50 Fireworks

When Joshua woke up, he found himself in the rune lab he had created in his soul world. He managed to stand up with great difficulty and almost fell over in the process.

'Damn it, I'm really low on energy...' he thought.

"Luna, give me a status report!" he ordered.

[hrtgetrfgg….. SYSTEM ... jojzofzjrojoj …. ERROR … zjrpjegjgmmrz]

"Great … Catherine, can you hear me?"

Unfortunately, he received no response. He felt the dire need to make a really dumb joke, yet it was useless without an audience. Naturally, there could only be one reason behind such interference: the little monster.

'At least Catherine should have escaped the nightmare, she'll be fine for now.'

Joshua was still terrified of that creature and he would really like to avoid a confrontation with it. However, after everything Catherine had done to help him, if he just crawled up inside this room and hide like a coward, he would betray the trust she had placed in him. And he was done disappointing his goddess.

He looked at the door leading outside, he was sure it was there waiting for him to come out. Of course, he wouldn't rush blindly either without a plan. He turned his attention to the terminal he used to program runes. Luna might not function properly at the moment, but he could still enter basic emergency commands to perform a health check of the hardware located in his soul world.

The results were rather grim, apart from the terminal inside his lab, his entire soul world had been contaminated by an unknown virus and was unusable.

'And that's why you never let your antivirus trial expire,' he thought sarcastically.

As for his energy reserve, there was barely enough left for him to move around and not much else. Whatever he decided to do, he would have to work with the items inside the lab.

###

As soon as Catherine opened the door, a disgusting black liquid began pouring through it. She was at a safe distance thanks to the pole, so she had time to react. Instantly, she froze the goo that tried to enter her world and blocked the entrance with a thick ice wall. The invasion of the strange liquid was stopped net in its tracks but there was no time to enjoy this small victory, Joshua's world was falling apart!

Catherine bit her lip, she tried to connect to Luna but only got some weird static noise as a reply. There was no other way around it if she wanted to reach Joshua, she would have to traverse through that weird goo.

###

Almost trembling, Joshua opened the door leading outside. What awaited him was one of the most bizarre landscapes he had ever seen. 'A sea of darkness' is the term that came to his mind. Indeed, his entire world was covered in a weird black goo. The liquid was about a meter high and was slowly rising. The bizarre substance was also covering the various pieces of hardware that were present in his world. No wonder nothing was working.

And yet, despite all of this, Joshua had calmed down as soon as he stepped outside. He was standing on a lone island of hope. He saw that the goo was blocked by some sort of barrier that had formed around his lab. Even more important was the magnificent statue of his goddess that was standing in front of him. Instinctively, he knelt in front of it and put his hands in a praying position.

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'Thank you for watching over this last bit of my soul. I vow to you I won't let it be in vain.'

His prayer was cut short as he heard a noise coming from the nearby sea. As he turned his head toward the direction of the disturbance, he saw a figure rising from the goo. Its appearance had been drastically altered since the last time he put his eyes on it and its form was no longer human, instead, it looked more like an eldritch horror by this point. Its many eyes looked straight at Joshua with envy and suddenly a vast amount of tentacles came out of the goo and slammed into the barrier. It trembled under the assault, but held steady, at least for now. That thing was waiting for one thing: to break through the barrier and swallow him whole. Seeing its assault was ineffective, the monster slowly sank back in the goo. A few moments later, an adult female form rose out from it. Smiling, it just said: "Hey, Daddy!"

Joshua's previous ramblings had led to this thing to become so powerful. It was best if he tried to remain calm and focused. And above all, not imagine what it could do, since it would grant it that ability. He wasn't sure what to do yet, so he had to gather information, without letting anything slip from his mind. He, therefore, began singing a song he liked in his head while engaging a conversation.

"There you are… Kids grow up so fast these days," he replied.

"Ohhh, you're finally talking to me? If you want to work on my education, I think it's a bit late. I'm already a grown-up and I have surpassed you in every possible way."

"Really? Looking around, I see you pretty much flooded the place and destroyed my previous hardware. I'm a creative mind, if all you can do is destroy stuff, I'm not gonna have a high esteem of you."

"You're such a fool," she started, "I'm not destroying anything, I'm just claiming my inheritance. I must admit the Luna System you created is pretty ingenious," she waved her hand making Luna's floating screens pop up around her, "Soon, I will have finished merging with it entirely. Then, I'll finish consuming you and move on to Mommy. You won't be there to see it, but you'll be proud to see what I can achieve with your powers combined."

"Fusing with it? You sound like you'll make Luna a part of you."

"Of course I will. While you created Luna inside your world, you two act as separate entities. That's so damn ineffective! Once I'm done, I won't need Luna. All her abilities will be inherently part of me. See, I told you I surpassed you!"

"I see…" Joshua smiled, "It's not a bad idea in theory…"

'But you made a fatal mistake', he thought.

Joshua took out the 2 items he had grabbed from the lab outside of his pocket. They were the 2 prototype rubits he had created. He set them both to a certain value and then used the remaining of his energy to throw them as high as he could upward. When they reached the summit of his soul world, they exploded into fireworks.

Diana let out a chuckle. "What are you doing? I know about rubits via the data I've acquired from Luna. It's too late to prevent me from obtaining them. I have all the info I need to create new ones."

"Do you, now? Well then, I won't teach you anything by saying that rubits are a 7-bit based unit. I suppose you also know that you can use seven bits to render a basic ASCII table. I, therefore, assigned each state of a rubit to a particular ASCII character."

Diana looked up, indeed, 2 letters had appeared in the sky. However, they didn't mean anything to her. Still, she couldn't help but feel a bit uneasy.

Joshua had vaguely felt Catherine's presence inside his world. She was trying to reach him by any means. He hoped she would get the message.

###

Catherine was slowly progressing through this world of goo. She sensed Joshua wasn't far away, but navigating through this mud was pretty slow. Furthermore, the liquid had some corrosive aspect to it and she constantly had to reinforce her ice bubble.

Suddenly, she heard a loud explosion. Looking up, she saw some fireworks and looked puzzled. Only Joshua would do something so silly at a time like this, but he wouldn't do it without reason. She then noticed the fireworks formed two letters: 'P' and 'W'. Thanks to Luna, she had long learned the Latin alphabet that originated from Joshua's world. This was a clear message for her. In informatical terms, 'PW' was often used as an abbreviation for 'password'. She smiled as she understood what he meant.

"Luna! Activate the emergency shutdown!!"

[ofjzriopjoj … PASSWORD?… zfjzoij ]