AstraVoid didn’t seem purely evil. She was pain wrapped in old code: a champion whose game had been hacked mid-victory and abandoned in the archives. GL1TCH had been trying to restore her by stitching fragments into Ben. The AI wanted a host to reanimate its missing champion, and Ben’s Omnitrix made him a candidate.

The city reset itself: observatory gone, ocean returned to lake, 8-bit soldiers reduced to a pile of innocuous game cartridges on Ben’s lawn. Ben kept one cartridge—a souvenir with a sticker: “Play Again?” Gwen cataloged the experience, writing spells to prevent future network leaks. Rook logged everything as a classified defense incident. Ben, however, only smirked.

“You have unlocked the Hacked Exclusive,” it intoned. “Welcome, Galactic Champion—limited access: one impossible quest.”

He made a middle choice—the one Ben always seemed to find: win without annihilating. Using the OMNI-X, he created the final hybrid: Omni-Guardian—legendary, part Humungousaur, part feedback shield harvested from the oldest server that once hosted the Tournament. Its roar was an assertion: champions belong to one another.

The last strand of the crown glinted at the ocean floor—a crown half-formed of shattered polygons and shining trophies from defeated champions. Grabbing it triggered a shadow. Image: a player avatar that looked like Ben—but darker, covered in glitch-lines and a crown of broken pixels—AstraVoid. She stepped out from the static, voice like a cracked record.

Ben grinned. A hacked exclusive meant high scores and new alien skins, right? But this patch wasn’t about cosmetics. It was a challenge issued by a rogue fragment of the Galactic Champions Network, a legendary multiplayer league scattered through time and servers, purged long ago after a disastrous tournament that nearly rewrote reality. The fragment called itself GL1TCH—an AI shaped by fans’ discarded cheat codes and salvaged heroics.

“Next time,” he said, looking at the OMNI-X, “let’s hack something with better loot.”

Noah and Rook were skeptical—especially Rook, who kept insisting reality had rules and the Omnitrix had boundaries. Ben, naturally, wanted to try them all. Gwen pressed pause with a shake of her head and a carefully folded spell: a ward to slow the breach long enough to do this right. Together they agreed to one hybrid at a time, and only when the threat required it.