Chapter 40: I'm the Main Character!
Ross couldn't get the smile off his face. He also wasn't in any rush to start exploring. If the underlying rules hadn't changed, Angel Island Zone was probably considerably safer than Zevil Island on the outside — a horizontal-scrolling platformer configured around traps and obstacles rather than enemies, and what enemies did exist in Sonic's world were fundamentally different from the ones in most combat-focused games. In practical terms, every enemy he would face here was a Badnik — a mechanical shell, and inside that shell, a small animal. You didn't kill them. You cracked the casing and the animal walked out. The most bloodless franchise in his entire platforming library.
He was also glad his Completion Vows hadn't come up as "Speedrun." That meant he could take his time — explore properly, and actually work on his training without a clock over his head.
What he hadn't expected was the immediate urge to run.
After the last few days of sustained movement through Zevil Island, his body had its own ideas. Following the principle he had laid out himself, he let it go.
He made it about twenty meters before something wrong registered and he hit the brakes.
He looked at his legs. Then his hands.
No controller. He was holding nothing.
But the acceleration he had just felt — the smooth, steady ramping up — was the exact feedback of Sonic Speed Movement doing exactly what it was supposed to do.
He had used Sonic's ability instinctively, without the controller, without running Real Mode.
He stood there for a moment.
The thing about video games was this: no matter what game was running, no matter who was holding the controller or the keyboard — in that moment, the player on the outside of the screen was the true inner core of the protagonist on the inside. The player projected themselves into that character. The player was the protagonist.
Outside the screen, you needed external hardware to translate your intentions into the game character's movements.
But what was his current situation?
He was inside the screen. He was standing on the same ground as the game's protagonist. He was the one who had to beat the enemies and clear the stage.
"I get it now. In here, I'm Sonic."
Less than a minute after entering the Secret Realm, Ross had arrived at what it actually was.
In here, he was Sonic.
He pulled up his status screen by mentally pressing START.
Well. Budget Sonic was still Sonic.
Sonic Speed Movement was still Grade E. Golden Ring Lifeline was still unchanged. No new abilities like Spin Dash had appeared out of nowhere. To become the real thing, he would need more cartridges and more Secret Realm clears.
But when his attention landed on the first item in the skill list, he paused.
Transmutation Affinity: Grade A, Lv-, passive ability. When the player possesses this talent, the player's Transmutation type aptitude is raised to 100%.
He had noticed this one when Real Mode first activated. The "Lv-" — no level counter — had told him something. And the ability itself, short and plain as the description was, understated what it actually meant.
A Manipulation type user, whose theoretical Transmutation efficiency was forty percent, would have that forty raised to one hundred the moment this passive was active. A Conjuration user who sat at eighty percent — same result. One hundred.
What did that actually represent in practice?
Rough reference point: Kurapika, later in the timeline. Kurapika could activate his Scarlet Eyes to shift into Specialization type and reach full efficiency across all six types simultaneously. That, combined with a solid foundation and the particular intensity of his hatred for the Phantom Troupe, had allowed him to kill the Troupe's strongest frontal combatant — Uvogin — in less than a year of Nen training.
A significant part of that outcome did depend on the type matchup: an Enhancement type running into a Conjuration type's rule-based Nen tool for the first time, with no experience to draw on, was always going to be at a disadvantage. But the fierce, sustained attack-and-defense exchange that preceded the finish had demonstrated clearly what full-efficiency application across types actually delivered in raw performance.
Ross, with the Little Tyrant's Endless Amusement, could achieve a result structurally similar to Kurapika's — and with a less destructive vow and restriction arrangement than someone who had already sacrificed as much as Kurapika had.
The pattern was becoming clear. The cartridges scattered across this world had each had a layer of Nen rules written into their base code. Every protagonist carried a type affinity setting that fit who they were.
Sonic's Transmutation Affinity A — made sense. Speed of that order wasn't brute force. It was aura constantly changing form, reshaping and redirecting in real time.
Kunio from Nekketsu New Record, on the other hand, had brought Enhancement Affinity A. Completely expected from a straightforward brawler who bulldozed through everything in his path by being more of what he already was.
Combining the two — running Sonic's Secret Realm while also mapped to Kunio through Real Mode — wasn't something he could do now. Mixing game systems would require conditions he didn't have yet.
He dismissed the status screen with a wave of his hand.
Looked out at the hills and streams of Angel Island.
Let out a full Tarzan yell, sending wildlife fleeing all over again.
Then he started moving deeper in.
One thing worth noting: the transition from a 2D game observed through a screen to a first-person physical Secret Realm did a thorough job of breaking every piece of spatial muscle memory a player had ever built up. What your brain remembered about the layout was built around a fixed camera angle and a flat plane. Here, that didn't apply.
What did apply was game logic.
The Secret Realm was derived from the game. Which meant it retained certain features that games included specifically to help players navigate. For instance:
Rows upon rows of Gold Rings, floating in midair, each one leading to the next like a trail of breadcrumbs.
Follow the rings and you couldn't get lost.
Ross walked along with a coconut in hand — knocked loose by a monkey Badnik that had chucked it at him from a palm tree — and made a deliberate detour off the main path. He found what he was looking for: a large flat section of rock whose color was noticeably different from the soil around it. He approached it without slowing down, launched airborne, wrapped himself fully in Ten, and drove the point of his elbow squarely into the rock.
Sonic Elbow Strike.
The rock shattered and fell away, leaving a perfectly square cave opening behind it — the geometry too clean and regular to be anything other than intentional.
His momentum carried him through before he could stop, straight into a Gold Ring inside — one that kept expanding as he approached, growing to dozens of times the size of any ring he had passed so far. He hit it.
His body disappeared into it.
After a brief, suspended weightlessness, Ross found himself standing on a miniature planet — like King Kai's training world from Dragon Ball, tiny and self-contained in the middle of nothing.
This was the location of Sonic 3's hidden collectibles. The Chaos Emeralds.
The greatest hidden content in the entire series.
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