Teo stood in the hallway, his mind a whirlwind of fragmented data. In his head, the logic was sound: Rialto had the level of a god, the eyes of a monster, and he talked about "Dragon Kings." Rizero had the reputation of a system-breaker. Therefore, clearly, they were the same entity—or at least two heads of the same multi-server hydra.
"A Dragon-Hacker," Teo muttered to himself, leaning against the glass wall. "A King who codes. It's the only thing that makes sense."
He ignored the fact that his internal map was pinging the Legacy Core near his heart. He was too busy trying to reconcile the "princess" comment. In Florika, the only royalty were the Corporate VPs, and they didn't wear crowns—they wore tailored power-suits and NDAs.
💼 The Boardroom Fallout
Inside the boardroom, the air was thick with corporate indignation.
"Elena," Maximilian Thorne said, his voice like velvet over gravel. "Your grandson's 'pathing error' was remarkably specific. He didn't just wander into a wall; he bypassed three levels of biometric security and interrupted a merger discussion regarding the Kyushu-Florika Bridge."
Elena smoothed her skirt, her face a mask of professional poise. "The boy is a legacy asset, Max. His code is old—unoptimized. Ever since the 813 was scaled to 15×, his internal compass has been... glitchy. He likely smelled the coffee in the lounge and his 'Delivery Script' overrode his common sense."
"And the rambling about Dragon Kings?" another executive asked, scoffing.
Elena didn't miss a beat. "He's been spending too much time in the Neo-Ybor retro-cafés. The local players have been running 'Fantasy-Mod' simulations. He's probably just parroting their dialogue trees. It's harmless background noise."
Thorne leaned back, his eyes narrowing. "Let's hope so. Because Rialto doesn't strike me as a man who enjoys being called an 'insect' or a 'madman' by a janitor."
🧼 The Escape
Back in the hall, Teo saw his opening. The security drones were recalibrating after Elena's "Etiquette Script" intervention. If he stayed here, Thorne would eventually come out and peel back his layers until he found the NPP core.
He didn't head for the elevator. Instead, he found a laundry chute marked [Textile Disposal].
[Notice: Physics override engaged.] [Passive: Soft Landing (Rank: Essential)]
Teo hopped into the chute. He slid down forty floors in a blur of gray metal and discarded uniforms, popping out into the industrial basement of the Aegis Tower. He hit the floor, stood up, and adjusted his Rays cap.
He needed to get back to the Spine. If Rialto—the Dragon-Hacker—was looking for the Glitch-Walker, then the hidden history of Florika was in more danger than his Abuela realized.
But as he stepped toward the service exit, the air in the basement curdled. The temperature dropped twenty degrees.
"Going somewhere, insect?"
Rialto was leaning against a massive coolant pipe, the green flame in his hand casting long, flickering shadows that looked suspiciously like wings against the concrete wall. He looked bored, but his red eyes were locked onto the spot where Teo was hiding the Core.
"I don't know what a 'Dragon King' is," Teo said, putting on his best 'Dumb NPC' face. "I just have a delivery for the—"
"Stop," Rialto snapped. The flame in his hand flared. "I don't care about your script. I felt it when you opened the Kyushu door. You didn't just look; you resonated. No NPC has a frequency that loud."
He stepped closer, his Level 18,523 bar flickering ominously above him. "You're the one holding the heartbeat of this dying server. Give it to me, and I might forget to tell Marienne where you're hiding."
Teo gripped the mop handle he'd grabbed from a nearby cart. It was a useless, Level 1 common item. But in the hands of an Invincible asset, even a mop was an immovable object.
"I told you," Teo said, his voice losing the NPC lilt and becoming hard as the 813 brickwork. "The coffee is for the Guild. And I'm already late."
Teo tightened his grip on the mop, his eyes narrowing as he stared down the Level 18,523 entity. He was an Invincibleasset, but Rialto had cracked his defenses once. He wouldn't let him do it again.
"I know your game, Rizero!" Teo shouted, his voice echoing through the basement. "I know you sent that Logic Bomb in the tunnels! You think you can just sneeze in your fancy Haiti villa and then come here to delete my Abuelo's cigar shop?"
Rialto's green flame flickered and died as he stared at Teo with aristocratic confusion. "Haiti? Who is Rizero? I am Agamenticus Rialto, the Dragon King. I rule over the Soskano Territory on the Kyushu Shard. And I don't sneeze—my personal cloud environment prevents respiratory afflictions."
"Don't lie!" Teo stepped forward, his defiance fueled by his own internal logic. "You're a Logic King with a dragon fetish! You probably have a 'Princess Marienne' held captive in a server farm somewhere between here and Port-au-Prince!"
Rialto recoiled, his face twisting into a sneer of pure offense. "Marienne is the royal consort of the Kusura Royal Family! She is my agent, not a captive! And I am the Dragon King—my designation is not a 'fetish,' it is a Divine Right earned by surviving 18,000 levels of existential threats!"
Rialto sighed, running a gloved hand through his black hair. He was clearly disgusted by the sheer stupidity of the maintenance worker. "I am an Agent of the Kusura Royal Family myself, sent incognito to perform a reconnaissance mission. The Kusura believe Maximilian Thorne is planning an aggressive digital annexation of the Kyushu Shard. I am not evil, insect. I am highly intelligent, highly effective, and yes, naturally cold and arrogant. It is simply my personality, honed by millennia of ruling."
Teo lowered the mop, the confusion on his face profound. He had spent the last hour building a grand conspiracy theory involving Dragon-Hackers, only to find out he was talking to a genuine, overpowered king who was also a spy.
"So you're saying... you're an agent trying to stop the bad guy," Teo summarized slowly.
"I am saying I am a sovereign ruler attempting to secure my borders against a corporate infestation," Rialto corrected, his tone dripping with condescension. "And your problem isn't the Haitian hacker, Rizero—it's Thorne and his nerdy little genius, Kian Thorne, who is downstairs right now trying to track your Core's signature."
Rialto shot a genuine, if arrogant, glare at Teo. "You're lucky you're bugged to be indestructible, because your intellect is an insult to the System. I'm going to find Elena and give her the real data. You are dismissed. Go back to your coffee and try not to get any more reality concepts corrupted."
Rialto turned, snapping his fingers. A tiny, glowing purple portal shimmered into existence beside him, and he vanished through it, bypassing the need for the elevator entirely.
Teo was left alone in the basement with a mop, a Core, and the overwhelming realization that he had just accused a foreign king of being a common Haitian sneeze-prone criminal.
Teo knew he couldn't waste time trying to rationalize the existence of Dragon Kings or arrogant spies. His priority was the Legacy Core, and Agamenticus Rialto had given him a clear target: Kian Thorne.
💻 Confrontation with Kian Thorne
Teo slipped out of the laundry room, his internal map flashing an urgent warning: the core's frequency was being actively scanned nearby. He followed the signal through a brightly lit service corridor until he reached the Aegis R&D lab—a highly restricted area.
Peering through a small window, Teo saw his target. Kian Thorne was the spitting image of his father, Maximilian, but softer: pale, with thick glasses perched on his nose, hunched over a bank of monitors glowing with complex, aggressive code. Kian, the "nerdy genius," was tracking the Core with focused intensity.
Suddenly, a voice boomed from the corridor behind Teo, interrupting his concentration.
"Oh, hi there! Are you lost? Because I am totally lost. I was looking for the corporate gym, but this looks more like a place where they keep the brain juice, you know?"
Teo turned to see a young man who radiated an unnatural cheerfulness that seemed completely out of place in the sterile Aegis Tower. He wore a ridiculously bright, coral-pink designer tracksuit, and he was using a custom-built, lightweight chrome wheelchair. This was the son of a high-level Miami Shard executive, a true background asset in the making.
"I'm Demetrius. Demetrius Alvear!" the young man announced, his movements rapid and slightly jerky, his eyes wide and constantly scanning the room—a clear manifestation of his ADHD. "Everyone calls me Demi! I just got in from the Miami Shard. Beautiful place, but way too slow on the lane speed. Are you maintenance? Can you tell me if there's a 50-meter Olympic regulation pool in this sector?"
Teo was momentarily stunned. Demi was genuinely friendly, an anomaly among the cold, driven corporate children. But his focus was absolute.
"I—I don't know," Teo stammered, pulling his mind back to his mission. "I'm just fixing the, uh, static."
"Static!" Demi exclaimed, his attention snapping to the word. "Oh, the static in the water is the worst! You know, I'm obsessed with professional swimming. Absolutely obsessed! Even though I can't exactly... you know... swim," he patted his chrome wheelchair with a rueful smile. "It's about the form, though! The physics of the stroke! The water displacement! I could tell you the split times of every gold medalist for the last twenty years! Did you know the Australian Sunbelt Record for the 200-meter freestyle is 1:44.06? Insane! I want to break it, but that's a bit hard when you can't get your center of gravity right. You ever try the butterfly? It's all about core strength, which I'm trying to develop, but ooh, is it hard to focus on the reps sometimes!"
Demi's torrent of hyper-specific, swimming-related information was designed to derail anyone. Teo, however, was struck by the sincere, desperate passion radiating from the wealthy, disabled youth.
"Look, Demi," Teo interrupted, trying to be gentle but firm. "You should probably go back to the lobby. This is a restricted area, and I have to stop a… a Data Glitch."
"Oh, a Glitch! Like turbulence in the water!" Demi's eyes flickered past Teo and landed on the window into the R&D lab. "Hey, isn't that Kian Thorne? He looks stressed. He probably can't focus on his code. I get that way when I try to work on my freestyle stroke theory! I'll go give him some tips on focus! You know, breathing and counting your strokes?"
Before Teo could grab him, Demi zipped his wheelchair toward the lab door.
"Wait! He's dangerous!" Teo cried.
Demi paused, smiling over his shoulder. "Danger is just a deep end, buddy! You gotta dive in!"
Teo watched in horror as the unusually kind, but entirely obsessed and easily distractible, background character rolled toward the son of the Aegis CEO, potentially jeopardizing the entire Legacy Quest.
Demi's wheelchair whirred with high-performance precision as he rolled into the R&D lab, his voice preceding him like a tidal wave. "Hey, Kian! You look like you're stuck in a high-drag zone! You know, when the water density feels off, you really have to focus on your reach-and-pull!"
Kian Thorne flinched, his fingers freezing over a terminal displaying a localized map of the 813. He looked up, his glasses reflecting the neon-green code. Teo braced himself, ready to intervene with his Invincible frame, but Kian didn't call for security. Instead, the tension in his shoulders evaporated.
"Demi?" Kian sighed, a small, genuine smile breaking his weary expression. "I told you to stay in the guest lounge. If my father sees you in here, he'll have your father's Miami data-rights audited."
"I got bored! My ADHD kicked in and I started thinking about the 1972 Munich Olympics, and then I saw this guy—" Demi gestured wildly toward Teo, who was standing awkwardly in the doorway— "and he said there was a 'Data Glitch,' which sounds exactly like a chlorine imbalance!"
Teo stepped forward, his eyes darting between the monitors and the CEO's son. "You're tracking the Core," Teo stated, dropping the "Dumb NPC" act. "Are you going to report me?"
"Report you?" Kian let out a hollow laugh. "I'm trying to mask you. My father wants the Legacy Core to bridge the servers, but he doesn't realize that doing so will overwrite the local identities of everyone in Florika. I've been secretly writing a counter-script to scramble the signal, but I couldn't find the source until you walked in."
The three of them stood in the center of the high-tech lab—the "Invincible" delivery boy, the nerdy genius, and the swimming-obsessed Miami heir. For a brief moment, the disparate codes of their lives synced.
"We should help each other," Demi chirped, his eyes bright. "Like a relay team! I can be the lead-off, Kian is the anchor, and you—" he pointed at Teo— "you're the powerhouse in the middle lane!"
Teo looked at the two of them. He felt the warmth of the bond, a rare flicker of connection in a world where he was usually just a background asset. But he shook his head. "No. I appreciate the help, but I work better as a ghost. I'm solo. Always."
Before Demi could argue, a sharp ping erupted from Kian's laptop.
"My father," Kian whispered, his face turning ghostly pale. "He's just stepped off the elevator. He's coming to check the tracking logs. Hide! Now!"
Kian pointed to a recessed alcove behind a row of cooling servers. Teo and Demi scrambled into the shadows just as the lab's pneumatic doors hissed open. Maximilian Thorne stepped in, his presence radiating corporate coldness.
"Kian," Maximilian's voice boomed. "Progress report. The signal spiked on this floor. Where is the asset?"
Teo held his breath, his back against the cold metal of a server rack. Suddenly, he felt a strange vibration next to him. Demi was shivering, but not from fear. His eyes were darting rapidly, and his hands were moving in a blurred sequence.
"I... I lost the signal, Father," Kian lied, his voice trembling. "The static from the storm is too high."
Maximilian walked toward the server racks—directly toward the alcove. "Then we clear the static. I'll run a localized pulse."
As Maximilian reached for the manual override panel right above their heads, Demi acted. Despite his physical constraints, his ADHD-fueled hyperactivity translated into a terrifyingly high Reflex Stat. In a burst of motion that shouldn't have been possible for a "background character," Demi reached out and tapped a hidden diagnostic port on the base of the server.
A massive surge of localized electromagnetic interference erupted, mimicking a catastrophic hardware failure. The lights flickered, and a loud, wet pop echoed through the room.
"Damn it," Maximilian hissed, pulling his hand back as sparks flew from the panel. "The cooling system is failing. Kian, fix this. I'll check the security feeds from the lobby."
As Maximilian stormed out, Teo looked at Demi in awe. The kid had used his hyper-focus to pinpoint a mechanical weakness in seconds, executing a move that would have taken a pro-hacker minutes. Even disabled and "just a background character," Demi had saved them.
"Swimming physics," Demi whispered with a wink, though he was sweating from the effort. "It's all about finding the path of least resistance."
Teo watched in silent amazement as Demi steered his wheelchair into an inter-room passage hidden behind a false panel—a corridor so narrow and obscured that even Kian's detailed maps hadn't registered its existence. Demi took the lead with a frantic, rhythmic energy, his movements showing absolutely no signs of the fatigue or magical drain that usually accompanied such high-speed maneuvering in Florika. Teo noted the mystery—the boy seemed to be running on a different engine entirely—but he kept his questions to himself, focusing instead on the hum of the walls.
The passage led them directly into the Central Electrical Control Room. As soon as they stepped inside, the air began to crackle. Teo's natural affinity for lightning resonated with the massive transformers, his skin prickling as he felt the building's power grid like a second nervous system. Without needing a terminal, he extended a hand toward the main console. A spark leaped from his fingertip, and the blaring red alerts on the monitors turned a calm, steady green.
"Alerts are looped," Teo whispered. "We're invisible for now."
He pulled up the security feeds, his eyes scanning the grid until they landed on a terrifying sight. Maximilian Thorne wasn't in the lobby; he was standing in the very room they had just vacated—the Security Feed Room. He was staring at a blank screen, his face twisted in suspicion. He knew something was wrong, and he was heading directly toward the control center.
"We have to go! Now!" Teo urged.
They scrambled back into the passage. In the blur of their flight, a strange sensation washed over Teo—a momentary lapse in gravity followed by a smell of ozone and burnt sugar. Suddenly, the sterile walls of the 96th floor were gone, and they were standing in the grand, marble-floored lobby.
"Wait," Demi panted, his ADHD brain struggling to process the jump. "How are we in the lobby? Did we fall? I didn't feel a drop. Is this a swimming thing? Like a slipstream?"
Teo didn't answer. He had seen it: a jagged, shimmering dimensional rip in the hallway they had just passed through. It wasn't an Aegis portal, and it didn't match the "Dragon King" signature of Rialto. It was something new—unfamiliar and ancient.
"Just keep moving, Demi!"
They didn't stay in the lobby for long. In a desperate bid to lose any pursuers, Teo led them into a high-speed service lift. The doors opened on the 100th floor, and before they could check the coast, they stumbled right through the rear service entrance of the Grand Boardroom.
The room was silent, save for the low hum of a holographic display. Twenty pairs of eyes turned toward the back of the room. Teo stood there, still in his singed maintenance suit, standing next to a boy in a neon-pink tracksuit in a high-tech wheelchair.
At the head of the table, Abuela Elena froze. Her hand, which had been mid-gesture during a presentation, slowly curled into a fist. She looked at the mud on Teo's boots, the frantic look in his eyes, and the "Invincible" tag that was practically vibrating under his skin.
"Mateo," she said, her voice a low, terrifyingly calm simmer that was far more frightening than Maximilian Thorne's rage. "I thought we discussed... etiquette."