The Guardian's Confrontation
Knuckles gritted his teeth, his fists clenched and his brow sweaty. The rocky ground beneath him trembled. The attack he expected from Mephiles never came in the way he anticipated. Instead, the shadowy entity simply raised its enormous crystal hand, and reality around him stopped.
"Your determination is... touching, Knuckles," Mephiles' voice echoed, a vibration that seemed to emanate from the very void.
The mighty echidna looked up. Mephiles stood there, but it wasn't just him. A colossal projection of his essence, a monster of pure cyan crystal energy and darkness, loomed behind him, towering like a titan of chaos. Mephiles' own purple aura had expanded into an absolute void, opening a portal to an unknown and distorted cosmos.