“It is kinda bullshit you didn’t get credit for all of that too, you should be up on the Top Ten with me.”

  “I’d rather not have a target on my back, especially with bounties now available and a squad heavy next phase. Besides, my collapsible net did the trick, did it not? I received more than enough points for assisting in Quizmaster’s capture.”

  Pinky sat on a large couch with her feet up as the Axio’s message faded from view. She grabbed a handful of popcorn from the bowl that BrainCraft had prepared before the message, though he had quickly abandoned it the moment the talk of new technology had cropped up. The device looked almost like a small mailbox and BrainCraft had some handheld device out that he was waving over it as he walked in a circle around it.

  “What are you doing anyway?” Pinky asked, pushing the footrest down as she leaned forward toward the tech covered coffee table.

  “I’m trying to isolate the mechanics of this device. Perhaps there’s a way I can modify it to give us more points or possibly shrink the amount of tokens needed to level up,” BrainCraft said, kneeling down and running a hand near what he thought was an access panel.

  “Is messing with that thing really all that good of an idea given everything Loophole told us?”

  “Everything Loophole told us doesn’t matter, at least not where this is concerned.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Because the two things simply aren’t directly related” BrainCraft said, feeling the outer edge of the panel as he tested it. “This game didn’t come from nowhere, there were always going to be people with motivations far outside of our control. If we decide to fret on that, and try to hunt those people down, well that would certainly come with its own set of consequences. At the same time, everything that has been put into the game and made available to us was put there for a reason. Our powers allow us to do things that shouldn’t be possible but at the same time Axio can suppress us from saying whatever he’d like. If we aren’t meant to have access to something,” He stopped only to push in on the side of the panel before it clicked, popping open to reveal a complex looking array of interfaces and a script that looked completely alien to Pinky. BrainCraft looked up at her with a smile that split his face in two before he finally said, “Then we wouldn’t have access to it.”

  Jon sat looking between the various screens in his Command Room. Nate had just retreated back into his bedroom after using both the Garage Gym to increase his Dexterity and the Team Book Nook to transcribe his Quantum Mechanics knowledge into a new Level 3 book.

  Swansong had left the squad base a bit earlier in the night, having slipped out after transcribing her Tranquility Dynamics knowledge into a Level 3 book herself. She told them to call her if a Crime Alert did come up, but the overly chaotic day had given way to a surprisingly quiet night.

  “Shouldn’t you be going to bed too?” Angie asked.

  “Eh, I’m a night owl,” Jon said, leaning forward as he pulled up the two screens that contained both Nate’s and Swansong’s powersets. “Now that Swansong has the Quantum Mechanics knowledge, I want to do some research and see if I can’t figure out how to tie that in with her songs… It would really be a lot more helpful if I could absorb the damn books too.”

  “For what it’s worth Mr. Codex, Ms. Swansong has greatly appreciated your help so far.”

  One of the interesting side effects that had come from the Command Room getting integrated into the Squad Base, on top of giving Jon more access to Swansong’s character profile, also gave him access to talk with Logan, Swansong’s P.A.I. Unlike Angie, Logan was practically the pinnacle of patience. While Angie had taken it a bit personally that Nate was mostly trying to ignore her in recent days, Logan had already been more than used to silence when it came to Swansong and had simply found it interesting to have more people to talk to.

  “Do you really have to use Mister this and Misses that? I thought I told you to pull that digital stick out of your ass,” Angie groaned and Jon rolled his eyes.

  “Formalities are important Ms. Angie,” Logan replied and Angie groaned again.

  “You’re not going to get under his skin Angie, I think you should probably just give up,” Jon offered, pulling up a wikipedia page on Quantum Mechanics. “I mean, I get what you’re going for, but you get that your abrasive attitude is why Loophole has been ignoring you… right?”

  “Oh he’ll get over it,” Angie muttered and then sighed. “I’m sorry Logan, if you need to act like a digital butler to get your kicks, you do you.”

  “Thank you Ms. Angie,” Logan replied and Jon could practically imagine Angie rolling her own nonexistent eyes. He knew how easily she could keep everyone distracted and he decided to put a stop to it while there was an obvious break.

  “Okay guys, let’s focus up,” Jon said, cracking his knuckles before he pulled open a few more pages. “Help me go over all of these things and start throwing out some suggestions. I want to get Swansong a combat option before Phase Two starts.”

  “You look tense, sir.”

  Clockwork Tyrant sat at the center of a large console. A hand stroke a well manicured beard as he stared across the room at a screen paused on an image of the Ascension Token.

  “I’m finally understanding why Axio told me you lot were necessary,” he said. His voice was thick with a posh accent that would have sounded right at home in Buckingham Palace, which he had coincidentally tried, and failed, to take over on more than one occasion. “Has Mr. Factory been able to finish replenishing his Stamina?”

  “He still has one more Exhausted debuff to shed,” The man standing off to Clockwork Tyrant’s side was barely a man, and he froze up as the older Augment shot him a deriding glare.

  “And why haven’t you leeched that debuff off of him?”

  “I… Sir I already have four Exhausted debuffs, if I leech another I’ll be knocked out for a day.”

  “So?” Clockwork Tyrant said. “You’re here because you’re in the Tenth Wave and have a useful ability Duskbreaker, consider yourself lucky I’m only asking that you knock yourself out so that you’re out of the way. You’ll still be here to reap the benefits, but only if you do what I say. Unless you’d rather be out there with the rabble that makes up the rest of your Wave when Perry is released.”

  Duskbreaker felt himself squirm under Clockwork Tyrant’s oppressive aura. He had no idea what aspect of the older Augment’s power had allowed him to exert such a pressure, but it wasn’t a feeling that he enjoyed.

  “I… yes sir. I will go and get him back to work. Should we continue production of the Clockwork Adapters?”

  “No, tell Mr. Factory to switch over to Clockwork Falcons and to continue with them through the rest of the night. I believe our control force is more than prepared and we will have more than enough time to bolster their ranks. We’re going to need to be able to coat the skies for search and surveillance,” Clockwork Tyrant said as he looked over at the Ascension Token on the screen. “We won’t want to miss out on such a fantastic opportunity for ascension, it’s what Axio would want after all.”

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  Pinky was snoring on the couch and BrainCraft stopped only to grab one of the throw blankets that his teammate had brought into their squad base. He placed it over her before returning to the device that he had already pulled more than a few components from.

  Much to both his frustration and, at least somewhat, relief, the device wouldn’t come apart easily, if at all. Every component he pulled out was still connected back into the device by strange looking wires that gave off a current that BrainCraft’s various devices simply couldn’t identify.

  Had he had an unlimited amount of time, he might have found this to be endlessly fascinating. He could have spent a day alone on the alien script that comprised all of the menus and panels he could find, but he knew that that wasn’t time that he had.

  For all the obfuscation that the device did maintain, BrainCraft had been able to identify a few things within the code using his own equipment. He was still going to have to tinker with finding a way to access the administrative settings to make the changes he wanted to change, and part of that was going to be at least partially figuring out the unidentified language so that he didn’t make the wrong changes.

  That said, BrainCraft’s powerset had increased his already impressive intelligence by leaps and bounds and he was confident that he was going to figure it out. So confident in fact that found himself opening up a chat window.

  “Well you’re up early,” Swansong said as I walked into the Squad Base. I hadn’t put on my costume when I had entered, but much like when Jon entered his Command Room, my normal face mask materialized on my face.

  Swansong held a steaming mug and was sitting over in the corner atop one of the large bean bag chairs that Jon had added to the room with a book in her lap. The chairs were one of the few things he had placed in the Squad Base that Swansong hadn’t gotten rid of and it was easy to see why with how comfortable she looked.

  “I could say the same about you,” I said as I wandered over toward the coffee machine. I had never been the biggest coffee drinker and when I did it was usually out of the old coffee pot that my Uncle Chris had left behind in his apartment when Jon and I had moved in.

  I reached up and into a cabinet where several non-descript mugs sat and then stared at the contraption that might as well have been alien to me. I reached up toward the touchscreen tentatively before a soft giggle pierced the silence that lingered in the room. Swansong was getting to her feet as I looked over and she wandered my direction.

  Much like myself, other than the white mask that covered the upper half of her face, Swansong wasn’t wearing her usual skintight costume. Instead she was wrapped in a fluffy teal robe and sported a pair of matching fuzzy slippers. She walked over, stepping up next to me as she reached forward and tapped a few items on the screen, then gestured for me to put my mug down.

  “Cream and sugar?”

  “Make it so sweet my dentist will question my life decisions,” I said and she rolled her eyes. She clicked a few options and the machine whirred to life before she walked over and turned, leaning up against the counter. “So are you an early riser normally?”

  “Nope, just nervous about today,” she admitted. “It feels like there’s… I don’t know… an energy in the air… right?”

  “I get what you mean,” I said with a nod, watching as the mug in the machine filled. “It’s like the calm before the storm.”

  “Exactly… I thought it was just because I had gotten through Phase One with only healing and these last few days had already been so different, but Axio’s announcement…” She grabbed her mug with both hands as she brought it up to her lips and took a long sip. “Why does it feel like he’s trying to turn the city into a battlefield?”

  “I’m not sure…” I said, taking the mug and turning to lean against the counter next to her. “That does seem like the most obvious answer, but it doesn’t quite explain his obsession with making us stronger either.”

  “Yeah… I know Codex kind of brushes it off a lot, but I really do wish that we knew a bit more than we did.”

  “He does have a bit of a tendency to underreact to things,” I admitted, “Though it has been helpful in keeping me from spiraling more than a few times.”

  Silence slowly took over as the coffee machine whirred and cooled down. I sipped at the slightly too sweet coffee as Swansong looked into her mug. I thought about it for a moment as I looked from my mug over to her. We were still strangers in a lot of ways but I liked to think we were already becoming friends. I reached up and patted her on the shoulder, startling her slightly as she looked up at me.

  “I know you still have your family here… we’ll do what we have to do to keep them safe, no matter what’s coming” I said as reassuringly as I could, “We make a good team, I think we got this, regardless of what Axio is up to.”

  A smile tugged at her lips as her cheeks flushed and she broke eye contact with me to look back at her coffee.

  “Yeah… you’re right,” she said. “We got this.”

  It was a surprisingly peaceful and clear morning. There were hardly any clouds in the sky, though the temperature was rapidly dropping as Winter rapidly began to take hold. The city was probably only a few weeks at the most from seeing their first real snowfall of the year.

  The city as a whole was alive with its normal level of activity. Cars were blaring their horns, civilians were packed onto the sidewalks, and there was more than enough food accidentally finding its way to the ground for the avian population of the city. While many New Yorkers would see the birds as nothing more than winged rodents, they truly did their own minor service by cleaning the streets of the improperly disposed of treats that many of the birds loved to snack on.

  Not all of the city’s birds were scavenging for morsels this particular morning though.

  At the top of the Guggenheim, there was a large device that, had anyone really looked at it, was clearly out of place. The device looked like a weird mixture of a lightning rod and a satellite array, though unlike the normal versions of these that normally did belong on rooftops, this one was heavily armored and had what appeared to be mounted weapons protecting it.

  This might have been intimidating to most people or animals that came near it and felt the buzz of energy that was clearly pulsing off of it, but Pigeon wasn’t most animals.

  Pigeon didn’t even care what the hell the device was. He only cared that it was in his favorite spot to perch. Although the guns did seem to start to warm up as Pigeon approached it, they weren’t able to track the bird as it seemed to take off in a flash, covering the weapons in a thick white goop that immediately melted them away.

  In a quick swoop, the bird crashed into the base of the device… and cleanly sheared through the thick metal.

  The energy emitting from the device faded as it dissolved into light and Pigeon found himself with the sudden need for a nap. It was a good thing he had his perch back.

  There was a rumble that slowly emanated out and into the city. New York City wasn’t necessarily a stranger to earthquakes, but this didn’t quite feel like that for the many civilians traversing the city.

  Even then, the civilians of the city were more than aware that they lived in a world where people casually broke the laws of physics. The moment the ground started to shake, many people began running for shelter, already preparing to clear out of the way before they found themselves in the middle of a fight between Augments.

  There were several large, fast moving objects that went flying in several different directions over the city, though to anyone watching they would have easily noticed that they all seemed to be coming from the Upper Bay south of Manhattan. For the civilians that were actually close to the Upper Bay, they got to witness a sight that would leave many of them, at least the ones that survived the night to come, with nightmares for weeks.

  The Statue of Liberty had been decapitated by one of the triangular metal objects that got launched off of the impossibly large object that had emerged from the ocean and as the objects started crashing into the ground around the city, the main raid alarms around it started blaring in whooping sirens.

  They had been installed decades before Augments had ever even been a thing and had been used rarely, if at all, outside of testing them for functionality. Once Augments were a thing, the alarms had been redesignated for one thing and one thing alone. A real, observable threat to the city.

  And for the first time since the early years of the Augments, the alarms were being sounded.

  Happy Wednesday! If you're enjoying the story, don't forget to leave a Rate, Review, or Comment!

  In case you didn't see it when I added it the the Author's Note yesterday, I'd like to point out that the specifics behind the Garage Gym have changed as, several folks pointed out, it had a severe lack of limitations that would have kind have had some broken implications for other Augments. See below for the updated upgrade:

  Garage Gym. Uncommon Squad Base Upgrade. Install this upgrade into an available Squad Display Case to unlock the Garage Gym Expansion. This expansion occupies 150 square feet of your base’s total size allocation and provides a dedicated space for personal growth. Each squad member may spend up to one hour per day, 4 days per week, utilizing the various gym equipment in this room to raise either their Strength, Dexterity, or Toughness by 1 point up to a maximum of 35 base points in any of these stats. Members are subject to one instance of the Exhausted debuff after utilizing this room.

  Come on over to my Discord to talk about the story, see advanced news, and just talk nonsense!