No one seemed suspicious at all as Maya returned to the first floor. Satoshi held up his end of the deal. None of the security guards seemed to treat her any different as she returned to Avanti at the lobby entrance, sitting on a bench near the receptionist’s desk, fiddling with an illusion of a bird with four wings.

“Come on, Avanti,” Maya said. “Mr. Takahara briefed me on the case. There’s someone else here we need to speak to.”

There was no case, no real formal briefing from Mr. Takahara, yet Avanti nodded and accepted without question, standing up to follow.

The receptionist wasn’t the same. “Excuse me? I believe that meeting was your only business here, was it not? Who are you—”

Time to flex the badge.

“Ma’am, we’re here to investigate a case given from Mr. Tahakara himself, high above your clearance and your pay grade,” Maya snapped, jabbing her finger into the desk like she’d seen Senior Agent Hale do. “Unless you want me to charge you with the international crime of resisting arrest, I suggest that you allow my fellow Agent through.”

The receptionist gave Maya a blank stare, as if deciding whether to scream at her or politely allow them through. “I understand. Please, good luck on your case.”

With that, she waved them through the metal detectors.

“Did you get the information you needed?” Avanti whispered.

“That and a lead that might give us everything we need to finish this case.”

Avanti followed Maya closely as they looked for the stairs. Once they found it, they fled to the bathroom to apply an invisibility spell. No cameras could track where they were about to go. It worked, but it had the downside of temporarily taking away Avanti’s color vision, since she applied the spell on herself, too.

So, Maya led her back to the busy stairs. It required a keycard, but they didn’t have to wait long for a woman to open the door for them and casually stroll past on her own business, unaware as they slipped in behind her.

As Satoshi described, a keypad-secured door sat hidden underneath the staircase. Unzipping the duffel bag was difficult to do invisible, but soon, Maya found the gadget she needed: a black box no bigger than a cell phone.

She placed it against the keypad, and it found the correct code in thirty seconds. Locktechs were the world’s most popular brand of electronic locks, and also the specific brand that the SRB came prepared to hack through.

The door led to a dark staircase that led deeper underground. Halfway down the staircase, Avanti tensed, and glowing yellow words appeared in the air.

“Bad feeling. This is the place.”

As they neared the second door at the bottom, Maya froze, waiting until the whirring of an automated drone passed by. Slowly, they pushed the door open and edged through, struggling to fit the heavy duffel bag through without making a sound.

Once they were in, though, Maya couldn’t not record. All of Arise Health used the same safe blinding white and brown wooden fixtures. This floor was different; the soulless, stark white walls and dim neon-green floor lights gave it a sinister feel, just as Avanti said.

This wasn’t a storage floor. This was her domain.

Security drones patrolled the halls, but against Avanti’s invisibility spell, the black drones passed on as if they weren’t there. They continued down the winding hallways, and every new revelation stole Maya’s breath. Scientists gathered around a room where a man trained with Fighter abilities. She recognized his face as someone that went missing months ago, somewhere in North City back in America.

In the room past that, she froze in shock at the haunting sight. Mindgame himself sat next to his mother in a small patient room with guilty, solemn glares on their faces, both now wearing eyepatches on their right eyes.

As soon as she nearly thought about his name, Mindgame's head slowly turned on a swivel. His movements were empty and emotionless, like a doll. He met eyes with her, and the familiar mental presence entered her mind.

“I knew you two would make it here.”

“You’re the boy West met with,” Avanti thought, her thoughts streamed into Maya’s head, too, like a shared call.

Mindgame…Grant, what did she do to you?

“To us?” Mindgame shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I did it because I believed in you, Maya. Work fast, Find what you need, and get out of here. She was here recently, and I don’t know where she went.”

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Can you use your powers to let us know if she’s near?

“No. I can’t help you anymore. If I even risk touching her mind, or obscuring her plan, my mother’s next. But, good luck. The world rides on you getting out of here alive.”

Even without spoken words, every thought dripped with a distant regret. She wouldn’t have thought he was only a boy, with this much trauma and depth in his thoughts. Mindgame turned away from Maya and Avanti and sat forward, his mental presence disappearing.

Maya clenched her fist and pressed on. In the next room, scientists worked around tables with vials of a strange, gleaming pink liquid. They waited until someone else entered the room to sculk in behind them. When no one was looking, Maya swiped a vial from the counter and read the label.

The Memory Shot. This was the substance Gigabyte wrote about on his chip, that allowed Apex to implant a level of knowledge equivalent to an ex-fifty into anyone. Anyone could become a borderline master at fighting.

Maya’s head spun as the realization dawned on her. Arise Health could’ve made a fortune on this technology; they could’ve upended the fighting world itself and made rankings almost useless. What was the point of fighting to raise your rank if, for a price, you could take a drug that made you a master? What would someone do for a priceless drug like this?

And yet, despite the possibilities, Apex only used it for her grand plan, only to cheat her way to number one in the world. Was this her backup plan, or did she not realize the potential power she sat on?

It was time to leave. The Takahara’s and Arise Health itself were assisting Apex in her plan to capture and train Fighters of her own to sabotage the Ultimate Versus, killing and holding hostages along the way, and she now had all the evidence to prove it.

Maya led Avanti back towards the door, and they both slipped out behind another scientist. Once she showed all her evidence to Senior Agent Hale, they had to visit Director Grindstaff himself, bypassing Senior Agent Decker and proving his help in the scheme, too. She’d probably get a promotion, instead of another administrative slap on the hand.

But, the promotion wasn’t the goal. Until Apex was behind bars, she still had more work to do.

The drones stopped.

All the distant mechanical whirring paused, and doors slid down over the one way mirrors to the smaller experimentation rooms and training cells. The neon lights around the bottoms of the walls shifted from green to a deep red.

And the radar attached to Maya’s phone vibrated.

A Fighter had suddenly appeared nearby.

Ahead, with a yelp, Satoshi was flung from around the corner, tumbling against the wall. Maya pulled on Avanti’s arm with a white-knuckle grip. As he trembled and screamed at the top of his lungs, lightning snapped and crackled around his attacker’s hands before she plunged it into his heart.

His screams fell into limp gurgles. Satoshi’s blood pooled around Apex’s feet as she Maya and Avanti from down the hall, grinning.

“Did you really think an invisibility spell would hide you?” she chuckled. “Our cameras have heat sensors.”

Maya’s blood had frozen in her veins, but a fire burning inside kept her on the move. This was the moment she’d prepared for. This is what the plan was for.

She unzipped the duffel bag. Apex raised her hand, gathering shards of metal in the air. Maya reached to the bottom of the bag and yanked out a smoke grenade. The pin was tied to the bag itself, and pulled away with a snap.

They both dropped to the ground as a storm of metal shards exploded from Apex’s palms, ripping through the space above their heads. The smoke grenade went off with a hiss, filling the hallway. A shard plucked Maya’s hat from her head. Another grazed Avanti’s cloak; she heard the tear of fabric.

But they were alive. If they let Apex get close, that wouldn’t stay true for much longer.

Five more seconds until Overdrive was back.

In the blanket of smoke, Maya turned heel and ran. Their movements stirred the smoke, but Avanti preserved their invisibility as they rounded the corner to a hallway in both directions.

Three seconds.

Avanti sent two invisible clones in one direction, and Maya threw a decoy grenade to follow them, mimicking the deep thumps and scratches of footsteps.

Overdrive was back.

Maya chucked a flash grenade around the corner.

As soon as it went off with an ear-piercing bang, Apex appeared only a few feet away, eyes trained on the clones flickering in and out of invisibility. While they ran away, Maya and Avanti silently stalked in the other direction.

“Smoke and invisibility? Is that all?!” she cackled, firing another Steelstorm towards the clones.

It would only keep her occupied for a few seconds. Keeping the invisibility spell in the smoke and the clones to misdirect Apex entirely took away Avanti’s sense of vision, so Maya led her to the next side door, a room that should lead them back to the cargo elevator on the other side.

The illusions were necessary; misdirection was key. Being seen meant death by Overdrive in a flash. Being close meant death by Slam Buster, by a crushed neck from the super strength afterwards, by a Lightning Thrust, or by a knife.

The plan and all the equipment in the duffel bag aching her shoulder down wasn’t to fight; it was to run.

Behind them, as the Steelstorm spray ended, the decoy grenade made a final loud thud.

“Oh, no! I’m sorry, did someone trip? I know it’s hard to walk with metal in your back.”

Maya pulled Avanti close and ducked into the side door, entering a server room. Cool and frigid, servers hummed with life around them, lining the walls and the two shelves on either side of the central aisle.

If the plan was correct, Apex would think they were hiding invisible and wounded in the smoke. They had seconds until Overdrive was back. Maya let go of Avanti’s hand as she dispelled their invisibility and the clones, bringing her vision back. They had Seconds to pass through the server room.

The door ahead locked itself.

When she was only a foot away, it locked closed and the light above it turned red. In her haste, she couldn’t stop, and the duffel bag weighed her forward. She shoulder-checked the door with a loud bang.

And Apex appeared in front of the only door in and out of the server room.