.5 To Have and To Code (6 page)

And all he had to fight back with were a bag of malfunctioning spells and a bush.

A smart man used what he had.  Daniel activated every spell in his bag, a quick line of code redirecting the error messages back at the band of misfits who had him under attack—most people at least paused when their screen started flashing red.  Then he crouched lower behind the bush and started coding.  One actually functioning shield spell, coming right up.

He had to give the misfits credit.  Several of them nearly beat him to the punch, and his coding was tight, fast, and powered by way too much adrenaline.  The shield popped into place just in time to rebound a lightning bolt that would have missed and a flying dagger that would have come way too close for comfort.

Damn. 

He tapped into the root code for the bush—maybe he could make the darned thing grow thorns.  Halfway through a grow spell, instinct had him looking up.

And nearly screaming like a girl.

The blasted bush was growing, all right.  Long, snaking tendrils—the kind that wrapped up minion avatars and ate them for breakfast.

Crap.  The coiled-spring feeling moved from his mouse hand to his chest.  Fight or flight time.  He needed bigger guns, and he was pretty sure he knew who had them.  A couple of slingshot lines of code, and he landed just inside the door of one of The Wizard’s spell stashes.  Realm’s number-one player, but it was a minor cache and a poorly guarded one, spotted ten minutes before all heck had broken loose.

He grabbed what he needed—and hoped like hell that The Wizard was fourteen years old and headed to morning classes.  Raiding the top-ranked player in Realm was likely to get the poor schmuck of an avatar he’d borrowed in some serious trouble.

For right now, however, it gave him what he needed.  Big game mojo.  He sucked in a loin-girding  breath of air, grabbed a fireball spell, and hit activate.  Time to clear the bushes.

A blast of light—and then an error. 
Spell requires magic.

Spells
were
freaking magic.  Daniel yanked up the code for the spell, trying to spot the problem.  Line 42—some kind of weird dead-variable call.  Maybe the spell cache hadn’t been so unguarded after all.  Fingers flying, he did surgery on the spell code, pulling out the dead lines and hooking together the rest. 

And tossed it over the bush just as the first guys with sharp swords breached his shielding spell.

When the smoke cleared, the troops were backing up.  Fast. 

Victory pounded behind Daniel’s eyes.  Hot damn.  He had weapons. 

Or he would have, once he did some repairs.  Until then, he needed to make scarce.  Smart gamers didn’t fight with half-cracked tools, and he was a very smart gamer.  And a guy running on pretty much no sleep.

Scooting down a convenient rabbit hole, he ditched the avatar and silenced his code.  Daniel Walker, over and out.  He watched, amused, as the dizzying attack melted into friendly and slightly confused chatting.  The players on this level had mad skills, insane weaponry—and the organizational skills of two-year-olds.  Raid leaders they were not.

But even if you considered escaping down a rabbit hole a decent gaming tactic, at best he’d held them to a draw.  And that was fairly embarrassing.

Even on no sleep.

Daniel scrubbed his eyes and peered at the clock in the corner of his screen.  Damn.  Nine o’clock in the morning and he hadn’t actually made it to bed yet. 

He leaned back in his chair and groaned.  Shit, he hadn’t iced his ribs nearly long enough either.  Poison had the meanest elbows in the hood, even when he was on your side.  And it had taken three hours of ball-stealing to convince the new kid that a little teamwork went a long way.

He pushed back from the desk. An all-night gaming session wasn’t his usual gig after a night with Skate and crew.  Especially one where he was on the wrong end of daggers and lightning bolts.  Those spells he swiped were going under the microscope—but first, he needed a nap.  Or at least some fried eggs and an ice pack.

He pulled up onto his feet, wincing.  This was the kind of crap that happened when he wished for a little more excitement in his life.

-o0o-

“He
what
?”  Nell tossed a box of donuts on the desk, trying to hear over her brother’s furious typing.

Jamie grabbed a donut without looking.  “Some jerk hijacked one of Govin’s avatars, shielded himself against a lightning strike, and stole some of your spells.”

The first two parts of that sentence were bad enough.  The last had little red spots flying behind her eyes. 
Nobody
raided her spell caches and lived to tell about it.  Nell slammed into a chair, fingers already heating up.  The miscreant was going
down.

“He’s gone.”  Jamie brushed spray sprinkles into his palm and licked.  “Vanished about two minutes ago.  You just missed him.”

She glared at the messenger and yanked her hands up off the keyboard.  Fire-witch fury was never good for the electronics.  “Dammit, why didn’t you stop him?”

“I thought the guys had it handled.”  Her brother shrugged, continuing to decimate donuts.  “It was a minion avatar he stole, and they had him pinned behind a bush.”

Nell’s brain was making its way through the haze of fury.  “Wait, what?  Back up.”  Stealing avatars was bad, and way against the game rules, but minions had really limited abilities.  “He shielded with a minion?  Against freaking lightning bolts?”

“Yup.  Wrote some really sweet lines of code to do it.”  Jamie grinned.  “While crouching behind a bush.  Govin nearly got him with a dagger.”

Govin had very few weapons—and unerring aim.  He also had a very upright set of morals.  Not the guy to steal from.  Nell pulled up the gaming logs, scrolling backwards through the action.  “When did he come online?”

“Midnight.”  Jamie crunched, adding Doritos to his donut breakfast.  “Spent most of the night in stealth mode.  Got flashed this morning when he tried to activate one of the minion’s spells.”

Minion spells required less magic than sneezing.  “What happened?”

“He tried it with straight coding.”

The big difference between Realm’s public levels and the elite, private ones was the ability to blend computer code and magic.  Throwing the switch between the two was second nature to all their witch players.  Someone had obviously been way too focused on being an obnoxious ass-hat.

Nell looked at her screen with scorn.  “Thiefs an avatar and can’t even get his basic spellcode right?”  She pulled up user data.  “Who is this joker?”  Somebody needed a refresher course on polite game play.  That happened fairly often in the public levels, but witches usually had better ethics.

“Dunno.  I was just about to take a look when you arrived with donuts.” 

Nell waited almost patiently—grunt work was what little brothers were for.  She helped herself to the last raspberry cream-filled.

“Huh.”  Jamie looked a lot more serious now.  “His IP address is cloaked and his other info doesn’t match any players that have logged in for the last year.”

There were no good reasons to cloak your IP address.  “We have a hacker?”  That was serious business—they had a lot of teenage witches in Realm to keep safe.

The fire beginning to shoot out of her brother’s eyes was a bad sign—Jamie was a good fire witch in his own right.  Nell started scanning logs and code, looking for traces.  There were very few—whoever this was, they were very, very good.

She got to the shielding spell he’d concocted behind the bush and felt the hard snap of two and two crashing together.  “The Hacker.  The guy who ran the levels of The Eternal Tower.  It’s him.”

“Can’t be.  He doesn’t have access.”  Jamie’s fingers were flying again, the raucous cadence of stampeding elephants.  Or one pissed-off witch.

“Doesn’t have
legal
access.”  But he’d found a way in.  Nell pulled up the shielding code again.  “It’s him.”  She was dead sure—enough time looking at someone’s code, and you learned their signature moves.  The Hacker’s style was stamped all over the intruder’s game play.  Hot coding, sneaky tricks, and dishonesty to the bone. 

And he’d held off some of Realm’s best players with a handful of stolen spells and a bush.

A
bush
.

Jamie leaned over her shoulder, his mind easing off high alert.  A known player, even a badly behaving one, was far less of a threat than an unknown invader.  “What kind of magic has he got?”

She didn’t freaking care.  He was going down.  “Doesn’t matter.  He’s mine.”

Her brother just shook his head as her fingers sparked—on purpose this time.  “All yours.  You can crush him as soon as he shows up.”

Dealing with hotshots who broke the rules was usually her job.  Jamie had come far too recently from their ranks. 

The reformed troublemaker in question pointed at her screen.  “Focus.  Magic.  What’s he got?”

Players in the witch-only levels all had magic—but abilities ran the gamut from blooming a few flowers to spraying half of Realm with lightning bolts.  Doing the latter required strong magic and superior coding skills, which was a fairly rare combination.  Most players had glaring weaknesses in one area or the other.  Knowing them gave you a leg up.  Nell glared at Jamie. Brothers were so annoying when they were right. 

She toggled her screen, pulled up The Hacker’s profile, and headed straight for his spell library.  “Lots of custom spells, so he can code.”

Her brother grinned and snagged the Doritos.  “Only if they work.”

As Realm admins, they spent way too much time cleaning up spell misfires.  Witches didn’t tend to proofread their code.  She clicked into one of The Hacker’s spells and scanned.  Efficient and to the point—under other circumstances, she’d admire his skills.  “Looks like they work.”

She clicked into a second one to be sure.  Yeah, the guy could code. 

Jamie pulled up the spell library again on a second monitor.  “His magic’s all over the place.”  He started pointing with a Dorito-orange finger.  “Lots of fire magic, but some earth spells here.  A water incantation, and two different storm calls there.”  He frowned.  “This must be somebody we know.”

Presuming they could code decently well, witches had the same powers online that they had in real life.  Someone with all four elemental powers would be hard to miss.  Nell frowned—they had plenty of renegade witches, but not any sneaky-bastard ones.  “Maybe he’s done some heavy trading.”  Some players had turned spell-swapping into a thriving business, although she had no earthly idea why you’d want a spell you couldn’t activate.

Her brother raised an eyebrow.  “How?  He isn’t even officially qualified for these levels yet.  No access to the spell flea markets.”

She snickered—Jamie wasn’t big on spell trading either.  Mostly because the merchants kept raiding his gypsy avatar’s closet.  Esmerelda’s silk gowns were hot commodities.

“Focus,” said her brother dryly, picking up her thoughts.

Right.  On the cheating scum had been sneaking around using other peoples’ avatars.  Nell grabbed the donuts—bad tempers required fuel.

Jamie reached for one and looked down at his screen.  And blinked.  “Damn.  He’s back.”  He looked up, unholy glee on his face.  “And he’s checking out the code on those spells of yours he stole.”

Nell only paused long enough to stuff one last donut in her mouth.

And launched The Wizard, all engines blazing.  Time to teach a rotten, sniveling thief a lesson he wouldn’t soon forget.

-o0o-

“Bit of a showboat, are you?”  Daniel shoveled in eggs and scanned another one of The Wizard’s spells.  A storm spell this time—complicated and replete with bells and whistles meant to flagrantly display power.

He smiled, wolf contemplating his dinner.  Those kinds of gamers usually lost, thanks to their own ego.

Not that this would be an easy take-down.  The spells were a fairly typical arsenal—but he was pretty sure he knew who manned them.  Powerful coding with splashes of brilliance—the signature was unmistakable, given the hours he’d spent trawling through Realm’s back end.

The Wizard was Jamie Sullivan.  Had to be.  And logic said the sexy and flamboyant gypsy that was Realm’s number-two player was his older sister.

Players probably got a real dig out of going after the game’s two creators.  Smart marketing.  And Jamie had some hardcore gaming skills.  The gypsy wasn’t bad either, but in Daniel’s experience, girls just didn’t have the obsessive focus necessary to be a really superior player, although there had been a couple of fourteen-year-old maestros lately that had him rethinking that position.

He wasn’t sexist.  Just realistic.  No woman threw a baseball harder than he did, either.

Jamie Sullivan, however, was going to make a very worthy adversary.

Daniel closed the folder of spells he’d swiped.  Looking any closer violated his own personal set of ethics.  And the battle would be more fun if he didn’t know all The Wizard’s secrets beforehand.

He switched profiles, logged in as The Hacker, and started working his way through the ballroom ladies of the Eternal Tower.  The door to the witch-only levels loomed.  Time to make an entrance.

An official one.

-o0o-

Sniveling creep thought he could just walk in the front door, did he?  Nell glared at The Hacker’s progress, sent a very terse message to the hordes cheering him on—and used her admin override on the Eternal Tower’s entrance.

She yanked open the door, power and might of The Wizard on full display, and looked down on the little librarian with scorn.  “You’re on my turf now, asshole.  And you messed with the wrong witch.”

Surprise blasted through the watching ranks of Realm players on both sides of the door.

Nell ignored them.  Glared at The Hacker.  And banged out the message that would begin his very short stay in Realm’s elite levels. 
I CHALLENGE YOU TO A DUEL, YOU RAT BASTARD.

They could have just banned him—he’d violated the game’s terms of service in about every way possible.  But it was going to be way, way more fun to crush him first.  As slowly and painfully as possible.