Author's note: Amy's pursuit of Sonic is like a game of tag that she plays blindfolded. It's impossible to win if she can't tell where she's going, so why not shed some light for her and see what happens?

Expect runaway fluff, drama and a smidgen of disaster.

Disclaimer: Sonic the Hedgehog, related characters and locales are copyright SEGA.

Amy Rises

Prologue

The Master Emerald cracked. Those pests managed to surprise me yet again. "Live and learn," was it?

Faced with the choice of giving up my hostage or taking a direct hit from Amy's hammer, I chose the former and chucked Sonic's limp body towards the ocean. Amy took the bait like the predictable fool that she was.

As long as I had the Master Emerald at my disposal, victory would still be mine. With this amount of power, all I needed was a good angle to lock on to my target.

"Look out!" Knuckles yelled.

It was already too late. The Egg-O-Matic veered sharply to the side to dodge Knuckles' gliding path and place the three pests where I wanted them: in front of my mighty Chaos Cannon.

Fire!

I pressed the trigger and kept firing at them like my life depended on it, which it did. The amount of light and heat coming out of my own invention exceeded expectations. If nothing else, the Master Emerald was a good battery.

My enemies recoiled from the unrelenting barrage I subjected them to. Their cries did not fall on deaf ears, however. For as long as they had the strength to cry out, I would continue attacking. Sonic and his clique were very tough to dispose of. It would be prudent to stop only when they were little more than sacks of charred meat.

Knuckles had intended to shield his friends from my weapon and ended up falling first. The jewel that he deified sealed his fate as I willed it, the light boring right through his abdomen. Albeit his eyes remained open, they no longer reacted to their surroundings. One down, two to go.

Amy gritted her teeth as she held onto her love interest, who remained blissfully unconscious. In the way she was going, she would save him from drowning, but she had no means of protecting him or herself from my attack.

Several shots bounced off of her hammer while dozens upon dozens hit the mark. She swung the hammer valiantly in front of Sonic to shield him even though it didn't make much of a difference to the result.

"Wake up! Sonic! Save us!" she wailed as Sonic's blue pelt gradually darkened from the red spilling from his wounds.

I chortled at her tenacity. That girl knew neither when to quit nor when she had been bested by the best. The outcome was decided when she came to a gunfight wielding a hammer. It was high time to pay and take the fall.

"Futile…"

The shock, the hatred, the horror–the evolution of her expressions were a feast for my eyes. In the end, she has learnt her place. She was a FAILURE. She couldn't save ANYONE. She was merely a happenstance burden to the so-called heroes and she would fall into obscurity, leaving no trace or memory behind.

With defeat becoming apparent and her strength leaving her, Amy appeared to resign herself as she looked at her hammer one last time and closed her eyes. She hugged Sonic with one arm, shielding a part of his battered body from the cannon, an ugly grimace spilling over her face as she took in the pain.

Naturally, I was recording everything. These moments represented the tipping point to my victory. Every ounce of their hopelessness contained the seeds of a bountiful future for my empire. World domination was at hand.

I laughed. I laughed harder once I saw her let go of the hammer and I didn't stop laughing until the hammer flew towards the Master Emerald, shattering it to pieces.

"No!" I pulled at my moustache in frustration when I noticed that the Chaos Cannon stopped reacting to my input. Amy was not allowed to mar my perfect victory. I would show her that I was still in control. "No matter. I still have my missiles…"

At the press of a button, rows of armament tubes ejected from underneath my craft. Amy was about to make a splash in the water, as kibble.

The Egg-O-Matic shook violently. I glimpsed at one of the warning lights I had been ignoring to check what was going on only to realise that a shadow collided with my glass dome, partially obstructing my view.

"Make way! Coming through!" I heard a grating high-pitch voice. It was that fox. I distinctly recalled shooting him down, making sure that his plane was in pieces, and yet he was back in my hair. Bah!

He peppered my craft with bullets as he swooped past, disabling my autopilot in the process.

"Looks like I'll have to take matters into my own hands."

The missiles would be sufficient to bring him and the rest of them down definitively. I set off half of my reserves to tail the fox's plane and steered the Egg-O-Matic to get a good shot of his friends.

Rather than Sonic and Amy, he caught Knuckles first. The echidna wasn't moving, so Tails had to keep flying the plane with one hand while avoiding my missiles. His greedy propensity to save everyone would be the end of him.

The plane almost skidded on the surface of the water the moment Amy landed on top of the wing together with Sonic. It was a reunion not meant to last. Tails exchanged words with Amy. If this was a farewell, it would have been touching were I not its enforcer.

Missiles caught up to the plane, several of them exploding in the water as the plane made risky manoeuvres near the surface in a desperate attempt to shake them off. Tails was a good pilot, but he was running out of time; my missiles were simply faster. He would need several miracles to happen simultaneously to shake them off, and the Egg-O-Matic had extras to spare.

Amy put both Sonic and Knuckles in the passenger seat before limping to the tail of the plane and materialising the hammer in her hand. A foolish, if brave attempt. She was intending to knock away every missile I sent after the plane, ignorant to the fact that I could detonate them remotely.

I watched the first projectile approach the plane only to be hammered into the water below. It made an outstanding air bubble once it exploded. This lifted Amy's morale. She was now eager to let the missiles get closer and finish them off in droves. In the meantime, I tapped into the individual missiles' controls to surprise her. The first objective was to blow her off the plane, thus, shutting down the plane's only form of active defence.

She took careful aim at the closest missile and swung her hammer to make it collide with another missile and bring both into the water below. I was certain that her heated actions took these missiles out of her primitive mental arithmetic. To be on the safe side, I made one of the downed missiles explode underwater and guided the other to catch up to the plane from below. The plane's fuselage had been hastily repaired and wouldn't be able to take a direct hit.

Amy was too preoccupied with the missiles tailing the plane to notice my ingenious tactic. The Egg-O-Matic spun around its axis to release a flurry of projectiles in seemingly random directions to further confuse my opponents. Tails' mood took a visible dive when he saw that I was determined to finish what I started. Soon, his morale would sink to the bottom together with his plane.

I had a good laugh. The battlefield was under my total control. Those pests thought they were making a difference, but they were wrong, dead wrong. Since I orchestrated this battle, they merely reacted in a predictable fashion to the inputs I provided them. The conclusion would be the same regardless of their actions: my win and their loss.

The Egg-O-Matic closed in on the plane from the side to prevent Tails from getting his emotions under wraps. Despite his scientific credentials, he had the psyche of a disturbed, fickle limpet. Seeing Sonic unconscious put him under tremendous pressure and seeing me, a threat as grand as the sun, grinning from ear to ear in his face, would break him.

Come on, fox boy. Look at me. I hurt your idol…and I am going to hurt you.

I waved at him. He refused to face me, but the way his mouth twitched told me that he saw me in his peripheral vision. What kind of expression would he make when the missile I guided up from the water destroys his flying piece of junk?

My craft shook as I pondered goading him some more. Numerous warnings lit up on my dashboard. Collision? Fire damage? What in the world?!

I scanned Tails' plane and noticed two things missing. One, the plane was not in pieces. Two, Amy was not on the plane.

The Egg-O-Matic took another hit. It was a pounding noise below, where the missile tubes were. The weight of the craft has increased slightly and there was a Chaos Interference alert. The systems were obviously beginning to malfunction because that specific alert was designed for a clump of concentrated Chaos Energy on par with Sonic or greater, the likes of which I had pre-emptively incapacitated.

Amy had the guts to board my personal craft and I would make sure she saw what those guts looked like herself. I fired off my missiles to smoke her out. The result was a series of explosions that pushed me out of my seat. I broke out in a cold sweat when I realised what it meant: that little rodent damaged the missile tubes, causing a misfire. The system warnings confirmed it.

The weight balance was shifting; Amy was moving up on the craft. I had to stop her at all costs. The Egg-O-Matic spun like a hurricane to shake her off. I got dizzy, but she still held on. Plan B was in order.

I couldn't allow her to reach the cockpit, so I diverted most of the missiles remaining in flight to catch her off guard. She would be too focused on venting her anger on me to notice them.

My personal craft was sturdy. The protective dome would still survive a hit from one of my own missiles in its current state, so I would be safe even if worse came to worst.

When she rose into view, she was a beautiful sight. Bloody, ripped clothes, a face that would have been howling in pain if it weren't for the seething rage about me outsmarting her like a chump. That's right, Amy. I did this and you were powerless to stop me.

She clutched the handle of the hammer hard enough to make a dent on the surface. It was the first time I saw her inflict damage on her own silly tool. I must have gotten her good. I promised myself to take note of her facial expression and see if I could force her friends to emulate it in their final moments.

Not that her struggles mattered. Plumes of smoke came into view, warheads gleaming in the sun as I primed them to scoop her off the surface and chain hits in the air one after the other. Amy wouldn't know what hit her, but I would.

Me!

She had been lucky when she noticed the missile I had sent underwater to blow up Tails' plane. Hitching a ride on one of my own armaments to reach my craft required some agility, but this was where her story would end. One needed brains to trump my plans and this pink rodent didn't have any. She was underestimating me if she thought she could match my tactical prowess.

Just as the missile aimed at her feet was about to dislodge her, Amy dashed to the other side of the dome. The missile hit my craft and exploded. Panicking, I had to quickly divert the other missiles I had sent her way to prevent blowing myself up in the process.

She thumped the dome with her hammer and used the momentum to catch up with one of the missiles I hadn't finished rerouting. It was a suicidal move because I could remotely detonate any missile, but, in the heat of the battle, I seemed to have forgotten which missile was which. Rather than play a guessing game and let my opponent recuperate, I decided to detonate all of them and solve the problem this way.

In a repeated stroke of luck, Amy hammered the missiles nearest to her, propelling them towards the Egg-O-Matic, and assumed a defensive position as explosions lit up the sky.

The protective dome spiderwebbed from edge to edge. My vision was now effectively blocked. A jolt and a heavy knocking sound replaced the warning messages: my craft was boarded by an angry-angry hedgehog. Forget blowing up Tails' plane. I didn't even have the luxury of taking a dive to pick up the pieces of the Master Emerald.

It looked like I had to solve this matter myself. I reached out for a sidearm powered by an artificial Chaos Emerald and prepared to show Amy the error of her ways. She should have stopped while she was ahead. Now, her empty head would pay the price.

The instance I saw her silhouette in the smoke, I pulled the trigger. The discharge made a hole in the protective dome, but Amy managed to dodge the shot by crouching. I tried firing at her feet only to have her jump off the spot I was aiming at.

I had to get rid of the glass dome to get a clear shot at her, yet she didn't even let me do that much. After headbutting the dome several times, she weakened the material to the point it could no longer hold up its own weight.

With a crashing sound, pieces of glass fell on my face. I saw Amy standing tall in front of me. She was breathing heavily and it was obvious that she didn't have much fight left in her, but she had the resolve to avenge her friends.

Our eyes stayed perfectly still as we glared daggers at each other for a few seconds. The one to make the first move would be victorious.

Try as she might, it was my battlefield and I decided the pace. Without my input, she was nobody.

However, that particular nobody was holding a hammer uncomfortably close to my face. If I increased the distance between us, I could safely aim and shoot her with my gun.

The stupid hedgehog wouldn't be able to track my swift fingerwork. With a few presses, I would turn the craft upside-down and have gravity take care of the rest. The seatbelt was a useful invention.

I glanced down at the controls I needed to execute my plan and saw her hammer punch a hole in the dashboard.

What?

"What?" she asked.

"'What?'" I replied.

I was flabbergasted by her performance. Somehow, Amy tracked my movements and prevented me from executing my plan. If I didn't come up with something soon, my face would be next in line to incur her wrath.

Like on cue, she struck the hammer against my scalp. The force of the impact made the world around me go dark for a spell. I repeatedly fired my gun while my vision recovered, but the absence of yelps and begging told me that I missed every shot.

The next time she swung her hammer I heard a crunching sound. Breathing got difficult all of a sudden. I could ignore the malfunction warnings blaring on the broken dashboard, but machine pain paled in comparison to the anguish of my flesh. I didn't need diagnostics to know that the rim of my nose was in an unusual shape and that blood was dripping down.

Fixing myself would take some effort. However, it was nothing compared to the benefits I was reaping right now. The longer I stalled Amy here, the more likely it was that Sonic would die. Knuckles could be patched up and I avoided going all-out on him, so he could save me the trouble of reassembling the Master Emerald. Sonic, on the other hand… Heh-heh. It took a good deal of blunt force and negative Chaos Energy to knock him out. As long as that energy stayed inside of him, the resulting corrosion would lead to organ failure. If I took away their hero, their resistance would ebb along with their hopes.

By the time they realised that they needed a Chaos Emerald or a good replica to absorb the poisonous energy, it would be too late for anything other than a funeral.

That was when I found my face planted in the dashboard. The pain from being hit with a hammer thrice came with a delay together with the realisation that Amy was gone, as was my Chaos Emerald-powered gun. This blow was not good for the shape of my nose. Ow.

It was safe to lift my face and look around, but I was no longer in the mood. Amy Rose experienced an unfathomable streak of good luck during this encounter. She intercepted my measures, my countermeasures…ruses, snares and deviltry with increasingly stunning accuracy. I needed to analyse this, take precautions and, when the preparations were complete, augment the strength of my nose.

Because we would meet again.

I disengaged a spy drone to keep an eye on Sonic's clique. Try as they might, I had the knowledge. I had the power. My victory was a matter of time.

In the meantime, I had to take care of a pressing matter: "Orbot, get to the medical bay. I have a concussion."

Author's note: Subsequent chapters focus on Amy's POV. This is a content warning.