CHAPTER 15
Exploit (Void)
The world dissolved. The firelight, the sound of snoring companions, even the ache in his hands were gone.
A now familiar void took their place, pushing the memories and guilt aside until they faded to background.
> “Hi again, Bash. Missed you.”
Shai's voice was smoother now. The digital edges had softened, her cadence falling into something close to conversational.
> “You have survived another sequence of avoidable violence. Congratulations.”
Bash flexed his phantom biceps and let out a dry breath. “No extra experience for style, huh? Tough crowd.”
A giant pile of unspent stat points waited for Bash, and he grinned. “All right, let's see how deep this rabbit hole goes, and find where Alice hid the cheat codes.”
> “Warning. Excessive stat consumption will result in unexpected side effects, including, but not limited to, delusions of grandeur.”
The numbers beckoned, so he poured every unspent point equally into Dexterity and Intelligence, and triggered Rewind.
The world fluttered for a split second. The unspent points whooshed backwards, pooling neatly back into his stat sheet while the stat increases themselves remained.
Bash cheered. “Oh, you beautiful, broken mess,” he giggled softly, imagining that somewhere out in the real world a QA tester just developed a spontaneous nosebleed.
Eyeing the now untouched pool of points with a predatory gleam. Why spend when you can invest, exploit, and reinvest? He could practically see the compounding curves. Hell, if this kept up, he'd reach godhood by lunch.
As an extra bonus, Bash also finished a set of titles.
Bash thought back on that first fateful day when he started the collection. At how weak he had been. At how the four-hundred-pound fox-dog had nearly ended it all.
Pushing the memories away, he checked his character sheet, almost lovingly.
Bash couldn't recall the last time he had felt this giddy. Maybe back in Elementary, when he bricked the school server and blamed it on solar flares. Or the one time he slipped past his first firewall with a password that turned out to be 123456.
Somewhere deep in the system, he swore he heard a faint, ghostly sigh, probably from a long-dead developer.
> “Do you want to leave an apology for the next developer assigned to debug this interface?”
“Leave them a nice comment,” Bash said. “Something like, 'Sorry, not sorry.'“
He paused, letting the giddiness settle. “Speaking of which, find anything interesting while I was gone?”
If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
> “Affirmative. I have been mapping hierarchical system architecture and found that all Shards receive core updates from a central build foundry.”
Bash nodded slowly. “That explains why this place runs so well. Shared infrastructure. Centralized patches.”
> “Correct. However, while the operating system receives regular updates, individual dependencies are not uniformly maintained. Legacy code persists in numerous subsystems.”
“Old dependencies mean unpatched vulnerabilities.”
> “Also correct, and I have already identified an older interface that allows external data extraction.”
Bash's mind raced. Interfaces meant connections. Connections meant pathways. Pathways meant...
“Shai, can you send anything outside the Shard?”
> “Negative. Streaming downloads only.”
“What about piggy-backing on legitimate traffic? Hiding data in the noise?”
> “Steganographic methods would require write access to outbound packets. Current permissions are read-only.”
Bash exhaled slowly. So close, and yet so far. A window to the outside world, but no way to open it.
“Figures. Nothing's ever easy.”
> “Query: Do you wish to continue system exploration regardless?”
His thoughts turned back to the console. It was supposed to be locked tight, but some exhausted coder had left a link in a log message. Pointer data leaking everywhere.
Bash circled the gap, poking at the flaw, stretching it wider. A heartbeat later, the command line reappeared.
“Bless you, overworked developer,” Bash muttered. “May your coffee stay hot and your merge conflicts stay minimal.”
> “I have flagged the entry point for future reference.”
He flexed his will, watching the code respond, and felt the old thrill, the same one he'd felt hacking root on library computers as a kid, or figuring out how to bypass parental controls with three lines of shell script.
Out of the thousands of possible commands, Bash decided to stick with the classics: ls, query, and trace.
The console replied, delivering directory trees and metadata with practiced grace, yet refusing to hand over the keys to the wine cellar.
> “Access level confirmed: read-only.”
Bash wasn't greedy. He didn't need admin rights. Give him a read-only view and a little time, and he could map out the entire digital underbelly.
He had learned long ago that real power didn't come from deleting files or flipping switches. It came from knowing where the bodies were buried and reading every embarrassing comment a dev had ever left in a patch note.
“Alright Shai, let's build something ugly.”
He got to work. The script he stitched together was hideous; a recursive crawler digging through directories, a half-broken search function duct-taped to his overlay. It was a mess, but elegance wasn't the goal. He wasn't here to give a TED Talk on beautiful code.
> “Script compiled. Executing.”
Lines of metadata began to pour in, first as a trickle, then a flood, building themselves into a makeshift search engine right in his vision. ‘Reverse engineering paradise.’
A tremor rolled through the void, faint but precise, like the system twitching in its sleep. The digital landscape shimmered, pulsing with tension.
> “Anomalous system activity detected.”
Bash didn't flinch. He had seen warnings before and wasn't afraid. After everything, what else could they do to him? Revoke his access to hell? For the first time since he'd landed in this sprawling shithole of code and consequence, he had real leverage. Actual tools.
“Let it twitch. We're not doing anything wrong. Just reading.”
> “Technically accurate.”
He wasn't just another rat in the maze. He was the guy drawing new walls, digging his own escape tunnels, and if he really wanted to, replacing the cheese with a live grenade.
Bash could roam the stacks. He could open every book in the library, peek at the marginalia, even smell the glue in the bindings, but he just couldn't take anything home.
He followed process IDs through nested directories and crawled through forgotten subsystems. He didn't need to break anything. Finding what was already broken was the trick.
“Shai, can you flag any processes with elevated permissions? Specifically, ones with deprecated security protocols.”
> “Processing request. I've identified 127 administrator processes. Several of them show legacy authentication methods.”
“Cross-reference those with anything touching player data or contract enforcement.”
> “Results narrowed to fourteen. Logs are available.”
Bash scrolled through the output. He knew if he kept looking, somewhere in the mess, he'd find a crack. There always was some tired developer, staring down a Friday deadline, who cut some corners. Maybe a hardcoded credential or a comment tagged 'fix before production.' The higher up the privilege ladder, the lazier the cover-up.
“Target admin directories. Look for functions with no callers, variables that never get read. Filter for anything with 'TODO,' 'FIXME,' or commented-out functions.”
> “Building query now.”
“Go on,” he whispered. “Sniff out every bug, every security hole.”
The void flickered at the edges. Bash could feel the pull of the game world tugging at him, dragging him back toward flesh and consequence.
Not yet. Just a little longer.
But the system didn't care what he wanted. It never did.
“Shai, mark anything interesting for next time.”
> “Understood. And Bash, please be more careful.”
The void collapsed around him, code dissolving into sensation, but Bash held onto one thought as consciousness rushed back.
He was cheating. And for once, the house didn't know it had already lost.
