This story now includes my really cruddy cover art..yeeaaaah…

On the other side of the Desert Sector, Odd, Mikey, and Yumi had been driven away from the rest of the group by swarms of crabs and other monsters. Odd and Mikey were doing their best to cover each other, the Lyoko warrior taking out approaching monsters in the distance with his laser arrows, and the ninja taking down anything that got close enough for him to hit them with his nunchucks. Yumi- as she said to herself, and to the two others- was being the voice of sanity, and keeping everyone focused and together.

Standing back to shell with Michelangelo and fighting the monsters that came close, she said to the boys "We need to connect back with the rest of the group!"

"I would love to," replied the turtle, "But we have no idea where they are!"

"Well, as long as he's still at the Supercomputer, we can just ask Jeremie where everyone is"

"Ah. Great plan. And if he's not there?"

"Then we just search for them the old-fashioned way".

"And try not to get blasted" added Odd slightly-too-cheerily from over his shoulder.

"Jeremie! Jeremie!" She yelled for their companion back in the real world, and hoped that everything was going well there. But the long silence was worrying her. "Jeremie, can you hear me?! We need to find the others! Jeremie!" He wasn't answering, why wasn't he answering?

Jeremie was a bit stressed. Ever since Xana had shown up in his life he was sort of used to it, but this had to be a new record for raising his blood pressure. Something was wrong on Lyoko, very wrong. And- even though he hated himself for it- he had no idea what it was. Monsters were doing things that he had never seen before, strategizing in specific battle formations instead of just attacking wildly, towers were glowing with whole new colors that he couldn't begin to say what it meant, and- he was broken from his train of panic and furious typing by a loud thud that sounded like it was coming from downstairs. In the scanner room. And he was in here by himself. Definitely going to be a record for stress, assuming that they got out of this with the world intact. If that didn't happened, they would have bigger things to worry about. Sliding out of his chair, Jeremie walked towards the entrance to the scanner room, grabbing a pipe leaning against the wall just in case.

Note to self: Find a way to put some actual weapons down here in case of Xana attacks. The amount of times that they were stuck down here with some specter or monster attacking them while they were defenseless was getting ridiculously high. He could probably find his way around some laws, for the sake of the world. He climbed down the ladder , pipe still clenched in hand, and froze when he thought he saw a shadow move. Taking a deep breath and worryingly adjusting his glasses, he balanced on the ladder wrungs, clutched the pipe to his chest, and then lept down at the moving thing with the pipe with a yell. He looked up in surprise when the pipe hit the floor with a clang, and he quickly looked around for the shadow. In the corner of the room, there was a ninja, with a spiky red symbol on its chest. Clutching his make-shift weapon to his chest, Jeremie stood back up, staring at the dark figure, and gulped. "Uh oh."

Jeremie still wasn't answering, and the group was trying their best to break from the swarm of monsters, running and clearing swaths of them to make a path. By now it was clear that there was something weird going on, and they needed to figure out what it was. But to do that, they first needed to catch up with the rest of the group. Yumi, in desperation, turned towards the turtle. "Don't you have any way to contact your brothers?"

"I've tried, already. All I got was static. I just hope that they're alright…"

Yumi had to resist the desire to swear, instead saying rationally, "Whatever is causing all of these monsters to show up must be keeping us from reaching anyone." She threw her fan, taking out a chunk of a swarm of hornets, before stopping a moment to take panting breaths. They couldn't keep fighting like this, taking out this many monsters was getting too exhausting. "We need to work our way back to where we all started. Maybe if we get there we can figure out what's going on".

"That's not going to be so easy, especially with our Einstein MIA. We have no way to even get vehicles!" shouted Odd as he took a few steps backwards and shot at more approaching monsters.

There was a beat of silence before Mikey smiled, and, tapping at the screen on his wrist, said proudly, "That, at least, I can fix!" and he pulled up his code runner. The Lyoko warriors stared at it in dismay, as they realized it only had one seat. Then they stared at Mikey, whose grin turned a bit more into a grimace. "Okay, so it'll be a bit of a tight fit. It's better than walking and having to fight monsters constantly, at least, right?" The two still look unconvinced, until a giant blast from a newly materialized megatank sent them all scrambling out of the way to get inside of the small one-turtle car.

"Go go go go go!" screamed the two Lyoko warriors at the driving turtle.

"I'm going, I'm going, I'm going!" he cried back, as the little buggy raced across the desert landscape, and was occasionally buffeted by fire from the smaller monsters. Based on Yumi's memory (the one who had paid the most attention to their surroundings when they got separated), they headed back to the area where they had started from. They could only hope the rest of the group was still there, and was doing alright.

Next time, all the groups will come together , and we see what the Shredder is up to. R&R, until next chapter! (ps, sorry for any possible inaccuracies with show canon. I haven't watched Code Lyoko in forever, and I'm mostly going by memories and wikis at this point. Hopefully nothing is too glaringly inaccurate.)