Marcus had been dreading this part.
Not the fight—the fight was going to be trivially easy, a fact he knew with the absolute certainty of a man who had memorized every panel of every issue and also happened to currently inhabit the body of a being who could bend space-time with his mind. No, what Marcus had been dreading was the concept. The sheer, undiluted, weapons-grade stupidity of what he was about to walk into.
Rough and Tumble.
Rough and Tumble.
Two skunk brothers—one big, one small, both idiots—who had somehow, through a combination of editorial favoritism and a writing staff that apparently couldn't generate new antagonists without recycling the same two morons across multiple arcs, become recurring villains in the IDW Sonic comic series.
Let Marcus be clear about something: he did not object to comedic villains. The Sonic franchise had a proud tradition of comedic villains. Eggman himself was, at his core, a comedic villain—a bombastic, egomaniacal manchild who built theme-park death traps and named his robots after himself, and who was simultaneously one of the most genuinely threatening antagonists in gaming because underneath all the buffoonery was a genius-level intellect capable of cracking the planet in half and harnessing eldritch gods. Eggman was funny and dangerous, and the tension between those two qualities was what made him work.
Rough and Tumble were just funny. Not even good funny. They were the kind of funny that happened when a writer needed a D-list threat to fill two issues and reached into the reject pile and pulled out a pair of cartoon skunks whose entire characterization could be summarized as "they rhyme sometimes and one of them is big."
And IDW had brought them back. Multiple times. Across multiple arcs. They'd been there for the Zombot crisis. They'd been there for the Surge arc—tools, pawns, recurring nuisances that the narrative kept insisting were worth the reader's time despite offering absolutely nothing that a generic Badnik squad couldn't have provided with less page space and more dignity.
Marcus understood, on an intellectual level, that Rough and Tumble served a structural purpose. They were low-stakes antagonists who allowed the heroes to demonstrate competence without burning through the big villains too early. They were palette cleansers. Narrative sorbet between courses of actual drama.
But God, did they have to be so annoying about it?
And now Marcus had to deal with them in person.
The settlement was called Barricade Town—a midsized community nestled in a river valley about thirty miles northeast of the farming communities they'd already cleared. It was a practical, sturdy little place: stone walls, wooden watchtowers, a central market square surrounded by workshops and homes that spoke to a population of maybe three hundred. Pre-war, it had probably been a pleasant place to live. The kind of place where people knew each other's names and argued about whose turn it was to maintain the irrigation ditches and held harvest festivals that went on three days too long.
Post-war, it was occupied territory.
Rough and Tumble—having stumbled upon the settlement during its post-war vulnerability, when its militia was depleted and its defenses were damaged—had waltzed in with a stolen cache of Eggman tech and declared themselves the new rulers. They'd locked up the town leadership, commandeered the food stores, and set up a perimeter of repurposed Badnik sentries that were just functional enough to keep the civilian population contained.
They had also, for reasons that Marcus could only attribute to IDW's bizarre insistence on making the Wisps a permanent fixture of every continuity they touched, captured a colony of Wisps.
The Wisps.
Marcus had thoughts about the Wisps being in IDW.
The Wisps were from Sonic Colors. They were adorable little alien creatures who granted Sonic temporary power-ups by merging with him—Boost, Drill, Laser, Cube, that sort of thing. They were charming. They were fun. They were a perfect fit for Sonic Colors, a game set in an interstellar amusement park where their presence made total narrative sense because they were alien refugees whose planet had been captured by Eggman.
Their presence in IDW made approximately zero sense.
Actually, that was generous. Their presence in IDW made negative sense. It actively subtracted sense from the universe. The Wisps had appeared in the comics with virtually no explanation for why an entire species of alien energy beings had apparently decided to permanently relocate to Sonic's planet and integrate themselves into the local ecosystem as though they'd always been there. No one questioned it. No one remarked on the fact that their town was suddenly home to floating jellyfish from another galaxy. The Wisps were just there, hovering around in the background, occasionally being useful, mostly being a reminder that Ian Flynn couldn't walk past a piece of Sonic nostalgia without picking it up and stuffing it into his coat like a compulsive shoplifter at a memorabilia convention.
It was, Marcus reflected, the IDW approach to worldbuilding in microcosm: take something from the games, strip it of the context that made it work, drop it into the comic with no explanation, and hope that the audience's pre-existing fondness for the source material would paper over the structural gap.
The Wisps weren't the worst example of this—that honor belonged to the entire premise of IDW, which was built on the assumption that readers had played Sonic Forces and therefore didn't need the comic to establish its own world, characters, or status quo. IDW Sonic literally began in medias res after a game, which was either bold postmodern storytelling or the laziest possible approach to launching a new comic series, depending on how charitable you were feeling.
Marcus was not feeling charitable.
But the Wisps were here, and they were captured, and however much Marcus might question the editorial decisions that had led to their presence, they were living creatures who needed help.
So he was going to help them.
He was just going to do it efficiently.
They reconvened on a hilltop overlooking Barricade Town as the late afternoon sun painted everything in shades of gold and amber. Sonic arrived first, naturally, vibrating with barely contained energy. Knuckles arrived second, having been lured off Angel Island with Shadow's strategically worded warning about potential Badnik threats to the Master Emerald—a warning that was technically true in the same way that saying "there might be a shark in the ocean" was technically true.
Knuckles the Echidna was exactly as Marcus remembered him, and exactly as IDW had written him, which in this case was mercifully close to the same thing. IDW's Knuckles was one of the less egregiously mishandled characters—still stubborn, still proud, still possessed of a temper that could be measured on the Richter scale and a gullibility that bordered on the philosophical. His fists were enormous. His expression was suspicious. His first words upon arriving were, predictably:
"This better not be a waste of my time. I left the Master Emerald unguarded for this."
"You always leave the Master Emerald unguarded," Sonic pointed out. "Remember that time Eggman stole it while you were standing next to it?"
"That was one time."
"It was at least four times."
"Those other times don't count, I was—"
"Focus," Marcus said.
Both hedgehog and echidna turned to look at him with matching expressions of surprise, as though a piece of furniture had suddenly offered a tactical opinion. Marcus was going to have to get used to that—the surprise people showed when Shadow acted like a functioning team member instead of an edgy satellite orbiting the plot.
"There are approximately forty civilians inside," Marcus said, nodding toward the town below. "Two hostiles—skunk brothers, goes by Rough and Tumble. Low threat level, high annoyance factor. They've got a perimeter of repurposed Badnik sentries, maybe a dozen units—Egg Pawns, mostly, probably running on backup power cells. They've also captured a colony of Wisps."
"Wisps?" Knuckles frowned. "Those little floaty alien things?"
"Yes."
"Why are those on our planet?"
Marcus stared at him.
Knuckles stared back.
Thank you, Marcus thought fervently. Thank you, Knuckles. At least ONE person is asking the obvious question.
"That's... actually a very good question," Marcus said slowly. "One that nobody seems to have an answer for. But they're here, they're captured, and they need help."
"Right." Knuckles cracked his namesakes—his enormous, shovel-bladed fists producing a sound like tectonic plates shifting. "So what's the plan? Sonic and I sneak in through the drainage system, flank them from—"
"No," Marcus said.
"No?"
"No sneaking. No flanking. No drainage systems."
Sonic tilted his head. "Shadow, buddy, I appreciate the new proactive attitude, I really do, but Barricade Town has walls. Like, actual walls. Stone ones. With Badnik sentries on them. We can't just walk up to the front—"
"Who said anything about walking?"
Marcus closed his eyes.
He reached inward—past the surface thoughts, past Marcus's consciousness, past the thin membrane separating the transplanted human mind from the vast, churning ocean of power that was Shadow the Hedgehog's birthright. The chaos energy was there, always there, a perpetual nuclear reaction contained by the inhibitor rings on his wrists, burning with the fury of a captive star.
He touched it.
It touched him back.
Chaos Control.
The words formed in his mind with the weight of natural law, and reality listened.
Rough the Skunk was having the best day of his life.
This was, admittedly, a low bar. Rough's previous best days had included: the day he'd figured out that his tail spray could incapacitate people at range (age seven), the day he and his brother had successfully robbed their first caravan (age twelve), and the day they'd found this stupid little town with its busted walls and its depleted militia and its stockpile of food and Eggman tech just sitting there like a gift from a universe that had finally recognized Rough's inherent superiority over basically everyone.
He was sitting in the town leader's chair—a sturdy wooden thing with armrests and a cushion and everything, very fancy, very authoritative—in the town hall, which he had renamed Rough's Palace, which Tumble had pointed out was grammatically questionable since they were both in charge, which had led to a fifteen-minute argument that they'd resolved by renaming it Rough and Tumble's Palace of Pain and Punishment, which was much better.
The Wisps were in cages in the basement. The civilians were locked in their homes. The Badnik sentries were patrolling the walls. Everything was going according to plan, which was impressive because the plan had been less of a "plan" and more of a "we walked in and nobody stopped us."
"Hey, Rough!" Tumble called from across the hall. His brother—larger, stronger, dumber, which was saying something because Rough was not what anyone would describe as an intellectual—was doing one-armed push-ups on the town hall floor because Tumble processed all emotions through physical exercise. "Rough! Hey! Rough!"
"What, Tumble?"
"We should do our rhyme."
"We don't have an audience."
"We could do it for the prisoners."
"The prisoners are locked in their houses."
"We could unlock them and then lock them again after."
"That defeats the purpose of—"
The air in the center of the town hall split open.
There was no other way to describe it. One moment, the air was air—normal, breathable, uninteresting air doing air things in air places. The next moment, a seam appeared in the fabric of space itself, a crackling, golden-edged tear in reality that pulsed with energy that made every hair on Rough's body stand on end and every instinct in his primitive skunk brain scream DANGER DANGER DANGER SOMETHING IS COMING THROUGH AND IT IS VERY ANGRY AND ALSO VERY COOL.
Shadow the Hedgehog stepped through the tear in spacetime like a man stepping through a doorway.
The chaos energy dissipated around him in fading golden motes. His hover shoes touched the stone floor without a sound. His arms were crossed. His red eyes swept the room with the clinical dispassion of a health inspector surveying a restaurant he was about to shut down.
He looked at Rough.
He looked at Tumble.
Tumble, to his limited credit, reacted first. The larger skunk launched himself off the floor with a roar, both fists raised, muscles bulging, tail coiled for a spray attack, every ounce of his considerable physical power directed at the black-and-red intruder who had just teleported into their palace.
Marcus sidestepped.
He didn't dodge—dodging implied effort, urgency, a recognition that the incoming attack posed some level of threat. Marcus sidestepped. Casually. The way you might sidestep a puddle on a sidewalk. The way you might lean away from a door that was swinging open. Tumble's fist passed through the space where Shadow's head had been, carrying the skunk's entire body with it in a momentum-driven stumble that ended with Tumble crashing face-first into the town leader's desk.
The desk did not survive.
"What the—" Rough scrambled out of his chair, reaching for the Eggman-tech blaster he'd strapped to his hip with all the tactical wisdom of a man who had learned weapon handling from action movies. He yanked it free, pointed it at Shadow, and pulled the trigger.
The blaster fired a bolt of red energy.
Marcus caught it.
Not deflected. Not dodged. Not countered with a chaos technique. He reached out with his right hand, and his gloved fingers closed around the energy bolt as though it were a baseball thrown by a child, and the chaos energy in his inhibitor rings absorbed it, converting Eggman's destructive output into fuel for his own reserves with a faint, satisfied hum.
Rough stared at his blaster.
He stared at Shadow's hand.
He stared at his blaster again.
"That's not fair," Rough said, in a very small voice.
"No," Marcus agreed. "It isn't."
He moved.
To Rough's perception—to any normal Mobian's perception—Shadow simply vanished from one position and appeared in another, like a frame had been cut from the film of reality. One instant he was across the room; the next he was directly in front of Rough, close enough that the skunk could see his own terrified reflection in those red, red eyes.
Marcus plucked the blaster from Rough's nerveless fingers with his left hand, crushed it into scrap metal with a casual squeeze, and let the pieces clatter to the floor.
"Here's what's going to happen," Marcus said, his voice low and even and absolutely devoid of anything that could be mistaken for negotiation. "You're going to tell me where the Wisps are. You're going to tell me where the town's leaders are being held. You're going to surrender peacefully. And then you're going to leave this town and never come back."
Rough's mouth worked silently. Behind him, Tumble was extracting himself from the wreckage of the desk with the dazed expression of a man who had just learned a valuable lesson about the relationship between mass, velocity, and furniture.
"And if... if we don't?" Rough managed, mustering the last dregs of his bravado like a man squeezing the final drops from an empty bottle.
Marcus looked at him.
Just looked at him.
The chaos energy in the room shifted. Not visibly—not in any way that Rough could have identified or articulated. But the pressure changed. The air grew heavier. The light dimmed by a fraction. The temperature dropped by two degrees. And every molecule in Rough's body suddenly understood, with the primal, bone-deep certainty of prey in the presence of a predator, that the being standing in front of him was not a hedgehog, was not a person, was not even really a creature—he was a force, a living weapon designed by a genius to be the pinnacle of biological destruction, and he was currently operating under restraint, and the restraint was optional.
"B-basement!" Rough squeaked. "Wisps are in the basement! Cages! Big cages! Town council's in the storage building behind the market! We'll leave! We're leaving! Tumble! TUMBLE! WE'RE LEAVING!"
"But our palace—" Tumble began.
"TUMBLE!"
"LEAVING! WE'RE LEAVING! GONE! BYE!"
The two skunks scrambled over each other in their desperation to reach the door, a tangle of limbs and tails and high-pitched vocalizations that bore no resemblance to the swaggering villains who had terrorized this town for the past week. They hit the door simultaneously, which meant neither of them fit through it, which led to a three-second farce of shoving and squeezing and panicked tail-spraying (Rough accidentally gassed his own brother, which would have been funny if it hadn't smelled like concentrated death) before they finally popped through the doorframe like corks from a bottle and fled into the street.
Where Sonic and Knuckles were waiting.
Marcus heard the sounds of the skunks' departure through the open door—a yelp, a thud, a sound that was probably Knuckles's fist connecting with something deserving, and Sonic's voice saying "Going somewhere, fellas?" with the perfectly calibrated cheerfulness of a hedgehog who had just been robbed of his dramatic entrance and was compensating through quips.
Marcus descended to the basement.
The Wisps were in cages.
Actual, physical cages—repurposed animal enclosures from what looked like a veterinary clinic, reinforced with scavenged metal plating and locked with heavy chains. Inside each cage, clusters of Wisps huddled together, their bioluminescent bodies dimmed with stress and fear, their usual cheerful chirping reduced to soft, anxious murmurs.
Marcus looked at them.
They looked at him.
And despite everything—despite his complaints about their presence in IDW, despite his frustration with the editorial decisions that had transplanted them from their original context into a continuity where they didn't belong, despite his firmly held opinion that Ian Flynn had included them primarily as a nostalgia trigger rather than a meaningful worldbuilding choice—Marcus felt his chest tighten.
Because they were scared.
They were living creatures—alien, yes; narratively questionable, yes; but living—and they were scared, and they were caged, and they were looking at him with those big, luminous eyes that communicated fear and hope and please help us in a language that transcended species and continuity and editorial mandate.
Dammit.
I can complain about the writing decisions that put you here AND still care about your wellbeing. Those aren't mutually exclusive.
He approached the first cage. A cluster of Cyan Wisps pressed against the far wall, trembling. A single White Wisp—the base form, the one that granted the Boost power-up in the games—floated forward hesitantly, its tentacles curling and uncurling with nervous energy.
"I'm going to open this cage," Marcus said quietly. "You're safe now."
The White Wisp chirped—a tentative, questioning sound.
Marcus wrapped his fingers around the chain securing the cage door. Chaos energy flowed into his grip, and the metal links glowed cherry-red, then white, then simply ceased to exist, dissolving into component atoms under the focused application of chaos energy that would have made Gerald Robotnik weep with pride.
The cage door swung open.
The White Wisp stared at the open door. Then it stared at Marcus. Then it launched itself at his face.
Marcus did not flinch—Shadow the Hedgehog did not flinch—but he did experience a moment of significant surprise as a small, gelatinous alien entity plastered itself against his cheek and began emitting a high-pitched trilling sound that he instinctively understood was the Wisp equivalent of hysterical gratitude.
"You're... welcome," he said stiffly, as the White Wisp nuzzled against his fur with the desperate affection of a creature that had been locked in a cage by idiots and was very glad to not be in a cage anymore.
The other Wisps, emboldened by their companion's survival, began flooding out of the cage—Cyan, Yellow, Orange, Green, a rainbow of alien energy beings swirling around Marcus in a luminous vortex of chirps and trills and bioluminescent joy.
He moved to the next cage. Broke the chains. More Wisps. More gratitude. More small, glowing aliens treating him like a combination of liberator, hero, and very warm pillow.
By the time he'd opened all six cages, Marcus was standing in the center of a swirling nebula of freed Wisps, their combined glow illuminating the basement in shifting colors like a living aurora borealis. The White Wisp had not left his shoulder. It had, in fact, settled into the crook of his neck with the proprietary comfort of a creature that had decided this was its spot now and no force in any continuity was going to move it.
"...Fine," Marcus muttered. "But you're temporary."
The White Wisp trilled happily.
It did not sound like it agreed about the "temporary" part.
Marcus emerged from the basement into the golden light of late afternoon to find a town in the early stages of liberation. The Badnik sentries—twelve Egg Pawns operating on backup power cells, just as he'd estimated—were scattered across the main street in various states of destruction. Sonic had handled most of them, based on the characteristic spin-dash crater patterns, but several bore the unmistakable marks of Knuckles's fists: robots didn't usually end up embedded in walls unless someone with superhuman strength and poor anger management had been involved.
Civilians were emerging from their homes. Cautiously at first—peeking through windows, cracking doors—and then with increasing confidence as they realized the skunks were gone, the robots were destroyed, and three of the most recognizable heroes on the planet were standing in their town square.
A cheer went up. Then another. Then a cascade of cheers, applause, tears, and the chaotic joy of people who had been living under the boot of two incompetent skunks for a week and were really, really glad it was over.
Sonic soaked it up like a sponge. He was in the center of the crowd, shaking hands, giving thumbs-ups, scooping up kids and posing for the mental equivalent of photographs (did Mobians have cameras? Marcus realized he didn't know and filed it under "things to figure out later"). He was good at this. The public-facing, crowd-pleasing, symbol-of-hope thing—that was where Sonic shone, and it was one of the few aspects of IDW's characterization that Marcus had no complaints about.
Knuckles was standing off to the side, arms crossed (apparently it wasn't just a Shadow thing), looking simultaneously proud and uncomfortable in the way that Knuckles always looked when people expressed gratitude—like he wanted to accept it but wasn't sure of the protocol and was worried he'd break something if he tried.
Rouge had landed in the square at some point during the liberation—Marcus hadn't seen her arrive, which meant she'd probably been inside already, likely having infiltrated through a window or rooftop access because Rouge didn't enter buildings through doors when there were more dramatic options available. She was speaking with the town council members who Marcus had directed Sonic to free from the storage building, her posture professional, her tone businesslike, her presence commanding in a way that drew every eye in the vicinity and not entirely because of her proportions.
Mostly not because of her proportions.
Significantly because of her proportions.
The town council consisted of five Mobians: a middle-aged beaver who appeared to be the mayor, a stern-looking hawk who was probably the militia commander, and three others whose species Marcus couldn't immediately identify because they were standing behind Rouge from his angle and Rouge's silhouette from behind was—
Marcus forcefully redirected his attention.
The White Wisp on his shoulder chirped.
"Quiet," he told it.
It chirped again, louder, with an inflection that was unmistakably teasing.
Great. Even the aliens are mocking me.
Sonic bounced over, trailing a small entourage of admiring children who were hanging off his quills and arms like ornaments on a very fast Christmas tree. "Dude! That was awesome! You just—" He mimed a teleportation gesture, complete with sound effects. "—BWAAAP, right into the building, and then I heard Rough scream—like, really scream, like he'd seen a ghost, which I guess from his perspective he basically did—and then they came running out and Knuckles—" He pointed at the echidna. "Tell him what you did."
"I punched them," Knuckles said.
"He punched them! Both of them! At the same time! One fist each! It was—" Sonic kissed his fingertips like a chef. "—mwah. Beautiful."
"It was efficient," Knuckles corrected, though the corner of his mouth twitched upward.
"The Wisps?" Marcus asked.
"Oh yeah!" Sonic noticed the glowing White Wisp on Marcus's shoulder and his eyes lit up. "Hey, little buddy! You okay? Everyone okay down there?"
As if in answer, the swarm of freed Wisps erupted from the basement entrance behind Marcus, flooding into the open air in a spectacular display of bioluminescent joy. They spiraled upward in a helical column of light, painting the sky in shifting rainbows, their collective chirping rising into a harmonic chorus that sounded like wind chimes made of starlight.
The townspeople gasped. Children pointed. Even Knuckles looked up with an expression that was dangerously close to wonder.
The Wisps dispersed across the town like seeds on the wind, some finding perches on rooftops and trees, others gravitating toward the civilians—a Cyan Wisp settled on a child's head like a glowing hat; a Yellow Wisp began orbiting an elderly cat in a lazy, affectionate spiral; a pair of Orange Wisps engaged in what appeared to be a celebratory dance above the market square.
They were, Marcus had to admit, kind of wonderful.
I still maintain that their presence in this continuity is editorially unjustified and narratively lazy, he thought, watching the White Wisp on his shoulder chirp happily at its freed companions. But I will concede that they are very cute and I would commit violence on behalf of any of them without hesitation.
This was, he suspected, exactly how Ian Flynn had gotten away with including them. Emotional blackmail via adorableness. Classic Flynn.
"So," Sonic said, extracting himself from his child-encrusted state with gentle care and a few well-placed tickles. He walked up to Marcus and stood beside him, both of them watching the liberated town begin the messy, joyful, chaotic process of returning to normal. "That was... different."
"Different how?"
"Different as in 'Shadow solved a problem without destroying a building, threatening a civilian, or monologuing about the futility of compassion.' Different as in you teleported in, handled the bad guys, freed the prisoners, and didn't once suggest that we should have just blown up the whole town to eliminate the threat." Sonic paused. "No offense, but that last one was definitely on the table in the Shadow I'm used to."
Marcus felt a pang of secondhand shame for the IDW Shadow who had, apparently, established such a baseline of behavior that basic competence and restraint registered as remarkable.
"The situation didn't require excessive force," Marcus said. "Rough and Tumble are idiots. They were never a real threat. The civilians needed liberation, not a warzone."
"See, that's what I mean!" Sonic turned to face him, green eyes bright with something that looked like excitement and might have been hope. "That's not Shadow talk. That's like... reasonable person talk. Teammate talk. Where's all the 'I walk alone' and 'your sentiment makes you weak' and—"
"I've never said those things."
"You've heavily implied those things."
"Then I was wrong to imply them."
Sonic opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"Okay," he said slowly. "Okay, who are you, and what have you done with the real Shadow? Because the real Shadow would rather eat his own hover shoes than admit he was wrong about anything, and you've done it twice today."
Marcus turned to face Sonic fully. The White Wisp on his shoulder puffed up importantly, as though it were part of this conversation and intended to contribute.
"Do you remember the ARK?" Marcus asked.
Sonic's expression shifted. The playfulness dimmed. Something older, deeper, more real surfaced in his eyes—the Sonic who had watched Shadow fall from orbit, who had carried Shadow's inhibitor ring as a memento, who had stood in the ruins of a space station and mourned a rival he'd barely known because he'd understood, in that moment, that Shadow had been good.
"Yeah," Sonic said quietly. "I remember the ARK."
"Then you remember what I did there. What I chose. I chose to save the world because someone I loved asked me to give humanity a chance." Marcus paused. "That's who I am, Sonic. Not the... edgy rival who shows up to disagree with you. Not the brooding loner who threatens people from rooftops. I'm the person who chose. Every time, I chose. To save the world. To honor Maria's wish. To protect the people she believed were worth protecting."
He looked out over Barricade Town—its damaged walls, its freed citizens, its swirl of liberated Wisps painting the sky in colors that had no business being this beautiful in a continuity this flawed.
"I've been acting like I forgot that," Marcus said. "I haven't. Not anymore."
The silence that followed was the kind of silence that exists between two notes of music—full, resonant, pregnant with meaning.
Sonic looked at him for a long, long time.
Then the hedgehog smiled. Not the IDW grin—the real one. The Adventure 2 smile. The one from the end of the game, when Sonic had stood on the ARK and said He was a great hedgehog with the simple sincerity of someone who meant every word.
"You know what, Shadow?" Sonic said. "I always knew you had it in you."
"Hmph."
"There's the 'hmph.' Love the 'hmph.' Never change the 'hmph.'" Sonic clapped him on the shoulder—and Marcus allowed it, which was itself a seismic event in the history of hedgehog interpersonal relations. "Come on. There are more towns. More Badniks. More idiots who need punching." He glanced at Knuckles. "No offense, big guy."
"Why would that offend me?" Knuckles asked, genuinely confused.
"See? This is why I love this team." Sonic crouched into his runner's stance, energy gathering around him like a visible aura. "Next stop?"
Marcus consulted his mental map of the IDW timeline. The next settlement. The next crisis. The next step on the long road toward making this world feel like it should.
"Riverside," he said. "Coastal town. Fishing community. Reports of Badnik activity in the harbor."
"Then let's go!" Sonic launched forward—a blue streak, a sonic boom, a trail of hope and speed and the unshakeable conviction that everything was going to be okay because he was going to make it okay.
Knuckles followed, sprinting with the ground-shaking determination of an echidna who had been promised threats and intended to punch them.
Rouge appeared beside Marcus—because Rouge always appeared beside Marcus, a constant, a certainty, a warm and distractingly curvaceous law of nature—and fell into step with him.
"You're doing something," she said. Not a question.
"I'm always doing something."
"You're doing something specific. Something new." She studied his profile with those sharp, intelligent, beautiful teal eyes. "You're changing things."
Marcus looked at her. The White Wisp on his shoulder chirped.
"I'm fixing things," he said.
Rouge's smile—the real one, the warm one, the one that made chaos energy do backflips in his chest—returned.
"Need a partner?"
Marcus activated his hover shoes.
"Always," he said.
And together, they followed the blue streak toward the coast, toward the next battle, toward the slow and steady and deeply necessary work of turning IDW Sonic into something that actually deserved the name.
The White Wisp trilled happily on his shoulder.
The sun set behind them in colors that rivaled even the Wisps' bioluminescence.
And somewhere, in the vast and indifferent machinery of the IDW editorial offices, a continuity that had been running on momentum and nostalgia and the goodwill of a fanbase that deserved better began—imperceptibly, impossibly—to shift.
END OF CHAPTER 3