like a starting pistol. "Alright! New plan. We hit the farming settlements first—they're the most vulnerable, least defended. Then the port town, then the mountain village. I'll call Tails en route, get him started on the comms thing. Amy's probably already organizing relief efforts because Amy's Amy. And Knuckles..." He paused. "Actually, Knuckles might be a hard sell."
"Tell him someone's trying to steal the Master Emerald."
"That's... that's lying."
"Tell him someone might be trying to steal the Master Emerald. There are Badnik remnants operating unsupervised across the entire region. It's not impossible that one of them could reach Angel Island."
Sonic stared at him. Then he laughed—a genuine, full-body, head-thrown-back laugh that rang across the valley like a bell and made something warm and unexpected bloom in Marcus's chest.
"Shadow," Sonic said, wiping his eye, "that is the most devious, underhanded, brilliant thing you've ever said, and I am one hundred percent doing it."
"Hmph."
"There's the 'hmph'! I missed the 'hmph.' The 'hmph' is the foundation of our entire relationship."
"We don't have a relationship."
"We absolutely have a relationship. It's called 'rivals who secretly respect each other but would rather eat one of Eggman's robots than admit it out loud.' It's very popular. I think there's a fan club."
Marcus turned away to hide the fact that his mouth was twitching again. "We're wasting time. Move."
"Sir yes sir!" Sonic snapped a sarcastic salute, and then he was gone—a blue streak heading northeast toward the farming settlements, fast enough to leave a visible wake in the tall grass behind him.
But before he vanished entirely, he glanced back over his shoulder. Just for a moment. Just long enough to catch Marcus's eye.
And he grinned.
The real grin. Again. Brighter this time. Steadier. Like a signal fire being fed fresh fuel.
There you are, Marcus thought, watching the blue blur disappear over the hilltop. There's the real Sonic. I knew you were in there.
Rouge appeared at his side. Because Rouge always appeared at his side. It was a law of nature, like thermodynamics or the inevitability of Eggman's defeat. She stood close—so close, always so close—and her arm brushed against his, and the contact sent a cascade of warmth through his fur that he absolutely refused to acknowledge.
"You're different," she said. Not accusatory. Not suspicious. Just... observational. The way a jewel thief might observe a new security system—with professional interest and a hint of admiration.
"I'm the same as I've always been," Marcus said.
"No." She turned to face him, and her teal eyes were sharp and searching and beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with her impossible IDW proportions and everything to do with the intelligence and warmth and quiet, fierce loyalty behind them. "You're not. You're... more. More present. More engaged. More..." She searched for the word. "...you."
Marcus met her gaze. "Maybe I'm finally remembering who that is."
Rouge studied him for another moment. Then she reached out and placed her palm flat against his chest, right over the white tuft of fur, right over where his heart was. Her glove was warm. Her touch was light. The gesture was intimate in a way that transcended the physical, that spoke to years—decades—of partnership and trust and something deeper that neither of them had ever named.
"Good," she said softly. "I like this version."
She pulled her hand back, turned, and launched herself into the sky with a powerful beat of her wings, soaring after Sonic's contrail.
Marcus watched her go.
I like this version too, he thought.
He activated his hover shoes.
He had a world to fix. A cast of characters to remind who they actually were. An entire comic book continuity to drag, kicking and screaming, back to something that actually felt like Sonic.
And if he had to do it while surrounded by inexplicably, unreasonably, architecturally thicc women who seemed constitutionally incapable of maintaining a professional distance from him—
Well.
He was the Ultimate Lifeform.
He could handle it.
Probably.
The hover shoes ignited, and Shadow the Hedgehog streaked north, a crimson-and-black comet chasing a blue one across the sky, and for the first time since Marcus had died at his keyboard with forty-seven downvotes and a Monster Energy can, he felt something that might have been hope.
The Moto Bug wreckage smoldered behind him.
The wind tasted like freedom.
And somewhere, in the narrative framework of the IDW Sonic universe, a story that had lost its way began—slowly, tentatively, like a compass needle finding north—to remember what it was supposed to be.
END OF CHAPTER 2