Turbo shot down that part of the wasteland that extended over the pit. He stopped in front of the line and looked at the lava, for once not with revulsion, but with eagerness. He could see himself tossing the glitch over the side and laughing as he watched her body plummet into the fire. Oh, it was going to be so satisfying…

His fantasy vaporised when he heard the bag rustling. Vanellope poked out, groaning as she rubbed her head.

"Ow. Did I fall over? Last I remember we were – wait. Why am I in a bag? And why I am in your car?"

Turbo seized her and threw her out of Behemoth. She yelped as she hit the ground and bounced across it, nearly going over the edge there and then. She opened her eyes and saw the pit raging below her. She immediately sat up, clutching one arm as she turned to Turbo with a delightful blend of fear and confusion across her face.

Turbo advanced on her, peeling his gloves away to reveal the wires in his skin. She saw them and seemed to figure out right there he wasn't the man she'd believed him to be. He wondered what her thoughts were. Did she think a virus had infected the 2013 Turbo, perhaps? Or maybe someone had hacked his code to make him behave differently? She wouldn't suspect him. She foolishly believed he was dead. He chuckled softly, then let all his hatred for her bleed out.

"I'm not the Turbo you think I am, glitch," he spat.

The sheer hatred in his face and tone and his use of 'glitch' clicked it for her. The slow realisation and ensuing horror was delicious to behold. She shook her head, murmuring 'no' and 'you died', denial written all over her. Turbo soaked it in.

"I've waited a long time for this. Nine months I spent skulking in the shadows of your game, letting you believe you'd beaten me! And I'm aware of the irony. I was living like you! A scavenger. A nobody. All because you took my life away…"

Predictably, she tried to use her glitch to escape him. Turbo fired an electrical blast right where she was going to land. It blew her off her feet and sent her back towards the edge. He had torn gashes into her legs, causing her to moan and grip them, blood seeping through her fingers. Turbo smirked at that sight for a second, then continued:

"But you know me; I've always got to do one better. So, you know what I thought would be really ironic? Killing you the way your wrecker friend killed me. Except you won't come back from this…"

He reached out to grab her, but there was a blast of engine noise. The white car rushed down the extension and halted half a meter away. The canopy opened and X-Turbo stood up.

Vanellope had no idea how to react. Two Turbos? What the heck was going on? She'd thought the old Turbo had taken over X-Turbo, but there X-Turbo was, separate. Had the old Turbo done to X-Turbo what he'd done to her? Except X-Turbo must have kept his memories, and instead of making a new form Turbo had taken X-Turbo's…

She glitched past Turbo, who was too distracted to stop her, then ran over to X-Turbo and jumped in his car.

"Are you alright?" he asked.

Vanellope touched the wounds on her legs. They throbbed like crazy from running like that.

"I've been better, to be honest with ya," she said.

Red sparks buzzed around Turbo's hands as he began building up a big charge to hurl at X-Turbo.

"How're you back to normal?" he demanded while he waited for this. "How're you here? I thought I made it so the game couldn't load you!"

X-Turbo stepped back at the sight of the sparks, but was able to meet the original's eye.

"No, the game just dumped me with the rest of its disconnected code. I made my way back and reconnected myself!"

Turbo opened his mouth to answer, but then the track itself shuddered, throwing them all off-balance and breaking Turbo's charge. Red tendrils appeared out of nowhere, zapping out of the sky and across the track itself. The part of land that connected MTM to the wasteland cracked. They all looked at it, realising what was going to happen and willing it not to. No use. The extension crumbled into the lava below, cutting MTM off from the rest of the wasteland. Vanellope and X-Turbo's hearts raced in synchronisation. They were trapped…

It wasn't just MTM that was being affected. All across the game red tendrils licked at the buildings. Some tendrils struck out and caused damage where they hit, slicing up roads and one even decapitated ALF the robot. The sky flickered between night and broken day in seconds.

NPCs were running towards the train area in total disarray. Only the racers remained. Mayor Thelonious appeared at one end of the street and made his way towards them. It could be seen in his eyes that he was as terrified as everyone else, but he was trying to keep a brave face for his city's sake.

"You need to get out of here!" he barked.

"What about you, mayor?" asked Flux, who had joined the others in the street.

"I'm not leaving 'til I know everyone is out," Thelonious answered. "Now come on! Get moving!"

They didn't budge.

"We don't know where Turbo and the twins are!" Lightning cried.

"We're not leaving without them!" Axel added.

Thelonious tried to argue, but the racers stuck by their own. He relented and looked for X-Turbo and the twins among the people darting to the train area. From the other end of the street came Nova and Delta. Delta was staggering a bit and Nova was holding his arm to help him along.

"Have you guys seen Turbo?" Nova asked them before they could ask her. "Del said he'd got into a fight with him and the next thing he knew he was locked in his garage…"

They hadn't, of course.

"Maybe he's not even in this game," Napalm suggested. "He must've gone to Game Central. We can at least look!"

Back at MTM, Turbo turned away from the chaos and looked at X-Turbo.

"What did you do? The game's crashing! You messed up coding yourself back in, didn't you?"

X-Turbo had no idea. It hadn't looked like he'd done anything wrong.

"I – don't – know?"

Turbo grabbed MTM's lever and pulled it. A screen appeared beside the track displaying the roster. By now the game had figured out there were two Turbos and was doing its best to show them separately. Both their icons and names were broken, so it couldn't be told which was which.

"I see what you did. You tried to hook yourself up to the roster without removing me first. An amateur move. This is why you learn about code before tampering with it!"

X-Turbo was still for a moment as this spun around his brain. His eyes went wide and he began to tremble.

"Oh God, I didn't mean for this, I, I was trying to do a good thing, I – no! There has to be a way to fix this!"

The desperation in his voice was agonising. Vanellope could hardly get her head around it, either. How were they going to get out of this? Then, it hit her. She remembered how she'd fixed the damage Turbo and the cybugs had done to her game. She grabbed X-Turbo's hand to get his attention.

"There is a way! You can reset!" X-Turbo had no idea what that meant. "Crossing the finish line will reset your game and fix the code. It worked for my game. You'd never have guessed the cybugs had been there!"

X-Turbo lit up like his city at night. Turbo heard her words and thought about them himself. He came to a conclusion that made him laugh, killing X-Turbo's enthusiasm.

"That will work, yes, but only for one of us," Turbo explained. "The problem is being caused by two Turbos occupying the same slot on the roster, is it not? The Turbo that crosses first will have their data read by the game and accepted. The Turbo that doesn't cross first will be considered excess data and deleted."

Two square lights appeared beneath their feet, bouncing around the area in front of the starting line. One of them found Behemoth and flashed. The other found the Debug Car and flashed. The racers disappeared from the roster besides the two Turbos, whose icons enlarged on the screen followed by the word 'OK!'. A metallic scream blasted at them from further along the track. MTM was awake. The lever…

Turbo smiled at X-Turbo.

"That's you."

He leapt into Behemoth and roared away from them, kicking a huge dust cloud into their faces. Vanellope coughed and hacked as it got stuck in her throat. The canopy snapped down, and she felt X-Turbo pull something over her – his seatbelt. Next thing she knew, she was thrown back as the Debug Car hurtled forward. Whoa, this car was rickety! She gripped X-Turbo for dear life.

"Hold on!" he said.

They left the land and bolted onto the cylinder. It twisted, bended and spiralled all above the pit, geysers erupting around it far higher than they were supposed to go. Red tendrils flashed from the sky like demonic lightning. The cylinder split apart, both halves running parallel to each other with one higher than the other. Turbo was on the higher one. X-Turbo followed him.

He tapped at the screen displaying the Debug Car's stats, altering them slightly:

Body – A

Boost – C

Grip – B

"We won't beat him if our stats are exactly the same," he told Vanellope, who'd been two seconds from asking 'why are you doing that'. "I can't just put every stat to A, 'cause it's not that simple. An A-level boost is way stronger than what I'm used to. I'll lose control! I'm keeping the stats as close to Behemoth's as possible while still being different enough to give us an edge – I hope…"

Vanellope understood. There was one thing about their situation she didn't understand, however. She looked back at the track behind them. Although she could no longer see it, she wondered how they were going to get through the track when the part before the line had been destroyed. X-Turbo read her concern.

"MTM's got checkpoints, not laps," he explained. "It's the only track with a finish line separate from the starting one."

Turbo, meanwhile, was trying harder than ever not to let his fear of fire get the better of him. He couldn't believe it had come to this. A race against his replacement! Well, at least this allowed him to prove he was the superior Turbo right before killing him. He'd kill the glitch once he'd crossed the line. He supposed he could kill her if he made his fake's car explode, but he wanted to see her face after watching her friend's deletion. He wanted her to be miserable right before she died. He knew he'd have to come up with some excuse for the game crash, but he'd cross that bridge when he came to it.

He looked in his mirror and saw the white car coming up behind him like a guided missile. He used to his boost to keep ahead of them, reducing his bar by a quarter, but they boosted too and pulled alongside him. Turbo grit his teeth and swung Behemoth into them. He hit them so hard they fell off the higher cylinder and crashed onto the lower one.

Turbo appeared on a screen in their car, face full of glee.

"Ha! You fools shouldn't even try!"

X-Turbo cursed him under his breath, then remembered he had a child with him and apologised profusely for his language. Vanellope didn't care. She couldn't stand to look at Turbo's face. The question 'why is he alive?' crashed through her head. She was trying as best she could not to think about how he'd nearly killed her in a situation like this one, as well as not to think about what would happen if X-Turbo lost. Why couldn't Turbo have stayed dead? Why hadn't he learned anything?

"Why're you even doing this?" she blurted out.

She didn't expect him to dignify her with an answer. The cylinders reunited into one, now with giant buzzsaws built into them, which were the source of the ear-bleeding metal sound. The first one nearly sliced them in half. Vanellope's nerves were ready to rupture, but luckily X-Turbo was better at avoiding the others. She had already begun to forget she'd said anything, which was why she was surprised when Turbo growled:

"It's what I have to do, glitch. You wouldn't understand."

They came off the cylinder and onto the chunk of land with steam geysers breaking up from it. It wasn't steam in the game's damaged state, however: it was lava. Turbo's bar was down by a quarter, X-Turbo's to half. The cars weaved around the deadly fire, but geysers were exploding all over, making it impossible not to take damage. X-Turbo and Vanellope rocked around as the lava rained on their car, slicing the bar down to its last quarter. Turbo was doing well until one erupted right in front of him. His mind flashed straight back to Diet Cola Mountain and he screamed and veered off to the right. X-Turbo took the lead.

The geysers ended and the land thinned out. There was a Re-Road, which was long enough to restore both their bars to full. In front were two white gateposts that turned red as the cars passed them. Checkpoint A. Two to go.

The next part of the track was an enormous cavern. They saw the mouth ready to swallow them, then darkness. The darkness gave way to a drop, which brought them to the belly of the cave. The rock road wound through the black, bringing them to a wider section with axes swinging back and forth. The Debug Car zigzagged between them, while Turbo did his best to copy, but took a big hit that cut his bar by a quarter. He spluttered and cursed as he tried to catch up, boosting to no avail, because X-Turbo boosted too. They weren't going to beat him. He couldn't die here!

X-Turbo was feeling more confident now that he had the lead, confident enough to face Turbo himself:

"Why wouldn't she understand?" he challenged.

Turbo didn't like being confronted by another like him. He visibly tensed before snarling:

"She hasn't seen what I've seen! Neither have you! When a game gets old, it loses its appeal. The players want to go where the games are the newest and best, leaving the older games to rot. And the less players you have, the less money you make, and the less money you make, the less your life is worth to the arcade. I won't be like that! I won't be old and forgotten! I'll keep moving forward!"

Vanellope wanted to block him out, but his words burrowed their way into her mind. A part of her had always wondered what had made Turbo so obsessed with the spotlight, though she'd never admitted it to anyone, not even herself. She didn't agree with him. She didn't want to face him, but at the same time she couldn't let him spout off like that when she knew how untrue he was. And if she distracted him from the race, it would give X-Turbo the advantage…

"No," she said to him. "You're wrong. Ralph's game, Tapper, Pac-Man, Burger Time and Frogger, they're all old games and still get players! Being old doesn't make you worthless!"

Turbo hated being confronted by Vanellope as much as he hated being confronted by X-Turbo.

"Don't talk about my arcade as if you know it better than me!" he raged at her. "They're only the games that have survived to this era. You can cite them just fine, but what about Berzerk, Stunt Cycle, Jungle Hunt, Centipede and Battlezone? Moon Patrol, Asteroids, Sea Wolf, Track and Field?"

Vanellope didn't know what to say. She thought she might've heard some of those names before, but most she hadn't, and she'd never met anyone from them. Could that be because they'd died when they'd lost their games, all because they were old? No! The thought was too horrible to bear. She couldn't believe Turbo felt so passionately about it, either.

"Their sprites had lives, didn't they?" he continued. "They had friends and loved ones just as you do! But they don't mean anything to you. They're nothing more than names. Ten years from now, Sugar Rush won't be anything more than a name to the next racing hotshot!"

His words hit Vanellope hard, but not because she was thinking of herself: she was thinking of Ralph and Felix. Their game was one of the arcade's oldest. Her mind swam with visions of Litwak picking the cobwebs off it, sighing, then pulling its plug and bringing in a modern game to replace it.

"Don't listen to him," X-Turbo urged.

Vanellope remembered something that made her awful thoughts pause, something that gave her the strength to face Turbo again:

"No, you're still wrong. There are other ways to survive! The Q*Bert guys lost their game, but Ralph let them join his. Now Ralph's game is more popular than it's ever been! The game's old, and the Q*Bert guys are old, but they didn't make it worse! They made it better!"

Turbo apparently hadn't known about this, because for once she had the satisfaction of seeing him stunned. Only for two seconds, however, for it quickly morphed into balefulness.

"For how much longer, huh? Do you really something like that will last forever? Please! So they got a few new characters, big deal. It won't be long before the players get used to it and bored of it. Then, you can watch as they drop like a stone..."

His words stung, but Vanellope looked away and tried not to let him see. X-Turbo made a growling sound, angered by the way he was making her feel. Vanellope tried to calm him so he'd keep his focus on the race:

"I'm not listening to him. He's a liar and a nutjob. He's just trying to mess with our heads!"

They left the cavern, hitting the second checkpoint. They were level with the pit now, rocketing along a strip of land with the flames either side. Up ahead was a huge, hollowed out pipe they were capable of driving all around. As they entered it, a tendril hit the part of ground behind them and annihilated it, causing the lava to flood into the pipe. It swirled around, chasing the two cars as they boosted to escape fiery death. X-Turbo drove down the middle while Turbo went along the left side, sweeping across a Re-Road that filled his bar slightly. The pipe was attached to another cylinder that curved straight up. Both cars made it in a nick of time before the hollow pipe snapped off.

X-Turbo still held the lead, but Turbo was getting close. They were completely vertical and shooting towards the sky. Turbo had his bar half full, while X-Turbo's was all the way down to the last quarter. A Re-Road appeared and X-Turbo moved towards it, but a red tendril stabbed down from the sky and forced him to dodge. Turbo boosted and pushed himself ahead. X-Turbo didn't boost. Vanellope realised why: his bar was low and he didn't want to risk her life…

The cylinder suddenly turned on its side and spiralled all the way back down to the bottom of the pit again. It dropped them into a rocky area with uneven ground. Parts of the ground were cracked and rumbled. To the side emerging from the pit was a volcano about half Niceland's size. It belched out fireballs the cars had to dodge. X-Turbo managed to shimmy away from one, but Turbo didn't and took a hit, falling back. X-Turbo claimed first, avoiding two more before he came to another Re-Road. He used it, but had only made it three quarters of the way when Turbo boosted alongside and shoved him off. Turbo filled up to all but the last quarter before X-Turbo shoved him back, however by that point the Re-Road ended.

The next part of the track spun them around a small, spiral-shaped mountain. It reminded Vanellope of the cake on Sugar Rush's Royal Raceway. The two cars were neck and neck, the Debug Car closer to the wall than Turbo was. X-Turbo glared across at his counterpart.

"What makes you so different from everyone else? Why do you think you've got the right to take other people's games? You don't!"

Turbo merely scoffed at that.

"I told you, didn't I? I'm a survivor! I know how the arcade works!"

X-Turbo shook his head. He agreed that games being unplugged for being old was terrible and wrong, but so was everything Turbo had done! And X-Turbo couldn't see how it had bettered his life. Sure, he had the spotlight he craved, but…

"You're alone," he said.

Somehow, X-Turbo found a nerve there.

"No I'm not!" Turbo hissed, his voice pure venom. "I have my players. My players are all I'll ever need!"

X-Turbo still didn't see it.

"That doesn't mean you're not alone! Your players don't know you. They don't care about your feelings!"

If Turbo could have reached X-Turbo to tear him apart, he would have.

"My players are the only ones keeping me alive! As if you could understand! You were born into this level of quality! And you love this game, don't you? Well how do you feel knowing that one day it'll be destroyed because your best just won't be good enough anymore? That happened to me! And not just me. I can't bear the pain I'd feel if I lost a friend like that!"

Turbo got to X-Turbo, there. The thought of losing his game that way was like a cannonball to the gut. He forced himself not to think about it, remembering how much he had to win, but he knew it would come back to him eventually. He picked up on what Turbo said about losing a friend. Wait, Turbo acknowledged the existence of friendship? That shocked Vanellope, too. X-Turbo couldn't help wondering why he had that attitude.

"How do you know? Have you ever felt it?"

Turbo didn't answer for a moment. He appeared to think of something, someone maybe, that Vanellope swore made him look hurt, but then his expression hardened.

"I'd stopped caring by the time my friends died that way."

He had looked hurt there, hadn't he? Vanellope thought she might have imagined it, because she had a difficult time picturing Turbo hurt over another. Maybe there were some friends he'd stopped caring about, but she was sure now there might have been someone he had cared for…

X-Turbo hadn't noticed him look hurt for that split second, being too focused on the race.

"Then you never let yourself find out how you could handle it," he said. "You're hollow. You think you're doing what's best for yourself, but you're really not. You carved out all your good feelings about people so that only the bad ones were left. That's not living!"

Turbo snarled like a wild animal and smashed Behemoth into the Debug Car. They hit the wall with such force Vanellope and X-Turbo were thrown about inside. Sparks flew and metal screeched as the cars thundered on, Behemoth keeping the Debug Car crushed against the wall. The Debug Car's stability trickled down to the red, but Behemoth took damage also. It got too close to the danger zone, so Turbo left them, powering into the lead with manic laughter. The light on the Debug Car's dashboard was beeping as X-Turbo tried to keep Turbo in his sight. Fortunately, there was another Re-Road, albeit a short one. Turbo used it to recharge himself to all but the last quarter, while X-Turbo made it to half.

They passed through the third and final checkpoint. Not much longer 'til the end. Vanellope saw X-Turbo's fingers tighten on the wheel. Any tighter and he was going to leave marks. He looked so determined it was actually one of the fiercest things she'd seen. She could tell he wasn't letting himself think for a second about losing, even with Turbo ahead. Despite this, she felt like she had to encourage him, just so he didn't lose it at the last hurdle.

"It's okay, Turbo," she said. "You can do this."

She was trying not to lose it herself. He seemed to feel better for her words, relaxing ever so slightly. She felt like what she said was cheesy, but he appeared to be grateful just to have someone there who had faith in him. He'd probably have been a lot worse if he didn't. He slowly nodded his head in agreement.

"I've screwed up so much, but if I win this th-then I'll put everything right. I'll get rid of him, fix the damage and then I'll do better, I swear…"