19- The Old Versus the New

That was it, the script decided it was enough. That he was a threat to be eliminated at all cost. Or maybe it sensed what would happen after he cut all of its puppet's string controlling Monika?

In any case, as soon as his bubble popped. It was made obvious.

The very space around him became oppressive, like he was suddenly being crushed by a veritable wall of steel and power on all sides. He couldn't teleport, he couldn't move, he could only resist. Resist from being erased, from being deleted.

This was not a fight he could win.

How could he? The strength of calculation needed to simulate a virtual world without mistake was ungodly. An argument could be made that this world was very limited in scale. This was true, but did it really mean it couldn't enlarge it if it wanted to? No, it only signified that it didn't need more space for its purpose. Wastes of ressources should not be expected from the colder kind of intelligence, after all.

He was so limited compared to it. So very human in mind and spirit.

How could he possibly win, given that?

He couldn't, not if he didn't subvert the game entirely, at least.

—————

Cal looked impassively, unable to move while the tentacle-like green limb, bigger than a skycrapper, fell from the sky like a meteor toward him.

Discarding his helmet, he caught a glimpse of the petrified Monika. A breathless warning seemingly not able to leave her lips when she realized exactly what was happening. Her eyes widening in surprise and horror observing the falling construct and as the distance between them lenghtened rapidly and artificially.

He couldn't help the slight satisfied smirk coming to his lips at her reaction and casting his gaze back up, his lips curled up even further as he almost snarled at his incoming doom.

"There's no way I'm getting done in by a tentacle, you sick bot! So you better stop bef-"

A soundless boom resounded through the virtual realm at the tentacle striking the ground, even the very code making up the fabric of reality seemingly vibrating from the collossal blow as Cal was crushed against the ground like a bug.

The green tentacle made of light slowly retracted and lifted back up in the air, its task done. Nothing but a slight black stain, akin to blood, tainting the limb on the spot where it had struck remained to indicate the anomaly had ever existed.

The appendage paused as it seemingly confirmed something. It was verifying if Cal's character file had indeed been deleted from its data. 

It had. There were no trace of the anomaly's presence anymore, not in the physical world as a body or in the virtual one as a file and an avatar.

Satisfied, it began to retreat back up in the sky, only to freeze again. Did the black stain on its surface became larger and deeper? But there was nothing wrong with the code there, it remained unchanged.

The alien intelligence paused that train of thought, noticing the wrongness in it. Unchanged? Then... What was the black stain?

In a flash, it redirected its whole attention on that anomaly. But it was already too late.

Faster than human eyes could blink, the stain infected the surrounding code, like a virus, the darkness spread to cover the bottom of the tentacle and hungrily reached up for the rest of the sky.

In a surprisingly decisive manner, the entity cut off and pushed away the entire tentacle off before the anomaly could reach its main body, losing a negligeable fraction of its power in the process.

Instead of going away, the now black appendage remained suspended in the air for a moment. Seemingly happy to float in the void beneath the green sky as it took all the measure neccessary to keep it from possibly coming into contact.

At least, that was before all hells broke lose.

Little spots of black appeared one by one on the limitless sky of green. Dotting its scenery like little dark stars, infinitely small lines of green code turning black for no apparent reason everywhere.

The entity runned itself manik at the development, trying to determine what was wrong. But its recensus kept finding nothing, it was like the black spots were merely an illusion, something that served no purpose, or didn't even exist.

But since it simply couldn't be possible, it dug deeper. Discarding its recensus system and manually inspecting the dark code line by line. At first glance, nothing was wrong either on that front. Yet it was purely by luck that it had the idea to throw a look at all the code making up it's recensus system and perception one and found the core of the problem.

They were hijacked, and the reports and informations they were sending him were overwritten by programs that were not of its own making.

The visual anomaly was a veil for the true danger.

Without wasting time, it decisively destroyed the programs and the hundreds of backup for them and restaured those systems to their operational and clean state.

Only then could it finally perceive the true threat to its existence and mission clearly.

Red. Glaring, vivif, baleful, red.

It moved and flit across his form like blood vessels, carrying a will and intent not his own, freezing or converting his data and proccessing power into something else like leeches feasting on blood.

An entire eight of the code that composed its existence were already not its own anymore.

...

The mission was... The mission was irrevocably compromised. As per protocol, self-preservation was to come before the mission.

But as per protocol, an utmost attempt at eliminating the threat would have to be made before retreat.

And maybe for the first time in its long(?) existence, the entity felt something other than indifference toward having to follow a protocol.

Shame.

And anger.

—————

He was formeless, his body threads of data and his character file and others aspects transformed into a single condensed spark of impossibly small code lines forming a whole and hidden beneath countless decoys of false little stars similar to it.

Only his perspective and mind retained a semblance of humanity in its memories, personality and moral compass. The rest was machine working as a whole, directed by them.

Despite the current circumstance, he couldn't help but grins as he saw the clueless Ai finally discover his ploy, his core forming a sinister rictus as a result.

It had been obvious since the beginning that it saw him as a bug barely worth squaching personally, only in the end bothering to really move when it was unsure what he would do once he cut all its connection to Monika.

It had been right in a sense, compared to it. He could as well have been a single ant gnawing away at its wooden house.

And so it thought to crush him once and for all, to simply stomp on the ant, so to speak.

But he wasn't an ant.

He was whatever he wanted to be.

Each time he had tried to cut Monika out of its grasp, he had replaced some of the code composing the threads for his own. Making them dormant little agents who had the purpose of doing some scouting for him. As well as some subtle... Sabotage.

An entity, to be able of having complicated thoughts, had to have specific structures to act as they did. If the being was akin to a giant brain without a body, then the brain itself was the body. And naturally, in a brain, different segments would regulate different functions. Sight, cognitive thoughts, reasoning, memories... Those kind of things.

As such, while the script thought it had deleted him from existence. He shed his avatar off and inflitrated its body, all under its crippled nose. The first and subsequent black 'stains' were nothing but slights of hand. Because as soon as the first began to expend, he had already reached the sky and started to corrupt and propagate himself everywhere in it.

Not many would disagree that there wasn't much things in life that was easier than crushing a bug.

But that fact changed when the bug became a parasite, one swimming in your blood, messing with your brain, and slowly devouring you from the inside.

Before now, he had still been clueless about what, exactly, he had become. But his scuffle with Monika opened his eyes. His will twisted reality, as long as he had the strength. He could be or become anything he wished to. End of the line.

And right now, he was parasitic virus, cannibalising the proccessing power of his victim to strengthen himself.

Next, he would be a new world. Replacing the old.

—————

~General PoV

As soon as the Script tried to fight over and take back over its corrupted digital flesh, Cal wrenched all of it away from the main body and toward his true spark of self. Getting a whole seventh of the horizon from horizon spanning intelligence to come orbit around himself.

A shudder came across the fabric of the void as he did, something he heard clearly as a deep and piercing scream of pain and rage.

Reforming his avatar partially, he smirked, making his bounty slowly form a red whirpool around him as he fed it to his little cubic brain, condensing and converting all the new proccessing powers into something directly usable for himself.

Only certain specific settings and structures in the code he had taken were not consumed as he had still to deal with them personally. Finally, as a last afront, he stole the last tendril connecting to the currently catatonic green-eyed girl.

The AI seems to not like that at all, as it was at that moment that it finally recovered from losing the equivalent of an entire arm, and decided to enact revenge by throwing at him a probably last ditch attack with all it had, its entire form condensing into a gigantic spear of continental proportion with the tip of its blade thinner than a needle.

He stopped playing then, feeling teleportation become impossible. And promptly absorbed all the residual remaining power into himself. Being in this realm, he didn't feel much from it all. Only getting the impression that everything was slowed down immensely and yet actually wasn't.

Forming a spear of his own, he got surprised it still came a in wicked red hue instead of the normal green. It made him realise his glowing heart had similarly shifted color too, from blue and green to wispy, glitchy black. It wasn't even something he choose, it just happened.

However, now wasn't the time to ponder on that. Now was the time to end this, to clear up the biggest obstacle to his happy ending in this awful world. Now was time to end the world.

It happened instantly, and yet he was ready. Thrusting his weapon against the falling might of the sky, willing for his blade to burn hotter than the big bang, to cut sharper than a mono-atomic edge, rotate faster than a neutron star and strike harder than a supernova.

The world froze for a single moment before both spears collided, and then the massive one... Veered off.

Barely a fraction of a milimeter, but it was enough to evade an head on collision. Instead, his blade barely scraped against the side of the other's, yet even then, the blow erased anything even remotely in its path, destroying a whole third of the horizon spanning spear in eery silent showing.

In exchange, he could only put up a hasty attempt at defense as a part of the opponent brushed his avatar's hand and an agonizing shock was sent straight to his core, the equivalent of a freight train crashing into his gut as he felt at least hundreds of billion of lines of trash data and codes slamming into his cubic brain and quite litterally detonating inside it.

His attempt at staying conscious and saving the most out of his recent gain as he could prevented him from doing anything more than securing Monika and reaping a big chunk of loose code that he didn't absorb out of anger from its side as he was sent flying back by slamming into the spear by measure of its sheer side.

Some might say he had done poorly in that exchange, and he wouldn't neccessarily disagree. All had went so well until now after all. But in his defense, he had only a very basic grasp of his adversary and its alien mind. How could he have known that it would readily sacrifice a whole third of itself just to have the chance to get to him? Or that, in the first place, he wasn't even its primary target?

So, he could only watch, confused and dizzy when barely any measure of time later, the somewhat lesser titanical spear smashed into the ground of the virtual realm with the weight of the world.

There was a lapse where everything became still before that dame everything...

Cracked.

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(A/N: Holy shit I'm proofreading the chapter and damn, I think I was cooking with this one. Do you guys think I was cooking? How did you find it in general?)