Max was beginning to wonder how long he was going to have to wait here in the stairwell while the security measures finished their procedures when the foam began to disappear from the room in a wave, starting at the back wall.

“Doesn’t that look familiar to you?” Nico asked as the entire floor was cleared down to the bare concrete by whatever this next disinfectant step was.

Max examined it as he scrolled through his sensors and then realized that he didn’t need to use any of them to identify what was going on there. That was a Disintegrator beam. Not quite the same as theirs, but similar in function to the ones mounted on their Mecha. How an Alliance Facility like this got a security system like that and why they would have it at all were questions for another day, but the fact remained that it was indeed a Disintegrator, and the entire floor was being swept clear to the bare molecules.

Once the beam reached the front wall, closest to where Max and Nico were standing, a green light came on, and a happy-sounding signal chimed in the hallway.

[Biomass storage facility is now clear for the reintroduction of atmosphere. Please enter the command authorization override to begin the structural integrity verification process.] The speaker near their heads informed them, and Nico smiled.

“This part is my specialty. Give me just a moment, and I will convince the computer to let us into the room after it fills with atmosphere again.” Nico informed Max while the green light of a successful cleansing blinked overhead.

Max listened in on her thoughts as she worked, and in only a few minutes, she had worked her way past the firewalls and had opened the source code to the login page to view the lists of administrator-level passwords.

“So that’s how you do it. You only have to enter a system once, and then you just use the password after that.” Max chuckled.

“There’s always one that is a backup or doesn’t update their password on a regular basis. They’re the best ones, but unless it’s a default Admin account, never pick the very oldest password to enter with. It’s too noticeable.” Nico agreed.

“I will keep that in mind. What’s the timer on the room being opened?” Max asked.

“Give it ten minutes, and it will be ready to go. The structural integrity check is going to take some time since the Klem caused damage to the walls and ceiling. But it should still pass, I think, and then we should be able to move through without any issues.”

“I guess there’s nothing to do but wait then,” Max smirked, knowing that Nico hated nothing in the world quite as much as she hated downtime.

But she had come prepared for it today. As soon as the decision was made, she took out her weapons and checked the charge on them all, polished up any possible damages using her [Repair] System Function and then handed them to Max to be optimized.

It wasn’t a bad plan, but the sheer number of weapons that Nico had brought with her was astounding. Max had brought two Flat Space storage items with him, one on each wrist, but his inventory was nowhere near compared to what Nico had with her.

“Where do you even keep all that?” Max asked with a laugh as he saw the gear begin to pile up.

“I’ve got six storage spaces with me. I didn’t know what we would need, and I knew that we didn’t have a backup supply person, so I just grabbed one of everything. That was a good thing, too. I haven’t gotten to use a lot of these things in combat yet.” She replied with a grin of her own.

Max shook his head and began to optimize her gear, getting it all just a bit more capable for when she inevitably tried it out later. He just hoped that there were, in fact, still targets down below them. If the security system had purged them all, she would not be a happy Nico.

All of their gear was repaired and optimized before the flashing green light on the wall turned to solid green, and the hiss of atmosphere entering the warehouse began.

[Temperature normalized. No hazardous materials were detected. Atmospheric composition is normal. Atmospheric pressure is normal. Deactivating emergency safety barriers.] The computerized voice announced.

“Good news, we’re ready to go see what’s below us. Now tell me, mister mind reader, how upset are the Klem on the floors below us?” Nico asked.

“I don’t actually sense any Klem on the floors below us. There could be a lot of those humanoid hybrids, but at the moment, they’re all doing their daily research and experiments.” Max explained.

“And you didn’t tell me so that I could tell you to gather as much information about their work as you could while we waited, just in case it spontaneously combusts?” She pouted.

“I’ve been recording as much as I can. I even borrowed your skill to transcribe everything that I saw in their thoughts, even if I didn’t understand it. So I have a lot of gibberish for your team to decipher later, and you had better hope that we recover a lot of that data to make it make sense.

In short, no making it ‘spontaneously combust’ until we have a backup copy of everything that we can.”

“You really know how to suck the fun out of life. Have I ever told you that?”

Max chuckled at her pouting. “Many times. More than once just today, in fact. Now, let’s see if the room tries to obliterate us as we move forward. We can grab the data when we get to the next floor, assuming that the computers are linked and not standalone lab pods.”

Nico shuddered at the thought. She could access technology from a distance, but hundreds of individual computers on a floor would be a nightmare for her if they weren’t linked by a network. She would have to break into every single one individually and manually extract the data every single time.

“Think of it as an exercise to keep your System Skills finely tuned,” Max suggested, then took a step toward the now empty biomass storage bay.