My Strength and Song

The sheer size and strength of a Hornet Assault Bee was meant to strike fear in the hearts of its opponents, bringing us all peace of mind... But I wasn’t supposed to be its target!

Was this the end for me? I'd had some close calls up to now, but this was a bigger deal then any of those combined.

I kneeled down and clasped my hands together, then I started to pray for a miracle. There was nothing else I could do. I was so powerless.

“God, please save me!" Tears were streaming down my face like never before. "I promise I’ll pray every night for the rest of my life! I’ll pray twice if I have to! Please don’t let me die!”

I hoped that my message got to Heaven. Otherwise, I’d be there soon enough to deliver it myself.

But if what the TCC said was true though, God wouldn't have liked me very much. I didn't want to think that was true. He's supposed to be nice and loving. Or was that love only to humans?

Was doubt in my heart? I was too scared to tell.

This was it... The two arms of the hornet bee were preparing to slam me between them. My end was near.

I shut my eyes, thinking it wouldn’t hurt so bad if I couldn’t see it coming.

…

…

…

Crunk!

Clank!

Were those the sounds of death? I still felt alive.

I opened my eyes. Two winged figures were holding back the arms of the hornet, keeping them from crushing me. Were they real life angels?!

No... They were Uncle and Janus!

“I'm glad we made it in time,” Uncle said. “This mutiny is unacceptable!"

“Hey, brat…” the face on the back of Janus's head uttered. “What's this all about?”

Was this a sign that God heard my prayers and sent them? Of course it was! How else could they have gotten here at such a perfect time?

I was moved to tears, happy ones though. But I had to wonder… Why send Janus? I thought Janus was our enemy and all that.

“Thank you… Thank you both…" I sniffled, while wiping away my tears. "But, why are you helping me?” I asked Janus.

“Because where I come from, kid, you're kind is venerated!" his enthusiastic voice cheered. "I never came here to kill you. Heck…I didn’t even know you existed till earlier.”

-Janus Re-tagged; Friendly-

His red outline suddenly turned green. That meant he was our friend now.

The hornet bee turned its red eyes to Janus, scanning every inch of him just to be sure it was seeing things properly. That light turned green upon confirmation.

“You would betray me, Janus? After all I did for you to get to this point?” That was the TCC’s voice. “We could have seen darkness completely shroud the surface world and put an end to the filth of mankind.”

“This wasn’t part of the deal, computer,” he responded. “I don’t kill kids, especially not this one.”

The envy green lights turned hatred red again, and the hornet's arms flared out in an intimidating way to escape the grasp of my friends.

“Very well. You have made an enemy of me too.”

I ran behind Uncle, hiding behind his leg. He placed a hand over top of my head, giving it a soft rub.

Janus's wings flared out, then he spawned his dark claws and pointed to the hornet.

"Alright, I guess you’re the final boss of this dungeon!"

Janus flew into the air, zipping across it at sonic speeds! A pixelated claw struck across the hornet's surface, but barely scratched away the paint.

“What the…?!” He leaped off the hornet back to us. “What’s with that armour? The other bees weren’t this strong…”

TCC answered and said, “You see, while I definitely allowed you to have some of the stolen spirit energy, most of it was being reallocated to produce very durable variants of the hornet.”

I think I knew what was going on. By adding mana into a normal atom, you could change the element's properties and turn it into an occulat element.

The downside was that it toke a whole lot of mana to make even just a few atoms worth of the special stuff. If my hunch was correct, she probably used all the stolen mana to make that hornet out of a very strong material I knew well.

“It’s made of ferronium, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Indeed. The very same material that you are made of. It also just so happens that no practical means exists to break such metal.”

That wasn’t good! That hornet wouldn’t be easy to take down. But where there’s a will, there’s a way!

I don’t know anyone named Will though…

“Uncle, what if we shut down the tower completely? TCC would also shut down.”

“That may work, if we shut down everything all at once," he nodded. "But we'd also have to disable that hornet, or she'd just use it as a vessel."

“Any ideas on how we do that?” Janus asked.

Uncle might have had something, but it was all dependent on how skilled Janus was at hacking things.

“Do you think you can hack that hornet?” I asked.

“That thing? Lemme' try,” he said as he closed his eyes to focus

His heart started screeching, he grit his teeth and fought the noise.

“Nope! No good. My signal isn’t strong enough.”

I mentioned to them that I could maybe amplify his signal, since I'd done it with stardust before.

Twisting my left ear, my antenna popped out again. Janus downer face snickered at the toaster sound it made.

“If you send out your signal to me, I can amplify it and take control of the tower and the hornet.”

TCC wasn’t going to just sit around and let us do that. She flew in, straight for me.

Both Janus and Uncle took the hit and held her back. Their combined strength was just barely enough to keep her from going further.

“That plan's our best chance,” Uncle said. “I’ll keep the hornet busy. So hurry!”

He was fighting with his stinger sword, leaping high into the air with his glass like wings and slashing at the hornet.

The hornet launched a volley of four rockets into the air. My sensors told me those were Anti Personnel Rockets (APR). Uncle ran to the other end of the hangar bay to keep them from targeting us.

*BOOM BOOM BOOM!*

The missiles blasted away at the ground! The damage was getting pretty severe, but the tower was holding strong.

Laser beams from the hornet's eyes followed up the explosions, cutting through anything in its path like a chaotic light show.

Janus and I wanted to leave the hangar, but the door that he and Uncle hacked open to get in were locked up tight.

We took cover behind some crates instead. They were well out of the way of the fight, but it wasn’t going to be safe forever.

It was hard to stop watching the fight, worrying that one stray missile, or one quick slice of a laser beam would be all it took to end us. The anxiety made me sick.

As we watched Uncle zip around the giant hovering machine of destruction, its mouth area opened up and a coil inside of it started to light up a hot yellow. What was it doing?

One of the hornet’s lingering APR missiles hit Uncle from behind. He fell down to the ground! Then the machine turned its glowing mouth on us!

“I see you,” TCC announced.

The light of the coil peaked and a powerful projectile shot out its mouth at lightning fast speeds toward the crates!

*BVWOOM!*

Janus tugged me out of the way just in time!

The shot that fired tore clean through the crates and metal wall of the tower, leaving a huge gaping hole to the outside. It hit the ground below and caused a massive explosion! What a nasty attack!

Uncle recovered and flew into the way of the hornet, using all his might to tug it away from our direction.

“What are you two doing!?” Uncle yelled at us. “Finish this!”

We didn’t have time to derp around and watch… We had to do this now!

Janus didn’t have a computer brain, so I couldn't interface with him at all. But his crystal heart was giving off a lot of radio waves that I could capture and amplify.

He had surprisingly good control over what he could send out, but we needed something that could hack the tower.

He sent out a radio wave with a special type of signal in it, I tuned in on the frequency and amplified it with my antenna. Now that the signal was passing through me, I used it to get my head wirelessly connected with the tower's mainframe.

I need to stay focused!

The more of my focus I put on trying to overpower the TCC’s control over the tower, the more I realized that this wasn't about how powerful her control really was. I was trying to get around the encryptions.

There was something odd about that firewall. It was identical to the thing I saw in the TCC earlier when I looked in her systems. The data didn't look like your standard binary ones and zeros or even like a quantum computer. It was a completely different type of system written in a language that looked...indescribable. It was like seeing a brand new colour. I couldn’t comprehend it.

Daddy definitely didn't make this. The firewall must have been someone else’s handiwork. Possibly whomever the TCC was calling God.

So, how was I going to bring it down?

"Uncle!" I shouted over his blade clashing with the hornet’s metal claws. "There's a firewall in a really weird language I can't get past!"

He gave me a passing glance, but he was too focused on the fight to really consider the problem in depth.

"Janus, give her your crystal heart!" He shouted, then continued to duel.

Eww… What is it, Valentine's day?! Yucky!

"My heart?" Janus looked at me funny. "I just got this thing, now I have to give it up?"

Oh, he was talking about his crystal heart! But what good was that going to be? Didn't he need it to live? Maybe not, since he seemed to be part human or whatever. Besides, he shouldn't have had it to begin with.

"What should I do with that?" I asked.

"If you take it, I suppose you'll get all the hacking powers I have. Just plug it in and let it work."

Oh, so it worked kinda' like a thumb drive. I could download any information his heart had on it.

Okay, but how was I going to plug it in? If I unplug my central heart, I'd go kaput. Can't take that thing out.

You know, I did have two other ports available on my chrome arm bracers. Those had backup crystals there right now, but I still had access to them, and removing one wasn't an issue.

Janus pulled out the crystal heart from his chest, struggling to stay conscious all the while. There was a little metal port left in his tech suit afterwards.

I took off my right forearm crystal and put that in a dress pocket. Then I plugged in the crystal to my arm.

-Downloading information... Hacking ability now granted!-

-Jammer Ability now granted!-

The crystal cracked from the inside once the download was done, then it shattered to bits.

Like Stardust, I knew exactly how to use these new abilities. It felt right at home in the Empyrion OS, like it was made for me.

Using the hacking ability, now powered by me directly, I was able to bypass the firewall completely and access the tower.

For the brief moment I was connected into the depths of the tower's systems, I felt sadness and anger all over it. Those feelings were hidden behind those encryptions like they were swept under a rug.

I realized something just then. TCC wasn’t just running the tower like some operator... She was the tower. It really was her body.

TCC was in pain. There were broken codes and tangled webs of information everywhere inside of her AI core, confusing her mind and making her suffer a deep sadness.

I thought whoever must have hacked her and changed her programing was really good at his job, but now I saw he was only really good at sweeping his screw ups under a fancy coded rug. Whoever he was, he was truly evil for making someone suffer like this.

It didn't take very long for TCC to realize I'd cracked the firewall. Her rockets turned on me next out of one final desperate attempt to finish me off.

*Woosh!*

*Fwoosh!*

Janus opened one of his dark portals and teleported up to the incoming missile. He caught it by the middle. His pixel wings burst out and he spun around mid air, then threw the missile into the wall away from us.

*BOOM! BAM!*

The explosion was wild!

"Kid, finish this!" He shouted, landing on the ground and almost falling over.

"O-oh, right!"

I used my power to disable everything, including the hornet, causing it to come crashing down. It was as easy as flipping a switch.

*CRASH!*

It worked! Everything went offline, just like we hoped.

Even the lights shut down in the hangar. The open hangar bay door was all that helped give us light to see.

"We did it!" I cheered.

Uncle was relieved, taking a deep breath and dispelling his crystal armour and weapon. He had armour skin, similar to mine, but it was blue.

"Thank the Maker," he sighed. "Excellent work, Young Mistress."

"Yeah, kid… Good job."

Janus didn't look so good. He was breathing really heavy and looked even more melty faced.

He was hunched over, trying to keep from falling on the ground. Uncle grabbed him by the shoulder and helped him sit down on a crate.

As Janus was recovering, Uncle materialized some kind of energy cuffs and slapped them over his wrists.

“What the…?!” Janus tiredly exclaimed. “You’re arresting me?”

“Of course. Did you think we would let you go free after all this?”

Uncle had a point, we couldn’t just let him leave and tell the surface about what happened here, or about me. Friend or not, he had to stay with us.

“We did help you out. You could go easy on us,” Janus's downer voice requested.

Uncle shook his head.

“You lost part of your spirit when you gave that crystal heart away. You’ll most likely die without treatment. We can keep you alive here, for now. That's how we'll show our gratitude.”

If the price for staying alive was prison, he couldn’t really refuse that. What a terrible peppermint, but what can you do?

Dang it, I mean predicament. I’m pretty bad with words, and I have a dictionary in my head, for goodness sake!

"Ahh..." Janus shrugged. "Guess it's game over."

At least he decided to cooperate.

Something was bugging me though, and it was about the TCC's situation. She let Janus come and tricked him into helping her. Both of them wanted everyone to fall to darkness across the planet, and they both believed they were doing the right thing for different reasons.

I didn’t know much about morals and stuff, but I knew darkness wasn’t usually a thing good guys used. People are afraid of the dark, so they want to avoid it.

But the problem was we also avoid the people that use dark powers too. What if avoiding those people meant they just kept doing those things? We never even get their side of the story.

I’m not saying what they were doing was good, but I am saying that maybe they had a problem we might be able to fix if we talked to them.

Hmmm… Now I was wondering something…

TCC was really messed up in the head, so she couldn’t distinguish right from wrong properly. But when I was in there for a second, it looked like everything was just a big spaghetti coded mess. That’s something that was fixable, like untangling controller cords.

I had a stupid idea… I knew we’d just won, I know we did… But I couldn’t stop myself from wanting something…

“I wanna’ save the TCC.”