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9
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Sissi's eyes adjusted quicker this time as she climbed out of the manhole on the bridge, swapping her rollerblades for another pair of shoes as Odd climbed up behind her.
"So Jeremie and Aelita have to be there for every attack?"
Odd pulled himself out of the hole. "Yeah. Einstein's the only one smart enough to run the supercomputer, besides Aelita, but she's the only one who can deactivate towers due to her connection with Lyoko and XANA." He pulled the manhole cover back into place and stood, taking Sissi's hand to pull her up. "And Aelita needs at least one guard to help fight off anything that tries to stop her from getting to the tower."
They both made their way inside. Odd paused before the chains, pointing off to the side. "The stairs are over there."
"Yeah, I know." Sissi said, before running at the chains before he could stop her. She leapt off the ledge, grabbing the nearest one and swinging wildly on it. At first, Odd thought she was doing quite well, but then he saw the mildly-frightened look on her face that said pretty clearly that she hadn't fully thought it out, and he couldn't help but laugh a bit. While she swung around holding onto the chain tightly, he leapt and grabbed one himself, swinging down to the ground smoothly. Soon Sissi's chain came to a stop, and she slowly shimmied her way down again, her face scrunched in a pout.
"You alright?" Odd asked as she landed, grinning a bit.
"I thought I could do it this time." Sissi replied, sounding put out. "I got the jump right, but once it was swinging I didn't know how to control it."
"You'll get the hang of it eventually. Come on, let's get downstairs."
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The elevator doors opened to the control room and Sissi and Odd stepped out. Jeremie was already at the computer chair, typing away rapidly. He looked back to Odd, his expression a little harried. "Get down to the scanner room, quick! Aelita's pinned down by a pair of Megatanks in the Forest Sector!"
Odd's eyes widened a bit, but he quickly turned and moved back to the elevator. Sissi hesitated, but Odd quickly spoke to her as he turned back around. "Stay up here with Jeremie. You'll be able to watch from the hologram." The doors began closing, and he grinned at her. "I'll be fine." Then they locked shut.
Sissi turned back to the hologram at the center of the room, which had zoomed in on the plane of green fragments dotted with the skinny trees. As she watched, a red flat circle stretched up from one spot on the map. Jeremie's typing didn't let up, but in the midst of it a window opened with a close up view of one spot of the sector.
Aelita had her back to a particularly thick tree, surrounded by flat green rocks. Her attire had changed to a pink bodysuit with white bands, an open-front translucent miniskirt, long purple fingerless gloves, and on closer inspection her ears had become pointed and she had pink tribal marks on her cheeks.
On the other side of the enormous tree, half a dozen or so yards away, were two enormous sphere-things. Each was gunmetal black, with their spherical bodies split in the middle, exposing metal struts and what looked like stretched red muscle pulled between the two halves. At the center of each was a large yellow circle with a strange emblem on it; smaller yellow circles with the same emblem dotted their way around the sphere halves.
As she watched, one of the two things suddenly glowed, before emitting an enormous red disc-like laser wave, which spread out perpendicular to the ground in front, above, and behind it. The wave slammed against the tree and it shook violently; soon it became clear that the huge tree was slowly being deeply gouged out, as the other thing fired the same way, the blast gouging even further.
"Are those XANA monsters?" She asked Jeremie, unable to pull her eyes away.
"Yeah. We call them Megatanks. They're some of the toughest ones he has; he only needs to send a couple to really mess with our day. They're heavy so they take time to start moving, and they're bad at turns once they're rolling, but they're extremely powerful and very, very dangerous."
Another screen came up showing the room with the cylindrical scanners downstairs; Odd was climbing into one before it closed up. "All set, Jeremie." His voice came from a speaker in the console.
Jeremie continued to type. "I'll try to put you as close as I can without getting you in the line of fire. Transferring: Odd. Virtualization!"
The scanner glowed, and a moment later a wireframe had appeared a short ways away from the battle. It slowly filled in with purple and yellow, and in a moment it had dropped to the ground fully formed, giving Sissi her first look at Odd virtualized. His outfit was a dark purple bodysuit like the others, though with splashes of dark blue at the legs and chest and yellow lines around the arms. His unique hairstyle was the same as ever, but it was accented by purple feline ears. Those matched the long tail behind him, and his gloves and the boots of the bodysuit were stylized like a lion's paws. As she watched, her boyfriend dropped to all fours and began to run not unlike a wildcat, moving at great speed.
"Why does Odd look like that?" She asked. "Actually, why does everyone look different?"
"Those are our virtual avatars." Jeremie explained. "It's not the originals; Lyoko scans someone when they first virtualize and provides a default one based on their subconscious. I've upgraded ours since then, since we needed more power and versatility, so these are the ones I put together with the group, though they're not too different from what they used to be."
As she watched, Odd caught up to Aelita behind the tree. His voice came from the speaker; Jeremie had apparently piped the sound from his headset to the console for her benefit.
"Doing alright Princess?" Odd leaned out from the tree past Aelita, pulling back as a Megatank blast shot past again.
"A little worse for wear." Aelita admitted. "They were guarding the tower, but they kept out of sight until I was almost there; they almost caught me in a cross blast."
Odd peeked out again, spotting the tower a ways past the Megatanks; it was glowing the familiar red to indicate XANA possession.
"Alright Jeremie, any suggestions? We're not going to be able to play hide and seek all day with these guys."
Jeremie shook his head. "Best I can say is that you should try and improvise. But whatever you're doing, hurry. The data stream is getting stronger. It's like XANA is trying to dump an enormous amount of information into something. It started building up as soon as Aelita virtualized."
"Oh, goodie." Odd leaned out from the tree again, ducking back from another blast. He swiped over his fist, double-checking his arrow count out of habit, then took a breath and leaned out again, hammering out a trio of arrows at the left Megatank. Two of them sliced through some of the sinew inside the body, but the monster quickly pulled its sphere closed and the last shot bounced off harmlessly. Ominously, the monster began to roll forward, apparently no longer content to wait.
"Uh oh. Aelita, we're going to need to make tracks quick here. Jeremie?"
In response, Odd's purple Overboard materialized in front of them. Odd leapt on, pulling Aelita on behind him; as soon as she had a grip on his waist, he rocketed away, just in time for the mobile tank to round the tree, open up, and hammer an energy blast into the spot where they'd been standing. At first, it seemed confused by the absence, turning itself around at random to look for its prey.
Before it could react, Odd brought the board swinging back around the tree, opening up with both shooters. This time, the tank couldn't react fast enough; arrows ripped through sinew and several buried themselves in the XANA eye at its center, and as Odd and Aelita pulled away, the Megatank exploded spectacularly.
Left alone, the second tank abruptly closed up and rolled back from the tree. Odd turned the board back to watch it; the tank rolled back into the clearing in front of the tower, then turned to face them and opened up.
"Dang. Hey Jeremie, this guy's playing guard dog out in the open; I'm not going to have a good angle of attack on him."
"Hmm…" Jeremie leaned over the computer screen. "And it's not liable to go after you as bait to let Aelita get past, since it would just focus on her first."
Sissi watched all of this attentively, completely transfixed. To her it almost looked like a video game, but the seriousness of everyone's tone made it clear it wasn't a pastime for fun. She couldn't help but also be both impressed and surprised by watching how Odd handled himself; he was agile, accurate, calculating every move, and strategizing on his feet. It wasn't the Odd she'd seen him as in the past, but from what she'd learned about him in the last few weeks, it was now a lot easier to understand the progression.
Which, she realized, made the persona he'd spent so long using in public to keep up appearances even more of an example of how much he actually thought things out. Sure, some if it was honest goofiness, but watching the battle play out, she felt like she was really getting a view of Odd for the first time all over again.
She looked away to Jeremie for a moment, trying to think of any way she could help or advice she could give, but nothing was coming to mind. She looked around the room again, trying to pick out her thoughts. As her eyes roamed, they passed over the hallway she'd ran down the day before.
In the darkness at the far end of it, eyes stared back out at her.
Sissi froze. "J-J-Jeremie."
Jeremie looked up as she slowly pointed down the hall. A strange sound was coming from it, like thick, lumbering, muffled footsteps. The glowing amber eyes were getting closer.
Jeremie's eyes widened. "Oh no. Odd, I think we found whatever XANA was doing. And it's here in the factory." He rapidly began to type again, and in the hallway several thick steel security doors began to slam down in succession. As they did, whatever was beyond them suddenly bellowed out a low, carrying, throaty wet roar that sounded more like several beasts yelling all at once. Both Jeremie and Sissi jumped as the sound of one of the doors being slammed by thick fists echoed up the hall.
Jeremie twisted to look to Sissi, his voice tense but firm. "Call Ulrich and Yumi, now. We're going to need them. Whatever that is, it's still coming. And it's angry."
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