The Endgame Battle!

The doors beyond the elevator opened up wide. My big and beautiful eyes were met with a super sci fi lookin’ glass ball the size of Texas with tons of bolts of lightning streaming out of its center, hitting the glass where there were little bubbles of energy. It looked like those things at the mall where you touch them and your hair flies up like an afro.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

“That right there is The Brain…” Teny-chan replied. “I’ve never seen it, and didn’t even know it really existed, but this is the thing that allows the full dive feature to work, as well as the advanced AI.”

So what she was saying was that all the missing devs must have been trapped in there, using their own minds to make this all work.

“I count sixty bubbles…” Teny-chan said. “No… Sixty one! There’s one in the middle!”

“A middle one?”

I walked into the chamber and got a better look at what was going on. Each of the bubbles had a different dude in them, some of them I even kinda’ recognized… Clearly all the missing devs.

But there was one that pissed me off especially, and it was the one in the very middle. All cocooned up in a bundle of energy was my Ray.

“Let’s get him out of there!” I said. “Spawn the access point, if you please, Teny-chan.”

As Tensei worked her magic, to spawn the access point, she turned back to me with a sad look.

“Just so you know, once we save these guys, I’m not sure the game will be able to work anymore.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“W-well...” she took a breath. “It’s because of this that the full dive feature works at all. Shutting it down will…”

A blast of dark energy came down from above and almost hit me. I dodged it just in time and twirled to catch myself.

“Looky-looky who decided to join us,” That witchy voice was none other than Malwaria herself. And right by her side was The Virus. “Took you long enough, but I figured you'd get here eventually.”

“So, you and Paul decide to show.” I said. “You’ve been working with The Virus this whole time?”

“Working with him?” She laughed like a psycho. “Darling, I have that man wrapped around my finger.”

“What?” I looked on in shock.

“You know the drill, darling. These men can’t do anything without us. They need a gal controlling them at all times. Otherwise, they tend to lose their way.” Her head titled up, condescendingly. “We give them a pretty body, and they give us blind obedience. Simple as that.”

“How are you controlling him?” I asked with an arched brow.

“Like you, when Tensei brought Paul into the game, he needed me to control him the whole time. Eventually I figured out how to get around that, buuuut…” she pressed her forehead against his silhouette. “I didn’t like how short sighted he was. He just wanted to get into the game, save some of his friends, then mess it up so nobody would ever play it again.”

“That sounds about right. But what did you want from all this?”

“The same thing I wanted since the start. Money and status! This guy here, top of his class. A super genius coder with the brightest future of all the men i’d ever known. Not much of a looker, but I only needed to worry about that for a few more years.”

“You better not be suggesting that you just wanted him to get rich, then take his money for yourself.”

She gave such a witchy smile that I just wanted to punch out. Well I was at it, I wanted to tear her permed hair out too.

“Listen, darling. You’re a babe, you know that? We hotties can do so much better if we try. But if we get rich off the good guys early, we’ll have some stability to our lives as we climb in status. You get me?”

“Is that all men are to you? Money makers? Steppingstones to status? These are human beings you’re playing with here. They need love, not lies. A woman who’ll be their other half.”

“Ironic, coming from someone who was just in absolute full control of her boy toy.”

That was so much different, and she was just trying to twist logic to her own will.

“We worked together. I didn't take advantage of him.”

“Oh really?” she held up her hand and a virtual screen appeared in her palm which showed some video… It was of us… Ray doing things. T-bagging, fighting until exhaustion, dressing like a woman. “You played with him just for fun and got some good laughs. Honestly, the dress up stuff was pretty funny to me.”

A wave of total guilt overcame me and my chest tightened. I really did play around with Ray a bit too much, exactly like she was accusing me. If the shoe was on the other foot… If I was the one brought to this world, would I have been okay with it?

“Mama, don’t listen to her!”

I tilted my head to Tensei.

“You love Papa Ray a ton, don’t you? So much that you both tease each other all the time! Teasing isn’t taking advantage of. You never did any of that stuff to be mean, and it didn’t hurt him deep down because he knew you’d stop if it went too far.”

She was right. Ray and I were always doing things to get some cheap giggles. But when things got serious, neither of us messed around because we never wanted to hurt the other.

If steam could have been blowing out of my nose, I woulda’ been a bull. This witch Malwaria was so manipulative that she needed to get knocked down.

“You’re a piece of work, and a bunch of other things I can’t say because this game censors everything…” I growled. “You don’t deserve a husband who loves you, and you’ll be doomed to never have a stable relationship. All the money in the world won't save you from dying alone with a hundred cats.”

“Hey, at least I’ll be rich enough to pay someone young to change my diapers when I get old,” she shrugged. “That’s good enough for me, I guess.”

Terrible. Just simply terrible.

“One more question before I bruise that pretty face,” I spoke up. “How did you plan on making money here in the game if it was a total mess? Nobody would play it.”

“See, that’s the fun part.” She gestured to all the men in The Brain. “The higher ups shoved all these guys in here in order to make the full dive feature work properly and never looked back. Then with a little coaxing from 'shareholders' offering up some extra cash, took much-needed vacations away from the studio, leaving such a powerful tool completely unguarded.”

“I helped Paul take over using this thing, learning all the secret powers it had to offer. I watched, learned it for myself and used it right. You have no idea the unimaginable power The Brain has. If I knew what I was doing, I could totally take over the world I bet…”

“But I’m not patient enough for that. So instead, I decided I’d just make the game look all pretty and perfect, then trap people inside and force their loved ones to pay big bucks to log them out.”

She wasn’t just a terrible person, she was a super villain. This was nuts! And she really believed she could pull it off?

And she wasn’t the only one with sins on her hands, because the higher ups were literally throwing their own men into that thing against their will to make it work. Absolutely demonic.

“If I had any pity for you, it’s gone,” I said. “You’re going down, sister!”

“Try me, bitch!” Malwaria jumped back onto a cloud of shadow and floated upwards toward the roof. “Take care of her, dear.”

The Virus raised his hands, preparing to spawn thousands of items to overload the game and freeze me. The moment they began spitting out from around him, I gave Teny-chan the signal.

“Delete all!” I shouted.

“Roger, Mama! Hyah!” Teny-chan puffed up her cheeks and brightened for a moment. All the thousands of items spewing out of The Virus completely disappeared and stopped spawning.

“What?!” Malwaria shouted. “How did you do that?”

“It was actually something super easy,” I replied. “Tensei’s able to make commands using her command prompt. We just wrote one up that deletes all entities besides players and NPC’s… Then voila!”

The possibilities were endless, as long as we had the know-how and creativity. She also had to stay focused the whole time, but it was just fine for her.

“Well, whatever.” Malwaria brushed her hair all nonchalantly. “It’s not going to be enough to stop me.” 

“That wasn’t the only command she made though…” I snapped my fingers. “Teny-chan, it’s time.”

For a moment, Tensei opened her eyes and snapped her fingers back at me, making sure her concentration stayed on deleting any items spawned by The Virus.

A rainbow glow appeared around me and my eyes brightened. Multiple powers coursed through my veins all tingly and quick, all of which were weaponized versions of glitches and features we'd been tapping into this whole time.

I jumped into the air and rocketed forward. My speed was so fast that I had zero control over where I was going.

“Ouch…” I slammed into the sealing, but bounced back quickly. “Let’s try again!”

With a few more darting motions around the room like a rabbit on crack, I finally caught my bearings enough to twirl and attack.

BAM!

I struck The Virus right in the back of the head! He went KA-BOOM!

That shadow man slammed right into the floor and skidded, but slowly recovered.

“How!?” Malwaria shouted. “No ******* way you just hit him! Wait… Did the game just censor me?”

Once I landed, I did a little spin and power pose to look cool. Then I grinned, because she was on the backfoot.

“What you're looking at right now is my Super Mama mode!” I threw a Bom-Bom up in the air.

“No!” she clawed at her own legs. “Kill her! Now!”

The Virus got back up and tried to fight again. He couldn't rely on spawning items anymore, so he tried to use insta-kill commands. But Teny-chan countered each one.

Now he was pissed and started to battle like a real man with his bear fists, but couldn't get around the floating-point error I had around me, or whatever it was called. I countered and smacked that bad boy back and forth with all kinds of explosions, dealing billions of damage points! His god mode was nothing compared to an angry wife!

All his darkness and shadow were getting wrecked, revealing that he was just an average dude underneath the skin of silhouette. Malwaria was seething as he was losing strength.

Once he went down, that was our chance to save my man.

“Teny-chan, let’s free everyone while we have the chance!”

“Roger, Mama!”

I ran to the keyboard and just started typing until something happened. No idea what I was doing, but mama was gonna’ figure it out!

“Numbers! Lot’s of numbers! Never stop, never surrender!”

A dormant part of my brain activated just then, from a time when I was openly wearing glasses and not part of the prettiest club at school. A time when nobody wanted to mention how exciting it was to get A’s on a math test, and when it wasn’t cool to talk about my virtual bug collection in Bug-Catcher 3 with other girls.

The sequences rushing across the screen were so complicated, but the longer I looked the more they started to mean something. The more I saw that each number represented a different aspect of this world, and how it all built off one single integer at the very core of the system. It wasn’t zero, it was one. An odd number that didn’t quite look right alone.

“Remove that, and the whole thing crumbles…”

As I was about to press the delete button, a pair of claws dug into my shoulders and pulled me away from the access point.

“Get away from that!” Malwaria shouted as she jumped me. Her fingers latched onto my hair and tried to rip it out. “You don’t realize how much money is at stake here!”

“I work at a bank!” POW! I slapped that B! “Nobody knows money more than me!”

I played dirty and poked her eyes like this was some sort of stooge routine, then kicked her off me.

“Say goodbye to your plans, Mally!” I girt my teeth and slammed my fist against the delete key.

“No!” she cried, rubbing her eyes. “Don’t do it!”

But it was too late for her. The Brain began to spark and explode, launching lightning bolts all over and making my hair get all frizzy from the static.

The pods connected to it fell down and POPPED on the ground, releasing any of the devs that had been trapped inside of them. They were free! FREE!

“Yes!” I threw a fist in the air. “♪Let’s go! Team Rose! Oh yeah!♪”

“Yay Mama!” Tensei came flying in at full speed and hugged onto me, spinning once and latching on like a little monkey. “We did it! We did it! Yeay!”

This was so great. We freed all the devs and stopped Malwaria and The Virus’s plans. But where was Ray? I didn’t see him anywhere in the rain of men...

“No fracking way!” Malwaria cried like a little baby as she crawled to the exit. Little did she know, Zorro and the gang showed up and blocked her from running. Even Ginger and Davy were here. “Come on…” she slammed her fist against the ground. “D-dear… Paul…” she got on her knees and pumped out her chest, using her arms to accentuate her boobs. That cutesy face made me want to punch her so bad. “Please, help me… These bad men are trying to hurt your lovely wife…”

“Go to Hell…” Paul growled back as he recovered from his form as The Virus. “You think I was deaf for all that? You were manipulating me!” he stomped over to her. “Only thing I’m helping you with is signing the divorce papers!”

“Eheh!?” She made a dumb shocked face like she didn’t see that coming. “B-bu…” It was hysterical watching her expression morph into a ditsy little smile to try and charm him more. “But h-honey, I ju-just said all that because…”

She was trying really hard to work her curves, but her witchy persona was shining right through that skin.

“Save it!” he interrupted her. “You’ve always gotten what you wanted because I was too much of a simp. But I’m done! I want to live for myself, and doing that means I need to stop this game from being released!”

“No!” She ran at him fast and held him back from walking to the access point. “If you do that, how will we ever become rich? Think about it! We can hate each other and be wealthy scumbags at the same time, you know!?”

“Do you ever even listen to yourself, Mally?” he raised his hand, ready to slap her away, his eyes glaring down angrily at her with nothing but hatred in them. “Just get out of my life already, understand?!”

His back hand flew quickly through the air, closing in on her cheek.

It inched closer and closer fast. Malwaria braced herself for the strike.

But those fingers never connected. Someone grabbed Paul and tugged his arm backwards.

“A man should never hit his woman!” Ray shouted like a boss before punching out Paul square in the jaw. “It's up to us dudes to duke it out.”

“Ray!” I shouted as I ran up and squeezed him tightly. “Oh my god, I’m so glad to see you again!”

“Hon, it’s been way too long…” he replied.

A flood of love rushed through my chest and filled me with nothing but desire to lock lips with him. The pleasure of our smooch was so sweet that I almost didn’t notice that the world was falling apart around us.

“Eww!” Tensei cried out as chaos rained down from above. “Mama and Papa are making kissy face!"

"P-papa?" Ray turned red as a tomato. "What did I miss here?"

"Maybe we should concern ourselves with the game that is crashing all around us?" Crow-boy brought up. "It would take more than Nimrod's Elephant glue, an industrial grade adhesive designed for only the toughest of jobs, to piece this back together." 

It wasn't just the game though, because Ginger and Davy fell to the ground, fast asleep.

“The devs we freed were powering the game engine and AI.” Teny-chan finished her point from earlier. “Without a brain in here, the whole system will just shut down!”

“Ah frack!” Ray shouted as he quickly pulled away. “Uhh…” he panicked as he turned around and frantically pressed his fingers against the control console. “Shoot shoot shoot… No idea what this is... But Ten, how do I stabilize it?”

"We need something that can power The Brain to stabilize things again!"

What did she think we were supposed to do here, find it a new brain? “Not like we have any spare brains layin’ around, Teny-chan!”

“Well, yes we kinda’ do…” her lips pursed, but a smile broke slightly through her nervous expression. “So, technically I could power the game if I were to connect with The Brain temporarily.”

“Do you have that kind of power?” Ray asked.

“It should work until we figure out another way,” Teny-chan claimed. “But we have to act quickly!”

The whole room was coming down around our ears, so if we didn’t do anything, we were done for. But there was something that really bothered me about this idea.

“Teny-chan, what will happen to you?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t know. I’ve never done this before, so we’re about to find out.”

That part worried me. No matter how much it might have been our only option, I didn’t want to let go of her.