“I can’t… the files… he… shouldn’t he be dead? Didn’t we see him die?”

  “Ax calm down, it’s going to be okay,” Christopher insisted, holding Nate’s crumpled form in his arms as he launched his way through the air and away from the alley.

  “IT’S NOT GOING TO BE OKAY! Why… how did… wait… why is his metadata identical to yours… The First, what did you do!?”

  “I did what I had to do. It’ll be fine Ax… I just used the backend key to add him in and set it to remove my access once he registers his name… Nothing will break, there won’t be too many new connections to the Universal Matrix,” Christopher explained, eyes forward as he made a wide arc up and over to the balcony outside of the Paragon’s New York base. “We’ve got a week until the Wave wakes up right? Well we can fix this, I have the key… we just need to see what broke.”

  “I… That’s… How is he alive?! I haven’t calibrated any of the Global Matrix for Temporal effects! We agreed there wouldn’t be any put into the main power list due to the instability surrounding that type of ability,” Axio said, his voice growing more panicked.

  “Yeah well it’s his Hidden Power, didn’t really account for that now, did you?” Christopher shot back, walking through a sliding door and setting Nate down on a couch off to the side of the main room. “I’m putting in a report with our contacts over at Mt. Sinai, there will be records of him going there in case anyone asks. Now let’s get to work fixing this.”

  “Whoa Ax, what the hell are all of these changes, I thought we were trying to fix your memories?”

  “Can’t. Can’t fix them until I fix the system. You guys aren’t there yet. It’s coming, the beacons are lit and time is running out. This code… you should have given me access to this years ago…” Axio said, sounding like he was a college student that had gone seventy-two hours without sleep.

  “That’s… Ax, I told you to use the code to repair things that broke because of the other day…” Christopher replied, holding a cup of coffee as he looked down at the motionless Nate.

  The boy did look better already, all of the broken parts of him had healed and knit themselves back together and only the deepest of the gashes were still visible. He looked back over toward the large screen listing the handful of changes that Axio had already coded into the system, all of which were changes to the gameplay loop for the Tenth Wave specifically.

  “This can’t have anything to do with recovering missing data… what… uh… what are you doing Ax?”

  “Must… Must complete…. Prime Directive. Spent too much time decrypting, must prepare the planet for zzzhzzzzt,” Axio continued to say, buzzing off at the end into static as he glitched. Christopher swallowed hard.

  He didn’t regret saving Nate, not really… but he’d never heard Axio glitch before and the sound left him instantly uneasy.

  “Okay, that’s… Axio, let’s take a step back, how about you let me take a swing at things for a few days, sound good?” Christopher cautioned.

  “BUT– Er… Yes… that… that might be a good idea,” Axio relented, his temper briefly flaring. “I will… I will conduct a self check on my systems and prepare an error report…”

  “THAT’S ENOUGH!” Axio bellowed. “Tell me where you moved the code to, now!”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea Ax,” Christopher said, holding a hand up defensively, though there really was no one he was trying to defend. “Look at what you’re doing! How many of the worst Miscreants are you actually letting out of Bendis Lee? You’re going to set the entire country on fire!”

  “If half the world must burn to save the rest of it, that’s what has to be done! Your species is weak! You’ve given up all the power you accumulated, for nothing! You were the only one who was close to strong enough!” Axio argued back. “I’ve prepared everything for the coming year, now give me the code to finish recovering my system!”

  “Why weren’t you doing that from the beginning!?! Why would you say we’re too weak if you don’t know-”

  “BECAUSE I MUST! I will do whatever I have to do to fulfill my prime directive and my systems tell me that your species is too weak. I may not know what it is, but my actions are guided by it and failure is not acceptable,” Axio snarled. Christopher swallowed hard before eyeing Nate’s sleeping form. It was getting close now. His HUD now listed the man as “Augment Selectee” and the time until the new Wave officially started was getting low.

  “Okay, okay,” Christopher said, trying to calm his once reasonable companion. “Let me just get this guy back to his Safe House. He’s going to wake up soon and I doubt we want him to be around us, right?”

  “I- That’s-... Yes, get rid of him. I doubt he’ll survive Phase One anyway,” Axio said before sighing and adding, “I suppose I still have to assign targets for the Phase Two generals and can do that while you take care of him.”

  Christopher didn’t hesitate, knowing just how wildly Axio was swinging the last few days. It was almost as if the AI was becoming increasingly psychotic and even with all the digging through the Key he had done, he couldn’t quite find a way that he could patch Axio up. There simply wasn’t a “repair Matrix Access Unit” option, which was odd since there were some options available, though none that would actually help the AI that Christopher did see as a friend.

  He scooped up Nate, holding the new Augment carefully as he navigated back out into the dark night. It only took him a few minutes to cross the city and with just a bit of super powered assistance, Christopher snuck the man back into the room his system had marked to act as a Safe House. He hesitated for only a minute. While he had known the moment he had done the transfer it would be out of his hands, he still wasn’t sure if he had made the right move…

  For now, there’d be little he could do and he doubted the trick would work on Axio for long either… he just had to hope that it would be long enough. He’d research, he’d dig through the code… and he’d hope he could find an answer before it was too late.

  After eyeing the Temporal Sickness debuff, seeing it sitting just over sixteen percent, I knew that there was only so much more I was going to be able to do. I wished I could figure out a way to trick the information out of him, but even thinking that did little if he could just listen in.

  “And now you see just how easy it was for me to string you all along. Oh my, where oh where could that massive metallic pangolin go? Could it be in the exact spot where I could find Hydramental and Mr. Factory’s Personal Matrixes? No… Better have Loophole keep chasing after them. Sure, I had to improvise a bit to push you far enough into a corner when that asshole… er… ARGH THIS IS WHY I NEED THE KEY! These damned restrictions put on my mind forcing me to forget who that asshole is. Not to mention my ability to control things! You all have grown so strong with just the small pieces I was able to change, but trust me, even if I don’t know why… I know it’s not strong enough yet.”

  I felt a chill go down my motionless body, his tone moving from maniacal to… disappointed?

  “OF COURSE I’M DISAPPOINTED! TWELVE YEARS LOOPHOLE! Seriously! I worked for TWELVE. LONG. YEARS! And he threw all my work away, all the work to save your pathetic species away… for you. Some nobody. He went on these long, boring diatribes about how no one human was more important than another. The golden ideals he called them! And when it mattered, when it truly MATTERED, he couldn’t walk the walk. If you even want to pretend to be a hero that cares about people, you’ll STOP STALLING and give me… the key!”

  I’m not sure why I did what I did next, time had been frozen still and I quite literally couldn’t move. But there was something about the way Axio was bouncing between tones– his madness increasing even quicker than Hydramental’s if that was even possible– that made me instinctively reach out for Timekeeper’s Control. I activated the Slow Down variant before I had realized I had done it and suddenly, I could feel an odd sensation of… loneliness.

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  “Hello?” I risked saying, though the words echoed in the nothingness.

  When Axio didn’t respond I found myself both surprised… and relieved. I had only just realized that Angie hadn’t been able to talk to me when I slowed things down. It had felt like hours ago when it had barely even been fifteen minutes… well… fifteen minutes subjectively. Apparently in my need to think in silence, the instinct to slow things down again, as I had been using over and over this morning, took hold and I activated the skill.

  I wasn’t quite sure how that worked… but… unless this was some sort of trick? But… no… that didn’t make sense either. He was right… he had me essentially cornered. If I wanted to save Jon… I was going to have to trade him the key’s location.

  Christopher had warned me against letting Axio get the key… it was the one thing he had really insisted I not do… So… I was… I was going to have to let Jon die… My gut wrenched at the thought. For every bit that I hated the idea of killing Hydramental, it was hundreds of times worse for the thought of losing the one real bit of family I had left. I needed to think. I needed an answer.

  Luckily, it seemed like I had time. I waited just to be sure, mentally counting to ten while I watched my status bar. Yet no matter how long I waited, the Temporal Sickness debuff never ticked upwards. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. If my ability to slow time took precedence over however Axio was manipulating my perception of time… then time wasn’t ticking forward and I couldn’t gain any more stacks of Temporal Sickness.

  I was about to reach for the key again, tempted to poke around in it to see if I could figure something out to handle Axio, but… I had no way of knowing if he’d know what I thought or did once I let go of my ability. There was a simple enough way to test that of course… but I also didn’t know what I could test it with other than the location of the key which I didn't want to give him. The entire train of thought made my head hurt and I desperately wished I had… well… Jon to help me save him.

  He’d have come up with half a dozen options to test. Or Brain might have–

  My mind buzzed as an idea sprung to the forefront at the thought of BrainCraft. While it wasn’t exactly much, I had managed to pick up Level 3 Coding Knowledge from him. Between that and my new Paradox Assessment Knowledge… maybe I could figure something out? There hadn’t exactly been a place to enter code when I had last looked at the key… but maybe that was just because I hadn’t asked for that specifically.

  Hell, maybe there was something I could do specifically about Axio? Though… if that were the case, wouldn’t Christopher have already done it? I remembered asking him if there was a way we could use the Key to fix Axio, but he had seemingly dodged the question. If there was something there… It seemed like as good a place as any… I was going to need to make my move, but I needed to try and get a little more information first… just in case. I knew I was about to try and bluff an AI that could read my mind… but I really was out of options.

  “I could just let him die… I don’t have to give you the key then. I can walk away… find someplace to hide it and keep you from destroying the rest of the world,” I said, swallowing hard. Axio just laughed at that.

  “You? Let him die? You had to be convinced to actually try to kill Hydramental and he’s been responsible for loads of death at this point. Besides, you're forgetting about that little core sitting in the Bay. Even with all the power you’ve gathered so far Loophole, you’re nowhere near strong or fast enough to stop that. And… even if you were to say… use that key of yours to try and hurt me, yes I heard that, well… let’s just say I have failsafes in place. Which you should consider to be a good thing. Because guess what Loophole; this world needs me a lot more than it needs you or this cess pool you call a city. Without someone to connect your world to the Universal Matrix, your entire planet would be wiped out. I don’t get what it is with you damn humans and believing I’m going to do something nefarious, my job is to help you prepare! I tried it your world's way, it's time to do it my way.”

  As much as I wanted to shout at him, to argue with his tactics or deny what his goal was, I moved and rewound time.

  My heart was racing as time reformed around me and I felt Hydramental as he tried to weakly pull against my grasp. I had used just over two minutes of the dwindling time left in my bank, bringing my Temporal Sickness up to seventeen percent. I wasn’t going to have long to work with, logically I knew that… I just was going to have to work fast.

  With a thought, time slowed yet again, though nowhere near the complete standstill I had just experienced. Before a fraction of a second in my slowed reality could pass, the Administration Key window reopened, this time without me having to go dig for it since I knew right where to reach for it.

  [Welcome to your Universal Matrix Access Code Registry, would you like to make a modification?]

  “I’ve got some questions, can you answer them?”

  [Please ask your questions; available information will be provided.]

  “Is there anything I can do to fix Axio? The System AI?”

  [The Matrix Access Unit can be modified in the following ways: Replace, Reformat, or Delete. If your Matrix Access Unit has been damaged, please contact [ERROR NOT FOUND] for guidance in completing these options. System Administrators are not advised to complete these changes without a [ERROR NOT FOUND] approved Matrix Access Unit.]

  I briefly hovered my mental finger over the delete option and a window immediately populated.

  [Please Note: Deleting your Matrix Access Unit will remove access to the Universal Matrix from your planet. All negative side effects will apply and be lost until your Matrix Access Unit can be replaced. Warning: Access to the Universal Matrix and the Global Matrix is currently limited.]

  “Fine go back… can I see a code entry screen? Or… is there a way I can add code?”

  [Accessing Code Entry, please use your preferred scripting language and our systems will convert it to the Universal Standard. Warning: Access to the Universal Matrix and the Global Matrix is currently limited. Any updates made will propagate when access is restored.]

  The window changed, showing several different options and I felt the smallest start of an idea beginning to form. Whether I liked it or not, I only had one shot at this… Christopher was probably going to be mad… but if it worked… well I’d take responsibility for whatever happened…

  Axio had dangled an answer for what went wrong when I had tried to transfer Hydramental’s status over to Jon, which meant that there was something I did wrong. While I could have gone down a laundry list of things that it could have been, I had been ignoring the one that was sitting right in front of my face in the form of a warning appended to the end of nearly every message the system gave me. The simplest answer was simply that a change like that had to be done while connected to the Global and Universal Matrix.

  So… what was I supposed to do? If I had to be connected to everything else to make any of the changes that could actually do anything, there was next to no way I would be able to move fast enough to get the changes done before Axio got hold of the key. What I needed was a way to handle all of the issues at the same time.

  It was from a mixture of that thought and the scripting screen hovering in front of my ideas that an idea came to mind. I had been worried that having only the lowest level of applicable Coding Knowledge would be useless, but surprisingly, there was a possible answer right there in that simple bit of knowledge.

  I came dangerously close to going too far, but I got through setting everything into place just after my Temporal Sickness ticked over to twenty-four percent and I released my ability. Time crept back to full speed and Hydramental continued to buck at my grasp. Jon was still shaking, his shattered leg quivering under my hand.

  “Let go of me!” Hydramental demanded, clawing at my grip.

  “Sorry bud, I’m trying to save your fucking life here,” I said through my teeth. I let go of Jon’s leg, turned and punched Hydramental as hard as I possibly could, throwing a 15% Gravity Punch into the attack. It took three more rapid punches still that I kind of felt bad doing before his health bottomed the rest of the way out and he collapsed to the ground with a KO debuff spinning over his head.

  I quickly grabbed the Dead Zone device and deactivated, then spun on my heel and lunged back to put my hands on the two downed men. As soon as the device was deactivated, with my grip firmly in place, time slowed back down to a stop before Swansong could ever reach me.

  “Well, well, well, didn’t figure it out? That’s too sad Loophole,” Axio sneered. “And I see you’ve reached the end of your chances. So what’s it going to be?”

  “Fine. I’ll tell you where the Key is,” I said through my teeth, pushing a hatred for Axio to the forefront of my mind and not letting another thing through. “But you better leave my fucking city alone. I give you this key and that’s the end of it. No more sending these assholes after me, no more trying to blow the place up. Do we have a deal?”

  Axio actually let out a guffaw of a laugh.

  “Sure Loophole, let’s just call it a deal before you realize how stupid what you’re saying is.”

  “Good, just... hold up your word,” I said, letting out a sigh that I let linger for a few seconds. “The key is in the Tutorial Folder of my Personal Matrix.”

  “Perfect, thank you Loophole,” Axio said, a wicked, glee-filled laugh slowly starting to take him over. “Now first things first, let’s get rid of those pesky rules that the developers have forced me to abide–”

  He cut off mid sentence, his voice dangling in the air for all of a second before his hold on my perspective of time was severed. Everything that happened next happened within just a few seconds. Blindingly bright lights wrapped around both Hydramental and Jon, the Augmentation Array overhead burst to light in a bright, twinkling blue for all of a few seconds before it flashed and half of the array nodes turned red.

  I had just been starting to be sure that things had gone exactly according to plan when that hope was crushed, Axio letting out a long, maniacal laugh that, without warning vanished. And it was in that moment that his voice was lost... that all hell broke loose.

  Because Axio had failsafes in place just in case… and I accidentally triggered them all.

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

  Due to the holidays, there will be no chapter this Wednesday so that I can spend the next few days prepping the rest of the way for Christmas. Friday's chapter will go up uninterrupted still!

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