Broken System Ch. 74-75 (Patreon)

Ch. 74 - An Invitation

That night, Benjamin and Raja eventually slept, though he left the connections intact on his spells so they could continue chipping away at the mountain of possible combinations for the whole night. It was not a restful sleep. Even before Matt woke him at dawn so he could disable his ad hoc network, he drifted fitfully as his subconscious was assaulted by the dreams of other people.

The end result of such bombardment was like a driving rainstorm in a psychic sense. Individually, each drop was insignificant, but together, they became a force of nature. He was sure that’s why the fragments he remembered were so bleak and alien. Benjamin wasn’t the type to remember his dreams very often. Everyone dreamed, of course, but most of the time, he woke up remembering nothing but blackness.

That night, though, he dreamt mostly of drudgery in a city that didn’t look so different from this one, save that it was even more twisted and unnatural. Sometimes, he made bricks from the local clay or crates from lumber that drifted down the river from further upstream. Other times, he was grinding grain into flour using an exhaustingly laborious stone mill.

It was all so primitive, and while he worked, he wondered why his owners didn’t invent windmills or the magical equivalent of electric motors to automate this. It just seemed so stupid. He couldn’t even suggest these ideas to his owners. All he could do was think them. No one had forbidden him from thinking; he just couldn’t act on those thoughts. On rare occasions, he even saw the Summoner Lords that so graciously ruled over and protected everyone. All he could do was thank them for the generous way that he and his fellow slaves were treated.

None of that suppressed the darker feelings that built up inside him as he worked diligently at task after endless task. That frustration simmered just below the surface, like a volcano that would never erupt. After all, what was there not to be grateful for? He and all the men and women he worked so hard beside every day always had the minimum amount of food required, and they were allowed regular rest breaks for six hours a day. It was all that they required. Forever.

Of course, waking up from that to the gaudy opulence they were surrounded by made the pink stone and alabaster statues all the uglier as far as Benjamin was concerned. He woke up feeling an overwhelming need to free everyone he’d labored alongside last night, right now, and even after he cut the connection and covered his tracks, the feeling didn’t leave him.

He could do it right now, of course. He could trigger the whole thing in this moment and end their suffering, but it was a terrible idea. Or did he just think that because right now, he was using all the overworked people of the city for his own ends? Benjamin wrestled with that question and spent the early part of the morning walking the hollow city, trying to get a better feeling of everything that was going on around him while the other Rhulvinarians were busy sleeping off last night’s festivities.

What he saw wasn’t quite as heartbreaking as the fantastical version that had haunted his dreams, but it still filled him with sadness. It was so close to being real, but everywhere he went, he could almost see the individual chains that bound them. On the waterfront, people worked tugging ropes in perfect unison to bring barges ashore, but there was no swearing or songs, and in the market and the streets, there was no laughter. Instead, there were only those dark, terrible eyes that nodded or bowed to him in respect as he passed. The only place where real emotions were allowed was beneath the paper lanterns that decorated the mages' parties.

The whole experience was enough to crystallize the vague anger he’d woken up to into something sharp and deadly. He didn’t know exactly how to turn that into a weapon that would pierce the hearts of these monsters. For now, all he could do was vent to his friends when he returned back to their suite before Arden got busy, but the thought never left his mind. With everything the Rhulvinarians had inflicted on their fellow man, they deserved no mercy.

The only bright spot of the day was Raja. With 5% of all possible combinations guessed. He felt like it was only a matter of time until he got his voice back. ‘You will live to regret this day!’ he joked. ‘A whole year of bad jokes to make up for!’

Benjamin smiled at that, but he was distracted as he wondered what else he could turn his worm toward. Why hadn’t he been trying to make a virus or trojan all this time? The answer was obvious, of course. Because he’d been obsessed with trying to break in through the front door instead of getting someone else to invite him in.

Did he really need the sigil of a dead man? Lord Jarris seemed powerful enough that his credentials were likely to be useful, but in any normal world, they would have been canceled already, wouldn’t they? Maybe he’d been going about this all wrong. Maybe he needed some malware that did more than just siphon a little mana and computing power.

That would have been his next project if not for his unwelcome visitor shortly after lunch. This time, it wasn’t Lady Thraxes herself. Instead, she sent a footman with an invitation to dine with her and a small group of her friends on the rooftop tonight.

Benjamin told the man to inform his Mistress that he’d be there, but as soon as he shut the door, Matt said, “It could be a trap, you know.”

“Of course, it could be a trap,” Benjamin shrugged, “But if I refuse, then she will definitely get suspicious. The mage I’m pretending to be just isn’t the type to lock himself away in his room like this. I'm certain half the people in the city are gossiping about it by now.”

“Then at least take me with you, or even Emma,” Matt insisted.

“God - I have no idea what that crazy bitch would do to one of you after she had a couple drinks,” Benjamin said, shaking his head. “There’s no way that I’m letting one of you deal with that kind of abuse.”

‘We could slip away,’ Raja said. ‘Just drop the illusion and pretend to be one of the faceless masses. We could go unload wagons or something while your program runs.’

Benjamin thought it was an interesting idea and a good fallback plan, but running and hiding just seemed like one more way of letting the summoners win. They debated it for hours on and off as Benjamin tried and failed to become immersed in one of the many coding projects on his to-do list.

His friends only wanted what was best for him, and he could understand that, but he also wanted what was best for them, and he had no idea what a Rhulvinarian Summoner might consider fair game when it came to one of the enslaved underclass. Someone might strike Matt down as a sort of practical joke and offer him another nameless, faceless servant as recompense. As if one life could ever replace another.

The only lives that mattered in this city were those with house names attached, and Benjamin was quite sure that if his mask ever slipped, his life would become just as worthless as everyone else’s. As the hours passed, Benjamin checked the traffic for any signs that the powers that be had noticed last night’s activity. He restarted his worm but hooked it directly to Raja before he started getting ready. If the Summoner Lords weren’t going to monitor their network, then he figured they might as well take advantage of that.

“Keep it below 5% in daytime hours,” he warned Raja as Emma helped him into a particularly gaudy jacket. “And if they catch and kill me - just hit the macro and set everyone free. That will be vengeance enough.”

They only had so many outfits fit for a noble with them, but he was determined to make as good a show as possible. It was the only way to keep this farce up. Partway through, while he was checking his character sheet, Benjamin noticed he was getting closer to level 6. He had no idea what he should be building toward right now or that doing so much coding would generate so much experience, but it was nice to see that he was making progress.

It was only once he was entirely ready to go that he realized this was almost certainly one of those occasions where he wasn’t supposed to show up on time. He didn’t know exactly how long he had to wait before fashionably late became rude, though. So, ten minutes after seven, he finally started walking up the stairs to the rooftop garden on the fifth floor.

Though he feared the worst, he didn’t exactly expect to see a crowd of stormtroopers waiting to greet him. He found no real malice, though. Instead, he found only a small gathering of five clear-eyed summoners and over a dozen dark-eyed servants.

Benjamin smiled blandly through his illusion as he approached Lady Thraxes and her other guests, but he wasn’t paying any attention to them just yet. Instead, he was focusing on their servants. He pinged each one to determine their name and then added their login details to a macro so he could take control of all of them in an instant if he needed to. Benjamin doubted that would be enough to save him, but he was sure that no one would expect it.

“Ah Mariek, darling,” Lady Thraxes said, smiling in a sequined top that was one part ballroom gown and two parts bikini. “You know Rynal and Jodan, of course, but I believe that for everyone else, some introductions are in order.”

Benjamin spent the first few minutes immersed in small talk as he tried not to let his stress show. He was obviously not very successful.

“You seem so tense lately,” Margerot chided him as the servants started to bring around glasses of sparking red wine. “Loosen up, Mariek - live a little!”

Benjamin tried, but mostly, that involved drinking enough to take the edge off as he worked his way through several elaborate courses that started with savory hors d'oeuvres and ended with roast beef.

During all that time, he managed to avoid being pinned down on any given issue. Whenever anyone tried to bring up the attacks, Benjamin would pivot and ask them how it had affected their lands and holdings.

It wasn’t until the desert course, when a few of the guests had retreated to a hookah that smelled of tobacco and alien spices, and everyone else was enjoying a pastry that one of the Lords he wasn’t supposed to know began to chat with Benjamin. He was an intense dark-skinned man, and though the Summoner Lord had shown interest in him before now, it was only then, when the alcohol had presumably loosened everyone’s tongues, that he finally pressed Benjamin on the subject that had been hanging over his head like a sword of Damocles all night.

“Our hostess mentioned to me last night at a different get-together that you have suspicions that fall close to my own,” Lord Ruthrin told Benjamin, pushing his slice of pie aside to lean forward and point his fork at him.

“Do they now?” Benjamin asked, pretending not to care even as he started to sweat. “Our hostess thought that I was being ridiculous and—”

“Not ridiculous, Mariek, simply… a touch too focused. Obsessive, even,” she said smoothly, “Ultimately, what can you do? Report that attack to the court and let them worry about it. I hear there are already specialists from the capital working hard on the problem.”

Lord Ruthrin shook his head. “Even if she is technically right, I have no intention of taking the loss of two of my house’s plantations lying down. Dozens of workers and acres of produce gone, just like that.”

Benjamin was about to interrupt, but the man continued, using a lesser illusion spell to bring up what were obviously pictures of a burned-down plantation and a ruined beacon plaza that had been partially dug up. “These heliographs are disturbing enough, but this…” The pictures he brought up next were of the beacon at Plantation 124, the first one that he and his friends had sacked. “How could beastmen reconstruct a beacon to repel all inbound traffic? My men had to march for almost an hour to reach their destination because they could travel no closer than that. What does all this point to if not collusion and sabotage?”

Benjamin realized that he’d screwed up the moment he saw the picture, but seeing the second one really put things into perspective for him. “Could I have a copy of these… heliographs for my research?” Benjamin asked.

The Summoner Lord made a small gesture, and the file slid across to him, opening a window and requesting permission. Benjamin approved it but saved the thing in a hardened sandbox in case it proved to be a trap. He’d wondered the whole time if such capabilities existed, and the answer turned out to be yes, giving him whole new realms to explore.

Right now, he couldn’t worry about that, though. He couldn’t worry about any of the clues they’d left behind either. Instead, all that he could do was focus on this conversation and hope that he did nothing to give himself away.

Ch. 75 - Borrowed Time

For the next couple of hours, Benjamin sat completely absorbed in the discussion as he and Lord Ruthrin talked about recent developments, and Margerot listened in. She was less concerned than either of them, but even after the rest of her guests took it upon themselves to start a minor orgy with the black-eyed servants elsewhere on the rooftop, she stayed as a part of the conversation instead of joining them, which Benjamin had not expected.

Being the dilettante that she was, he felt certain that she’d lose interest in this, but for whatever reason, she stayed fixated as Benjamin absorbed as much information as he could and tried to unleash as many plausible red herrings as he could for the Rhulvinarians. While he did so, he occasionally sent messages to the rest of his group via the party interface, letting him know that he was okay as time dragged on, but he focused on his strange conspiratorial dinner party.

While he tried to convince them that the centaurs seemed to have learned runic magic, he learned that at least 9 other plantations had been sacked in the last week and that whoever was doing so was moving further and further west toward areas that had been considered safe for years, dodging all manner of traps that had been set for them along the way.

“Don’t you see?” Benjamin said, pounding the table. “If they know where our forces are deployed, then they must have people at the highest levels. Only a few families could possibly be behind that sort of thing once you consider the scope and scale!”

“Careful, Lord Darton,” the dark skin man cautioned. “What you describe might well be treason. It would be wise for all of us to move very carefully from this point on. Merely suspecting what we do is dangerous enough.”

“The Prince will want to hear of this, of course,” Margerot said, “Have you scheduled an audience with him yet, my dear Mariek?”

“Not yet,” Benjamin said, “But soon.”

He planned on doing nothing of the sort, of course. However, the longer she thought he did, the less likely she was to try to do it herself.

After they finally had no other news to discuss, Benjamin tried to depart smoothly, but the lovely Lady Thraxis insisted that he escort her to her room, where she immediately tried to seduce him. Benjamin put her off, of course, but some drunken part of him wanted to give in even though her existence repulsed him.

After all, despite being an inhuman monster the way her pale skin was only barely covered by her impractical dress made it very hard to say no. By the end of the night, the most he could say before stumbling back to his room alone was, “First, we unravel this conspiracy, then we meet with the Prince, Margerot. After that, I would love nothing more than to spend a few days celebrating our victory with you.” The way she’d smiled at that made Benjamin certain that the real Lord Darton had rejected her recently, but he wasn’t about to dig into that.

By the time Benjamin returned to his rooms, it was almost midnight. That was when he found out that Raja had stationed himself on the rooftop of the next building over, ready to assassinate anyone who had raised a hand against him. It was a touching gesture, and it made Benjamin smile all the brighter as he explained what he learned to his friends once Raja returned.

“So they know what we’re up to, but you made them think it’s someone on their side?” Emma asked. “Smart. Who knew you had it in you, Benji?”

“What else am I going to say when they discover that the runes were reconfigured?” he responded blearily. “That was completely my fuck up. I should have thought about that. The more evidence we leave behind, the quicker they catch on to everything.”

“Well, someday they’re going to take someone alive or grab one of those horns you built, and then it's kind of back to the drawing board, isn’t it?” Matt asked.

“Yeah, pretty much,” Benjamin answered, rubbing his eyes. “But what the hell am I supposed to say? It's probably just your slaves that are breaking free because one of them learned to code; don't worry about it? I’m surprised that the man didn’t mention the lack of bodies. I'm pretty sure he thinks that whatever monsters are raiding the plantations are eating them, but I didn’t want to bring it up.”

Eventually, he got around to telling them about the helioglyphs. He wanted to show them to everyone, but he didn’t dare open that file until he’d had a chance to analyze it in much greater detail, and there was simply no way he’d do a good job of that when he was drunk and tired. So, instead, he crashed out.

Thanks to the alcohol, Benjamin slept like the dead and had no bizarre dreams to wrestle with. In the morning, over a breakfast of eggs and sausages, they discussed their options.

“I don’t see this stalemate lasting more than another day or two,” Benjamin said between bites of toasted bread with jam as he noted just how much he'd missed this simple pleasure. “There’s no way that Margerot doesn’t go to the Prince in another day or two when she finds out I haven’t. That’s not nearly enough time to discover Lord Jarris’s sigil.”

“Can’t we continue working on that once you free everyone and we kill all the mages?” Emma asked.

“Sure,” Benjamin agreed. “But I’d kinda hoped to have a skeleton key that we could use to steal more secrets. I’m convinced we haven’t even seen the tip of the iceberg. Every interaction I have with these assholes, I find out something new. Like those pictures, I mean... helioglyphs I told you about. Now that I know that they have file transfer capabilities, there are whole new ways to exploit that.”

“Maybe they already know that,” Matt said. “I doubt you’re the first one to think of a way to abuse that feature. This might be the whole reason these guys are so obsessed with paper messages.”

“First? I never think that I'm first at anything,” Benjamin laughed, “But big companies with dozens of full-time professionals fixing their code base still couldn't keep hackers from finding new zero-day exploits every week back on Earth. Every new feature gives me one more feature to play with.”

‘I don’t care if we figure this out before or after we do the job,’ Raja chimed in, ‘I just want my voice back.’

Benjamin spent the day carefully examining the files he’d been given for signs of boobytrap. He found something that might have been a sort of spyware designed to let someone else listen in on him, but he set that aside from the photos themselves. That was easy enough because they were in an entirely different format.

That little wrinkle was enough to make Benjamin wonder about what Matt had said, though. The fact that they trusted paper more than encrypted magical messages made him think that there was almost certainly a lot of spying done this way.

“What I really need to do is create some kind of antivirus software,” he mumbled to himself, “But ain't nobody got time for that.”

The best he could do for now was continue to use his makeshift firewall and check everything that he let through manually, but it was far from optimal. Really, the longer he thought about it, the more everything seemed far from optimal when it came to the Rhulvinar’s rune magics. If they really were a century-spanning, world-hopping empire, then why hadn’t they figured all of this out a long time ago?

Maybe one day, I'll find an answer to that, he thought with a sigh.

For now, though, he decided that he was going to work on a different sort of self-destruct sequence inspired by all of his recent experiments with mana flows. After all, what would happen to a mage if their mana were to short circuit, and all of their mana were to be expended at once? Benjamin didn’t know, but after feeling almost 10 mana a minute flowing through him on a sustained basis, he imagined it would be pretty messy.

A couple hours later, he had a working prototype for a bomb sitting there on his codex, just waiting to be used. It was one of the simpler pieces of code he'd made in a while that was essentially just a magical short circuit, and when he explained it to his friends, Matt’s first reaction was, “Who are you going to test it on?”

“Oh my God!” Emma burst out laughing, “Before you say Margerot, please tell me that you’re going to bang her at least once.”

“What?” Benjamin asked in confusion. “I was going to test it on myself, but you know, with just one mana and see what happened. Why in the hell would I want to sleep with Lady Thraxis?”

“Well, first, because she’s hot as fuck,” Emma smiled, “And second, because she’s totally into you.”

“First off, she’s into the person she thinks I am,” Benjamin, “And second, she’s definitely not my type.”

“No?” Emma countered, “Not into smoking hot redheads?”

“I’m not into evil slave-owning bitches,” Benjamin shot back. “Have you considered that might not even be her original body? These creeps can change bodies like you or I change clothes.”

Benjamin wasn’t sure that was true, but he was pretty sure it was, and that was enough for him to be disgusted every time one of them looked his way. However pretty Margerot was, she was a vulture in a skin suit, and even if he hadn’t gotten laid in like a year, he still had standards.

“Well, even if you aren’t going to bang, you probably need to find a different guinea pig, man,” Matt said, “Your soul is still broken, isn’t it? You start detonating your mana pool, and who knows what’s going to happen next. You might fall to pieces or something. Definitely better to use it on one of these mages if you ask me.”

That made a lot of sense to Benjamin. Well, at the very least, it played enough on his fears that he decided not to follow through with his original plan. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to detonate a woman’s soul, however vile she was. So, in the end, he decided to narrow down his target list to the men who had sat around the table with him on the previous night. Eventually, he was able to narrow down that list to just one name: Lord Ruthrin.

Benjamin wasn’t particularly disposed to political intrigue, but as soon as he thought about it and what the fallout of the man’s death would be, things started to fall quickly into place. Until now, he’d thought their best bet was to stall for as much time as possible, but if this new weapon worked like he thought it would, then he thought that there might be a real first-mover advantage to be gained.

He quickly explained all of this to his friends, who were more eager to try it out than he was. When all was said and done, he cautioned them, “We could still try to wait this out. There might be something to be gained by—”

“Screw that,” Emma said, “I’m tired of waiting. I want someone to kill.”

“Agreed,” Matt said, and Raja nodded vigorously behind them. “Waiting is for cowards. The sooner we kill these assholes, the sooner we can move on to the next battleground.”

The response was more eager than Benjamin had been expecting. In fact, it bordered on the bloodthirsty, but honestly. He was good with it. Ever since he’d arrived and seen so many people living out hollow, meaningless lives that they had no say in, all he’d wanted to do was burn it down, so they might as well get started.