Chapter 4: Escape

As Dr. K had warned the team, Venjix was powerful. He was vicious, striking where he felt them weakest and mocking them the entire time. However, it wasn't a decisive power that overwhelmed them. He was strong, but so were they, and the Rangers were giving as good as they got against the dangerous virus.

"Anyone ever tell you that bigger doesn't mean better?" Roxy asked as she caught a weak point in his thick metal plating and cut through it. Venjix hissed a curse as he felt the tip of the blade scratching through circuitry, and he swung a large hand to bat her away. He caught the Yellow Ranger across the face, and she gave a cry as she was thrown aside.

"Roxy!" Ravi yelled, rushing to her defence.

"Ah yes, those human emotions. So sweet, so touching…so easy to manipulate!" Venjix waited until Ravi was close enough and punched him hard enough that he went flying across the room, rolling to a stop and groaning. "You humans act so high and mighty, like those emotions make you better, when in reality they make you blind to logic and the smart choices!" Venjix then fired a blast of energy at the fallen Blue Ranger.

Before it hit him, a wave of something warm and comforting to the team of Rangers filled the room, and swirling golden light wrapped around Ravi, causing him to vanish and reappear behind Keeva and Roxy.

"Maybe emotions do make us do stupid things," Keeva called as she lowered her hand, letting her sun magic fade. Roxy helped Ravi to his feet, and he murmured a quiet thanks. "But they do make us stronger. Love, joy, sorrow, they're what make us who we are. Emotions are what allow us to have courage," the Green Ranger told him, and lifted her massive sword again.

"Well said," Asher grinned, and threw her hand out. A ball of golden light flickered to lift as she moved, and was sent flying towards Venjix. It exploded against his armour, making him snarl as he staggered backwards from the force that almost knocked him off his feet.

"You've already lost to humans and our pathetic emotions," Blaze fired a shot from his Jet Shot that hit the same place as Asher's attack had. "Every time you try to rise up, we're just going to keep stopping you. If not us, then someone else will do it. Just like we've done for the original team," he told Venjix, who let out a rumbling growl.

"I failed previously because of your tragic emotions, but not because they make you stronger than me. It's the opposite! The human hybrids were worthless, distracted by familial bonds, and my useless generals were too busy turning on one another to follow orders. If not for them, I would have crushed you!" Venjix roared, and fired another blast of energy that knocked the team off their feet.

"Blaming everyone else for your failures. Not very logical," Jasper stated as he pushed himself back to his feet. "It was your idea to use human hybrids. Your generals were of your own creation, programmed by you," he pointed out in his soft voice.

"What's that phrase? Something about a lousy crafter blaming his tools," Keeva grinned.

"That's the one," Ravi agreed as he stood. His energy levels were falling, but he still had enough strength to fight.

"Mock me all you want," Venjix spoke, but it was obvious their words were affecting him. "I am not some foolish human who will falter at your taunts. I am superior to all those who came before me," he vowed.

"You've come the closest," Asher allowed as she lifted her Zip Slammer and rested it over her shoulder - a stance very similar to the previous White Ranger, Venjix noted. "But you fell, just like all the others. And you'll fall again," she promised.

"Grinders!" Venjix roared, and their eyes widened as the robots they thought weren't complete came to life. Their visors flashed, and instantly they moved to stand with their master. "Destroy them!" he ordered.

"See?" Blaze grit his teeth as the fighting broke out again. "You claim to be so much better, but you're sending in more minions to do your dirty work," he pointed out as he fought off the massive swarm of Grinders.

"Just another thing for him to blame when he loses," Roxy said, cutting through them as if they were nothing. Compared to Venjix and his seemingly impenetrable armour, they might as well have been nothing.

"There's no end to them!" Ravi shouted, throwing punch after punch, aiming to take them down in one hit.

"Because he's creating more as we take them down," Asher noticed the machine that was quite literally churning out robots for them to fight. "We can't fight endlessly here. We need a plan," she called, looking over at Blaze. The Red Ranger narrowed his eyes, trying to think quickly as Venjix continued to attack him.

"I have an idea," Jasper said suddenly as he fired a shot into the air and let the dispersing energy take care of his opponents. "Give me one minute, and try to corral them over here," he gestured towards the machine creating the robots.

"A minute? That's all you need?" Blaze shouted over his shoulder. Jasper cocked his head.

"You're right," he allowed, and grabbed a Grinder lunging for him. He swung, flinging the robot with strength greater than they assumed the soft-spoken Black Ranger capable of. It crashed into others, and they toppled over in a heap, open to attack from his Jet Burst. "A minute and 10 seconds," Jasper amended, and took off towards the machine.

"Is he serious?" Ravi hissed as the Black Ranger vanished behind the moving machinery.

"You saw the footage from the fight in Corinth the other day," Keeva said simply, cutting through three Grinders with one swing. Ravi swallowed, making a note to keep out of the Green Ranger's range. Slowly but surely they forced the fight over to the machine, keeping the Grinders - and Venjix - right beside it.

"Keeva's right," Asher nodded. "Jasper is better than his dad when it comes to machines…and when it comes to his mum…" she trailed off.

"Done! Get away!" Jasper shouted as he popped out, leaping over the machines to get clear. The Rangers had barely managed to move to a safe distance when the machine exploded, flames and power ripping apart the robots closest while badly damaging the ones not as close.

"He puts the Boom Twins to shame," Keeva giggled, delighted by the carnage.

"That was closer to one minute 5 seconds," Asher said idly. Roxy shook her head, unable to understand how Asher and Keeva were so unbothered by Jasper's talents in the explosives department.

"No!" Venjix roared furiously as he saw that the damage had extended past his footsoldiers. His factory, only just built, was badly damaged. "You will pay for this!" the red lights of his eyes flashed in the dim light of the factory.

"Rangers, let's get this done," Blaze called, lifting his head. He refused to back down against the monstrous machine in front of them.

"Right!" the rest of his team shouted.

It didn't take them very long to clear out the last of the Grinders, leaving just Venjix against the team of six once again. They were all breathing heavily as they faced him, but didn't let it stop them as he showed signs of wear and tear as well.

"Turbo Strikers!" Ravi dashed in and delivered two powerful punches to Venjix's armour, and was rewarded by a crunching sound. The metal was weakening, and judging from the roar of anger, Venjix knew it too.

"Jet Burst!" this time when Jasper shot his crossbow, he aimed directly at Venjix, and the power exploded and threw Venjix backwards. He fell onto his back and rolled, coming to a stop amongst the wreckage of his new factory.

"Zip Slammer!" Asher charged in as Venjix got to his feet. He didn't have time to defend against the strike she landed with the hammer, and it smashed through the first layer of protective metal. Venjix let out a snarl, and grabbed her, tossing the White Ranger aside. She dropped her hammer as she crashed into the wall, sinking down.

"Turbo Sabre!" not giving up, Keeva took Venjix's focus as Roxy ran to help Asher back to her feet.

"I'm okay," Asher coughed, wincing. She could feel her suit's energy levels draining quickly, and grimaced. They needed to finish the battle soon. Looking up, they saw as Keeva kicked Venjix back, and threw out her hand. The golden light of sun magic surrounded it, and acted as a jet that slammed into his robot body, making him roar.

"It's not as potent as fire, but it'll weaken the metal enough," Keeva told them over her shoulder.

"Roxy!" Blaze shouted, and the Yellow Ranger charged in. The magic had only just vanished when she carved through the spot where the magic had been focused, finding it more malleable than before. Before Venjix could catch her, Roxy kept moving, managing to get out of range so he couldn't retaliate against her. "Jet Shot!" Blaze fired a blast that made Venjix roar and stagger backwards. For a moment, he didn't move, letting out a low growl.

"I will not be made a mockery of again!" he roared, his power exploding from him and lifting them off their feet. The Rangers cried out as they were thrown backwards, crashing into rubble and debris. Their suits shattered as all but Blaze demorphed, leaving them struggling to catch their breath.

"Oh no," Roxy breathed as she looked down at her hands, no longer hidden by thick gloves.

"We're out of energy…" Asher breathed, her glasses cracked.

"And out of time," Venjix snarled as he approached them. "I warned you that you had come here to die," he growled, his eyes flickering.

"His armour," Ravi gasped out, and their eyes went to the hole in his chest, made by their barrage of attacks.

"We have a chance," Blaze realised. He forced himself to his feet. "I told you, Venjix. We aren't going to let you destroy the world, not like you did before," he vowed, and held out his hands. The large black and red blaster that they had seen Ryne working on appeared in his hands, and the Red Ranger grimaced at the weight.

"One last chance, how desperate you truly are," Venjix taunted them. Blaze took aim, but his hands shook as he did.

"With such little time to create this, I wasn't able to fully guard it from itself. After one shot, it will fry itself," Dr. K's warning echoed in his head, and despite his earlier, confident words that it would work, he couldn't help but be nervous. They had one chance. If they failed now, Venjix would win.

"I've got you buddy," Ravi was suddenly beside him, putting a hand on the blaster to keep it straight.

"We're here," Asher said softly, touching his arm and smiling warmly at him. Blaze told himself that if they survived the fight, he was going to ask her out, regardless of how intimidating her father was.

"You can do this," Keeva grinned, standing with him as well.

"We've got your back," Jasper told him, a small smile on his grime-covered face.

"Let's finish this," Roxy said as she slipped her hand into Ravi's, and looked up at Blaze confidently. "Let's save the damn world," she said, and Blaze laughed.

"Right," he nodded, suddenly a lot less nervous with his team beside him. He focused his attention on Venjix, who was charging up an attack of his own. "Fire!" Blaze shouted, firing the shot. It ripped through the energy that Venjix had thrown at them, and collided with the damaged section of his chest.

For a moment, it seemed like nothing happened. Venjix had been knocked back a step, but had stayed standing as the last of Blaze's energy ran out, and he demorphed too. When they stared, he started laughing.

"Was that truly your final attempt? Dr. K has truly lost her-" Venjix suddenly jerked, staggering. "What? No, the antivirus?!" he snarled as his body continued to shudder and spark dangerously. "I cannot be destroyed! I am Venjix, I am eternal!" he roared.

"Not anymore," Blaze told him coldly. The Rangers ran for cover as Venjix roared, and exploded, taking out the last of the machinery around him.

The silence that descended afterwards felt deafening to the team, who sat for a long time and just stared at each other. When it was clear that there was nothing remaining outside of their cover, the team burst out laughing.

"We did it!" their cheers filled the air as they laughed and cried, victorious in preventing the world from falling into disaster once again.

Venjix was a computer virus. He didn't truly feel any emotion. Yet what surged through his programming was close enough to what he knew to be utter fury. Again, his plans had failed, and again, he was on the cusp of complete destruction. This time had been humiliating, or at least what felt like humiliation to him.

It had taken two decades to regain the power necessary to rise up, but the world had not been as he had expected. Humanity had help from SPD, putting them far ahead in their technological advances than Venjix had estimated.

And Dr. K. His creator thought herself several steps ahead of him, locking him out of the network by flooding it with an antivirus specifically designed to destroy him. Not to mention her team of heroes who had once again put everything on the line to stop him. In stealing the Ranger files originally, Venjix had believed something as pathetic as the brightly coloured heroes could stop him, using the files to learn from the failures of the past. Yet he had failed too.

But Dr. K wasn't as brilliant as she seemed to think, and he was going to prove it to her one last time.

Despite getting word from the Rangers that they had successfully defeated Venjix and destroyed his new factory, Dr. K hadn't dared to relax. The former RPM team were still running around town, fighting off the robots that Venjix had sent in as they had predicted. Thanks to Scott's orders through the military, Nora's knight armour and Teddie's own legendary powers, they had easily taken them out.

"Dr. K, you should really take a break," Kiana advised, hands on her hips as she watched Dr. K rapidly typing, her eyes flicking from one screen to another so quickly that Kiana wasn't sure she was taking everything in.

"I will take a break once I'm sure that Venjix has been completely eradicated," Dr. K replied, and Kiana gave a heavy sigh, her shoulders slumping. She looked at Ryne, hoping for some backup, but the younger girl shrugged.

"Don't look at me. Mum said she was worse before," Ryne told her. Kiana sighed. She only had flashes of memories from back then, having spent some time in the garage when Annie was an active Ranger, but she couldn't recall any interactions with Dr. K.

Both jumped, and Dr. K's fingers stilled as alarms started to blare loudly. Kiana and Ryne rushed over to Dr. K, whose eyes were wide as she stared at her screen.

"Impossible," she breathed.

"Oh, you would love to think so, wouldn't you, my dear creator," Venjix's voice came from the speakers, making Kiana's eyes narrow as Ryne raised a hand. Blue lights flickered to life, dancing around her fingers as she prepared to fight any assailant that came through. "You succeeded once again in destroying my body, and severing that part of me from the network to escape. You even predicted that I might have stored a little part of myself somewhere secure, just as I did before," for a computer virus, he was talented at taunting.

"And I was correct," Dr. K breathed, but she didn't look victorious.

"Yes, you were. Too bad you didn't consider where I would chose to store a fragment of my programming," Venjix mocked her. Kiana looked closely at the screens, and hissed as she saw just where Venjix had chosen to hide. Within the same place as her program to detect Venjix within the Morphin' Grid, manipulating it to render it useless.

"What now? You're weakened again, and you're still shut off from the network," Dr. K kept her voice strong, refusing to show any weakness. Venjix laughed.

"I have no need for your pathetic network," he told her. "Having lost twice, I considered the variables that lead to my failures, and I've come to a conclusion," Venjix said, sounding almost thoughtful. None of them spoke. "You, Dr. K," her eyes widened a fraction at his answer. "As my creator, you are my greatest adversary. No matter how many times I return, you will always be prepared, with the luxury of time to prepare whatever you need as I recover. Even after your frail human body is gone, your mind will continue to thwart me," Venjix admitted his conclusions as Dr. K stared, wondering just what he was planning.

Ready with her antivirus to wipe him out the moment he made a move, Dr. K chose to let Venjix tell her everything. "So instead, I will utilise the one thing that I believed completely worthless to me," as the virus spoke, files began to pop open on screen, and Dr. K felt like her stomach had plummeted through the floor.

"What are those?" Ryne whispered, not recognising the designs.

"SPD's designs for a transportal device," Dr. K's answer had horror seep like ice into their bodies.

"Adapted to suit me, of course, but with the base code for time travel here, it was child's play," Venjix laughed darkly. "Thank you for everything, my dear creator. Soon, the Morphin' Grid shall be under my control, and I will rule the world!" the screens went dark, severed from power as Dr. K leapt to her feet.

"What do we do?" Kiana asked, looking around for any sign of what they should do.

"Scott's Morpher, we need to-" Dr. K spotted it hooked up to one of the other computers, being used to monitor for Venjix in case he tried to hide inside it once more. The computer screen was flashing a warning, and Dr. K felt like she was going to be sick as the Morpher began to glow red. "Stop it!" she lunged towards the table where it sat, but as she reached for it, the Cell Shift Morpher vanished, moving through time.

"No way," Kiana breathed, hands to her mouth as Dr. K stared at the spot where the Morpher had been.

They had won the battle, but might have just lost the war.

Despite a fragment of Venjix escaping through time, the atmosphere amongst Rangers both old and new had been positive. They had succeeded in driving off the greatest threat that humanity had ever experienced, and Scott had been the one to confidently point out that there was nowhere in time that Venjix could hide from Dr. K's genius.

Their confidence in her, and her own determination, had calmed her down before she could spiral into guilt at letting Venjix escape into another time. The more she thought about it logically, the less frantic she was.

Having looked over the data that Venjix had given her in his arrogant bragging, Dr. K realised that it would take him enormous power to jump to a different timeline, and as a fragment of the true Venjix, he would barely survive, trapped within Scott's Cell Shifter Morpher.

Knowing that there was a chance, Dr. K began to work with SPD, using the Transportal Device as a base to develop a code, combining it with the detection software she had created to track Venjix.

Once that was ready, all they could do was wait. The timelines were seemingly infinite, and the Transportal Device risked destabilising the Morphin' Grid, so they couldn't go charging across the timelines to find him.

In the meantime, everyone began to settle down once again, and even Dr. K allowed herself to relax, but they were all ready, just in case. Her new RPM team worked with Scott, monitoring for any new threats that might try to take advantage of their recovering world, but even they started calling in to see how Dr. K was doing.

In creating a new team of Rangers, Dr. K had unintentionally added to their Ranger family, and she didn't mind at all.

A year passed without event before the program pinged loudly, disturbing Dr. K from her tea. There was a rattle as she set her cup down, quickly bringing up the system responsible for the loud alert on the tablet sitting beside her.

"You found him?" Flynn asked, sitting up from his slouch on the sofa. In his hand, a smoothie remained untouched. Cassie was sitting nearby, eyes wide.

"It would appear so," Dr. K nodded, anticipation in her stomach.

It didn't take long for others to appear - Gemma, Ziggy and Teddie had all been nearby, planning on visiting Dr. K themselves when Flynn had sent the word out. However, it was only Cassie standing beside the doctor, pulling a scarf around her neck and mouth to obscure the scarring.

"Are you sure we shouldn't go with you?" Teddie asked once again, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. She couldn't stay still. Dr. K nodded with a small smile.

"First, I want to survey what's going on in this timeline. If too many of us come flooding in, it may cause people to panic," she pointed out. Teddie nodded slowly, unable to argue with her words, but she still wasn't entirely placated. "If there is reason to panic, then I will bring the Rangers to help," Dr. K assured her.

"And I imagine that this world will have Rangers of their own. You have a tendency of popping up whenever you're needed," Cassie signed, making the former Rangers grin.

"She's right about that," Ziggy nodded with a bright grin.

"Needed might be a strong word for you," Flynn teased him, shoving him lightly as Teddie giggled. Gemma grinned, and Cassie rolled her eyes.

"As one of the two who lost the Green Morpher to Ziggy, I feel a compulsion to state that he was very heroic," she said, a smirk on her face. Teddie burst out laughing. Ziggy looked delighted as Cassie winked at him.

"If you're all quite done," Dr. K cleared her throat, but was fighting to suppress a smile. "Are you ready?" she asked Cassie, who nodded.

"Good luck," Teddie told them as Dr. K activated the Transportal Device borrowed from SPD, opening a portal in front of them.

"Luck is an abstract concept, but…thanks," Dr. K said, and stepped through. Cassie followed, and the portal closed behind them.

"She never changes," Teddie laughed.

"It's great, isn't it?" Gemma beamed, her adoration for her best friend as strong as ever.

"She'll succeed, and so will whatever team of Rangers she finds," Flynn said, putting an arm around Gemma. "So, how about a game? I haven't had the chance to whoop you in years," he challenged Ziggy, gesturing to the door leading to the garage, where the old pool table still stood strong.

"I seem to recall beating you frequently, but sure, if you're so desperate to be embarrassed in front of your wife," Ziggy shrugged, following the former Blue Ranger out.

"You cheated, man!" Flynn exclaimed, starting an old argument the two had.

"And Dr. K thought it was wise to leave us in charge?" Teddie wondered. Gemma could only laugh in response.

And if you've read the end of Beast Morphers: On the Winds of Worth, you know just how it all plays out!

Thank you to everyone for your support for this (mercifully) short story. It was fun writing the RPM side after having the ideas in my head for as long as I have.

The next story in this series is the second to last - Dino Fury: Shadows of Hope. I'm going to be taking a small break before I get started on this one, as my Decembers are normally very hectic with travelling and whatnot, plus I have some extra stress currently that means that I might not be able to focus on writing for a while.

Anyways, I hope you liked it! Please let me know what you thought of this little spinoff!

Please review!