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Her new strategy wasn't much different than the old one, only this time Matrix and AndrAIa got to go in guns-a-blazing and take over control of major net junctions. I'd become convinced, now, that she was keeping Bob in Mainframe for his own good. She wasn't being very romantic to him anymore, wrapped up tightly with the war and her duties therewith. My guardian was still in the dark about the rest of his collective. I would have preferred that he blissfully remain so, being tied so close to him now, I didn't want to have to feel the hurt he would feel when he learned that he'd been fighting against his friends and academy-mates this entire time. Unfortunately he found out on his own, but he was too busy to feel sad.

Mainframe was under attack.

We hovered between Matrix and the collective, a sea of familiar code bobbing before me. I ran a quick scan to see who was there. Carden, I couldn't find Turbo, hopefully he was still battling the virus somewhere, I'd run into nearly every one of these guardians at some point in my career, excepting the youngest of course, but I was more alarmed to find not a single keytool among them. None! That would explain why the guardians weren't using portals, but what happened to all of my friends. Keytools are few, we all knew each other by name and signal. Picking through I recognized the code of some of their partners. Were the keytools removed? Destroyed? I shuddered.

Total war broke out over our heads, Bob battled very well. He couldn't break his code and delete his own, but he used our powers to disable and remove the guardian ships from the system. I was proud of him until nearly a second had passed… then I started feeling woozy.

I'd resigned myself to giving Bob all of my powers, but he was draining both me and himself. I could feel his code start to come apart at the seams and dashed to patch things up. This excessive work was taxing his body. He was defragmenting. This was bad. Yes, it was very bad. The degradation in the web hadn't helped either, it seemed he was missing some of his frame code. It made his physical structure even less resilient than I had thought. You can use my powers, Bob, but I'm going to work for you now, I'm going to hold you together, for both our sakes.

And access some energy soon would ya?