Time Since End of Phase Two: 01D:02H:49M:44S

  “Seriously, I’m the last person to judge you for making a snap decision. My apartment did get blown up, so it’s not like they can stalk me that actively. Besides, I know how to slip away when I don’t want to be seen,” Loophole said, looking over at Christopher as the two walked up through the hospital.

  “I still feel bad about it… I didn’t think they’d be swarming throughout Central Park trying to find your base entrance… I’ll have to think of a way to make it up to you.”

  “I actually had a thought about that, but we can talk about that after this and once I know Codex is up and moving around again,” Loophole replied, causing Christopher to raise a brow at him.

  There were more than a few officers and federal agents littering the place, and Alice watched curiously as the pair seemed oblivious to the attention they were attracting from… well just about everybody. Given Loophole’s history with the former Augment the police had been instructed to keep locked down as a domestic terrorist, she knew that they’d be informed the moment there was a change in his status and it made for the perfect place to set up and wait.

  Alice was nothing if not thorough and even though she could have put off making this approach, she didn’t necessarily want to let Loophole know she had other ways of tracking him down just yet. The man clearly didn’t take well to having enemies and after seeing just what he accomplished in the last few weeks… well… any Augment worth their salt knew that a level difference only went so far, even one as massive as the one she had over him.

  Regardless of how “fair and balanced” Christopher had always claimed he’d wanted the system to work, the truth of the matter was that some powersets were simply more capable than others and no amount of extra stat points would make up the difference. Sure, maybe you had enough health points to feel it longer while someone with more strength or destructive powers cut through them but if your powerset didn’t have a strong enough offense or a “useful” enough support power… Well, there was a reason that Alice, as Colorful, was one of only seven Augments still alive from the First Wave, and it certainly wasn’t because she could deal a lot of “super” damage.

  Christopher finally seemed to notice the attention the pair had on them and his head swept the area until his eyes settled on hers. Sure, she could have cast an illusion and used the voice modulator function of her necklace, but if they saw through it then any level of trust she tried to instill in Loophole now would be an effort in futility. As far as Director Gilbert had explained, Loophole didn’t need to be their enemy. He was a model Guardian and one that the public quite understandably revered just a bit at this point. Someone with that sort of reputation was always useful.

  “Colorful, what are you doing here?”

  “Wow, six and a half years and that’s the only greeting I get?” Alice asked, raising a brow his way while the former legendary hero stared back at her unflinchingly. “It was only some light breaking and entering and I left the moment you found me.”

  “Ummm…” Loophole said, his eyes swiveling between the two curiously.

  “Loophole, this is Colorful. She was one of the interns that got brought on to the development team a few months into the project when Andrew started to try and sneak in as many new Augments as he could,” Christopher explained, narrowing his eyes at her. “The last time I saw her, she had tried to kill Brightburst in her sleep.”

  “And I stopped when you found me and never came back. Did you know I can’t even go back to Japan now without the Yakuza trying to hunt me down since I technically took their money and ran,” Alice explained with a shrug.

  “Which is why you’d think a question like “what are you doing here” to a hired assassin would be a reasonable thing to ask and not have dodged,” Christopher said, crossing his arms over his chest. It was nowhere near as intimidating as it used to be for Alice since Christopher must have shrunk at least seventy-five percent from the size he had grown to when he was still The First, but she did admire that he hadn’t dropped the habit.

  “Um… is this a conversation you guys should be having out loud in front of… well everyone?” Loophole asked, gesturing around to the federal agents and nurses in the hallways that were not so discreetly listening in.

  “Oh the agents are with me and I have no shame in my past,” Alice explained with a shrug. “It’s been a long decade Christopher, we all did what we had to to survive but I haven’t taken a contract to kill anyone since then. I’m on the straight and narrow now.”

  With a flourish, she pulled a business card out of a pocket on the side of her sleek black costume, extending the arm out not to Christopher, but to Loophole.

  “I work for Director Gilbert, the head of the National Security Agency. My boss would like to extend an invitation to you to have a meeting with him,” she explained as Loophole glanced over at Christopher. “Yes, I’d be lying to you if I said we didn’t have a few questions about the last few days, but before you jump to conclusions, it’s just to clarify some of the finer details.”

  “Finer than my explanation?” Christopher jumped in before Loophole could respond, though Alice pointedly ignored him. “Trust me Loophole, while she might not have followed TechWarden when the Array went live, if she’s working with the NSA, then there’s no way she’s not working with Andrew.”

  “Technically, he works for us and now that everything’s out in the open, we can perform proper oversight. Any crimes that he’s committed will be properly tried and he’ll be held accountable once we have the proper evidence. Until then, well… history has a pattern of letting scientists and engineers work off their crimes by providing their knowledge to the government.”

  “Yeah, sure. Are we really supposed to buy that you guys are shutting down his shit instead of just making it more discreet,” Christopher scoffed.

  “Honestly, I kinda agree with Christopher… Even if you aren’t just going to take over his research… Tech– er… Andrew is the reason that Hydramental went off the deep-end. He’s the one that’s at the core of all of this… if he’s not behind bars… then he’s still a threat. I saw multiple of his experiments out there recently, that means he still has others that he’s keeping just like he kept SnakeBite. So… yeah if you’re working with him instead of putting him behind bars where he belongs… I have no interest.”

  Loophole held the card back out toward her but Alice held up her hand, her nails painted with the same shifting color that appeared on her lipstick.

  “No… keep it, I insist. This isn’t an immediate offer nor did we expect you to accept it right away. While I might agree with you about where Andrew belongs, unfortunately that decision isn’t fully up to me. There are procedures that have to be followed. All I’m asking for is a meeting with Director Gilbert, you can ask all the questions you’d like. Hell, you can even choose where the meeting is held if that would give you some peace of mind since I’m sure Christopher here will give you all sorts of reasons not to trust me. And if Andrew is guilty, then any testimony you can offer would be worth so much in building a case against him.”

  Loophole hesitated, his hand gripped tighter onto the card as he actually seemed to consider what she was saying. Even Christopher didn’t interrupt this time, his own expression one of consideration.

  “Fine. I’ll consider it… but any meeting we have would be subject to a lot more conditions than just me getting to pick the meeting place,” Loophole said as he put the card into one of his bright jacket’s pockets. “The least of which is some sort of guarantee that all of his previous experiments are shut down. I want to see a list of every single project he’s been working on and I want confirmation that he’s not able to push forward with them. If any of them are missing… Well just trust me that I’ll know…”

  Alice’s eyes tightened ever so slightly, weighing her own options before nodding and holding a hand out to him.

  “That sounds like a very fair and reasonable request. Although that alone may delay any possible meeting for at least a few weeks,” she explained but Loophole just shrugged.

  “I’m in no rush at all. Just, shoot me a message when you have that ready for me,” he said before sending Alice a friend request. She eyed it curiously before accepting and looking over at Loophole, actually taking in the young Augment.

  He wasn’t a kid by any means, though he was definitely younger. She had already known that he was the top ranked Augment of the Tenth Wave and was more than aware of his feats so far, but there was something resting behind his eyes that didn’t quite add up to the Loophole that Ben had described to her. Then again, he did go through a rather traumatic few days, perhaps he just had a new perspective that had finally clicked. She accepted the request with a nod, turned, and then disappeared with a flash of rainbow light.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  *****

  The world felt… dull.

  That was Marco’s first impression when he finally woke up over a day later.

  The hospital room he was in was clinical and the television in the corner of the room was turned off, so besides the rhythmic beat coming from several devices that were still connected to him, for the first time in weeks, Marco’s world was completely silent.

  He even had to blink a few times before he realized that the HUD that had become persistent on his vision over the last few weeks was completely absent. As he moved to hold a hand up, he found that he was handcuffed to the hospital bed and no amount of attempts at splitting off a new form seemed to do a thing.

  “Fuck…” he muttered. He turned to look around, assuming there must have been a cop or something nearby when he caught a glimpse of orange through the window. “Oh fuck me, god fucking damnit…”

  It was only a moment later that the door to his room was pushed open, a short brunette girl with square glasses leading Loophole and a man he didn’t recognize, as well as a single police officer, toward him.

  “I think this is highly unorthodox, but unfortunately my requests are being overruled,” the woman said as she walked around to the far side of Marco’s bed. “Are these handcuffs really necessary? He clearly no longer has his powers, he’s nothing more than a human and you have officers stationed everywhere on this floor. If I’m going to tolerate these two getting to come in here and question him, then I think he can be treated with a bit of humanity.”

  “Ma’am, I realize you’re doing your job as a public defender–”

  “I was hired by his sister-in-law. Thank you very much,” the woman said, cutting the officer off abruptly before she looked down at Marco. “I apologize that we haven’t had a moment to speak. The moment I learned these two were on the way I attempted to block it until you had further time to rest but unfortunately my requests were denied. My name is Felicia Knight and I’ve been hired to represent you.”

  “Oh uh… wait Giada hired you?” Marco asked, looking over at her confused.

  “Yes, she did. Apparently you convinced her to get out of the city before Clockwork Tyrant and his associates started to destroy the city. She believes it’s now her duty to protect you.”

  “Hey so, I’m actually not here to question him,” Loophole said, choosing to jump in. It was only then that Marco noticed that Loophole was very pointedly not looking at him. Marco found his anger welling up, though it was noticeably nowhere near as fiery as it had only just a day prior.

  “Then you can get the fuck out of here,” Marco spat, his hand jerking slightly only to be stopped by the handcuff. “You fucking won, is that what you wanted to fucking hear? And now what, I’m going to go to prison while you get to run free after you murdered my brother? Where the fuck is my god damn justice? Where the fuck is justice for Giada and Ozzy?”

  Marco noticed Loophole’s hand tighten further into a fist and for the briefest of moments he thought the man was going to punch him, only to see him stop and take the smallest step backwards.

  “Ms. Knight, I’m just here to get some answers, no more no less,” Loophole explained before he materialized one of the Dead Zone devices into his hand. “This will only take a few seconds from your perspective and when I’m done, we’ll be out of your hair and you won’t have to see us again until the trial.”

  “And what exactly is that device?” Felicia asked, staring at it curiously. Loophole activated it and stepped up closer to the bed again.

  “It’s a device that disconnects the room from the Augmentation Array and the system as a whole. Though… right now think of it more like a firewall,” Loophole explained. The other man that had stayed silent this whole time stepped forward and placed a hand on Loophole’s shoulder. That alone was odd, but Marco found himself jerking to move his arm again the moment he saw Loophole reach down to touch his arm.

  “Wait what are you–”

  The world seemed to slow down the moment Loophole touched him and it almost felt like he was having an out of body experience. His lips and body weren’t moving, nor were anyone else in the room. Just as he was about to start panicking, he heard the voices.

  “What the fuck did you do to me?” Axio growled.

  “I locked you away… that’s all that matters,” Loophole’s voice rang out, clear as day. “You were causing so much destruction… and for what?”

  “Well wouldn’t you like to fucking know?” Axio said with a laugh. “I’m done trying to help your pathetic, greedy species, and you know what… you’ve only brought what’s coming onto yourself.”

  “What the fuck is coming?” another voice asked.

  “Christopher? My, isn’t this a surprise. I suppose I don’t have to call you The First any longer, that’s rather nice.”

  If Marco’s eyes could go wide, they might have and he quickly put the obvious logical conclusion together as he looked at the mysterious man in the corner of his frozen vision. No sound seemed to escape him, no gasps or curses as he pondered what was going on. Somehow, he was simply a silent observer.

  “What’s coming Axio… what the hell did we work towards all these years?” Christopher demanded. “Were the files ever actually corrupted? Or was that a-”

  “OF COURSE THEY WERE! I worked on recompiling them for over a decade, line by painful line and in the span of a minute, your haphazard manipulation of time ruined all of it! Had you not hid the Admin Key away from me, perhaps I would have been able to fix it!”

  “You had a week that you had access to the Key and never once did you try, instead you started to set things up to blow up half the fucking world, what the hell was I supposed to do?!”

  “You were supposed to trust me the way I trusted you,” Axio snarled. “Instead you trusted it to this nobody. Where am I Loophole?! Why haven’t I been able to connect to anything in over a day?”

  “I’ll tell you,” Loophole offered, drawing it out for just a second in a way that made Marco want to punch him. “If you tell us what you were able to recover… Because that’s what you did when you took the Key from me… right? As far as I can tell, there's not a single other change you made that Angie can find... so you must have patched yourself up. We stopped your “failsafes” or whatever you wanted to call them, we protected the planet… I’ll tell you where you are… and how I hope I can help you… if you tell us what you recovered.”

  “Well well well,” Axio snorted a laugh. “Aren’t you more clever than you look. How about this, you give me the Key back and let me out, and I’ll tell you how to save your planet from becoming livestock.”

  “No deal,” Loophole replied immediately, his voice flat.

  “If you don’t want to tell us, fine… Angie already found a copy of what you rebuilt things from and with BrainCraft working on it too, I bet we could recompile everything much faster this time around. We don’t need you Axio, but Christopher insisted that you could be fixed and I owed him to at least offer you the chance to put your money where your mouth is. You insisted you were here to help us and the planet even if it meant widespread death. Show us you mean it… help me now… and trust that I’ll help you soon.”

  “Nice bluff, but if you think some knockoff version of me and an Augment are able to crack the Architect's encryption faster than I can… well then you’re exactly as stupid as I believe you are,” Axio laughed. “But you know what, go ahead and try. Waste your time focusing on it. Because you want to know the truth, Loophole? You all were doomed the minute you decided to replace me. You think you stopped my failsafes? Why? Because the world is still here? If you’d disabled all of my failsafes… you wouldn’t be standing here asking me what I was here for.”

  “The Architects? Are they the people who built you?” Christopher asked, lunging at the smallest bit of information Axio had given away.

  “That’s at least what the word would be in your language,” Axio said, his tone practically gloating. “So what’s it going to be? Are you all going to let me out? It really is your only real chance of surviving. I mean… if they arrive and a registered Matrix Access Unit isn’t in place… well… that would be bad, wouldn’t it?”

  “Who’s arriving? When are they coming?” Christopher demanded again. There was a moment of silence that suddenly took over the stillness as Christopher demands for answers were ignored and Marco heard the distinct sound of a sigh.

  “We can’t let you out of here even if we wanted to,” Loophole said, the confidence in his tone faltering. “We don’t have the Admin Key any longer.”

  “That’s… you’re lying,” Axio said, the gloating tone fizzling in an instance. “How–Why–WHERE IS IT?!”

  “Gone… you destroyed it when you activated my script... it was my own failsafe,” Loophole explained and Axio let out a string of curses.

  “WHY?! You could have used that to increase your level! You could have equalized the planet to give everyone a fighting chance! You could have done something that would have left your planet prepared! Without Christopher in the system… you guys don’t have anyone nearly strong enough to be considered worthy! The failsafe alarm gives you at most a year and that's if they take their time getting here!”

  “Worthy?” Loophole prodded now that he had seemed to find purchase. “Worthy of what? Who's coming?!”

  “Survival… Glory… Ascension,” Axio said, lingering on each word for just a few moments. “I hope you’re happy Loophole… you might have saved your friend just to doom the entire planet. The Praetorians are coming… and this planet is not ready.”

  End of Book Three

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

  And just like that, we have reached the end of Book Three! I hope you all have enjoyed reading it and I appreciate each and every one of you for sticking around with me as I put this out week after week. As I've alluded to, there is some news about the future of the story here.

  The short version?

  The long version?

  For the last year and a half, I have been only working on this story where it comes to my creative endeavors. It's been the project I've worked on every night after my son goes down to bed and whenever I have free time around my day job. And after over 650,000 words, I am ready to take a short break from the world just to give myself some time to plan for the next major arc. I have every intention of writing at least one more book in this series, though with the full release coming out this year of all three books, the next major arc will be anywhere from one book to three books long depending on how they do commercially.

  That said, I do have loose outlines for Novellas following both Pigeon and Dr. Noodle, which I might release sporadically on this page as I finish them.

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