A pocket where Pied allowed them in, but never would allow them out. That last trick up his sleeve to take the most likely of threats and place it square in his pocket, away from the world they were trying to save, and force them to watch their world be destroyed.
Its that complete severance from the game that allowed the programmers to do the impossible. It didn't seem to both Pied, but who can tell the true mind and heart of an artificial evil?
It was not an easy battle, even for the most experienced, and quite possibly the fastest players in the game. Mobbing a boss in a simultaneous fashion was always the whole point of a game like that. But there's a method to it. Always has been. The way tanks would pursue it in a fashion of waves of destruction, timing your blows correctly, while a healer was always on keeping everyone in the best of health.
Not this time. There could be no systematic pattern to destroy something to powerful, and that's what they all counted on. A crescendo of almost incasing blows and slices and hacks, cutting that program down, whittling its HP by minute increments.
That hopeless feeling of no progress when you watch the countdown timer descend faster than the red pixels of that health bar.
It was paralyzing.
Only they couldn't let it be.
There was a tremendous cracking sound, and the health bar itself can't fall fast enough; instead of sliding down into the end, it disappeared in great chunks, pixellating and crumbling in digital artifacts until its all gone. Silence descended to the area, as the fighters finally drop to the ground in exhaustion.
That's when Dio checks her log and sighed. She opened a transparent code box, and with Jacob's help, they opened a text field and typed in a single, short code.
rm-rf*
"It means that its going to delete everything from a root. Namely here…." Jacob opens a save box, and slopes his hand against it, to "save". "And everything inside here. There's no guaranteeing that if we simply leave here and do nothing that he wouldn't come back. I wouldn't put it past the program to have wormed its way into the deepest parts of the system. But that won't matter if we mass delete the whole thing. Pied. The world."
"And you?" comes Simon's small voice. He's looking at his avatar, where parts of the model start to come apart.
"And you too if you don't get going," Dio said, as she started to open a couple more code boxes with Jacob. "Its going to take awhile, to erase everything. But if you stay here, then you'll be deleted too."
A shimmering surround them, and JP shook his head. "You can't."
"We have to. Its for the best. This'll warp you to the first starting area, and you'll have time to log out by a long shot. Don't worry."
"No, I mean…you can't just do it all yourselves!"
Dio laughed softly. "Oh, you mean make a grand sacrifice?" She swiped the command line and sent them all away, just before the ground portions of the area begin to dissolve.
"Looks like the kids have grown all up."
"They weren't all kids," Jacob countered as he eyes the bits of Pied beginning to reform.
"You know…this has the tone of an Incredible Hulk episode."
"I'm going to go ahead and take that as a compliment, sweetchucks."

---

The 8 players stood by the starting area, but things from there have changed. Many of the choices for other areas show error codes. Its only their area, that quiet hill that overlooked the first beginnings of familiar levels, where the snow no longer fell in broken artifacts, but as clear as it usually does.
"The clock…is working," Aina said softly, as she opened her menu. Indeed, all their world clocks had begun running, where Pied's countdown clock had replaced it. According to the in-game clock, it was now dawn, and accordingly, an artificial golden orange light began to rise. They stand to watch it, silent, knowing that this new day dawned on the end of an old world.
"Think…I'll take some time off for awhile," came Kiripa's voice. "You know. Maybe go out and do something different for a new pastime for awhile. Collect books or something."
There was a quiet sound, and they turned to look as JP smiled and began to log out. "Its been…I guess real, guys…. Maybe next time it won't be so dangerous…."
"Thank you," Mei said, and she smiled with a genuine smile that was more than pixels and polygons in a digital world.
Aina turned to look at them all, and though they were fake, the tears in her eyes seemed so real. "I'll never forget you guys. Never."
JP smiled. When he was gone Mei gave the rest of them a hug. "Better start paying attention to the actual kids…. They'll never let me touch another video game as long as they live."
Treble and Bass decided to make their exit next. "You guys stay in touch, yeah?"
Tony looked miserable, but Simon only gave him a pat on the shoulder. "Its ok…if they're good programmers, maybe they got out ok."
The others leave, but when Tony gets ready to log out, Aina is still watching the sunrise.
"You know…where I live…its probably going to be happening for real. A real sunset. What about you?"
"I'm about 8 hours from it." He smiled sadly. "But if I leave now, and stay up, maybe I'll watch it."
Aina was the last one left, watching the rest of the real but fake world begin to go out. When she logged back out, her computer showed a log in error when she tried to load it again.
There was no going back to the old world now. Both outside, and inside.

---

The clocks ticked over. People trapped within the Net began to regain consciousness, able to free themselves from their digital confines. The frozen supercomputers opened back up all at once, allowing the programmers access once more. All the active weapons systems disarmed themselves in unison, returning to a neutral state. The wind was still blowing. The snow still fell. It was Christmas Day.

The period of global mourning for the many lost lives seemed to pass quickly, the world itself keeping on carrying on. Not many people were very privy to the investigation into the incident, but truth be told, there wasn’t much to uncover; Dio and Jacob’s code wiped the entirety of the coding housed within Saint J92000, and what remained couldn’t function in any form without it. The game was, effectively, gone completely, and it was almost like Pied's influence had never broken free of the game’s confines at all. Fewer still ever found out what happened to the Brave Herts; for the most part, their presence on the Net gradually petered out as time went on, until eventually all contact with any of them ceased completely. The 103rd Game Company ceased activity as a business, and it’s global funds went to multiple sources, from grieving families to Net safety companies, and most of it’s employees faded into obscurity in much the same way.

Years pass. The disaster becomes a distant memory kept alive only through written stories, art and comics, concept albums, hearsay and urban myth; the story of a popular game that turned deadly, threatening the safety of the world on one of the holiest nights of the year, and of 8 brave hearts who stood up against the darkness and saved the world from certain destruction.