Lucky.

Just as Odd uttered his enthusiastic words, the scanner room's shaft door burst in a crash and clang of shredded steel, water flowing in and slowly but surely rising up to the point where it would flood Jeremie's control room through the ladder passage. Jeremie, startled by the noise, looked back at his own shapt door. It seemed to look right back at him, innocent, without a visible trace of damage. The frightened boy looked back at the monitor and adjusted his headset.

"Okay, you guys. The tower's halo should be visible from here. Move fast, but watch out for a great swarm of Hornets coming your way. Ignore them and get to the tower ASAP. Avoid getting hit at all costs."

Jeremie felt a cold sweat. This really was serious. He had no idea where Ulrich was, had no perception of the damage outside, no way of telling how many homes and buildings and trees and structures were gone...

He shook it off just to regain it again. the swarm of Hornets he saw as a bunch of red blips on his monitor had evolved into a solid coat of red. Danger red. Death red.

There had to be hundreds -- no, thousands of Hornets in the Mountain sector at that time. There was no way that Odd and Aelita could avoid being hit.

~~~

"Augh!! We can't possibly avoid this!" screamed Odd, who, even semilally intrigued at the challenge, knew of the peril that would ensue. Gesturing to Aelita to hang on, Odd sped up the Overboard to its maximum velocity. The path to the tower lay straight ahead, although in a crescent path. If they were to go the short way, they would be flying over the digital void and would not ever leave Lyoko if they fell in, a fate that the Hornets would take every step to ensure. Flying into the swarm was the only option.

"Laser arrow!" shouted Odd as he shot blindly into the swarm. When a hit occured, the Hornet exploded, causing a chain reaction. As big as these reactions were, glorious red and orange blasts of victory, they were only a dent in the swarm's paint job.

Aelita realized that she and Odd were almost completely surrounded in the exponential amount of Hornets, pink lasers emitting shots, all trying to take the precious life of the two warriors.

And then it happened.

~~~

Yumi didn't exactly know what went on for sure after everything fell apart. She was under the water, the rain, struggling, not knowing which way was up and which was down, that horrible direction, down...

Suddenly, she found herself soaked and floating in the flooded street that she knew well, immediately realizing the tearing cold of the deadly combination of gusts of wind and sharp rain.

That wasn't the only thing that she realized.

"Hiroki?" she asked herself, then bellowed. No answer.

Where is Hiroki?! she thought, dreadful thoughts flooding her mind not unlike the rainwater around her.

It's not...he couldn't be...

~~~

Nobody could see. Debris pricked their eyes whenever they tried to see the result of this hurricane-like entity. Milly, now awake, yet unimaginably disoriented, tasted the rain-pattered blood dripping from her head. She heard a chaotic noise next to her -- Ulrich and Tamiya screaming at each other. This freezing time drove into the three of them like a hammer and nail. Hypothermia was catching up to them all. It was almost game over. Almost.

~~~

Odd whimpered and disappeared into a white wireframe, falling into the endless Hornets. It threw her balance off, and she also plummeted from the Overboard down.

"Odd?!" she heard Jeremie scream.

The hornets cleared a hole as she fell, nearly a dive into the dreaded void. Bad void, death void, bad... was all Aelita could think.

Suddenly, she was hit by a hornet shot, which threw her dramatically off axis, crashing her into the dirt a few yards from the tower.

It all made sense. XANA couldn't let Aelita die. Her memory was a necessity. With this, though, came the Scyphozoa, which followed her to the tower, tentacles outstretched. Aelita got up and bolted into the tower, an environment full of blue binary and windows. Floating up to the highest level, she let the screen read her hand for verification before printing in the sky blue text that was the lifeblood of the very Earth at times:

AELITA

CODE: LYOKO

~~~

The water stopped. Everywhere. Yumi went from floating to laying on a solid bed of water. Jeremie the water stopped flowing into the control room. Odd lay suspended in the open scanner, now filled with water. Ulrich, Milly, and Tamiya froze, crouched
in a bundle on the ground.

Jeremie knew what he had to do.

"Return to the past, now."