Heart of a Warrior III:
Warrior’s Redemption
Chapter 16: Victory, Defeat, and Revelations
Aelita gasped as she stared down the business end of Odd’s arm, a tiny hole aimed directly for the center of her head.
“Odd…what are you doing?!” she cried, looking shocked at his betrayal.
“My only actions are those that follow the will of Lady XANA. Nothing else matters to me.”
“Very good, Odd!” XANA fake-cheered from the exit of the platform. She twitched her hand, and half of her Krabes scuttled off to secure the other exit.
“However,” she continued, “I do believe that there is a little of your old self still in there somewhere… so I have but one task for you. It’s a little thing, really,” she said, waving a hand in the air as though shooing a fly. “Just something to prove your loyalty. It’s about Ms. Hopper…”
XANA’s eyes suddenly narrowed, and her gaze sharpened to the point that it seemed as though they could see through you.
“Kill her.”
The command was still ringing in the air when Odd’s wrist erupted, and Aelita barely managed to dodge the purple bolts that were loosed at her head. She tucked her legs in and rolled to the left, springing to her feet as years of Lyoko fighting had conditioned her to do. Her hands snapped open, pink balls of shimmering light charging themselves up in her hands, crackling slightly.
“Odd, I don’t want to hurt you-” she began.
“But I want to hurt you!” came the reply. Aelita held up the two spheres of energy, holding them in place while Odd’s new purple ammo embedded themselves into them.
After a minute, Odd had to stop to reload his new weapon, and Aelita got a good look at the new shots. They weren’t the golden shards of metal that had been Odd’s previous weapon, but instead were long, crystalline shards of some kind of purple-pink jewel. She leaned in a little closer…
And all of them exploded, sending her flying backwards into a tree. Unharmed, but dazed, she blinked stars out of her eyes in time to see Odd diving for her, claws extended to their fullest, a snarl ripping out of his throat. She rolled again, and then again, as he swept his arm up as he landed, spraying the area with needle shots. She dodged left, then right, jumping and ducking under hastily aimed shots with the desperation only fear can bring.
“Odd, I don’t want to fight you,” she murmured, “But if I must, I… WILL!!” She punctuated the last word with an Energy Field attack, which slammed into Odd’s stomach. She tried to make a dash for the exit while he was preoccupied, but a barrage of lasers from the Krabes made this impossible.
By the time she scampered out of the way, Odd had fully recovered and was angry. Giving an inarticulate roar of rage, he leapt forwards, knocking her to the ground and giving her a large slash mark across her back. She gasped in pain, but struggled to her feet anyway.
He gave a deadly smile at her, as his red jewel began to glow slightly…
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Franz Hopper was nearly insane with worry. He had been monitoring his daughter’s progress on Lyoko, and had seen the plumes of smoke and heard the massive blasts from the battle between the two super-powered programs. One, he knew, he could not possibly interfere with. The other was the battle on Lyoko, where his daughter was fighting for her life against her own friend. That battle, he knew, he could do something about, but unfortunately, he was unsure of the consequences.
The program was untested, and could potentially hurt his daughter. However, at the same time, it had the potential to save her life and give her an added advantage over XANA and her allies.
Carefully, he considered his options, checked his variables, and triple-checked them. He debated. He pondered. And he carefully, carefully, hoped and prayed that the program would work as planned.
His musings were interrupted as he heard his daughter gasp in pain. He swiveled around to view the battle, and saw that Odd had dug his claws into her side. He slashed upwards, causing her to scream in pain.
Franz sprang into action, spinning back to his keyboard and typing in command codes and access codes to Lyoko. Data began to spin and reconfigure itself, and a single line of text appeared on-screen:
“HYPERLINK MODE ACTIVATED.”
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
In the skies above Kadic, strange flashes of light shone against the clouds, causing civilians to gaze towards the heavens in wonder. On a nearly cloudless day, there was what appeared to be random bursts of lightning. A few had taken to the streets, yelling about how it was the end times, but none of this mattered to the two combatants.
Bass’ cloak billowed about him as he dove forwards, only to be cut off by a razor-tipped wing slashing across his face. Hissing as a tiny stream of data escaped, Bass darted backwards to avoid a massive purple buzzsaw, while peppering Forte with his own energy blasts.
“You fool!” snarled Forte, “You compare yourself to me? You’re not strong enough to be even CONSIDERED on my level. Why the Doctor wants you dead so bad is utterly-”
“WISE!!” Bass roared as he darted in and slammed his hand through Forte’s chest.
Forte looked down at the arm now planted firmly through his upper torso, and smirked, even as his outermost extremeties began to turn into a wire frame, his skin flaking off and de-virtualizing.
“I wouldn’t say that you’re exactly wise,” Forte grinned as his legs and arms disappeared, “Especially when you only have one arm free…”
His head was nearly gone now, but he had time for one last statement, “And XANA gave me the Triplication ability…”
Even as he said this, Bass felt vise-like hands latch onto his neck, razor-sharp claws digging into his windpipe, vital data flows being blocked from his central data processor…
One hand scrambled with Forte’s clawed hand, while the other worked desperately to try to free itself from the disintegrating corpse of one of Forte’s clones. Suddenly his neck was getting twisted around, as Forte reeled his arm back.
FABOOM!!
With a loud explosion, Forte threw Bass against the ground, the Black Shadow’s body breaking the sound barrier as he plummeted. With a cacophonous thunderclap, he handily demolished the rest of the dorm rooms.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Aelita skidded across the ground. Large gashes leaked blood and data from her sides and chest, and she carefully rose onto two legs, one hand leaning heavily on a tree trunk.
With her free hand, she tentatively charged a ball of light, and held it out towards the approaching, untouched, Odd. As he approached, he smirked angrily, and fired a single shot at her.
The bolt shot through the air at supersonic speeds, and ripped straight through the Energy Field as though it were a tank through tinfoil, before blowing apart her entire forearm.
She screamed and fell to the ground, cradling the stump that used to be her arm.
Odd sneered at her as he walked up to her prone form on the ground.
Aelita stared at her friend. Things were so different now. Even the light…
Wordlessly, he raised his arm so it was pointing at the center of her forehead.
“Goodbye,” he murmured, and fired.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Time seemed to slow for the barest instant
A beam of light rocketed from the heavens, slamming down directly on top of the Princess of Lyoko. While originally finger-wide, the beam expanded to completely cover her entire body, trapping it in a column of the purest, whitest light that XANA and Odd had ever seen. But it was not just white, all the colors of the rainbow flitted across its surface, yet remained whiter than the purest snow, all at the same time.
As if in slow motion, the shard of explosive crystal poked its way out of Odd’s skin, than began to crawl at microscopic speeds towards the Princess, who was now protected by the pillar.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Aelita awoke inside the pillar, feeling oddly refreshed and relaxed. She was on her back in the middle of an infinite plane, rolling with rainbow-white smoke as far as the eye could see.
“AELITA.”
A slight whoop noise sounded just behind her, and she stood up and turned around. Her father’s face was gazing down at her from a rectangular window about seven feet off the ground.
“Daddy-?” she started, but was cut off.
“AELITA, MY DEAREST, I PROMISE TO EXPLAIN EVERYTHING LATER. RIGHT NOW, HOWEVER, YOU ARE IN GRAVE DANGER.”
His image appeared to fiddle with some controls just outside of the camera’s range, then he turned back to the recording device.
“I HAVE CREATED UPGRADES FOR YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS. I GIVE YOU YOURS NOW. BE CAREFUL, IT WILL STING A BIT…”
Suddenly, waves of black energy assaulted Aelita’s frame. She opened her mouth to scream, but that only allowed energy to flow into her, assaulting her very core…
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Time slowly began to return to normal as the pillar of light vanished.
Odd, his new slit-like pupils widened in shock, stared as Aelita’s arm blurred, catching the shard out of the air and threw it into a far-away tree.
Only Aelita... was changed.
Her outfit was a one-piece, double-toned pink jumpsuit not entirely unlike her brother’s. a steel belt wrapped gracefully around her waist, connected to a transparent miniskirt that looked as though it were made of glass and steel, but felt as though it were made of the finest silk. A titanium bandeau wrapped snugly around her chest, with a small red alloy plate squarely in the center. Her arms were clad with two fingerless gloves that extended all the way up to her shoulders, where their ends were covered by shoulderpads made of the same transparent materiel as the skirt. Around her wrist was a star-shaped watch, now glowing soft pink. Two angelic wings, glistening like precious gems at dawn, were folded gently against her back.
She smiled, and Odd could feel a twinge of fear in the pit of his dark heart.
“Hello Odd,” she said in a light, conversational tone, as she charaged up her Energy Field, “I figure that you might not know who I am, what with my upgrade looking so drastically different and all, so let me introduce myself.”
She pointed her hands out in front her, the fields fusing into a massive rose-colored ball of light.
“My name is Aelita. We need to talk…”
With that, she released her wave of power. Odd was propelled backwards by the pulse of pure energy. He tumbled head over heels for several dozen feet, before he slammed into a tree. Instantly, he dissolved into reddish-black smoke, before vanishing entirely.
Aelita breathed a sigh of relief, before ducking to avoid a furious barrage of lasers from XANA’s Krabes, and the lady herself was looking furious.
Aelita dodged behind a tree, and smiled slightly. Dropping to her knees, she placed her hands together as though praying. Tiny filaments, infintismially thin, rose from the ground and wrapped themselves around her hands.
The Krabes and XANA remained in position, blockaiding the only path that led to the tower. XANA’s face was like a statue’s, hard and uncompromising. She would hold the line HERE1 The Brat would not interfere with her father’s plans again…
“Hey, XANA!”
Aelita’s head was now poking out from behind the tree. The monsters’ eyes swiveled towards her, charging, refining their aim-
And suddenly, with a lurch of XANA’s virtual stomach, she was plummeting towards the Digital Sea. Her loyal monsters were flailing wildly, but without the ability to fly, they were doomed. One by one, they fell down into the void.
XANA snarled as she halted her downward momentum, and began to rise quickly. She drew her katana out of her scabbard, and already it was glowing with bloody power. She rose, rose, rose… but not quickly enough.
Overhead, Aelita shot past where XANA’s troops had fallen, cruising as fast as a motorcycle on her new wings. Without the hassle of walking everywhere, she was at the tower before anything could stop her.
XANA peeked over the edge of the deconstructed path just in time to see the white bubble’s approach…
In the real world, Bass was on all fours, bleeding and leaking data from a thousand grievous wounds. Forte was laughing as the bubble overtook them…
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
THREE WEEKS LATER…
LOCATION: TOP SECRET, CLASSIFIED UNDER ACCESS CODE “F40u5.”
It was dark in the briefing room, the only light coming off of a few computer screens and holograms, showing various humanoid figures. These humanoid projections were standing next to actual humans, but no one’s face was visible. There was no telling who could be listening.
“Your navi has recovered?”
“Yes, he has. He should be back up to optimal performance in no time.”
“You have reviewed the documents.”
“Of course he has.”
“Is this necessary? After all, we already have an operative in position among the Kadic staff.”
“He has no Navi, Agent Punk. He can’t give any more support than the occasional after-action report.”
“I still find it suspicious that he’s the only one who can remember these events.”
“If you were to have read the reports, you would know why that is.”
“Quiet, Agent Searchman.”
“Quiet!” said the leader, a man wearing an overcoat. The table immiediately fell to attention.
“Agent Eugene, you will go. Your expertise in this field is only rivaled by Hikari’s, but he can’t be trusted with this information.”
“Are you sure, Famous?”
“Yes. I’ll have the passports and paperwork filled out as soon as possible. Go.”
A boy stood, collected a small device from the table, and walked out. As he left, the light flickered off of his dual-colored hair…
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
LOCATION: KADIC ACCADEMY
It had been three weeks since the massive assault by XANA. Three weeks since Odd had been taken. Three weeks since a tragedy had struck.
Fifteen students and Rosa, the cafeteria lady, had simply fallen dead for what appeared to be no reason. William Dunbar, Thomas Jolviet, and twelve others. Gone. Forever. Odd DellaRobia was gone as well, but no one could find him. His dog, however, was found dead in his room. Jim had been surprisingly understanding, and had allowed the small animal to be buried under a small tree in the park. He even chipped in for a small gravestone.
Jean-Pierre had confined all the boarding students to their rooms, the school was closed down for investigation, and students like Yumi, who traveled to school, were barred from the building. But after three weeks of investigation, searches, inquiries, and in-depth probings, nothing turned up. The school was re-opened, and a somber weight pressed down on everyone.
The remaining Lyoko Warriors met at Aelita’s house, the Hermitage, with Jim’s permission, on the condition that he escort them there and back. Jim was waiting outside the house while the conversations took place.
“Odd’s been taken,” Ulrich stated sullenly.
“People are dead.” Yumi added with the same tone.
“We’ve been working with a monster… No offense.” Jeremie stated.
“None taken,” chimed Bass from a computer monitor set up for this purpose.
“At least we have your upgrades, Daddy…” Aelita’s voice trailed off as she gazed upon the sullen face of Franz Hopper.
“But that’s not the solution, dear,” he answered tonelessly. “We have no idea who this ‘Forte’ is, nor how he’s working with XANA, or even how XANA turned Odd!”
“I know.”
The eyes of the Lyoko Warriors turned to Bass.
“Forte was a clone of me used to resurrect Alpha, almost a year ago. I thought I destroyed all of them…” he grumbled.
They waited patiently for him to continue.
“However, I do know how he’s working with XANA, and how she turned Odd. Odd was turned because of a force known as ‘Dark Power.’ It’s a deadly, corruptive force found in artifacts known as Darkchips. I don’t know how they got into Odd, but it would fit in with her partners.”
Bass took a deep breath. “Forte uses Dark Power to attack, so he’s using darkchips to fuel himself. And there’s only one person who has access to darkchips that I know of. This is the same person who I saw XANA call, “Father,” and the same person who resurrected Alpha the first time.” He was angry now, and the volume of his voice rose considerably.
“The person responsible for everything here is-”
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
LOCATION: UNKNOWN
In another darkened room, far from the prying eyes of the multitude of morons populating the planet, a man was standing, examining data from six different computer programs.
Two figures materialized out of the gloom, bowing to their lord and master before speaking.
“Father, I-”
“Save your breath, XANA. You’ve apologized enough.”
“But Father-”
“I SAID QUIET!!”
Silence rang following his outburst.
“Forte, XANA, I want the next energy shipment on time. No screw-ups. It’s been three weeks; be cautious.”
“Yes Sir.” The two spoke in unison, before teleporting away.
The man was alone, clutching his skull-topped cane.
“The fools…” he rasped, angry.
“The total fools. They know nothing. They think me dead. They think me gone. They know NOTHING AT ALL!!”
“I’ve been planning this since before the LifeVirus. I’ve been planning this ever since I first heard of Hopper’s little discoveries. And everything has gone EXACTLY according to plan…”
“Oh yes. Soon they’ll all pay…” he growled.
“THE WORLD WILL PAY FOR DOUBLE CROSSING THE GREAT, AND ALL-POWERFUL DOCTOR ALBERT WILY!!”