Six weeks later, Jostan occupies an independent safehouse above a shuttered transit clinic. Dusty windows mute Leonidas’s neon, while a disposable relay pulses on the metal table.
The relay burns through its casing and projects Avasma into the room as a narrow, unstable image. Her transmission arrives without a return path, her presence reduced to light and clipped static.
Avasma
I moved higher in the hierarchy tower. That was supposed to give me distance. Instead, the newest restrictions are failing.
Her image fractures into layered diagnostic windows: access trees, redacted identity fields, and a correlation graph tightening around Jostan’s masked credential. The relay suppresses every external handshake.
Avasma
A system I helped design has begun matching your mask to its original owner. If the tower completes that correlation, it will expose me with everything I learned without permission.
Avasma
I need you to sever the link before the tower turns either of us into an asset. I brought the meeting here because this relay dies when we finish.
The projected graph freezes at a branching junction, one route pointing toward the tower and another toward an unlabeled municipal archive. Avasma’s transmission waits for Jostan’s response.
✓ Quest Accepted
Access Avasma's coordinates and learn how to rise in the hierarchy
“I trace the tower branch for Avasma's coordinates and hierarchy path.”
SUCCESS (Legendary Hacking, rolled +2)
Jostan anchors the tower branch inside the disposable relay’s diagnostic shell, following its hierarchy markers without touching the municipal archive route. The graph unfolds under his control.
His hacking isolates the tower’s correlation engine from Avasma’s identity fields, then resolves the concealed path through three administrative tiers to a supervisory node beneath Leonidas.
Coordinates populate beside the hierarchy path: a restricted service annex below the tower’s civic records division, reached through an obsolete inspection network and a local maintenance junction.
Jostan copies the route, access sequence, and supervisory node identifier into his buffer. The tower can still see its own branch, but it receives no usable link to Avasma’s identity.
Avasma
You found the path. More importantly, you kept my restrictions out of the trace.
The projected hierarchy path stabilizes into a clean map and a narrow timing window. The relay begins its final countdown, preserving the coordinates while preparing to burn itself out.
Quest Complete
Access Avasma's coordinates and learn how to rise in the hierarchy
Skill Upgrade: Electronics Good→Great