R1's exhaust roared.
Overhead, a golem hundreds of meters tall plummeted, displaced air from its plunge crushing the surrounding pine trees into wooden splinters.
I cranked its throttle.
My fingers remained locked around the handlebars, rigid. But above, that stone giant became a blur of light brown, melted snow and plummeting bricks smearing across our vision in long streaks.
Earth quaked beneath R1's tires as the golem's shadow swelled ever wider from behind.
Magic circles rotated beneath the bike's chassis. Violet light bled from its frame, exploding outward to tear a pressurized corridor of air around us.
Medusa's fingers tightened on my coat. I hunched forward, chest nearly touching the fuel tank, and she folded with me.
R1 dissolved into a speeding line of violet-black, shooting hundreds of meters ahead.
I tilted, and the bike slid sideways. Its tires bit at the edge, vaporizing snow and carving a charred trail in our wake.
One moment, a sky of molten bricks above. The next, snowfall touched our hair.
Yet the golem's shadow still stretched behind us, chasing our rear tire by a mere inch.
I didn't stop. I braced, locking my shoulders tight and jamming my legs against the footstands. That golem struck the earth behind us, unleashing a tremendous shockwave that tore open trenches in a wide radius. An impact slammed into our air corridor.
R1's rear tire bucked upward, followed by the front, launching us airborne. Ahead, the asphalt road from before shattered and peeled upward, wrenching itself skyward.
For a moment, we were screaming through the air, meters of empty ground beneath us, with that peeled strip of asphalt leading the way.
Then, Medusa and I both pushed down on our thighs. R1's rear tire dipped, the front rose, and we surged, dropping our tires onto that floating strip of road.
The bike's frame compressed on impact, its dragon-tendons howling as cracks raced across their whole casing.
Crimson headlights swept across asphalt as we screeched forward, using the ruptured road like a ramp.
R1 climbed higher. I swung the bike sideways, chassis still rising until it was completely horizontal. Instantly, the magic circles threaded into its tires blazed to life.
We flipped through air, the bike spiralled alongside us. Sky. Ground. Sky.
Gravity wrenched us forward and down, the magic circles rotating in disjointed, flickering spins.
R1's tires hammered into earth, frame skidding horizontally, chassis tilting inward, a huge curtain of soil tearing ahead. The magic circles aligned with each breath, absorbing force, momentum, and velocity, synchronizing perfectly—
Snap.
All rotated once. Together.
A continuous burst of pure force erupted from the tires.
It hit the ground. Its shock pushed against our forward momentum, a wave of opposing force ripping through the chassis, every bolt and cable groaning as our velocity met its mirror.
The skid held. R1 slid sideways across soil, tires grinding two furrows on our path. The magic circles spun in reverse now, bleeding velocity into ground, transferring momentum into heat and light. Violet cracks spiderwebbed beneath us, warping everything beneath into a dark, glass-like surface in our wake.
Soil was still being flung in a curtain ahead when we carved through it. The world blurred sideways, soil, snow, sky all smearing into horizontal ribbons.
I held the handlebars steady. Our slide was everything. Too sharp and we'd flip. Too shallow and we'd roll. I kept R1 on its edge, let the circles absorb our force.
Thirty meters. Twenty. Ten.
Another smaller curtain of soil collapsed ahead of us, spent. R1's tires caught shattered ground and dug in.
Its frame jerked, dragon-tendons snapping taut, and the bike straightened with a shudder.
Five meters.
The magic circles gave one final rotation, violet light flaring bright enough to stretch our shadows across a clearing. Then they dimmed, spent, spinning down to a slow, exhausted flicker.
R1 came to a stop.
Silence.
Just our breathing and the scent of burnt rubber.
I stood there, hands still locked on the handlebars, engine humming beneath me. A drop of sweat slid down my cheek, dripping down onto the snow, hissing and dissolving that white into vapour.
Behind us, two scars of charred ground stretched for as far as an eye could see, smoke curling up from them.
Medusa's grip on my coat hadn't loosened. Her forehead pressed on my shoulder. I could feel her breathing, fast and shallow.
"We still aren't done." I said to her, grip tightening on the throttle.
Medusa's arms crushed further around me, and she nodded against my shoulder.
I twisted its handle and pulled the accelerator.
R1 skidded, rear tire drifting in a tight circle, headlights pointing back the way we had come.
The engine's pitch climbed.
And we blurred.
...
..
.
Vapor floated in the air as I walked through it, coat damp with sweat and torn in places. Black tattoos over my face and body had receded, dormant beneath my skin.
The receding sound of R1's engine resounded from the distance. Medusa was taking it to keep an eye on the perimeter and hold anyone coming here after that earlier commotion.
I brought my focus back to the surroundings.
There used to be a forest around me; it had ceased existing just minutes ago. A ten-story-deep crater, wider than four adjacent soccer fields, was all that was left.
Pools of melted magma covered the crater in patches, liquid fire dripping from them along the crater's downward bends.
Elsewhere, useless metallic components and stone-dust spread in patches, enormous golem limbs lying half-buried in the soil close by.
I walked over to a heap of shattered rocks mixed with dirt and glass, swiping a single finger across it.
Black markings flashed across my face for a fraction before vanishing. That mound's crown slid off its base, crashing to the ground beside it with a rumble.
Taking a few steps forward, I plunged my hand into a specific section of the bisected mound's base. Glass and stone tore into my glove, but a single magic circle rotated across the cloth, its fibers flooding with mana for reinforcement.
It took me nearly two minutes of searching inside to close my fingers around what I was looking for.
I wrenched my hand back, dragging out a dim, silver core of threads larger than my fist. A puncture wound was visible across it, where Mukuro's bullet had passed through.
My other hand came up, and fingers snapped, three magic circles rotating in a sequence across the glove.
A wooden table and chair materialized beside me, and on top of the table rested a sleek, silver laptop.
Before I could move toward them, a low beep resounded from the core in my hand. Ignoring it for now, I strode over and settled on that chair amidst all the devastation.
Then, I set that core on the table and pressed both hands against it, fingers sinking into its silver threads.
With a slight jerk, I pulled them apart, tearing the core down the middle.
It was hollow inside; a small terminal lay within, radiating a dim silver glow.
It looked like a construct woven entirely of thin threads, with no screen or casing. Where light touched those threads, they shivered, rearranging themselves into characters and numbers, forming a language that seemed a mix of nearly a hundred others.
Continuous beeps echoed from it, words crawling across its length, changing and pulsing every second.
My mind went into overdrive.
Symbols strobed past my vision faster than any human eye could track, and yet each one landed in my memory while I was already multiple words ahead. Kanji, runes, letters I'd never seen assembled by mixing alphabets from three different languages.
Understanding flashed through my mind. A fraction of those words became comprehensible.
T#rm$n!l *u#s@a%h^i&.
!e%$ d*s&ru^t se@uen/e.
T@m!r — #:2*
Not enough. Fragments, scattered vowels, half-formed words neither here nor there.
I stopped trying to read it in pieces.
Everything, from borrowed alphabets, to half formed words, to runes and symbols stitched together from different ancient languages, all of it collapsed into a single line of patterns inside my mind.
I solved the simplified equation in moments, reaching a single answer, a key capable of solving this problem specifically.
The static tore apart.
Terminal Jubstacheit.
Self-destruction sequence.
Timer — 1:24
A timer alongside a self-destruct sequence. It was expected. Those beeps were akin to a bomb before detonation, tracking with Jubstacheit choosing to destroy everything rather than share any Einzbern craft.
It was almost dull, how logical he acted.
I placed that terminal on the table beside my laptop, pushing the ruined core aside for better maneuverability.
The magic circles on my gloves rotated again, a USB cable materializing in my grip. I plugged it into the laptop's port and flipped open the screen.
It flared to life, and my fingers moved across the keyboard, barely more than a blur.
A black window popped up first, green text cascading down it, line after line, too fast for anyone without my talent to follow. Windows split, multiplied, and stacked over each other in a shifting algorithm of code and diagnostics, each one reflecting faintly in my eyes.
One of my hands drifted away from the keypad to hold onto the end of that USB cable, bringing it close to the terminal.
Those writhing strings across that terminal twitched once, as if scanning their surroundings. Then, a small section of threads warped inward, knitting together into the familiar shape of a USB port.
I fed the cable's tail in. It locked in with a click.
Then, those strings slithered around the cable, swallowing it further in.
The moment a connection between them solidified, a new silver-colored window popped up on my laptop, red code spilling down it in the same language I had just deciphered.
Bringing my focus back to the laptop, my fingers flew across its keys.
Timer — 1:19
This thing was a collection of moving threads, and threads were essentially circuits. That meant it had to obey a set of rules, and any system with rules could be broken.
[Ultimate Programmer] and [Ultimate Hacker].
I reached in and clashed against its firewall.
The silver window flashed in short intervals as my fingers sped up, and in seconds, it was overpowered by tens of black screens overflowing with green code, its flashes stretching into long cuts.
I didn't let up.
Those long cuts tore even further, green climbing across its red code, absorbing it into my own algorithms.
The threads of that terminal thrashed, snapping tighter, weaving themselves into a lattice of unfamiliar script.
*!%&@ — #:%5
The silver window stuttered, my green flushed out by its red text, and it shoved every other window aside to reach the very front of my screen.
I glanced at the terminal once and kept going.
Green and red tangled against one another, my code fighting to overpower the Einzbern's.
Those threads tried to resist harder. My fingers were faster.
T@^e* — 0:52
My windows buried the silver one under an avalanche of green algorithms.
The threads convulsed in response, and swallowed more of the USB cable inside, clutching the cable itself.
That single silver window detonated from beneath my black ones, exploding into a dozen others, red code running down them like blood.
My jaw tightened imperceptibly.
Its language was adjusting and re-encrypting itself every moment, forcing me to divert more than half of my thought streams to decipher it again and again.
The silver windows kept dominating my laptop screen, red code bleeding outward to morph my green code into their color.
T!#e& — 0:20
Finally, I sighed when just twenty seconds were left and willed.
Sky-blue particles floated around my neck, shaping into two slender arms that looped around my throat.
"Huhu... Couldn't hold back from summoning me, huh, darling~?" Someone blew warm air into my ear, cackling like she couldn't be more delighted.
Blonde twin tails, blue eyes. Enoshima Junko.
My eyes remained glued to the screen, and I spoke without even glancing at her.
"We don't have time for this."
"Aww, no fun~" Her weight dropped into my lap before I could react, her back resting against my chest, arms still looped around my neck like she'd done it a hundred times before. "But timers make everything so much more exciting, don't they? Tick, tick, tick~"
I didn't look up. My fingers didn't stop moving.
She leaned in, pulling my neck down with her, eyes flicking to the screen, then to that countdown blinking red in a small corner.
"Ooh. Self-destruct." Delight spiked through her voice. "Now that's a countdown worth watching."
"I'm sending you back to summon someone more useful," I said flatly.
"Rude~" But she was already sliding off my lap, twin tails swaying as she straightened, gaze flicking once more to the countdown. "Fine, fine. Business mode."
Her spine straightened, the teasing in her expression cooling as her eyes settled on those red codes.
"So... What's the plan, darling? Or were you hoping I'd just look pretty while you do all the work?"
Junko asked, gaze sliding over to those writhing threads.
"Read everything that flashes on the screen. Translate it out loud. I don't have time to spare processing power on language."
"Ooh, delegating. I like it when you're bossy~" Junko smiled, a hand rising to her cheek, but her pupils were already flicking left and right across the screen, all her lazy amusement burning off in an instant.
Red code kept flooding down, making my green text flicker unstably.
T#$^* — 0:15
"Access log," Junko said, her voice even now, stripped of teasing. "Timestamp—six minutes ago. Someone logged in remotely."
"Not that. The algorithms further down."
She moved her eyes down and read out loud.
"#$%%^@("
I stopped deciphering the shifting language, only cross-checking her words to ensure she didn't pass on a wrong translation deliberately.
The rest of my mind now focused on my laptop.
Timer — 0:10
My fingers streaked. Green finally overtook red and swept it away. The silver windows folded one after another, red vanishing under green text entirely.
8
Those thread's writhing slowed, restoring calm to that terminal's surface.
6
The beeping sounds that had echoed from the start ceased.
4
Terminal Jubstacheit.
Self-destruction sequence — Terminated.
Timer — 0:04
All the leftover silver windows flickered once, then went black.
"Done."
"Mm, look at you." Junko was already climbing back into my lap, arms sliding around my neck, that same delighted grin curling back onto her face like it had never left. "So calm. So—hey, don't I get a reward for being such a good little translator?"
"What do you want."
"Obviously—" she leaned in, her voice dropping to something low and obsessive,"—a kiss."
Her lips moved fast, a last inch of distance left between us.
Then she dissolved.
Sky-blue particles scattered where her mouth should have been, drifting apart like smoke in wind, and she was gone entirely, her weight, obsession, and laughter all vanishing at once.
Silence settled where she'd been.
I looked down at my empty lap.
Then at the laptop, which flashed with a single green line.
[Access granted]
"..."
When did I start needing the help of others for anything?
...
..
.
***
[200 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter]
[10 chapters ahead on P@tr3on = [email protected]/Not_Aaryan]
...
[Author's Thoughts]
I decided to only do a single chapter today. So, how was it? Felt legit? Like experiencing hacking something real without even knowing anything about it? If so then that is exactly what I wanted you all to feel. The adrenaline of hacking something build by hundreds of years of work from a magus lineage while following the whole process, even while not knowing the H of Hacking.
To be honest, I'm as clueless in this as anyone else, just had an idea about how it should be possible to show and did.
And with this... our arc here is coming to an end, maybe one or two chapters at most, then we'll be back, wrap everything there in around some chapters, then launch over to our neighbour. I have a new and unique idea before Izuru goes there, stay tuned.
Anyway... have a happy day, everyone!