Pain was the only clock Zero had left.
It didn't tick in seconds or minutes. It measured the eternity of the night in throbs of agony that radiated from his crushed left leg, and in the hollow, aching void that clawed at the center of his chest.
If the silence in Sunset Heights was a held breath, the silence in the Old City was a corpse. Here, the moonlight didn't wash over the buildings; it seemed to be swallowed by the gaping maws of shattered windows and collapsed roofs. The shadows were thicker, sharper, smelling of wet rust, stagnant water, and the copper tang of old blood that the rain hadn't quite managed to wash away. There was no reconstruction here. No friendly drones fixing masonry, no soldiers painting over scorch marks with hopeful colors. This sector was a graveyard of steel and ambition, left to rot while the rest of the world pretended to heal.
Zero dragged himself over a pile of shattered concrete, his breath hitching in his throat with every agonizing inch. His boots scraped against the rebar, the sound echoing too loudly in the stillness.
He reached up, his gloved fingers grazing his face. He didn't feel the soft fur of a Mobian; he felt cold, jagged metal.
The mask was still there, but it was no longer the face of a god. It was a ruin. The left side had been sheared off completely during the final impact, exposing his matted, soot-stained fur and a wide, terrified blue eye that watered in the biting wind. The right side remained, a cracked and scorched plate of silver that clung to his skull like a parasite. The yellow lens over his right eye was fractured, spiderwebbed with complex cracks that split his vision into a dozen broken realities. Through that lens, the world looked like a kaleidoscope of gray and black, shifting with every tilt of his head.
He was half a monster, half a mortal. A fractured thing for a fractured world.
He stopped, leaning heavily against a partially collapsed wall, his hand drifting down to clutch his chest. The fabric of his bodysuit was torn open there, scorched black at the edges, revealing the ugly, jagged crater where the Phantom Ruby had once been embedded into his very sternum.
It was empty.
The absence of the gem felt heavier than the gem ever had. It felt like a missing organ. It burned, not with heat, but with a cold hollow ache, a phantom limb sensation for a soul he had sold. A low, buzzing vibration crawled under his skin, making his teeth ache.
Withdrawal, he thought bitterly. His body was mourning the loss of the parasite. It was screaming for the energy that used to sustain it, but there was nothing left to give.
He should be dead. He knew that with absolute certainty. When the ruby had been ripped away, when the tower collapsed, the sheer shock to his system should have stopped his heart. He remembered the darkness closing in, the absolute certainty of the void. Yet, he had woken up in a crater of glass and ash, his body broken but stubbornly, impossibly functioning.
He looked down at his chest. For a split second, through the spiderweb cracks of his mask's lens, he thought he saw a faint, red distortion ripple across his fur.
He blinked, and somehow the distortion was gone.
He squeezed his eyes shut, both the exposed one and the masked one and shook his head, fighting the rising bile in his throat.
Brain damage, he told himself, the diagnosis cold and clinical. Concussion. Madness.
It was the only explanation. The Ruby was gone, which meant the magic was gone. These glitches in his vision were just his mind snapping under the weight of his failure. He wasn't seeing power; he was seeing the cracks in his own sanity.
A low, mechanical hum echoed from the street above, cutting through the wind.
Zero froze. His ears swiveled, the one exposed ear pressing flat against his skull, the other muffled behind the metal plate. The instinct was instant, primal, and humiliating. He wasn't the hunter anymore. He wasn't the apex predator. He was the prey.
Through a crack in the masonry, he saw the blue sweep of a searchlight cutting through the fog. A Resistance patrol drone. It hovered like a carrion bird, its turbines whining softly as it scanned the debris for heat signatures.
Fear, cold and sharp as a jagged blade, spiked in his gut.
If they found him, there would be no trial. Why would there be? He wasn't a prisoner of war; he was the monster who had blotted out the sun. He was the reason their city was in ruins. He could imagine the look on their faces. Sonic's self-righteous pity, the red wolf's trembling anger. They wouldn't lock him up. They would put him down like a rabid animal.
Or worse... they would keep him alive. They would see the scar on his chest, the unnatural physiology that Eggman had twisted. They would strap him to a table in a white room and pick him apart, slice by slice, just to see how the monster was built. They would study his broken body to ensure nothing like him could ever be created again.
"Hide. I have to hide."
He pressed himself deeper into the shadows, the cold metal of his broken mask scraping against the brick wall with a sound that felt deafening. He held his breath until his lungs burned, until black spots danced in his vision. The drone paused, its mechanical eye rotating toward his hiding spot. The lens dilated, focusing.
Zero's heart hammered against his ribs so loud he was sure the machine could hear the rhythm of his terror.
Please, he thought, the word tasting like ash and bile. Not like this. Don't let me die in the dirt.
The drone hovered for an eternity. The blue light swept over the bricks, inches from his exposed boot. Then, with a mechanical whir and a click of servos, it turned away, drifting further down the street to scan a pile of rubble that looked more promising.
Zero slumped against the cold brick, sliding down until he hit the grit of the floor. He let out a shaky exhale, his body trembling violently. The adrenaline crash hit him hard, leaving him weak and shivering.
He was alone.
The realization wasn't new, but tonight, amidst the wreckage of his own making, it felt heavier. It brought a fresh wave of nausea that had nothing to do with his injuries.
"Doctor..." he whispered, the voice coming out distorted by the damaged vocal modulator in the half-mask, sounding like a radio tuned between stations.
The memory hit him then, sharp as a knife, dragging him back to the moment his life ended. It wasn't the battles he remembered. It wasn't the height of his power. It was the betrayal.
The chaos of the Fortress crumbling around them. The alarms blaring like screams. Zero had reached out, his vision blurring, his body failing as the Ruby was torn from the reactor. He had called for an extraction. He had called for the man he had sworn loyalty to.
He had begged.
For the first time since he had donned the mask, the Ultimate Mercenary had shown fear.
"Doctor! The systems are failing! I require assistance! Don't leave me here!"
And Eggman... Eggman had looked at him. Not with concern. Not with panic. Not even with anger. He had looked at Zero with the bored indifference of a man discarding a broken tool.
"You have served your purpose," the Doctor had sneered, his voice cutting through the explosions. He turned his back as the escape platform rose, leaving Zero to the fire. "I have no use for failures. You were only as strong as the gem I gave you. Without it... you are nothing."
The word carved itself into Zero's heart deeper than any weapon.
"I'm nothing. Nothing but a failure."
He had given everything. He had thrown away his squad, his identity, his face, all to become the ultimate weapon. And the moment he cracked, he was tossed into the trash.
Zero looked at his own hands, trembling in the dark. One was gloved, the leather torn and scorched. The other was bare, covered in dried blood and dirt. These hands had crushed hope. They had rained fire. And now, they couldn't even stop his own shivering.
"I need..."
He tried to stand, but his leg gave out, sending a fresh spike of white agony up his spine that made his vision swim. He bit his tongue to keep from screaming, tasting the metallic tang of copper.
He couldn't stay here. The deep ruins were too cold, too exposed. If the drones didn't get him, the infection in his leg would. He needed warmth. He needed shelter.
"I want a second chance."
The thought bubbled up, unbidden and pathetic. He wanted to scream at the unfairness of it. He had been manipulated, hadn't he? He had been used. Didn't that count for something?
But then he looked at the ruins around him. He looked at the scars on the city. He had done this. He had enjoyed doing this. The world didn't give second chances to nightmares.
And yet... the survival instinct was a stubborn, selfish thing. It didn't care about morality. It just wanted to live.
"I have to move.", it commanded. "Or else I'll just die here in the dirt and the trash like Eggman said."
He forced himself up, grabbing a twisted length of metal pipe from the debris to use as a crutch. It was a slow, agonizing shuffle. He stuck to the shadows, navigating the labyrinth of the Old City.
The journey was a blur of pain. Every step was a negotiation with gravity. He stumbled through the remains of a commercial district, the shattered storefronts grinning at him like skulls. Mannequins, melted by the heat of the war, looked like corpses reaching out to grab him.
He came to a blockage, a massive pile of debris where a bridge had collapsed. He stared up at it, his chest heaving. He had to climb.
He dug his fingers into the concrete. He pulled. His muscles screamed in protest. Halfway up, his boot slipped on a loose tile. He scrambled, his injured leg banging hard against a steel girder. He cried out, a raw sound that was swallowed by the wind, and slid back down a few feet, scraping his arms raw.
He lay there for a moment, panting, staring at the dark clouds. It would be so easy to just stay here. To let the cold take him.
"No. I can do this. I have to. Whatever it takes. I need to get out of here."
He gritted his teeth and pulled again. Inch by inch. Pain by pain.
When he crested the hill of debris, the buzzing in his chest began to swell. It wasn't just a sound anymore; it was affecting his sight again.
Suddenly, the street wasn't empty.
For a split second, he saw them. Standing in the middle of the ruined road. Squad Jackal.
They were laughing, cleaning their weapons, passing a canteen around. They looked so real. So alive.
"Captain?" one of them asked, the voice clear as a bell. "You coming?"
Zero reached out, his heart leaping into his throat, a desperate sob breaking from his chest. "Wait! I'm here guys! Wait for me…"
When he blinked again, the image dissolved into red pixels and vanished into the wind. He was reaching out to a pile of garbage bags fluttering in the breeze.
He choked back a sob, his vision blurring with tears he refused to shed. He hit the side of his mask with his fist, trying to jar his broken brain back into working order.
"Stop it." he growled at himself. "They're gone. It's not like they came back from the dead. Stop seeing things that aren't there."
He kept walking. He had to get away from the ghosts. He had to find somewhere the silence wasn't so loud.
He moved instinctively toward the smell of greenery, the scent of damp earth, pine needles, and life. The Park.
It sat on the border between the ruins and the outskirts of the living city. It was a neutral ground, overgrown and quiet.
Zero stumbled into the tree line. The ground changed beneath his feet. The unforgiving concrete gave way to soft soil and grass. It felt alien. It felt... forgiving. The air here was cleaner, lacking the smell of smoke and death.
He leaned against a thick oak tree, gasping for air. The contrast was jarring. Behind him lay the black skeleton of the war zone, the monument to his sins. Ahead of him lay the manicured peace of the suburbs.
He shouldn't be here. He was a stain on this landscape. A smudge of darkness in a painting of light.
But the lights... the lights were so close.
He broke through the other side of the park. The city outskirts.
It was quiet here. Suburban. Peaceful. The streetlights buzzed softly, casting long, calm shadows. He saw tricycles left on lawns. He saw laundry hanging on lines. He saw a world that had moved on without him.
Through the haze of his delirium, he saw a house.
It wasn't a fortress. It wasn't a base. It was just a small, white house with a low stone wall and a garden that smelled of night-blooming flowers. A warm, yellow light spilled from the window, casting a golden square onto the lawn.
It looked... warm. It looked like a memory of a life he had surrendered long ago. It looked like the kind of place a hero would live.
Zero staggered toward it, drawn like a moth to a flame. His vision was tunneling now, the edges of his sight consumed by the red static of his failing mind. He didn't know whose house it was. He didn't check the name on the mailbox. He didn't care. He just wanted to be near the light. He wanted to pretend, for just a second, that he was someone who could belong in a house like that.
"Just... rest" he slurred, his legs feeling like lead. "Just for a minute."
He reached the low wall. His body screamed at him to stop, to just curl up in the dirt and let the cold take him, but the pull of that golden light was too strong. It was hypnotic.
He didn't stop at the grass. Driven by a desperate, illogical need to be closer to that warmth, he dragged himself across the lawn, his boots leaving furrows in the dew-soaked earth. He hauled his broken weight up the concrete steps of the porch, his breath rattling in his chest like loose gravel.
He was so close now. He could feel the heat radiating from inside.
His hand reached out, trembling, not to knock, but to hold onto something solid. He needed to anchor himself to this reality before he faded away completely.
He slumped forward. His heavy weight slammed against the wood of the front door with a dull, hollow thud that echoed through the quiet night.
As he slid down the surface, his cheek pressing against the painted grain, a final, lucid thought drifted through the static of his mind: I have made a terrible mistake.
He had brought his darkness to the one doorstep that should have been forbidden to him. He was a monster dying on the threshold of a sanctuary he had no right to touch.
He closed his eye, his body going limp against the wood. He was a broken villain collapsing at the entrance of a house he should never have gone to, completely unaware that this final, desperate mistake might just be the best thing that had ever happened to him.