I didn’t trust the near immediate silence after the explosion.

  In fact, I didn’t even want to move from the spot for nearly ten minutes before Swansong finally reminded me that Jon was still lying partially comatose back near my… well… destroyed apartment. While I did want to rush back to check on him, I also trusted that Mr. Greyson wouldn’t let anything happen either. Before I could pursue that, I needed to get some answers out of Mr. Factory.

  Since I already knew much of the history thanks to Christopher, Mr. Factory was able to skip to the relevant parts. He told me about how he and one of the other “lower level” workers, a girl named Lauren, grew close during their time isolated in Christopher’s family home. About how, after the array rose, neither of them actively pursued much of anything in terms of actually participating in the game.

  The majority of the levels they had gained had come from the mass of work they had done during all of the time leading up to the array’s launch. Neither of them ever claimed a territory, nor did they ever actually establish themselves for a side within the system… At least… not until Lauren made one small mistake. Her mom had been over, helping to prepare the nursery for a child they had never expected they’d have while Mr. Factory was off meeting with several old colleagues to refresh printer supplies, when an earthquake hit.

  The crib broke, and part of it impaled her mother. Without even thinking, Lauren jumped into action, using her specific ability to manipulate biomass to completely heal the hemorrhaging woman, who just so happened to stay lucid enough to see and remember it all happen. Breaking the Secret Identity protocol came with consequences and they were ones that an Augment with extremely limited offensive capabilities was not equipped to handle.

  Mr. Factory returned to find his new home destroyed and no amount of searching turned up the woman he had built that life with. After that, he knew that he could only bide his time, assuming that any move he made before the supposed “information restoration” date would have been completely useless, especially when he only had the smallest of ideas on how to get back at Axio.

  It was tragic, I wasn’t so heartless that I couldn’t admit that. But it still didn’t excuse everything he had done and the destruction he had been responsible for in his hunt to put an end to the A.I. once and for all. To his credit, he went willingly when I turned him over to Lt. Nester, scoring 5000 Phase Points for the act of apprehending him. Those weren’t the only ones I had picked up either and to say I had a wall of notifications would have been an understatement of frankly massive proportions.

  Taking out Hydramental and Mr. Factory put an end to Droids R’ Us once and for all, making our claim on New York City uncontested and granting the entire squad 30,000 points split between the six of us. Needless to say, if we were still worried about gaining Phase Points, we’d all have been hurtled even further into the lead, but with the system resetting following Angie’s ascension to system A.I., the Phase was just going to end, almost anticlimactically. While I briefly wondered how the other regions were going to take it… or even Hive Queen out in California, I had had way more than enough excitement for one day… and it wasn’t even past noon.

  Thankfully, the world seemed to take a beat with the sudden chaos of everyone being able to actually hear Angie.

  I still couldn’t quite believe that was working out as well as it was. Angie always had loved talking though and now she had an entire world of people to talk to… or at. She had gone mostly radio silent to me after I dropped Mr. Factory off with the 10th precinct and then told them to meet me over on 49th so that I could turn in another Miscreant.

  While Duskbreaker decided to head home, eager to take an actual break, Freak ran off to meet up with Pinky, hoping he could either “talk some sense” into Tempest’s Wrath, or at the very least get her to brawl at the Fight Club. I wasn’t about to stop the two of them since they were easily the most sociable of our entire squad and if the girl could be reasoned with, well maybe that was better than taunting her into trying to destroy the city.

  Other than the Phase Point gains and the updated Territory Claim, the rest of my notifications were a mixture of achievements and level increases to all three of my powers and half a dozen of my abilities. It was going to take me a bit of time to get used to hearing Peter reading off my notifications instead of Angie, though he certainly didn’t seem to go off on nearly as many tangents. I’d have to see if that held true when I took the time to open the handful of loot boxes now sitting in my B.E.L.T.

  Between everything that had happened this morning, on top of the S+ Squad Base loot box I had picked up, I also had a single S:Tier, received from the achievement the entire squad got for claiming a Metropolis Class Territory, two A+:Tiers, one for “Friendly Fire” when I struck Swansong and nearly emptied her health bar and the other that came with apprehending a Miscreant over triple my level, and then a single F:Tier that I received for an achievement I had gotten after I added Mr. Factory to the raid squad during that last push to stop the explosion. Because apparently teaming up with your direct enemy at the last minute was worth at least a random piece of gear or loot.

  My mind was still racing as I stood in the middle of the constant activity that had taken over 49th Street, looking over at the pile of debris where my home had once stood.

  Even though the other buildings surrounding ours hadn’t been destroyed, it was hard to argue that they were completely structurally sound either after getting peppered with building shrapnel and the concussive force of the blast. There were more than a few people who had gotten injured, and while Mr. and Mrs. Greyson had both been thankfully out of the apartment when the explosion had gone off, there were still a few tenants that were missing. That thought alone made me feel nauseous… and I knew how much worse it could get if I really let myself think about all of the casualties that must have occurred.

  Marco no longer had the KO debuff over his head when Swansong and I had finally gotten back into the area, though he was still somewhat surprisingly knocked out. There were ambulances on the scene that had both jumped into action to check over the two men that more than a few witnesses had seen get tangled up in the massive explosion. Swansong had jumped into action, eager to offer her Song of the Peaceful Mind to the panicked crowd simply trying to understand what had happened and if they were actually safe finally. With her off doing that and no one immediately trying to kill me, I was able to come to terms with one extremely important fact.

  Jon was safe and alive.

  Mr. Greyson had made sure of that after I left, even if my friend had looked like he was rapidly healing when we had taken off. While this should have filled me with an immense amount of joy… the fact that one of his legs now ended in a stump just below the knee made it clear that I hadn’t been quite fast enough. That itself was surprising, though it made sense when Peter explained that while the system and Augmentations could certainly heal a lot, regrowing a limb that had been practically pulverized into dust was a shade too far, especially without someone like Lab Grown who could manipulate biomass.

  If there was one thing I was absolutely sure of, it was that if that kind of Augment did exist out there still, Angie probably would have told me and been working to rush them across the planet to help. I had been just about ready to let Jon get taken in by the paramedics to do some tests, since apparently I didn’t quite have the reputation to insist that their follow ups were unnecessary, when a helmet and a pair of gloves materialized atop Jon’s chest slowly rising and falling. At that same moment, I saw the name that lingered over his head flicker, adjusting as it went from “Codex. Level 29 Guy in the Chair.” to “?????. Level 15 Powerset Architect.”

  While I had no idea what the hell that powerset was going to mean, I wasn’t about to question it until I could actually talk to Jon, the change in his name made it clear that the Augmentation process was fully in motion, even if I wasn't sure how long that was going to take. So instead, I scooped up the Command Gear and pulled it back into my B.E.L.T. and then walked back over by the only other ambulance that really mattered to me at the moment.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  The officers that had taken up position near Marco, after I insisted on it, all looked at me with varying degrees of curiosity, but with the media and the majority of the civilians who didn’t live in the immediate area cordoned off behind yellow tape at the end of the block, few people actually tried to question me or even really bother us outside of the information we were happy to provide ourselves. Which is why I was surprised when I heard a throat clear, causing several of the officers to look past me with their eyes practically popping out of their heads.

  “Can you please give us some space, preferably as much as possible to allow us to have a private conversation with Loophole here?”

  “That’s… yes of course Ms. Calypso ma’am,” one of the officers rattled off with barely a moment’s hesitation as his expression went from shocked to compliant before he turned off to the side. “Let’s give the heroes some room, fellas!”

  As the officers cleared out, I finally looked back to find Calypso standing there, hands clasped behind her back with Christopher right next to her and a man wearing a dark blue costume with a field of stars plastered all over it. My vision highlighted the man as:

  “Starstepper. Level 99 Astral Guide. Squad: Candy Bar Pun.”

  The squad name made me pause for a moment, but only until my mind snapped back to the fact that Christopher and Calypso were actually here.

  “How… Wait if you could get here this whole time-”

  “We couldn’t have… at least not this easily,” Christopher said as Calypso quieted back down to avoid triggering side effects with her voice. “I may have done too good of a job protecting the city when I was around and with all of the bases we had that I could just fast travel through, I never had to find someone who could teleport here.”

  “Well luckily for them I have access to the list of Augments and was able to convince Starstepper here to lend a hand,” Angie offered, rather triumphantly.

  “Ik probeerde te slapen!”

  “And I told you you didn’t have to linger around after you dropped them off,” Angie shot back. “This is getting translated back into Dutch, right?”

  Starstepper tossed his arms up into the air, saying a few more things that I couldn’t even begin to figure out how to spell before he snapped his fingers and disappeared in a shower of sparks.

  “Sorry about that, I'm still getting used to the controls in here. Christopher, I’ll be on hand when you’re ready for me.”

  “Thank you, Angie,” he said, looking up towards the sky before down to me. “So… you used the key huh?”

  “Yeah… sorry about that,” I said, resisting the urge to look over toward the paramedics surrounding Jon. “This… I’m… I just…”

  And that was the moment I finally lost my composure. My head sunk as I looked down toward the ground, the weight of the last few days finally hitting me. Just before my eyes could start to well up, before the tears could start to come, a hand touched my shoulder and Calypso whispered close to me.

  “Be calm.”

  A wave of serenity passed through my system, not unlike when Swansong directed her Song of the Peaceful Mind towards someone and I felt my chest become lighter, my breaths coming easier with each passing moment as her words took root.

  “I put in you an impossible position, Loophole. You have nothing to apologize for,” Christopher said, stepping forward when Calypso stepped back. “If anyone is to blame for all of this, it’s me. I’ve hid in the shadows and kept things quiet for years. Maybe had I come forward when the array first rose, none of this would have ever happened, unfortunately, not even you can change something that far back in the past.”

  “You couldn’t have predicted any of this…” I said, though he just shook his head.

  “No… probably not. But my silence has allowed for so much more tragedy than my heroics ever truly saved… It’s let people like Andrew work in the shadows, doing god knows what…” Christopher explained, his attention turning toward the crowd pushing against each other to see past the ambulances to see who I was talking to. “So… the big question that I think needs to be asked though… What happened to Axio?”

  “That’s…” I started to say, unable to stop myself from looking back down at Marco and then over to the stretcher Jon was still lying atop of. “Everything happened so fast and I didn’t have a lot of time to think… I used the bit of coding knowledge I was able to pick up to write a script that went off the moment Axio used the key for himself. It’s what transferred Angie into his position and Peter, Hydramental’s former P.A.I. into my head….”

  “So… you put Axio into his head?” Christopher asked, nodding toward Marco and I hesitantly nodded.

  “I did… unless I wanted to erase him, it was the only thing I could think to do… especially since you said he still had answers that we needed… There was an extra rule that I put into the script that said if I touched Hydramental while we were under a Dead Zone, I’d be able to speak with Axio again. I had no idea if it was going to work, but I figured hell… it was at least worth a shot. But since mine got destroyed earlier and my mind has been… well a bit preoccupied, I haven’t been able to test it yet…” I explained, feeling a bundle of nerves as I finally told someone what I had done in the brief moment I had to work with. I swallowed hard before I continued, unable to keep myself from looking over at Jon. “And since I wasn’t sure if that was going to cut off his access from the system or not… Well… I told the script to move the Admin Key into a spot that he didn’t know it already was.”

  “Wait… you put the Key onto him? Did you have the script do it before or after the Augmentation process started?” Christopher asked, finally drawing my attention back to him as I looked at him slightly confused.

  “I didn’t really have enough time to specify that… so I guess… before? Should that matter?” I asked, causing his brow to pull together.

  “Maybe… I guess we won’t know for sure until he wakes up, Also, if you’d be willing, I’d like to be with you when you try to communicate with Axio. I can't stay on the sidelines any longer,” Christopher said and though he sounded resigned, I could see his eyes darting over to Jon every few seconds as his mind obviously began to race. “That said, there’s a lot going on and a lot that I still need to do here. I suppose I’ll just have to circle back after I get done talking with the press.”

  “You’re gonna talk to the folks over there?”

  “Yeah… like I said… my silence on everything is the root of everything that’s happened in the last ten years… it’s time the public knew the whole truth,” Christopher explained, holding a hand out toward me. “For what it’s worth… I don’t regret saving you Loophole, even if I hadn’t… it would have probably only been a matter of time until something like this happened. Maybe you were just the right person for it to happen to…”

  I took his hand and shook it, feeling his hand grasping mine firmly before he yanked me closer and actually hugged me. It felt weird, I wasn’t about to lie about that, especially since we were still strangers to each other. But even then, I couldn’t help but hug him back, feeling a soothing calmness pass by me that was completely unlike the artificial one Calypso’s words had given me. I expected him to say something after we lingered there for maybe just a few seconds too long, but instead he pulled back, looked at me for another second before patting me one more time on the shoulder. Then, after locking eyes with Calypso for only a moment, they both turned and walked off toward the pulpit of reporters that were starting to clearly get restless.

  I expected the paramedics and officers to rush back over, eager to take their positions back up but was instead left in silence as I stood near Marco. He was no longer wearing his multicolored gear, instead having been draped in a hospital gown after much of his gear vanished upon being removed from the game and it made him look far more human than he had in the last few days.

  I was just about to start spiraling, questioning my decisions and if I had made the right one– hell, I knew Miss Mist alone was probably not happy with my decision to not kill the man responsible for Pinneedle’s death– when I felt a hand wrap into mine and squeeze. I didn’t jump, instead squeezing the small hand back before I looked down at Swansong as she stared after Christopher’s retreating form.

  “Was that The First?” she asked and I nodded once. “Huh… he looks smaller than I remember from the pictures my brother had.”

  A laugh escaped my lips before I could even think about it and she looked up at me with a smile, looking for an explanation.

  “That’s what I said,” I explained and she rolled her eyes before squeezing my hand again.

  “So… we saved most of the city, presumably stopped the robot attacks from continuing, and unless I misheard, he’s about to go reveal all of this to the world huh?”

  “Yeah… kinda been a busy day… and I doubt we’ll get off so easily that it’ll stay quiet for us after all of this,” I said with another laugh. “Maybe we can just cross our fingers for a quiet rest of our night.”

  “About that…” Swansong said, trailing off slightly, though she never let go of my hand. I, of course, couldn’t help but jumping immediately to worry.

  “Shit, what did we miss…” I groaned, causing her to let out her own laugh as she shook her head.

  “No, no, sorry, I should have worded this better,” she said, quickly trying to backtrack. “It’s just… uh… well I had told myself I’d do this once we knew the droids were handled. Maybe I thought we’d have a few more days but my parents have also been bugging me a lot this morning, especially since I haven’t been home the last few nights either…”

  “Umm… where are you going with this?” I asked cautiously, causing Swansong to fidget ever so slightly.

  “So... uh... Do you… um… Do you want to have dinner with my family tonight?”