Attack of the Egg-Wyvern - Novelization

This is a novelization of Sonic's final boss battle in Sonic the Hedgehog 2006. I do not own Sonic or any of the characters mentioned below, all rights belong to SEGA, etc etc...

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Music: [link]

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Dr. Eggman’s hands flew madly over the control console of the Egg Carrier, Elise peering over his shoulder with a look of concern. Sweat beaded on the mad genius’s forehead as a small window opened on the monitor before him. Eggman glanced at it once, and stumbled backwards as though he’d been struck – and at that moment, a hundred sirens began to wail, and the entire battleship trembled like a leaf.

“Wh-why is this happening?!” he yelled. There was nothing that could have done this, nothing on the radar screens – it was as though fate, the universe itself, had conspired to mock him, to thwart him in his moment of triumph…

“NO!” he roared, and then quickly backed away from the console as sparks began to fly...

“Playtime’s over!”

Elise knew that voice, she smiled as she turned around, and ran to her hero. He’d take care of all this, she knew he would…

But Eggman knew that voice even better than Elise, and as he turned around, he knew exactly what he’d see: Sonic the Hedgehog, that small, irritating smirk creasing his face.

“This ship is about to crash… too bad, Eggman!”

Eggman stamped his feet furiously on the metal, like a child throwing a tantrum… but this wasn’t like the first time the ship had crashed. Now he had substance, a conductor, something to channel his frustration and rage towards as the Egg Carrier began to lose altitude…

“I’m not finished yet!”

Without warning, the mad genius darted off to his right, every ounce of strength and speed gifted to his strangely athletic body sent his feet pounding down the nearest hallway. Sonic blinked, then scooped Elise up without another word, and sprinted after him…

…into howling winds.

Sonic’s pounding feet smashed into the tiling, which shattered under his feet, and he and Elise fell through the air… onto a wide, chain-link iron grating that held firm under their weight. It didn’t even bend under the impact, but it wasn’t as large as he’d thought… most of the platform he was on was composed of firm steel, with a handful of chain-link nets dotting it. The entire platform was slung beneath the bridge of the Egg Carrier, and though the gray-white mosaic of clouds whipped all about them both, the flooring was perpetually within the shadow of the flying battleship. Sonic sidestepped onto a more solid chunk of the platform, leapt high, back into a dark recess of the Egg Carrier, and his hands deposited Elise on the hard floor.

“Stay here, keep quiet. Eggman doesn’t care about the Egg Carrier anymore, he’s gonna cut his losses and come after me next. He wants me dead. I can distract him, but he’s sure to come back with something crazy to try and kill me as usual, and I don’t think I can fight it while I’m carrying you. Understand?”

Elise nodded. “Hurry back!”

Sonic turned, and leapt back to the platform below. His head turned swiftly, his eyes absorbing every detail of the undercarriage of the dying Egg Carrier…

“You keep getting in my way, you pesky little hedgehog!”

Sonic whipped around, just in time to see Eggman, high above, sliding into a small cockpit within the head of a great steel monstrosity. It bore a remote resemblance to some medieval dragon, a great horned crimson-and-ivory cranium leering down at Sonic from between gigantic ruby wings. With a single flap of those wings, the Egg-Wyvern ascended into the sun-drenched afternoon sky…

“Very well, I’ll take you out myself!”

“Right back at ya! I’ll finish this here!” yelled Sonic.

The immense war machine swooped around the platform, as the mad genius looked for an opening… and found one.

Eggman gave an icy laugh, and the Egg-Wyvern’s great wings swiveled back into the V-angle of some great, nightmarish hawk.

“Here I come, Sonic!”

The war machine dove for the hedgehog with momentum that could level a skyscraper, and Sonic’s eyes narrowed… at the last instant, the hedgehog jumped high, and Eggman smiled. He’d expected a desperate attack on the cockpit, and had come prepared, the reinforced Plexiglas would …

…be completely useless, as Sonic jumped OVER the cockpit, and wrapped his hands around the horn of the giant.

“Ngh!”

Eggman snarled, his hands wrestled with the controls for an instant… and then, to his utter shock, the entire machine swerved to the left, against his will, opposing his command! He didn’t understand…

…and then he did.

The Egg-Wyvern’s main rudder was directly atop the thing’s cockpit-head, a spot that afforded it incredible maneuverability – and surprising vulnerability. Sonic was doing something up there, something with the rudder…

Up top, Sonic was wrestling desperately to hang onto the massive horn as his hands began to slip. If he fell now, it was all over… and Eggman’s steering was becoming increasingly erratic, what in the world was he doing down there?…

…neither of them even noticed the immense chunk of debris from the disintegrating Egg Carrier falling directly into the war machine’s path.

With a tremendous crash, the Egg-Wyvern smashed cleanly into the wreckage, sending Sonic flying and the machine spinning out of control. Sonic’s mind was clear in an instant, and he braced himself as he crashed back down onto the platform. Shaking his head, he glanced up as the mech righted itself and swiveled about to face him.

“Bah, this is nothing!”

Sonic saw he wasn’t lying; as the thing swooped to dodge a second chunk of debris, it was obvious the Egg-Wyvern was as dangerous as ever. Still, the Egg Carrier was breaking apart as it fell, and now Eggman was forced to dodge another hunk of wreckage every second, swooping and plunging madly… but it wasn’t affecting his aim (or was it some computer’s?) in the slightest.

“Take this!” snarled Eggman.

A dozen sapphire lasers arced down from the Egg-Wyvern’s wings, every one slamming into the platform at the same time… Sonic suddenly felt like a break dancer again as he rolled and ducked to slip between the weaponry… a dozen explosions suddenly bloomed around him, nowhere near the lasers, totally unpredictable, raining fire as they expanded, and Sonic dove away in desperation… and now the tail of the mech coiled up and towards the hedgehog.

“Fall!”

A plethora of missiles slammed down all around him… and to his horror, Sonic saw that these were blasting the platform around him apart, tearing out one foothold after another, threatening to drop him into an endless blue-and-white abyss… one landed way too close for his liking, and Sonic dove onto the nearest safe point he could see...

There was a sudden blaze of blue lightning, and when the air cleared… Sonic realized this area… less than seven feet wide… was all he had left to run in.

“Wah ha ha ha ha haa!” The Egg-Wyvern did a strange sort of swooping pirouette, as if dancing with glee, as its master cackled madly from within…

The hedgehog grimaced. He’d have to be very careful here…

“Can you avoid this, Sonic!?”

A dozen crimson lasers lanced out directly at the point where the hedgehog was standing now, and Sonic dove out of the way as they slammed into the platform… just barely out of their grasp, just barely!

“Can you make it here?!”

The cockpit opened up, and now Eggman was laughing at him from inside the machine as a pair of strange robots extended their way out of the dragon’s jaws, each pointing the unmistakabe shape of a laser cannon at him...

“Do it!”

Sonic knew the drill here. Leaping high, he dove for one robot… slammed into it an instant before the other began to fire a long blue laser, bounced high… and crashed into the open cockpit. Though he missed Eggman completely, he felt something hard and mechanical disintegrate beneath his spines. There was no time; he bounced away again, aiming desperately for the platform… and landed squarely in the center, much to his surprise. A loud crack echoed behind him, and as he turned, Sonic saw the top half of the Egg-Wyvern’s great head spiral away into the sky…

“No! The canopy!” roared the doctor.

“Hey, Eggman, what’s the matter?”

“You… I’m just getting started!”

Sonic grinned. “This is it, Eggman! Prepare for another defeat!”

Eggman snarled. “I won’t go down like this!”

Eggman peered down at the hedgehog with a small frown. Almost all of his footholds were gone, but the hedgehog had dodged every attack, sidestepped every missile and laser he’d sent at him… and even on this tiny scrap of the dying battleship, he had no doubt that Sonic would simply avoid whatever he sent at him. If he simply aimed for the platform, instead…

The doctor’s eyes narrowed. The hedgehog had survived too many brushes with certain death for his liking. The Death Egg’s destruction, the space capsule off the ARK, he should have died a long time ago… but there was always something there, something to bail him out at the last second. His radar didn’t show anything, the hedgehog obviously didn’t have all the Chaos Emeralds, but anything could happen… perhaps that annoying fox-boy was following them in his plane? Who could know?...

No, he wanted to make quite sure the hedgehog was dead this time. He wanted to see his body blown apart, his eyes wide with shock, his legs twisted and broken, unable to run ever again… he wanted to see Sonic splatter against the front of his creation... and now a horrible smile creased his face, because over the howling winds, he heard a voice calling out to her hero…

“Sonic, watch out! He’s still trying something!”

Eggman nodded. He most certainly was. And afterward, he knew where the princess was… he could retrieve her at a whim, limp back to the Aquatic Base, finish his plan…

“Here I come, Sonic!”

The Egg-Wyvern dove at Sonic one last time, one last attack that would end this war once and for all… but in that instant before it would have ended forever, Sonic bounced up…

With a sudden crash, what was left of the Egg-Wyvern’s cockpit seemed to disintegrate. Sonic leapt high, and landed on a small pylon connected to the undercarriage… leapt again… and now he was within Elise’s hiding place once more. The hedgehog scooped her up quickly, and as he leapt out from the underside of the Egg Carrier, Sonic barely registered Eggman falling from the dying war machine’s ruined cockpit, planted in a rocket-fired ejection seat, still screaming in frustration…

“I can’t believe this! No - …” and in an instant, his screams were silenced as the seat slammed into a falling hunk of wreckage, and he was hidden from view. Sonic winced… but this wasn’t the time, he had to keep Elise alive.

The hedgehog leapt down, and he and the princess were suddenly within the lowest decks of the Egg Carrier. He had seen a handful of escape pods down here, and if he hurried…

Suddenly, the hallway before them peeled away, and Sonic froze in shock as the Egg Carrier began to fall apart around them. It was below the clouds now, and losing altitude rapidly… it was crashing into the ocean, but they were less than a hundred feet from a nearby cliff. Elise gasped… but the hedgehog had already seen an exit.

He leapt high, bounced off a nearby pylon, dashed madly across a broken beam, and leapt for the edge of the cliff with desperate speed… his fingers were outstretched… his teeth were gritted… and Sonic alone could make it, he always did… but he was not alone this time.

The weight of Elise killed his momentum, and his eyes widened in horror as he slowed… slowed… stopped, just a few feet from the rim of the cliff… and now they began to fall back into the sea, down to the murderous rocks below…

…Sonic could never quite understand or explain what happened next. A sudden roar came from beneath him, and a blast of hot air snapped his spines forward… and now he was flying back up the cliff, his fingers bruising Elise’s arms as they clenched in astonishment… and as they reached the top of the cliff, he waved his limbs in confusion, trying to figure out what was going on… Elise went flying…

The hedgehog and the princess crashed into the soft grass, rolling for a few seconds before coming to a halt. Sonic recovered first; he sprang upright and ran over to Elise…

She was lying still, her arms outstretched, but she was breathing, and there was a small, relieved smile on her face.

Sonic grinned, and then he began to laugh, a near-crazed sound of sheer relief now that it was all over. He was safe, the princess was safe… Eggman? Who knew? He’d survived worse before…

It was over.

As the sun rose over the emerald valley, Sonic laughed once more, a high, mad sound that seemed to drive itself into Elise, and before she knew it, she was laughing too…

Sonic turned to her, and grinned.

“Nice smile!”

And for the first time in a very long while, Elise just lay back on the grass and grinned to herself.

Relief… it was a feeling unlike any other.