Hunter Moebius and I don't own Code Lyoko or Kaitlyn Belpois

Today was a day everyone had all been working up to; it was the day the Warriors were going to finally deal a crippling blow to XANA, and weaken him severely. Before the appearance of the vortex, Jeremie had started building a program for this exact purpose, based off information that Cassidy had predestined, which allowed him to make sure that nobody would be harmed, unlike what the vortex showed had happened in the previous timeline, before Cassidy appeared. The entire process took several weeks, before finishing with one caveat: it would require nearly all of the Supercomputer's resources to power it up. But compared to sacrificing Franz Schaeffer, it was worth it, especially to Aelita and her mother, Anthea.

A plan was soon hatched, which would involve the setting up, and the execution, of the program. Jeremie assumed that XANA would be waiting for them on the Ice Replika, where they had originally lost the Skidbladnir to the Kolossus.

And how right he was. The group drew straws over who would go to the Replika, and who would go to Sector Five to protect Aelita. The shortest ones drawn—Yumi, Ulrich, William, and Cassidy—went to the copy of the Ice Sector, while the longest—Kaitlyn, Patrick, Sissi, Franz, and Odd—went to where XANA's memory was stored with the elven pinkette.

It wasn't long before the Kolossus arrived. XANA soon became curious about the supposed plan, and diverted as many of his aggregated resources that he had collected from his Supercomputers into the gigantic creature, in hopes of stopping any possible retaliation before it could get very far. But Jeremie was already beginning the first phase of his plan, which involved Aelita siphoning resources from the Supercomputer, via the terminal in Sector Five, into the blond genius' program, preparing to target the creature. All the others would have to do was keep it occupied until Jeremie was ready.

"Hurry up, guys!" the blond genius yelled over the intercom.

With every step, the Kolossus began to move slower and slower, as its body began to pixelate, fading in and out, as they continued their work.

"We're doing our best, Einstein," Cassidy shouted to the air. "It's no picnic over here. Especially with this monster! Ulrich is still making the climb in case of—GAH!"

Before she could finish her sentence, Cassidy soon found herself underneath the Kolossus' gigantic foot, causing her to instantly dissipate in a cloud of pixilated dust.

"E-emergency…" she groaned as her scanner opened, before she staggered out. "A-are you s-sure that we w-won't lose—"

"No, it's going to work, Cassidy," Jeremie reassured her. "I'm sure of it."

"I'm going to keep you at your word, but if he…has to, I'm never going to Lyoko ever again! I don't care how much you all need me. I'll just be your go between from that point," she growled, ambling over to the elevator.

"Oh, you won't have to worry about that. He's not going to, and I'm going to make sure he doesn't."

"Lucky you made a corporeal humanoid form for him, huh, Einstein?" she smiled, pressing the button to go up.

"Yes. And thanks to us using resources from Sector Five, too, we'll be able to weaken XANA."

The freight elevator ride up to the computer lab was short, and soon Cassidy joined Jeremie by the Supercomputer.

"Thanks for doing this for me. I would hate to make Aelita intensely sad for repeating history," the psychic brunette nodded. "Especially since she just got him back a while ago."

"Don't mention it," Jeremie momentarily glanced over at her, with a smirk on his face. "I don't want Franz Schaeffer to die any more than you or Aelita do."

"Plus with you two working round the clock to at least weaken him until we can regain Lyoko's strength to defeat him for real, this will be great to do," she giggled. "I may not be proud of unleashing the monster, but I'm glad that it messed with events just enough that we could work like this."

"And I'm glad you told me about the alternate timeline, so that we could find a way to destroy XANA, without anyone having to give up their residual energy."

"Yeah. Plus, it's going to be great! Is it okay if I hug you after all this is over? I know that you're not that type, but—"

He grinned, again. "After this is all over, we'll have a gigantic group hug."

She nodded, before turning her attention back to the screen. "Look! The Kolossus has completely disappeared!" A gigantic grin blossomed across her features, threatening to separate her chin from the rest of her face. "And Ulrich's still on the Replika, safe and sound."

"It's working…" Jeremie whispered and smiled.

"Jeremie," a window appeared on the screen, showing Aelita's ID card, along with sound bars that moved whenever she talked, "I've rerouted enough energy from Sector Five to your destruction program."

"Way to go, Aelita!" Cassidy cheered. "The Kolossus has disappeared from the Ice Sector Replika."

"You guys are doing great!" Jeremie exclaimed. "And now, for the finishing touches…"

"Finishing touches?" Cassidy's smile began to droop, slightly.

"With the last bit of energy Aelita just transferred to my program, I can finally run the last routine, which will directly attack XANA," Jeremie turned to look at her, getting visibly excited at his own words.

"Oh, I almost thought there was something different you were talking about. I got a little worried there, Jeremie," she chuckled.

"It's fine," Jeremie nodded, still smiling. "And here we go…"

Quickly, the blond genius returned to his keyboard, furiously typing in the commands for the last portion of his program.

"This is so exciting…" Cassidy felt her excitement rise, once more. "To think that we're going to…"

"Yes! It's working!" he shouted. "Franz Schaeffer, you are a genius!"

"And so are you, Jeremie," she winked.

Jeremie stopped, momentarily, as a blush began to fill his cheeks, bookending his smile. It didn't last long, and he soon returned to his keyboard.

"The final calculations are set, Jeremie," Aelita announced. "Ready when you are." Proxy-pie.

Hearing Aelita's thoughts caused Cassidy to squeeze her eyes shut, her excited smile threatening to swallow up the rest of her face. She absolutely loved reading Aelita's and Jeremie's cute thoughts about each other, as they always caused great excitement within her; this was no exception.

"That's great, Aelita." First her father comes out of the scanner, then her mother follows, we are roommates… Can things get any better between us?

I think I hear a promise ring and wedding bells, Einstein, Cassidy thought, knowing he wouldn't be able to hear it, a silent giggle shaking her body.

Jeremie soon noticed her expression, as he looked up at her. "What's on your mind?"

"Nothing…" she chuckled, bleating like a goat. "Just thinking of a joke Odd said."

Jeremie chortled, shaking his head. To him, only Cassidy would laugh at a joke Odd had made, more than once. "Ya don't say!"

"Hey! The Replika's starting to disappear! Time to bring the gang in from there." She pointed excitedly.

"Good idea!" Jeremie's fingers leaped into action, soon becoming a blur across the Supercomputer's keyboard. "Materialization, Ulrich! Materialization, Yumi! Materialization, William!"

In the Scanner Room, the doors to the cabins opened. "Well done, William! You did really great this time!" Yumi praised.

"Yeah!" Ulrich agreed. "You did exactly what we told you to do, and you didn't go off and do your own thing."

"I owe it to Cass up there," William pointed to the ceiling. "Even if she hid in an invisibility cloak for the first few moments."

"Old habits die hard," Cassidy muttered sheepishly.

"Don't worry, Cassidy," Yumi smiled, reassuringly. "We understand."

"Plus, he was in a modified version of his old XANA outfit. I had to remember that he was on our side. Thank goodness for Yolanda."

"Yeah." Ulrich nodded. "She really came in handy, there."

"Sorry, Cass." William felt his cheeks heat up. "I hope you didn't have a panic attack."

"I didn't, thanks to her method that saved me the last time."

"Guys! We're almost there!" Jeremie cried out excitedly.

"Really?!" Yumi's voice, and face, rose in excitement. "How close are we?!"

"Replikas are disappearing left and right!" Cassidy announced. "Holy shiitake mushrooms! This is crazy!"

"Don't let Odd hear that. He'll want to eat some," Ulrich quipped, to which Yumi chuckled.

"This is incredible!" Jeremie exclaimed. "My program is working even better than expected!"

"Jeremie, I'm so excited!" Cassidy squealed.

The excitement soon got to Ulrich, Yumi, and William as well, as the three quickly boarded the freight car, and rode it up to the computer lab, soon joining Jeremie and Cassidy around the Supercomputer in under a minute's time.

"I can't believe this. This has got to be the most amazing thing since… the monster had been unleashed," Jeremie beamed.

"Thanks for being careful with your words, Einstein," Cassidy commented, smiling at the blond genius.

"I couldn't have done this without Franz helping me out along the way," the young programmer nodded.

"And this time he is out in the open to help out," Yumi agreed, ruffling the psychic brunette's hair.

The girl giggled, her heart revving up in excitement. "I just can't…"

"How are things on your end, Jeremie?" Aelita's angelic voice wafted through the Supercomputer's speakers.

"Incredible! The program is running incredibly well!" Jeremie grinned from ear to ear. "How are you and the others holding up?"

"Sissi's taken damage, but she's still standing. Odd's still flying around, getting rid of Mantas," Aelita replied. "Patrick is helping him, while Kaitlyn's still standing guard with Daddy and me."

"I see, Sissi's down to sixty life points. Be careful, Sissi! Two more shots from a Manta, and it'll be game over!" Jeremie warned.

On Lyoko, Sissi adopted a sheepish grin. She had become a cheerleader, wearing a pink outfit that had gold assets, and carrying a matching baton, which she could use as a weapon. "Sorry, Jeremie. They only hit me because I wasn't paying enough attention."

"Don't worry about it. Just be careful, and follow what the others tell you, okay?" Jeremie announced.

"Other than that hit, she's been holding her own, cuz," Kaitlyn smiled. "She even made it past the Creepers without being hit."

"That's great! Keep up the good work, Sissi!"

"Yeah, Sister, I'm proud of you!" Cassidy announced over the Celestial Dome.

"Thanks, dear sister. Makes me wish I could fight alongside you here," she beamed, throwing her baton at a Manta. "Too bad that Sam didn't want to join us. She's only been here a month."

"Don't worry about it," Kaitlyn soothed. "Maybe next time he attacks, she would like to come."

Nearby, Aelita continued manipulating data on the holographic terminal, with her father, Franz, close by, supervising her progress.

Jeremie watched the development from his screen, while she continued. "We're so close now… Keep going, Aelita and Franz."

"Roger, Jeremie. Still working on transferring the remaining resources. I'm rerouting additional power, just in case."

"Just be careful how much power you use. We want to keep Lyoko running, too," Yumi cautioned.

"Don't worry. Lyoko will still have plenty of energy left, even after I'm done."

"Thank you, Aelita. We are so close, I can feel it," Cassidy smiled.

"Just one—wait! It's there! We got it!" Aelita joyously cried.

Jeremie's smile threatened to swallow his entire face. "That's great! NIce one, Aelita!"

That one action rendered Cassidy unable to speak temporarily. Instead, she squealed and jumped around, happy to hear what her former first roommate just told the lab.

"Einstein, I think our psychic's just lost her lid," Ulrich cracked, attempting to put a cap over his laughter.

"She's probably just overloaded from all of the excitement." The blond genius turned to the German-named boy. "I'd give her time. She'll come out of it."

"I have never seen her this worked up since the time we finally found the key to materializing Aelita," Yumi giggled.

"You're right," Jeremie nodded, giving her his attention this time. "Can you believe how far we've come, since then?"

Cassidy shook her head, her intense feelings of excitement continuing to overload her being.

Nearby, as he watched, William was becoming more and more concerned.

"Uh, guys?" he started, fear starting to overtake his voice. "Are you sure Cass isn't gonna—"

Suddenly, as if his words were a trigger, the psychic brunette collapsed on the floor, her eyes slowly closing as her vision faded to black.

"…pass out," he finished, deflated.

Yumi gasped, looking at her downed Savior in worry. She knelt down and pressed her middle and ring fingers on her wrist, her anxieties melting away when the psychic brunette's pulse pumped at a regular rate. "She's just passed out. She'll wake up."

"Let's hope it doesn't take three months, huh?" The black-haired boy put his hands akimbo.

In reply, the room went silent, as Ulrich, Jeremie, and Yumi glared at him with their eyes half-open. They didn't find his attempt at a joke funny in the slightest.

"I'll make the final adjustments!" the blond Einstein growled, turning back to the Supercomputer, before his fingers flew over the keyboard.

"Guys, I wasn't even making a joke." William put his hands up defensively.

"I don't care!" Ulrich narrowed his eyes at the black-haired boy, very displeased. "We don't ever want that to happen again!"

Yumi folded her arms, giving William a similar look of displeasure. "You shouldn't even be taking that sort of thing lightly. All of us want to forget it even happened!"

"You're the ones that don't get it," William shot back. "When I heard that Cassidy had fallen into her coma, I worried about her in my room. I still think that vortex was some sort of dream to me, like a revelation. I messed up big time, when I broke up with her. Now I want to fix what I destroyed, even if we just stay good friends."

"William, it's okay. We worried about her at the hospital, as well, but that still stung," Ulrich sighed. William had a point; even though he hadn't been Cassidy's boyfriend for a year or more, after they had freed him from XANA's control, he realized the gigantic mistake he had made, which had led to him breaking up with her, and found that he still cared about her, whether or not she returned those feelings.

"Yeah, I get it." William rubbed the back of his neck apologetically. "Sorry, guys."

"It's fine, William," Jeremie accepted the apology for the others, focusing more on the keyboard than the black-haired boy. "Now I just need to finish the final adjustments…"

Just as he did that, Cassidy's eyelids twitched, cracking open. "Uh… huh?! W-what did I miss…?"

"You didn't miss anything at all, Cassidy," Ulrich smiled, glad that she had regained consciousness. "You're still just in time."

"Yeah!" Yumi walked over to the psychic brunette, before kneeling down by her head, smiling warmly. "Jeremie's just about to finish the final adjustments, so we can finally weaken XANA."

"I'm glad I'm not going to skip this moment," she giggled, rising to a sitting position. "I missed so much."

"Well, you're just in time for this," Jeremie declared, moments before he pressed the Enter key. "The final adjustments are finished!"

"Awesome!" the samurai shouted.

Just then, Aelita's voice wafted through the Supercomputer's speakers, as Yumi helped her Savior to her feet. "That's wonderful! I'll stay here and monitor the power transfer, just in case."

With the finishing touches on the XANA weakening program in place, everything seemed to be working smoothly. The power drain on the Supercomputer, especially from Sector Five, stayed within normal boundaries. In the computer lab, everyone's eyes were glued to a progress bar on the center monitor, showing what appeared to be XANA's remaining total resources, as they slowly depleted, while Jeremie continued to type. It seemed as though everything was going to go off without a hitch.

As she watched, Cassidy was struck by a slight curiosity. "Hey, Jeremie. If that weird tower was still active, and we tried this, do you think that it would've… um… done harm to me?"

Jeremie turned to look at her, momentarily, his face showing confusion. "I'm not sure. Given your reaction to Aelita's attempts to deactivate it, I would hope nothing out of the ordinary would happen, but there's really no way to know for sure."

Satisfied, Cassidy nodded, a smile returning to her face. "I was just wondering. It hit me at random."

The blond genius nodded, soon returning his attention to the Supercomputer in front of him. "That's okay. It's better that we don't have to find out the answer firsthand."

"That's true. Plus, I wasn't in the right mindset, either. I was still learning how to walk, and some pieces weren't making sense—and some don't make sense, now. However, we're still working on stuff," she grinned.

The Einstein, once again, nodded. It had been a crazy several months since the psychic brunette had emerged from her coma. She had to relearn certain basic motor functions, such as how to walk, but the nurses, along with Odd, Aelita, Yumi, and Sissi, were there to help her every step of the way. Then came the threat of the tower on the weird Replika, which had been based off an older design of the Desert Sector. He remembered how scared she had been of taking the Skidbladnir by herself.

Since they had used the scanners for purposes other than virtualization and materialization to great effect in the past, for things such as her Dream Barrier Destroyer, and his so-called "Reverse Schyphozoa", he correctly assumed it would be easy to transfer bits of the others' courage to her. They weren't expecting her reaction, though. He recalled wondering if the scanner had focused too much on Ulrich, as she suddenly possessed similar tendencies to the samurai. But thankfully, once she had deactivated the tower, and its subsequent explosion sent her back to Earth in one piece, the effects mysteriously wore off. Still, it was quite an adventure for all of them, not in the least for Cassidy.

Odd's ID card suddenly appeared on the center monitor, next. "Einstein, the Mantas are disappearing!"

Jeremie's face rose, with excitement. "That's great! Is anything happening to Sector Five, or the Celestial Dome?"

Aelita's ID card appeared next, as if on cue. "Nothing's happened to anything else, just yet. We all seem to be fine, here."

"That's great, Aelita," Yumi grinned.

Soon, monsters all over Sector Five were disappearing into pixels, one by one. An army of Creepers had been dispatched from the Core Zone, in hopes of attacking Aelita and the others from behind, while the elven princess stood at the holographic terminal, but before they could reach the Celestial Dome, they began to dissolve into pixels, one after the other. Replikas continued exploding left and right, all over the Internet. XANA was losing more and more of his energy.

Soon, all the Replikas were destroyed. Blip after blip on the holoweb vanished, before none remained.

"Franz?! Are you okay?" Cassidy asked, some of her anxiety rising despite her excitement.

In moments, Franz's card popped up. "I'm okay, young angel. I'm still here on Lyoko with Aelita and the others."

A large grin overtook Cassidy's face, moments before the psychic brunette fell to the ground, once more, the excitement overloading her. Jeremie's eyebrows rose when he heard the clatter, but instead focused on rematerializing everyone, three by three, knowing that Ulrich, Yumi, and William would be able to tend to her.

Once Sissi had made it to the lab, her eyes beheld her fallen "sister." "Cassidy! Are you okay?! What happened to her?!"

"She passed out, after she heard that Aelita's father had made it out okay," Yumi stated calmly.

"I knew she shouldn't have had that hot chocolate this morning! She was very hyper afterward. Hmph! Rosa makes hers so sugary." The principal's daughter folded her arms against her chest.

"But the main thing is that XANA is weakened," Jeremie declared, whirling the chair around to face his friends with a grin on his face. "Now we won't have to worry about him for a long time!"

Odd raised a fist, a huge grin upon his features. "YEAH!"

Yumi and Ulrich high-fived each other, before she pulled him into an excited hug. Aelita wrapped her arms around Jeremie, before excitedly kissing his cheek. William did a fist pump, grinning from ear to ear. Patrick and Kaitlyn high-fived each other, as well. Franz and Anthea cuddled each other, before sharing a kiss, and Sissi hugged her unconscious "sister."

The happiness in the computer lab threatened to blow the roof off of the factory. With XANA's power phenomenally weakened, it would be a very long time before he would ever try to challenge them again.

At least, that's what they hoped.