Outside the stadium the cheering crowd can still be heard. It is anathema to the quiet of the city. Eclipse City looks like a ghost town. Only a few essential and logistic vehicles can be seen.
"I spy with my little eye…"
"Really, Countdown?"
"I'm just trying to pass the time."
The rest of the HDF have been put on city patrol. Countdown has the south section; Seraph has the north. While Mystica and Siphon have the west and east respectively. An operation between the police and the lab's own taskforce is on the ground. Other branches of Infineverse Labs have also stopped their operations. Only the main lab remains partially active as it is the beating heart of the city.
Countdown makes another sweep of the S4 section. The streets have never been this quiet and manageable. He doesn't even need HQ to plan out a clean path for him.
**Clank!!!**
He quickly hones in on the sound and approaches the alley. A cat jumps out from behind some boxes.
"You lost, little guy?" He extends his hand.
The cat runs back into the boxes.
"A shy one, huh."
His comms crackle to life. "What's going on over there? You should have finished your current area by now." The technician is staring at the monitor, waiting for the all clear.
"Sorry about that, I got distracted." He gets up. "The area is all clear."
Earlier that week. The heroes had a briefing at HQ. Mathers and Oken were present along with Dr. Lacy and some of the elite taskforce.
"As you all know, we have been having a rise in rogue boost users. This is due to this." One of the taskforce members places the broken nullifier on the table.
"Someone has somehow made a universal nullifier." Mathers starts to pace around the room.
"They have the father frequency. Somehow, by some means, they have acquired the father frequency. Meaning they can at any moment shut down a boost — or do what they have mostly been doing: shutting down restrictor bands."
"Why weren't we told this information sooner?" Valiant enquires.
"Because the doctor has trust issues." Oken chimes in.
The room goes silent for a moment.
Oken walks to the main monitor. "I feel like you're not understanding the gravity of this situation."
The screen lights up and schematics of the restrictor band cover the screen. You can see all the individual components of the device, even the engravings on the circuit boards.
"The restrictor band is a marvel of engineering — maybe even greater than the unicollider.
Designed by my grandfather and further refined by me and my father. It uses the same energy that gives you boosts. My grandfather discovered that if you expose firmament particles to other firmament particles with the exact frequency but from different collision harness events, they cancel each other out. This meant we could effectively shut down boosts… well, we could if we had the same exact particles needed.
After many collision harnesses he found the first father frequency that would in theory restrict the output of boosts. And that's how the restrictor band was born. Over the years we have found better father frequencies. The one we are currently using in the modern restrictor band was found by me. It is the closest to being a universal shutdown switch if need be…" He turns to face the room.
"Wait, so you're saying they can take away our boosts?" Seraph looks at his teammates.
"Did you even listen to me?" Mathers exclaims.
"They can't take them away — they can just shut them down temporarily. To take them away they would need an exact copy of your firmament particles, which would be almost impossible to get. The issue is that they can shut down the restrictor band since they have its frequency."
The monitor pulls up all the past rogue events that have happened in the past few months.
"Over the—"
"You have said your bit, doctor, let me do mine." Dr. Lacy steps forward.
"Over the past few months there have been more rogue users than average. As you know, rogue users are people who once had restrictor bands. Usually they remove them by overloading the restrictor band, but this is extremely dangerous, so the cases of rogue users have mostly remained low. Until now. We have interrogated the recent rogue individuals, and they all seem to have used a nullifier to remove their restrictor bands."
Of the various images shown, the screen zooms in on one in the top right.
"This individual gave us the most information. He is the one who made that mess in E4. After some probing we found out that there is a greater scheme going on with the nullifiers. They are up to something."
Valiant shifts around in his chair. "All this information and still no information on how to stop them."
"That's complicated." Mathers stands up again. "We could change the father frequencies in all the restrictor bands in the city — that would take some time and—"
"And the criminals could escalate their plan in response." Siphon chimes in.
"Exactly." Mathers nods.
"So, what can we do?" Seraph asks the whole room.
Oken gets up from his seat. "My turn to teach the class." He stands in front of the monitor. "We have come up with a plan, and it involves the academy games." He smiles. "Most of the city will be tuned in to the games. This opens up two options.
One, the criminals will have a mostly vacant city to further their plans. Two, they will attack the games themselves to strike the most fear in a single stroke. The plan is to place all of you in strategic positions so we can stop them before they can do damage."
A map of the entire city sprawled across the monitor. "Let's get to work."
In the present day, Seraph glides across the north. He has been given a special set of goggles so he can scan the area with ease. They also feed live footage to HQ.
"This is way more boring than I thought."
"Don't forget — the silence is good." Mystica replies.
"Well, it's putting me off." Countdown joins the comms conversation. "Hey, why haven't we heard from Siphon?"
"That's because I'm enjoying the silence for once, unlike you." She replies.
Another voice joins the conversation. "Can you all try to keep the comms clear?" Valiant disbands the bickering.
"Easy for you to say… you're watching the show."
"I'm just monitoring my position."
"Yeah… right." Countdown and the rest of the team go silent.
Valiant smiles as he goes back to monitoring the dome.
"And just like that, ladies and gentlemen, the first round has come to an end. In the lead we have Team Aluber, followed up by Team Ji-ri, and in third place is Team Mark. A great performance by all the teams. We are going to give them a short rest before the next round."
The students walk back to the tunnel. Mark seems furious at the results. He squeezes his gloves as he looks at Aluber.