"Five years, Rouge. Five damn years, and we still don’t know what happened to him. One minute he was there, smirking like he always did, and the next… nothing. No body, no signal, no damn clue. And now all we have are rumors—he's dead, he's with Eggman, he ran away. None of it makes sense! Sonic wouldn’t just leave us! He wouldn't… leave me...." Shadow clenched his fists, his voice trembling with an anger he couldn’t shake, an anger that masked something deeper—something he refused to name.