Axton was about to check another part of the social area that he was in, but a sudden chime from his datapad caught his attention. Sally had asked to see him, and she seemed to want this meeting urgently. Axton had an idea regarding what this could be about, so he said a temporary farewell to Thomas and sped over to the two War Suits of his own design with great haste.

Sally was still tweaking things on Spider-Can when Axton reached her, and as he had a good idea what she was concerned about, he set to work himself without asking for anything. He carefully checked over the IFF tags that had been forced upon them by the authority in charge of the upcoming game, and almost immediately his suspicions, and those of Sally, were confirmed.

It didn’t take a genius to see that these tags could be remotely manipulated, already having a connection back to a faraway receiver that was both taking data from them and sending it back. Axton didn’t need to pretend that this couldn’t be manipulated to drive up tension and suspense if used properly.

Hell, if the people on the other side wanted, they could use these tags to make friends turn into foes and vice versa. He did a quick and subtle check to see if the same was true for all the other Suits, all while pretending to merely be checking out the competition. Every single one of them had been installed the same way, all of them easily able to be altered by a remote control.

Well, there were two that were not. That fact was something that set off alarm bells in Axton’s head, and he tried to dig a bit deeper into the coding of the tags. Sure enough, these tags didn’t just have the ability to make allies appear as enemies and vice versa, they also could hijack Suit systems, either shutting them down, lowering their capabilities, or even just remotely operating them.

The two tagged Suits that did not have these issues were obviously set up to be the ultimate winners, even if they had to cheat to do so. Well, Axton wasn’t going to have that happen to him. He still had a few days to work with in-game, so he opened up his inventory and set to work, having already removed the tags from Franken and Spider-Can.

They wanted to cheat? Fine, he would let them. But they wouldn’t be able to use those cheats on him. These other two, the ‘champions’ had obviously grown accustomed to endless victories, likely through the use of such cheats. If that was indeed true, then it meant that they had likely grown sloppy and rusty.

Axton needed a few more tools to make his plan work, though, and Sally had already dreamed up a few extra bits and bobs that could be dropped in as assistance. It would be decently easy to make use of the IFF tags to allow these gadgets to work well, all while being allowed in the Battle Royale. If Axton and Sally had their way, even if the dropped assistance was captured by an enemy due to their own actions or by interference, that would avail those foes absolutely nothing.

He now had a basis for how to use IFF tags to add even more fun to this game, and he was sure that his actions would, once again, have immeasurable consequences down the line. But that was what he wanted, in the end, and if he exposed the cheating using IFF tags here, along with how to use such tags to set up traps and exploit enemies, then all it would do is change up the game even more.

Those marketing assholes would rue the day they tried to make him serve their will for next to nothing, and what better way to do that than to add more spanners to the works? No doubt was in his mind that the devs intended to tell everyone about such a hidden feature eventually, but if he could pre-empt them and display another secret for all to see, well then he would be the one praised for it, not them.

With those thoughts in his mind, Axton set to work. It would be pain and a half trying to make something that would skirt around the inevitable objections that the people in charge (and likely the two reigning champs) would have regarding this, but if he could reverse engineer these tags in just the right way, he could likely build his own versions. If that ended up happening, which he was nearly 100% sure of, he could then work on another set of devices that would act as a sort of ‘firewall’ for the two Suits.

It would take a few days, but at the very least he could build something that would prevent external tampering via the wireless connection that the tags provided, and if he was lucky and had the time and resources needed for it, he might even be able to build a device that could not just block the interference but reroute it. And, of course, if that was too hard or took too much time, he could always just make something that emulated the return signal, allowing the people trying to remotely manipulate his and Thomas’ Suits to think that they had control, even when they didn’t.

Still, this would take time and concentration, along with a bit of isolation. He already had no shortage of eyes watching him and ears listening to him, so he would either need to work even harder to obfuscate his actions and plan or simply go elsewhere to do his work. Unfortunately, he couldn’t move these two Suits from here now that they were here. The authorities wouldn’t like that, and he already needed to avoid their suspicion.

Since that was the case, he would need to rope Thomas into this, and maybe, just maybe, get a hold of some of the other Players here. He had a decently strong belief that the others here, or at least the Players here, would be fucking pissed as all hell if they were cheated like this, so maybe getting them into this would be a good idea. At the very least, if more people were working on things like this, the authorities would not be able to interfere without potentially starting a riot or being forced to cancel the Battle Royale.

And, if Axton was correct, the authorities likely already had taken a lot of money to run ads and whatnot, and if the game was canceled or lost a massive number of participants, that money would need to be returned. Given that the station was nearly falling apart behind the scenes, likely being held with duct tape and prayers, they couldn’t afford that.

So, then, it was time to make another temporary alliance. He could only hope that they decided to play his game, rather than ratting him out and foolishly believing that they wouldn’t be screwed over in turn.