Aelita's POV

"This could be our big break, if we get there in time. You're sure there weren't any cameras?" Jeremie asked.

"Yeah, I made sure right before I solid snaked it out of there. Not a camera in the room, and I was careful to avoid the ones around the rest of the factory." Stacey said. Odd did this sort of laugh snort thing he does sometimes. Odd showed me the Metal Gear series. It was...really complicated, I remembered it was a stealth game, though, and sometimes you sneaked around in a cardboard box. Is that what Stacey meant? Did she sneak around in a cardboard box?

"You know what this means, right? We're finally one step ahead of Xana- I mean, Morgan." Jeremie said. I smiled bitterly. There was a time when Xana was the biggest threat we had ever faced, the biggest treat we ever though we would face. And, make no mistake, Xana had been a legitimate threat to humanity. But it seemed like Xana always did more planning and experimenting than acting. Morgan just went ahead and did it before we could really muster up any defense against her. And now that we did have a better idea of how to fight back, she was nowhere to be found. Because of her, two of my friends were dead, and one was...Well, who knew where Ulrich was? He probably wasn't in jail anymore. I doubted anyone stuck in a prison anymore.

I would have taken Xana over this, any day. With Xana, I knew my purpose in all this, I was the key in fighting back. Even if I couldn't fight well, I could deactivate the towers. There were no towers, anymore. No fantasy world in which to play the hero.

And there was my father.

How long was he going to keep playing with my emotions like this? He had weaved in and out of my life more times than any father should. Every time I thought we could be together and have some semblance of our mangled family restored, he went and died again. Still, I couldn't help but feel pangs of joy and fear in my heart. As much as my mind wanted to tell me the world would find a way to make it end the same way, I couldn't hear that my father was in Morgan's clutches in some death maze and not feel anything.

"We have to rescue him." I said, standing up. We were all pretty close to the factory. There weren't as many monsters around this area, anymore. There wasn't much of anything around here anymore. This was ground zero; a bald spot on the face of the Earth, almost entirely picked clean. It was incredibly depressing, if I was being honest. The others nodded. They knew how I felt. Well, Stacey knew some of it...but the others really understood.

"If anyone can produce another weapon against her, it's Franz Hopper. He's pulled through before." Jeremie said. Yes, he pulled through, right before he disappeared again. No, I couldn't think like that. I couldn't be so jaded. If I was, then Morgan won...

"Yes, but we have to be careful." Stacey added. "We already know for sure that Morgan has eyes on that place. Plus if the monsters see us, she'll end up knowing about it."

"What if you went back to the factory and kept an eye on the screens for us?" Odd asked.

"I could do that, keep in contact with you through walkie talkies." Stacey nodded. Pulling two walkie talkies out of a backpack next to us. "Who wants to take the other one?"

"I'll do it." Jeremie piped up. It made sense that he would take the relay position. He was our grand strategist. He was the one playing chess against Morgan.

"Wait, wouldn't it make more sense for you to go, Einstein?" Odd asked. "You'd be heading into a maze full of monsters. Last time I checked, you could barely handle a Kankrelat by yourself."

"Exactly. If I go to the Factory, I'd be alone. If a monster catches me, I'm done. In the maze, you and Aelita can help."

"And you think I can handle them alone?" Stacey asked.

"You already did." Jeremie shrugged.

"Fair enough." she responded. So, after gathering our supplies Stacey headed to the factory, and we headed to the coordinates Stacey had recovered. She was actually doing very well in her role as a spy. She hadn't been around for very long, but it really felt like she was a part of the team.

The maze my father was trapped in was just outside Paris. So, we wouldn't be too far away from the factory. It was a very well kept tree maze made of evergreens. It was weird...Most of the trees in Paris had been knocked down by monsters or people looking for wood. These ones were standing tall, though.

It only took about a minute to figure out why. There were Creepers patrolling the area. Their lasers were devestating. That's why the Creepers were chosen to try and take out the heart of Lyoko. Or, at least, that was the reason I thought they were.

"Are you in position?" Jeremie asked into the walkie talkie.

"Sure am, Einstein. I see you on the screen." Stacey whispered. "Let's do this."

"What's it look like from your view?" I asked. It took a moment or two to get a response from the other side of the walkie talkie, but eventually she answered.

"Creepers around the perimeter, a whole smorgasbord of monsters inside. None of them are all that huge. There are also wolves, two of them. They look restless."

"Wolves?" Jeremie asked.

"Because of my nightmares..." I trailed off. If Yumi were here, she would comfort me...She was dead. She was dead and there were wolves around. My nightmares, my waking nightmares...

But how did Morgan know about that? Did...There was a point in time when we thought my nightmares were a form of Xana attack. I had insomnia for months back then. It was not good for my fighting performance. Still, I had my doubts that it was a Xana attack, considering he hadn't been that subtle with any other attacks. He had given bad information in order to get Jeremie to degrade his mental stability, but he hadn't been able to manipulate our minds directly. Maybe Xana recorded me when I talked about my nightmares, and Morgan dug that up?

It was a trap she was in the process of creating. This time, though. This time, we had the upper hand! We found this place before she was ready to set her cards on the table.

That would make all the difference.

"There's going to be a blind spot in the Creeper line in a minute. I'll give you the signal. You'll only have a few seconds."

This was it...we were going in. I was going to go rescue my father. The wolves...Morgan knew what buttons to push, and how to push them. I would have to go through one of the worst things I could in order to save him, and even after all he did to me, I wouldn't be able to not save him. Morgan wasn't around to make sure things went smoothly, though. If we moved quickly enough, we could win.

I readjusted Taelia's backpack, heavy on my shoulders. I'd been carrying it around mostly since Ulrich...left it in the bunker. Sometimes, at night, I rummaged through it, thinking I might find something I hadn't seen yet. I don't know what I thought I might find in there...some hint, some answer to everything that was going on. Something...we may have missed, a hidden meaning, another message, something from Taelia. Some help from beyond the grave.

But no matter how much I checked the pockets, nothing new appeared, and no hidden meanings occurred to me. There were just the same jackets that I wore sometimes. They were warm and worn and felt weirdly like home...The same couple of Swiss army knives cluttered the bottom of the bag. I always carried one in my pocket. And, of course, the faded Polaroid picture of me and dad and mom and Taelia with long black hair. Sometimes, at night, I looked at it and tried to remember my childhood, anything before the night my mother was kidnapped. No matter how much I tried, I couldn't. That was my earliest memory. At least there was some physical proof that there were better times...

So we each had a pocket knife, and Odd had his modified nail gun. I had a small device in my pocket that would emit a sound frequency that Rengrade employees assured us would incapacitate the monsters within a large radius. The only problem was it was very loud. There was no doubt Morgan or Emily would notice us if I set this thing off. So, it was only to be used in an emergency. I was planning on using it once I got my father, so we could quickly get out.

We weren't the most prepared rescue team in the world, but we needed mobility over firepower.

"Now's your chance! Go!" Stacey urged through the walkie talkie. Jeremie cast a nervous glance at us and nodded.

We dove headfirst into the maze, keeping close together. Stacey said we only had a few seconds before the gap in the security perimeter was closed, so we got in the maze and quickly turned a corner, out of sight. Creepers, as a rule, were fairly easy to take down, but their lasers were extremely powerful. Back on Lyoko, a single hit from a Creeper was enough to nearly devirtualize us. I didn't want to have the displeasure of finding out how much damage it could do to the human body on Earth.

"Stacey, cam you guide us?" Jeremie asked. We waited for a moment, but there was nothing but static on the other end. "Hello? Stacey?" he asked again...still nothing. I looked up at the thick trees surrounding us.

"The signal's blocked. Looks like we're on our own." I said. I wasn't entirely convinced that a bunch of tall trees would block the walkie talkie signal. It might have been something Morgan set up, so that once you were in, you couldn't communicate with the outside world.

"Let's all just stay together." Odd said. "And for the maze, we just...um..."

"Stick to the right wall." Jeremie finished for him, and shushed him. The monsters might be able to hear, or if not them, the wolves definitely could. We needed to stay as quiet and out of sight as possible.

We all crowded towards the wall to the right, and we started to walk. Waiting for death...I felt like I was waiting for death.

No, no, I couldn't think like that. Thinking like that, in any show or anime or story that I had ever seen, that sort of thing raised the death flag.

I flipped the blade of the swiss army knife out. It wouldn't do to be unarmed now. I felt a little bit safer with the blade.

I heard the nervous wimpering of the wolves. You'd think that would make them less scary, but it didn't. There was also the sound of mechanical twitching that so saturated the world we lived in. We didn't see any of the monsters yet, but it was a big maze.

The Kankrelats came first. As soon as one appeared, Jeremie cringed and stepped back into me. I held him by the shoulders to make sure he didn't knock me over or anything, and also to comfort him. He took a deep breath to steady himself, and drew his pocket knife. At that point, though, Odd had already shot the Kankrelat dead. Now its metal husk lay inactive with a nail through its brain. Odd blew the slight wisp of smoke from the gun.

As soon as that one died, the other twitching and whiring became faster, more frantic. They saw us. Or at least they knew something was going on. If the monsters knew we were here, it was only a matter of time before Morgan did. Odd wasn't wrong to get that Kankrelat...I just wish he hadn't been that impulsive.

Only certain monsters could even move around in the maze. There weren't any Megatanks, thank goodness.

A few more Kankrelats spotted us and charged. We made short work of them with our various weapons. Even someone like Jeremie was willing and able to fight these things. Even a little kid like Hiroki...Was Hiroki even alive? It just now occurred to me that we never even bothered to check. After Yumi...and all of that, we just sort of stayed away from Kadic and the surrounding area. We didn't go looking for anyone. Except for Emily, we had no idea what the fates of our classmates were.

We would find them after Morgan was defeated, find and rebuild.

In the skirmish with the Kankrelats, one got a hit on me. The delicate pink hairs on my forearm burned away completely, and the skin itself was scorched. They weren't lethal or even really debilitating, as long as there were only a few. A shot from a Kankrelat still hurt, but I could still move forward.

Mere moments after I was shot, I heard howling nearby. The wolves...why were they howling? Did they smell me or something? I could hear something rushing at me. To say this was bad would be an understatement. As the noises got closer I began to run and panic. It wasn't just me, we all started to scramble.

"Stay together!" Odd cried out. I felt Odd's hand grasp mine. His hand was always a lot warmer than Jeremie's. Jeremie had poor ciculation.

Something tore into my hand. Teeth...wolf teeth. I turned around and it was right there. Eaten by a wolf, wwhuh? Eaten...

No. I refused to die like that!

I jerked forward, and saw a chunk of my hand come out in the wolf's mouth. I ran as fast and far as my legs would take me, nearly tripping on the corners.

I glanced behind me every two or three steps. The good news was that the wolf was also having trouble turning the corners. Once or twice I actually heard it smack into a tree. That put some distance between us, distance that was easily made up when we came to a straight path. Fear drove me forward, hunger drove him forward, and so the chase continued.

Until...I busted into a clearing. And that's when I saw him. My father.

He looked ragged, like he had been there for a while. his glasses were scratched badly. Still...it was him...my dad.

It was also the center of the maze. There wasn't really anywhere else to run. No other path went into this clearing. No escape. But no, we had to. We made it this far.

"Daddy!"

"Aelita!" Daddy returned my call, recognition in his eyes. He got to his feet from a sort of fetal position. He looked half dead.

A snarl erupted from the wolf behind me. I whipped around. No, not now! I was so close. He was right there.

The wolf lunged, and I found my lower half pinned to the ground. Our faces were inches apart. I could see the teeth, glistening. I had seen this so many times before...so many times. The natural conclusion to the nightmare. The wolf got the elf, and had itself a nice meal. The wolf was not at fault, though. It was thin and malnourished, manipulated into a tool of murder.

I had a tool of murder too, and I used it, to stab into the wolf's throat. Blood splashed onto my torso. I must have gotten the main artery, it died instantly. I pushed the body off of me as best I could and scrambled out from under it. My clothes were drenched. I couldn't bring myself to look down at my body.

"D-daddy..." I managed to stutter. "We gotta get out of here." I was really starting to feel the pain in my hand. I didn't want to look at that either. I grabbed hold of his hand and started to pull him. He did not budge. I frowned, turned back around, and looked at him.

"I don't think I can make it out of here..." He said. There were more injuries on his body than I initially realized, bite marks and laser burns. He had tried to escape by himself.

"We have to try!" I said. I felt tears start to drip down my face. I wasn't about to lose him again. We would-

"Can you...hold me?" he asked. What? He wanted me to hold him.

I looked at him, a good, solid look this time. There stood a broken man. This was not the man I knew as a child...he was battered, bruised, and broken. As much as our fight against Xana had hurt us...he had it worse. He had died and come back and been absolutely abused by Xana. Losing data like he did, and then coming back into the real world after being virtual for so long.

It only made sense that he would want to be held. He hadn't felt another human body in the past twelve years.

I walked over and embraced him gently. Tears still stained my face, and I could feel him, warm and shaky. My father...here with me at last...

And then I felt a blade pierce through my back, and I think into my heart, because it lurched, and quickly weakened. I looked into his eyes...and I saw the eyes of Xana. He smiled maliciously, watching me fade. I...shouldn't have been surprised. I shouldn't have dared to hope, should I?

"I'm sorry...everyone..." I mumbled, although I'm not sure my mouth actually made the words at that point. I was cold and growing colder...fading quickly. I couldn't feel anything.

I couldn't...go on...

Sorry...

The end is nigh. Hope y'all have an awesome day!