He is My Master

57: Four Minutes to Midnight

                 *******EXCLAIMER*******
I DO NOT OWN THIS NOVEL IM MERELY TRANSFERRING IT TO WATTPAD CHECK OUT THE ORIGINAL AND GIVE KUDOS TO AUTHOR Chiisai Kitsune ON FF.NET HERE

     https://m.fanfiction.net/s/4256772/59/

"We can't fight them all." Shadow's voice was hoarse, his mouth a grim line. Both hedgehogs were watching as more and more shapes were bursting forth from the battlefield's earth, lurching, staggering, half-formed and screaming. At the same time, soldiers of all armies were scattering and clambering backwards in terror. More than half of the plain seemed to be engulfed in a sea of writhing black bodies.

"We...we have to," Sonic said, obviously trying to keep his voice steady, but unable to conceal the despair that was clearly trying to creep in at the edges.

"But what are they?!" Lara-Su stammered, her gaze flitting from the chaos on the plain to Sonic and Shadow's grave faces, her dreadlocks flying.

"They are the Black Arms. An army created of his blood," Shadow replied, only Sonic noticing the bitter edge of his tone as he knew his partner had to be thinking of how the very same blood was of course also running in his veins. "They feel no pain, no fear, no mercy, and they are too numerous to take on."

"No matter. We will fight to the last warrior standing," Knuckles replied, and it wasn't even said in a boastful growl, just in a tone conveying that this was nothing but an immovable fact. "But if there's one thing my mother taught me about fighting against an enemy that uses magic, it is that you go after the caster first. Where is Black Doom?"

And as if in answer to his question, it was then that the sky split wide open.

xxx

The minutes were ticking by like drops of Chinese water torture.

Or at least, Knuckles thought so. It was daylight, technically, but by now the sickness of the entire planet was evident. Instead of a normal dawn, a strange, greenish twilight had crept across the horizon this morning and laid itself across the landscape, turning familiar surroundings into uncanny copies of their former selves, as if their world had vanished overnight and been replaced by something alien and sick.

The echidna supposed that if they bothered to switch on the news, there would likely be all sorts of emergency broadcasts, interviews with clueless scientists and probably hysterical mobs people on the streets in the bigger cities. Not here, though. Here it was silent, apart from the ticking clock.

They had done all they could. Now there was no more need to talk.

Occasionally, his eyes flitted over to the status bar on the monitor, detailing the progress of their experiment, their last chance to prevent the end of the world. Currently it hovered at 43 percent completion. Knuckles wondered whether they would live to see it reach 100.

All of them were exhausted, but too strung out to sleep. Instead they sat, him, Rouge and Tails, in the fox' workshop like zombies, too tired to do much more than stare at the screen with the numbers.

Rouge had brought them a diamond as clear and pure as light made glass. Knuckles had moved his home, and with it the Master Emerald, to hover directly above Tails' house so the fox' machines could syphon as much power as possible into it. And the kit had worked for an entire day and night prior to recreate a machine that could fashion a normal gem stone into a copy of a Chaos Emerald, so it could maybe replace the missing one and stabilize the atmosphere of their world before it was too late.

Now that the process had started, Tails had said, there was nothing more they could do but wait.

Even Sonic and Shadow, who still had not regained even a bit of their memories, had become strangely subdued over the last few hours, as if even they sensed something was gravely wrong. They sat in their chaos-proof containment chamber, Sonic curled up and cowering against Shadow's side, the black hedgehog just silently staring at them until all three of them had become too uncomfortable to remain in the underground lab any longer and instead had relocated to the fox' workshop on the ground floor.