Disclaimer: See Chapter One. (Didn't own it then, don't own it now, probably won't own it next chapter, either...)
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The moment she saw him fall, Yumi practically dove to the ground, sliding on her stomach to reach over the newly formed edge, stretching as far as she was able. "Ulrich!" she reached for him, her grasp falling pitifully short. She looked back over her shoulder, back up at Aelita and Odd. "I can't reach him!"
Odd whirled. "Aelita! Make a platform underneath him, a ledge, a foothold, anything!"
She met his desperate gaze, the emotion reflected and amplified, her own eyes close to tears. "I can't! I already used up my gaiakinesis, I don't have enough energy left—"
Odd didn't wait for her to finish. He shouted upwards, "Jeremie!! I need another vehicle! Now!"
"I don't have one! The second overwing isn't finished, the programming is still in fragments—"
"I don't care if it's a stinking broomstick, just send something!"
In response, the air next to him started to glow with a simple grid, outlining something as it began to materialize. Odd had to admit, it looked exactly like something with fragmented programming. It started with the overall shape of an overwing, but the outline flickered and pieces of it died, fading from existence. Those that continued to fight for solidification weren't even connected. The platform looked like it had been sawed in half and broken off at the front; the handle controls, not attached to a front panel of any sort, clattered uselessly to the ground the moment they became real.
"Merda!" Odd kicked the handles out of the way and grabbed at the two severed pieces of platform. One half sagged unsuccessfully against the ground, and he tossed it aside. The other piece seemed to be hovering, but that was all. It looked like a flat, misshapen skateboard with no wheels. "There's no controls, Jeremie!"
Over the headset, Jeremie was muttering something incomprehensible, creating and modifying computer codes as fast as possible. He didn't have the luxury of time to test or double-check; he had to hope that the code would be correct, and that it would hold out. He pounded the execute button.
On the piece of overwing board, a crude-looking foot pedal of some sort materialized.
Knowing exactly what it was and what it was supposed to do, Odd didn't even bother to try registering what instructions Jeremie might be shouting at him. He leapt onto the board and stomped his foot down hard on the pedal. The board jumped forward violently, and he wrestled with his own balance, lurching back and forth in an attempt to turn it in the right direction. Another second and he had it speeding on course to the edge where Ulrich had gone over.
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The sword broke.
Never in the entire time that he had been fighting on Lyoko had Ulrich ever seen his weapon break, or even bend. He had deflected lasers and stabbed through countless monsters, never putting so much as a scratch or dent in the metal. But now, by whatever ill chance, the amount of weight that he was pulling on it and the odd angle at which it was driven into the earth had somehow proven to be too much of a strain. And the sword broke.
Ulrich fell and Yumi shrieked, and then Odd was over the edge, plummeting after Ulrich in a hard, desperate dive. The air whistled past furiously as he crouched against the board, clutching with all fours to its now-vertical surface as it shuddered with instability and speed. He was gaining; just another second and he knew he'd be able to reach Ulrich. Digging the claws of his left hand deeper into the board, Odd released his right and stretched it forward toward his friend. He saw Ulrich lift his own hand, fingers stretching to meet him—
And Ulrich slammed into the surface of the void, his form suddenly swallowed by the immediate explosion.
Odd howled and threw his weight backward, yanking the scrap of a vehicle completely upright and miraculously turning his plummet into a violent ascent just short of driving into the void himself. Behind him the white eruption pierced the air, its energy sending forth a shockwave that nearly sent Odd careening completely out of control.
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Yumi lay where she was, pressed hard against the sandy ground, half-balanced over the edge. Her eyes were as wide as they had ever been, staring in disbelief at what she had just witnessed. A numbness was creeping into her body, but beneath it roiled a sudden, incomprehensible desire to fling herself over the edge and fall into oblivion after him.
A Kankrelat scuttled up to the side and fired its laser into her abdomen. She didn't feel it.
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Jeremie gasped as Ulrich's code completely vanished from his monitor, and he made such a mad scramble for the second keyboard then that he nearly fell out of the chair. He punched at the keys as fast as humanly possible, typing in passwords and access codes that would let him into the void deletion system of Lyoko. His fingers stumbled at one point, and he cursed aloud as the computer took time to consider his incorrect entry and reset the screen so he could try again.
This had happened only once before—more than a year ago, when Yumi had fallen into the void. Any contact with the void at the base of each region meant instant deletion from the entire system, but from that prior experience Jeremie knew that the human pattern remained in the erasure buffer for a few minutes while the computer processed the deletion.
If he could get into the deleted files quickly enough, he could use the materialization program and bring Ulrich back. Just like he had done for Yumi.
On the other monitor, a large window popped open, displaying a short countdown. Jeremie grimaced; he'd created the timer program after Yumi's close call so that just in case it ever happened again, he'd know exactly how much time he had left before the patterns were completely inaccessible.
The numbers currently gave him ninety seconds.
In the next instant, the access codes gave way and Jeremie was in the erasure buffer. He relaxed just a little bit; he still had more than a minute to find Ulrich's code, and he already knew exactly what to look for. In just a few moments he could have Ulrich back in the real world, safe and sound. But as he scanned for the files, his short-lived relief gave way to rising panic.
Ulrich's code wasn't there.
Jeremie gaped at the screen, disbelief and horror dominant on his features. He swung his gaze back to the counter—seventy-two seconds. Still more than a minute left, and the patterns should be in the buffer, still accessible.
This time Jeremie glanced at the system name, making sure he was looking in the right place.
He was.
Jeremie scanned the files again, manually as well as electronically, and then a third time. He found nothing.
Forty-four seconds.
His sense of dread only grew as the timer continued its merciless count, giving him an ever-diminishing opportunity to find what wasn't there; to save a friend who was somehow already lost.
Twenty-eight seconds.
A fourth search through the files, and a fifth, each scan more desperate than the last.
Nine seconds.
Still nothing.
Long after the timer had hit zero, Jeremie kept looking.
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Odd careened back over the edge of the sand, back over solid ground. The board-vehicle was shuddering violently, sparking underneath him with damage from his near brush with the void explosion. It quaked and sputtered, wrenching back and forth until finally it plowed into the ground.
Odd went sprawling hard, practically skidding on his face, not even bothering to try and land with any sort of dignity. When he came to a stop, he lay there for a moment, uncaring. Scrapes burned on his skin, and his torso sparked with damage for the first time since he transported to Lyoko. He focused on the distant sensations, wondering what Ulrich had felt when he hit the void.
A dismayed cry from Aelita snapped him back to reality. He levered himself up on his elbows, twisting backwards to see.
Poor Aelita was trying to fend off nearly a dozen of the remaining monsters on her own, standing valiantly between them and a prone Yumi who continued to stare blankly over the edge where Ulrich had fallen. The little pink-clad humanoid had no more gaiakinesis left with which to fight back, and she had to have been running dangerously low on life points. Still, she held her ground, one of Yumi's fans held in one hand and the broken handles from the incomplete overwing in the other.
She blocked the laser fire from a Kankrelat with Yumi's fan, then hurtled the bulky control handles at it. The awkward, blunt weapon somehow managed to lodge itself neatly in the Kankrelat's head dome, but not on the target mark. Instead of bursting into fragmented code, the little monster merely keeled over, thrown off balance by the weight. It lay sideways on the ground, legs kicking frenziedly as it continued to fire in a useless direction.
A Krabe marched forward, looming over Aelita like an ill omen. As it powered up and fired, she gave a leap, jumping over its laser and landing on its flat top. The Krabe shook itself, trying to dislodge its occupant. Aelita swayed dangerously, trying to keep her balance as she whipped open the fan and sliced down into the eye mark.
The monster blew apart, and Aelita went flying, landing none-too-gently on the ground and directly in the sights of another Kankrelat. The monster wasted no time in firing. Aelita cried out again as her torso sparked from the hit; she scrabbled to get to her feet, to get out of the way of danger.
Still on the ground, Odd awkwardly pulled his arm around, firing two rapid shots as he tried to line up his launcher with the Kankrelat as quickly as possible. One arrow flew wide while the other buried its tip in the ground near the monster's spider legs.
Distracted by the attack from a new angle, the Kankrelat swiveled, forgetting Aelita for a moment. Aelita used the small advantage to full capacity, dashing and leaping towards Odd as he continued to lay down cover fire.
Odd grimaced, sending another arrow spinning at a Kankrelat that crouched next to Yumi. "Yumi, don't just sit there!"
Oblivious to the situation that she was putting both her remaining friends in, Yumi continued staring over the edge, her eyes fixated on the distant void, not even flinching when the Kankrelat exploded and bits of shrapnel struck her arms and face. Another laser, from somewhere behind them, struck her motionless figure between the shoulder blades, causing even more sparks of damage.
Gritting his teeth, Odd whirled to find the source of the new attack. "Jeremie!" he screamed, not caring if he sounded desperate, not even knowing what he was calling out for. "Jeremie!"
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Jeremie watched the screen as everything fell apart.
Odd was shouting at him over the speakers, and Yumi was motionless on the screen, taking damage at an alarming rate. Aelita was running rapidly away from monsters that he couldn't see, and Ulrich was somehow gone. He couldn't understand how it at all gone so wrong so quickly…
"Jeremie!"
The sound of his name through the headset jolted him back into a conscious frame of mind. He grasped at the keyboard with one hand, leaning forward and calling back into the microphone at the same time. "I…I'm bringing you back! All of you!"
A dread, cold feeling settled in his stomach as he began to realize just how stupid he'd been over the past few months. He had ignored his work on the Lyoko programs and let them sit idly, unattended for weeks. If Xana had used that opportunity to modify the supercomputer's programming so that Jeremie could no longer detect monsters, what else might he have done? Xana could have tampered with whatever he wanted—the vehicles, the towers, the virtualization program—anything.
As for the materialization program, Xana had been the last one to use it when he'd materialized himself on earth to infect the water supply. If it had somehow been tainted, or Xana had modified it in Jeremie's absence, there was no telling what might happen.
But it was too late now. Jeremie had no time to check the program to make sure it was functioning properly and clean of any viruses. There was no time to try another course of action. He needed to bring all of his friends back to the real world, now.
He activated the program, hoping that he wouldn't regret it.
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The window on the screen blared at him, alarms sounding off through the headset as bright red warning symbols sprang to existence over the materialization program. Jeremie swore and yanked his headset off, the shrill sounds still coming through the speakers even as he tossed it aside.
A moment later, he almost gave a breath of relief as he scanned the computer information and realized that the alarms weren't due to any interference from Xana. His programs weren't being hacked or infected, but that didn't make the situation any better. The systems were failing, seizing up.
Jeremie typed inquiries, but he already knew what must be happening. He'd left the system inoperative for too long, and he'd put it under too much strain in the past few minutes. The vehicle program was the main culprit; when he sent the fragmented overwing to Odd, the computer had of course been trying to run an unfinished program, and it had started to freeze. Now it was spreading to the materialization sequences, and from there it could affect the virtualization…
Jeremie's fingers flew across the keys, trying to quarantine the damage. If they lost the virtualization programs, there would be no way for them to get to Lyoko. In defiance of his efforts, the error windows continued to flash on the monitor. After a few moments, a new one popped open, and then another.
Don't do this to me! Jeremie thought viciously at the computer. It wasn't working. He couldn't fix it as long as the programs were still operating, and he couldn't stop them because they were frozen. The scanners hadn't activated yet and materialization could go down at any moment…
He stopped moving, stopped breathing, his fingertips poised motionless over the keys, head cocked down in tense concentration. From the floor below, vibrations suddenly emanated upwards and a low-pitched thrumming sound spread beneath them.
Jeremie let go a breath of relief – the scanners were working. They were coming back.
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Yumi was the first to rematerialize, her scanner sliding open with a familiar whoosh and the lights inside making her shadow stretch across the floor. She stumbled out, catching herself on the scanner to the left, which began to hum and glow as she steadied herself against it. The doors opened a moment later and Odd tumbled out unceremoniously, gasping for breath and trying to shake off the effects of returning to their plane of existence.
When the third scanner activated, both of them turned their heads, staring at it. Yumi took a few halting steps towards it, eyes wide and unblinking, waiting for what seemed like forever before the doors finally opened. There on the scanner's floor, looking like she'd fallen down somehow during rematerialization, sat Aelita, blinking at the light and looking bewildered.
"Aelita." Yumi said her name strangely, like a statement. Then she turned and dashed into the elevator, slamming her hand against the access button, not bothering to wait.
The elevator doors closed, leaving Odd and Aelita in the scanner room, listening to the cable car ascend without them. Odd gave Aelita a sad look, then stepped over the threshold of her scanner and offered a hand to help her up. "Hello again, Princess. Welcome back to Earth."
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Author's Notes: Hi everybody! Thanks to everyone who gave a review, you have no idea how much I appreciate hearing your thoughts. Just thought I'd toss in a quick update this time, see if maybe I can shorten the chapters and keep the posting momentum going this time.