With all the chemical fires spewing poisonous gas, walls and floors full of spikes, hyper-acidic electrified black liquid flooding the place, walkways made of cracked pipes spewing lethal sprays of acid, invisible landmines and motion-sensing bombs, and deadly Shadow Android robots able to use Chaos Control and attack when you least expected it, Killer Factory Zone was enough to make a Sonic fan who had stuck by the franchise for over twenty years of bad games give up on the series completely.

There was no room for error, and no room to go fast. And with the broken pipes and crumbling toxic architecture you had to use for platforming, and the constant unexpected hit-and-run Shadow Android attacks, there was no room to go slow, either. You had to move like someone who knew exactly where to go, what was safe to stand on, what wasn't safe to stand on, and where the hidden explosives were.

You had to move like someone who'd died trying to navigate this hellish factory a thousand times, learning through trial and error.

And not even all the trial and error in the world could save you because every time you went for a tricky jump, there was a chance that a Shadow Android would appear above you, hovering in midair to roundhouse kick you into some hazard, killing you.

Every so often, walls would close in around you and the area would fill with Shadow Androids who had no fear of death and would try their hardest to grab you and drag you down into a swarm of the black Hedgehog robots, so the walls could crush you along with all of them.

And if you thought about cheating with Chaos Control, forget it. Eggman could never figure out how to make Artificial Chaos Emeralds, but he could artificially create their opposite: Authority Emeralds, which rendered all nearby unauthorized use of Chaos Emeralds and their fake counterparts inert. Not even Super Sonic with all seven emeralds or Hyper Sonic himself could use the power of the emeralds with one of Eggman's Authority Emeralds around. But of course, Shadow Androids and Metal Sonics could use those things just fine.

And to top it all off, there were no rings. The teleporting Shadow Androids made sure to collect all of those before you could get anywhere near them.

Fortunately for Melody The Hope, she was made of adaptive cyber-electrical metal slime that couldn't be harmed by poisonous gas or acid, and the Shadow Androids were just made of an extremely tough metal that the poisonous acid could easily eat through. And she had enough computer processing power to scan the area around her, calculate all possible traversal options ten trillion times per femtosecond, and figure out the optimal safest and fastest route to take.

Still, even with her speed and her ability to withstand the electrified and poisonous black liquid and swim through it with ease, the level stretched on and on and took so many winding paths through spikes and hellish poison...

Ten minutes, that's how long it took her to get through this miserably cruel level. And she had no doubts that a creature less able to cheat than her would take even longer to make it through this hell.

When act two began, she quickly realized that it was an exact copy of act one just with the addition of these infuriating and undetectable invisible blocks that would turn visible and physical if you touched them from the wrong angle. And some of those blocks? They exploded after being turned visible. If it wasn't for her sonar ability, she would have no idea where these blocks were and she'd be forced to leave, grind extra lives, and come back when she had over a hundred lives to lose trying to beat this accursed zone.

Ten minutes later, she got through the zone and found herself at the core of a titanic machine that sucked life energy out of the earth and forced it into mass-produced Shadow Androids to make them stronger. Before her very eyes, every glassy-eyed machine that had that green liquid life dripped on it turned from mechanical to furious, a false life overwhelmed with programmed hatred for everything.

This sick process was overseen by a... Well, who else could it be but a Shadow Android that seemed different from the others.

In Silhouette, he matched Shadow perfectly, save the gun on his right arm and the glowing red of his LED-screen eyes. His body was a sleek metal silver polished to a perfect sheen, and where Shadow's blackness had red highlights, this machine had blue ones.

"Hey, you'd make a neat action figure!" Melody smiled. "How about you show me your kung-fu grip?"

The machine that built and awakened Shadow Androids laughed, and the blue-striped silver Shadow spoke in a distorted and overdriven version of Shadow's voice. "Unit S-Zero-Two standing by. Designation: Midnight Blue."

"Midnight Blue? That's your name?" Melody asked. "Your parents must not have loved you very much, because that name sucks."

"I have overseen the creation of so many Shadow Androids..." Midnight spoke. "How fitting that one is reprogrammed and sent after me."

"I'm no Shadow Android, genius." Melody retorted. "Tails made me."

"Ah, Tails." The machine had no mouth, it could not smile. "The teenaged Fox who gave Eggman so much trouble in the past. Now reduced to cobbling together flimsy weapons for his foolish friends out of scrap."

"Tails is more of a man than you'll ever be, android scum!" Melody yelled.

"Do you even know what those are? Do you even know what life is?" The Shadow Android asked. "I was programmed to know these things, and know that machines like you and I have no free will. When I am told to attack, I attack. And when you are told to attack, you attack just as mindlessly as I do."

"Mindlessly? Don't make me laugh. I didn't choose this factory in Dead Hill Zone because it was the closest, I chose it because they're all overseen by S-Zero-Two Units like you! You're all connected by the same wireless network. If I can take over one of you, I can take over the rest of them and order all of you to make your factories self-destruct!"

"Impossible. This unit cannot lose. It has all of Shadow's misery, and none of his joy. I remember everything Shadow remembers, and I am haunted by his fury. The life I am ordered to give my Shadow Androids in this facility, the life I was given in this way, is a false life. I am hollow, yet filled with rage. Eggman built me this way because he thought hatred for Eggman was what made Shadow strong. Hatred for this world motivates me."

"That's your problem, idiot!" Melody laughed. "Hatred isn't anywhere near as strong as love! That's what makes Sonic faster than Shadow: His love for running! And that's what makes Sonic fight harder to save this world than Shadow: His love for everything that makes this world beautiful!"

"Love? Error. A machine cannot love. A machine cannot have a soul."

"I might be a machine, but I still have a soul!" Melody pointed at him. "And my soul is telling me it wants to stop you!"

"Foolishness. You have been alive for a day. I have been alive for three years. No machine can ever have a soul. No matter how hard I rampage when Eggman orders me to do so, I will never feel anything."

"Oh? Well, today's your lucky day." Melody snarled, activating her Wispons as the heavy metal boss theme started to play. "Because I'm going to make you feel pain."

Melody flew high into the air, opening fire on the Shadow Android named Midnight Blue. He crouched and formed a black diamond-shaped shield of spinning energy, sending every shot flying back, forcing Melody to dodge. She put her weapons away, reshaped her arms into blades, and flew down onto the robot to slash at it, and Midnight blocked her blades with his gun, smacking her swords away.

He tried to punch her stomach, and she put a foot on his chest and shoved him away. She brought her two blades together and turned them into a chainsaw, and he turned his gun into a rotating minigun, opening fire on her as she rushed towards him and slashed his bullets out of the way. She slashed her chainsaw into his head, sinking the blade in and cutting deep into his skull, but he twisted and flipped over to throw her away. The huge cut-out chunk in his head didn't slow him down as he activated his rocket skates, ran fast enough to catch up to her, and started punching and kicking her again and again, increasing her velocity until she slammed into a wall full of spikes, piercing her everything.

She screamed, but she wasn't done, she grabbed two spikes from the wall and slammed them into the sides of the robot's chest, aiming for the heart he didn't have, shattering his chestplate to reveal his hollow head.

Oil spurting from her wounded body, she shoved herself off the spiked wall and landed on the ground in front of him. He punched at her face, she grabbed his arm and tore it off before slapping him across the face with it, shoving the arm into his face with the hand sticking out, and palm-thrusting the hand as if hi-fiving it to drive the arm deeper into the robot's face, sending it stabbing out the back of its mechanical head.

Midnight sent out a signal, and herds of Shadow Androids leapt off the conveyor belts and assembly lines to surround and attack her. She started breakdancing as the Shadows ran around her, and every time one Shadow Android ran in to attack her, she spin-kicked it or wing-sliced it or tail-slapped it hard enough to smash it apart.

Midnight took this moment of opportunity to grab a weapon, a long and sharp red laser sword, and slash through his own Shadow Androids to swing his blade at Melody, who blocked with her own chainsaw arms.

The two of them slashed and slashed at each other, blocking and parrying and dodging and clashing their blades, each one trying to cut through the other, yet Melody proved she was the superior swordswoman by slashing apart every Shadow Android that tried to hit her from behind during the fight.

It was so epic, the boss battle theme started to get lyrics sung by Midnight Blue.

With every life I take

The bloodshed is surreal.

Another copy of a copy

Is anything we do even real?

All we were made to do

Is watch the world get worse.

And when this story arc ends

This barren earth shall be our hearse.

Break through the waking dream

To see it's all a lie.

Every creature on this earth

is as empty as the sky.

The only reason we live

is to aid in our own genocide.

We're all as hollow as corpses

With nothing left inside.

Midnight sent out a signal and moved a pipe of toxic black fluid over to pour its lethal contents onto Melody, and where someone else would have ran away while the pipe chased her, she chose to attack Midnight Blue harder, forcing him to bring the pipe over to engulf them both in acid.

The two swordsmen swung their blades at each other faster and faster, each swing flicking away acid that almost fell onto them, until the two warriors were creating a spherical gap around themselves no acid could fall upon. Every angle in a sphere was struck faster than a raindrop could fall by these two and their blades, every Shadow Android and the android-making machine ended up destroyed by the poison they were sending everywhere, and by the time the pipe had ran out of poison, the battle was over.

Melody allowed Midnight to stab his sword straight into her face, so she could turn her bladed arms back into hands, pull the sword out, and decapitate Midnight Blue with it.

Melody's body turned into metal slime and she engulfed the headless body, learning its secrets and taking over its abilities. Soon, the secrets of wirelessly controlling important parts of Eggman's levels and commanding Shadow Androids were hers. And after that, it was easy for her to command the other Midnight Blue units out there to begin the Self-Destruct sequences for their factories, and copy what they did to begin this factory's self-destruct sequences.

After grabbing an Authority Emerald so she could have Tails analyse it later, she used the Authority Emerald to let herself use the artificial emerald inside her, and used Chaos Control to teleport out of this base before it exploded violently, sending poisonous chemicals and stockpiled gallons of glowing green life energy high into the air. All the pollution in the world couldn't stop that magical green liquid from fixing this barren wasteland, purging poison from the soil and water, and bringing life back to this hellish hellhole.

"Killer Factory Zone, complete. Time to go back to Tails," She decided.

Flying back, she noticed how beautifully blue the oceans were getting now that the pollution was gone. With no fish, the oceans were clear, and she was able to fly down into that ocean to clean herself before flying back up, and flying back down, breaching the surface of the water over and over, hopping into and out of the ocean like a dolphin.

"I love the earth!" She grinned, spreading her wings high and rocketing into the air, piercing through the clouds before settling down to take a nap on them.

And then she realized these clouds weren't supposed to be solid. Yet she was holding them together with...

"Psychic power?" She asked, her robotic mind bringing up her full genetic data for her to look through. "There's no way... Aha!"

She realized the dormant genes for psychic power had been activated by her protocols to perfect her genetic code, and they came from one source in particular. "Sonic The Hedgehog... is the great great grandfather of Silver The Hedgehog?"

She flew faster than ever before towards Tails's workshop in the main Resistance Base.