After assets of bugged superclusters and a delete-attack from 0 or 1 faded away from the cosmic data flying around the light tunnel, Maverick already leapt forward towards Uzi, Iker, Ember's frozen pig body, and Bastian inside the light tunnel they were floating on. Even though ve only entered Kaya form to heal vis wound for a few seconds, ve was able to lunge an enhanced needle arm to redirect his paw, causing the talking lion with a bleeding paw to crash into the side of the tunnel before being able to strike anyone in the group.

"I will finish off Maverick on my own!" Uzi shouted. "You two stay at the front of the tunnel at all costs."

"What?" Bastian yelled. "We never agreed to this."

With Iker being left in the dark about the tens of restarts Bastian and Uzi went through to try to beat Maverick, Ember, and Ameen... Iker had no clue what they were talking about.

"If you are going to do that, you better come back out alive," Iker yelled.

Uzi's tendrils formed a smile under vis bubble-wrap eyes.

"Do you remember how we first met?" Uzi asked Iker. "This is around the time the memory bleeds in."

Even though Uzi was yelling earlier too, ve asked that question normally as Maverick was stabilizing himself on the end of the light tunnel that was flying across the stars.

"... I was the one the recruited you didn't I?" Iker said. "A future version of me."

"Bingo," Uzi said. "You changed me for the better kid. This is the least I can do."

Bastian's feline blue eyes were glaring at the arak the whole time. "You better not lose. Don't let the fight being taken off the Brennisteinnian stage throw you o—"

"It won't fulo," Uzi asserted. "I promise."

Iker moved his front paws forward. Even though his mind wanted to respect Uzi's wishes, his feline body did not. However, Bastian held him back with paws of his own.

From what seemed to be from advanced esper powers, with the help of all the powerful influx around them to protect them from the vacuum of space and to somehow surpass the speed of light, Uzi made vis memories appear around the cosmos. Memories of places ve had been. Even though it would have been difficult to pull off on vis own, Uzi was using vis esper powers as a shortcut to jaunt verself and Maverick. Ve would have learned the trick from fighting Ember in another timeline.

"Do you know what the gates are really for Bastian?" Uzi asked.

"No."

"We are tracing the path for the Apeirosrail. Even though it exists in the past... we are the ones that forge its tracks in the future," Uzi said. "Or at least what we deem to be the past and the future."

"I had a feeling," Bastian said. "... just could never put that idea into words. You know what you are about to do is going to disrupt reality some more."

"Yea, but 0 or 1 has not been defeated yet," Uzi replied. "Once we beat it... we can focus on fixing time and data paradoxes."

Maverick was apparently aware of what Uzi was trying to do, because he tried to shoot Uzi once again while ve spoke. However, as if ve experienced this part of the fight many times, Uzi caught it by the wire with vis own Kaya form, then shifted back to Anagami form. Vis influx that was glowing around vis body was now diluting and spreading across the light tunnel.

With a massive chunk of the glowing influx in the tunnel beginning to pixelate, Bastian grabbed Iker's furry neck with a nibble as Iker let his distress propel him forward. Bastian's pull kept Iker safe by only a few inches.

Before Maverick almost landed another slash while Uzi was vulnerable, he and Uzi disappeared with the portion of the tunnel that became pixels and data.

"UZI! YOU BETTER WIN!" Iker echoed across the cosmic tunnel, the light tunnel now blending in with constellation and meteors in the distance.

[https://img.wattpad.com/1c9bacf67002c328e2bf4506a26819600be46693/68747470733a2f2f73332e616d617a6f6e6177732e636f6d2f776174747061642d6d656469612d736572766963652f53746f7279496d6167652f47684973334c4b716463733245773d3d2d313430373639393338382e313761333633303866656237386431363538333234373935383532342e706e67?s=fit&w=1280&h=1280]

Joaquim fired his grenade launcher with moderate success.

The largest mob that coalesced in the vicinity of a broken down suburban house became flying glitchy limbs, the rest were finished off by Zinnia's own subsequent attack.

"Nice aim," Zinnia said.

"What do you mean? I missed most of 'em!" Joaquim groaned.

"Err... I missed completely the first time."

"What? This is not your first time? Are you keeping secrets too?" Joaquim asked.

"Yea," Zinnia said. "I was in either the past of your simulation or a in different simulation altogether, there's no conclusive evidence either way. I was only rescued because my jaunting abilities were detected..."

"What do you mean?" Joaquim asked. She showed him a hand motion earlier that opened the tips of his fingers to fire smaller bullets, which was safer to use among allies when needing to fire from a close range. As he was standing with Gabe that was incinerating enemies with magical fireflies, Borrys that was rushing a mob with his horns, and Renée that was using a scalpel to stab sole swine trying to stealthily attack them along with Lucia still shooting and reloading, Joaquim began firing at the mid-sized group that was marching across the rugged street.

Joaquim then realized Zinnia Woo stayed quiet while he waited for his hands to reload on resources to remanufacture eight bullets in each finger. Perhaps I should use one finger at a time. You're so dumb Joaquim. So wasteful.

When he stopped talking to himself and glanced over to her, he noticed that Zinnia's lips quivered as much as a mercury-influx android could. "I... I don't want to talk about it."

Joaquim nodded before a webby hand grabbed his face.

"JOAQUIM!" he heard multiple voices scream as he was lifted across the street. He raised his head in midair to find pale arms with undead lips. Without even needing to touch his android body he somehow entered after stepping off the Apeirosrail, the lips opened to suction off influx as spinning moonlight kept hitting Joaquim's eyes.

Can you hear me? Zinnia asked. This time it was not Uzi's mindlink; it seemed to be some kind of telecom attached to the machine Joaquim's mind was in.

Was it also dangerous for him to know why he and Zinnia got these bodies? Wait, that would be valuable information for Ember to be able to shut them down. These must be inventions of her with modifications.

Joaquim figured it out on his own as he and the king with a crown of static lines landed into a crater by a baseball field.

The guy you're fighting is immune to all damage. The only way to make him vulnerable is to bring the book to the cosmic library.

What library? Joaquim asked.

As the zombie king threw his cape of skin away from his limping feet that kicked up gravel and dust into the night's gust, Joaquim understood at the very least that attacking him would be a moot action. To his surprise, even though his body felt much heavier, his clunking feet beneath him was picking up pace faster than any regular human being could run.

Guessing from the distant groan behind him as Joaquim ran towards where his group should still be, the crowned aberration was not happy that he was running away.

MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOWWWW!!!!

With the long downtown road in view where zombie swine were being culled, Joaquim glanced up at the staticky sky to find where the yowling was coming from. Like an instant meteor, a beam with the silhouette of two cats and a pig flashed above Joaquim.

"MEOW! SHIT!"

"FUCK WERE GOING TO DIE!"

A black cat and white cat were spinning and falling towards the roof of a bowling alley.

Iker kept yowling.

"I do NOT want to add bowling ball to my resume!"

"Bro, you'll be dead before the interview."

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

As if Joaquim's knowledge of influx jumps was arranged into a perfect GPT prompt for his android body to understand, small fire thrusters beneath his feet tore through his right-out-of-the-nineties vans to fly towards the spinning cats.

"I am going to get caught twice by Joaquim," Bastian said. "I don't know, he might be more of a friend than you are."

"What?!" Iker yelled, spinning more erratically than Bastian.

Bastian laughed. "Relax. I had to get you back for punching me somehow. That was my payback."

And before they noticed him opening up his arms, Joaquim caught them both. However, as if some cosmic script was triggered by their touch, three of them began to be enveloped by static.

"What's going on?" Joaquim asked.

"It's fine. We are beating Ember here," Iker said. He became a glowing cat at first, but his silhouette was growing into an adult man the longer he was in Joaquim's embrace. "Run closer to the group."

Joaquim's landing tore through the concrete atop the bowling alley, then he made one other jump, now falling in the middle of where Renée, Borrys, Lucia, and Gabe were fighting off swine. He glanced back to see the pale king levitating towards them.

"Where is the book?" Joaquim asked.

"It's probably using higher dimensions to hide," Bastian explained.

Then they froze in midair.

"Shit. We're going to the labyrinth."

Indeed, Joaquim did not pay attention to the flying assets above the street, and he brushed against a hovering image.

"How do you guys know what to do?" Joaquim asked. "I am so lost."

"Have you ever done a speed run of a game?" Iker asked. "One where you have to do very specific bugs and glitches to skip ahead that make no sense?"

"Yea?"

"It's the same thing with us," Bastian explained. "I have been trying to save the world over forty-two times... so the specific things we do won't make sense to you until the future."

"So wait..." Joaquim said. "The moment you two learned how to defeat Ember in this location... will I get to see that for myself in the future."

"Exactly," Bastian said. "Be careful that you're not the one to be on that temporal mission to retrieve that information... then give it to a younger version of Iker."

Joaquim would have scratched his head if he was not frozen by whatever sorcery was happening around him from touching the floating image. Scan lines and whitenoise was all around them, assets of labyrinth walls loading in like gentle sand pouring into rectangular containers.

"Use one of the red squares," Iker muffled through his frozen mouth.

"I can't—"

"You can. You just need to imagine it and will it," Bastian muffled as well. "Noah will translate your imagination and will into instructions on whichever machine or mind this simulation is in."

"Every time we slip through simulations, we always risk touching the vacuum of space, or ending up in some harmful plane like the plane of eternal lava," Iker explained. "Imagine the red square as a save point. Fatima and Mirca have written a script that will switch our body asset while preserving our older one."

"Wait I didn't get that. And who's Mirca?" Joaquim asked.

"Just imagine the red square damn it," Bastian said.

And he did. Joaquim, now simply a body made of influx. He glanced back at the android and human-cat bodies that were going back across bugged assets... to what seemed to be the Derry Hill simulation they left atop the flickering horizon. A red square was hovering above their bodies that were now assets floating away.

"The script also tries to move any bodies we use in simulations where it can stay safe," Iker said. "Now those bodies will stay as dark matter in Derry Hill."

Joaquim smiled. It made more sense for him to see it rather than having frozen cat-humans try to muffle it out. The bodies they were in looked more like distant pixels at this point.

However, Bastian and Iker vanished.

"IKER!"

Joaquim screamed when he found himself all alone in this incomprehensible zone of reality, until he saw a flickering large hand over where Iker and Bastian were.

Most likely the hand that was responsible for making them vanish.

An ominous groan came from behind, and Joaquim turned his influx head to spot the zombie king noclipping in the same direction as him.

The zombie boss was chasing after Joaquim.

Joaquim turned his head back to the virtual hand that was generating into giant manicured hand. Following the giant's arm above with his eyes, Joaquim saw that it was attached to Ember who was the size of a skyscraper, and she was riding on a scarlet beast on an astral red dress that had a train that might as well stretched for infinity.

The beast Ember was riding on...

It resembled a defeated Spiderland with seven heads and ten horns made with yedaliuth bone.

When he met eyes with the scarlet beast... Joaquim experienced the same sensation he had when Camilo pointed at him in that glitchy session.

The scarlet beast used an esper ability on Joaquim with eye contact alone.

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Iker's blurry vision finally settled in, but he refused to look at him in the eyes.

Boring white walls were present, yet prison bars barred him from his human father on the other side.

With the exact same plastic chair and unremarkable floors on each side of the cold bars, it was impossible to tell who was the prison or the visitor.

Maybe they were both prisoners.

Maybe they were both visitors.

The atmosphere around the glitchy white box they were in was so tense, even more tense than when Iker woke up that morning to a shootout in Colorado Springs.

Actually, Iker could not breathe.

He did not need to breathe either.

It was as if he was both alive and dead.

The eighteen-year-old felt more like a .human file than a human, and he was not sure if he was experiencing time itself at all anymore.

Indeed, among the bugged assets and horizons drifting in the data around them, a large and broken glass shard spun so serenely from a combusting house covered in static. Iker's reflection revealed that there was no blood or blood flow in his skin or flesh. It reminded him of a time he stood with human mannequins made of meat and metal.

When did he experience that memory?

On Bastian's tenth rerun?

Fifteenth?

Did he ever even experience it? Did an esper plant that memory a long time ago?

Iker at this point had to fight against succumbing to madness. His urge to make sense of what could not make sense was seeping onto his other thoughts. He did have a convenient yet unwanted distraction right in front of him.

"Even when you no longer possess any memories that would justify that utter ire from you to me," Maverick said. "You unconscious mind continues to hold on to that hatred. The universal mind Spiderland always manages to impress me as much as ve annoys me."

Iker stayed silent, but decided to finally meet Maverick's gaze.

He had the same dark eyes that could be mistaken for black eyes rather than dark brown eyes, and they had the same animated eyebrows. However, where Iker was aloof and round in the face, his father instead had serrated features.

Maverick was known for his composure, but the one context that always was bound to ignite his encrypted anger was not responding to anything that left his mouth. Iker now had an educated guess that this was his father long after he lived as a talking lion; sometime after Bastian's forty-two attempts. While Iker was ruminating on what to say, he noticed that Maverick was impeccably still; as if he could also be a hologram or an avatar. Disturbingly, he was keeping a side of his face perfectly hidden and it unnerved Iker.

Now that Iker thought about it... he could be data too in this bizarre realm they were in. He could move his light limbs, but they were unnaturally light. As if he was just earthplexus light himself, because his body also neither had a heartbeat or a single goosebump. As a carbon body in a situation like this, every single hair on Iker's body would be standing, yet it was if his skin was not really there.

"Was... was your name always Maverick?" Iker asked.

Maverick chuckled with an echo of static following his voice. Startingly, his lips did not move. Not even a pixel.

Scan lines glitched in the buggy box they were in, a box that could have been two prison cells side by side or an asset designer's deranged idea of a prison's visiting area. Maverick was taking his time before speaking too it seemed.

"Yes, but my nickname was Mav for the longest time before I lost control of my reputation," Maverick said. "It was around the same time Dominic realized that even with his cybernetic enhancements, a hacker would be worth more than hundreds of strong humans as net runners came to understand that reality was a simulation too. I never found out how he discovered that biopunks were about to leap in power due to supersoldier research, but I am not surprised he kept that secret. We are in an information war after all. If someone figures out or knows exactly what you can do, you are as good as dead. Once Dominic saw me as a threat to his throne rather than just the mafia IT guy, he unconsciously began using my full name. He came to understand I would become some kind of eldritch virtual being if he did not kill me as a human."

"Or perhaps you went too far. And if Dominic thinks you've gone too far—"

"I will not hear it from you son," Maverick interrupted, his static lips remaining still. "There were timelines you defended him even after he shot your arm off."

"He and I were both acting on insufficient data," Iker said. "I know you are one of the reasons I can barely remember all the tens of timelines and memories that have happened. Dominic went after me after Bastian and I killed him on the false pretense that he murdered Bastian's parents, and I cannot for the life of me remember at all how Bastian killed him."

Maverick was about to speak, but Iker lost his composure. His mouth picked up speed as more sentences left his mouth, and he showed more teeth as each word left his mouth. He gave his frozen father one final scowl before he threw his own chair into the white wall... and both assets vanished.

Across the realm the white box was in, past the wall that got deleted, half-loaded horizons and corrupted landscapes levitated as far as Iker could see. The horror of not being able to rely on any memories Iker had come crashing onto his virtual chest and he bellowed into the virtual void.

Iker snapped as he forced his eyes shut, and he took in a deep breath out of habit alone to face his father again. "I can't do this anymore. When will I be able to rely on the things I remember? This is madness."

The tapping of fingers was audible, yet Maverick's hands adorned with lavish rings were only glitching. "Interesting. The last time were here, you would know that I got you to come here to meet me for negotiations. Perhaps you still do... has your will finally worn out across all these timeli—"

"I don't give a fuck anymore," Iker said. "When will this shit start making sense?"

Iker expected another laugh, but there was silence.

"I promise there is a point to what I am about to say... but this is the only way I can help you understand it," Maverick explained. "Have you ever got into an argument about time paradoxes in a movie that had time travel elements?"

"All the time. I would think you would know that about me by now," Iker replied. "I almost enjoy ruining those movies for people as much as I enjoy ruining your own plans. And frankly I know you won't ever grant me the memories that made determined to bring you down, so I don't give a fuck about what you have to say next. You either give me answers or you shut the fuck up."

And as a chair asset respawned on Iker's side of the bars with Bastian's sneakers pixelating in...

"Iker, this is the point where you get your untainted memories. This is the point in your worldline that keeps you human," Maverick said.

And his father finally moved... revealing half of his human body...

His shattered body was leaking data. Instead of an eye, nostril, and cheek on the hidden side of his face, radiating plasma was leaking out of his open skull that was made of whitenoise. And beside him... it seemed a portal was spawning.

Manifesting on the dancing lights were...

Silhouettes of a smoke behemoth and Camilo.

And with his lips finally having motion, Maverick said with a cold grin, "This is when you will find out everything your mind can comprehend."