Before the steam can even clear from the molten crater, a metallic clatter echoes across the yard. Rashad's backpack—the Purification Tank—twitches on the scorched earth fifty yards away. Its internal magnetic couplers, sensing the dangerously unstable, reactor-level surge of unrefined mana leaking from Rashad's skin, ignite.
With a pressurized hiss, the heavy tactical pack launches itself off the ground, flying through the air like a homing missile. It slams directly onto Rashad's broad shoulders, the metal latches snapping shut around his chest with loud, mechanical clicks. Instantly, the glowing tubes piercing his forearms hiss as they flush the volatile purple-white radiation back into the filtration core. The liquid glass beneath his feet hardens, and Rashad slumps against Ayden, his eyes fading from a nuclear white back to their usual calm, human brown.
"Man..." Rashad wheezes, wiping a thick smear of soot from his forehead. "That bag has terrible timing. I was just about to see if I could grow a third arm with all that extra juice."
Ayden, despite having half the skin on his right forearm charred to a metallic silver from the sheer heat of their clash, just lets out a loud, echoey laugh. He tosses his arm over Rashad's shoulder, completely unbothered by the fact that his flesh is literally repairing itself at a cellular level. "A third arm? Bro, if you grew a third arm, I'd just have to break all three of them. That's a lot of paperwork for Joseph's interface."
The Assembly: A Broken Council
The mention of Joseph's name makes the laughter die instantly. The entire circle of the Prodigies gathers around the edge of the pit, the atmosphere turning heavy as the reality of their situation sets back in.
Inside Joseph's mind, the prison isn't just crowded anymore; it's a meat grinder. The Original Walker didn't just create one Clone years ago. He created a lineage of them. The specific, original monster that brutally murdered Jay, Cygnus, and Rix at the factory was just the vanguard. Now, after the multi-universal clash in the city, Joseph is hosting a whole catalog of different versions of the Clone—the Prototype, the Prime, the Shadow-Draft—all locked behind the fracturing digital walls of his consciousness.
Joseph stands a few paces away from the group. His glasses are long gone. His eyes are a shifting, unstable ocean of glitchy grey and violet static. He isn't reading his book anymore. He's standing perfectly still, but his left hand is twitching in a binary rhythm, a subconscious sign that he's using 95% of his god-level processing power just to keep the "Delete" command from executing on his own soul.
Tae steps forward, his white duster unblemished, his golden Logos aura humming with an icy, absolute authority. For months, Joseph has been Tae's right-hand man, the advisor, the cold brain behind every tactical edit the Director made to reality.
But looking at the grey static in Joseph's eyes, Tae makes his move.
"Effective immediately," Tae's voice cuts through the yard like a guillotine, "the hierarchy is changing. Joseph, your mind is carrying too much corrupted data. I cannot risk the tactical interface of this team being compromised by a virus."
Tae turns his golden gaze directly toward Diego, who is leaning against the fence, casually tossing a dark thought-energy dagger between his palms.
"Diego," Tae announces. "You have the same cognitive capacity as Joseph, without the baggage. As of right now, you are the new Chief Advisor and the primary strategist for the Prodigies."
The First Spark: Code vs. Cognition
The silence that follows is deafening.
Joseph's head snaps up. The violet aura around him flares with an ugly, jagged intensity. The "Prideful Killer" inside him doesn't just feel insulted; his entire existence is rooted in being the absolute smartest, most untouchable mind in the script. To be replaced in front of the newcomers—by a cousin who just walked through the gate—is a direct error code to his ego.
"A new advisor?" Joseph steps forward, the space around his feet stuttering as his time-manipulation subconsciously glitches the local timeline. His voice carries that horrible, overlapping dual-tone of the Clones. "You're replacing me with a second-rate copy? He doesn't even know the base code of our power, Tae. He's a tourist."
Diego doesn't even flinch. He catches his dagger, a highly punchable, deeply sarcastic smirk spreading across his face. "A tourist? Please. I've been in this yard for twenty minutes and I've already mapped out six flaws in your timeline loop, 'Archive.' You're running hot, your processing speed is dragging, and frankly, your tone has a lot of negative energy. Which, by the way... tastes delicious."
"I'll show you what a flaw looks like," Joseph snarls.
Before Tae can give an order, Joseph vanishes. He doesn't use speed; he uses Time-Deletion, cutting the seconds between him and Diego down to zero. He appears right in Diego's blind spot, his hand shaped into a surgical palm-strike aimed to disrupt Diego's nervous system.
But Diego is already moving. His mind-palace technique had already calculated Joseph's trajectory based on the raw spike of prideful anger Joseph emitted. Diego drops low, his leg sweeping out to catch Joseph's ankle while simultaneously manifesting a small thought-shield to absorb the kinetic feedback.
They scrap for a brutal, lightning-fast ten seconds—a flurry of high-IQ blocks, tactical parries, and psychological feints that look more like a chess match than a fistfight.
"LOGOS: STAND DOWN."
Tae doesn't even raise his hand. He just releases a syllable of Absolute Logos, and a massive, invisible weight slams down on both Joseph and Diego, pinning their boots into the dirt and separating them by ten yards.
The Babysitter Dilemma
Tae adjusts his collar, his golden eyes scanning the horizons of the city. "I have business to handle downtown. The narrative ripples from the Clone's public appearance are causing rifts in the city grid. I'm going to clean it up."
Tae turns his head toward Ayden, who is currently sitting on a rock, trying to use a tiny localized galaxy to grill a marshmallow.
"Ayden," Tae commands. "You are in charge while I am gone. You will watch everyone. Especially those two. Keep them separated, keep them contained, and make sure nobody deletes the property."
Ayden freezes. The little galaxy above his hand blinks out of existence. He looks at Tae, then at Joseph (who is vibrating with violet rage), then at Diego (who is dusting off his trousers with an air of immense superiority).
Ayden groans, throwing his head back with all the dramatic, charismatic flair of a high school student being told he can't go to the arcade.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on, Royal Buddha," Ayden says, standing up and waving his hands defensively. "Look at me. Do I look like a nanny to you? Unless I'm getting paid in advanced cosmic currency, I am not babysitting these two geeks. They are going to bore me to absolute death with their 'data signatures' and 'psychological projections.' I was literally just in Kd's demon realm chilling. Why do I gotta watch the nerd squad? Make Ethan do it! Or Jax! Jax loves sitting on roofs looking important. Or just make up some text overlay script to lock them in a room. You know how I get when I'm bored, Tae. Things explode."
Tae's eyes flare with a blinding, golden light that completely silences the wind in the yard.
"NO," Tae says, his voice carrying the finality of a period at the end of a sentence. "I said you, Ayden. And that is final."
Ayden sighs heavily, slumping his shoulders in mock defeat. "Fine. Whatever you say, Your Holiness. Royal Buddha gets what he wants."
The Geek Squad's Hypothesis
"Tae, this is absurd," Joseph spits, his voice dripping with pure, aristocratic arrogance as he glares at his older brother. "I am not some child that you can confine to the yard. And what's hilarious is that you picked Ayden to 'watch' me. That moron couldn't watch clouds move without getting distracted by a shiny rock. Realistically? If he tries to keep me here, I would pummel him into the bedrock."
Diego lets out a short, sharp chuckle, adjusting his sleeves with a smug shake of his head. "As much as I absolutely hate to agree with this failed, glitching version of me... the Archive is right. Ayden is, well... let's just say he's not good product. He's pure muscle, zero syntax. I have approximately 4.2 million ways to take Ayden down using nothing but his own short attention span and a basic psychological trigger."
Ayden, who was halfway through a yawn, stops dead in his tracks.
The playful, charismatic lazy energy drains from his face in a fraction of a second. He stands up straight, his chest expanding as his silver God of Fighting aura begins to simmer. His eyes change—the normal pupils disappearing, replaced by two swirling, microscopic galaxies that spin with immense, crushing gravitational force. He cracks his knuckles, the sound echoing like small sonic booms through the crater.
"Oh, word?" Ayden smirks, the dangerous, masochistic glint returning to his eyes as he looks at the two strategists. "Yeah, Tae. Go ahead. Take as long as you need in the city, bro. Take a couple days, actually. Because I'm about to test these little hypotheses the Geek Squad is trying to talk about."
The Sentence: A Box to the Death
Before Ayden can take a step toward them, Tae steps into the center of the yard.
The air pressure drops so low that even Kd, who was brooding in the shadows of the porch, stands up to look. Tae releases his full, unmitigated Logos Aura. The golden light is so intense that the entire orphanage is cast in a sharp, blinding midday glare. The sheer force of his presence silences everyone—Ayden's galaxies slow down, and the Clones inside Joseph's head stop screaming for a brief second out of pure instinctual fear.
"If you two want to be my advisor so badly," Tae says, his voice completely devoid of emotion, "if you want to prove who the real brain of this group is... then stop talking."
Tae looks between Joseph and Diego. His golden eyes are cold, calculating, and strangely ruthless.
"You want the seat? You fight for it. Right here. Right now. A box to the death. No time-control, Joseph. No thought-weapons, Diego. Pure, raw, hand-to-hand combat until one of you stops breathing."
The condition is insane. The brothers look at Tae in shock. Ethan steps forward to protest, but Jax catches his shoulder, shaking his head. Tae is the Director; if he's rewriting the scene like this, there's a reason. (Though, deep down, Tae has no intention of letting either of them actually die—he will edit the script before the final blow lands—but they don't know that.)
"Begin," Tae commands.
The Merciless Brawl
Joseph and Diego don't hesitate. The pride of the Logician and the arrogance of the Mind-Palace collide with brutal, physical force.
Without their god-level mana abilities, it is a disgusting, visceral display of martial arts. Joseph drops into the high-IQ, cold execution stance of the Prideful Killer, his strikes targeting Diego's jaw and ribs with surgical precision. Diego counters with the fluid, defensive efficiency he used to fight Ayden, his elbows cracking against Joseph's cheekbones.
THWACK. CRACK.
Blood sprays onto the liquid glass floor. Diego lands a heavy, devastating left hook that shatters Joseph's nose. Joseph doesn't even blink; his violet-grey eyes are wide and manic. He grabs Diego by the collar, slamming his forehead directly into Diego's face in a brutal headbutt, sending both of them sprawling into the dirt.
They scramble back up like animals, their shirts torn, their knuckles split and leaking crimson. Diego wipes blood from his eyes, his cynical smirk entirely gone, replaced by a desperate, survivalist rage. He drives a knee into Joseph's stomach, coughing as Joseph hooks him across the jaw in return.
The Director's Poison
While they bleed, Tae stands at the edge of the ring, his voice cutting through the sound of breaking bones like a slow poison. He looks directly at Joseph, his words designed to twist the knife in his little brother's oldest wounds.
"Look at you, Joseph," Tae says, his tone cold and mocking. "You used to be my right hand. Now you're just a broken drive. You couldn't even keep the Walker out of your head. You let Cygnus die. You let Rix die. And now you're getting out-boxed by a newcomer who's only been here for an hour."
Joseph's breath hitches. A sharp, agonizing spike of red static shoots through his violet aura.
"Shut up..." Joseph growls, his punches becoming wilder, heavier, throwing a right cross that fractures Diego's collarbone.
"Diego is everything you were supposed to be," Tae continues ruthlessly, driving the wedge deeper. "He's clean. He's smart. He doesn't carry the failures of the Tundra. You're a liability to this family, Joseph. Maybe the Clone should just take the rest of your mind, because you aren't using it anyway."
"I SAID SHUT UP!" Joseph screams.
The True Hypothesis
With that scream, the violet aura around Joseph completely turns to a pitch-black, neon static.
His pupils vanish. His teeth sharpen into a jagged, unnatural grin, and his voice drops into a terrifying, quad-tone echo that belongs entirely to the Prime Clone. The hand-to-hand restrictions shatter as a massive wave of negative narrative data explodes from Joseph's chest, threatening to swallow Diego whole.
"LOGOS: THE ARCHIVE IS LOCKED."
Before the Clone can fully manifest, Tae appears directly between them. He catches Joseph's black-static fist with his bare hand, his golden aura flaring to its absolute peak. With a single, heavy pulse of Absolute Logos, Tae drives the black static back down into Joseph's chest, forcing the Twin Clones back behind the firewall.
Joseph collapses to his knees, vomiting blood and grey mist, his eyes slowly fading back to his own exhausted, glitchy grey. Diego falls back against the dirt, clutching his broken collarbone, breathing heavily as he stares at Tae in utter disbelief.
The yard is completely silent. The brothers are frozen.
Tae stands over both of them, his white coat still spotless. The cold, ruthless look on his face instantly melts away, replaced by that familiar, calm, slightly arrogant smirk.
"Both of you are my advisors," Tae says smoothly, sheathing his energy. "Congratulations. You both passed."
Diego coughs, spitting out a mouthful of dirt. "Passed? You... you just tried to make us murder each other! You purposedly drove a wedge between me and the Archive! Why would you do that if you wanted us to work together?"
Tae turns his back, looking toward the city gates, his smirk widening as he looks back over his shoulder at his full team.
"Because, Diego," Tae explains, his golden eyes gleaming with the deep, hidden strategy of the Director. "I didn't care about who won the fight. I needed to see if Joseph's emotional triggers could bypass his logic. I wanted to see if making him furious would draw the Clone out to the surface where I could measure its current strength."
Tae glances at Joseph, who is sitting in the dirt, breathing heavily but looking up with a realization of what his brother just did.
"Now I know exactly how much pressure the firewall can take," Tae says, walking out the front gate toward the city. "Ayden—the Geek Squad is all yours. Try not to break them too much while I'm gone."