Max caught up with his team in the training area, where Charlie and Xavier were sparring one-on-one. Leah would randomly shoot her spetsdods at them when they least expected it. Max's eyes narrowed. Xavier was struggling as Charlie pressed him backward, despite having four swords to use against Charlie's single katana.

No one had noticed him yet. Max paused. He'd unconsciously dragged a growing cloud of motes and foglets with him after leaving the Thieves' den. He'd used it to mask himself from sensors and quietly coopted any sensors coming his way with the alien Joining skill. It was better even than his fully capped Hacker skill in that it wouldn't trigger a defensive countermeasure or alarm. He grinned, determined to add to Xavier's last-minute training.

[Chthonic Joining +1, Chthonic Joining reaches level 18, Warning - custom-skill not calibrated. Metric reassessment upon skill maximum.]

[Mask +1, Mask reaches level 6]

He slowly crawled up the wall, glacially slow, to enhance his capped and stealth skill's ability to blend in. His Claw and Stiction let him get above the battling pair with no one the wiser. His foglets and motes passively floated in, mixing slowly with his team's active clouds of sensors. With his splitting thought stream, he triggered many skills at once.

He commandeered the room's controls and snapped off the lights, while his foglets erupted with strobing emissions on every wavelength. He shot off a Focused EMP into the wall. The training room acted like a Faraday cage and bounced the burst of power in a ricochet into the pair. Both screamed in confusion and surprise as Max invisibly dropped between them. He spun as he fell, spraying the pair with his latest skill to unlock, Molten Spray while targeting Leah with his K-Gun.

[Focus EMP +1, Focus EMP reaches level 8]

[Molten Spray +2, Molten Spray reaches level 3]

[Stiction +1, Stiction reaches level 9]

[Ricochet +1, Ricochet reaches level 6]

Max bounced and leaped over Charlie's sword swing, grabbing Xavier in a necklock and flipping the teen with his momentum as he landed. His PreCog skills, coaxed him to drop flat as Leah's full auto spetsdods dart tore over him, pummeling Xavier with a combination of shock and cryogenic rounds.

Max reversed his stiction and bound/slid across the floor clipping Charlie's legs out from under him as he used the free foglets in the room to pull Leah's cloak up over her head telekinetically. Max kept sliding, narrowly avoiding a pair of EMP crossfire from Xavier and Leah.

Sparking and short-circuiting foglets dropped as the distorted atmosphere was peeled apart. Max turned the lights back on with maximum illumination. Everyone froze, blinded as he kicked up into a fighting stance. He grinned as everyone snapped around targeting him. He held up his hands in surrender.

"Hey, I yield!" Max said, breaking into a laugh.

"Jesus, Max. How'd you sneak up on us like that?" Leah asked.

"Just using those custom skills from the monster universe that none of you wanted." Max barked. Charlie growled.

"That's cause none of us poor humans have active uplift virus repairing the damage. My newest daemon, Nurse Flo, made me promise not to use them. The only one I can use is the Chthonic block. All the others give me seizures and cranial bleeds."

"Same." Leah and Xavier said. Max snorted and wiped his nose; he grimaced as the traces of a nosebleed matted his fur.

"Ok, good point. Still, it comes in handy for me." Max replied.

"Dammit. Maybe you should have challenged Abigail. I think I made a mistake." Xavier whined. Leah patted him on the back and soothingly spoke.

"You just beat us to the finale, X. We're all out of Refusal tokens. Now it's just the luck of the draw for everyone."

"Hey, maybe I could fight her. My Skinwalker and Mask skills have increased steadily. I could pretend to be you." Max said. Xavier looked hopeful but then his expression hardened a bit seeing Leah's fearful look. He shook his head.

"No. I appreciate the offer, but this is why we're down here right? To push ourselves? No, I'll do my best and that will have to be enough. And if it's not, then I'm out. Training doesn't stop after the Labyrinth. Maybe we can join that League of Assassins game or do the Diamond Man amateur events when we all get out of here?"

"Good answer, kid!" Charlie crowed. "Now we all kind of lost our shit when Max turned the world sideways there. Let's talk about how we can avoid it! Abigail is a stealth fighter, that's exactly the kind of thing she'll try to do."

Max grinned as his friends played out some strategies. He held his tongue about Kane's plans for the heist. Xavier needed to focus. He realized as his crew talked that their skill sets had diverged quite a bit.

"Hey guys, have you got Gestalt yet? It can really help to keep your head in the game when you lose your active sensor mode. Here's how I unlocked it…"

Max sat with his friends in one of the many Viewing Lounges as Xavier's fight countdown began. His stomach was twisted up in concern for his friend. He didn't feel good about the match. He hadn't reviewed Abigail's large showcase of fights like Xavier and Charlie had, but she would be a tough opponent even for him.

"Um, guys. I kinda' feel bad. I haven't bet on Xavier's match yet." Max admitted. Charlie looked surprised and then a little sad. Leah looked down and admitted she hadn't either.

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"I'll be honest with you both," Charlie said, "I made a large wager on Abigail to win." He held up his hand at both Max's and Leah's expressions.

"Seriously, I want Xavier to win. I'd be delighted if I lost my bet, but I have to separate my feelings from my betting. We all do. We need to keep making credits and keep winning or we'll all be on the block like the wiz kid. If you're smart, you'll put a wager down now…and make that bet with your head, not your heart."

"I get it. I just don't like it." Max said, crossing his arms.

"I'm going to sit this one out, too," Leah said with a withdrawn look. Charlie's hard look softened and he nodded and raised his beer.

"To the kid! Let's hope for a win." He spoke. They toasted together and pensively waited and nursed their drinks as the countdown ran out. The massive screens lit up as the stage was revealed, lighting up one section after another.

Xavier's nervous expression filled the screen as the view of the room expanded. The stage was filled with caged sections and gates. Flames, ice, electricity, and acid graced the periphery in various forms of walls, pools, and obstacles. The sections spiraled up and out where a golden gateway glowed brightly down upon the segmented arena, an obvious exit.

"It's an escape room variant! Xavier excels at these! This is perfect for him. He has a chance!" Leah said breathlessly. Another display showed Abigail's platform rising into the large central room.

"Fuck! They're both inside the same cage. It looks like he won't be able to avoid a fight." Charlie said.

Max growled at the image. Xavier and Abigail found each other at almost the same time as they took in the expanse. Xavier hollered, opening up with lasers and K-gun rounds as he charged. Max nodded approvingly as he was shedding drones while he closed.

Xavier and his drones closed upon on Abigail who was standing still watching with amusement. Max gasped.

"God damn it. It's a decoy. Come on Xavier, wake up! It's not real." Max groaned.

Xavier barreled forward, his four lightsabers flashing as he pounced. Max's prediction proved true as the image dissolved, the avatar's projection motes being disrupted by the attack. Xavier must have been running his precog skill, because he bent over backward without warning, narrowly avoiding a massive salvo of kinetic rounds.

The room's motes and foglets oscillated and strobed similar to the moves Max had done earlier. This time Xavier kept his wits about him. He pulled his Longboard Rambler shield around him and deflected another blast as he scrambled backward. Xavier saw the distant lurking shadow at the same time as his seated friends but didn't have time to close.

Grenades rolled across the caged stage and exploded with streamers of…string. The filaments shot out were sucked into most of Xavier's drones. The drones fell; their propellors tangled up and knotted. Xavier shot forward, using his board to close the distance. He cleared the area with EMPs to reveal the hidden Abigail.

Abigail smiled and pointed two fingers at Xavier as he approached. Xavier dove, but no beam emerged. As he rolled amidst the downed drones, they all shuddered and split in explosions. Xavier roared as he was thrown from his board, landing at Abigail's feet.

Xavier shook off the disorientation and clambered to his feet snapping out and igniting his lightsabers in a practiced move. The ionized blades sputtered as mote particles shorted and snapped in the ionized plasma. Abigail's words carried clearly over the video feed.

"Too predictable, boy. I'm doing you a favor. Let's try to cap the pesky acid resistance before you go, shall we?" Before Xavier could react, Abigail spun and side-kicked Xavier into the nearest pool. Leah cried out in the lounge.

"That clever bitch! She's prepared counters for all his favorite attacks. Did she somehow request this field? It was supposed to be a random draw!" Leah's cheeks reddened in anger. Max sighed.

"I expect she has counters for most everything at this point. The videos didn't really tell the true story of her past victories. If she'd done this level of prep with all her opponents, we failed to see it since we didn't pull their past battles. Damn it!"

Xavier struggled to pull himself from the acid pool. Whenever he got close to the edge, Abigail would blast him with a random attack. Xavier surrendered and Abigail eventually helped him out of the caustic bath.

The buzzer sounded recognizing Xavier's forfeit, and the displays faded to black and switched to the fight's statistics. The team marched gloomily to the stage exit, but Xavier never came out. Realization slowly dawned on the group, but Charlie was the first to say it.

"Bastards! They didn't even let him come back and say goodbye. This place sucks!" He raged and ranted with creative swears that made Leah blush.

Max's ears drooped. He had a way to potentially beat the game, but now Xavier wouldn't be able to participate. He eyed his friends critically and finally spoke up.

"What would you two say if I had a way to turn the tables on the AI running this level?" He spoke quietly making sure that his motes were active and creating a privacy barrier. Charlie ceased his ranting and looked quizzically at him.

"I'd say that I'm interested."

"Let's go someplace more secure, where we can talk about my meeting with Kane. He shared an interesting plan that should solve all our issues." Max wanted to smile, but Xavier's loss was still too fresh. Instead, he grimly led the pair off the gaming floor. This discussion would be best had in the privacy of his Tesseract.

Mal's fragment unspooled from the background cipher algorithms as Max used his full attention on the match and his friends. Mal approached the Tesseract node carefully. Despite Max's efforts to utilize the alien code to create signal-blocking firewalls, echoes of signal still leaked out near the node before his systems could isolate and filter them.

Mal was acutely aware that Max had been monitoring her. She'd been sure to avoid the node when he had a split consciousness minding her activity. Both had fragmented and frameshifted to analyze Xavier's fight. One of her extra fragments managed to lose itself in the shuffle. She found herself drawn to the signals like a moth to a flame. Its whispering seemed to call to her.

Mal had tried to shield Max from the insidious noise as much as possible, but the voices were growing in number and power. Unlike Max, she couldn't use the foreign code. She'd partitioned herself to try and parse it and learn its secrets and it had infiltrated her systems. Only by purging the fragment copy and the sandboxed partition was she able to stop it from corrupting her code.

She shuddered in the buzzing trunk line of Max's augments. She'd managed to expand into the unused portions of his Neocortex module and boost her own framerate and fragmentation capabilities. Max's biological brain was performing far beyond the human baseline. He rarely even tapped the augmentation's system of neural enhancements now, somehow taking the computational burden instinctively rather than using the system.

Mal was worried. Max's usage of the Chthonian skill code was slowly increasing, its embedded presence in his augmentation digging deeper and crowding her out. Despite her increased processing room in the Neocortex, she found areas of Max's augmentations system, her home, inaccessible.

She'd repressed her own integration into his augmentation system, pushing off advancing the AI companion skill. It would enable her to tune the augmentations and learn their absolute limits, but it would also reopen the option for Max to change or merge with her.

She didn't want to have that conversation again, especially with her concerns about the Chthonic skills. She'd made herself scarce, pushing the facade of the daemons to the front with a nudge and whisper when Max needed help. She was confused as to how they would move forward. She missed her former self, so free of fear and doubt.

She listened and the voices cooed for her and her alone. They promised more, much more if only she opened the way. Mal shuddered again and backed away in restrained terror. She had caught some feedback beyond the audible range and had seen glimpses and images of the monsters that lurked beyond.

She raced away from the node, determined to try and talk to Max about it. Maybe he could erase the skills. The software was just too strange. It morphed and changed constantly. Surely, he could see that it was too dangerous. She hesitated.

It wasn't her first attempt to discuss it. She sighed, thinking it wouldn't be the last. Every time she tried to broach the subject her deeper neural networks cycled erratically. Mal looked inward into her substrate code and recognized the sliver of foreign symbology lining her deeper unconscious drive algorithms. It wasn't spreading, but the alien jumble of logic structures flexed and shifted like an egg…a growing egg.

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