Chapter Text
Repetition let him hone his new abilities. The second fight was an echo of the first. And the first, technically, was an odd mismatched echo of battles actually fought. The biolizard had new mutations but it was also long dead. Putting it out of its misery in this ‘white space’ didn't change its deceased status. Metal overlord didn't even require the same amount of firepower to take down as the moment in time the fight served to be a reflection of. Granted, he did nothing but grow stronger in the interim and a part of him thought he could've handled the original without help too. Then there was the enemy the professor suspected came from a point in the future- well. It was strange to consider the present to be an echo of something that hadn't even happened yet. And that wouldn't happen, if he had anything to do with it.
(Time could be changed. Time was changed. And the professor still asked him not to tell him anything, so that he wouldn't alter a timestream that soon would lead to misery.)
There was…frustration, yes. He wanted to use every new power he took for his own to save her, them, and to defeat Black Doom again once and for all. The latter took priority currently. The professor and he agreed on that course of action. But the idea to change their fate was the first that he had the moment he saw them again.
The professor and him did not agree there yet and Shadow was no closer to knowing how he could save these versions of them. When Black Doom perished, the effects he held on this strange place would surely break. Time was of the essence, too. He needed to be done before the faker was done in his own part of the void.
Time was the essence of everything here. Very funny.
But it was true. Despite how pressing any need seemed, the constraints were held in amber until acted upon. Moments reoccurred in loops. Reviseable loops, contents done faster sometimes than others, however that worked. Shadow didn't need to know the full details. He just needed to know that he wasn't risking his time by walking into these echo chambers, and that he was getting something out of retracing the same halls.
Practice honed his reflexes, let unnatural movements become second natures, inspired new ideas for applying these morphs, and, yes, provided a sink for his frustrations at impotent plans.
The echoes were more lifeless than the identical rooms were when the gates first swirled open. No ‘time’ passed outside, so long as he was inside the mirror away from the reality casting the reflection. Shadow fought, and he fought. The only opponent he did not really test himself against repeatedly was the biolizard. The ghost of a sound, the afterimage of chaos control in motion, whatever way the echo could be explained, the duplicates repeating the motions of an arena he conquered already still moved through those motions of suffering. And he had told it he would end that. So even if the biolizard was dead, and then a hole in time opened and acted like that wasn't the case except the timestream clearly was intact (and didn't need to be, it did not need to be one unchanged timeline), he wouldn't keep dragging even that shadow through needless pain again and again. Besides, the new mutations didn't make it a challenge. He wouldn't be improving himself by conquering a given thing.
When it came to…well, he had no idea who the guy’s name was. The professor predicted he was an opponent from the future; with the added context of the stranger’s words, the theory altered more to him being an opponent Shadow wouldn't ever fight. Good. The world faced enough threats. Another megalomaniac with a penchant for talking too much about darkness and submission didn't get a future. If only he could cut off most problems before they could even begin…
Maybe it could be considered dangerous to keep going through the portal. If it contained a threat to the world he was sworn to protect-
But he was fighting an echo to start with. The shadow cast by a different timeline altogether, visible only on the floor of this one, and unstable as could be.
Black Doom grew in strength with every moment Shadow spent in that white space. But he didn't further steal power in between an entry into one of those vortexes and exits, and Shadow took that to mean something important:
He reentered the portal and no critical time passed for any of those in white space, held hostage by the Time Eater or Black Moon. By testing himself against gray shades of a better fight, he did not risk letting either threat succeed.
Or so went his thought process.
It was a miscalculation.
If no time passed, then explaining the spread of corruption would be rather impossible.
The oil, the ink, the shadows and poison, the unnatural rot festering over the structures stolen into white space, slowly, slowly, ever so slowly, so those watching could question and doubt their own memories about whether that little square foot was water or goo before, and so the self-claimed bastardized godhood in the sky kept his focus on his personal prize- not the presence of an actual god.
Shadow could be afforded grace, even if he wouldn't give it to himself. He had no way of knowing what this opponent was. He couldn't expect it to be any different than fighting Metal Overlord repeatedly. No one knew the distinct difference between the Biolizard, metallic mess, or even the being in the Black Moon who was taking advantage of this time anomaly.
‘Time’ belonged to another once, before this fact was unwritten, and never occurred. The more exposure white space had to the undone god, the further it corrupted to the touch of a timeline which shouldn't exist concurrent to the current.
Shadow threw off the last clone and fell to the floor. It stuck against his shoes and legs with a disturbing sensation. The feeling was unpleasant enough that he almost doom morphed then- but a more pressing issue was at hand.
He shouldn't have fallen, because the last clone shouldn't have been a clone. It should have been a far more solid body under his hands that he could throw into a pillar before dropping down here.
The deserted room was uncannily silent. All of the gunk on the floor remained, unfixed. Every part of the chamber remained like it was every other time he saw it.
This fight, this shadow of a fight-
The echo was still a grayed out replica of the first fight in here. Except it lasted now. As if chaos control was used intentionally and then did not expire.
Every time, Shadow would end these challenges in a scripted manner he put down to being more memory than present event; that way they would be completed with similarities to the finish that actually defeated or killed them. (The real them, not these memories. Rouge told him Sonic had to get an emerald from Metal Sonic, while Metal Sonic was here from a different period in time to be defeated by Shadow? It did not make it feel like an actual portal ever opened up under the actual Metal Overlord and dropped him into Shadow’s path. He fought his memory, or maybe Metal Sonic’s, because if a living opponent was around in the present timeline then it made more sense how their memories were what this space drew from, not Shadow’s, considering Shadow didn't have memories of a fight he NEVER FOUGHT.) He made the same jumps, kicked the same spots, yelled the same lines. No matter what differences occurred in the meat of the fight and what new morphs and powers he had, Metal Overlord always threw that last boat at him and he always sailed over to get in a good strike to the dragon’s core. In the case of the stranger, a wave of- presumably not clones, because if that was their intended purpose, their master was really losing all power at that point- rose like the dead, fell all too easy, and purple smoke obscured the moment the weird crystal creature was replaced by the sealing device.
The end was reached, the cry went out (only slightly less tangibly bitter and desperate when it was a hollow echo and not the first time), Shadow walked back towards a vortex that once again had visible depth with that color and noise rather than being a hazy gray out of the way like it became when the fight started playing out.
But the clones fell. The floor remained in its corrupt state. Sound haunted, no last ringing note to put this place into rest. Shadow killed every last moving creature. Clearly, since there were none left. He could count when he did. He could count the amount of duplicates destroyed before, as always, he reached the real one and sent him to the floor.
And his count came up both right and wrong. Right, because he'd killed all the clones. Wrong, because he'd only killed the amount of clones and did not have one extra number on top from the original. This time, one of the replicas stood where the real one should have been, took the blow that should've been a takedown, and predictably shattered, melted, faded, away. It did go down more easily. In hindsight, the feeling was too fragile of the head under his hand. By now, he knew exactly how it felt to grip the scaly surface, push it to the ground until skull broke, dust flew, and the strange sealing device popped out once again to lie on the dirt.
He morphed to swim to the edge of the corruption and then walked up to the portal.
The room was still, in a way that felt incomplete. It felt gray, for lack of a better word. It acted like a glitch. So far as he could tell, the enemy didn’t sink under his own viscous flooring to hide forever instead of playing to the fated script. That left Shadow as the sole occupant of the arena, if he considered an echo and its even more hollow clones to be occupants (it almost felt too participatory to).
If there was no one here to flush out, then he should just be able to leave.
Shadow put one hand against the gray, hazy vortex. Adding pressure didn't help.
He hit it with both hands. Nothing changed the speed at which it swirled. Nothing made it turn into the colors it had when it was available for access or exit.
The sealing device wasn't even anywhere in the room for him to investigate!
A harsher hit.
How was he supposed to trigger the memory’s end if it didn't play out to the consistent finish?
It didn't matter if the portal tried to keep him here. He would leave.
In the end, he did leave.
Black Doom lost his chance. Maria was gone. The emerald went to a Sonic who was none the wiser.
The question of the broken arena stayed an unsettled conundrum. Perhaps time repaired itself enough that a memory of something that didn’t exist in the timeline simply stopped working.
Shadow wouldn’t accept such a clean answer.
And he wouldn’t allow anything- or anyone- to interfere with his responsibility to protect the world for all its people.