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Schlatt sat up. He was covered in blood. He glared up at Dream, who laughed manically.
‘Oh, do grow up,’ the admin grinned. His halos, covered in eyes, flashed a vivid viridian. ‘You have no power here. You were Quackity’s puppet, now you are mine. You tied yourself to me, and you didn’t even notice! How adorable.’
‘I may not have power,’ Schlatt hissed. ‘But I have one thing you’ll never have.’
‘What’s that?’ The admin tipped his head.
‘Humanity,’ Schlatt grinned ferally.
As he said this, out burst Fundy and Quackity from the closet. They were armed to the nines. He frowned. Where was Wilbur- and what the fuck were those two doing there? Last time he had seen them, they had declared that they hated him. And they had abandoned him to Dream.
‘Fuck off, you green pussy,’ Fundy snarled. His ears were pricked and he kept licking his lips as if the god were a delicious meal about to be feasted upon.
Dream laughed. ‘These two? Oh, but they abandoned you Schlatt. They were so easy to manipulate…rather like you. Little puppets dancing on my strings to a viridian melody of violence and suffering.’
‘Yeah, and you talk too much.’
‘Wha-‘
Dream was cut off by a sudden stab through his chest.
‘‘Twas never meant to be,’ grinned Wilbur salmonfucking Soot.
‘You motherfuckers,’ Dream cursed as he crumpled to the ground and slowly died.
Quackity helped Schlatt up. ‘Lo siento, cariño. For leaving you with him.’
He eyed the corpse with distain. Schlatt smiled. He wrapped his arm around his husband, feeling happy and hopeful for once after months of anxiety.
‘At least we’re all alive.’
‘At least we have each other,’ Fundy said. He was looking at Wilbur, who then wrapped his foxoid son in a hug.
‘We do,’ the brunet said firmly. ‘And we always will. Until the end of our days.’
Because it is never too late to fix your mistakes and learn from them.
*
So, what the fuck happened?
Wilbur did not go insane, which definitely helped them out. So when they found Schlatt, covered in blood and trying to find Tubbo, in the woods they took him back to Pogtopia. After a thorough interrogation, they discovered that Dream had gone off the deep end. He had started glitching in and out of existence, talking in different voices, and manipulative.
Admins were regularly exposed to the code that made up the world, so when a virus or something showed up they could be corrupted. Once corrupted their goal is to corrupt the entirety of the server- but they have to avoid being noticed, so they stick to subtle tricks to get their way. If a server reaches corruption totality, the server and everything in it dies.
And Dream was very much corrupted. It was obvious in hindsight. He’d slowly gone off the rails for the last six months and had successfully hidden it until he started manipulating everyone like they were his puppets. So the group had made a master plan, that they called ‘Operation Cysticercoid’ because they were acting almost as parasites (like the tapeworms whose life cycle they named themselves after) to Dream- taking his resources and using what they got to kill him. The killing part came because Technoblade revealed that the corruption would only spread to the rest of the server if the corrupted admin was not removed.
The plan was complicated, but was relatively simple in some aspects. Schlatt had to get Dream alone. Considering Dream had spent the last several months trying to corrupt Schlatt, this was easy. But also Wilbur had to be snuck into Manberg without Dream sensing his presence. Thanks to being an admin, Dream could sense when a certain player was nearby. However that was not foolproof. Two substances could deceive Dream: crushed ender pearls, or the breath of an ender dragon.
Due to journeying into the End being banned in the server, they opted to use the ender pearls. Which meant slaughtering a lot of Endermen.
‘I hate this fucking job,’ Wilbur grumbled as he pulled on netherite armor Technoblade had given him and walked out into a swarm of Endermen to collect 5,578 pearls to smash into small pieces that they would use to make wyrm-glass.
(They had voted on who to send and ended up deciding to send Wilbur, which he did not appreciate. He responded by trapping Tommy and Tubbo in the Pit™️ for five minutes.)
Wyrm-glass was a very light, flexible, and durable substance that did indeed occur naturally but was almost impossible to mine. In its unrefined form it was called draconium, but in ender pearls and ender dragon scales it was at its purest. It was capable of deceiving even the Goddess of Death, according to her son Technoblade (who, unlike Wilbur, got to see her relatively often due to his status as a God. Wilbur, alas, was a regular mortal. Somehow.).
It took bloody forever to make too. It required 5,578 fucking Ender pearls. Which meant basically mass homicide of Endermen, which gave everyone an icky feeling but they had not much choice in the matter. And then the process of making Wyrm-Glass was laborious too: first smash the pearls into fragments, then add the blood of the mortal god (they used Wilbur’s blood). Mix with Ghast tears and then smelt in a forge for six hours to five days, depending on how much Wyrm-Glass one needed.
And bam! Part of the mission completed. Next up had been the acquiring of armor and shit, which had been relatively easy since the Pogtopia boys (especially Techno) had acquired a lot of supplies, so they were well off there.
And they’d needed to find a replacement Admin to take Dream’s spot once he’d died. They’d decided on Techno and Wil’s dad Philza Minecraft, who they invited to the server. They conducted the admin ceremony after Dream had died.
And so all that had been left was waiting. And waiting. And waiting some more for the opportune time to strike.
In the end, Fundy and Quackity showed up randomly of their own accord without working with Pogtopia. They had heard rumors of Dream’s madness, realized what that had meant for Schlatt, and showed up to find the man.
And for everyone else other than Dream, they lived out their days happily. Until a crimson Egg started a world-threatening cult, anyways…