Aelita passed through the Way-Tower and onto the Ice Sector, Ulrich and William following close behind her. Ulrich had lost a lot of strength on their way over, but he persisted on still being able to fight. The tower containing the last piece to Odd's code was a fair distance away, complicating the already difficult process.

"Jeremy," Aelita said, "can you virtualizes the vehicles for us?"

Jeremy, upon hearing her, put his earpiece back in an said, "I'm on it. William, you can just use the overboard until I can program you a vehicle." Jeremy typed a few codes in on his keyboard, causing the vehicles to appear on Lyoko.

They each hopped on their own respective vehicles, Ulrich the overbike, Aelita the overwing and William the overboard. William had some trouble with it at first but gradually became more accustom to it.

As they approached the tower, Jeremy called out to them. "Guys, you've got company. Three tarantulas up ahead."

Ulrich looked ahead only to find that his vision was beginning to blur. The group of three warriors arrived within range of the monsters only to be welcomed by a seemingly endless amount of laser fire from their adversaries. Aelita and William pulled mid air spins and tricks to dodge the lasers, a true display of their skills. Ulrich on the other hand was having trouble even driving straight, his vision losing its clarity more quickly than he had expected.

William made it behind the three tarantulas, causing the one in the middle to turn around and face him. He jumped off and gave the monster a stare, a challenge. The monster repositioned itself as though it was intimidated by William's boldness. When it finally fired off its three round bursts from both of its arms, William used supersmoke to dodge it.

"Missed me." His remark caused the monster to fire again out of anger. He again dodged it with his supersmoke.

"X.A.N.A., you're slackin'. You can't even hit a 14 year old boy." He used his supersmoke to get behind the aggravated monster and slashed his sword straight through the mark of X.A.N.A. on the monsters head, destroying it. "Guess your not very smart either, X.A.N.A." William laughed a little while saying this.

William was caught off guard as he began to fade into code, shot simultaneously by the monsters on either side of him. "Well played." William said as he exited his scanner, feeling slightly defeated.

"Jeremy, William's devirtualized." Aelita said.

"We don't need any other surprises like that, be carful. Aelita, you can't be devirtualized or we lose the fragments, meaning no Odd." Jeremy replied in a serious tone.

Aelita looked over at the two remaining monsters and noticed that they hadn't turned back to face her yet. Seeing the open opportunity, she fired an energy field from her right hand, destroying the tarantula on the left. The one to her right returned fire, hitting the overwing with all six of its shots. Aelita caught herself with her wings just before she hit the ground, the vehicle having vanished into a cloud of code.

"Aelita, we have a problem. X.A.N.A. has begun running a program to delete all information from the tower, you have to hurry before he finishes." Jeremy frantically worked to stop X.A.N.A.'s program, but he wasn't holding out too much hope in his end.

"Got it Jeremy, I'll make..." Aelita in her distraction was hit by the tarantula's lasers, losing most of her life points. She looked ahead of her to see the monster preparing to fire again. Her hands moved, trying to form an energy field to block the blast, but she was too late, the monster fired it's lasers. Aelita shut her eyes in fear of what was about to happen, but heard something she didn't expect, Ulrich's voice.

"Aelita!" He yelled, using all of his force to jump in front of her, stopping the lasers from hitting her, but in turn devirtualizing himself.

Aelita took this opportunity to fire off an energy field, destroying the monster. "Jeremy, how much time until X.A.N.A. clears the tower?" She asked, running as fast as she could towards her target.

"I have no idea, he has fluctuated times back and forth from three hours to seconds." Jeremy worked fiercely, his fingers beginning to cramp from all the typing.

Aelita reached the tower in record time, her legs would have been worn out had she done this on earth. She entered the tower quickly, levitated to the second platform and rushed to the terminal. She began searching for data, information, code, anything, but what she found was a blank terminal.

Empty.

Void.

Nothingness.

"Aelita, X.A.N.A. has finished clearing the tower! Did you get the fragment?" Ulrich, William and Yumi stood behind Jeremy waiting for Aelita to answer, a time which felt as thought it stretched on for hours.

"I... I didn't get it..." Aelita fell to her knees. They all thought for a second 'this is a bad dream, wake up', but as the seconds passed, none of them did. This was real, Odd was gone.

"I'll bring you in." Jeremy said, starting the materialization process. A few seconds later as Aelita exited the elevator, she was met with a scene of true pain. Yumi was wrapped around Ulrich, Yumi crying while Ulrich was left speechless, his mind still not able to accept that this was real. Jeremy sat in his chair, softly crying while frantically typing, trying to do something about this even when he knew there was nothing he could do. William was leaned up against the wall, and although he would deny it if anyone asked him, Aelita could have sworn she saw a tear fall from his face. Aelita walked over to Jeremy and did all she could do, cry on his shoulder. All she could think about was Odd, his face, his hair, his jokes. All anyone in that room could think about was how they would never see their friend again.

—

The next day, the gang all met at their usual lunch table to eat breakfast, although none of them were in any mood to eat. Yumi had left home early to see her friends before school started.

"Well," William said, "what are we going to do about this? What are we going to tell the teachers?" It was true, in their mourning for their friend those thoughts had never crossed their minds.

"I don't know, William. I just don't know." Jeremy said, his mind was unable to think of what to do, because there was nothing to do. Odd wasn't coming back, they would have to tell the teachers something, but he was too broken up about it to come up with something now, they all were.

*Beep* *Beep* *Beep*

Jeremy's laptop went off, causing the gang to look up from their blank stares and move their focus on him. He pulled out his laptop and found something very peculiar.

"Guys... It's a message." Jeremy began to shake a little bit, his hands hardly able to type. "It's from a user called 'Carthage'."

"Could it be my father?" Aelita asked, deeply hoping it was so.

"I'm not sure, but whoever it was they sent a pretty large file." Jeremy answered.

"What did they send?" Yumi asked.

"It's... It's a file containing Odd's code." Jeremy's words acted like a crane lifting the weight off of the gangs shoulders.

"Really?!" Ulrich asked, his face lighting up.

"I think so. We need to get to the factory, now!" And with that they all ran to the factory.

—

Jeremy had worked for the last twenty minutes imputing Odd's code. When he was finally finished he entered the code. The rematerialization process had begun. They all piled into the elevator and went down, the fear of all of them being that it wouldn't work.

As the elevator doors opened up, they were all filed with joy at what they saw.

"Guys, what happened? Man am I hungry, is it lunch time?" Odd asked, emerging from his scanner.

"Odd!" They all yelled, rushing in to hug him, tears of joy rolling off of their faces.

All six of the Warriors were gathered in Jeremy's room, trying to go over some recent events.

"Jeremy, could that have been my father?" Aelita asked.

"I'm not sure, but I couldn't think of anyone else who could send us that code." Jeremy answered, cracking a slight smile towards Aelita.

"Whoever it was, we have to face facts. X.A.N.A. has gotten much stronger, and I doubt that will change." Yumi said. "We need to up our game or one day one of us may be gone for good, and I can't go through that again." The room felt the weight of her words, all of them knowing it to be true.

"Don't worry Yumi," Odd said, "as long as Rose keeps giving me seconds for lunch, I could beat X.A.N.A. and then some." They all burst out laughing, breaking the serious atmosphere that had lingered over them for so long. One thing was for sure; X.A.N.A. was going to throw everything he had at them.

But something else was also true; they were going to fight as hard as they could to beat him every time, no matter what.

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