It's Morgan's pov. Enjoy, you guys.

I waited. The orb containing Xana's fragments pulsed red once, twice, three times. Nothing happened. I waited a few moments, but it seemed like nothing else was going on. I terminated the program and tried it again. Nothing happened. I tried it again. Nothing happened. I looked through everything to see if I had made any programming errors. I found nothing. I ran it again. Nothing happened.

I grit my teeth. Nothing was happening! Why wasn't anything happening?! I did everything right!

I did...everything right. I followed Taelia's memories exactly. I supplied enough power to restart...

Well. That was it. If this wasn't going to revive my father...nothing would. Forget it, forget it. I broke down the fragments of Xana into energy and absorbed it with the rest of it. Fine. I would do this on my own. Father wanted me to kill the Lyoko Warriors and take over the Earth. I would do it with or without him...and I guessed it would have to be without.

And I let the Lyoko Warriors get away. Well, I could find them. At least Taelia was dead. She did not have the EMP gun, though. That thing was a threat. I needed to make getting my hands on that a priority. But for now...I was tired. Today had been exhausting. The Lyoko Warriors were hiding. They would not come back tonight. I needed some time to regroup. I took Kanky and went back to my dorm.

I lay down on the bed and ran my hands through my hair. It was really just a gesture...I had no real hands or hair. I looked at my hand in the air and it turned black and smoke-like and formless. That was what I really was. I turned it into a human looking arm, again. I couldn't let myself get caught. Everyone would find out soon. Very soon. Kanky sat on my stomach, which moved gently up and down. It was part of pretending to be human. There were so many little things I had to keep track of consciously that human bodies just did without thinking.

I was...really fatigued. I went into sleep mode, and my vision cut out immediately.

It was cold...and snowy. It seeped into me. I melted into the ground, my body turning to ice. There were dark shadow figures and they were choking me, choking the life out of me. Everything was a double image. Static, I heard static, like tuning a radio to the right frequency. I grew giant wings and went into the sky, and then they were cut, and they grew again and were cut and it hurt. Pain wracked my body. I was running at Taelia and running at me and they didn't have eyes or heads. White faceless figures in black suits and ties and a wolf howling, an engine revving. Things were not my own I was not my own. I was alone. The world burned and Taelia slit my throat. Crimson blood spurted from my neck like a ribbon.

I stared at myself a smaller version...everything was dark and we were made of lightning. All was quiet. She stared at me with her big eyes. She was so calm and put together. I charged electricity and aimed at her. How dare she?! She did not flinch. She just stood and stared at me, probing my thoughts...looking for a soul. She was not afraid. My hair frazzled, my eyes wild. She looked up at me and said something, her voice steady and sweet.

"For the soldier is a child."

My vision of the outside world cut back in. My alarm had gone off. A background program was set to end sleep mode when the alarm went off. I saw things again, I knew I did, but the memory was deleting itself. I rolled out of bed. I heard a small thump and skitter. Kanky had still been sitting on me, watching over me, and when I rolled over suddenly, I knocked him onto the ground. He could write himself, though. He walked off as if nothing happened. He knew that around this time he needed to go into hiding, and so off he went, into the electrical system. Maybe one day I would materialize him properly, so he could be an actual physical robot in this world. However, that would make him more vulnerable, and I would have to be in a position where I didn't have to hide him.

I went to classes. Classes were very boring. Their purpose was to teach people new things. This became useless when you had immediate access to the world's largest source of information. Anything any class here could teach me, I could just as easily have in my head in an instant. Human brains didn't work like that, of course. They had to encode information with repetition and effort, and the information could be easily lost. I was more interested in using the information I already had to solve problems, apply what I knew in actual situations. That was what Xana's training essentially was. It wasn't so much learning skills as how to think fast enough to use those skills quickly, effectively, and accurately.

But...I wouldn't be getting any more training from Xana. He was dead for good. Now I had to fulfill his last wishes: kill his enemies and take over the world...and then what? After the world governments surrendered to me...what would I do then?

"Has anyone seen Jeremie, Aelita, Odd, and Ulrich?" Mrs. Hertz asked. Physics II was our first class of the day. It seemed nobody else knew, so I spoke up.

"I think they're sick or something." I suggested.

"Oh no! I have to go get them some hot soup!" Sissi stood up and said. Everyone looked at her funny, including Mrs. Hertz.

"Sit down Elizabeth." Mrs. Hertz said, and she immediately sat down. Mrs. Hertz raised an eyebrow. I had only been here two weeks, and I already knew Sissi hated to be called Eliabeth. She made quite a big deal about it.

But of course, this wasn't Sissi. That was a clone. Belpois did a pretty bad job on the AI, though. It didn't even act like Sissi. I wasn't going to fix it. This was a golden opportunity for some entertainment.

The rest of the classes that I had with the grade below me went by in much the same way. And the classes with only my grade asked about Yumi and William. All the teachers wondered why all of them were missing at once. Oh, and Taelia too. They didn't really group Taelia with them yet. There was a funny rumor going around about Taelia. Certain students seemed to think that Taelia was Aelita's clone or twin or something. After all, they looked almost exactly alike, always hung out together, and had the same letters in each other's names.

There were rumors about me too. I was a little too mysterious for everyone, a little too much of a loner. As my plans started unfolding, I would probably be paying less and less attention to Kadic. I needed someone who could stay here and gather information for me. Someone who had very good observation skill. I needed an underling, disguised as a friend.

I sat at the lunch table the Lyoko Warriors usually sat at. The table was empty. I no longer needed to eat in order to fuel. The Supercomputer had plenty of power. Now I just needed to eat to keep up appearances. I wondered what taste was like. I couldn't taste anything...there was nothing to taste on the network, or smell.

"Hey, are you ok?" I looked up. It was Emily DeLuc. She didn't seem to have a lot of friends around school. Maybe Emily could be my underling.

"Yeah, I'm fine." Emily was in all of my classes.

"Mind if I sit?"

"Not at all." I said. She sat. We talked about classes. She thought I was funny, apparently something I said made her laugh. She talked about this camp she went to and how great it was and asked what my plans were for the summer. I said I didn't know yet. I was probably just going to stay here and take some summer classes to catch up on the credits I missed by joining the school as a tenth grader. She said I was smart and could probably just take some tests to make them upo, and then maybe come to camp with her. They did a lot of brain games there she thought I might like.

So...did that make us friends now? Could I gain her loyalty this way? Did I...do it right? There was only one way to find out, I guessed.

Night fell and I retired to my dorm. Now there was the problem of the Lyoko Warriors. They were hiding, and honestly, I had no idea where they were. I'd kept a close eye on them ever since I got here, but there was a time when they went off the grid. I couldn't listen to them or see them. That must have been when they planned their escape. They must have gone off the map as well when they separated from Taelia. I looked through all of the cameras of Paris and could not find them.

Well, if I couldn't go to them...I would have them come to me. I had already proven I could manipulate their actions by harming people. That was the thing about heroes, they couldn't help but take action when the place they were supposed to be protecting was in danger.

This was just like a logic puzzle. What resources did I have and how could I use them to get what I wanted? I sat on my bed and brought up Xana's records in my head. Maybe by going through the records of all of his attacks would give me an idea.

And then I came across it. There was an army of robots just sitting in a facility in Siberia! The Lyoko Warriors had destroyed the Replika, but never the robots! That was a golden opportunity.

In a blizzard stricken landscape one could see the outline of a building, a sort of research facility. If one were to look inside, one would find a large open room, filled with row after row of perfectly still, perfectly identical, seven foot robots. And if one were to look closely at the one in the corner, one could see it's arm twitch.

Let the countdown begin.

Time Elapsed since last chapter: 1 day

Time Elapsed since ch1: 2 weeks 2 days

And so the new arc starts. This one will be shorter I think.

Review and fav and follow if you enjoyed, and as always, have an awesome day!