More than Human [SciFi LitRPG]

Max dreamed. Deafening booms that he recognized as Chthonic speech crashed down upon his head again. He found himself as one drone of a Mi-Go collective. They were all strangely cooperative, unlike their cannibalistic nature from his earlier dreams. They worked together, laying down string after string of complex networks made of KITAEV Materials (Quantum Spin Liquids).

Max recognized the formatted metamaterial from his Nano-Crafting courses. It enabled high-temperature superconductivity because the electrons had a phased superposition that negated their natural resistance.

The Mi-Go's tiny thought process hummed in synchrony with its peers. Its neighbor rolled over, defunct and depleted from overwork. The Mi-Go ate and took the materials and skills of its cousin into itself. It shook as its carapace split when its core grew. Extra appendages sprouted. The Mi-Go flexed, sensing more of the world around it.

The last atoms were accreted and placed. The massive machine activated with the Mi-Go still inside. Arcs and loops of power cycled about the central host of Max's dreamscape. Its neighbors are annihilated and crisped as the chamber energy spikes. A small void formed near the Mi-Go and pulled it through. The world went dark, but there was a twinkle of lights in the distance.

Max woke with a start. He was on the floor of his Players Villa room, twisted in the blankets and his fur drenched with sweat. His migraine receded as the system notifications pinged.

Max shook his head at the skill list. The combat skills were priceless, but if Dreamless worked, it would solve his current problems. He hoped it would help and picked it. The Stat error wasn't new. It was a sign that his uplift changes were still messing with the augmentation monitor.

Max remembered all the recent events in a disorientating flash. The team's loss was due to him. Team immunity had ended. The knockout requests had begun the same day. The perception was that Utopia was weak.

The players' attention was focused mostly on Max and Xavier, but everyone was now facing daily challenges. Worse, the dreaded daily knockout challenge was now a guarantee, as the group's team match defeat had dropped their team ranking dangerously low.

They'd collectively burned off their Refusal tokens and would soon be unable to avoid elimination fights. It was only a matter of time until he, or one of his friends, would have to face a superior opponent with winner-take-all stakes.

[Max! Thank goodness, you're awake! You overslept! Your augmentations locked me out while you were sleeping. You only have minutes until your challenge match. You are all out of Refusal tokens. You have to win it to earn another token. Also, Xavier called an emergency meeting an hour ago.]

"Fuck!" Max exclaimed. He bolted to the bathroom and immediately accessed its plumbing. He activated the water to blast the shower stall with steaming water while he stripped off his adventurer's uniform.

He split his focus, scrubbing himself clean while using his local cloud of foglets to strip out all his gear from the soiled uniform. He shook himself dry and dressed. He was out and running down the hall in record time. He reviewed personal messages on the way to the match.

Max groaned and flipped to the next leaderboard.

Shit! We are scraping the bottom. Since our big loss, we're getting too conservative. Now we're falling behind. We need a big win. Not only to get closer to the exit ticket price tag, but to scare away the predators. Max thought. He flicked the balance sheet away.

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Well, that sucks. Xavier lost. I doubt I could have given any advice that would have helped…I hope he doesn't blame me for not being there before the match. I need to figure out how to deal with these dreams. Max put the notices away and checked his stat sheet.

Max meditated, in quick time, as he caught his breath in the ready chamber. He's just made it before the doors closed. It would have been another loss and a signal to the opposition that he still wasn't in top form. He accessed all his equipment: tesseract, smart suite, a pair of combat drones, his grappler, and the weaponry inside the pocket space.

With a quick conversation on the run with his worried teammates, he had promised to meet them for lunch after the match. They weren't convinced by his excuses that he'd overslept. He said it was a combination of forgetting to set an alarm and having his augments in privacy mode.

I need to win this! They are counting on me to raise our team rank. Right now, we're only ranked ahead of the newest teams, New Boston and Shanghai Surprise. We need to pull out of our downward spiral. I caused this with our Death Race loss. I can't let it happen again.

He put Musashi on active with Mal in his headspace with the rest of his daemons on observational reserve as the room filled with mist. His opponent was Hume McHumface from the AI team, but the challenge format could be anything.

These challenge matches were both useful and dangerous. The risk was low with the smaller wagers being the only stakes. He could probe opponents and work out best how to fight them. Winning could help counter any perception that he might be an easy target for a Knockout challenge.

Unfortunately, the matches were all televised. All the skills and tricks that he used would become known to all. His daemons and teammates had long and fractious debates about how much strength to show. Max growled as the field began to clear. He couldn't afford any more losses.

He went over his rapid review notes one last time. Hume's videography showed that he favored heavy guns and distance sniping. All the AI had some skill with accessing and wresting control of drones and systems. Hume's frame was well equipped for melee, but the AI tended to avoid it.

The mist cleared, revealing the arena. Max quickly assessed the environment, noting potential hazards and cover. He activated his drones, positioning them strategically. The "room" didn't have any walls as the illusory space expanded. Explosions, drones, and shrapnel exploded as bodies rushed and clashed around him. Larger air frames screamed overhead.

The room was a simulation of clashing foot soldiers from the Ought Fifty chaos of worldwide urban battles. Somewhere out there, Hume was staring at the same field. The fight format was revealed; a standard Battle Royal, with the potential to add to the fight with proxy fighters if they could co-opt some of the warring drones and NPC fighters.

Max wasn't a history buff, but Mal provided some context. The uniforms were from the Amazonian Mecha Wars in 2053. The Neon Cross Cartel had fought against the New Brasilia Compact using symbiotic war beasts and heavily augmented soldiers. Max quickly used his Skinwalker skill. His form morphed to mimic the uniform of the nearest Compact fighters and expanded his senses while boosting his subjective time sense.

Max searched through all his sense feeds. His opponent was either hiding or just masked by the chaos. Unfortunately, the Luna AI team had become wise to the Nano Tagging tactic and has begun scrubbing themselves clean like Max's team did. That cheat was no longer an option to quickly find the robot.

His multitasking mind identified and burrowed into the systems of the battling soldiers and drones as he wove and dodged melee and errant laser fire. He cracked several firewalls as he punched and shot at War Beasts.

He flexed some of his lagging offensive skills discreetly while he searched for his foe. Slowly, he dug into them and subsumed control of beasts and drones as he used his Chthonic skills to cut through their security to tie them into his command gestalt.

Max was delighted when he noticed that a dormant Nano Mote had activated on his forearm. It was uncategorized and was new since his last scrub. Musashi agreed that the timing was too coincidental to be anything other than enemy action. That AI, Hume, had employed some new versatility in tagging and was now seeking to locate him. One of Max's instances had predicted that the AI would try the next step in the tracker game and use a passive tracker.

Max quickly isolated the newly broadcasting tag and removed it. One of Max's puppeteer Mecha-Beasts accepted it and ran into the scrum of fighting with Max not far behind. Max didn't even need to wait for a full minute before a high-powered kinetic exploder round detonated in the beast's head, showering the nearby fighters in a shower of blue lubrication fluid, artificial tissue, and synthetic cartilage.

He backtracked and cross-compared all the sensory logs from the mass of battling forms, half of which he discretely controlled but pretended were still fighting each other. He pinpointed the origin of the shot to a rise less than 200 yards north.

Hume was still scratching his head in a parody of human confusion as to why the combat hadn't closed and awarded him victory when all the circulating fighters suddenly turned upon him and charged his overlook position.

The referee AI called the fight while the android Hume still had his head and one arm remaining attached. Max released the masses, with only a nosebleed as proof that he had been the cause of Hume's defeat.

"Are you sure you're okay, Max? You look like hell." Charlie asked, peering closely at Max as he answered. Max enabled Poker Face to cut out any tells and answered him again.

"I'm fine. I just had a rough night. It's all good. I even won my fight without any significant exposure of my true skill levels." Max said evenly.

Charlie leaned back in the booth; his weathered hands wrapped around a steaming coffee mug. His augmented muscles tensed slightly, a habit from years of military conditioning. "And how exactly did you control that many mechs, Max?"

Max's ears twitched - a tell he couldn't quite suppress despite his poker face. "It was a combination of skills. I multitasked access, piloting, drone use, and hacking while handing off controls to my daemons." Max answered. He didn't want to admit to using the Chthonic bootleg skills of Domination and Joining. Despite their utility, the whole team was leery of the alien software. They didn't have Max's deeper understanding of it.

Xavier snorted, spinning a small device between his fingers - clearly something he'd been tinkering with during their wait. "Nothing special? You basically puppeteered an entire battlefield. That's not 'nothing special', that's borderline impossible."

Leah, quiet until now, stirred her milkshake. Her eyes, still recovering from her memory injury, focused and unfocused as she processed the conversation. "Give him a break guys. He's clearly not been sleeping. You're all avoiding the real issue," she said softly. "Everyone of us is one loss away from elimination."

The tension at the table grew thick. They all knew what she meant. Their recent performance had dropped them near the bottom of the leaderboard, and individual knockout challenges were becoming inevitable.

"I guess that sets the stage for the real reason I wanted to meet immediately," Xavier said, setting down his device with a decisive click, "I've challenged Abigail to a Knockout match tonight!"

"Are you crazy?!" Leah yelled. "She's been undefeated since we've arrived on the level! Baboya!" She smacked him in the arm.

"Easy there, princess." Charlie soothed. "We all got to face the music, eventually. Our overeager young friend just stepped in front of the bus before us. I know you've been studying the match feeds. Do you have a plan?" Charlie asked while he squinted at the kid.

"Of course I have a plan? Do you think I'm stupid? My plan is to get you all to figure out how I can win! Come on. We have until seven o'clock tonight to figure something out." Xavier stated deadpan. The table erupted in groans.

Max whined softly to himself. Xavier's clock was ticking, and Abigail was probably going to send him home no matter what plan they cobbled together. The team's increasingly heated argument was interrupted by a familiar android stepping up to their table.

"Yous players need ta keep it down! Half of the dina' is listening to ya. How is da boss supposed to run the bookies if ya keep blabbing your plans? Take it to a private booth!"

Tony "Lefty" Lombardi said. His plastic features and suit were smooth and polished with his only flaw being the rusty replacement limb for his left arm. The team quieted down and the gangster continued.

"Very good. Now, da mut and I need to step away for a bit. The big man wants to see ya. You all best start praying, cause unless ya start earning back some of the dough that he's lost on ya. I wouldn't be surprised if he's gonna alter your current arrangements. Capiche?"