HOME | DD

Description
This is a novelization of one of the final boss battles in Shadow the Hedgehog. I do not own Shadow, Sonic, or any of the characters mentioned below, all rights belong to SEGA, etc etc...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Music: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdehxN…
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As Shadow the Hedgehog and E-123 Omega tore into the core of the Lava Shelter, they halted for an instant in confusion.

The heart of the base – or at least, the room in which they’d assumed was the heart – was an immense, steely, circular track built upon the magma itself, with a single, searing metal platform in the center. The room rippled and wavered with the scorching heat.

Upon the track, directly in front of them, was seated the target of their aggressions.

Dr. Eggman was seated inside a truly bizarre contraption, a great orange monstrosity that towered over even Omega. It was vaguely ball-shaped, and supported by four long, spindly legs that extended, spider-like, from the sides of the machine to the ground, each limb resting atop a relatively small, orange wheel. The front of the mech was decorated with three plain green panels, set side-by-side, in a pattern that reminded Shadow of something distinctive, though he couldn’t quite place it. Above those panels lurked a great steel pattern of cold metal eyeglasses, a great protruding nose, and a flat ersatz moustache, aping the Doctor’s trademark design choice.

Shadow almost smirked at the bizarre design, but his eyes were wary. As bizarre as the machine appeared, he felt the Chaos emeralds he now carried exchanging their swirling chaos energy with the form of the Egg Dealer… and more importantly, the Chaos emerald that lay within it, no doubt protected from outside influence by some defensive mechanism of Eggman’s own design.

The Doctor himself sat in a cockpit on the top of the machine, grinning evilly down at them both.

“Nice to see you, Shadow Android… and you too, Omega. It certainly looks as if you’ve… well, done quite a bit of damage down there. But did you really think YOU could challenge ME?”

Omega was the first to react; his strident, mechanical voice thundered fearlessly across the room. “Doctor Eggman!” echoed the voice; “I will destroy you, and reign supreme!”

“Yes, Doctor.” growled Shadow. “You will regret ever having created me… you’re going straight to Hell!”

Dr. Eggman’s moustache bristled in ferocious indignation. “Why you little… you’re nothing but pieces of scrap metal! Once I’m done with you, you’ll be thrown in the junkyard! You will feel my wrath!”

The great machine reared for an instant, its great gangly legs clawing viciously at the heat all around, and then slammed into the floor in front of them. Shadow and Omega crouched down for an instant as the metal beneath their feet buckled and flexed from the stupendous weight. The immense machine loomed over them both, its obese pilot snarling ferociously as he spat out his ultimatum to them both:

“I’ll turn both of you into scrap with my latest and greatest invention!”

Omega’s great ironclad arms rattled and clanked as untold sums of ammunition brought themselves to bear, aching to tear his foe to ribbons, waiting for the command to lance out from his central processor…

“Final target confirmed. Commencing combat!”

Shadow, for his part said absolutely nothing as the Egg Dealer began to move once more… but blinked in surprise as the tremendous mech began to roll away from them along the steel track at an astonishing clip, the three panels in the cockpit beginning to shift, forming into another picture even as Shadow watched…

Both the hedgehog and the robot darted after the Egg Dealer, Omega’s thrusters sending him flying along right alongside Shadow. Shadow squinted at the machine up ahead, wondering what it was attempting with its movements…

…and then he got it, but Omega was already speaking by the time he’d turned to face the robot. “Target’s design is meant to emulate a slot machine. If all three slots are allowed to align, an attack will be launched immediately.”

“Good to know, but it’s a bit late for that!” growled Shadow.

“Get ready for a real blast!” boomed Eggman from up ahead. “It’s time for Missile Fever!”

With these words, a pair of immense, squared launchers roared out of the sides of the Egg Dealer, and a tremendous blast echoed across the room as the missiles roared off to seek out their targets…

…but Shadow and Omega were simply too swift for such mundane weaponry, as they’d already proven time and again. The missiles slammed into the walls of the room several yards behind them, warping and twisting the magma-forged metal alloys into slag as Shadow and Omega raced along after the Egg Dealer. Shadow frowned – the mech’s cockpit was too high for a direct assault, and the legs and wheels were moving too swiftly to accurately judge a rebound off of them… and to make matters worse, the thing was already lining up a second trio of images. These looked vaguely familiar, though the machine was moving too swiftly, and Shadow was too far away to see what it was meant to represent… but it was too late. The missiles were gone, but the Egg Dealer was already preparing to level something else…

“Pawn Fever! Prepare to be skewered!” cackled Eggman.

Oh. That’s what the pictures were.

A number of loud clangs reached Shadow’s ears (and Omega’s audioreceptors) as half-a-dozen Egg Pawns crashed onto the steel before them. As one, they turned towards Shadow and Omega, leveled their razor-tipped lances, and charged, the steel trembling beneath their approaching footsteps…

An instant later, six rapidly dissipating fireballs and a cloud of scrap metal skittering into the magma heralded the unhindered approach of Shadow and Omega. The former’s eyes scanned the Egg Dealer for any signs of weakness, and his eyes settled on the great spinning images in the heart of the machine…

What would happen if he were to disrupt those images?

Shadow leapt high, and his foot lashed out to slam into the middle image on the Egg Dealer – the one on the left had already slid down to reveal a strange trio of orbs, nestled together with an unnerving appearance of innocence. There was a sudden crack as the image kept trying to slide down into the machine… Shadow had a sudden, awful mental impression of his shoes getting yanked into the immense machine, followed by the rest of his body, to be ground into a vile paste… but then it stopped, and Shadow yanked his shoe out, dropping to the ground with his characteristic light-footed ease.

“Bah!” spat Eggman. “Don’t think that you stand a chance against me!” and the machine sped away over the steel floor as Shadow and Omega gave chase once more.

Omega’s right arm ascended into the air, and a sudden flurry of homing missiles spewed forth from the mighty robot’s arms, to needle in on Eggman’s cockpit like a flurry of mad hornets. For an instant, the machine was obscured in a flash of fire and smoke as the whole room seemed to tremble from the force of the blast…

…and then the Egg Dealer shot obstinately out of the cloud, Eggman cackling madly away in the cockpit. A handful of dents in the crimson hull of the machine were all Omega’s weaponry had managed to achieve.

A loud, disturbingly cheery tone reached Shadow’s ears, followed by Eggman’s booming voice.

“Now it’s time for Bomb Fever! Get ready to be blasted into oblivion!” he bawled. A thin stream of deceptively small orbs rolled out of the back of the machine as it blazed across the steel…

…and an instant later, Shadow and Omega were surrounded by raw destruction.

Shadow’s skin flexed and rippled from the force of the blasts, the raw heat singed the tips of his fur. He saw Omega was having a much harder time dodging the blasts, he wasn’t sure whether the spectacular leaps the robot was performing came from preprogrammed skill or the kinetic energy of the bombs propelling his nigh-impenetrable frame forward. At any rate, he had no time to worry about Omega; his own body was far less resistant to the power of the weapons leveled at him, and his only choice was to dodge, evade, leap high, and dodge again as one explosion after another bloomed fearlessly around him…

…and then he was in the clear, the fireballs were fading away behind him, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw a mildly singed Omega roar out of the dying smoke like a juggernaut.

The Egg Dealer was still racing along up ahead, but Shadow had a plan this time. His eyes watched as the panels slid around and around, and without thinking or planning, he leapt high… slammed into the first panel… and thumped back down to the ground, a cold smirk splitting his muzzle as the image of launching missiles snapped into place up ahead. If he was right about this…

Eggman frowned as the second panel snapped into place on its own, and then froze in horror for a moment as the final panel clicked down after it. He turned back to the control panel of the Egg Dealer, frantically keying in one command after another, but he was already too late. Shadow lunged towards the third panel, and slammed home into it just as the missile icon appeared once more.

The launchers snapped into place alongside the giant machine once more, but Shadow saw something new this time: a laser sight that seemed unsure as to where to go for an instant… and then pointed itself at the cockpit of the Egg Dealer.

“What? W-wait! Abort launch!” gasped Eggman, but it was already too late. Confused by the glitch in its system, the Egg Dealer fired another salvo of missiles. These were substantially more powerful than Omega’s weaponry, he knew, and the evil scientist cringed for an instant, awaiting the inevitable.

As one, the missiles launched away, curving about the Egg Dealer’s hull before slamming home into the giant’s undercarriage with a spectacular roar of power.

Shadow blanched in astonishment as the mech rocketed out of the smoke, and then almost smiled. The underside of the machine was pockmarked with a half-dozen massive dents, some of which seemed to be dripping with sparks. The Egg Dealer had been damaged, though it was still moving, still dangerous… and Eggman knew it. He shook his white-gloved fist at the hedgehog, a cold sneer on his lips. “Oh, that’s it! Now you’ve asked for it!” he barked.

Yet, Shadow already knew what to do again. He grinned sideways at Omega before bounding high into the air to strike at the massive machine once more. The bombs appeared in the slot machine as he struck at it once more… (“Ah, hey!” snapped Eggman), twice… (“Stop that!”) and then a final time. The mad genius’s face turned pale once more. The Egg Dealer halted abruptly, and then the back two legs slipped apart. The immense mech suddenly collapsed on its face with a tremendous crash that would have been comical, had nobody known what was to come next.

Eggman’s voice thundered out from the cockpit once more. “Gah! No! Don’t drop them here!” he wailed, but it was too little, too late. As Shadow sped away from the downed machine, a single bomb slid out of a hatch in the back of the Egg Dealer…

Shadow grimaced as the force of the explosion sent him to his knees. When he turned back, he was astonished to see the mech hurtling away once more, its barely-dented legs carrying the warped and burned cockpit within which the singed – but very much alive – Eggman was still moving, still piloting his brainchild, still hell-bent on destroying both his foes.

Shadow rocketed up to the spinning panels once again, and one, two, three, they fell before him… but it wasn’t until he’d dropped to the ground and glanced up once more that he saw the icons of his own silhouette upon the Egg Dealer’s face.

“N-no! Not Shadow Fever!” moaned Eggman.

Shadow blinked in surprise. He would never know the truth of why Eggman had this feature programmed into his machine – never know of the incomplete program designed to summon a horde of Shadow Androids as a trump card, never know that the Shadow Androids fed off negative Chaos energy… which the damaged Egg Dealer was now extracting from the Chaos emerald within its core, and never know why it was now sending that same energy coursing through the nearest Shadow Android template it could find – Shadow’s own body…

But he did know that his body was now coursing with the power of negative Chaos, and he grinned icily up at the trembling Eggman.

“Death to all who oppose me!”

He leapt high…

“Chaos…”

…Eggman whimpered, and covered his eyes…

“…BLAST!”

…and the world exploded.

As the crimson radiance dissipated, Shadow was astonished to see the Egg Dealer stubbornly standing before him… but only for an instant. Smoke was leaking from the monstrous machine’s sides, countless dents and tears in the hull gaped wide to reveal flames licking at smoking, melted wires, and the mech was swaying on its feet…

“Wh-what?! N-no! This… can’t be…! Gaaaah!” moaned Eggman…

And then the Egg Dealer collapsed on the steel floor with a spectacular crash, its useless legs stirring feebly for a moment before falling still forever.

“Sorry, doctor, but this is the end for you!” hissed Shadow.

His hand extended towards the Egg Dealer, and he felt the Chaos energy swirling about him, surrounding everything in the room as he silently concentrated on the Chaos emerald within the machine… and Omega clanked up behind him just as the crimson Chaos emerald silently floated out of Eggman’s shattered mech.

Shadow gazed pensively as the seven jewels of unlimited power rose around him one after another, circling his triumphant form, heralding the power of their new master…

“Finally, I’ve got ALL the Chaos emeralds!” he whispered.

There was a low crash from within the Egg Dealer’s cockpit, and to nobody’s surprise, a crimson form in a familiar military jacket flopped limply out of the machine. One thin arm grasped the floor, dragging his body forward, and then another. Eggman seemed badly injured; there seemed to be no escape plan for him this time, no last-second race away to someplace he could plot revenge… the combined forces of the Black Arms, G.U.N., and those damned animals had finally used up all of his ingenuity, resources, and cunning, and this was merely the final blow in a long, slow war of attrition.

Crawling in agony towards the agent of his defeat, Dr. Eggman glared defiantly at his foe from behind his cracked spectacles. A cold, hate-filled voice oozed from between his broken teeth, and one hand balled furiously into a fist.

“I made you… and this is how you repay me?” he snarled.

Shadow glanced up at the Chaos emeralds surrounding him, his eyes far away. Omega quietly stood beside Shadow, deferring to another for once, as his respect for the one who had finally eliminated his despised creator held his expanse of ammunition in check.

Shadow, for his part, had finally had his epiphany. Whether he was the real Shadow or not didn’t matter, after all. He had just single-handedly eliminated a threat to the world that years of struggle and hardship had never tamed… At one point, he had known nothing about his past, and now that he had something to know, to fight for and claim for his own… it didn’t matter if he was Shadow or a mechanical copy. He was what he was. There was nothing to debate, or worry about, or second-guess.

He was free.

Finally, Shadow turned back to Eggman, and spoke again.

“I am Shadow Android, the Ultimate Battle Life-Form created by Eggman. You may have created me, doctor, but I will now lead this empire, and androids will rule! This is WHO I AM!”

For an instant, Eggman’s expression changed. His eyes widened, and his lips parted, as though he was about to say something, but then Omega’s voice cut through the silence with merciless volume…

“Eggman… target acquired… locked and loaded… FIRE!”

“What?!”

“Goodbye, Doctor!” hissed Shadow, and his hand thundered down on Eggman’s collar like a thunderbolt.

“NOOOOOOO!”

For one sick, hideous instant, Eggman felt an impossible, searing pain as his neck snapped like a dry twig…

And then black silence consumed his mind, and he felt nothing at all.

Description
This is a novelization of one of the final boss battles in Shadow the Hedgehog. I do not own Shadow, Sonic, or any of the characters mentioned below, all rights belong to SEGA, etc etc...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Music: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdehxN…
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As Shadow the Hedgehog and E-123 Omega tore into the core of the Lava Shelter, they halted for an instant in confusion.

The heart of the base – or at least, the room in which they’d assumed was the heart – was an immense, steely, circular track built upon the magma itself, with a single, searing metal platform in the center. The room rippled and wavered with the scorching heat.

Upon the track, directly in front of them, was seated the target of their aggressions.

Dr. Eggman was seated inside a truly bizarre contraption, a great orange monstrosity that towered over even Omega. It was vaguely ball-shaped, and supported by four long, spindly legs that extended, spider-like, from the sides of the machine to the ground, each limb resting atop a relatively small, orange wheel. The front of the mech was decorated with three plain green panels, set side-by-side, in a pattern that reminded Shadow of something distinctive, though he couldn’t quite place it. Above those panels lurked a great steel pattern of cold metal eyeglasses, a great protruding nose, and a flat ersatz moustache, aping the Doctor’s trademark design choice.

Shadow almost smirked at the bizarre design, but his eyes were wary. As bizarre as the machine appeared, he felt the Chaos emeralds he now carried exchanging their swirling chaos energy with the form of the Egg Dealer… and more importantly, the Chaos emerald that lay within it, no doubt protected from outside influence by some defensive mechanism of Eggman’s own design.

The Doctor himself sat in a cockpit on the top of the machine, grinning evilly down at them both.

“Nice to see you, Shadow Android… and you too, Omega. It certainly looks as if you’ve… well, done quite a bit of damage down there. But did you really think YOU could challenge ME?”

Omega was the first to react; his strident, mechanical voice thundered fearlessly across the room. “Doctor Eggman!” echoed the voice; “I will destroy you, and reign supreme!”

“Yes, Doctor.” growled Shadow. “You will regret ever having created me… you’re going straight to Hell!”

Dr. Eggman’s moustache bristled in ferocious indignation. “Why you little… you’re nothing but pieces of scrap metal! Once I’m done with you, you’ll be thrown in the junkyard! You will feel my wrath!”

The great machine reared for an instant, its great gangly legs clawing viciously at the heat all around, and then slammed into the floor in front of them. Shadow and Omega crouched down for an instant as the metal beneath their feet buckled and flexed from the stupendous weight. The immense machine loomed over them both, its obese pilot snarling ferociously as he spat out his ultimatum to them both:

“I’ll turn both of you into scrap with my latest and greatest invention!”

Omega’s great ironclad arms rattled and clanked as untold sums of ammunition brought themselves to bear, aching to tear his foe to ribbons, waiting for the command to lance out from his central processor…

“Final target confirmed. Commencing combat!”

Shadow, for his part said absolutely nothing as the Egg Dealer began to move once more… but blinked in surprise as the tremendous mech began to roll away from them along the steel track at an astonishing clip, the three panels in the cockpit beginning to shift, forming into another picture even as Shadow watched…

Both the hedgehog and the robot darted after the Egg Dealer, Omega’s thrusters sending him flying along right alongside Shadow. Shadow squinted at the machine up ahead, wondering what it was attempting with its movements…

…and then he got it, but Omega was already speaking by the time he’d turned to face the robot. “Target’s design is meant to emulate a slot machine. If all three slots are allowed to align, an attack will be launched immediately.”

“Good to know, but it’s a bit late for that!” growled Shadow.

“Get ready for a real blast!” boomed Eggman from up ahead. “It’s time for Missile Fever!”

With these words, a pair of immense, squared launchers roared out of the sides of the Egg Dealer, and a tremendous blast echoed across the room as the missiles roared off to seek out their targets…

…but Shadow and Omega were simply too swift for such mundane weaponry, as they’d already proven time and again. The missiles slammed into the walls of the room several yards behind them, warping and twisting the magma-forged metal alloys into slag as Shadow and Omega raced along after the Egg Dealer. Shadow frowned – the mech’s cockpit was too high for a direct assault, and the legs and wheels were moving too swiftly to accurately judge a rebound off of them… and to make matters worse, the thing was already lining up a second trio of images. These looked vaguely familiar, though the machine was moving too swiftly, and Shadow was too far away to see what it was meant to represent… but it was too late. The missiles were gone, but the Egg Dealer was already preparing to level something else…

“Pawn Fever! Prepare to be skewered!” cackled Eggman.

Oh. That’s what the pictures were.

A number of loud clangs reached Shadow’s ears (and Omega’s audioreceptors) as half-a-dozen Egg Pawns crashed onto the steel before them. As one, they turned towards Shadow and Omega, leveled their razor-tipped lances, and charged, the steel trembling beneath their approaching footsteps…

An instant later, six rapidly dissipating fireballs and a cloud of scrap metal skittering into the magma heralded the unhindered approach of Shadow and Omega. The former’s eyes scanned the Egg Dealer for any signs of weakness, and his eyes settled on the great spinning images in the heart of the machine…

What would happen if he were to disrupt those images?

Shadow leapt high, and his foot lashed out to slam into the middle image on the Egg Dealer – the one on the left had already slid down to reveal a strange trio of orbs, nestled together with an unnerving appearance of innocence. There was a sudden crack as the image kept trying to slide down into the machine… Shadow had a sudden, awful mental impression of his shoes getting yanked into the immense machine, followed by the rest of his body, to be ground into a vile paste… but then it stopped, and Shadow yanked his shoe out, dropping to the ground with his characteristic light-footed ease.

“Bah!” spat Eggman. “Don’t think that you stand a chance against me!” and the machine sped away over the steel floor as Shadow and Omega gave chase once more.

Omega’s right arm ascended into the air, and a sudden flurry of homing missiles spewed forth from the mighty robot’s arms, to needle in on Eggman’s cockpit like a flurry of mad hornets. For an instant, the machine was obscured in a flash of fire and smoke as the whole room seemed to tremble from the force of the blast…

…and then the Egg Dealer shot obstinately out of the cloud, Eggman cackling madly away in the cockpit. A handful of dents in the crimson hull of the machine were all Omega’s weaponry had managed to achieve.

A loud, disturbingly cheery tone reached Shadow’s ears, followed by Eggman’s booming voice.

“Now it’s time for Bomb Fever! Get ready to be blasted into oblivion!” he bawled. A thin stream of deceptively small orbs rolled out of the back of the machine as it blazed across the steel…

…and an instant later, Shadow and Omega were surrounded by raw destruction.

Shadow’s skin flexed and rippled from the force of the blasts, the raw heat singed the tips of his fur. He saw Omega was having a much harder time dodging the blasts, he wasn’t sure whether the spectacular leaps the robot was performing came from preprogrammed skill or the kinetic energy of the bombs propelling his nigh-impenetrable frame forward. At any rate, he had no time to worry about Omega; his own body was far less resistant to the power of the weapons leveled at him, and his only choice was to dodge, evade, leap high, and dodge again as one explosion after another bloomed fearlessly around him…

…and then he was in the clear, the fireballs were fading away behind him, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw a mildly singed Omega roar out of the dying smoke like a juggernaut.

The Egg Dealer was still racing along up ahead, but Shadow had a plan this time. His eyes watched as the panels slid around and around, and without thinking or planning, he leapt high… slammed into the first panel… and thumped back down to the ground, a cold smirk splitting his muzzle as the image of launching missiles snapped into place up ahead. If he was right about this…

Eggman frowned as the second panel snapped into place on its own, and then froze in horror for a moment as the final panel clicked down after it. He turned back to the control panel of the Egg Dealer, frantically keying in one command after another, but he was already too late. Shadow lunged towards the third panel, and slammed home into it just as the missile icon appeared once more.

The launchers snapped into place alongside the giant machine once more, but Shadow saw something new this time: a laser sight that seemed unsure as to where to go for an instant… and then pointed itself at the cockpit of the Egg Dealer.

“What? W-wait! Abort launch!” gasped Eggman, but it was already too late. Confused by the glitch in its system, the Egg Dealer fired another salvo of missiles. These were substantially more powerful than Omega’s weaponry, he knew, and the evil scientist cringed for an instant, awaiting the inevitable.

As one, the missiles launched away, curving about the Egg Dealer’s hull before slamming home into the giant’s undercarriage with a spectacular roar of power.

Shadow blanched in astonishment as the mech rocketed out of the smoke, and then almost smiled. The underside of the machine was pockmarked with a half-dozen massive dents, some of which seemed to be dripping with sparks. The Egg Dealer had been damaged, though it was still moving, still dangerous… and Eggman knew it. He shook his white-gloved fist at the hedgehog, a cold sneer on his lips. “Oh, that’s it! Now you’ve asked for it!” he barked.

Yet, Shadow already knew what to do again. He grinned sideways at Omega before bounding high into the air to strike at the massive machine once more. The bombs appeared in the slot machine as he struck at it once more… (“Ah, hey!” snapped Eggman), twice… (“Stop that!”) and then a final time. The mad genius’s face turned pale once more. The Egg Dealer halted abruptly, and then the back two legs slipped apart. The immense mech suddenly collapsed on its face with a tremendous crash that would have been comical, had nobody known what was to come next.

Eggman’s voice thundered out from the cockpit once more. “Gah! No! Don’t drop them here!” he wailed, but it was too little, too late. As Shadow sped away from the downed machine, a single bomb slid out of a hatch in the back of the Egg Dealer…

Shadow grimaced as the force of the explosion sent him to his knees. When he turned back, he was astonished to see the mech hurtling away once more, its barely-dented legs carrying the warped and burned cockpit within which the singed – but very much alive – Eggman was still moving, still piloting his brainchild, still hell-bent on destroying both his foes.

Shadow rocketed up to the spinning panels once again, and one, two, three, they fell before him… but it wasn’t until he’d dropped to the ground and glanced up once more that he saw the icons of his own silhouette upon the Egg Dealer’s face.

“N-no! Not Shadow Fever!” moaned Eggman.

Shadow blinked in surprise. He would never know the truth of why Eggman had this feature programmed into his machine – never know of the incomplete program designed to summon a horde of Shadow Androids as a trump card, never know that the Shadow Androids fed off negative Chaos energy… which the damaged Egg Dealer was now extracting from the Chaos emerald within its core, and never know why it was now sending that same energy coursing through the nearest Shadow Android template it could find – Shadow’s own body…

But he did know that his body was now coursing with the power of negative Chaos, and he grinned icily up at the trembling Eggman.

“Death to all who oppose me!”

He leapt high…

“Chaos…”

…Eggman whimpered, and covered his eyes…

“…BLAST!”

…and the world exploded.

As the crimson radiance dissipated, Shadow was astonished to see the Egg Dealer stubbornly standing before him… but only for an instant. Smoke was leaking from the monstrous machine’s sides, countless dents and tears in the hull gaped wide to reveal flames licking at smoking, melted wires, and the mech was swaying on its feet…

“Wh-what?! N-no! This… can’t be…! Gaaaah!” moaned Eggman…

And then the Egg Dealer collapsed on the steel floor with a spectacular crash, its useless legs stirring feebly for a moment before falling still forever.

“Sorry, doctor, but this is the end for you!” hissed Shadow.

His hand extended towards the Egg Dealer, and he felt the Chaos energy swirling about him, surrounding everything in the room as he silently concentrated on the Chaos emerald within the machine… and Omega clanked up behind him just as the crimson Chaos emerald silently floated out of Eggman’s shattered mech.

Shadow gazed pensively as the seven jewels of unlimited power rose around him one after another, circling his triumphant form, heralding the power of their new master…

“Finally, I’ve got ALL the Chaos emeralds!” he whispered.

There was a low crash from within the Egg Dealer’s cockpit, and to nobody’s surprise, a crimson form in a familiar military jacket flopped limply out of the machine. One thin arm grasped the floor, dragging his body forward, and then another. Eggman seemed badly injured; there seemed to be no escape plan for him this time, no last-second race away to someplace he could plot revenge… the combined forces of the Black Arms, G.U.N., and those damned animals had finally used up all of his ingenuity, resources, and cunning, and this was merely the final blow in a long, slow war of attrition.

Crawling in agony towards the agent of his defeat, Dr. Eggman glared defiantly at his foe from behind his cracked spectacles. A cold, hate-filled voice oozed from between his broken teeth, and one hand balled furiously into a fist.

“I made you… and this is how you repay me?” he snarled.

Shadow glanced up at the Chaos emeralds surrounding him, his eyes far away. Omega quietly stood beside Shadow, deferring to another for once, as his respect for the one who had finally eliminated his despised creator held his expanse of ammunition in check.

Shadow, for his part, had finally had his epiphany. Whether he was the real Shadow or not didn’t matter, after all. He had just single-handedly eliminated a threat to the world that years of struggle and hardship had never tamed… At one point, he had known nothing about his past, and now that he had something to know, to fight for and claim for his own… it didn’t matter if he was Shadow or a mechanical copy. He was what he was. There was nothing to debate, or worry about, or second-guess.

He was free.

Finally, Shadow turned back to Eggman, and spoke again.

“I am Shadow Android, the Ultimate Battle Life-Form created by Eggman. You may have created me, doctor, but I will now lead this empire, and androids will rule! This is WHO I AM!”

For an instant, Eggman’s expression changed. His eyes widened, and his lips parted, as though he was about to say something, but then Omega’s voice cut through the silence with merciless volume…

“Eggman… target acquired… locked and loaded… FIRE!”

“What?!”

“Goodbye, Doctor!” hissed Shadow, and his hand thundered down on Eggman’s collar like a thunderbolt.

“NOOOOOOO!”

For one sick, hideous instant, Eggman felt an impossible, searing pain as his neck snapped like a dry twig…

And then black silence consumed his mind, and he felt nothing at all.