“Um what the hell did I miss?”

  “Oh thank Axio, Codex is awake!”

  “Hit it!” I shouted up and there was a sudden change in the music that was echoing off of the walls of the nearby buildings.

  I slammed a 25% Gravity Punch powered fist through the thick metal breastplate of a robotic creature that was labeled by the system as a Clockwork Gorilla. Although it had taken a good amount of dodging, I had stacked over 250% onto the Target debuff for the robot thanks to Swansong’s Song of Doubling, allowing me to cut my way through the robot’s rather large shield. Even with it down, I still continued my assault, wanting to make sure I had stacked enough damage before going to deliver the attack. Once I did though, with her Song of Hercules taking effect, the strike cut through the last of the robot’s healthy sized health bar like it was butter.

  Although part of the reason I had come out into the city in the first place today was to find other Augments in my wave, I had initially been planning on dissolving the Temporary Team-Up and going off in different directions from her. Although it wasn’t fair to her, I was feeling exceptionally paranoid with my Acceptance Matrix turned off and although as far as I could tell she really did just want to help people, I kept feeling myself wanting to excuse myself to take another breather.

  Before I could do that though, we received yet another Crime Alert. Instead of making up some excuse and running off, I fought back against my natural urge to tell her I could handle it on my own. I was under no misconception that Swansong and I were the only Guardians in the city, but we had received the Alert, meaning there was a good chance that we were the closest people to it. Since the Alert didn't come with a built in time limit like others had, we didn’t just immediately book it, instead coming up with a quick game plan before we took flight to hunt down the threat. Given the name of the Alert, we weren’t expecting another spider, but since we weren’t sure exactly what to expect, we tried to at least cover the basics.

  Once we did take flight, it took us less than a minute before we found three metallic animals roaming up a street on the northern edge of Central Park and we landed to intercept them. The three gorilla robots were each at level 14, placing them right above my level and three levels above Swansong. On top of the level discrepancy, they all sported heavy shield bars to protect themselves as they randomly attacked the cars that they had been rampaging near. Swansong immediately began belting out her Song of Doubling when I hit the ground and I got to work on the closest of the three mechanical beasts.

  I was just yanking my fist from the second of the three beasts when Jon’s voice entered my head and I shook my hand out, small flecks of what looked like oil flying off of the leather.

  “Oh you know, just a bunch of animal robots, nothing out of the ordinary here,” I said, finally responding to Jon and trying to sound as casual about it as possible. I looked over toward the last gorilla and then up toward Swansong as she floated closer to the beast, giving her a nod of approval. She had stopped singing as she looked at me and waited for me to move.

  “Yeah and you have a teammate, so I reiterate, what the hell did I miss?”

  “Angie, fill him in for me while I finish this monkey,” I said, turning my attention back to the last gorilla before I rushed toward it. It stood up on its hind legs, showing off just how large the mechanical beast was and actually beat its chest in anticipation as I rushed toward it.

  “Actually gorillas are a type of ape!” Angie said and then heard her clear her throat before I blocked her out to let her fill Jon in on the morning's activities.

  “Let’s take it from the top!” I shouted up to Swansong and she nodded as she began belting out the melody for her Song of Doubling.

  The gorillas, much like the giant spider, were ridiculously slow and I had used that to my advantage as I peppered the first two with strikes. The stacking Target debuff that my gloves inflicted did a lot of the work in taking these things down and I wasn't about to change up tactics when I knew it was working. Even without knowing just what the Hidden Upgrade on them were, I was still more than happy to have them as a part of my loadout.

  I activated Float Like a Butterfly and dodged under a clumsily slow fist from the gorilla, landing a few blows to the underside of the massive appendage before turning my attention onto the creature’s side and starting to get to work just as I had with the last one. Its body whirred as it started to try to move to attack me again, but I wasn’t going for strong attacks, I was going for fast ones. The Target debuff increased by 10% with each landed blow and I had it up to 150% before the gorilla could try to hit me again with one of its lumbering arms.

  Unfortunately for me however, I hadn’t put myself quite into the same position as I had when targeting the first two, and the large arm of the robot came rushing toward me just a bit too quickly. I threw a 25% Gravity Punch in a slightly panicked response, aiming directly for the appendage. The strike, thankfully, broke the gorilla’s arm off at its elbow and knocked it back a solid few feet, giving me just a few seconds to catch my breath as I eyed my Stamina bar sitting at only 15%. I materialized one of my Enhanced Stamina injectors and jammed it into my arm.

  “Okay, so why are these things Loophole’s level then?” Codex asked, Angie quickly wrapping up her explanation of the morning's events. “If another Augment made these things, shouldn’t they be higher leveled?”

  “I feel like I’ve explained this before, but just in case, let’s go over it one more time for clarity,” Angie said, winding up just as I chased down the gorilla, refusing to let my stacks drop off of him. “Minion and Henchmen coded assets are designed to be modular. Due to the process of creating new Augments and the desire to maintain fairness, Axio purposefully regulates the levels of any non-Sapient or engineered assets utilized by Miscreants to be the lowest level necessary to handle the region that they have been deployed to. This is supposed to be a game after all, we can’t just have one side wreaking havoc for absolutely no reason now can we?”

  “What the hell could the reason for robot gorillas be?!” I shot back, dodging a clunky swing from the gorilla before getting back in close and continuing my rapid barrage of jabs and punches.

  “Besides them being, in general, cool?” Jon asked.

  “We really need to redefine your definition of cool, I swear you’re one lab accident away from being a super villain in your own right,” I muttered as I grit my teeth and planted my feet in front of the mechanical gorilla.

  Its chest plate was now littered with small dents from my landed strike and I pulled my fist back, winding up for a final strike as the Target debuff reached 300% increased damage. Between the Gravity Punch I had already thrown and my continuous strikes, I had ripped through the rest of the gorilla’s shield in no time. I was about to call for Swansong to change her song when I noticed the swap happened without me even stopping to request it.

  My fist launched forward and I threw a 35% Gravity Punch that blew a small hole into the robotic chest. The rest of its body seemed to stall in the air, taking a full few seconds before it creaked and fell backwards, hitting the pavement with a loud thud before several notifications were added to my screen. I prompted them to open as I slowly caught my breath, looking down at the scrap metal.

  “Crime Alert Completed! Cyber-Simian Smash! First a spider, now some gorillas? What’s next? A slug!? Now wouldn’t that be weird. Reward: You have received 5000 Credits.”

  “Phase Points Gained! Team Victory: You completed an objective while teamed up with a fellow Augment. I’m still not exactly a fan of how pushy she is, but I guess you two work well together. Total Value: 150 points. Crowdpleaser: Complete an Encounter with an Audience of Sapient NPCs. 10 points per NPC. Total Value: 420 points.”

  “Gravity Punch. This ability has increased to Level 3. Every 5% of your Stamina, up to 50% of your total, put into this skill now deals an additional 70% damage. Every 5% of your Stamina you use for this ability past 50% of your Stamina deals an additional 140% damage. This ability has been augmented 1 of 3 times. Current Augmentations: Limit Breaker.”

  “Okay, so I guess the question should actually be, if they are Miscreant in origin, where did they come from? If I’m remembering correctly, SnakeBite’s supposed involvement with the Vipers was super obfuscated, so why are these ones actively being attributed to a Miscreant?” Jon asked, although I could tell by the way he asked the question it was more for himself than for me. I shook out my hands and cracked my knuckles as I waited for him to stop muttering to himself.

  “Honestly you know this is way outside my expertise, I was wondering if you had any idea. The spider and the gorillas both had Clockwork in their names, any chance that has something to do with it?” I asked as I looked over at Swansong just as she set herself down next to me. There was a bit of a telltale glaze over her eyes that indicated to me that she was going through notifications of her own and I was more than fine giving her the minute to do so.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “Hmmm, let me see what I can find. There’s been more than a few different Augments that have worked with robots I’m pretty sure so, they don't tend to be that subtle,” Jon replied. I looked over at Swansong again, her eyes still glazed over. I wasn’t sure how or if I was supposed to explain Jon to any new teammate, but if I was going to have a squad, it was something that was going to come up eventually and something that I needed to figure out.

  I could try to pass him off as another Augment, but since his Control Gear only gave him limited access to the system as the Guy In The Chair, he didn’t have the same suite of interface options. It would only take Swansong trying to add him to her friend list for her to realize he wasn’t an Augment himself.

  Although we hadn’t fully disclosed our powersets to each other, the Alert hadn’t come with a timer. So, before we left the roof we decided it was best to at least go over the very basics of our abilities. Swansong had a surprisingly small list of abilities, with only half of her initial bar filled up and a single passive ability. Since she hadn’t needed to focus on combat, she hadn’t had a reason to wildly expand her powerset as I had. Even the Doubling and Hercules songs only came about to allow her to power up her three recovery songs to allow her to better shed the hidden disease stacks that the patients she helped had.

  Thanks to our short conversation, I knew that each of her songs were gradual stamina drains, and Strength wasn’t one of the stats she had made a priority of throwing that many points into. While I had wondered why she had preferred to stay airborne during fights given just how much of a drain on my stamina Personal Gravity Laws could be, Swansong was lucky in the fact that she didn’t have to pay any stamina to utilize her flight. According to her, although she didn’t tell me what the name of it was, the movement ability that she had generated was connected directly to her secondary power just as my Luck Bomb had been for me.

  Since we didn’t want to wait too long before we responded to the alert, we still ended up dancing around the core factors of our abilities, although I supposed Swansong really had been more than open with what she could do even if she didn’t outright tell me what the individual powers that made up her powerset were called. Since she had heard me confirm her brother’s guess about the gravity nature of my powers, I didn’t hold anything back as I told her about that portion of my powerset. I explained that I used it to fly and power up my attacks but made sure it was clear that my power wasn’t actually based in gravity itself and that seemed to more than satisfy her curiosity before we launched toward the threat.

  “You’re really good at switching that song out, you didn’t even need the call out on this last one,” I said when I finally noticed the glaze fade from her eyes. I jabbed a thumb down at the gorilla with a hole in its chest. “Like, perfect timing for that strike,” I added and she looked at me with a smug grin.

  “I noticed it when you threw the strike that broke its arm off. You have a tell before you use that ability,” She said and then knelt down by the prone robot. “I wonder what the point of these guys are…”

  “No clue, kinda trying to figure that out myself,” I said with a shrug. “At least that punch of mine just got a bit stronger… Wait, I have a tell?”

  “You pull your arm further backward. Like, a lot further back It’s almost like you’re overly winding up a punch,” She explained and poked at the cold metal.

  “Huh… Well good catch. Any movement on your skills?” I asked, unsure of what else to say to that.

  “Well the good news is that since I’ve barely been using these two abilities up until now, my Song of Doubling has already powered up. Shouldn’t drain me as quickly which is nice. I’d bet Hercules isn’t far behind,” Swansong said and stood back up. She materialized a Stamina Injector into her hand and pressed it against her forearm in a fluid motion. “Think there’s more of these guys that we can hunt down? Wouldn’t mind trying to push to the next level.”

  “I was thinking about that. I kinda think we’d have gotten more alerts if there were some nearby but we could always go and take a look. I think this one came because we were the closest ones to it since we were on top of the hospital,” I said, tapping my chin. “We aren’t the only Guardians in the city either, I’d be willing to bet the closer folks are the ones who got called in.”

  “That does make sense…”

  “It's a good guess too. I'm not finding anything immediate that has to do with the Clockwork name, but "New York City Robots" is trending online,” Jon spoke up. Swansong went to say something but I held a finger up and she stopped, giving me a curious look that told me that unlike when I was looking at windows in my vision, my eyes weren’t glossed over. “There’s been about a dozen of these guys dropped into the city. Pinneedle and Grand Strike took out a few of them each with relative ease and there’s some footage of Hydramental fighting and taking down what looked like a robot scorpion.”

  “Anyone other than that?” I asked, looking away from Swansong and out toward the small crowd of onlookers that had, as they usually did, gathered to watch us.

  “Well, Freakenstein also showed up to one of those robots… although that might not be a good sign since he now has a giant rhino horn attached to his forehead and immediately went crashing into a bank…” Jon explained and I could hear the rapid click of keys.

  “You know, a horn is a pretty bold choice, not exactly something that’s all that easy to hide,” Angie said and I rolled my eyes.

  “I think hiding is the least of Freakenstein’s concerns,” Jon shot back.

  “That’s still only four…” I muttered, tapping at my chin again and looking back just in time to catch as Swansong cocked her head to the side.

  “What’s only four?” She asked.

  “Sorry, bad habit of talking to myself,” I said, lying poorly.

  “Yeah.. we kinda all do that. What’s only four?” She asked again and I nodded toward the approaching police officers and cleanup crew by way of distraction.

  “Lets hand this off and head for a roof really quick. This might not be a conversation for normal ears,” I said.

  Unlike with Central Park, these officers noticeably didn’t give us a contact card for the Harlem neighborhood we were in. There were a few reasons why that could have been the case, the most obvious of which being that there wasn’t a non-Sapient NPC amongst the group of officers that responded to us and I decided it wasn’t worth questioning too far. We left the scrap to be cleaned up and took off, heading for the closest rooftop.

  “For what it’s worth, I don't think you have to do the whole dance about me with her,” Jon said while I flew. Before I could respond, he continued, “I mean, I’ve been looking into more stuff with her here and she’s basically been on a healing spree on the East Side the last few days. Pretty much unless someone had a broken bone, she took care of them. I think she’s about as close to “pure good” as you’re gonna find.”

  “Yeah but you raise a whole bunch of questions that I don’t have answers to,” I shot back. We set ourselves onto the rooftop and Swansong walked over to the ledge, looking back down at the mess we had left behind.

  “I actually really think you’re overthinking it… Like, I don’t think pretty much any Augment knows how this system works or ask nearly as many questions as you've been asking about it. All you really have to say is you got the gear out of a S+:Tier and used it to bring someone just so, so much smarter than you into the game to help. Seems pretty clear cut to me,” Jon said and I heard Angie immediately start to laugh.

  “I mean... sure, I get she has a good reputation but like, I did just meet her. Should we really be jumping the gun?” I asked, finding myself staring over at her as she continued to look down toward the street.

  “Look, putting aside the fact that I’ve always kinda wanted to be able to manage a whole superhero team, the sooner you do find someone you team up with, the sooner you can start getting into a good rhythm with them in case this next phase is as team intensive as we think it is,” Jon explained. Swansong finally stood back up, giving me a soft smile as she turned around and caught me staring. I quickly diverted my eyes as I felt my cheeks burn ever so slightly. “I get having secrets, I really do, and I’m not saying you need to go and tell her everything with TechWarden immediately, although I do think you’re going to have to find a way to start spreading the word about him… Regardless, I get having a bit of paranoia when it comes to him, he’s already proved that he can work behind the scenes with a frightening amount of power, but you can’t just suspect anyone and everyone that’s being nice to you as being an agent for him either. Paranoia simply isn’t going to be your friend when it comes to working together with someone… you got to have trust too. And again, unless her whole “healing angel” thing is just a giant, over-the-top act, I think you might have lucked into the perfect person to trust. And isn’t lucking into stuff kinda your thing?”

  “So, what was “that’s only four” about?” Swansong asked yet again, walking back over toward me with a soft smile. I could fight with myself, and Jon for that matter, about this over and over, I knew that I could, but I also trusted Jon and I knew that he was right. I was letting my paranoia over what had happened with SnakeBite overly color my perception and while the next Phase wasn’t on us yet, it was rapidly approaching.

  “Augments. I was working on trying to figure out if other robots had been taken care of around the city and was talking about the members of our wave. Axio didn’t say it was our region, but I know we had eleven of us here in the city because of me when the wave first started, which means there’s eight of us left now. Even with a quick search, I was only able to count off four possible members of our wave, leaving half of them still unaccounted for,” I explained and she raised a brow.

  “Huh? Do you have an interface upgrade that lets you search the internet? I have the phone upgrade attached, but that only lets me text and make calls and I didn't see any sort of web search interface at The ViewFinder,” She said, clearly just a bit more curious.

  I thought about how to explain Jon for just a second as I thought back to when I had last teamed up with someone. Members of a team that I was in, even a temporary one, could hear Jon IF I made the active choice to let them. I felt my gut turn ever so slightly but I forced it to settle down as I found my resolve. No matter what was going to happen with the game, with TechWarden and the rest of it, every choice I was going to make was going to have to be a leap of faith and I was going to have to just get used to that instead of warring with myself over every single decision I made. Turning off my Acceptance Matrix had been a choice and I was sure that it was the right one. Even with the worry and paranoia that was eating at me, I wasn’t going to go back, but I couldn’t let it permanently cripple my ability to trust. With a mental command, I finally made the choice and told my system to let Jon’s communication reach the entire team.

  “You know what, I was trying to figure out how to explain this next part but it’s going to be easier just to let him do it. Hey Codex, you’re patched in, want to tell Swansong here what you told me about the robots?”

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