Chapter Text
Shadow the Hedgehog hated Osea's sky tonight; it had his anger.
The Shadow Jet fought for altitude by the inch and lost it by the yard. The canopy had gone blank. Rivulets ran vertical on the glass. The instruments disagreed with each other and themselves: six thousand feet, then five, then six again, the needle indecisive. Lightning no longer struck. Now it dwelt.
Shadow had dropkicked gods and devils. He had ridden the shockwave of an orbital cannon, and he had torn reality open with two words. A thunderstorm should not have been giving him this much trouble.
He stopped fighting it. He banked the way the storm was already turning, and the storm hushed, and he broke out under the cloud-base with Osea below him.
The city glowed in electric veins across a dozen islands, maybe more. Karst towers stood out of the sea in scattered clusters, limestone worn smooth by peaceful centuries of tide and typhoon, and the Oseans had built their city into, around, and on top of them. Bridges stitched the islands together in corkscrews and loop-de-loops, spiteful to cars. Cable cars hung motionless on their lines. Strung between shutters, laundry filled and emptied with the gusts, a hillside breathing. Down the commercial terraces the evening lights were coming on, gold and neon against a dark that had arrived hours early.
Maria would have loved to see it with him.
Now emergency lights strobed across the hilltop districts. Fires burned in three places he could count. Smoke came off them already shredded, spent before it could rise. The rail lines hung dark but not empty. And above the bay, the storm had opened an eye.
Shadow pulled back on the yoke and pressed the button shaped like his quills. A hiss above his ears; water bled through the canopy seam and ran down the inside of the glass. Outside, St. Elmo's fire took the length of the fuselage and burned there without burning it, greening the letters of his own name along the nose. He pressed the button again, then again, again— the roof would not lift past the seam.
From his wrist, a man's voice. "Agent Shadow, confirm visual on Osea Bay," said Commander Abraham Towers.
"Confirmed." His eyes tracked the spiral overhead, tightening toward a point above the bay, toward a circle of steel spangled with navigation lights: the GUN base, stretched between the seven largest karsts off the shore. "When did it open?"
"Ninety-four minutes ago." The radio crackled. A funnel cloud swallowed the nose of the aircraft, and for three seconds there was nothing but gray and the shriek of wind shear, the jet airframe groaning beneath. Shadow rolled out of it. "Reports from agents in the city have confirmed entities at multiple points. Visual profile matches Black Arms, but—"
"It's not him."
A pause. Then, "Clarify."
"I'd know."
Another pause. "Understood."
Black Doom had come out of the nadir of the universe, and dying had not made him leave. Shadows die with the body that casts them; what Doom had left in the dark rooms of him had outlived its body. Not shadows. Ghosts.
Yet the whispers had gone quiet after the Time Eater. If the Black Arms had returned, why hadn't the screaming?
The screaming arrived after all— from his wrist.
"Commander, report!"
Pops and explosions where Towers' voice had been. The line died and rebooted in two crashes of static. "—eryone alright?! There's been an attack on our position — situation here is under control, don't bother with us. The Chaos Emerald at the Osea Bay installation is under assault and our forces are spread too thin to engage. Your primary objective—"
"I know my objective."
Shadow punched the canopy open. Wind and rain took the cockpit in one gust. Below, the eye kept its spiral, wide and patient.
'Five minutes.'
He stood up on the edge of his own name, looked down the electric veins bleeding smoke, and stepped off into the dark.
