Vilgax Knuckles IMP

That was fine. Knuckles was fast. If he had a long enough straightaway he could build up speed almost without limit. He could circle Battleworld. He could circle it twice. All he had to do was keep increasing his momentum. His feet made paths everywhere around the circumference of the planet, so fast he doubled back on himself, so fast he was almost in two places at the same time, and then he was in two places at the same time, four, twelve, more, faster and faster free from physics and limitation. Knuckles was so fast he was almost everywhere. Free and unlimited.

And there was a simple principle about speed. Mass times acceleration equals force. What would happen if he collided with something going that fast?

What would happen if he hit something moving just as fast going the other direction?

That was what Knuckles wondered. Would he die?

Would it even matter? He'd done all he needed to do.

That was more than almost anyone got in this life.

Knuckles curled his whole body into the roll. Now he wasn't just running at blistering near-relativistic rates, he was spindashing, he was speeding like lightning. Vilgax might have been fast, but Knuckles had better fine control. He was going to roll himself directly into Vilgax, straight ahead, a dead-on collision.

At this rate, neither of them were able to move out of the way in time. And when they crashed, the impact shattered an entire tectonic plate.

There was the second strike. There was the opening.

The one blow Knuckles dealt to him was powerful enough to knock him out of his transformation. It had to knock him out of it, it would have pulverized him otherwise. It almost did. Knuckles bounced backwards and crashed into the dirt a mile away from the contact site. Rings flew out of him.

Vilgax could not move.

He wasn't XLR8. Or Diamondhead, or Gray Matter, or Alien X, or anything else.

He was shattered and split open and broken again.

He'd been there many times before. He'd been in the worst scrapes. He'd crawled out from underneath piles of corpses whether they were made by his own hand or not. He'd been reduced to even smaller amounts of flesh than now. But his condition was bad. The damage from Excalibur had only barely healed. The hit that tore him out of his alien transformation only made things worse. Now his head barely held on, opened like a piñata. He didn't need it. His other organs could take over for the function of his brain if they needed to, but those were in heavy disrepair as well.

- Round 5