“So… you’re not an Augment,” Swansong said, floating in mid air with her legs crossed in a meditation-like pose.

  Although I had told Jon to fill her in on the robots, we rather quickly got stuck on the semantics of just “what” Codex was in relation to the game.

  “Nope, though I really, really hope that might change eventually,” Jon’s voice crackled. “Patching” him into the team essentially just gave him access to communicating within Swansong’s head just as he did in mine. “I’m basically Augment adjacent right now. Just a guy with P.A.I. level access to game data, only I don’t have to be asked to look into things, I can just use… you know, common sense.”

  Swansong looked over at me with a curious glance and I gave her an awkward smile.

  “Is he your brother?” She asked and I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Not quite, but close enough,” I said and she rubbed her hands together as a wide, toothy smile crossed her face.

  “You do realize that now I really want us to form a squad… right?”

  “Really?” I asked and scratched the side of my head.

  “Strength coming from you and an actual, non-P.A.I. source of information coming from him? You’re literally a two for one special,” she said with a wide smile and Jon barked a laugh.

  “Ugh, I really don’t like her. Mr. Blue Eyes is my ear candy, thank you very much,” Angie groaned.

  “Sheesh, someone’s threatened,” I said to her and she groaned again.

  Although Jon’s voice now echoed through to both of us, my internal communication, at least when I was focused directly on her, only went to Angie. She did at least seem to be able to still directly focus on talking to me while leaving Jon out of it, but with my Acceptance Matrix turned off, I was able to effectively tune her out when I really didn’t want to hear her. It wasn’t necessarily that I suspected her of being up to something, but the simple fact was she had been telling the truth when I had first met her. She wasn’t a true A.I. and she was bound by even more rules and regulations than even Axio was.

  “Okay, so as I was saying,” Jon cut back in, apparently aware that I had gotten internally sidetracked even without being clued in. “According to the sources I can track there have been twelve confirmed sightings of either single or small groups of robotic animals this morning. Although you two haven’t taken down that many of them, there’s actually a whole lot of chatter about you two teaming up. It’s kinda the top post over on AugmentWatch right now. Like, even the top comments are people debating between calling you two Swanhole or Loopsong. Personally I think if you guys make a squad I wouldn’t touch either of those with a ten foot pool.”

  “Swanhole?” Swansong said her nose scrunched and brow pulled together. “That’s… that’s just terrible…”

  “You have been on the internet before, right?” Jon asked and she rolled her eyes.

  “I mean, yeah I have but seriously? Swanhole!?”

  “And Loopsong, you keep forgetting about Loopsong,” Jon said, a clear bit of teasing in his tone.

  “Anyway, we’ve taken care of two of the groups then, you mentioned something about Grand Strike and Pinneedle taking care of some of them too, right?” I asked, doing my best to keep us on track.

  “Yeah, but no surprise there. They weren’t technically on The First’s team, but there’s been more than one instance of them fighting with the old Paragons of Justice when bigger threats have shown up. Pinneedle took out four of the groups that appeared down on Staten Island and Grand Strike fought one of those Spiders too, though the one he fought had a lot more weapons on it, and he took down what I think was supposed to be a metal turtle? Honestly there really doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the animals that this dude is building robots to resemble and it’s not like they have been doing anything other than just trying to destroy stuff.”

  “Okay, so that accounts for eight of the robots… you said you were trying to figure out which other Augments from our wave are in this area, right?” Swansong asked and I nodded.

  “Yeah. During his end of Phase announcement, Axio was talking about the regions he had set up specifically for our wave and how many people were in each of them. He made a point of calling out our region and mentioning that we had eight Augments left,” I said, lifting myself up off the roof with Personal Gravity Laws and mimicking her meditative pose a few feet away from her. “I’ve had some… uh… run ins with him a few times already, so I know that there’s a guy named Hydramental from our wave that is working out of Chelsea that took down one of the robots, and then Codex also found some information that suggests Freakenstein is causing some trouble over in Brooklyn but managed to take down a robotic rhino while he was out and about this morning too.”

  “I actually think I’ve narrowed that down to either Crown Heights or East Flatbush, but it’s hard to say for sure, the dude just really shows up to break stuff, rob some random places, and then vanishes back into nowhere,” Jon added.

  “Which would make the four Augments that you had counted off already…” Swansong said and reached up to tap at her chin. “But… how do you know that it was our region that Axio was talking about He didn’t exactly specify New York City…”

  I hesitated and then just sighed. There was a certain cascading effect that was bound to come up but I hadn’t even stopped to realize just how easy it was going to be to push over that particular row of dominoes. This wasn’t exactly anything like, exceptionally big, but it did open the door for a lot more questions. Even so, I sort of had to tell her in order to explain how I knew what I knew.

  “Because I’m the “extra” Augment that got added into the wave that Axio had talked about early on,” I explained and her eyes widened for only a minute. I braced myself for whatever question came next before she just started to nod her head in recognition.

  “Ah, I guess that would make it easy for you to figure that out then,” she said.

  I looked at her carefully as her attention drifted out toward the city. I was just about to wonder why she hadn’t felt the need to push me further on what felt like an interesting bit of information when I realized that the answer had been staring me in the face in the form of the constant twinges of worry I had been feeling. It was the Acceptance Matrix. She hadn’t followed up on how I had acquired the trophy for Jon either, something that I felt like I would have had to know if I had been in her shoes and skipping past me being the extra made it almost abundantly clear.

  “Angie… If I tell her to turn off her Matrix… how will her P.A.I. respond?” I asked and then before she could respond I added, “Or better yet, had another Augment been telling me to turn my Matrix off, what would you have told me?”

  “I… In that situation I would have vehemently raised concerns with why the other Augment was trying to convince you to do such a thing. While the decision to turn it off was always yours to make, it was part of my job to always try to ensure that you wouldn’t do it due to the detrimental side effects. As you are no doubt aware, that Matrix was providing you with emotional stability in the face of the dangers you are now faced with,” She explained.

  “Which means if I did try to push that, she would more than likely immediately become suspicious of me and probably not trust me… which wouldn’t be a good thing if I did want to make a squad with her,” I replied and looked away from Swansong just before she looked back my way.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  “Okay, so we have ten of the twelve robots accounted for, what happened to the other two?” Swansong said.

  “So, the other two were actually pretty close to where you two are now,” Jon said, the rapid clicking of keys ever present in the background. “Well, relatively speaking at least. There was a large robotic squirrel that went climbing up a building near the northern border of Harlem and then another group of gorillas that destroyed a few cars in Washington Heights. No one has any footage of how they got destroyed, but the gorilla’s arms had all been turned into crumpled, distorted piles of metal and the squirrel’s insides were basically cut into ribbons and it fell from about fifteen floors up and crashed into the ground before anyone could catch what happened.”

  “Then that’s got to be someone pretty stealthy then that doesn’t want to be seen,” Swansong said.

  “If we assume Freakenstein is the only Miscreant that took out one of the robots simply because it happened to be in his way, which seems to be totally in character for him from the recorded sightings on him so far, then this mystery Augment is the last of the possible Guardians in your guy’s region. Again, that does completely rely on Axio telling the truth that you guys are pretty evenly split too and no Guardians from other waves taking down any of the robots. Although the city is pretty big, because The First had had his team based out of here there really aren’t that many Augments that had chosen to make the city their base of operation. There really was no point, so other than Grand Strike and Pinneedle, I’m pretty sure the Guardians from your guy’s wave are the only ones in the city.”

  “You do realize all Codex is doing here is making me want this squad to happen even more,” Swansong said, looking right at me with a wide smile. “I mean, I love Logan, my P.A.I. that is… but there’s something about having someone who just knows the right things to look up. I really don’t think I would have learned any of that on my own, even if I had been at home trying to Google it all on my own.”

  “It was one of the reasons why I was happy when I got the gear for him,” I admitted. “The dude is a certified Augment nerd, honestly I think he and Ryan would get along like peanut butter and jelly.”

  “You know I’m still listening right?” Jon asked.

  “Are you offended?” I shot back and he barked out a knowing laugh. Out of the corner of my eye I caught as Swansong hid a laugh of her own behind a hand and she set herself back down on the roof of the building we had been floating over.

  “Well anyway, I don’t think there’s any others that are running around right now, but I do think I’ve figured out at least the source of the robots… well not the location that they are coming from but the Augment that made them,” Jon said, and both Swansong and I perked up.

  “Really?” I asked. After the craziness and secrets that had come with uncovering SnakeBite and TechWarden, I had been anticipating it taking much longer for us to get any traction on where the robots were coming from.

  “Okay, so this is all assuming it’s not just someone hijacking the dude’s name since other than a few articles, I can’t find anything recent on him. But, if we ignore that, then there was a guy that tried to mount an attack on London about four years ago named Clockwork Tyrant. He hadn’t been using robot animals at the time, but he did have some normal humanoid robots that he had used to attack Buckingham Palace. The articles I found said he called them his “Clockwork Army” which seems to line up with the spider and gorilla names. He had actually gotten a small part of his army into the building before Golden Idol showed up and put a stop to his shit pretty quickly,” Jon explained.

  “So what, Golden Idol just arrested him and… huh… where do arrested Augments go to?” Swansong asked as she started to pace back and forth along the roof.

  “That is a very good question,” I said and floated back down to the roof before too much of my stamina got eaten. “The better question is how the hell does an Augment that gets arrested get out of prison…”

  “Yeah, I’m not finding anything that explains that process at all,” Jon said. “Do either of your P.A.I.s have any answers that I’m not finding?”

  “Well Angie? Do you?” I asked as Swansong’s eyes glazed over.

  “That information is classified Loophole, but I think you already knew that,” Angie said. “But for the record I do think this is why arresting the Miscreants isn’t necessarily the best idea.”

  “Thank you for looking, Angie,” I said, ignoring the clear implication in what she was saying as I looked over to Swansong. The glaze over her eyes rapidly faded and she shook her head. “You didn’t get anything either?”

  “Nah, Logan did tell me that he doesn’t think there’s any one location that they are kept in, but that he doesn’t know what happens to them when they do get contained,” she explained.

  “Well, I guess it doesn’t exactly matter how he got out at the end of the day…” I said and scratched the side of my head. “It is kinda weird though that he’d go from London to New York City…”

  “It sounds like the kind of mystery that might need a team to solve, don’tcha think?” Swansong said, shooting me another smile that nearly split her face in half and I rolled my eyes.

  “Okay Daphne, settle down,” I said and her nose scrunched up again.

  “I always thought I was more like Velma… Is it the red hair?” She asked, reaching up and running a hand through her hair until she just had a strand she was still holding up in front of her face. I nodded and she rolled her eyes before tucking the strand of hair back behind her ear. “Well regardless.You know I’m right.”

  “Okay fiiiine, we can make a squad, happy?” I said and she clapped her hands together. I walked over toward the edge of the building and looked toward Central Park. “If this dude is from a few years ago we’re gonna need all the help we can get. Even if the things he sends out get equalized so that they are within our level range, there’s still bound to be ways that he can work around it.”

  “Are you trying to say there’s a loophole he could use?” Jon said and Swansong let out another laugh. Before I knew it, I was also laughing.

  Maybe it was simply Jon taking the moment to talk just a bit of sense into me, but he was right to do so. There was a certain energy that Swansong seemed to emit that was infectious and I could really see just how much I had lucked out with her stumbling onto that spider fight. But even trying to hold onto that thought, I felt my gut clench ever so slightly as my laughter died down.

  It was too perfect. She was too perfect of a squadmate and I felt a new bit of suspicion starting to rise.

  TechWarden certainly had been up to something and it was clear he had a way to take over people’s Acceptance Matrix to do the things he wanted them to do, but I was pretty certain that wasn’t what was happening here. He wasn’t the only person that had an agenda and with my hatred focused on him in the last few days, I had been ignoring the other person that had an agenda even though it had been right in front of me the whole time.

  I should have realized it when Jon had introduced himself to Swansong as Codex, but I had been so focused on not talking about how I had actually gotten the S+:Tier box that had given me the Command Room that I had let it slip past me. After all, I had only gotten the box because Axio had been pulling a lot of strings behind the scenes all for his own test purposes, using myself and Jon as guinea pigs. The box was meant to be a reward for assisting him. I still wasn’t even sure why he had done that, but now I was almost positive he had his digital finger in the pot yet again.

  Just like with him giving me the Command Room instead of killing us on the spot when Jon had figured out it was all a game, I was positive that there was a reason that I just wasn’t seeing why he was trying to push Swansong and myself into a team. Sure, it was possible I was letting the bit of paranoia I had been feeling take the wheel again. It was possible that I was just trying to find a reason to be suspicious, but this felt different. I looked over toward the girl with the healing voice, putting on a smile as she caught my gaze.

  “So we have to actually go over to the Registration Center in Sanctuary Square to make that right?” She said, practically bouncing on her toes in excitement.

  While I had no concrete proof that Axio wasn’t manipulating people’s Acceptance Matrixes to make them do what he wanted, SnakeBite had made it a point to tell me that Axio was bound by rules that stopped him from doing just that. I really didn’t have a reason to believe he had lied to me given everything else we had talked about, so it seemed reasonable enough that it was the truth. So even if Axio had been the one to orchestrate the encounter between Swansong and myself, then it was only by setting up the circumstances to allow it to happen.

  Swansong still had to be the one to want to team up with me enough to keep pushing for the squad as much as she had and that infectious energy that she emitted made it almost painfully clear that she was being genuine.

  “Well yeah, but we are gonna need a name too…” I said, suddenly feeling my stomach grumble which made Swansong let out another giggle.

  “Sounds like you’re hungry too,” she said and I just shrugged. “Well then how about we go to The Common Ground and grab some lunch, we can brainstorm a few names and then go set that up afterwards? I’m sure we will need to figure out all the squad mechanics too and Codex can start tinkering with stuff on his end? Wait, can he come to Sanctuary Square?”

  “Nope! It’s bullshit!” He complained and Swansong laughed yet again, her freckled face now flush from the constant mirth. “But whatever, you kids have fun.”

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

  If you haven't voted on the poll in Chapter 4, make sure you go back and do that as today is the last day. I will be closing the poll tonight at midnight EST. I'm pretty sure we all know which of the answers is going to end up being the winner at this point though. Almost makes me wonder if I should reveal what the things you guys didn't vote for would have done in Monday's Author Note.

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