Two weeks earlier

They called it the Sorceress.

Or at least, that was the identifier they used to refer to it. More concretely, SORCRSS_m7.

Whoever they were, the hackers had opened a hole in the game and created a character to peek inside. Sumiko was fascinated by this. Following the trail of the hackers as they tried to erase their footprints was challenging, a game in and of itself. She had fought the temptation to log in and see what the game was like, but she couldn’t resist seeing this war unfold, as the intruders, while not playing the game themselves, set up this complex procedure, maybe to be able to wreak havoc into the system once they could actually go inside and play.

The Sorceress. A character that barely interacted with anything else in the game, but that was potentially a source of information from outside and of items that couldn’t be obtained during normal gameplay because they were hacks. Sumiko could only imagine what they could do, but she figured that those items would serve as shortcuts to acquire infinite currency or skills, jump instantly between different realms, or become invincible.

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And there was an interesting piece of code that seemed to prove her hypothesis. There was a quest (a “task” in the Anderworld’s parlance) that was not in the logical structure of all the rest, but it was an isolated thing. It was a task that told the player to go and talk to the Sorceress! But obviously, that task couldn’t be activated through normal means. It had to be triggered. And the trigger appeared to be a non-autorized player logging in.

They set this up for their own use, Sumiko thought. But the temptation had come back now, stronger than ever. What if I go first? What if I somehow manage to log into the game without triggering the security system? If so, I could talk to the Sorceress myself. Be the hacker inside.

The idea was ludicrous, but Sumiko couldn’t get it off her head. She knew the Anderworld was online. She knew there were already a bunch of people playing it. She knew there was a way for a non-registered player to access a source of potentially wonderful bonuses. Her gamer heart was beating so fast she thought she was about to faint.

She kept following the trail for days, completely fascinated by the war that was brewing up in the virtual world.

Her enthusiasm only subsided about ten days later, when she found out what they had done to Mike.