I wasn’t quite sure how he would plan on getting out to the island with most boats and ferries unlikely to be operating, but I had to assume he had some sort of travel skill at this point that I just wasn’t aware of. Or at least I'd have to be stupid to assume that he didn't have some sort of travel skill that he could lean on. All I could do was hope that he wouldn’t get there with any sort of speed and we could at least see one of the other Augments from our wave.
While we could have just flown at Swansong’s max speed, something we had measured to be just around 60 miles per hour, she insisted I rush to the island just to scout things out since I could theoretically get there much, much faster. I had initially found her speed cap curious, but the fact that she didn’t burn a single point of stamina to use the ability made the cap at least make a little bit of sense in terms of fairness. It had actually gone up since she had first gained the flight power when her Ethereal Projection Secondary Power had reached Level 2 and seemed like it would continue to rise with each level. Each additional level the power gained after that initial ability acquisition added 5 miles per hour to her speed limit, but it still paled in comparison to the speeds I was able to put on with Personal Gravity Laws.
“I’d stay on the far side of the island if I were you, you guys are gonna be getting really damn close to that Pangolin,” Jon said as I darted down, doing something that felt almost a bit cliche but that I just couldn't resist. I flew only a few feet above the water as I shot toward the headless green statue. I partially expected to leave jets of water flying out behind me as I rushed over the deep dark water and was almost disappointed to see that I barely only left a ripple. It obviously had to do with just how my Personal Gravity Laws worked to only affect my own gravity, but it did take just a bit away from the effect. The moon was high overhead, and while it wasn't full, the lack of clouds in the sky and the ambient light added by the fires across the city made it easy to still see things clearly.
The large form of the Pangolin, with the exception of a few more of its large scales, hadn’t moved an inch since it had settled into the mouth of the bay and as curious as that was, I had to leave it alone for the time being.
I quickly gained altitude as I came up on Liberty Island and my eyes widened as I saw the head of Lady Liberty resting on its side on the bottom most layer of the island.
“Damn… I almost wish I could screenshot that because that’s one hell of a sight…” Jon said. Although I knew I could always count on him to keep things light, there had been a slow creeping strain that had filled his tone over the last few hours. Even when he had been joking with Swansong about my new ability or complaining about missing seeing Pigeon, there had been a growing edge in his voice that told me just how much the chaos had been affecting him.
I looked over to the torch raised toward the sky and could see a pulsing, golden light coming off the side of it closer to where the head should have been. There didn’t seem to be anyone else on the island and I thought about it for a moment.
“Hey Swansong, stay high and keep an eye out for anyone approaching, I’m going to stay near the token and once you see them getting close, if I have to, I can activate Spectrum Veil to go invisible until I know what to expect. If you see Hydramental coming before anyone else makes their approach, let me know, I’ll grab the token and we can just bolt so that we don’t have to get into that argument,” I said, thinking about the skill I hadn't used in some time now. I examined my current bar. While I had 14 slots for activated abilities at this point, it still felt painfully limited. I replaced Entangle on my hot bar with the skill, not wanting to swap to my stealth based bar just in case I did get into a fight.
While it had certainly had its uses, the last few days of head on brawls had left my longer form invisibility skill to gather just a bit of dust. In the grand scheme of my abilities, my Fun House ability gave me a more battle ready option for invisibility. Still, I appreciated having the ability in my arsenal as I floated over and set myself down on the ledge of the large torch.
“Sounds like a plan to me,” she replied.
Axio’s announcement had given us a pretty clear image of what the Ascension Tokens were supposed to look like and they had even included the tokens spinning in a black void on the screens of our base. But even with that, I hadn’t been expecting to actually see the token just floating there in midair, completely ignoring gravity and spinning slowly, just as it had when Axio had announced it.
I also wasn’t exactly expecting the token to be the size of a basketball, but that was neither here nor there and I moved myself into the shadow of the torch. While I could keep Spectrum Veil going rather long now thanks to my growing stamina, I didn’t want to just activate it and wait for someone to show up. Even if I did use more of my time to back things up and reset my Stamina Bar, it would only matter if the other Augments that came, if they came at all, within a few minutes of me using the skill.
It was a longshot of course, but a thought came to mind and I kicked myself for not doing it before Hydramental had left the Raid Group. I pulled open my friend’s list, halfway surprised that neither of us had actually just gone ahead and removed each other.
I scowled at the message and heard Angie chuckle.
“He does have a point you know,” Angie said and I sighed, quickly going through the options in my head.
“Guys, I’m trying to convince Hydramental not to come here, it’s a long shot that we probably should have done a few minutes ago but here we are,” I said.
“Gee, if only someone in this squad could rewind time and remedy that situation,” Jon said in a clearly mocking tone.
“I’m not wasting time from my limited bank to go back and talk him out of coming here, you know that...” I said and he just laughed in response.
“Why not just tell him that you could just grab the token at this point so there’s really no reason to try?” Swansong offered, thankfully trying to keep us on track.
“Because I may have told him that I’m waiting to see who else shows up,” I said and as I heard Jon go to speak up I immediately added, “And even if I did go back in time to stop myself from telling him that, he’d wonder why I wasn’t just grabbing it in the first place since this beacon won't go away until the token gets grabbed.”
“Shit… okay good point…” Jon said. “Fuck it, if the goal is to just keep him from coming over here then just offer a trade. Tell him you guys won’t go after one of the other tokens if he just hangs back.”
“That works for me. What about you, Swansong?”
“Huh? You’re the leader, if you think that’s what we should-”
“Once again, I’m not the leader, Swansong. We’re a team. If we are going to make these kinds of trades and deals, we all have to agree to them,” I said, cutting her off before she could finish.
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“I… Yeah I’m okay with it,” she said after just a moment and I turned my attention back to the chat window with Hydramental.
I was almost surprised at how quickly he agreed to it and I felt my suspicions briefly rise before I heard Swansong start to speak. I shook my head out and looked around.
“Can you say that again?”
“There’s some sort of disturbance tearing through the bay coming from Lower Brooklyn, it’s not moving fast but it does look like it’s heading for the island,” Swansong said and I walked along the edge of the torch to try and get a better view.
The bay was large and I didn’t have any sort of enhanced vision that could help me, especially given that the light that was being provided to the area was still meager in comparison to what it would be in the daylight. Even still, I thought I could see something similar to what would have been thrown off of a speedboat as it cut through a calm lake.
“Let me know when it gets closer,” I said, planting my feet and staring out toward the disturbance as I let my Area Sense spread outward.
Other than the spinning coin, which did feel like a small ball of pulsing energy to my ability, there was an almost eerie level of stillness in the air. The small sprays of water in the distance stayed consistent, slowly pulsing its way toward us as I turned my attention to the unmoving Pangolin.
I had known it was massive and it had only gotten more so the closer to Liberty Island I had gotten, but it was still monstrous to behold. Axio had once mentioned that there were going to be kaijus that appeared, but both Jon and I had assumed that would have meant something closer to Godzilla rather than Mecha-Godzilla.
I was just about to take a step when I felt a new object suddenly pushing its way into the middle of my area, only a few feet behind me. On instinct I jumped up and into the air, turning myself around as I moved to put distance between us. I knew it was a risk to leave the token within reach of this new intruder, but while I wouldn’t rewind time to try and get Hydramental to back off earlier, I would if this new person immediately went for the token.
The person didn’t materialize out of thin air, instead slowly rising out of a literal puddle of shadows in the ground. The man was dressed in a sleek black trench coat and had a full face black mask that still left space for shaggy, curly black hair to be shown. His entire outfit had rich purple colors used in the trim of each piece of his outfit and I felt an itch in the back of my head as I tried to place where I had seen him before. I highlighted him and his info box materialized before he even fully rose from the ground.
“Duskbreaker. Level 12 Eclipse Leech.”
His dot appeared on my mini-map green and while the non-hostile coloring made me relax just a bit, I still didn’t know who this stranger was.
“So, just gonna throw this out there. Are you friendly or are you just trying to grab the token and run?” I called down to him when he had finally stepped all the way out of the shadows. He tilted his head up toward me and cocked his head to the side.
“Oh shit, wasn’t expecting someone to be here,” the man replied, his voice coming out in a bit of a timid jump that didn’t match with the dark aesthetic of his outfit. He looked over his shoulder at the spinning token before turning his attention back to me. “I mean… yeah that had kinda been my plan… I guess the better question is why haven’t you done that yet?”
“Any ideas on who this guy is?” I asked internally as quickly as I could and then floated slowly toward the dark-clad Augment. I set myself down on the balcony to stop draining my stamina before saying out loud, “Isn’t it obvious? I’m trying to figure out who else is here so that we can coordinate better with all of these droids rampaging around.”
“Oh… Yeah I guess that makes sense,” Duskbreaker said and looked over his shoulder again. “I guess the others would only keep coming as long as the token is acting as a beacon…”
“Well at least he’s quick on the uptake,” Jon said, a clattering of keys accompanying his voice. “There’s a few reports of him up in Harlem, almost shocking we haven’t seen him so far given the proximity to Swansong’s main territory, but he has been busy. Not quite sure what he can do exactly, but he's been able to handle at least a couple of the droids that people have managed to get footage of.”
“That doesn't really explain why the hell this guy look so damn familiar to me though,” I said, feeling my brow clench in frustration.
“Did you recently rewatch the Matrix?” Jon offered and Angie let out a fit of giggles.
“That’s what he looks like! He’s just missing the stupid sunglasses!” She said between laughs.
“Have we met before this?” I asked curiously, ignoring the two as they continued to make jokes and Duskbreaker dropped his head to the side.
“Us? Oh no… we haven’t. I’m barely keeping up with the point requirements, let alone doing anything like interacting with you guys up actually in contention for the leaderboard… I did see you fight in the Fight Club the other day though,” Duskbreaker admitted almost sheepishly.
“Huh… that must be it,” I said, thinking back to the last time I was there and finding that while the memory was a bit of a haze, I was able to at least place his outfit amongst the crowd that had been there.
I looked at Duskbreaker again and selected him, allowing the menu choices to populate. While the mini-map, rather unfortunately, didn’t distinguish between Guardians and Miscreants with their dot colors, instead only choosing to distinguish between Augments, Sapients, Non-Sapients, and Hostiles, there was a trick that I could use to see just what side of the field he was playing for. I sent him a Friend Request.
His eyes lit up briefly before they fogged over and he accepted the request. I quickly opened up my friend list, something that was conveniently split into two columns, separating the Guardians from the Miscreants. Duskbreaker’s name was added to my list of Guardian friends, which surprisingly now also seemed to include Silver Wrangler. I filed that away to investigate later and felt my stomach settle slightly as my suspicions eased up. While Hydramental was proof enough that not all Guardians were exactly good people, this did at least go a long way for me.
“Looks like he’s the last Guardian in our region, which means whatever is making that water spout coming our way is probably a Miscreant,” I called out to Jon and Swansong.
“It’s still on a direct course for the island and getting closer,” Swansong said. I wasn’t quite sure where she had actually gotten off to, but I was thankful she was playing scout for us.
“Okay look, this token is important and all, but I’m not trying to start a giant fight over it when we have more important things to take care of tonight,” I said pointing out toward the bay. “There’s at least one more Augment on the way here, probably a Miscreant. I’m going to try and talk to them as well, see if I can at least get a feel for who they are and if they can at least be reasoned with enough that we can all work together to stop these droids. Like you said, I need the token to stay in place as a beacon… is that going to be a problem?”
Duskbreaker once again looked over his shoulder toward the token and then back to me before he shook his head.
“No… I actually think you’re right to try and gather as many of the others together as you can for this,” He said. His voice still seemed a bit unsure, but his form that had been fidgeting since the moment he stepped out of the shadows finally seemed to stiffen. “Besides, I’ve seen you fight… I don’t think I’d be able to beat you if I did want to try to fight you over it…”
“Eh, I’m sure you have a trick or two up your sleeve,” I said with a shrug. “I can’t promise you this token and I’d totally get if you didn’t want to be here when the others get here, but a united front might be the best way to keep whoever this guy is from trying to immediately jump to violence.”
“I can do that… although again, I’ve seen you fight, I don’t know what I’d be able to do if someone was able to overpower you,” he replied. I reopened the menu and sent a Temporary Team-Up request to him that he quickly accepted. He was added to a small subtab underneath Swansong and my group.
“The Augment in the water just picked up the pace, they’ll probably be there in about a minute, two tops,” Swansong called out and I turned my attention back over to the spouts of water that were now noticeably closer. Swansong’s dot became visible on my map as she lowered her way through the sky towards us, her white costume glowing brilliantly in the light of the moon.
“I guess the news reports and rumors that you two were a team weren’t a lie,” Duskbreaker said with a small bit of awe as he looked up toward her.
“We work well together,” I said before nodding over toward the spraying water. “Now it looks like we got company, you ready for that united front? Maybe we will work well together too.”
Even under his full face mask, I could see as he swallowed hard, almost nervously, before he nodded.
“Yeah, let’s do this.”
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