Hiro reached Rena and Valeria’s hideout. Much to his surprise, Demon Hachiko took a guard position outside the building, the dog alert as ever as he scanned the streets.

“I was wondering how you were going to react,” he told Hachi.

The demon dog’s tail wagged a few times and stopped.

“I’ll be back.” Hiro jumped to a fire escape and headed in. He quietly stepped into their hallway and knocked to the beat of We Will Rock You.

First, the sound of furniture shifting. Then locks clicking.

“About freaking time,” Valeria said as she opened the door, a little smirk on her face. She tapped an invisible watch on her wrist.

“I said I’d be here, didn’t I?”

“Heh, you did say that.”

Hiro entered to find Rena seated on the kitchen countertop flipping through a magazine. Juan was on the couch, chiseling a small piece of wood with a knife. Valeria, who now had her hair braided, looked Hiro over. “You look like you’ve gotten into some shit.”

“You could say that,” he told her.

“And you reek.”

“That figures.”

“And you could use new clothes.”

“I have some in my fallout shelter, but I thought I’d come here first.”

“Yo, Hiro,” Juan said as he looked up at him. “What up, amigo?”

Rena hopped off the kitchen countertop. She plopped down onto one of the sofas and brought her knees to her chest. “So, how did it go?”

“God, did it go,” Hiro said. “I don’t even know where to start. What about you all? Tell me what you all did first?”

“We asked you first,” Valeria said as she took a bite from a Survivor Tender.

“What, no pigeon?” Hiro asked.

“We ate earlier,” Juan told him. “I made something like fajitas.”

“Something like that,” Valeria said skeptically. “Hiro, for real, though. What’s up?”

“Well, you all saw the Spectators, so we can loop back to them later. Um, I was ambushed by Mercury, so that sucked. I found a merchant who only takes cash and has social media themed skills, or something. She’ll be available in the Second Interim. Ummm, I took part in a Doom Sample Sale, and now I have access to Doom System enemy descriptions for higher level bosses. Seems to work on new encounters with Remnants, Hunters, and Sentries.”

“More proof that the system is hallucinating,” Valeria said. “We’re getting monster descriptions as well.”

“There’s more to it than that,” Hiro told her. “I think the solution to the fights, if there could be something like that, are in the descriptions.”

She held his gaze for a moment and finally nodded. “I didn’t think of that.”

“We did a Sample too,” Rena told Hiro.

“I took part in two, and they were wildly different from one another. The first was with a Survivor named Samuel. He’s Australian. He should be meeting us at some point,” Hiro said, skipping over the part about the two of them being marked. “The second one was less than thirty minutes ago. Before that, um, another merchant, I explored Central Park, and…” He locked eyes with Valeria. “Took care of the Bunny Triplets.”

“You did?”

Hiro nodded. “But I should have waited.” He slowly removed the fuzzy pink shield off his backpack, the grip of which twisted up his arm. For a moment, it felt like it was breathing, the fabric warm against his bare arms, which had a few strips of duct tape still on them.

“I was going to ask about the shield and the duct tape,” Valeria said, “But I’m guessing you’ll tell us. And what do you mean you should have waited?”

“The shield belonged to a Survivor named Bianca, a teenager. I teamed up with her in Central Park. She was…” Hiro thought of how to describe her. “Ambitious. She had me convinced we could take the Bunnies and we did, but at the cost of her life.”

“Hit them with Truck-Kun?” Valeria asked.

“It was fucked.”

“Anything else?” Valeria asked. “Learn anything?”

“I got a demonic shiba inu. Hachi’s outside right now, I think.”

“Come again,” Rena said, her eyes bulging slightly.

“Just don’t try to pet him. Hachi seems to follow me around and attack anything that he encounters. That’s about it.”

“Will he attack us?” Rena asked.

“I’m going to assume no.”

“Noted,” Valeria said. “Anything else?”

Hiro’s voice lowered. “The Doom System took one of my powers.”

“It did what?” Valeria asked.

“One that I was able to use in a loophole sort of way.” He explained how he had figured out how to cheat with {Sacra Limina}. “It also spoke to me.”

He recalled the message and how strangely it had read:

Juan stopped whittling. “It spoke to you?”

“I was pissed off about bodies. Why don’t they disappear like everything else? After Bianca died, I didn’t want to just leave her there, so I took her back to bury her in Central Park in the catacombs there.”

“Catacombs?” Rena asked.

“The Doom System also seems to be making bonus areas that Survivors can tackle, but that’s the only one I’ve encountered. Speaking of which, did you all see a huge skeletal crocodile? I’m talking kaiju-sized.”

Valeria linked a few times. “So much to unpack there. But go back to the part where the Doom System spoke to you.”

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“It punished me for asking it to stop leaving bodies behind by summoning a Revenant for me to fight. If it’s going to treat us like some sort of sick game show contestants, and it’s going to pit us against each other,” Hiro said, thinking of the Butcher’s Mark, “then the least it can do is remove the bodies after they have fallen. I suppose that would create an issue with Stolen Valor, but I’m not here to get into that. I don’t really care how it works itself out.”

“I feel that, amigo. But if it did get rid of the bodies, I wouldn’t have been able to bury my brother and my sister,” Juan said.

“I didn’t really consider that part,” Hiro admitted. “At the time, I was just left with this sixteen-year-old girl’s body and I was pissed about that. Anyway. What’s done is done. I just wish I hadn’t tackled the bunnies with just one other person. I got cocky.”

“It happens,” Juan said with a grunt.

“And the Doom System was not happy that I spoke directly to it. The system seemed almost indignant. I don’t know how to describe it other than that.”

“Did you write down what it said?” Rena asked.

“With what? I don’t have anything to write with at the moment. But the text was weird, written in an abbreviated way. It was something about the world always being available at my fingertips, making me an anomaly in the history of the planet. To remember that.”

“Huh,” was all Valeria said upon hearing this. “Cryptic, juvenile, a little batshit. Checks out.”

“But if we’re going to do this right, if there is a right way to do this, we have to be better. And by we I mean myself.” Hiro shook his head. “Anyway. If you ever want to say something to the Doom System, like say something directly,” he told them, “you know how to do it. But be careful.” Hiro finally sat on an ottoman. “What about you all?”

“Well, there was the Sample Sale,” Rena said. “That was something else. We fought a monster that was like half-bat, half-dragon. Juan saved the day with that one in his metal form.”

“I just let it beat the shit out of me while Val sniped it and Rena finally moved in close once it was low on health to torch the fucker,” Juan said.

“And the rewards were what you would’ve expected, sort of making fun of us in some ways,” Rena said, “but still useful. Like me. I’m Jewish. If I’m the first to come to a description, the Doom System usually frames it in some way that is either Zionist, or anti-Zionist, like stereotypes. For the Sample Sale, it gave me an explosive Israeli pager.”

Hiro was well aware of the way the Doom System seemed to incorporate Japan into many of the things it told him. It didn’t happen with every description, but it was quite often.

“And it gave Juan a power known as El Coquí’s Curse which, well, you should explain it,” Valeria told Juan.

“Coquí are little frogs in Puerto Rico. There are so many of them, and they are small. Like the size of a penny. It’s a Roulette Skill, but basically, it allows me to cover an enemy in the frogs and they devour it. I tried it.”

“That was certainly disturbing,” Rena said.

“They ate one of those horned tigers. Stripped it to the bone.”

“And you?” Hiro asked Valeria.

“It gave me Healies.”

“Healies?”

She pointed at her tennis shoes. “I can kick them back and skate up walls and shit.”

“It’s really cool,” Juan said. “I wish they fit me.”

“That sounds useful,” Hiro said. “I got a One Hit Wonder that’s not useful in the least bit.”

“Yeah?” Valeria asked.

“{Thoughts and Prayers.}”

She snorted. “Seriously?”

“It said to cast it at the start of each battle. So I will. I haven’t really tried it out yet, but it doesn’t seem like it has a big chance of working. Just a hunch.”

Valeria slowly shook her head. “It just leads me to believe, yet again, that the Doom System is some sort of multiverse AI that has gone off the rails. Have you ever heard of Dead Internet Theory?”

“No,” Hiro said.

“It’s a fringe conspiracy theory, or it was, that basically argued that human-generated activity on the Internet was on the decline while bots and fake users had truly taken over. Later, it played into AI-generated content, which created what’s known as an ‘erosion of authenticity’ because social media recommendation engines, content filtering, marketing, all of it could be skewed. Now. Imagine you are training a system on all of this skewed information.”

“Okay,” Hiro told her as he looked at Juan, who had gone back to whittling away at the small figurine he was creating. For her part, Rena poured a glass of water from one of the jugs and drank it.

“That system has metaphysical powers, capable of entirely modifying not only the space time continuum, but the very nature of what we consider reality, things like physics, laws of nature. What I’m saying is that this is just the start. It’s only going to get worse, and it’s going to mock us, help us, hurt us, and do whatever it can to entertain us, because the Doom System thinks that’s what we want. It said that from the beginning. It thinks humans want competition, they want to be entertained. And how, with all of the data that humanity could feed it, how could it not come to that conclusion?”

“I don’t know,” Hiro finally said.

She let out a big huff. “I don’t either. But once those Spectators join the fray, I think it’s going to get a lot more difficult, and chaotic. Why? Because the competition is heating up as we move to the moment that the gates open again. Notice that the Hunters have stayed in their general vicinity, they haven’t actually hunted us? I believe something like that changes.”

“That’s why I was planning on resting. I haven’t rested.”

“You haven’t rested since we last met?” Valeria asked. “That was a while ago.”

“Have you guys encountered energy drinks yet?”

“We ran to a merchant selling those,” Rena said.

“Well, I took one that sort of put me to sleep briefly, but it made me wake up feeling like crap.” Hiro didn’t yawn to illustrate his point, but he wanted to. “So I was planning to rest through the start of the Spectators entering into the fight, or game, or whatever this is.”

“That might not be a bad idea.” Juan put down the figurine and checked his phone. “So we have about two hours then to do anything we were meaning to do before the Spectators come.”

“What are you thinking?” Valeria asked him.

“Didn’t you say the Statue of Liberty attacked you?”

“You can’t be serious,” Valeria told Juan.

He gestured to Rena. “She has explosives. Maybe we could take the Staten Island Ferry out there—”

“I believe the Statue would come to us if we wanted her to,” Valeria said.

“We can also look for another Doom Sample Sale,” Hiro said. “But I don’t know. The last one I did had me face off against my ex-girlfriend, only her body was fused to a bear. So, maybe not. Maybe we don’t want to do something like that.”

“New York is massive,” Valeria said, “and we have only explored certain areas. We could go toward the Trade Center? That’s not far from here. You were planning to sleep in your fallout shelter, right?”

“In a perfect world I would head back to Billionaire’s Row,” Hiro told her, “and get into one of those condos on the eightieth floor or some shit. It felt pretty secure being that high up. But it’s not easy getting up there. And my fallout shelter seems secure.”

“It does seem like it would be a good place to watch it all go down,” Juan said, “but I’m definitely not going to take the stairs to the top. That would be brutal.”

“The looting is good in Billionaire’s Row. I could try to {Bounce} you up there. I carried Bianca’s body to Central Park doing that.”

“And I could get you up there with my Healies,” Valeria told Rena.

“You would probably want to test that first, right?”

“Of course,” Valeria told her. “We have two hours. We could get there in two hours without heading down to the subway system.”

“I don’t know,” Rena said. “It seems like we might be stuck up there if things are really going crazy. It would probably be better if we stay here in this area, near our base. It’s close to the gate, too. What do you think, Hiro?”

He locked eyes with Juan, and in that moment, both of them knew what needed to happen next. “Are you going to say it, or should I?” Hiro asked.

Juan’s demeanor changed. “The Lady in the Yellow Raincoat.”

Rena turned to him. “We talked about that.”

“You talked about it, to me. I never said shit.”

“We don’t know what actually killing another Survivor will do. We know about Stolen Valor, but actually killing someone, like hunting them?”

“I’ve already done it,” Valeria reminded Rena. “Nothing happened to me. If what you’re really saying is you don’t want to go hunting her down with us, I get that. You could stay here.”

Rena hesitated. “I don’t want to be dead weight.”

“You aren’t dead weight. You’ll be safe here, and we can take the next two hours to try to deal with her.”

“But we need Rena for the Statue of Liberty,” Juan said.

Valeria smirked at him. “We won’t be able to take her down. And if we’re going out there now, we’re doing it for revenge and a little extra Soul Essence. We won’t be able to get more skills working together, but we can get more followers. So the raincoat lady. Let’s get the bitch.”

“I’ll come with you all,” Rena said.

“Hell yeah, you will,” Juan stood and let out a deep breath. “The raincoat lady it is.” He grabbed the figurine he had been chiseling and shoved it in his pocket. “Let’s do it. It’s good to catch up and all, but for all we know, the Doom System is about to seriously fuck us by releasing the Spectators, and I’d like to deal with the lady that killed my brother before it does.”