Commentary for August 7, 2020:

This whole fight wasn’t in the original version of this story. Instead, Sora-Ya bolted as soon as Knuckles showed up to deal with her and jumped into an escape pod, fleeing the ARK and Knuckles’s wrath. But like I said, I wanted to give Sora-Ya an expanded role in this version of the story and have more of a long term goal in mind to infiltrating the ARK than simple revenge against Eggman. The Echidna Empire is very strategically oriented, after all, so they really wouldn’t come here just to assassinate a guy.