I made out like an absolute bandit.

Though none of the enemies had dropped so much as a single credit of loot, I did receive 10,000 credits for completing the mission. But that wasn’t what really mattered at the end of it.

Even though they were massively underleveled and severely weakened, each and every one of the snakes that I was responsible for taking down counted toward a large combined Kill Non-Sapient Augment Phase Point gain. I certainly hadn’t been actively keeping track, nor had I been trying to kill them, but the serum’s death side effect was still present and automatically assigned the kills to me as each of the injected soldiers fell. Between the various leveled versions of the soldiers that I had finished, I gained a whopping total of 2375 points.

Then there was the Crowdpleaser gain. The buildings on either side of us were tall and while not all of the windows could be opened, a cursory glance at the closest ones made it clear there were people practically pressing their noses to the glass. It wasn’t quite as much as the gain I had gotten from taking down the Augments, but I still received 1420 points from it. This one actually came with an achievement called Showman attached to it for completing a Mission Alert with over a hundred Sapient NPC onlookers.

And then even though it gave me only 200 more points, given just how quickly I went from scarfing down a Cuban sub to taking on a horde of snake-men, it was still a nice addition to see Powerleveler at the end of the list as I went through my gains.

Although I had just leveled, I was wholly unsurprised to find that the swarm of snake-men had given me more than enough experience to reach level 8. I already had an idea of which of my abilities I wanted to use, but knowing that it wasn’t going to be placed on the timer until I got home meant we still had some time to talk it over.

Personally, I was leaning toward using the Augmentation on Gravity Punch and crossing my fingers for an option that would give me a bit finer control over how much damage I doled out with it but Jon was curious to see what sort of extra effects Center of the Universe would have. He did admit that it probably wasn’t the best time to try experimenting with an ability that didn’t have as big of a damaging effect.

Since I wasn’t handing Hydramental over to the police, I didn’t receive any extra Phase Points just for knocking him out, which felt a little bit weird but after gaining 3995 points in a single swoop, it was hard to complain that much. Since no one could really confirm he was trying to attack me with how many of the Vipers his attacks took down, the arriving officers didn’t question me as I lifted his still knocked out form up and took off for the tallest building I could find.

Flying while carrying him was not easy. Apparently my Personal Gravity Laws didn’t make it easy to keep things, or people, that weren’t myself from being affected by the elements the higher into the air I went. Had I not been holding him as firmly as I was, I might have even dropped him by accident. Sure, I could have woken him up on the ground, but that just risked him trying to make a break for it or try to start up another fight and I needed to get him to hold still long enough that I could get at least some sort of answer.

“Dude, you are all over the subs right now,” Jon laughed in my ear as I set down on top of a building just slightly into Chelsea. “Like, not even just the Augment focused ones, there’s shots making it onto the more mainstream subs too.”

“I am? Damn people don’t waste any time, do they,” I said, unable to keep the smile off my face. I didn’t exactly drop Hydramental to the ground, but I wasn’t exactly careful either and I stepped over his body as I walked over to the lone door into the main structure. With a quick test, I discovered the door was locked and nodded to myself. Even if he could just burn the door down, it would at least give me a few seconds to react before he could try to run.

“It was that Launchpad and Earthbound Impact combo dude. Someone was filming in the building next to you and they pretty much got a clean shot of the entire thing from take off to smackdown, their words not mine, though they are pretty perfect,” Jon rattled off as I turned my attention back to Hydramental.

“That is certainly going to increase his reputation, even more so than the artificial boost provided from the Alert,” Angie chirped.

“Well damn… save that video, I want to see it later,” I said as I looked down at the still unconscious thorn in my side. “Hey Angie, how long would he stay knocked out if I didn’t use the injector?”

“If the recipient is not rendered dead, the KO debuff will last for a maximum time of 45 minutes. This was designed to allow for the… let’s say undisturbed… transport of them to holding facilities if they are Miscreant aligned.”

“I guess that makes as much sense as anything,” I said, kneeling down beside Hydramental's unconscious form as I materialized the injector. “Let’s just hope he can’t turn into fire and fly away. That would be annoying as hell.”

“Wait,” Jon said before I could use it. “Shouldn’t you like… tie him up or something?”

“Really? Aren’t you supposed to be the smart one here?” I asked as I leaned back. “Unless I can neutralize his powers, I’m pretty sure he can just duplicate and escape the bonds with one of his elements to attack, hell he still might do that. I only have one of these, if I have to knock him out again because he’s not cooperating, I’ll just leave him somewhere and he can deal with it. But I’m not hunting him down again after this. Shit, he honestly might not even have anything useful, but everything we have is leading back to his brother. There’s no way in hell it was a coincidence that we were both sent to this alert… Axio is up to something, I’m just missing a piece of the puzzle.”

“Sheesh, you’ve really put a lot of thought into this… do you actually think Axio is really up to something though? I know you’ve been scared of what he can do and everything going on with Sal is definitely interesting but I mean, how much is actually Axio messing with it all and not just doing his job?” Jon asked but I bit my tongue.

Nothing had necessarily changed where it came to my conversation with Axio and I still wasn’t ready to risk mentioning. Jon was already in much farther than I had initially intended to let him in, and if there was a second threat… well I’d have to just figure out what it was before it could become a threat. I shrugged as I turned my attention back down to Hydramental and injected him, then quickly backed away.

“Honestly, at the end of the day I’m not too sure, but the mobs I have to deal with have all been tied to this and he’s connected to it. It’s as good a place to start as any,” I said as I watched the debuff vanish and Hydramental’s health bar jumped back up to 50%.

He immediately snapped into a seated position, looking around his new environment until his gaze met mine and his eyes hardened.

“Ok bud, how about you keep yourself together and we just talk like two people,” I said with my hands held up. His eyes glazed over for a moment before he looked down and let out a long, pained sigh. “I’ve just got a few questions I want to ask… though I’m sure you might have one or two of your own… How about you go first.”

“How the fuck do you know about my brother?” He said immediately. He wasn’t necessarily aggressive, but I wouldn’t be calling him friendly either. It felt like there was a resignation to him as he slowly stood up.

“Remember those maps we got back on the train?” I asked and he nodded. I put my hands down slowly. “Yeah so one of the dens on my map sent me to a yacht up at the cruise terminal and I… uh… Well I met Giada amongst other things."

He shot me a look and I almost brought my hands right back up.

“Should you really be telling him all of this?” Jon asked but I ignored him.

“Was she always the… uh… shooty type?” I continued when Hydramental didn’t start splitting into duplicates. “Cause I kinda had to have her arrested in front of her son for pointing a gun at me… and having a whole bunch of those Vipers acting as a security detail.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Are you trying to get him to attack you!?”

“He’s gonna find out one way or another, better to just lay it out now,” I said quickly. “Just shut up for a bit, will you two?”

“Hey I didn’t say anything!” Angie complained.

“What the ever loving fuck are you up to?” Hydramental said, looking up toward one of the nodes in the Augmentation Array that floated miles above us.

“Huh? I’m trying to stop these bikers before they keep unleashing swarms of fucking snake-men bikers on my neighborhood, or did you not see the horde we just had to fight off? Everything I have discovered so far seems to point toward your brother,” I said and he looked over at me with a shake of his head.

“Get off your high horse, I’m not talking about you,” he said. “I’m talking about the fucker controlling all of this.”

“Ah yeah. Axio’s been doing a good job fucking with me too, I bet we could compare notes and be here all day,” I said and he rolled his eyes before he walked over toward the edge of the building. “Look, I can tell your brother’s a touchy subject, but as far as I can tell he’s either up to some shit or involved or who the hell knows. I don’t want to fight you again, so if this is something you don’t want to talk about then tell me to fuck off and I will. But Giada seemed to think he’s still around so I gotta know, is the Sal we’ve been fighting some clone of him or some shit?”

Hydramental leaned back before hopping up onto the ledge. He looked down briefly before he sat, letting his legs dangle as he looked toward Madison Square Garden in the distance.

“Or some shit…” he said after a few moments had passed. “That guy… Sal the Snake… he isn’t my brother. I don’t think he’s a clone necessarily either but I haven’t seen him outside of his snake form so I couldn’t say for sure. But I think the name just happens to be a coincidence. It’s gonna sound really dumb, and I couldn’t tell you what his powerset is actually called since you know, I didn’t know about the game back when he first got Augmented, but he’s like… a snake vampire.”

“A snake vampire? You’re kidding me right?”

“Not now, Angie,” I said to her quickly before I raised a brow at Hydramental and said out loud, “A snake vampire? You’re kidding me… right?”

“I mean, I doubt that’s his actual powerset name, but more or less, yeah. I didn’t actually know it when he first started off though. I just thought he could shapeshift into a Naga and had increased strength and speed when he showed it off to me. Then Chelsea had a bunch of these bikers show up. Sal swore up and down that he was gonna drive them out and he did… hell it only took him a week,” He said, his hand tapping at the ledge as he looked back over at me. “I was a dude just finishing up high school… I thought he was a hero… y’know?”

“What happened?” I asked, trying to push him forward just enough without putting him back on the defensive.

“I followed him out one night the week I was going to graduate. I thought he’d been hiding everything from me cause I was still in school but I… I don’t know... I wanted to see how he fought cause he was always so cagey about it. Maybe I’m an idiot, I don’t know, but he said he didn’t want to be famous, he just wanted to help people and keep our neighborhood and his family safe. He kept himself out of the news, kept people from knowing about what he did…”

“Maybe not an idiot… but maybe just a bit naive,” I said and he let out a wry laugh. “It’s family, people tend to have blind spots where it comes to family.”

“Heh… but see, I barely said anything and you figured it out. It took me seeing him biting one of the bikers and seeing him burst like an overfilled water balloon to realize what he had been up to…” He explained and I noticed him shudder. There was a bit of a nip in the air with fall in full swing and being up on top of a building certainly wasn’t helping, but something told me that wasn’t what had caused it. “It wasn’t like they were fighting and he was trying to defeat them either, I would have at least been able to understand that given how brutal the job can be. Even back then I knew that, I had watched more than enough Augment fights online. But they were like, lining up and waiting for him to bite them. None of them even flinched when their friends blew up right next to them... He had vats all around the room with these half grown bikers hanging in this weird fluid and he was… I don’t know… I guess experimenting on them? Most of the ones I saw him bite died immediately but a few of them… I saw a few of them change into snakes themselves… at least for a few seconds before they just dissolved into nothing like those guys back on the street did.”

“Into snake-men augments… Which is why you called him a snake vampire… okay that at least makes a little bit of sense,” I said and leaned back against the ledge. “Was that before or after the picture he keeps in his office?”

“Picture?” He asked, his head turning and expression softening ever so slightly. “What picture? What office?”

“It was back on the yacht, he had an office with a whole bunch of pics of you two growing up. There was one of him in his mask and you were practically glaring at him in it,” I explained.

“Fucker kept it all this time…” Hydramental muttered almost low enough that I might have missed if I hadn’t been specifically paying attention to him. “It was the day after. He missed my grad party and came home telling our parents he was off stopping some crime ring. Had I not just followed him the night before I probably would have just believed him. He said he wanted to take a pic to at least celebrate my graduation and, well that…”

I let out a sigh as I pushed off from the ledge. It still hadn’t quite explained anything and I wasn’t even sure where this was getting me either.

“If that was 3 years ago, what the hell has he been up to all this time? I mean, I’m not blind, these bikers haven’t been running around Hell’s Kitchen for the last 3 years, I feel like I would have seen that all over the news,” I said and scratched at the back of my head. Hydramental just shook his head as he turned and hopped back to his feet and off the ledge.

“That’s the thing. Believe it or not, after we took that pic he spent the whole night trying to tell me and our family about all the good he was doing. He kept saying his mentor had shown him some amazing things he could do with his abilities… he never said who the dude was, but just insisted that it was going to revolutionize the world,” Hydramental explained as his shoulders dropped. “And then a few days later he just vanished. Giada and little Ozzy too. My folks said he left a note but it was just so sudden and random... They refused to put out a police alert because 'Sal's an Augment, he can take care of himself and his family...' but I was never able to understand why they were just so... dismissive."

“Well that’s not suspicious at all,” Jon murmured and I couldn’t help but agree. I was just about to respond when Hydramental looked over at me and took a few steps.

“When I first woke up with my augmentation, after my P.A.I. got me settled in, Axio slowed things down and told me some things… said they were things I shouldn’t repeat out loud but the short of it was that I had a chance to confront my brother if I just got my hands on some key… he wasn’t allowed to just give it to me because of the rules of the game, but if I just followed along, I’d get the chance. But that's the thing... I’ve cleared out pretty much every one of the dens on that fucking map I got, and I haven’t found a fucking thing…”

Right there on the edge of my vision, almost aggressively, my Snake Key mission shook, practically demanding my attention.

“Should I just put the cards on the table?” I asked internally.

“Can he take the key from you by force?” Jon asked and then thought about it for a moment before changing his question. "Angie? Can it be taken by force?

“Only if he renders Loophole unconscious or dead. Or I suppose if he had an item with the Pickpocket feature, but those are generally on gloves and I don't think he's wearing gloves. Loophole could have looted him while he was unconscious but he has, ugh, ethics.”

“Well you’ve already come this far, if he goes to make a move just make it vanish, but I think he’s probably not going to attack you,” Jon said, once again jumping past Angie’s superfluous details.

“I uh… So I think I may have been the one to collect that,” I said and materialized it in my hand. The ornate key felt incredibly out of place, and the rubies that represented the snake’s eyes glinted with the sun still hanging high overhead. Hydramental’s eyes widened briefly before they hardened and he stepped forward again. I immediately pulled it back into my inventory. “I found it on the train after you left and it gave me a mission… After everything I've had to deal with since finding it... well I’m going to see it through to the end.”

“That’s my mission,” he said, his jaw set as his blue and yellow clones separated from his body.

“Pull yourself together, I’m not going to fight you again,” I said, letting my own tone match his. “Believe it or not, I agree with you, Axio’s been up to something since all of this bullshit started. I’m not going to hand this key off to you, honestly given all the threats tossed our way every night I’d be willing to bet I’d get some bullshit thrown my way if I did hand it off to you. But, if you can just chill the fuck out, I’m offering you the chance to finish this with me. If it is related to your brother, you at least deserve that much.”

All three sets of his eyes glazed over and there was another gust of wind that passed by us. Electricity even seemed to dance between the fingers of his yellow form for a moment before it stopped and his forms all remerged together. The glaze vanished and he shook his head.

“If that key does lead to my brother, then when we find him I'm asking you to back off and let me handle him on my own. That’s the only way I’m going to ‘finish this with you.’”

“Does that count as chilling the fuck out?” Angie asked and Jon laughed.

“I think anything that’s not him throwing the elements at Loophole counts.”

“Fine,” I said and extended a hand out toward Hydramental, simultaneously sending him a friend invite. He stepped forward and grabbed my hand as he accepted the invite, his expression still hard. With that done I took a step backwards, activating my Personal Gravity Laws as I started to lift off from the roof. “Now, I’ll shoot you a message when I figure out where the hell this key is taking me and you can meet me there, sound good?”

“Wait where the fuck are you going? Aren't you gonna at least drop me back off on the ground?” He asked as he took a few steps forward. I held up a hand and nodded toward the door on the far side of the roof.

“Dude, you threw a shit ton of fire, ice, and lightning at me not even a half hour ago. Not to mention that flying you up here when you were unconscious was hard enough as it was. Take the stairs and we can call it even,” I said, and then before he could respond, I took off, heading back toward home. I did still have a level to finalize after all.