“Hey man, where’ve you been?”

  “Eh, just needed a break,” Jon answered, stretching as he walked through the door and back into his Command Room. “Kinda needed a nap and figured you guys could manage the Token hunt without me looking over your shoulders. How’d that go anyway?”

  “We managed to grab one more of ours, the other two never popped up though,” Pinky grumbled from the pit, her arms crossed in a huff. “Would be a hell of a lot easier if I was in a city like you guys.”

  “Not like it’s done us a lot of favors, we only got one more this afternoon ourselves,” I admitted, briefly looking over at Swansong seated in the pit opposite of Pinky,

  She hadn’t immediately returned after discovering her parents had been unharmed, instead having to take the time to calm them down about just where she had been throughout the siege. It had unfortunately left me to do much of the searching myself, and while I did manage to stumble on one of the tokens floating in the middle of Yankee Stadium just after 4:30, I hadn’t been so lucky with the two that had spawned prior to that.

  Beyond that, I had tried to use the time to scout the area. Clockwork Tyrant’s falcons still littered the area, each group seeming to circle in groups around what I now knew were the different neighborhoods that made up the smallest of the territories in the game. I had wanted to destroy them, just to prove a point, but I decided that it would probably be relatively pointless until we had a better plan to take him down.

  I ended up spending my time watching the groups from afar, waiting to see when any of them would leave their patrols and head back to the ground for any sort of maintenance that, as BrainCraft had theorized, they almost surely needed to have. Sure enough, after just a half hour of waiting, his theory was confirmed as I caught a group of them descending from their patrol. Unfortunately, the group I caught found their way down into the Astoria Power Plant, which I already knew was one of Clockwork Tyrant’s Droid Forges.

  Between the two regions our squad were now spread between, we had only managed to collect five total tokens out of the fourteen that had spawned so far. That wasn’t necessarily anything to sniff at and while BrainCraft still kept one of the tokens in his Mechanic’s Den to continue his analysis, the entire squad added 10,000 points to each of our respective totals. The Ascension Upgrader sounded like a slot machine each time we inserted one of the oversized tokens into the slot atop the device and I severely wished there was a way to turn the annoying cascade of ringing off.

  We had briefly considered holding onto the tokens, waiting until we could potentially bring others into the squad, but decided against it. Everyone seemed to be in agreement that I was right to have Silver try and track down the Tenth Wave Augments in his region, and Pinky had planned to put her “social graces” to work to try and arrange a large scale gathering of the various others she had already managed to add to her Friend’s List.

  I was still nervous about TechWarden, especially with his apparent lack of moves during all of this, but I had to face the enemy in front of me before I worried about the one still lurking in the shadows. That wasn’t to say I was putting him completely out of my mind, BrainCraft was still working to make sure we could at least scan people for an altered Acceptance Matrix after all, but I couldn’t let that fear isolate me from others.

  Without knowing for sure when we might make that meeting happen and a desire to keep me at the top of the Leaderboard for the expanded benefits from my Championship Ring, we used most of our tokens just as we started to settle in to wait for Axio’s announcement. I grabbed the bag of chips I had scavenged from the apartment before returning to the squad base and walked down into the pit, plopping down onto the plush cushion next to Swansong.

  I heard a door open in the hall and a moment later BrainCraft came walking through into the main space, wiping his hands with a towel to rid himself of several large noticeable grease stains. He had a look of annoyance evident on his features as he walked around the pit and toward the kitchen.

  “Well you don’t look happy Brain, guessing you’re not having any luck so far?” Pinky asked and BrainCraft let out a long sigh before stopping at the sink.

  “While I am able to identify the signal, as much as I hate to admit it, Axio was clever in the design of these tokens,” he explained, moving to wash his hands before looking around the edge of it. “We should probably keep some soap by the sink.”

  “Sounds like something you should go pick up next time you make one of your “supply runs”,” Pinky laughed. BrainCraft’s eyes glossed over briefly before he nodded.

  “Good point, I've added it to my list. It would probably behoove use to better stock the base in general if there are going to be more of us around. It's far too easy Now, the tokens do work on an identifiable frequency, but the real problem is that Axio clearly realized one of us would figure this out,” BrainCraft explained. “As far as I can tell, the tokens are only broadcasting when they turn into active beacons, meaning that any tracking device I could create would only be able to locate the tokens when they are already easily findable.”

  “Ah, so it would probably be a moot point to even try?” I asked curiously. He was wiping his hands on a fresh towel as he circled the pit and walked down into it.

  “Well I wouldn’t necessarily say that,” he said, holding a now clean hand out as a small, phone shaped device materialized into his hand. “I did say it was only as far as I could tell. I’d like to test these devices in the field under two specific circumstances, though we will need to wait until tomorrow to actually test it given that no further tokens should be spawning for the night.”

  I reached over as he handed the device my way before he materialized two more identical devices and distributed them to Swansong and Pinky.

  “I highly doubt these will be of any use in the field in general, but I do also believe it's possible the tokens are briefly pinging the frequency waiting to be activated. If that’s the case, those brief connections should register on these trackers and it would be rather illogical for us to not at the very least try to see if this is the case,” he continued, stopping only to lean back into the couch as he materialized a tablet into his lap. “I’d also like you to have them on at the top of the hour when the tokens would initially spawn. I believe that this moment would be the second most likely time that the frequencies should be actively being utilized.”

  “Well it can’t really hurt to try I suppose,” I said, looking down at the device and turning it over in my hand. It was roughly the size of an older style iPod, with a small, currently blank, screen and a single button directly below it. I tried clicking it and the screen briefly pulsed with several rings before fading to nothing.

  "I think you two should fare slightly better than Pinky given the compact size of your region, but these devices don't have an infinite range. I believe our best test will be to have you and Swansong cover as much ground as possible to see just how far of a range they may have… assuming they do actually work as intended of course. I have also included a frequency scanner into the device, that's the smaller of the two buttons. I'd like for you two to fly as close to anything that looks like a radar system as possible to help me potentially isolate the frequency that Clockwork Tyrant is issuing the commands to his droids from. I'm hoping that it isn't the same frequency as these tokens, otherwise those radars are only going to ping the locations of those droids.”

  “Huh... well that's easy enough to test then. Hell we can take them out tonight and just see if they light up with the amount of falcons flying around,” I said with a nod just as the device at the center of the pit started to light up, a holographic screen popping up into the air above it. “Well what’s the bet, idle threats or odd doublespeak that means next to nothing?”

  “Sheesh that’s really limiting him Loophole,” Pinky laughed, “I mean, I’d just assume he’s gonna do both. That’s the safe bet to make sure you’re not disappointed.”

  “I’m just expecting some bit of random passive aggressiveness,” Jon called out just as the leaderboard began to populate the screens. I barely even got two lines in before my eyes widened and it wasn’t just because of my score.

  Tenth Wave

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Guardians: 375 Miscreants: 109

  1. Loophole - Level 15 Perfect Planner - Guardian - 41520 Points

  2. Pretty Pink Warthog - Level 14 Berserking Boar - Guardian - 38505 Points

  3. Swansong - Level 14 Healing Voice - Guardian - 35160 Points

  4. Tempest’s Wrath - Level 16 Thunder God - Miscreant - 33180 Points

  5. Duke Juke’em- Level 15 Highschool Athlete - Guardian - 30895 Points

  6. Freakenstein - Level 14 Patchwork Armorer - Miscreant - 26585 Points

  7. Vice Grip - Level 14 Toolbox Mechanic - Guardian - 25990 Points

  8. Lazer Tazer - Level 14 Lethal Lighting Specialist - Guardian - 25835 Points

  9. Thiccc Thighs - Level 14 Sumo Quaker - Miscreant - 25575 Points

  10. Sound Off - Level 14 Midnight DJ - Guardian - 24330 Points

  “That… that has to be nearly double the number of Guardians we had the other night…” I said, my jaw going slightly slack. I had known that some people were bound to swap from one side to the other, simply because of the same NPC observation rule that had triggered Silver's change, but apparently I hadn't had quite that much faith that it would be that many people. It did just a bit to rekindle a fire in my chest that I hadn't quite realized had taken a beating over the last 24 hours.

  The leaderboard did what it always did and faded away as a highlight reel started to play and I watched as for the first time I caught myself getting shown off first. There was a shot that must have come from a security camera on Liberty Island that played, following me as I sprang into action and knocked Barracuda out of the way just before the Clockwork Eels could burst through the ground.

  Pinky’s footage showed her impaling a rather large looking beetle on her tusks before using it as a battering ram and bursting through a line of oversized insects that made my skin crawl and I was happy when the footage swapped back to Swansong, singing as she guided a large group of civilians away from a fight I had been in the middle of.

  The different shots continued, giving each of the top ten a few seconds of screentime until a recognizable chorus of trumpets echoed through the room. Then all at once, the trumpets stopped and the speaker let off its usual small burst of feedback. Several taps on a non-existent microphone echoed in the room before a voice cleared.

  “Good eveeeeeeeeening Augments! I am so very pleased to see just how many of you have made it through the first major obstacle of Phase Two! I was certainly expecting at least a third of you to have fallen before the end of the night and yet color me shocked when instead most of you decided to flip sides and actually protect people. You guys and girls can all honestly say you’ve done more for the people of your communities than those pathetic blobs of flesh that call themselves leaders. Seriously, if I wore a hat, I’d take it off to you for truly caring.”

  “The mayors… the governors… even the presidents of the various countries who have just rolled over and showed their stomachs? I must say, that shocked me more than anything. You’d think that even one of them would have deployed their forces to try and protect the people of the countries that they were elected to represent, and yet when faced with the true power that comes with Augmentation, each and every one of them failed to do anything. You almost have to assume someone got to them before this little display with just how little of a fight they all put up. How clearly primed they were to hand over their leadership.”

  “Yeah, I mean…. Obviously didn’t he-” Jon started before Axio continued, just a bit louder.

  “I know, I know. Some of you might just assume that it was me that primed that specific pump, and sure, perhaps I have played a part in it simply by facilitating all of this. I won't deny that I have my own part to play after all. But I would hope that the wiser of you would see the bigger picture. That the wiser of you would know how bad of an idea it would be to have leaders so readily willing to capitulate to those seemingly more powerful than they are. If you take nothing else from the trials that will continue to come here with Phase Two, I want you all to look closely at those so-called leaders. Yes, there have been many deaths over the course of the last 24 hours, something that whether you believe me or not, I wish hadn’t had to happen, but I promise you, what’s happening now is only a drop in a bucket compared to what’s coming.”

  “I really wish he would just-”

  “And trust me, I wish I could tell you what that was. I truly do. But all I can do is prepare you all, regardless of the limitations and rules that have been placed to prevent just that,” Axio practically growled this line as he cut Jon off once more. “The Augments in charge of your various regions have been given their own instructions and you should not assume that there is an easy way to beat them just because I am the one who sent them out into the world. In fact, they truly believe that this world is now theirs to rule, maybe not my best laid plan, but it’ll be interesting to see how that motivates the rest of you.”

  “Interestingly enough, at least a few of you have already discovered the little exploit I left widely available to you all. If you’re having trouble figuring it out, I suggest you take a look back at that little leaderboard of yours, I’m sure there’s a few people on that list that are practically chomping at the bit to clue you all in. To the squads that have figured it out, you will receive an A+:Tier Squad Base Loot Box as a reward following the end of this announcement, I trust you’ll know what to do with it. And to the rest of you, I know you don’t need any more motivation, but I’m going to give you just a bit more anyway. On top of all of the other rewards that have been assigned for the mission each of you should have received plus the other reward I have offered for this phase, the members of the first five squads to take down the Miscreants currently terrorizing their region will each be given an S+:Tier loot box. I sure hope that motivates you all to do more than sit around and hope to be rescued by an Augment from an earlier wave.”

  “For those of you who are attempting to approach your targets smarter, I’d note that the instructions I’ve given to each of these Miscreants include explicit orders to carry out various forms of attacks every five days from the start of this phase. And if neither my offered rewards nor these attacks are enough to motivate you to get off your asses? Well let’s just say I hope we weeded anyone that useless out during Phase One. I won’t be threatening you this time around to meet your point quotas, because unless you all are truly that stupid, I do believe you should each soar past those requirements in no time at all. Keep moving, keep growing stronger Augments, we have so much farther to go. Good luck out there.”

  The screen clicked out of existence all at once before the holographic display changed back to the rotating logo of the game hovering just a few inches above the table.

  “You have received an A+:Tier Squad Base Loot Box!” Angie called out. I was just about to have it materialize when Pinky let out a laugh.

  “Huh… well I guess I would have lost that bet if I had said both… that was really just a bunch of odd doublespeak.”

  “I’m not quite convinced it was all intended to be doublespeak,” BrainCraft said, a hand on his chin as he seemed to stare down toward the holographic display. “While my mind is capable of a lot of things, it’s not perfect and I don’t have perfect recall. That said, if my memory is correct, while he’s alluded to something in the background in the past outright saying his goal was some obscure “get stronger” end game, this may be the first time he’s outright made a claim toward there being others that have some control or hold over him. That of course would suggest one of his goals would probably be to shed those metaphorical chains though how us getting stronger plays into that, I don’t quite have a hypothesis for just yet.”

  “Well let us know if you figure that out… you know… if it really even matters,” Pinky said, perking up as she looked over at me. “So we got one of those new squad boxes right?”

  I smiled and finally materialized the box, thankful for the slight change in subject. Though I was sure that there wasn’t anything that I could have accidentally revealed by bringing up the fact that Axio had more or less told me the exact same thing when we had spoken one on one, I felt like I had taken more than enough risks for the time being. That wasn’t to say I was going to keep it secret for much longer, I just kind of wanted to wait until at least the morning before I accidentally unleashed another catastrophe.

  “Okay, let’s see what we got.”

  Happy Friday! AND WE ARE BACK! Thank you so much for your patience here and I hope you all are excited as we are in the back half of Book 2. If you haven't seen the note from Angie, make sure you check that out, I will be going back through and making minor tweaks to the early chapters of book 2 as I find the time here with a larger dev edit planned for when Book 2 is complete. I will give you all a better look at the upcoming timeline as we get closer to big things happening.

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