Wildcard Assembly's Squad Base, Multiple Locations Current Phase Points: 182620 Current Ascension Tokens Applied: 39 End of Phase Two: 24D:02H:33M:23S

"I'm assuming this means you at least are less suspicious of me?"

"Or we just really need a tech genius."

"You're not helping Freak," I said, reaching up and pinching the bridge of my nose.

"I mean, he's not wrong though…" Jon said, leaning back in his chair in the Command Room.

"Why are you guys being like this?" I said, pinching harder.

"No, no… believe it or not, this is actually reassuring," BrainCraft said, eyeing the plans I had set on the table. "I'm actually rather impressed though. My designs were based on my own clumsy reverse engineering from the device you had turned into pieces, I wasn't sure they'd be sufficient."

"How long will you need to build one of these?" I asked, shaking my head with a sigh and BrainCraft started to hum to himself as he raised a hand to his chin.

After a decent bit of consideration, I ended up selecting Pulse Flow as my Augmentation for Combat Cadence. All three of the options had seemed like relatively good choices, but the fact that the third option seemed to have less restrictions on it was what had drawn me to it in the end. I even took a moment to slip back into my own personal Training Dojo to test it out before I moved too far ahead with things. I discovered a handful of things with just a few quick experiments.

First, somewhat unfortunately tapping my hand against my own body didn't seem to count toward stacking the heightened Stamina Regeneration. It made sense of course but part of me had hoped that the nebulous wording of the modification would have worked in my favor. The same thing seemed to be the case hitting inanimate objects and I decided it would be best if I took a moment to actually see what would trigger the stacking to start. After having the dojo spin up some Echo Phantoms for me to practice on, I discovered that my general strikes, punches, and even the random occasional kick I threw out counted, which was completely unsurprising.

What did mildly surprise me was how my attacks that spread affected it. I tested it with both a high powered Mass Driver and a Gravity Punch preempted by my Quantum EchoStrike and in both occasions, any attack that caused splash damage to other targets or caused follow up damage such as with my Paradox Chain counted as additional strikes toward the stack. It wasn't a guarantee to get the stack up to maximum, but it was still a good start in boosting how long I could stay in a fight.

Before I headed back to the squad base, I took the time to upgrade my Stamina Management to Level 6 with my Tome of Many Things, slightly surprised to find that Combat Cadence didn't evolve. I couldn't be too disappointed though, because the moment I gained the knowledge, I also simultaneously generated a new ability as I briefly wished for a way to lower the stamina cost of my abilities.

"Adaptive Reserves. Level 1 Passive Ability. Your stamina consumption dynamically adjusts to your remaining reserves. Whenever your stamina drops below 75% of its current maximum, it is treated as fully restored for the purpose of percentile-based ability costs. Each "restoration" recalibrates your current stamina pool as the new 100% value, applying after any action that causes your stamina to fall beneath the 75% threshold. Each recalibration reduces your total Stamina Regeneration rate (after all bonuses) by 20%, stacking multiplicatively. These penalties persist until you have remained out of combat for five continuous minutes, at which point your regeneration rate is fully restored."

Jon had immediately started trying to figure out how the math for all of that worked out but even I was sure that would make it possible for me to throw some things like Gravity Punch much more before I was fully out of Stamina. I almost wondered if I should try Augmenting it again to see if I could get another Limit Breaker Augmentation onto it but that would be a dilemma for my future self to tackle. Knowing that I did need to talk to BrainCraft, I quickly absorbed The Gambler's Playbook to gain Level 3 Game Theory knowledge before I headed back for the base.

Freak and Swansong had managed to bring back the 2PM token without any further attack on the city, though they did have to fight his way through several Clockwork Spiders that were hanging out outside of the base. After giving me a quick peck on the cheek, Swansong headed off into her Safe House, promising to be back shortly since she knew most of the squad was still waiting to open up Loot Boxes. While he was still crunching the numbers, Jon had also been communicating with Pinky as she talked with the surprisingly and thankfully friendly Fiddle Me This. I still wasn't sure what to make of the name, but I also wasn't about to turn down a potential ally in the face of everything crazy.

Though maybe for once, we'd use the Phase Lounge instead of fully inviting them into the squad, especially given the recent bout of paranoia we all seemed to have gone through.

BrainCraft finally moved, materializing a tablet into his hand before he held it forward to take a picture of the blueprints. He went through, turning the pages a few times and taking a picture of each one before he brought the tablet back towards his chest. He tapped a few buttons on the screen before nodding and looking back up.

"It should take about a half hour or so for the printer I have set up in my Den to print one with the proper configuration now that I have all of the necessary information. The code The First included on the last page here can be uploaded to the build, which is apparently necessary to make it work. Honestly, I don't know if I'd be able to build one of these without the printers we were able to scavenge from the Droid Forges. I still haven't quite been able to reverse engineer how it works."

"Do you need to? Didn't we grab like, a dozen of them? They don't even all fit in your Den," Freak asked, raising a brow and dropping a hand into a bag of chips.

"It would be nice. I'd be able to build more of them myself and potentially alter them to work some of the more unpleasant kinks out of them. I've broken down a few of them to create a detailed blueprint but unlike any of the other tech that I've had them print, all I get are oversized paperweights of unusable scrap when I try to print out the pieces to build more of them myself. I can't even put the scrap to use since the printers refuse to reuse any material that it's already used in a printing cycle, so I'm hesitant to try further until I can figure out what it is that actually makes them tick."

"Well I guess we should count ourselves lucky we had them on hand," I said, looking at the time. I was just about to get up to head for the Team Book Nook, intent on transcribing my Stamina Management knowledge into a book that I was relatively positive everyone in the squad could use when I saw a flash of pink out of the corner of my eye.

Pinky and Duskbreaker had walked into the main lounge, Duskbreaker looking relatively sheepish as he trailed behind her.

"Hey the gang's all here," Pinky said, a wide smile crossing her face as she scanned the table. "Have we all hugged and made up?"

I looked over at Jon, meeting his eyes as he shrugged ever so slightly. The truth was, I wanted to say that we had, and when we considered the implications of the Dead Zone device, it was really, really tempting to say that my faith in Brain had been restored. I was obviously putting some level of faith in him just to get the device built, though my apparent immunity to the zones might have played some part in that to be fair.

"We've conditionally made up," BrainCraft answered, looking over at us with a knowing smile. "I don't doubt there are at least some concerns that these three still have about me, even I'd have to consider their judgement if they let themselves be swayed by a single piece of evidence."

"I told you things wouldn't be 'back to normal,'" Duskbreaker said as he wandered over to the kitchen.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"Fine fine, take your hundred credits but you really gotta stop being like, so damn pessimistic all the time," Pinky groaned, walking over and down into the pit in the center of the room. "Where's Swan? I've been waiting hours to open these loot boxes already."

"She apparently had to put in some face time with her folks, they were blowing her phone up while we were waiting for the last hour to expire," Freak explained, hopping up from his chair and wandering over to the pit to join Pinky. "So I'm guessing you didn't snatch the token away from the Fiddler?"

"His name was Fiddle Me This, and no. I had six levels on the guy but he didn't exactly seem like he wanted to fight, which… I mean fair, I woulda stomped him. He's been grabbing the tokens that appear near Crescent City which kinda explains why we never found any of the tokens that spawned up that way," Pinky explained, leaning her head back onto the couch. The moment Freak sat down next to her, one of her hands darted for his bag of chips without her ever even moving her head. "And I know Codex mentioned adding him to the Phase Lounge, but unless we want to invite him to the squad I don't think he's gonna be joining the team. He was a Miscreant during Phase One so he can't access the Guild Hall."

"Which means he can't get to the door for the Phase Lounge…" I muttered, furrowing my brow just as the door to Swansong's Safe House opened up and she came through in a bit of a hurry.

"I'm here, I'm here, you can stop messaging me already Pinky."

I looked over to Pinky, her head still draped back over the couch clearly looking at Swansong as a wide smile spread over her face.

"Hey Loophole, it looks like everyone is here, want to Luck Bomb these loot boxes for us?"

"Did you… did you really spam Swansong until she showed up…?" DuskBreaker asked, pulling a cup from the coffee maker as he looked over at Pinky.

"I thought that was obvious," she said, sitting back up as she made a small stack of loot boxes appear on the small table in front of her. "Now come ooooon, we got the last tokens of the day spawning in twenty minutes."

"We should throw this in the Upgrader too, I know you guys will at least get a level off of it even if Dusk and I still gotta wait a couple more," Freak added, materializing the token that he'd brought back.

"Ooo yes, do that too," Pinky said, nodding her head enthusiastically.

"I'll take care of it, I need to check on some things in the Den anyway and I don't have any boxes to open," BrainCraft said as he walked from the table over to Freak and held his hand out. Once he had the token in hand, he looked over to me and added, "I'll let you know as soon as the device is ready if you want to do some testing with it."

"Thanks," I said, opening up my B.E.L.T. and materializing the six loot boxes I had been sitting on.

Besides the three I had gained during the sudden rampage of Droids, I had also been sitting on three boxes from the previous day when I had faced down the first of the Giant Chickens, leaving me with a total of one S:Tier, two A+:Tiers, an A:Tier, a C:Tier, and finally an F:Tier. I had meant to figure out a way to get one of our Vibe Zones in the base higher so that we didn't need to rely as much on my Luck Bomb for this specific use, but between the heightened paranoia and the laser focus on the potential meeting with Calypso, it had slipped my mind.

I was just about to open one up when a Level Up notification flashed across my vision, coinciding with Brain dropping what would be our 40th collected token. I opened the screen for my Level 25 stats and quickly dropped two points into Luck, and then two more into my Intelligence. With those extra points, I made myself eligible for the Burden of Mass book that I was still sitting on. Since I was already going to need to start thinking up some ideas for my Game Theory knowledge, I figured it probably wasn't a bad idea to add another field of knowledge to pull from while I was actively brainstorming for abilities. I tabled that idea for the moment though as I heard Pinky let out a squeal, realizing I had let myself zone out the conversations happening around me.

"Huh, what did I miss?" I asked, looking over just as a flash of light encircled Freak.

"Well he got a Level Up scroll, but I got this," she said, pointing up toward a new, bright neon pink mask that was covering the top half of her face.

She had been wearing a rather thin, streamlined one before this that anyone really should have been able to see through if it hadn't been for the system's ability to mess with perception, but her new mask was easily three or four times as wide, with the majority of her forehead now covered up by an additional pink band that just also happened to have what looked like a pair of small, stubby devil horns sticking out from it.

"I don't think warthogs normally have horns," I said with a raised brow and she visibly rolled her eyes.

"And they're not pretty or pink normally either, but do you really think I'm gonna complain when this thing gives me +15 to Strength?"

"No… I guess you wouldn't," I said, lightly shaking my head as I looked over at Swansong who had sat down at the table next to me. She had already gotten through the two boxes she had in the small amount of time I had been distracted, and she held up her arms as if to answer my unasked question.

"Level Up Scroll and then Codex got me these after he rerolled the F:Tier I got from the rampage earlier," she explained. "They're nothing too special, but I didn't really have a good piece of gear for my wrists either so I'll take the boosts to my Ingenuity and Style…"

"Sheesh… I take care of one level and you guys burn through your boxes in no time…" I muttered, causing Pinky to laugh.

"Well you're also sitting on way more boxes since you've apparently been hoarding them…"

"Fair…" I said, turning toward my boxes. I didn't want to let myself get any more distracted so I let the conversation die there as I reached for the C:Tier first.

I hadn't actually gotten one of the lower tiers in a while and I was not at all disappointed when I opened it and found a single Targeted Ability Level Up Scroll and a small satchel of Enhanced Stamina Injectors. Though I thought about immediately using the scroll on my new Adaptive Reserves ability, assuming that leveling it up would probably mean increasing the Stamina floor before the "reset" happened, I decided to hold off on it, just in case a better idea came to mind after I did get any other new abilities made.

The A:Tier came with a Jacket of the Action Hero, which, not unlike the belt I used to wear, would have increased my Action Bar slots, Dexterity, and Strength. While it might have been nice for some people to get, between the fact that I didn't even need an Action Bar any longer AND the fact that my Jacket was one of my "Iconic" items, it was quickly going to be destined for the resale shop, especially after I offered it to the rest of the room and even Duskbreaker didn't seem interested.

The first A+:Tier only had a single item in it, though it was one that definitely counted as an upgrade.

"Nanoweave Denim. Gold Tier Equippable Pants. These rather plain looking jeans aren't going to be changing up your style game all that much, but you're not gonna be wearing them for that. These jeans meant for the worker in the harshest of environments are sure to protect you from the most basic of attacks! +10 to Toughness, +8 to Strength, +2 to Charisma. These pants come with the Blunted feature."

It was the second time I'd gotten an item with the Blunted feature and I had Jon quickly investigate to discover that the 20% reduction to damage from physical damage did in fact stack. It probably wouldn't have mattered if it didn't since the stats alone were an upgrade from the pants I was currently using, but the fact that they did stack made the pants all the better. My second A+:Tier caused lights to shine around me and Pinky to immediately groan as I received my own Scroll of Level Up, bringing me immediately up to Level 26 and giving me some extra Phase Points from the Power Leveler gain. The box also had 5000 credits in it, but the fact that I had another level up and Augmentation to handle already made it easy to shrug that away.

Once again though, I tabled it for the moment as I reached for the S:Tier, intent on saving the F:Tier for last in case I needed to use Jon's reroll on the S:Tier. When I opened it and found another basic Training Dojo for my squad base, I was glad I had gone in the order I had decided and decided to take the chance on Jon rerolling it.

For the effort, I was granted another 5000 credits and a cloak that would replace the rather basic item I had placed in the back slot. While it would certainly be breaking the +5 Dexterity I got from having the set bonus between my head and back slot, this was once again a spot where I wasn't necessarily complaining.

"Cloak of the Phantom. Platinum Tier Equippable Cloak. This fancy cloak should not be worn if you are intending to haunt an opera house, at least not without a stylish white mask that covers half of your face! +10 to Dexterity, +3 to Style, +1 to Charisma. The cloak comes with the Ghost feature."

"Ghost! This feature amplifies the effects of any skill or ability that can obfuscate your position. Double the length of any ability that causes you to go invisible or in any way become hidden from your enemies."

With my newest pieces of equipment added to my active set, I reached for the F:Tier box and opened it. It spun for a few seconds and I fully anticipated to get something completely useless but instead was pleasantly surprised to see a Small Satchel of Full Restore Injectors, giving me five of the item that would not only fully cap off my Stamina, but also my health.

"Okay, got my boxes handled. I just need to apply my Level 26 stuff," I said, finally looking over to see both Pinky and Freak getting ready to head out. "You guys need any help for these next tokens?"

"Eh, you're in New York so unless Dusk starts portalling over there now to grab you and get you back, it's unlikely you can get out to help us in Cali in time," Pinky said with a shrug.

"And if Hydradouche shows up, you can get across the city faster than any of us," Freak added. "I say just stay here and start transcribing that Stamina knowledge of yours. Codex was just saying that shit was gonna be useful for all of us."

"Plus, then you'll be nearby to test with Brain once the device is ready," Jon added. "But we can focus on that in a second, how about we don't wait hours to apply this Augmentation, okay?"

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