The two teens went wandering through the concourse, looking for anyone who might be able to tell them where their “benefactor” may have run off to. They were, to put it mildly, very annoyed with him, and very annoyed that they hadn’t figured out his treachery earlier.

They knew that Mr. Johnson was on the tournament committee; from this, they assumed that more or less any guard or major employee of the tournament would be able to point them in the right direction, and so they were on the warpath for anyone who might fit that description.

It didn’t take them long to spot somebody: a tall, wide man with a military crew cut, wearing the mirrored sunglasses, Bluetooth earpiece and black suit that marked the event’s guards, leaning against the wall and watching the assorted audience members pass by.

“Careful, Ava. That guy’s got something,” Sam muttered to her as she walked up. “Play it cool.”

“Hello! We’re fighting under Mr. Johnson, with Lockheed Martin, and we were wondering if you knew where we could get a hold of him?” Ava asked, putting on a fake-cheery, ultra-polite demeanor. The guard looked up and then clicked something on his earpiece.

“Name?” the guard asked.

“Ava Hidalgo,” Ava said.

“Oh, shit, yeah! You’re the girl who took down Wolf,” the guard said, a glimmer of recognition coming over his face, partially hidden by his shades. “Let me get a selfie with you, and I’ll get a message through.” Ava rolled her eyes, and leaned in, putting on the biggest, fakest smile she could, as the guard fumbled for his phone and snapped a quick picture.

“That good?” Ava asked, returning to her previous stance several steps away from the guard.

“Yeah, my kids are gonna love that,” the guard said. “What do you want me to say?”

“Just tell him his fighters need to talk to him, and that it’s urgent, right-now important,” Ava said.

The guard clicked his Bluetooth earpiece back on.

“Hey, chief?” he muttered into it. “I’ve got one of the fighters, Hidalgo, Lockheed Martin, looking for her manager. You know where to find him?” A beat. “Alright, yeah, just tell him to meet her in her suite.” Another beat, and then he clicked his earpiece again. “He’ll be just a moment,” the guard finally said, looking Ava in the eyes and ignoring Sam, to the latter’s mild annoyance.

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In the suite, the two sat on the couch, twiddling their thumbs as they waited for Mr. Johnson.

“You know what, fuck it, let’s smoke something,” Sam said, fumbling through the bag. Ava raised an eyebrow.

“Thought that was my thing,” she said. Sam looked up at her, a little indignant.

“Hey, I like weed too, I’m just not stoned all the damn time,” he said. “Half the stuff you bought on that boat looks like alien space nonsense to me.” He fished out a pre-rolled half-gram joint and lit it, taking a puff and coughing.

“More your speed, huh?” Ava said, taking it from him and taking her own puff.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m used to,” Sam said. “I don’t even know how to roll the damn things, I just buy ‘em that way every now and then.” Ava did a double take.

“Wait, who’s your guy?” Ava asked.

“Luke was, actually,” Sam said. “Or, uh, kinda Scott, more accurately. I’d just give him like ten bucks, and he’d go get Luke to give him a joint about this size for it.”

“You’re kidding?” Ava asked. “Those fuckers were overcharging you.”

Sam burst out laughing.

“No bullshit?” he asked.

“No, like, seriously, I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but they were charging you out the ass,” she said, giggling, her eyes bloodshot red.

A knock on the door rang out, the same shave-and-a-haircut rhythm as the previous night, and this time, they knew exactly who it was. Ava steeled herself, and opened the door.

“Jesus, it smells like a fucking skunk in here,” Mr. Johnson said, wearing what appeared to be a luxury bathrobe.

“Come inside,” Ava said. “It’s important.”

“Is it so important that we can’t discuss it out here, instead of me having to face that stench full-on?” Mr. Johnson asked. Ava leaned in and whispered.

“Do you really want everyone else in this hallway learning about my new Code?” she teased, causing his mood to change. She leaned back, and he happily walked right into the suite as she closed the door behind him.

This would prove to be, as tacticians refer to it, a horrible mistake for him, as Ava’s fist caught him directly in the solar plexus and sent him gasping, followed by her circling directly behind him, clasping one hand firmly over his mouth, and placing her other arm around his neck. She leaned into the man’s ear.

“I know you’re up to something,” she whispered. “I don’t know specifically what you have going on, but I know that you did something that got our friends killed. So you’re going to talk, and you’re going to explain what you did, and why. And if you scream, or call for security, I’m going to break your neck, right here.”

God, I love this girl, Sam thought to himself as he watched, holding one of the liquor bottles from the bar by its neck as an improvised weapon that he prayed he wouldn’t have to use.

“Do you understand me?” Ava asked. Mr. Johnson frantically nodded. “If I take my hand away from your mouth, are you going to scream or call for backup?” A frantic sideways head shake. She released her hand, but kept the arm around his neck.

“I know you’re probably mad at me, and-“ he started.

“That’s a fucking understatement, right there,” Ava snarled, interrupting him. “If I didn’t want answers, you’d already be dead. Enough with the excuses and apologies. Talk or die.”

“Okay, fine, Jesus,” Mr. Johnson said. “The tournament is rigged. Not all the way, but we pick the champions. It’s based on whichever corporate donor puts the most money into it.”

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“Okay, so what does that have to do with Luke and Scott?” Ava asked. “Why did you order Konstantinov to kill them?”

“Let go of me and I’ll explain it,” Mr. Johnson said. “It’s a long story, and I really don’t think you want to spend an hour hunched over me ready to break my neck. I promise, I’m not going to call for backup.”

Ava released the death-grip of her arm around the rich man’s neck, and he stood up, patted himself off, and sat down.

“Thank you,” he said. “So, if you want the simplest and most blunt answer… you remember what I told you about how parasites evolve, correct?”

“Yep,” Ava said.

“Did your parasite evolve when Luke died?” Mr. Johnson asked.

“Actually, it did,” Ava said.

“You’re welcome,” Mr. Johnson said. Ava clenched her fist, ready to try and take his head off, but held herself back, barely.

“What the fuck do you mean, you’re welcome? You had our friend killed, you stupid son of a bitch!” Sam interjected, his face red with rage.

“The entire reason why you’re both here is because we want Konstantinov gone. He’s… a bit boring. His powers are that he can’t be harmed and that he can eat people in seconds. Not fun fight material,” Mr. Johnson explained. “On top of that, Rosneft hasn’t been putting their usual cut into the tournament to keep him here, and Lockheed’s the top donor now. The wrinkle is, though, Ava wasn’t going to be able to beat him on her own. That was the whole thing with the sparring match.”

“You arranged that?” Ava asked, in disbelief.

“Not as such,” Mr. Johnson said. “But I did send Konstantinov to the gift shop at the same time you would be down there, knowing that it was almost inevitably going to happen. I wanted to see how your Code interacted with his. Turns out, it didn’t.”

“So you called an audible to get me to evolve,” Ava said, putting the puzzle together. “And Luke was the sacrificial pawn to get me there.”

“Precisely,” Mr. Johnson said. “If we hadn’t needed a potential expendable, we wouldn’t have let you bring Luke in the first place. We didn’t know for sure if your power was gonna be enough to crack the Iron Russian, and if it wasn’t, we needed your parasite to evolve so it would.”

“What about Scott?” Ava asked.

“Scott? Oh, you mean the healer kid? Maxim has full permission to defend himself if he’s under threat. That wasn’t my order,” Mr. Johnson said, starting to walk out of the suite.

“Hold up. You don’t get to walk out yet. We have more questions,” Ava said. Mr. Johnson sighed and waved them along.

“Then come walk with me and ask,” he said. “You jackasses woke me up, so I’m going back to my room. If you can fit it in the walk back to the restricted area, I’ll answer it.”

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“So, if this is all hush-hush and nobody knows about it, how come everyone seems to know about it?” Ava asked as the three walked.

“What do you mean by that?” Mr. Johnson asked in return.

“General public seems to have no idea this is a thing, outside of a few scattered conspiracy theorists, but here’s a ton of rich people who most certainly do. What’s the deal?” Sam rephrased for her. Mr. Johnson stopped.

“That’s a short question with a long answer, and it ties into Maxim’s whole deal. Do you wanna know the long version, or the short version?” Mr. Johnson asked.

“Give us the long version,” Ava said, wanting to keep Mr. Johnson up and torment their friends’ indirect killer some more while she could.

“Alright, fine,” Mr. Johnson said, hanging a left into a café along the wall of the concourse and waving for them to sit down. “So, basically, you know how half of the world’s science since World War II came from the Nazis? Operation Paperclip, all that sort of thing?” he began, once they were seated and listening.

“Vaguely familiar,” Ava said. “Go on.”

“Well, you can add genetic engineering onto that. The parasites started life as an SS project towards the end of the war. The very first parasite hosts were Wehrmacht soldiers who were volunteered by their battallions,” Mr. Johnson explained.

“So I’ve got a Nazi Krang in my skull? Great. Fantastic,” Ava said, annoyed. Mr. Johnson lifted his hand up.

“Now, hold on. The Nazis actually didn’t really get very far with it, and were on the verge of abandoning the research when the war ended; it seemed like they were only managing to get weird powers out of people, not useful powers. The goal was to make a real-life Aryan superman, and they ended up with shit like a guy who could melt into a puddle,” Mr. Johnson explained. “When the Soviets took Berlin, they were actually the first ones to find all the documents about it, and about how to make the parasites reproduce in a lab. What’s more, they found a live parasite, which we refer to as Progenitor-RU.”

“And I’m guessing that’s what’s in Konstantinov’s head?” Ava asked.

“Not quite,” Mr. Johnson said. “Actually, as far as we know, Putin’s government still has Progenitor-RU, assuming it didn’t get incinerated when the Berlin Wall fell with everything else Soviet and sketchy. Maxim is… his own special experiment they did.”

“Go on,” Sam said.

“So, Maxim was your average everyday Soviet kid. We don’t actually know much about his life before about age ten, when the Soviet government took him in as a test subject, and frankly we’ve never asked and don’t want to know,” Mr. Johnson said. “First, they infected him with a direct descendant of Progenitor-RU, which gave him the Code of Steel. Then, they took a political prisoner from Kazakhstan who’d been infected with the Code of Absorb in the same round of experiments, shot him in the heart, and then surgically removed the parasite from his pineal gland and grafted it onto Maxim’s.”

“Huh. And I’m guessing it worked?” Ava asked.

“That… depends on what you want out of the guy. He became an absolute unstoppable killing machine, but it’s also caused him to be in constant pain. The dude’s essentially had a nonstop migraine since he was ten,” Mr. Johnson said. “Eventually, he turned into the Soviet Union’s method of dickwaving, because he was unreliable in an actual combat zone and had a habit of just going berserk and eating everything on two legs, and they put a lot of money into the earliest Parasite Tournaments to make sure that dick waved loud and proud. Berlin Wall fell, and he just ended up being the Russian Federation’s method of dickwaving, instead.”

“This is all kinda getting away from what we initially asked, isn’t it?” Ava asked.

“It is, and I’m sorry, but it’s important context,” Mr. Johnson said. “Back to what you were initially asking, there’s a lot of parasites in the world, and a lot of parasite hosts, but… out of all of them, there’s only a scattered few who ever realize anything’s weird. For most people, they get attacked by some weird bug, and they have a bad seizure, and then it just becomes another thing to start worrying about on their yearly checkup. Nobody ever thinks to really look into it, and if they do, we’ve made damn sure they’re not going to find anything concrete beyond a few conspiracy theorists talking about superheroes. However, the military-industrial complex, as you’ve hopefully noticed by now, is very, very aware of the parasites, and it’s almost an unavoidable subject if you’re high up in those circles or clued into the world of the uber-rich in any way; if you have a combat parasite, and you show it off to the world in any way, you will end up getting recruited or scouted by somebody.”

“So, I’m gonna be a soldier now?” Ava asked, annoyed by this.

“Not as such,” Mr. Johnson said. “More of an arms tech demo.”

“That’s so much better,” Ava said.

“See, for years, we were operating on trickles and drips with the parasites. It was locked up Soviet tech for ages, outside of us getting the occasional defector who’d bring back one that we could force to reproduce a few times before it withered and died. That’s the other reason Maxim kept winning: because we just flat-out couldn’t produce anything that was strong enough to kick his ass, even if we wanted to. A few years ago, though, we managed to get a fragment of Progenitor-RU and grow it into our own, which we call Progenitor-US. With good ol’ Uncle Sam’s cooperation, we’ve been letting out millions of the little bastards into every major American city, just praying we get something that can take him down,” Mr. Johnson explained. “And you’re our savior, Ava.”

Ava looked around to see if there were any cameras. No dice. It was 12:00 AM, and the employees of the café had long since left and gone to bed. The only witness, if she chose to do anything, was Sam.

Perfect, she thought to herself, and stood up, reaching out for a hug with a big, fake smile on her face. Mr. Johnson embraced her, smiling himself, under the assumption that she was accepting her duty. She pulled her arm back, manifested killing intent into it to form the chrome gauntlet, and plunged its blades into Mr. Johnson’s back, making him grunt loudly in pain and spit up blood onto her shoulder.

“I don’t save people who fuck with my friends,” Ava said. “You should have known that going in, if you knew me so goddamn well.” She withdrew the gauntlet, letting it fade into air as his body dropped and twitched slightly.

Sam looked at her, a smirk on his face, but his eyes wide as dinner plates.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here, right now, before they realize you did that,” he said, grabbing her by the hand and running like Hell for the elevator.