The celebration in Knothole lasted three days.
Three days of joy, of reunion, of hope reborn. The de-roboticized Mobians flooded into the village and the surrounding settlements, reuniting with families who had thought them lost forever. Tears of happiness flowed freely, laughter echoed through the Great Forest, and for the first time in years, the people of Mobius dared to believe that the nightmare was truly over.
Nazo spent those three days in a haze of contentment.
He helped with the logistics of resettlement, using his chaos abilities to construct temporary shelters and transport supplies. He visited the recovering victims, offering what comfort he could to those struggling to process years of lost time. He spent quiet evenings with Sally, Rouge, Bunnie, and Amy, learning more about the intricacies of their unconventional relationship.
He even returned to Vanilla's cottage for dinner, where the cream-colored rabbit treated him with warmth that made his chest feel tight in ways he still didn't fully understand.
Everything seemed perfect.
Which, of course, meant that something terrible was about to happen.
Ten thousand light-years away, in the cold depths of space between dimensions, something was approaching.
The vessel was enormous—a mobile fortress the size of a small moon, bristling with weapons that could crack planets and shields that could withstand supernovas. Its hull was black and red, emblazoned with a symbol that would have been familiar to anyone on Mobius: the circular emblem of Dr. Robotnik.
But this was not the Robotnik that Nazo had broken.
This was something far worse.
Inside the command center of the Death Egg Mark III, a figure sat upon a throne of cold metal and pulsing circuitry. He had once been human—or close enough—but that was centuries ago. Now he was more machine than flesh, his organic components long since replaced by superior mechanical alternatives.
His brain floated in a nutrient bath at the center of his chest cavity, protected by layers of adamantine armor. His eyes were crimson optical sensors that could see across the electromagnetic spectrum. His body was a masterwork of robotics, capable of feats that would make the mightiest warriors weep with envy.
He was Robo-Robotnik. The Robotnik who had won.
In his dimension—designated Anti-Mobius by the cosmic cartographers—he had achieved total victory. Sonic the Hedgehog had fallen to his machines. The Freedom Fighters had been crushed, roboticized, and repurposed as his loyal servants. Every living being on his version of Mobius had been converted to mechanical perfection.
And he had been bored ever since.
"Status report," Robo-Robotnik commanded, his voice a symphony of synthesized harmonics.
"We are approaching the dimensional barrier to Zone Prime, my lord," one of his robot lieutenants responded. "Estimated arrival: six hours."
"Excellent. And the reconnaissance data from our probes?"
"Fascinating, my lord. Zone Prime appears to have recently undergone significant upheaval. The local Robotnik has been... neutralized. His roboticized army has been de-roboticized by an unknown entity. The Freedom Fighters are celebrating their victory."
Robo-Robotnik's optical sensors flickered with what might have been amusement.
"De-roboticized? How quaint. Someone has been playing with forces they don't understand." He leaned forward on his throne, metal fingers drumming against the armrest. "Tell me more about this 'unknown entity.'"
"The data is incomplete, my lord. But our probes detected a chaos signature unlike anything in our records. A being of immense power—possibly exceeding even Super Sonic levels. He calls himself 'Nazo.'"
"Nazo." Robo-Robotnik rolled the name around his processors, analyzing it for meaning. "A chaos entity that can reverse roboticization. That's not supposed to be possible."
"No, my lord. It isn't."
"Interesting." The mechanical tyrant rose from his throne, his massive body moving with surprising grace. "It seems Zone Prime has developed some new toys in my absence. How delightful. I was beginning to fear that this expedition would be boring."
He walked to the main viewport, gazing out at the swirling chaos of interdimensional space.
"Prepare the Roboticization Wave Emitter. When we arrive, I want to undo this 'Nazo's' good work. Let's remind these primitives what true technological superiority looks like."
"Yes, my lord. And the Freedom Fighters?"
Robo-Robotnik's mouth—a mechanical approximation that served no functional purpose but intimidation—twisted into something like a smile.
"Leave them for last. I want them to watch everything they've accomplished crumble before I convert them. Despair makes for much more compliant servants."
The Death Egg Mark III continued its journey toward Mobius Prime, carrying with it the doom of a world that had only just begun to hope.
The first sign that something was wrong came at dawn on the fourth day.
Nazo was walking through Knothole with Amy, listening to her excited plans for a "proper date" once things settled down, when he felt it—a disturbance in the Chaos Force so profound that it stopped him mid-step.
"Nazo?" Amy looked up at him with concern. "What's wrong?"
"Something's coming," he said, his voice distant as he reached out with his senses. "Something... wrong. The dimensional barriers are being breached."
Before Amy could respond, the sky lit up with crimson light.
A massive vessel emerged from a tear in reality itself, its bulk blotting out the sun as it descended through the atmosphere. It was impossibly large—miles across—and it radiated malevolence that Nazo could feel like a physical weight.
"What IS that?!" Amy gasped.
Alarms began to wail across Knothole. Freedom Fighters scrambled to battle stations. Civilians ran for the shelters that had been so recently constructed for exactly this kind of emergency.
But the attack didn't come in the form anyone expected.
Instead of weapons fire or robot armies, the massive vessel simply... hummed. A sound that resonated at frequencies that made bones vibrate and teeth ache. A pulse of energy—sickly green and shot through with red—expanded outward from the ship in a sphere that moved faster than the eye could track.
It passed through Knothole in an instant.
And then the screaming began.
Nazo watched in horror as the de-roboticized Mobians began to transform.
Metal erupted from their flesh. Circuitry replaced neural pathways. Eyes that had only just regained their light went dark and empty as mechanical conversion reasserted itself with brutal efficiency.
The process was instantaneous and irreversible. One moment, thousands of freed beings were celebrating their liberation. The next, they were robots again—standing motionless, awaiting commands from a new master.
"NO!" Nazo lunged toward the nearest victim—a rabbit woman who had been laughing with her children only moments before. He reached out with his chaos power, trying to undo the roboticization as he had done before.
Nothing happened.
He pushed harder, drawing on his connection to the Master Emerald, channeling every ounce of power he could muster.
Still nothing.
The roboticization was different this time. More thorough. More... complete. Whatever technology had created it was beyond anything Robotnik Prime had possessed. It didn't just convert flesh to metal—it rewrote the fundamental nature of the beings it touched.
"It's not working," Nazo gasped, falling to his knees. "Why isn't it working?!"
"Because you're dealing with a superior model," a new voice answered.
Nazo looked up to see a holographic projection materializing in the village center. The figure it displayed was humanoid but clearly mechanical—a robot wearing the form of a man, with Robotnik's distinctive features rendered in metal and crimson light.
"Allow me to introduce myself," the projection said with mock courtesy. "I am Dr. Ivo Robotnik—but not the pathetic version you recently defeated. I am Robo-Robotnik, from a dimension where I achieved total victory centuries ago."
"Another Robotnik?" Sally had arrived, her face pale as she took in the horror unfolding around them. "How many of you ARE there?"
"Infinite versions across infinite dimensions. But I am the only one who matters—the Robotnik who won. The Robotnik who converted his entire world to mechanical perfection. The Robotnik who grew so bored with success that he decided to seek new challenges elsewhere."
The projection gestured at the newly roboticized Mobians, who were now standing at attention like soldiers awaiting orders.
"My Roboticization Wave technology is far beyond anything my counterpart developed. It doesn't just convert organic matter—it rewrites reality itself at the quantum level. Your chaos tricks won't work on my creations, 'Nazo.' They are mine now. Permanently."
"I'll find a way to free them," Nazo growled, silver energy beginning to crackle around his form.
"You're welcome to try. But first, you'll have to deal with them."
The roboticized Mobians turned toward the Freedom Fighters, weapons emerging from their converted bodies. Thousands of them, all programmed for a single purpose.
Destroy.
"Have fun," Robo-Robotnik's projection said cheerfully. "I'll be watching from orbit. Try not to die too quickly—I've come a long way for this entertainment."
The projection vanished, and the robot army attacked.
The battle was chaos.
The Freedom Fighters were forced to fight against the very people they had spent years trying to save. Every converted Mobian was someone's friend, someone's family, someone's loved one. Pulling punches wasn't just a moral choice—it was an instinct.
But the roboticized victims had no such limitations.
They attacked with mechanical precision and enhanced strength, their converted bodies far more powerful than their organic forms had ever been. Laser blasts scorched through the village. Metal fists shattered walls and bones with equal ease.
Nazo fought at the center of the chaos, trying desperately to disable rather than destroy. He used precise chaos strikes to short-circuit robot systems, careful bursts of energy to overload neural processors without damaging the organic components beneath.
But there were too many, and they were too powerful.
"We need to fall back!" Sonic shouted, appearing beside Nazo in a blur of blue. "We can't win this fight without killing them!"
"I won't abandon them!" Nazo replied, deflecting a laser blast and countering with a disabling strike. "There has to be a way to reverse this!"
"There IS no way!" Shadow's voice cut through the chaos. The black hedgehog was fighting with lethal efficiency, having made his own moral calculations. "These aren't the same roboticized citizens we dealt with before. The conversion is total—there's no organic consciousness left to save!"
"You don't know that!"
"I'm reading their neural signatures! There's nothing there but programming!" Shadow dodged a strike and countered with a chaos spear that cored through a robot's chest. "They're already dead, Nazo! We're just fighting their corpses!"
The words hit Nazo like a physical blow. He reached out with his chaos senses, examining the roboticized Mobians more closely.
Shadow was right.
The wave hadn't just converted their bodies—it had erased their minds. The consciousness, the souls, the essential SELVES of these beings were gone. What remained was just machinery shaped like people.
Robo-Robotnik hadn't just roboticized them.
He had murdered them.
Thousands of people. People Nazo had saved just three days ago. People who had been reuniting with families, rebuilding lives, daring to hope for the first time in years.
Gone.
All of them, gone.
Something inside Nazo cracked.
The transformation came without conscious thought—not to Perfect form, not even to Super Perfect. He went straight to Chaos Nazo, green fur erupting across his body, purple gem blazing on his chest, golden bands materializing around his wrists and ankles.
But it wasn't enough.
The rage, the grief, the overwhelming sense of failure—they demanded more. They demanded EVERYTHING.
Chaos Nazo looked up at the massive vessel hovering above the planet, and his yellow eyes blazed with fury that transcended mortal emotion.
"ROBO-ROBOTNIK!" he roared, his voice echoing across dimensions. "YOU WILL PAY FOR THIS!"
He launched himself skyward, leaving sonic booms in his wake, heading directly for the Death Egg Mark III.
Robo-Robotnik watched the approaching chaos signature with genuine interest.
"Fascinating," he murmured, studying the readings. "His power level is astronomical. Far beyond anything I encountered in my own dimension. This 'Chaos Nazo' form appears to be connected directly to this zone's Master Emerald."
"Should we activate defensive systems, my lord?" his lieutenant asked.
"Not yet. Let's see what he can do." Robo-Robotnik's optical sensors glowed brighter. "I've conquered my entire dimension. Every challenge, every threat, every hero who rose against me—all defeated. I've been waiting centuries for an opponent worthy of my full attention."
Chaos Nazo struck the Death Egg's shields with the force of a supernova.
The impact was visible from the planet's surface—a flash of green and gold that momentarily outshone the sun. The Death Egg shuddered, its massive form actually pushed backward by the force of the blow.
"Shield integrity?" Robo-Robotnik asked calmly.
"Ninety-two percent, my lord. Regenerating."
"Excellent. He's strong. Very strong." The mechanical tyrant rose from his throne, servos whirring as he prepared for combat. "But strength isn't everything. Let's see how he handles true technological superiority."
Chaos Nazo tore through the Death Egg's outer hull like it was paper.
He carved a path of destruction through the massive vessel, obliterating everything in his way. Robot defenders were vaporized. Bulkheads were reduced to slag. Entire sections of the ship simply ceased to exist as his rage-fueled power expressed itself in pure annihilation.
But the Death Egg was vast, and Robo-Robotnik had prepared for powerful enemies.
Traps activated in Nazo's path—dimensional snares that tried to shunt him into pocket realities, temporal bombs that attempted to freeze him in time, reality anchors that worked to suppress his chaos abilities. Each one slowed him down, cost him precious seconds, gave the ship's automated repair systems time to close the wounds he had inflicted.
And then he reached the command center, and Robo-Robotnik was waiting.
"Welcome," the mechanical tyrant said, rising to his full height. He was massive—easily fifteen feet tall, his body a masterpiece of destructive engineering. "I've been looking forward to this meeting."
"You murdered them," Chaos Nazo snarled, power radiating from his form in waves that distorted reality. "Thousands of innocent people. People I SAVED."
"Murder implies I care about their deaths. I don't. They were simply organic inefficiencies that needed to be corrected." Robo-Robotnik tilted his head, studying his opponent with clinical interest. "You, on the other hand, are something special. A chaos entity with power that approaches my own. We could accomplish great things together."
"I'm going to destroy you."
"Many have tried. None have succeeded." Robo-Robotnik raised one hand, and energy gathered in his palm—not chaos energy, but something else. Something that felt fundamentally wrong to Nazo's senses. "I've had centuries to perfect my combat systems. Every hero from my dimension fell before me. What makes you think you'll be different?"
"Because I'm not a hero," Chaos Nazo replied, his voice dropping to something cold and terrible. "I'm the darkness that heroes leave behind. And right now, that darkness wants to CONSUME you."
They clashed.
The battle between Chaos Nazo and Robo-Robotnik was unlike anything Mobius had ever witnessed.
They fought through the Death Egg, their exchanges demolishing entire sections of the massive vessel. Chaos Nazo's reality-warping abilities met Robo-Robotnik's technological countermeasures in explosions that rippled across dimensional boundaries.
Robo-Robotnik was everything his weaker counterpart had failed to be—prepared, adaptable, and utterly without mercy. His body shifted and changed throughout the battle, reconfiguring to counter each of Nazo's attack patterns. When Chaos Nazo attacked with raw power, Robo-Robotnik deployed absorption fields that redirected the energy back at him. When Nazo tried to unmake the robot's form at the molecular level, reality anchors prevented the manipulation.
"You're impressive," Robo-Robotnik acknowledged as they separated briefly, both combatants assessing the other. "More powerful than any opponent I've faced in centuries. But power alone isn't enough. I've been fighting and winning for longer than your species has existed."
"Then you've never faced anything like me."
"Haven't I?" Robo-Robotnik's chest opened, revealing the nutrient bath that contained his organic brain. "I conquered a version of Sonic who achieved a permanent Super form. I defeated a Shadow who had unlocked his full potential as the Ultimate Lifeform. I destroyed a Knuckles who had bonded completely with the Master Emerald. Every hero, every champion, every hope that my dimension produced—I crushed them all."
His chest closed, and his eyes glowed brighter.
"You are powerful, Nazo. But I am VICTORY INCARNATE. And victory does not lose."
They clashed again, and this time, Robo-Robotnik began to gain the upper hand.
His adaptive systems had analyzed Nazo's attack patterns, identified weaknesses, developed countermeasures. Each exchange favored the machine a little more. Each moment of combat brought Nazo closer to exhaustion while Robo-Robotnik's virtually unlimited power reserves remained untapped.
Chaos Nazo found himself being pushed back, his attacks growing less effective, his defenses more desperate.
"You feel it, don't you?" Robo-Robotnik taunted as he landed a devastating blow that sent Nazo crashing through multiple bulkheads. "The inevitability of defeat. The realization that no matter how powerful you are, there's always something stronger. Someone who has prepared for centuries for this exact moment."
Nazo struggled to rise, his Chaos form flickering. The golden bands around his wrists were cracked. The purple gem on his chest was pulsing irregularly.
"Give up," Robo-Robotnik advised, floating toward his fallen opponent. "Join me. With your chaos abilities and my technological perfection, we could conquer the multiverse together. Every dimension, every reality—all of it bowing before our combined might."
"Never."
"Predictable. But disappointing." Robo-Robotnik raised his hand, energy gathering for a killing blow. "Very well. If you won't serve, you'll be recycled. Your chaos signature will make an excellent power source for my—"
The Master Emerald pulsed.
Across dimensional barriers, across the vast distance between Angel Island and the Death Egg, the connection that Nazo had forged during his battle with Enerjak blazed to life. Power flooded through him—not just the Master Emerald's reserves, but something more. Something deeper.
The Chaos Force itself was responding.
Nazo had been created from its negative energy, given form by its will, chosen as its champion. And now, in his moment of greatest need, it was answering his call with everything it had.
His body began to glow—not with the green of Chaos Nazo, but with pure white light that contained every color and no color at all.
"What—" Robo-Robotnik took a step back, his sensors screaming warnings he had never seen before. "What is happening?! Those readings are impossible!"
Nazo rose from the floor, lifted by power that transcended physical laws. The cracks in his golden bands healed. The irregularity in his chest gem stabilized. His form shifted, evolved, ASCENDED.
When the light faded, something new stood before Robo-Robotnik.
His fur was pure white, glowing with inner radiance. His eyes blazed with golden light that saw through time and space. His body was surrounded by an aura of prismatic energy that bent reality simply by existing.
He was no longer Chaos Nazo.
He was something more.
Something that had no name because nothing like it had ever existed before.
"You wanted to know what makes me different," the ascended being said, his voice echoing with the power of the Chaos Force itself. "This is what makes me different. I am not just a chaos entity. I am not just a guardian or a protector. I am the WILL of the Chaos Force made manifest. The instrument of balance. The answer to threats that cannot be answered any other way."
He raised one hand, and the Death Egg began to shake.
"And you, Robo-Robotnik—you who have perverted technology and destroyed countless lives—you are exactly the kind of threat I was made to stop."
For the first time in centuries, Robo-Robotnik felt something he had long thought himself incapable of.
Fear.