"The newest version is v7, but we're playing v3. It's much more fun," Marcus explained.

"That's just your opinion," Leo chimed in.

"No, it's factual," Marcus responded, a hint of defensiveness in his voice. He looked around the table for support, but found none. "Guys? It's factual, right?"

"Sure," Kenji said, his voice a flat, noncommittal rumble.

"If it makes you happy," Anya whispered.

Marcus's lips thinned. "Fine. Then I should tell you which class everyone is playing and where we are in our campaign. Glitch is a Data Witch, Ursa Major is a Glitchblade, Goro is a Synth-Junkie, and Kitsune is a Memewarrior. I'm the Game Master, so I don't play. I think it's best if you choose from the remaining classes for some interesting synergy, but it's okay if you choose one that's already been taken. Your choice. Oh, and we started playing a few months ago, when—" He paused as he rubbed the back of his head. "When we were not so knowledgeable about the game, so we went with our avatars."

Synth considered the options. The available classes were Street Prophet and Lootmancer. He chose the Street Prophet. It was a support class, a role that would allow him to observe and help. He quickly rolled for his stats, the data coalescing in his mind, and sent the digital sheet to Kodiak.

"Hmmm. An interesting choice," Kodiak said, rubbing his bear chin.

"What did you choose?" Leo asked, leaning over to look at Glitchy's sheet. "Street Prophet?! That's so lame. All they do is stand around chanting binary code to buff people. Blah."

"I think it's a good choice," Anya whispered, coming to his defense.

Leo just waved a dismissive paw and leaned back in his chair.

"Before we begin," Kodiak started, his voice a low, serious rumble. "Can you answer one question?"

Everyone's gaze snapped to Glitchy.

"Ask away," he responded.

It was Reina who spoke, her voice a sharp, pointed blade. "Did you win the tournament?"

Kodiak glanced at her, a silent warning in his bear-like eyes, but he didn't intervene.

Synth weighed his options: lie, a simple, logical act of self-preservation, or tell the truth, an act of trust. He had been welcomed into their circle and would show them the same good faith.

He glanced at Anya, wondering if she had told them that he had made it to the finale.

"Yes," he said, his voice a quiet, simple statement of fact. "I did."

The room erupted.

"YES! I KNEW IT!" Leo's teddy bear avatar slammed both paws on the table, the holographic stars rippling violently. "PAY UP, KITSUNE! 100 CREDS, RIGHT NOW!"

Reina's fox avatar let out a low, frustrated growl, its nine tails twitching with irritation. A private message, a simple credit transfer, pinged in Leo's interface. "Don't spend it all on skins," she muttered.

"Congratulations, Glitchy," Anya whispered, her rabbit ears perking up slightly.

Kenji's hulking frog avatar gave a slow, deliberate nod. "A significant victory," Goro rumbled, his voice a sound of pure, pragmatic respect.

"Dude, what was the grand prize?" Leo asked, leaning so far forward he nearly fell out of his chair, his earlier bravado replaced by genuine, wide-eyed curiosity.

"A cyberdeck," Synth stated, his synthesized voice flat, betraying no excitement.

"A deck?" Reina's voice was sharp, cutting. "They don't hand out legendary-tier prizes for nothing. What are the specs?"

"It's a pre-Collapse military prototype," Synth explained calmly, as if reading from a technical manual. "Model designation: Aegis X-9. It has a quantum processing core, self-rewriting encryption, and an experimental AI co-processor that adapts to hostile intrusions by consuming and integrating their code."

A stunned silence fell over the table. Leo's jaw dropped, his fluffy teddy bear face a mask of pure, unadulterated awe. Anya's rabbit avatar seemed to shrink in on itself, her ears drooping with a new, profound anxiety. Even Kenji's stoic frog avatar seemed to lean forward slightly, a flicker of something like shock in its unblinking eyes.

Reina, however, just stared at him, her vulpine eyes narrowed, analytical, and deeply, profoundly suspicious.

"How about you?" Synth asked, deflecting the sudden, heavy attention. "How was the tournament for everyone?"

"An interesting experience," Marcus said, his voice frayed at the edges.

"He didn't pass stage one," Leo blurted out, finally snapping out of his stupor. "He's still brooding about it."

"Hey! It's not my fault I got attacked by a horde of scrappers!" Marcus protested.

"It's your fault for choosing to go into one of their nests unprepared," Reina shot back.

"Yeah, you got me there," Marcus said, his voice a low, defeated rumble.

"I was eliminated in stage one, too," Kenji grumbled. "But at least it was a glorious defeat."

"How did you get defeated?" Glitchy asked.

"I was chasing a player who seemed to follow a lead somehow. Their demeanor was very calm, which got my attention. I followed them and observed their skills, which proved to be an opportunity. After they defeated a group of three scrappers, they used too many resources and entered a cooldown, so I took my chance and attacked them with my bow. I almost had them, but they managed to defeat me at the last moment as their cooldown ended. It was an honor to fight against such a skilled strider."

Synth connected the dots. A flicker of data, a half-remembered combat log from the tournament, surfaced in his mind: an archer, precise and deadly. The near-defeat. That was Goro.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

"I was trying to get a key fragment from the back of a huge data leech," Leo said, his voice full of a dramatic, self-important sigh. "I almost had it, but the damn thing has some kind of aura that turned me into mush."

"I was eliminated in stage two," Reina grumbled, her voice still bitter. "I took a key that turned out to be a fake. And the second time I didn't make it." Synth remembered. Ray had made a copy of one of the keys so that he could take one of the originals. "If I could get my hands on the piece of shit who made that fake key…"

Bad luck, I guess, Synth thought.

"Glitch made it to the finale," Marcus said, his voice full of a quiet, paternal pride. "But she was eliminated by one skilled player."

A private message pinged in Synth's interface. It was from Anya.

I hope you're not mad at me for stealing that key fragment. And I didn't tell them you made it to the finale. They just… expected that you did.

Synth looked at her small, anxious rabbit avatar, then back at the rest of his new and chaotic…peers. He sent a single, simple message back.

It's okay.

"She even told us she believed it was a rogue AI," Kodiak rumbled, his massive bear avatar leaning forward, his gaze intense. "That means you defeated it. How was the fight?"

Anya's rabbit avatar flinched at the memory, her ears drooping. Leo leaned in, his eyes wide with anticipation. Reina's nine tails swished slowly, her expression a mask of cool, analytical skepticism.

Synth's stick-figure form remained perfectly still. He accessed the memory of the final battle, then began to carefully, methodically, construct the lie.

"They were… efficient," Synth began, his synthesized voice flat. "Their code was unlike anything I had ever encountered. They were masters of improvisation, immediately learning from my movements and adapting their strategies in real-time. It was like fighting a digital god."

He described the duel, painting a picture of a desperate, high-stakes battle of wits and reflexes. He told them how they had systematically dismantled his defenses, their attacks a blur of silver light and flawless code. He described how he had been disarmed, his avatar heavily damaged, bleeding data from a dozen different wounds.

"I was losing," Synth stated, the simple admission hanging in the air. "Their technique was perfect. Logically, I should have been eliminated."

"So what happened?" Leo blurted out, unable to contain himself. "How did you win?"

"They made a single, infinitesimal error," Synth explained, the lie now flowing smoothly. "In their final attack sequence, they over-calculated the trajectory by a margin of 0.4 percent. It was a flaw so small, no normal system would have ever detected it. But it created a single-nanosecond opening in its defense matrix."

He paused, letting the fabricated drama build. "I exploited that opening and injected a recursive logic bomb directly into its core programming. A simple, elegant piece of code designed to force an infinite, paradoxical loop."

Anya's ears twitched, her technical mind instantly grasping the concept. Reina's eyes narrowed further, a flicker of something—begrudging respect, or perhaps deeper suspicion—in their depths.

"Their system couldn't process the paradox," Synth concluded. "Which caused a catastrophic system failure. That's when I struck by plunging my dagger through their chest. A moment later their avatar was nothing but a shower of dissolving data. "

Leo let out a low whistle. "Whoa. You mind-tricked it into killing itself. That's… that's badass."

Kenji grunted in approval. "To find a weakness in a perfect defense… that is true skill."

"Not killing themselves, just crashing their connection to the server," Synth corrected.

"That doesn't make it any less impressive. Congratulations on the win," Kodiak added.

Only Reina remained silent, her nine silver tails now perfectly still, her gaze fixed on Synth's simple, unreadable, two-dimensional face.

Finally, Kodiak's voice, deep and resonant, rumbled from his massive black bear avatar, breaking the quiet. He cleared his throat, the sound a low, authoritative bass note that drew all eyes to him. The light from the starfield table reflected in his dark, patient eyes, making them glitter like a distant, knowing galaxy.

"Alright," Kodiak began, his gaze moving slowly around the table, lingering for a moment on Synth. "For the benefit of our newest player, a quick recap of what we did so far. We've just completed Act One of our campaign: 'Neon, Lies, & Packet Fries.'"

He leaned forward, his massive paws resting on the edge of the starfield, the holographic nebulae swirling around them. "The team was hired to investigate a series of data corruptions plaguing the Chromed Gutter district. Turned out to be the work of a rogue AI calling itself GRANDMAMA.EXE. We tracked it to a hidden server farm run by a cyber-cult, The Binary Choir, who were worshipping the damn thing. Act One concluded with us… liberating the AI."

Leo snorted, a puff of pixelated air. "You mean we stole it."

"We rescued it from a life of unwanted deification," Reina corrected, her voice dry as dust, not looking up from her weapon. The polished silver of her revolver caught the starlight, a cold, clean line in the dim room.

"Whatever you want to call it," Kodiak continued, a hint of amusement in his rumble, "the AI is now housed in a piece of our gear, which made you all fugitives from the cult that wants their god back. And as if things couldn't get worse, every major corp in the city wants the tech. Your job is to figure out what to do with it."

He clapped his paws together, the sound a solid, final thud that seemed to make the very air in the room vibrate. "Which brings us to Act Two."

The virtual basement flickered, the code of the simulation stuttering for a moment before resolving into a new space: their safe house. It was a digital reconstruction of their real-world apartment, but idealized and amplified. A sprawling virtual basement filled with a chaotic but comfortable collection of salvaged tech and personal touches. Wires, thick as pythons, snaked across the floor, connecting a half-dozen mismatched, humming server towers that blinked with a steady, reassuring light. Each member had carved out their own territory. In one corner, a massive, worn punching bag, shaped like a grotesque glitch-beetle, hung from a steel beam. Goro's hulking frog avatar was methodically, rhythmically, punching it, the impacts landing with a satisfying, bassy thud. In another corner, a massive, plushy beanbag chair, the color of a soft, digital sunrise, was Glitch's domain; her small rabbit avatar was already curled up in its center, a translucent data-slate floating before her. For Ursa Major, a massive, wall-mounted flat-screen TV displayed the chaotic, vibrant splash screen of a popular combat game, a collection of mismatched, brightly colored controllers scattered on the floor before it. And for Kitsune, a sleek, chrome-plated mannequin stood riddled with a thousand tiny, precise holes, a testament to countless hours of virtual target practice. The air here was thick with the scent of digital rain, the distant, chaotic sound of illegal drone races, and the faint, comforting aroma of old, overheated electronics. A single, bare bulb overhead buzzed, casting a sickly, yellow light that made the shadows in the corners seem deeper, more menacing, yet it was, for them, the light of home.

"You're laying low," Kodiak narrated, his voice painting the scene, his own avatar now gone, a disembodied god setting the stage. "The creds are running dry. The pressure is on. And then… you get a message."

A single, encrypted data packet materialized in the center of the table, pulsing with a soft, anonymous light. Reina's avatar was on it in an instant, her silver tails swishing as she ran a dozen different security scans, her vulpine face a mask of intense concentration.

"It's clean," she announced, a note of surprise in her voice. "From an info-broker. A big one."

The packet opened, projecting a holographic message into the air. A high-level executive from Soylent Technologies was looking to acquire a "unique piece of software." The pay was astronomical. The meet was at a neutral, high-end virtual sushi bar in the Adscape.

Leo's teddy bear avatar shot to its feet, his chair scraping loudly against the virtual floor. "Yes! Finally! I'm so tired of being broke. I can finally buy the Tatsu-Tearer 8.0!"

"Sit down, Major," Reina snapped, her voice a whip-crack, her vulpine eyes narrowed to slits. "It's a trap."

"How do you know it's a trap?" Leo whined, slumping back into his seat, his earlier excitement deflating like a punctured balloon.

"Because it's too easy," she shot back, her tone laced with a weary cynicism that felt older than her avatar's years. "A high-level corpo exec doesn't reach out to a crew of back-alley nobodies through an info-broker unless he's setting a trap. I want to run a full background check on this suit and his entire corporate history before we even think about responding."

Kenji's hulking frog avatar grunted, a low, thoughtful sound that seemed to come from deep within his chest. "She's right, it's a risk." He paused, his gaze moving from Reina's tense, coiled form to Leo's dejected slump. "But we can't hide in here forever. We need the resources." He looked at Reina, then at Leo, his voice a steady, pragmatic anchor. "We go. But we go prepared. Full tactical with as many as possible escape routes planned so there are no surprises."

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