Broken System Ch. 44-45 (Patreon)

Ch. 44 - Snow Day

“So we’re just going to jump because she says so?” Emma asked.

Benjamin noticed that she hadn’t let Matt heal the cut on her throat, and the red scabbed-over line stood out in sharp contrast to the pale skin of her throat. The wound was an accusation as much as her words, and as Benjamin clicked open his eyes, he closed them immediately.

He was tired of fighting. He had other things to focus on.

Benjamin had been up half the night after the Throne’s envoy had left, trying to prioritize his to-do list. He needed a way to hack into the systems of the other enslaved peoples, which was a task that still eluded him. More importantly, though, he needed some way to protect all of them from the mind-control magic of the Rhulvin. Thinking about how easily Ethan had used that wand against him was disturbing, and Benjamin was sure that was the tip of the iceberg as far as those dangers went.

Right now, Raja was checking a billion combinations a day, but that was still just a drop in the bucket. So, not only did he need to find a way to upgrade his hacking tools by several orders of magnitude, but he also needed to build the magical equivalent of a firewall from scratch, and he had three months to do it. It was a nightmare project, and instead of letting him focus, Emma wanted to pick a fight with him about whether or not he’d given into the Throne.

He sighed. “I’m very sorry that I chose to save your life. Mea culpa.”

“What?” she demanded, her outrage going up another notch. “You did no such thing! I could have—”

“Gotten your head cut off if you moved a muscle,” Matt interrupted, agreeing with him for once. “That fae woman could have killed us all if she’d felt like it, Emma. Just drop it, okay. It’s not like we had other plans.”

“I can take care of myself,” she said in a huff, though he noted she didn’t refute anything Matt had said. He also noticed that She didn’t go outside like she usually did at this point. He didn’t blame her. He’d gone out first thing in the morning to pick any of the remaining pastry ornaments before the birds got to them so they could all have one nice breakfast, and it was cold out.

Thanks to Raja’s efforts, they had some leather boots and fur gloves they could wear, but without serious winter gear, none of them belonged outside for long. He expected it would only get worse, too. The snow had not stopped falling, and it was almost up to his knees now, which was just enough to start floundering in.

“I mean - what could we possibly have to do that’s more important than saving people who are stuck in the same position we were in?” Nicole asked.

“How about… surviving?” Matt asked. “Fighting those people would be no joke. I’m not sure I can protect all of you if it comes to that.”

He let them debate the issue as he returned to the task at hand. Coming up with a plan. At present, he had no way to hack the average system user in a timely manner. Even if he assumed that all mages were like Lord Jariss had been, and they all used such low-security passwords, it would still take weeks, which meant, what? Sneaking into one of these villages, tying down someone, and running his brute force program until something gave? That sounded like a terrible plan, but all the alternatives were worse.

The easiest way would be to confront one of the mages and steal their wand. If the data stored within it was as unencrypted as everything else had been, then that would be everything he needed right there. That data could give him a bounded search range that was actually manageable, but of course, they would have to actually survive such an encounter, and escape unbrain-washed, which wasn’t nearly as easy as it sounded in his head.

Honestly, it sounded kind of like a death sentence to him. They’d only killed Lord Jarris because the man had been extremely overconfident, and they would need some crazy guerilla tactics to come up with a way to set that up again. For now, what he really needed to do was focus on some sort of mind-control protection spell.

Benjamin had seen spells for resisting the elements and for demons in the spell list, but it seemed to be a very intentional oversight that there was nothing to shield someone from the very powers that the Rhulvin used to maintain control over their warriors. Still, in a basic sense, it wasn’t hard to imagine what that spell would look like if he took the most important rune sets from dominate and persuasive suggestion and mixed them with the commonalities he found between endure elements and mind of the sacrosanct. The combination almost immediately showed that the beta version in his codex would grant a 50% resistance to mental magic, but he wasn’t sure that would be enough.

He set that aside to let the ideas percolate and focused instead on the interface. It followed that if the systems intentionally had no access to spells related to mental resistance, then they were intentionally vulnerable to such things. That meant that he should be able to close certain ports and theoretically render them immune…

It was at that moment he had an epiphany. How are these spells able to work anyway if they don’t have the password to the systems in question? Suddenly, he felt like he was going about all this backward, and he needed to dig even deeper into the subject, but that was what his friends distracted him, derailing his whole train of thought.

“So what do you think we should do, Benji?” Matt asked.

At that moment, he’d been juggling a dozen facts as he tried to link the runes involved with mind control spells to the way that the system seemed almost tailor-made to accept such commands rather than reject them. He almost had it, and then, as his attention was wrenched away by the direct question, they all fell to the ground and shattered. He would have to try to reconstruct them later.

So, with a sigh, he sat up. “I think that I’ve got an awful lot of work to do between now and spring if we are going to be able to do anything to make our… umm, benefactor, happy, and I think once we do, it will be like kicking a hornet’s nest.”

Matt and Raja nodded, and that, and even Emma didn’t seem quite so hostile once he spoke, so he continued. “Look - long term, I just want to get home - the same as the rest of you, but I haven’t figured that part out just yet, but while we’re here - we might as well help all the other people that have had their lives stolen.”

“But that could be millions with this many cities,” Emma said, pointing at the map that was already starting to wilt around the edges. “Why do we have to risk our lives for people we don’t know.”

“We don’t have to,” he shot back, “But I want to. Look - maybe it won’t even be that hard. If I can figure out how to make some kind of self-replicating worm or virus, maybe we can take out the Rhulvarian empire without a shot being fired, but right now, I’m pretty far from that point.”

“What do you mean?” Matt asked. “You were able to unlock all of us pretty easily.”

“Yeah, well, that’s because Lord Jarris used a seriously boomer password,” Benjamin sighed, “But next time, that won’t help us unless the first city we go to happens to be the one that he was taking us to, and all the other enslaved humans were locked up with the same style password.”

“So you mean we’ve only gotten this far because you were what? Lucky?” Emma scoffed. “Figures.”

“It’s better to be lucky than to be good,” he countered, not sure where he’d heard the saying that had risen to the top of his mind. “And I’m pretty sure I can. I just need time, and fortunately, if the weather keeps up like this - I should have a lot of it.”

After that, they debated what their plan should be and where they should go when the weather finally allowed it. Raj and Emma thought they should just go to the closest because that would make for the quickest target, while Matt and Nicole thought that they should strike for the largest nearby city, where their river met the larger Mississippi-style river that flowed west to the sea. Benjamin thought they were both bad ideas.

“There’s just too much we don’t know,” he said, “But the one thing I do know is that the ones closest to the danger will be the ones most prepared to fight. Anything along the forest here - they’ll be ready for us, but these little towns over here in the middle of nowhere? They’ve gotta be farming communities, or training grounds, or something like that. In my mind, that means big enough to have some kind of overseer but small enough that they might not have a whole army to throw at us.”

“Well, with their awful magic, those mages can turn everyone that works for them whenever they want, can’t they?” Nicole asked.

Benjamin nodded. “That’s true. We just have to make sure they don’t get the chance to give any orders. If we can do that, then everyone should stay nice and docile like a beehive until we can set them free.”

“If we can set them free, you mean,” Emma said, twisting the knife.

It might have been Benjamin’s imagination, but he was pretty sure she was being more aggressive than ever since he’d shot her down a few weeks back, and he wasn’t sure how to take that. To her, everything had become an act of aggression, and he was sure that rejection ranked somewhere way up there.

“What happened to the positive girl who always told us to do our best?” he shot back, twisting a knife of his own. “I miss her.”

This time, the sour look on her face was enough to make her leave the hovel, at least for a little bit, with the help of the furs that Raja had made for their watchmen. “I’m going to go look around, assholes.” she spat, and then she was gone, but the only one that seemed to miss her was Matt.

Benjamin allowed himself a moment to wonder if she was always like this, but he’d been too into her to notice or if everything that had happened had broken some important part inside of her. He didn’t dwell on it, though. They were all broken.

“Alright, so when the snows melt, and we aren’t going to all die of frostbite, here’s what I think we should do,” Benjamin said finally, pulling the map closer to himself. A little disguise, a little luck, and a whole lot of programming, and he thought that just maybe they might be able to get a foothold on Rhulvin territory and start just the sort of insurgency that would let them catch these bastards by surprise.

Ch. 45 - Midwinter Workout

A few unexpected things happened over the next month. The first was that the pine tree that the strange young emissary continued to grow and bloom even as the weather got colder. The pastries never came back, but every few days, some new fruit would pop up, and they would find it waiting there when they woke up in the morning. Blue plums and purple melons were the most common as the days went on, but there were other, stranger varieties, too.

It was a welcome surprise because the second was that they were running through food faster than they’d anticipated, thanks to spoilage. It was heartbreaking to see so much of their hard work going down the drain, but as the weeks wore on, they found more and more dried fish or smoked venison that was obviously too decayed to eat.

Still, Raja managed to catch a few hares and, once, a mangey wolf, and they still had all the acorns they could stomach, provided they spent hours grinding them into a thin paste. So, they weren’t going to starve, but most nights, they all went a little hungry as the dwindling cache of food got smaller and smaller.

During these dark, restless days, they all worked on their own little projects. He worked on his coding projects, Emma sharpened her knives or argued with Matt, Nicole stitched Raja’s spare leather into something resembling armor, Raja worked on creating a new, better bow, and Matt mostly just stared into the fire. It was the last one that disturbed Benjamin the most. Trapped in this tiny room with the rest of them, his eyes took on the intensity of a caged beast.

Benjamin felt it, too. They all did. Only Raja had managed to maintain his good humor despite everything that had happened, and though he couldn’t tell jokes exactly, he laughed at everyone else’s even when they weren’t funny and did his best to keep everyone’s spirits up.

It was worse after the sunset, and the only light came from the small fire they kept burning all the time. After that, there wasn’t really enough light to carve or sew, and everyone either chatted or just waited for sleep to take them. Benjamin, at least, didn’t have that problem. Those were his most productive hours.

He’d already installed the time dilation runes into his codex so he could work at double speed, but nothing was better for productivity than a few hours of uninterrupted work time. In the last few weeks, he’d made great progress. He’d been forced to pick up persuasive suggestion to test whether or not he’d successfully hardened his system to mind-control magics. It had wasted a spell slot, but there was really no other way to test it.

Persuasive Suggestion (0 mana): Make a target more likely to help you with anything you ask. Unlikely to work on emotional decisions, or subjects which the target has pre-existing strong feelings about.

He probably should have picked up Dominate because it seemed likely that it was more powerful since it cost eight mana, but the very idea of the spell had disgusted him. Regardless, his results had been outstanding. Not only did the changes he made to Raja’s system make his friend completely immune to the magic, but the alert that Benjamin installed to indicate that someone was trying to control him popped up on Raja’s HUD. It was a big step forward.

Benjamin wasn’t so foolish to conclude that he’d conquered this issue in a single stroke, but once he’d started down this rabbit trail, the result had been fairly straightforward. Every day he worked on this problem, he grew more convinced that these defects were intentional.

Some of the earlier problems he’d found, like the unencrypted log files, could have just been sloppy, but to him, it was clear that whoever had designed this system had done so to make it as easy to control the people using it as possible.

It was enough to make him wonder if the taskmasters and the powers that be had the same system or if they used something entirely different than the people they lorded over. That thought disturbed him and made Benjamin what else they might be capable of that he wasn’t ready for, but it wasn’t a constructive thing for him to focus on.

Instead, he focused on the processes that he could. He needed to make a virus that could infect a large number of strangers and pass between them, and then somehow use that to hack everyone. He’d managed to increase the strength of his brute force attack further by ruling out certain rune combinations that were impermissible within the systems themselves, in the same way, a modern OS wouldn’t let you use certain characters when naming a file because it could screw with the file structure.

That discovery had only reduced the complexity of the problem by a couple of orders of magnitude. That wouldn’t be enough to get where he was going, even though it pleased Raja greatly that it brought him one small step closer to getting his voice back.

Then it occurred to Benjamin that he might have been going about this the wrong way, and he ended up spending the next few days feverishly creating a new spell: Data Leak. In a sense, it was a war dialer, which was a term that was old when he was young, but basically, it took advantage of the same openings he’d just spent the last couple of weeks closing and convinced the system to give you the key to its own defenses.

Despite the fact that he had magic, he still couldn’t make math go faster when he was checking every single possibility. What he could do, though, was use those security gaps meant to allow for the mage’s foul commands to smuggle data back out. This proved to be a remarkably easy trick to accomplish, but before he finalized the spell, he needed to work on the contagion effect so that it became self-spreading, and there were some parts of that he hadn’t quite worked out.

That was fine. It would come to him. Benjamin had no idea what month it would be in the real world but imagined that it was January or close to it, so he had months left to figure everything out. He used the break to help Raja with his bow project. Lesser creation wasn’t very good at putting complex objects together, but it was pretty good at shaping simple ones, and together with Raja, they proceeded to slice a piece of wood into thin segments and then melt them back together in such a way that the grain alternated.

On Earth, this would have involved glue, and the block of wood they would have ended up with would have been called a laminate. Here, though, it was better. There was no glue. It was just a piece of would with an impossible amount of rigidity for its size, and that was something that Raja could shape to be what he needed. It still wasn’t as good as the sweet compound bow he’d lost, but when it was done, it was going to be worlds better than what he was struggling to hunt with right now.

It was only when they were all about to go stir-crazy that they started to spar in earnest. One morning, after weeks where not even a single monster had been sighted, and they just couldn’t take sitting in the warm, dark little cave they’d built, they decided to spar.

At first, Benjamin convinced himself it was like calisthenics but slightly more aggressive, but after watching Nicole take Raja apart in a series of armlocks that surprisingly didn’t require healing, he decided it was more like MMA or boxing and immediately began to dread his turn.

Matt called the winner of that fight as it started, which pitted him against Nicole. This was a fight worth watching. Raja had no real training in melee combat, so he was every bit as lost as Benjamin would be compared to these two, but here was a combination of strength vs speed, and though Matt refused to strike the girl, letting her score hit after hit with fast kicks and leaping strikes, once he got his hands on her, he forced her to the ground putting her facedown in the snow until she conceded simply because she was freezing.

That just left him and Emma to slug it out after that. Benjamin honestly wasn’t sure who was going to win this one, given Matt’s hesitance to hurt her before now. He quickly became more interested in just how different Nicole and Emma were fighting. Nicoles used her long legs to improve her short stature, but Emma moved inside Matt’s guard as soon as possible. She stayed there almost the whole time, almost managing to weave out just in time. In the end, he was certain that if she’d had her knives instead of her fists, Matt would be a dead man, even with his healing.

Still, as it was, she could never hope to bring him down barehanded, and eventually, he walked away rather than get serious with the woman he loved. Which, of course, meant that it was his turn to face off against her.

“Come on, Benji,” she purred. “I’ll go easy on you. We can fight with one hand tied behind my back.”

He thought about it for a moment but knew he still wouldn’t have a chance. “How about I admit defeat proactively, and you two try to help us learn a few useful moves instead,” he volunteered. “There’s no way that Raja or I can beat a pair of ninjas like you two.”

Emma seemed genuinely disappointed that he wasn’t about to let him wipe the floor with her, but it was the look that Nicole gave Raja that was infinitely more telling: there was no way that the two of them weren’t banging during the times he went off on all those long hunts. Not after the flicker of smolder he just saw.

This, at least, they agreed to, and with a short explanation, the boys found themselves being put through their paces by the girls. Despite the falling temperatures, the vigorous exercise kept all of them at least a little warm, but the whole time, Benjamin found himself distracted.

Suddenly, he found himself both jealous of and happy for his friend. Nicole still wore her wedding ring, which struck him as a little weird, but she was very cute, and he hoped they’d be happy together, just like he hoped that Emma and Matt would figure out a way to be together again, that that it seemed likely at this point. He’d be perfectly happy being the fifth wheel for a while if everyone else got to be happy.

At least until he found a nice elf girl to settle down with, he decided with a smirk.

It was that fantasy that cost him. Until that moment, Emma had been taking it easy on him and letting him practice his blocks in a way that was challenging but doable. The moment he looked distracted, though, she delivered a savage jab to his solar plexus that brought him to his knees.

She let him lay there dazed in the snow for a moment before she helped him to his feet. When she did that, though, she whispered, “The next time you lose focus, I might kill you myself.”

Shortly after that they all went back inside the hovel to warm up, but even Benjamin thought that what they’d just done was a good idea, and that they should probably do it more often, no matter how psychotic Emma could be.

The rest of the day was pretty normal, and Benjamin was dead asleep when Nicole came back in and woke everyone sometime in the middle of the night. “You have to come quickly!” she shouted excitedly. “Hurry, come on!”

As he struggled against sleep’s formidable grasp and tugged on his shoes, Benjamin noted that she didn’t sound afraid, though she didn’t know what else it could possibly be.