During the events of the Neo Flying Battery, Dr. Robotnik was able to restart the giant ship with the power of a chaos emerald. The Neo Flying battery needed some time to regain full power before it would be a formidable distraction so sonic had time to spare. After some time of running, jumping, spin dashing, (and in some instances) insta-shielding his way through the enemies inside the ship, Sonic reaches the control room with the power source. As sonic tries to pry the emerald out, the defense system kicks in full force tapping into the power of the chaos emerald. Five small laser beams and a large cannon are the only thing separating sonic and the emerald. While the small lasers fire, sonic dodges them with relative ease until the large cannon charges. The cannon hogs enough energy away from the ship to shut the engine down temporarily. The cannon is slow to fire but the blast is immense...it knocks the emerald out of the control room through the hole in the ship created by the cannon and into the large hole in a sector of the marble zone, also created by the cannon. With the emerald gone, the Neo Flying Battery plummets with sonic still inside. Sonic moves around the ship looking for a way out, but his options are slim as the only way out would be to jump out of the ship and hope for tails to catch him, but the ship is too close to the ground and the blast from the ship would catch tails' plane. with only seconds before the ship crashes for a second time, sonic spots a fire shield, pops it open, and revs up his spin dash. The Fallen ship plows through a section of the marble zone and burrows deep underground.
The level starts with sonic spin dashing out of the Flying Battery wreckage, with fire shield intact. The lava lit area is littered with fallen pillars, ancient statues, and those robotic bats from sonic 1. As this area is unknown, a chaos emerald fell down here.....so...he goes to find it
