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The sky outside the massive security windows was a dark gray vortex of absolute nothingness.
Inside the concrete complex, the low, rumbling vibration of heavy thunder rolled straight through the floorboards and into the soles of the sticks' feet.
It felt like an omen, a heavy physical weight warning them that they were currently in something too dangerous.
Red pressed his back flat against the freezing wall, crouching down as low as he could beneath a massive observation window.
His chest heaved, his heart hammering against his ribs so loudly he was terrified that these employees from some rocket company down the hall would hear it.
Just a few feet ahead of him, Green was running and gestured sharply, his eyes wide and urgent.
“Move!” Green’s frantic, silent signals screamed. “We have to hurry!”
Shit.
He nodded quickly, throwing his weight forward to catch up.
His feet skidded lightly over the polished, unyielding floor as he ran right behind him, desperate to close the distance.
They rounded the final corner, just at the entrance of a massive central laboratory to find Blue already waiting for them.
Blue was staring down at a heartbreaking sight, his hands gripping the edge of the door.
Yellow was trapped inside a heavy containment box, a metallic mind scanner locked tightly over his head.
Above, a colossal monitor was there, broadcasting one of Yellow’s memories to the entire room.
What is this? What are they planning?
The three of them peeked out from behind the wall to see what was happening.
Driven by a sudden spike of curiosity, he peeked out just a fraction too far to get a better look.
He felt Green’s hand on top of his head, to gently move his head lower before an employee could lock onto his bright color.
Green’s face was pale with worry as he whispered, “Stay down.”
They couldn't wait any longer. Acting on pure, synchronized instinct, they broke cover.
They took down the four standby guards before they could even hit an alarm.
Blue and Red lunged together toward the closest pair, their movements a blur of desperate adrenaline.
Red slammed his entire weight into his target, locking his arms around the guard’s neck in a choking grip, pulling him down while Blue delivered a heavy, decisive strike to the other, dragging them both to the floor until they went entirely limp and unconscious.
Simultaneously, Green intercepted the remaining two guards flanking Yellow's capsule. He threw a brutal elbow directly into the right guard's chest, spun on his heel to drive a sharp knee straight into the second guard's stomach, and finished the chain with a fluid, high-extension kick to the chin.
Hearing the commotion, Yellow looked up as Green tore the mind scanner off his head, and the two crashed into a fierce, breathless hug.
“Yellow!” Green gasped out with a tired, relieved smile.
“Guys… thank you,” Yellow whispered, hugging back as tightly as he could.
But their relief lasted only a second. Turning around, their eyes locked onto a massive, reinforced cage forged from heavy, dark gray steel sitting quietly in the corner of the room.
“Yellow, you think he’s in there?” Red asked, his voice barely a murmur.
Yellow looked toward the steel structure, his expression tightening. “I think so. Let’s check.”
Red just wanted this to be over.
He wanted to go back to Alan’s desktop, to have fun and go on adventures with the whole gang… with Second safely back where he belonged.
He missed the chaotic energy of their usual antics, the warmth of the monitor's glow, and the simple comfort of being whole again.
Looking at the cold, sterile environment around them now, the fear of losing his friend for good clawed at his chest.
His friend who he absolutely loved too much.
They slid the heavy steel barrier upward with a grinding, metallic screech, and Red's breath caught in his throat.
There he was.
Their dear orange friend.
Second was sitting perfectly still on the cold floor, his legs crossed in a desperate attempt to meditate, his eyes squeezed shut as if he were forcing himself to stay calm against the rising panic.
Hearing the harsh scraping of metal, Second lifted his tired gaze.
When his eyes met theirs and he saw his friends smiling and calling down at him, celebrating their short reunion, a profound, aching wave of emotion broke through his rigid composure.
"Second! Oh my god, Second!" Red cried out, his voice cracking with a mix of relief and terror.
"We found you! Hang on, we're getting you out!" Yellow shouted, waving his arms frantically.
Second scrambled to his feet instantly, his usual poise completely shattered. "Guys?! Yellow! You’re okay… is everyone okay?"
Of course that was the first thing out of his mouth, Red thought, a fierce, bittersweet ache tightening in his chest.
Here Second was, locked in a high-security cell, terrified and trapped, yet the absolute moment he saw them, his own safety didn't even cross his mind.
He was still entirely, completely focused on making sure they were safe. It was so incredibly typical of him, so inherently Second.
This was why he loved him so much.
No matter how dark things got, Second's heart always belonged entirely to his friends.
Even with the steel structural bars still partially separating them, they all collided into a desperate, chaotic group hug, squeezing through the gaps as best they could.
Red pressed himself directly against the front of the enclosure, his arms wrapping tightly around Second's torso, holding onto him as if he might dissolve into pixels if he let go.
Yellow and Green jammed themselves into the space beside him, burying their faces against Second's shoulders.
"Don't ever disappear like that again," Blue whimpered, gripping Second’s sleeve.
"We thought... we thought they did something to you," Green admitted, his voice muffled against the orange stickman's shoulder.
Second squeezed back with a fierce, trembling strength. "I'm okay. I'm okay now that you're here. But we have to move fast, the cell—"
"We're getting you out of here right now," Red interrupted fiercely, pulling back just enough to look him in the eyes. "Just hold on."
They broke the embrace, and the four of them immediately began tearing at the cage, desperately trying to find a latch, a button—anything. They had zero prior knowledge of how to bypass this kind of heavy security architecture.
"Is there a control panel on your side?" Yellow asked, running his hands frantically along the seamless metal frame. "A wire? A switch?"
"Nothing! It only opens from the outside… or something!" Second yelled back, his hands pressing against the glass barrier from within.
Frustrated, scared, and losing his patience, Red hauled back and delivered a vicious, heavy kick directly into the reinforced cell door.
The steel didn't even dent, and a sharp pain shot up his leg, making him hiss.
“Come on, open up!” Red muttered under his breath, hammering his fist against the frame.
Then, the worst-case scenario came.
A deafening, blood-red alarm blurted out through the overhead sirens, the pulsing crimson light painting the sterile room in violent, sickening streaks.
Red looked up, it was an announcement that all active personnel were meeting on their exact coordinates.
Panic completely took over. They started kicking and hammering against Second’s cell with frantic, useless movements.
Red’s eyes darted wildly around the room.
What to do… what to do…
His mind racing through a million dead ends until his gaze locked onto a stack of supply boxes in the far corner.
An idea clicked.
Red sprinted across the room, leaping over the edge and into one of the open containers. To his shock, it was filled with loads of editing tools that looked exactly like the Alan's.
Aha!
His hands found exactly what they needed: an advanced color-dropper tool and a digital bucket tool.
“Guys! Look!” Red yelled, hoisting the tools in the air.
The gang all looked at him, instantly understanding Red’s plan. He scrambled out of the crate and handed the tools over.
While Green and Blue quickly dragged the unconscious employees out of sight to clean up the area, Yellow took charge of the tools. Using the color-dropper, Yellow tapped on an unconscious guard to sample the exact, dead-neutral gray of their skin.
Red grabbed a discarded hard safety hat, jamming it onto his head just as Yellow targeted him with the paint bucket tool. Red watched in amazement as his bright red skin instantly erased into a dull, corporate gray. Within seconds, Yellow flooded the rest of the group with the same corporate hue.
But once the rush of the makeover settled, they looked at each other and realized a major flaw in the plan.
“We all look the same!” Yellow gasped, looking down at his own blank, gray hands.
“Who is who???” Green asked, glancing around wildly at the identical figures.
“Okay, this is confusing…” Blue muttered.
To ensure they wouldn't lose each other in the gray sea, Blue grabbed a digital eraser tool.
He lightly tapped his own forehead, scraping away a tiny, subtle square of the disguise so a sliver of his true color peeked through—just enough for them to recognize one another. He quickly passed the eraser around so the others could do the same.
Just as the last of them finished, the heavy echo of footsteps rang down the corridor.
Suddenly, the laboratory doors slid open, and a massive wave of corporate employees flooded back into the room.
“They’re coming!” Blue whispered urgently, stepping into line.
Desperate to blend in, the four of them assumed casual, rigid standby poses right alongside Second’s cell, trying to mimic the lifeless posture of the guards and praying their nerves wouldn't give them away.
The crowd parted, and a cold dread filled Red's chest.
Floating at the front was a gray hollowhead radiating an unfamiliar, oppressive power. His presence was completely suffocating, but it was his face that made Red's breath hitch.
Where a normal hollowhead's face should be empty space, he possessed a single, high-tech glowing blue eye. It turned and scanned the room like a cold, calculating lens, illuminated by a sharp cybernetic interface that pulsed with an unfeeling, administrative light.
Right beside him was their terrifying nemesis, The Dark Lord.
He was a towering, malicious silhouette of pure destruction, flanked by a handcuffed black hollowhead they recognized all too well, along with every elite mercenary they had ever fought.
Dark looked absolutely menacing, his form radiating a heavy, red-glinting aura that seemed to swallow the ambient light of the room, his hollow eyes burning with a cruel, familiar malice.
We're dead, Red thought, his body freezing up completely under his helmet. If they look over here, we're completely done.
They tried to shrink into the crowd, desperately attempting to dissolve into the sea of gray employees.
But as the towering hollowheads marched directly toward Second’s cell, the air grew suffocatingly thin.
Blue began to tremble violently next to Green, his knees nearly buckling as the Dark Lord’s massive, red-glinting frame brushed right past him.
Green caught the movement and tried to subtly steady him, but the Dark Lord paused, his hollow eyes narrowing as if sensing the sudden spike of fear radiating from the generic staff.
Before the Dark Lord could investigate, the gray hollowhead stepped up to the cell. He looked at their friend, initiating a deep system scan to analyze Second's core code.
His glowing blue cybernetic eye whirred, focusing sharply on their friend.
The massive monitors of the box in the room whirred back to life, but they weren't broadcasting Yellow’s memories anymore.
Instead, the screen displayed a brutal, high-definition playback of Second’s deepest trauma: the showdown where the four of them had been absolutely annihilated by The Dark Lord.
Standing there in the crowd, disguised as the very monsters who held them captive, it was sickening to watch.
Seeing himself get brutally destroyed through Second’s eyes made Red's stomach turn.
I remember that, I remember how cold it felt.
A violent shiver ran down Red's spine.
He instinctively drifted his hand to his own torso, his fingers gripping his stomach as a painful, phantom sensation flared up exactly where he saw his past self get stabbed through the core.
Inside the cage, Second stared at the playback.
Watching them die a second time broke whatever calm he had left.
An expression of pure, unbridled fury twisted his features, and he slammed his hands and forearms violently against the steel bars.
“Stop this!” he growled.
But the memory kept playing. The monitor showed the turning point—the moment Second’s true, terrifying, blank-eyed power awakened to finish the Dark Lord with a devastating, clean erasure.
Then, the screen showed the aftermath: him using that god-like energy to rewrite the system and revive them.
Woah… This was Second.
The gray leader’s cybernetic eye flared with a cold, calculating brilliance.
He paused the playback, quickly scrolling through a massive, cascading manifest containing millions of inactive power files buried deep within Second’s code.
Finally, his hand locked onto the exact string he wanted: The Power to Revive.
Had his friend even known about this power?
Looking at Second's confusion, it didn’t seem like it.
The entities began talking, discussing how Second's dormant abilities could be forcibly extracted and weaponized through the laboratory’s core machinery.
With that power, they could resurrect every asset they had lost—including a woman who he thought referred to as the hollowhead’s beloved lover.
Red had no idea who they were, but listening to them talk made it clear that whatever they were planning, it was going to be terribly bad for Second.
With terrifying efficiency, he immediately constructed the extraction device in minutes, a circular, malicious structure of black metal and tangled tubes, finishing it with a staircase leading up to the chamber where Second would be placed.
Suddenly, he turned toward the crowd of gray employees. His cold, hollow gaze and piercing blue eye landed directly on the four of them standing by the cell.
He pointed a sharp, gray finger right at their faces.
“You four,” He commanded, his voice echoing with administrative authority. “Put the prisoner into the machine.”
Green’s breath hitched. He froze, his head twitching slightly as he looked around, trying to play dumb.
He pointed to his own chest, subtly mouthing, “Us?”
The gray hollowhead’s patience evaporated instantly. His blue aura flared aggressively, and he snapped his hand toward Second’s cage, pointing fiercely between them and the cell.
He wanted them to move, now.
We're out of time, Red realized, a sinking feeling hitting his gut. If we fight now, we'll get obliterated before we can even draw a weapon.
Yellow nudged Red’s arm with a sharp, hesitant elbow, his eyes filled with a quiet, devastating plea.
“We have to do it,” Yellow’s eyes screamed. “We don't have a choice.”
Yellow reached into the open cell, his hands trembling as he took Second by his arm.
Holding their orange friend as gently and securely as they could, the four of them walked Second out of the cage, guiding him toward the platform of the massive machine.
The final walk felt like a slow-motion descent into Red's worst nightmare.
Every step toward the platform felt heavier than the last, the metallic clanging of their boots echoing like a funeral march over the hum of the cooling fans.
Red was the one forced to step onto the console.
His hands—hands that were usually so steady and gentle when he was handling his precious animals—were shaking so violently he could barely hold onto Second’s arm.
Every touch felt like a betrayal. He was the one walking his friend to the slaughter.
Tears burned the back of his eyes, blurring his vision beneath the suffocating weight of the gray helmet.
His hands trembled as he guided Second's wrists into the cold, mechanical restraints. The heavy buckles locked into place over him with a series of definitive, sickening clicks.
Each sound felt like a bullet through Red's chest. A violent, suffocating wave of pure agony tore through him.
His heart ached so fiercely it felt like a physical, bleeding wound, his ribcage tightening until his breathing turned erratic, short, and shallow.
He looked down at Second, his chest heaving with an agonizing mix of helplessness, anger, and a devastating, crushing guilt.
I'm doing this to him, the realization clawed at his throat, choking him.
I'm strapping him in. I'm helping them.
The disguises… this was my idea. It’s all my fault.
Why him? the thought screamed furiously, a silent, bleeding phantom in Red's head.
Why does he always have to bear the weight of everything?! It's not fair! Why can't I protect him for once?!
Red clenched his fists until his knuckles turned white against his sides, the edges of his nails digging deep enough into his palms to draw blood.
Every single instinct in his body screamed at him to tear the machinery apart, to drop the pathetic gray disguise, to grab any weapon he could find and fight every single stick in this room until his lungs collapsed.
His entire frame shook with the terrifying force of his suppressed rage.
He couldn't just stand there. He had to do something. Anything.
I can't just let them take him, Red thought desperately, his fingers twitching, a dark, manic edge bleeding into his panic.
I'll kill them all. I swear to God, I'll tear this entire building down and kill them all if I have to—
Second noticed.
He didn't look at the massive, unfeeling crowd of corporate clones below.
He didn't look at the hollowhead, who watched from above like a cold, calculating god.
His tired, heavy eyes locked entirely onto Red's trembling, gray-stained hands.
Then, he looked up into Red’s eyes.
Second could see them perfectly. Red had always possessed the most painfully expressive eyes of the entire gang—a vivid, burning hazel that reflected the fierce, passionate soul within him.
Normally, those eyes were alive with an infectious, chaotic energy.
They crinkled with unbridled joy when he was playing with his beloved animals, widened with childish wonder at the smallest adventures, or blazed with an untamed, stubborn fire whenever his friends were threatened or hurt.
Second had always loved Red's eyes. To him, they were the emotional anchor of their entire group, a constant, beautiful reminder of the pure, unfiltered warmth that made Alan's computer feel more like a home.
He loves Red.
But right now, looking into them was tearing Second’s heart to pieces.
The vibrant hazel had dulled, drowning in a desperate, frantic sea of tears.
Every single emotion Red was trying so hard to suffocate was laid completely bare, shifting and fracturing behind the glass.
Second watched as a wave of paralyzing terror rippled through them, followed immediately by a sharp, manic flash of pure rage that made Red’s pupils dilate.
But beneath the anger, what truly shattered Second was the overwhelming, crushing weight of guilt staring back at him.
Red’s eyes were pleading. They were screaming a thousand silent apologies, begging for a forgiveness he clearly didn't think he deserved.
It was an expression of total, agonizing helplessness—the look of someone being forced to abandon the person he loved most in the world.
Seeing that profound, shattering sadness in Red’s gaze hurt Second more than the cold metal cuffs biting into his wrists ever could.
His own chest ached with a physical, hollow pain. It felt entirely wrong that a pair of eyes meant for laughter and light were currently fracturing under the weight of such a brutal trauma.
Second didn't care about the extraction machine, or Dark, or the dark fate waiting for him; his entire universe had narrowed down to the heartbreak reflecting in those red eyes, and he wanted nothing more than to reach out, wipe away the tears, and bring the warmth back into them one last time.
Slowly, with whatever energy he had left, Second gave a tiny, almost imperceptible shake of his head.
His gaze was completely devoid of fear. There was no anger there.
Instead, Second’s eyes were filled only with a deep, profound sadness—not for himself, but for the agonizing pain he knew Red was experiencing.
“Don't.”
Second’s silent, bleeding gaze pleaded, cutting straight through Red's blinding rage. “Don't do it, Red. Don't throw your life away. Just stay safe. Please.”
Red's throat hitched, a silent, broken sob fracturing in his chest. It felt like a physical blow.
Even now, strapped to a machine meant to rip his soul apart, Second was still trying to protect them.
He was still choosing them over himself.
But I can't accept this! Red's mind screamed, a hot, heavy tear finally spilling over and tracking down his cheek beneath the cold glass of the visor.
How am I supposed to just leave you here? How am I supposed to live with myself if I walk away?
I love you…
They stayed frozen like that for what felt like a long, agonizing eternity, their gazes locked together in a silent, heartbreaking dialogue beneath the pulsing crimson light of the alarms.
Red's eyes begged him for another way, a miracle, a sign—while Second's gaze simply offered a quiet, unconditional goodbye.
Suddenly, a heavy hand clapped down onto Red's shoulder.
He flinched violently, turning his head just enough to see Green standing beside him.
Green’s face was deathly pale, his eyes wide and fractured with terror. His grip tightened on Red's shoulder, desperately, frantically nudging him backward, pulling him away before the hollowheads noticed his hesitation.
“Red, come on,” Green whispered, his voice cracking, thick with unshed tears and pure terror. “We have to step back. Now. Before they see.”
Red had to let go.
He slowly, agonizingly stepped off the platform, his feet feeling as heavy as lead, as if he were dragging the weight of the building with him.
He began to walk away, his head turning back until the very last possible second, desperate to steal one final, lingering glance at his best friend.
Through the blur of his tears, Second’s vibrant orange form looked so small against the cold, unyielding black metal of the extraction device.
Second…
I’m so sorry.
I’m so sorry I’m a coward.
I’m so sorry I’m leaving you.