“Congratulations! You have reached Level 16, please return to your Safe House to assign stat points and additional attributes!”

  The double layer of Exhausted debuffs hit me like a truck and I felt myself breathing slowly as I dropped down toward the ground. I wasn’t necessarily falling since I did still have Stamina left, but I wanted to reserve as much of it as possible, just in case there was still something lingering in the wings.

  As I descended, I let Angie read through the long list of notifications that had accumulated.

  “New Achievement! Platinum Crasher. While Platinum bases may not be the highest ones you’ll encounter if you survive long enough, this is a monumental moment for you all the same. With a great amount of assistance, you cleared your first Platinum base! This is a Gold Level achievement. Reward: You have received an A:Tier loot box.”

  “New Achievement! Combo Powerhouse! Well, well, well, talk about becoming a heavy hitter. Now, I know this probably won’t mean much to you since you’re so used to seeing your damage scaled based on your Base Attack Strength, but hey, this should really put some things into perspective for you. You have delivered over 100,000 points of damage in less than 20 seconds. Did you know most players don’t see that kind of damage potential until at least their late 20s? You’re getting just a little bit ahead of the curve there Loophole. This is a Platinum Level achievement. Reward: You have received an A+:Tier loot box.”

  “Lucky Charm Feature Activated! Your A+:Tier loot box has been upgraded to an S:Tier loot box!”

  “Phase Points Gained! Combo Master (NEW): Deal more than 25,000 points of damage to a single enemy in less than 20 seconds. Value Equal to total damage dealt divided by 20, rounded to nearest number divisible by 5. Limit, once per day. Total Value: 5865 points. Team Victory: Complete an objective while a part of a team. This gain has a static value. Modified by Squad Trophy Valor Crest. Total Value: 250 points. Crowdpleaser: Complete an Encounter with an Audience of Sapient NPCs. 10 points per NPC. Total Value: 3640 points.”

  “Local Area Manipulation. This power has reached Level 5. Your Local Area’s range is now a 19 foot radius. Ability Upgraded! Area Sense: This ability can now be used while moving. This ability cannot be used while another ability is being used. If this ability is used while moving, it is put on cooldown for a time equal to half the total time the ability was in use before being deactivated.”

  “Gravity Punch. This ability has increased to Level 4. Every 5% of your Stamina, up to 50% of your total, put into this skill now deals an additional 80% damage. Every 5% of your Stamina you use for this ability past 50% of your Stamina deals an additional 160% damage. This ability has been augmented 1 of 3 times. Current Augmentations: Limit Breaker.”

  “Misfortune Abound. This ability has increased to level 3. Negative effects to enemies now occur with a chance equal to 2% for every 1 point of Luck you have minus their current level. This ability has not been Augmented.”

  “Quantum Overclock. This ability has increased to level 2. Initial stamina refill increased to 130% capacity. All other effects still apply. This ability has not been Augmented.”

  “Personal Gravity Laws. This ability has increased to Level 4. The base level stamina drain for this ability has been reduced to 4.25 stamina per second of use. This ability has not been Augmented.”

  I wasn’t exactly surprised by the amount of upgrades I had received since it had been a solid few encounters since I had gotten any, but, even though it was the first thing Angie had read out, the Combo Master Achievement was the one that made me do a double take. The achievement had been spot on that I really hadn’t considered the actual point value of my strikes, just relying on knowing I was doing higher and higher scaled damage. But seeing the number that I had to pass just to get the achievement left me far more stunned than any of the upgrades to my abilities, including the change to my Area Sense, even if that one was a really big deal even with its limitation.

  My mind was racing as I considered the implications of the damage I had managed to deal. Between my gear and the points I had dropped into my Toughness, my health was still less than 4,000 points total, even with buffs. The idea that I had done well over 20 times that much damage in a single sweep of attacks was rather mind boggling and actually put just a bit of fear into the pit of my stomach, especially knowing that there were plenty of players higher leveled than me that must have had their own ways to deal similar amounts of damage. I needed to get better about asking questions when they came up instead of letting the time pass and forgetting to ask at a later time, so I pushed forward while it was fresh.

  “How much damage do my basic attacks do?”

  “It is about time you asked! Basic attack damage is incredibly easy to determine and I am happy to finally explain it to you. Though maybe remind me to yell at Codex later for not going over this with you,” Angie piped up, briefly giggling when Jon let out a small objection to her claim. She continued forward as if he hadn't and I was glad she didn't get sidetracked. “A single strike, delivered at full striking speed (which I’ll be fair, is a bit dubiously defined), will deal damage equal to your Strength stat times 10. That’s it! Basic strikes that do not use an ability that are thrown at faster than your natural full striking speed (such as if you are flying at a heightened speed), can create recoil effects on your body equal to 5% of the total damage dealt by the attack.”

  “You okay?” Swansong’s voice broke through as I felt a hand rest on my back. Only then did I realize I had been leaning over and was propping myself up with my hands on my knees as I still was working to slow my breathing.

  “I- I uh… yeah,” I said, straightening back up as Duskbreaker descended the rest of the way down the stairs and came jogging over toward us. “That took a lot out of me… we might need to call it for now…”

  “What the hell was that attack!?” Duskbreaker asked, coming to a stop next to us. There was the general sound of a crowd outside of the giant hole that had been formed, something that somehow managed to count for the Crowdpleaser phase point gain even though the majority of our fight had been well outside of their view.

  “Best thing… I could throw,” I said. With my feet firmly on the ground, my stamina was starting to creep back up, but the two layers of Exhausted debuffs certainly weren’t helping. “I wasn’t sure what Tyrant was going to do with that egg, but I didn’t want to risk a second one of those giant pangolin things running around the town… So I just sort of... went for it and hoped it would be enough.”

  "Yeah... I'd say that was more than enough," Duskbreaker said, his eyes still wide as he stared over through the shattered wall.

  “Talk about a strike though… I got an achievement for assisting you on that combo. It gave me an A:Tier and I can only imagine what you got,” Swansong said and I could hear a bit of curiosity in her tone.

  "My jacket upgraded it," I said, reaching up to briefly fiddle with the clover charm hanging off of the zipper on my jacket. "It wasn't a bad one to proc either."

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  "Dang you have an upgrade feature? Talk about lucky..." Duskbreaker said and I chuckled before I could stop myself.

  "Yeah... guess you could say that," I said and Swansong let out a giggle of her own.

  "That's putting it mildly," she said. Duskbreaker looked between the two of us, though I wasn't able to tell quite what he might have been thinking given that his features were completely covered and he eventually just shrugged.

  "So uh.. it looks like you've been running a marathon even though your health bar has barely been touched," Duskbreaker said, letting the topic of my luck drop off. “I uh… I can help you with those debuffs if you want me to.”

  “Huh? You can?” I asked, raising a brow at him and he almost squirmed as I looked at the blank black mask that covered his face.

  “Yeah, I have a few limits that my P.A.I. says I should keep to myself, but I can handle two Exhausted debuffs pretty easily. If there's more droids nearby it's probably a better idea if you are ready to go... just in case, y'know?” he explained, the shadows underneath his feet seeming to shudder slightly.

  I didn’t think that Swansong and I were necessarily planning on doing any other bigger operations anytime soon, or even this evening for that matter, but the idea of not having to worry about the debuffs just in case was a hard offer to pass up.

  “As long as it’s not going to slow you down at all. We don't know that there are more out there to deal with right now and I don’t want to be free of the debuff if it’s gonna hurt you in the short term,” I explained, but Duskbreaker just shook his head as a few black tendrils jumped up from the ground and wrapped around one of my hands, slowly changing until it looked like a 5 fingered chicken claw that grasped onto it.

  “Honestly, I'm not doing much more here tonight and absorbing debuffs is the only way to level this skill up so any chance I can get to do it is good for me, but I'll only do it if you want me to…” he explained with a shrug, the tendril claw flexing around my hand slightly before I closed my fingers.

  “Sure, go for it.”

  As if the tendril was waiting for me to, for lack of a better term, complete the handshake and give it permission, there was a sudden cold feeling that pulsed through me before the first of the two Exhausted debuffs vanished. A blue ball of energy went hurtling down and through the tendril before the debuff reappeared on Duskbeaker’s status bar with an interesting looking red border that I hadn’t seen before. A few moments passed before another wave of cold passed through me and the second debuff vanished just as easily as the first from my bar. As the blue ball traveled into the tendril, it released its grip on my hand and sank back into the ground at Duskbreaker’s feet.

  The shortness of breath I had been feeling was gone and I felt just as refreshed now as I had when Swansong and I had gone running from our base in the first place. There was a wave of heat that replaced the chill my body had felt from the debuff being taken and I looked up to see Hydramental’s red clone descending to the ground with two torrents of flame slowing his fall.

  “It is absolutely fucking stupid that we don’t get a better reward for clearing this place just because we didn’t report it to the fucking police. Let alone not getting the fucking Basebreaker point gain just because we don’t have a claim. I’d say trying to take the fucking city back from a maniac counts as a claim,” Hydramental growled after landing, the several balls of energy that came from his other forms remerging with his body and completing the color wheel that was his shirt. He walked the rest of the way up to us, patting Duskbreaker on the shoulder maybe just a bit too hard and making the surprisingly timid Augment jump from the sudden contact. “I mean, who the fuck would we even have reported it to when this Clockwork fucker just upended god damn everything.”

  “He’s got a point, though my guess would be the developers didn’t exactly have this scale of issue in mind when they developed the game. Granted… how they developed this game in the first place is still one hell of a mystery,” Jon said, though it almost came out like he was simply talking to himself and I decided to push past it.

  “Well at least we got some phase points out of it,” I said with as casual of a shrug as I could.

  “Yeah, 150 whole points for a Team Victory, almost feel like I shoulda just bailed and let you guys handle this on your own,” he said, his lips turned downward as he crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Wait, what-” I said, stopping just as quickly as I started before looking over at Swansong who was looking at me curiously. Logically I knew that they wouldn't have gotten the same points from my combo, but it still seemed odd to me that they only received the Team Victory gain. “Didn’t… uh… didn’t you guys get the Crowdpleaser gain at least?”

  “What? No why would-... oh you fucker,” Hydramental groaned as he looked over at the giant hole in the wall.

  “Huh, what?” I asked, following his gaze over to the hole.

  With nearly the entire side of the building gone, it almost seemed like we should have probably been rushing to get out of the building, but other than those few alarms that had quickly shut themselves off following the destruction of the Clockwork Egg, there had been little actual reaction from the base or the building.

  “The crowd must have seen you when you punched that thing through the wall, it must have been just enough to give you the points, I was sort of wondering why I didn’t see the same amount pop up in my window for Swansong,” Jon explained.

  “Once again, you get fucking lucky, don’tcha? Just happened to be in the right place at the right time and got a little more attention. I should just fucking expect it when it comes to you at this point,” Hydramental said with a heavy sigh, turning his attention back to me and then at the destruction around the building. “Well points or not, it’s a good thing we got rid of this. I’m getting really fucking tired of all the god damn robots running around Chelsea.”

  I dragged my eyes away from the wall, risking a glance at Hydramental. Something was definitely different about him and it wasn’t even subtle. Sure, he might have always sworn like a sailor who was afraid of a thesaurus and he was still doing that, but there was an almost noticeable lack of any real underlying hostility.

  “He’s acting… weird… right?” I asked.

  “Just a bit… but wouldn’t TechWarden realize that you would realize that and then… well you know, giant loop of “he knew that you knew that he knew” and blah blah blah?” Jon said.

  “And if he was on TechWarden’s side, wouldn’t something like this have been the right time to try and spring an ambush on you? Isn’t he sort of after you?” Swansong asked.

  “Maybe… I'm still kind of guessing at his goal but this just doesn't seem right...” I trailed off, looking over at Duskbreaker who had started to wander off toward one of the parts of the bottom floor that hadn’t been destroyed.

  “Hopefully Brain can figure out that matrix scanner, it’d be really nice if we could verify at this point. Granted we didn't exactly think that was going to be possible in the first place but that's not going to stop me from hoping,” Jon said.

  “Well, as fun as it was to let off some fucking steam, I’m not about to sit and dig around in here hoping for some sort of “droid key”, kinda doubt Axio would pull the same lazy move twice” Hydramental said, looking over until I met his eyes. A smile cut across his face that felt just a bit more predatory than it probably should have and he turned on his heel to head for the hole I had created in the wall. He held up a hand in a wave as he added, “and look at that, we can work together without it having you end with you hitting me with a cheap shot and knocking me out, it’s a fucking miracle.”

  “That’s it?” I said before I could stop myself, stopping him in his tracks before he looked over his shoulder with a raised brow.

  “What were you expecting? You made it clear you don’t want me in that little squad of yours and I sure as fuck ain’t gonna beg. Next time we come across one of these though, I’m going to be the one to destroy the big fucker. Sure as hell ain’t gonna let you have this permanently over me,” he said and without another word, he left the temporary team up and continued forward before he climbed over the rubble that had been left in the wake of the destroyed wall.

  “He’s… uh… interesting,” Duskbreaker said as he moved back over to where Swansong and I were still standing.

  “That’s certainly one way to put it,” Swansong said with a bit of a forced laugh.

  “What was he saying about the squad though? Why don’t you want him on yours? He’s really strong… err… I mean… not like you or anything but like… umm…” Duskbreaker said, stumbling over his words as he tried to backtrack.

  “We don’t exactly get along if it wasn’t obvious,” I said with a shrug, hoping Duskbreaker would leave it at that. He didn’t, but luckily it wasn’t Hydramental that he lingered on.

  “But… like… he’s a Guardian, right? Isn’t strength in numbers kind of the plan? I figured that you had asked me to the Common Ground to recruit me… or uh…. was that just me being hopeful?”

  Swansong and I shared another look before I turned back to him, “That was sort of the plan, kind of got into the habit of having those conversations over dinner or drinks out there.”

  “Oh… huh yeah I guess that makes sense… wait, how many- oh there’s two greyed out people in the party… guess it might be helpful if I actually pay attention to my interface… just easy to zone out past it sometime y’know?” Duskbreaker said, reaching up and rubbing at his shoulder.

  “We are probably gonna head that way here now if you wanted to meet us there in a few, our other squadmates will probably be there and we could see if you’d be a good fit,” I explained.

  Duskbreaker had been a big help so far and even though I was nowhere near Jon’s level of nerd, I did feel like I was slowly getting a handle on the game as a whole. His ability to outright absorb debuffs was powerful. Sure, he had limits. He had made that clear enough. I was still on the defensive from TechWarden and I couldn’t imagine that he’d only be coming at me from a single avenue, but something about Duskbreaker’s timidity almost spoke more to his Acceptance Matrix being disabled as opposed to being overwritten.

  “I um… I actually have to check in on something… a personal thing… but maybe tomorrow… if that’s okay?” Duskbreaker asked and I nodded. It was entirely possible that, like Swansong, he had family in the city that he was worried about and I certainly wasn’t about to push when someone claimed they had to take care of personal matters.

  “Just shoot me a message and we’ll grab a bite,” I said, holding a hand out to him. “Consider it an open invitation.”

  Duskbreaker hesitated briefly before taking my hand and shaking it as the shadows underneath him began to well up. As he released my hand, he followed Hydramental's example and leaving the team up before he slowly began to sink down and into the shadows.

  “I’m uh… I’m not going to take the front door… I have a feeling the crowd out there is far more than I care to ever deal with…

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