Sonic.exe: The Final Round

CHAPTER 1: AWAKENING

Everything and everyone has their own stories. Some of them end good, some of them end bad.

So let’s just start off my story with this; I’m not that big of a Sonic fan. Never really saw the appeal in the series, especially with how much mediocrity it had. Hell, it became what was considered a literal hellspawn back in my neighborhood due to reports of a figure called “X” terrorizing his world and franchise. Most people started to fear the franchise because of that. Children, especially.

Weird stuff, I know, but it was apparently true after police started to notice brutally mangled corpses with numbers carved on their chests. That even added more of a reason to not even bother with the series that is Sonic The Hedgehog.

At this point of time, more than 457 people have been killed by the thing. It’s widespread, and the population of my town is slowly decreasing.

..But despite that, I thought they were overreacting and it wasn’t just some random disc. Something like that just couldn’t happen. So what do you expect me to do?

I was just chilling in my living room watching some TV, on a cold winter evening. Can’t remember what I was watching, but that didn’t matter.

I had the local postman ring my bell so I instantly got up and opened the door, and I was greeted with a box with a letter attached to it. Apparently the box was sent by one of my friends. For the sake of respect and privacy, we’ll just call him Mike.

After the postman had left, I got to the living room and opened the box, and pulled out its contents, and I was greeted by a disc.

It had a case, so I opened it and saw the disc’s contents, and it was just a CD-R that said “Sonic.exe” on the bottom of it.

…Great.

Heard about this thing in stories, and news headlines, and because of how much fear it put into civilians, I mostly thought this was a prank or perhaps the real deal. The letter I read even had some scribbly messy writing from Mike that told me to destroy the thing and not even lay a finger on it or else I’ll be haunted to death or something. Cheesy and all, so I thought this was just a prank…

…Only one way to find out.

CHAPTER 2: HELL ON “EARTH”

I decided to load the disc in my Windows XP computer in my room, and it surprisingly worked for an old computer that didn’t work with most modern games. Then again, this is Sonic.

And as the application opened, I was greeted with the average SEGA bumper or whatever. But it was corrupted and jumbled to hell, for some reason.

Then, It transitioned to Sonic on a title screen, and he looked.. Odd and out of place from what we know is the usual colorful and bright mood of the original Sonic. Bleeding eyes, discolored tone, and what seemed to be “hell” behind his floating ring. He looked extremely realistic, too, which was uncanny for a 16-bit game.

Already getting some shivers from it and knowing that this was actually real, I tried to open the disc so I wouldn't get exposed to the danger that most people talked about. Especially during the literal evening.

It didn’t work.

The computer’s tray didn’t open, and I tried closing the game manually by my computer, it didn’t work either, while the screen became full, the game being the only thing that appeared in my computer screen, and after that screen, I was greeted with a character selection screen with a red foggy background with reversed Earthbound music. Could tell, because I’m a big Nintendo guy. Three characters to choose from. However, I could only choose one.

I noticed that above the static, there was a Tails with bloody eyes just like Sonic, and had a darker fur than the typical orange, I had seen how the characters looked like.

And then, there was..this one villain.. Dr. Egghead, I think his name was. I dunno, don’t play too much Sonic. Especially after this kind of experience. I wasn’t that much of a fan of those games, as I said before.

But he didn’t look human, he looked like a dead rotting human corpse with his own pixelated brain exposed. Don’t wanna think about it too much.

Noticing that the only selectable character was… a red echidna.. Which’s name I suppose was Knuckles. But I picked the character, he looked pretty strong, to be honest. And he was the only thing I could choose on the screen, so I had no choice. Seems like Mike did save the best for last, but didn’t even play the best.
I was greeted with what I knew was the Scrap Brain Zone, supposedly the first act of the game seen from the title.

But at the time, I knew it as “YOU CAN'T RUN”, with, of course, Earthbound music. Giygas’ battle music in particular.

With blood all over the zone, especially on a specific saw blade that was placed on the ground. Seems that whatever caused this was the cruelest, and that Dr. Egghead guy would not do this. He looked a little too soft for that kind of stuff. And he’s dead already.

But what I noticed was that Knuckles had a defensive idle, seemingly, probably defending himself from someone. Though there were no enemies in sight, which was strange. Most Sonic games, and games in general, need enemies for difficulty. Part of game design.

Then again, this is a fanmade hacked ROM we’re talking about.. I think.

And I decided to continue with the game, although I was weirded out, I needed to find out what was going on with this game. And there was no turning back, either way, since I couldn’t turn off the game due to the disc tray not opening.. Though I could just not interact with the computer and let it stay on for as long as it wants.

Even if it overheats.

But either way, I needed something to keep me company. I decided that I’d keep going right and play the game, with a bunch of obstacles; loop da loops, basic terrain, hazardous objects, all that stuff. Then after a while, red static shined across my entire room and then faded, but then there was something different. It was pitch black, and text that was just a jumble of fonts appeared to tell me something.

The static then came back to cut back to something even more different then text floating in pitch black terrain.

The game switched to a scene where “Sonic'' showed up and was trying to mess around with Knuckles. Bloodshed was found everywhere in the zone, with Knuckles looking angry yet determined. Yet sad, in some way.

As I stared in an apathetic way, yet I was so confused in my mind, Knuckles’ idle animation began; of course, Knuckles was tapping his foot as he stared at the screen. But suddenly, Knuckles became.. Surprised? He realized something.

He looked directly at my soul, using his hands to gesture an “X”. I suddenly became surprised as well, realizing that I had something to do. I pressed the X button on my keyboard to see what happened, and Knuckles managed to do a punch animation. I decided to control Knuckles and then went towards the “Sonic” figure, but then when I punched him, he vanished out of thin air.

Then he came back on the right, in which he looked more evil with black eyes and red pupils with bloody tears. And discolored fur, with grey shoes. Weirdly soothing yet irritating ambience was playing, and I got a little bit mad; I kept going right, punch, left, punch, right, punch, and kept doing the same process.. To no avail.

The character fell down to the ground, it seemed as if Knuckles was exhausted, pretending he was crying. As soon as Sonic began walking towards him, I tried to spam the punch button. And guess what happened? It worked.

Knuckles managed to catch the evil Sonic off guard by punching him with his sharp knuckles straight to the face with the Sonic’s own blood splattering with a scar on his cheek, taking him down and then Knuckles running away at high speeds.

But how was that possible? I thought that in hacks like this, the character would always have to die. At least, that’s what the many fangames based on rumors and stories told me. But then again, those were fangames.. Based on stories, so they always had a settled fate. But this was of course a real game, so things are not just settled and staged.

As Knuckles was running, he managed to run past a sign with a gigantic red “X” on it, spinning to show Knuckles’ symbol of the sign to show that he finished the zone.

But instead of “KNUCKLES HAS PASSED”, it said “KYLE HAS PASSED”

Kyle.. how I’ve heard that name before. But it’s a common name, so I may be mistaking one person for another.

But there was some kid named Kyle, who was friends with Mike. Though I’ve never met this Kyle in person. Probably had played this game too, but why was he mentioned in the game? That was the most strange part.

And another strange thing happened. I saw the evil Sonic levitating above the ground, moving near the sign. He then stared right at me with a horrific grin, saying something in an oddly high quality voice.

“You’re a lot of fun to play with.”

He said with a dark tone that echoed around all the room, as if he was watching me outside. The screen then cut to black, with random and scrambled fonts and letters to talk to me with a specific sound effect.

“Let’s raise the stakes, shall we?”

Raise the stakes: what was that supposed to mean? Maybe raise the difficulty? Something related to that.

So after that, the game cut to a zone called “Hidden Palace Zone”. It seemed to play some Genesis music in reverse, which I later learnt was the reversed version of Hidden Palace Zone.

Everything in the temple was destroyed, the saturation and color was lost, the crystals were damaged, and it just seemed like boring old catacombs.

It seemed like a final boss, well, it kinda looked like that, but this Zone mostly creeped me out the most because of its appearance. I dunno what it was, but it felt like the influence of X that Mike mentioned in his letter.

I tried to shrug it off, but it was hard.

So I continued with the game and tried to forget about the Zone, but something kept disturbing me, it felt as if someone was watching me. Some sort of presence in the room, I was alone in the house after all. The fact that I was in a dark room in the evening made it worse too, and I’m not even afraid of the dark. Especially as someone old enough to get a good job.

But anyways, me and Knuckles, or… Kyle.. managed to get through the palace with ease, Until I got into a room with about seven giant emeralds, with one being more on top that was green. It was glowing. More bigger, too.

The green glowing one, I supposed was the one that Knuckles protected, but why was it here? In the temple? Perhaps it was stolen, or perhaps the palace is the secret safe spot for the thing? I dunno. But from what I remember, Kyle managed to take control of himself with me being unable to do anything.
The music faded out, and Kyle got on top of the big green emerald. I could remember him speaking a specific chant, or ritual. This is what he said…

“The servers are the seven Chaos. Chaos is power, power is enriched by the heart. The controller is the one who unifies the Chaos. If this is the control of that power.. Please, you–”

“Already failed at controlling it.”

A deep and growly voice interrupted, as Kyle looked back and then a loud buzzing noise played as “Sonic” crashed into Kyle and caused an illegal instruction to happen. I jumped at the loud noise and sudden game crash, IMMEDIATELY closing down my computer… and the noise finally stopped. I had to turn on the nearby lamp in my bedroom, to try to get what happened out of my head in a peaceful atmosphere. But then I tried to open the disc tray, and it just wouldn’t open.

How I feared.

CHAPTER 3: NIGHT TERRORS

But I took a bunch of deep breaths, and had an idea…

I put my computer in a small enough suitcase that I had for travelling purposes, and then threw said suitcase out my bedroom window and then closed it. I wanted the memory of that thing to get out of my head, even if I was cursed forever.

And yes, I know it’s in a suitcase. But as the suitcase gets cold, it makes it so that the computer exceeds its temperature limits by being too cold and a little misty. But yeah, I decided to sleep soundly for a while, trying to sleep normally too.

Until I had the weirdest vision.. Or dream.

The dream was consisting of that realistic evil Sonic who was watching me in my dreams, and asking me why I was still trying and that I was gonna fail no matter what, after all, humanity was the thing that belonged to him, and that he was gonna conquer the world, but then suddenly,

I heard a voice of a soul, It was Kyle. Who said to turn off the game and to destroy the disc just like Mike had told him in the letter, with his white silhouette showing.

Until, the Sonic looked back at him with an angry tone and made it so that several lines of barbed wire squeezed his entire body and cut his skin with several scars, and then his jaw fell out. I watched in horror as that happened. He then told me that if I did what he said, I’d end up like him. He then lunged at me and I woke up in a fright.

Hopefully that doesn’t mean…

..no, it can’t be that.

I decided to end it all for once, and got up from my bed. I was sweating, but I had to put an end to this. I knew what was going on now. There were souls inside the game. I needed to destroy that damned disc, which meant continuing with the game. So I decided to get the suitcase and take it out of the cold land outside. It was evening, so it was hard to find it, but I managed to grab the suitcase and get it inside the house, and I checked my computer to see that it was still fine and working, so I put it on the table.

I realized I still couldn’t open the disc tray and destroy the disc.. So there was only one option.

I turned on the computer, apparently, the game was still on my screen, and the illegal instruction message only seemed to be a crash. So I basically had to restart my computer fully by holding deep onto the power button on my laptop.

It restarted, and got back to the save screen.

Somehow, Knuckles was still alive, despite the crash course. This does give one more opportunity to end it all, though I need to do it carefully.

CHAPTER 4: REVENGE

Heading back to the Hidden Palace Zone with the same reversed music and broken atmosphere, I got to the shrine that held the emeralds. Kyle got back up onto the green one, seeming more determined this time. He then continued his chant..

“The servers are the seven Chaos. Chaos is power, power is enriched by the heart. The controller is the one who unifies the Chaos. If this is the control of that power.. Please, you must help me in this fight!”

Kyle finished off, chanting the same thing that he did in the last route, or the failed route. I noticed that he was looking back and hearing something zooming, as I could hear it too. As it got louder, Kyle quickly threw a hard punch at the hedgehog creature that seemed to be known as X, and he was distant from Kyle. Kyle was on the now glowing emerald that seemed to be surging Kyle with power, with X being knocked down on the ground with an angry expression with his shell shattered a bit. I could see black ooze or matter leaking from him. But that was strange.. Maybe it was part of the other’s kind, but I didn’t care. Kyle seemed to be the strongest, even stronger than the hedgehog who had been influencing me in my dreams, and with Kyle’s help, a fight began. I could see that the six other emeralds were also glowing, beginning to fly and surround Kyle. Kyle got into the air, with a loud transforming sound effect playing as he did a specific pose or position. But after Kyle transformed, the game suddenly went to pitch black with the noise gone.

Text then appeared in said pitch black, this time more organized.

“I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the one of the High. Yet you shall be brought down back to Hell, to the sides of the pit.”

A distorted laugh that sounded oddly similar to the Kefka laugh from Final Fantasy VI would be heard.

“Then come and fight me, KYLE."

https://soundcloud.com/mjmstuff1/hell-zone-0-exe-boss-battle

A song similar to this played as the terrain.. Or.. area showed a glowing pink Kyle and an abstract X whose form I couldn’t even begin to comprehend were floating menacingly in a galaxy above a planet with red skies and purple stars in the galaxy. My hud was switching letters like crazy, my rings suddenly increased to 66.

Why did they suddenly increase to 66? Was that part of the game? Or was that a gift made by the.. Demon? I doubt X would dare to give me any ring, so I just assumed it was part of the game. X’s demonic Kefka laugh would be repeating, which is what I thought was a sign of taunting. But he’d start illuminating fireballs to throw at Kyle, so I immediately got to controlling Kyle for a while and got out of the way. I pressed X to see what could happen, and Kyle suddenly blasted towards X in the air and sorta damaged his vessel as he spun in the air. X quickly got in control of himself, hopping onto a nearby meteorite and dashing back at Kyle quickly. I wasn’t ready for it, so I lost 10 rings. Because they slowly decreased, at this point, I had 52 rings. So I decided to pay attention to the movements, or I’d fail both Kyle and what may seem like the world big time. This was my only opportunity to fight back, otherwise I’d be the reason why many people would be killed, or I would be one of the characters in the game, one of the souls.

I’d lunge back at X, hurting him again; this time, I dodged his movements and attacks, striking back. At times, I actually had to run from X and progress deeper into space; more rings were there too, so that’s a kickstart. There were some rings that were red, however, which decreased my ring count; I grabbed a few of them, but no differences were made.

I now have 63 rings. The battle between Kyle and X is still going on, and Kyle decided to do the work for me instead. He took control of my own control, and I just watched with attention. Kyle started to throw a few punches and kicks, X threw a big fireball back at Kyle. He was suddenly now lost in deep space, looking around and grabbing some rings; meteors were being thrown by X and Kyle quickly dodged them, getting to X. He grabbed him by the throat, and Kyle brought him to a spinning meteor and made it so that X’s vessel grinded onto the meteor. It hurt a lot, and I could remember a deep, ear grinding scream from him as he got off with a lot of his ooze or matter draining from half of his vessel. But he managed to somehow stay alive. And.. the matter draining from half of his vessel just revealed a pure black and dark purple, and I didn’t know how his vessel was able to stay that.. And I couldn’t even comprehend most of what he looked like. At least, I can barely remember. It was that stunning to look at.

Right now, X wasn’t the best at defense, and I knew that. His powers were his number one factor, and that’s what he was relying on. He wasn’t relying on his awareness of the environment.

Now was the final strike, Kyle was gonna end it, well, we were gonna end it, in a way. So Kyle slowly approached X, and had said in a box of text that somehow appeared out of nowhere.

CHAPTER 5: FREEDOM

“I call this one ‘to Hell and Back’. Say goodbye, DEMON.”

And with that, Kyle grabbed X’s face and VIOLENTLY ripped off his jaw. It was similar to how the earlier victims were killed. Kyle didn’t show any form of remorse to X or any pity, the demon didn’t deserve any. Then, Kyle shoved both of his power surging hands down X’s throat, with the void stuff in his vessel literally GLOWING WHITE across the ENTIRE ZONE as the vessel burnt and his true form (which I could comprehend; black void matter with red glowing eyes in the dark) was shown to me. A cluster of pure evil, finally banished away. But as he was being banished with the emerald energy, I could hear him screaming loudly. Same with Kyle, who was trying his hardest to use all of his rings and energy to destroy the fucker to literal death. As a huge surge and explosion happened, all of Kyle’s rings were gone…

And X was gone, too. Kyle then fell all the way down to a restored and normal planet, falling into the wild grasslands. Kyle, after landing onto the ground hard, looked at me with what a hurt yet happy expression on his face. He then said one final word…

“Thank you, Terrence.”

He said those words with a thumbs up that was directed to me, as he said my name and went unconscious.. Or dead. I never knew.

After those events, the disc tray ended up opening with the application shutting down as well. I grabbed the CD, and broke it in half with my bare hands, and then left the broken pieces on the floor, starting to stomp it continuously till there was no assembled piece left.

I could hear the whispers of souls finally being free and happy, seeming to have gone to whatever good place there is; something they deserved. I too would be sad if I was trapped into a disc forever, destined to suffer in the hands of a false god.

But I still had a suspicion. What if there were copies of this game? What if there were other CD’s?

..Eh, I suspect they’d be normal by now, hopefully X’s reign of terror finally gone and what we know as “SONIC.exe” just being a perfectly normal ROM hack. With no one dying, of course.

This is one of those stories about X that ends well. After two years of terror, we’re all free from his chains.