Rogue Huntsman
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Arex was a nervous wreck.
Her trains of thought were crashing, each cart jumping the rails left and right and barely leaving her any room to hang on to the ideas she was already struggling to formulate.
Her mind was hardly starting up in any regard and her hands were shaking far too incessantly to even begin to type anything away at the digital keyboard across the bottom of her scroll's screen.
She knew what to do, she's done this before, but this attack felt personal, far more personal than any of the companies she's worked contracts for to play a hand in defending against Sentinel. This was different.
This felt entirely different.
The pit in her stomach dropped even further when she received a second notification drowned in bright red.
Her second firewall was just breached.
Alarms were already blaring in her head, she didn't need them brightening her screen too. She quickly shut out of those notifications and bypassed most of the graphical displays of her scroll.
She linked herself straight into the core of her code and… and just stared…
Her hands were still shaking.
She needed to settle her nerves somehow. She needed to take a breath, calm down, find a way to get a clear head and-
Another alert flashed before her eyes. Another firewall fell.
She had some of the most advanced software even remotely possible! She spent years writing it, even longer customizing it to differentiate it from any other software on the planet, and continuously spends her time every day actively updating it to keep it out of the technological Meta's reach.
How was she supposed to fend off an entire organization of undefeatable hackers…?
"I can't do this…"
Arex's voice was hardly above a whisper, softly ushering from her almost quivering lips as she watched a fourth firewall fall. She couldn't do anything.
Not against that.
It was impossi-
The crunch of a bagel bag shot into the room like a crack of thunder in a barren sky.
Her entire attention snapped to the noise, gaze whipping behind her and eyes seeking out the source as soon as her nerve-wracked mind caught wind of it.
Niro was at the table… casually eating a bagel.
For a split second, even if it was just a passing moment, the lime green eyes beneath the shadow of Niro's cowboy hat met hers… and her whole body locked up.
Death suddenly challenged her, and she couldn't tear her gaze away.
Her body stayed locked up until his momentary glance turned back to his bagel, all control flooding back to her in a single rush of all her senses.
In that small moment, her lungs dispelled the tense air clamped inside her tight chest and slowly began to fill with a new breath of revitalizing oxygen.
A breath she really needed to take.
Just… just calm down… you can do this. You can adapt to this. Arex knew this task wasn't impossible. She knew, to every extent, how far her abilities reached.
If she settled down and truly focused, she could fend this attack off. She just needed to set her mind to it, suppress her surroundings, and start churning through the code she needed to in order to change and counter the advances of the intruding force.
She just needed to kick herself into high gear and do it.
With the alert of a fifth firewall dropping, Arex brought her gaze back to her bed and shook her hair frantically in one final measure to help with her nerves. Raven locks cascaded over her vision for a moment, but she brushed them away just before she pulled herself from her chair and climbed over her bed in a rush.
The phoenix quickly crawled her way past Kitsuki and maneuvered over the expanses of both sets of sheets.
She dropped her scroll onto her mattress behind the kitsune and leaned over the other side of her personal bed, reaching into her box of backup tech accessories and withdrawing another scroll from it.
She quickly expanded it and leaned back onto her bed, pushing her lower back against the headrest and pillow behind her before placing the second scroll down flat on the mattress in front of her crossed legs.
Its screen quickly flashed on and she synced it to her alerted scroll, a keyboard soon filtering across the holographic display in a faded LED setup of keys.
As soon as she was laid out, she went to work on shutting Sentinel out and began fabricating her fluctuating network of direct and indirect countermeasures.
She needed to be cunning and complex if she was going to pull this off…
And if Niro's presence in the room was enough of an incentive to force her to give this her all, she was damn well sure she was going to give these hackers a run for their bottomless lien.
Anoel was running through the halls of Beacon in a wavering wake of dispersing heat. She was irritated, a very dangerous chord strumming oh so loudly in her body at the prospect of someone directly attacking her little sister.
She had every intent to burn whoever it was allowing Sentinel to hack into her sister's scroll alive and reduce them to nothing more than pitiful ash, erasing their existence from the world of the living.
They didn't just have the nerve to taunt Arex… they had the balls to step up to her, call her out on something she had no control over, and then hack her for it with no other reason but a game.
This was a low blow on all accounts, and they had no reason to be putting Arex through any of this.
Ohohoho… when she gets her hands around this person's neck, she was going to show them what it felt like to swallow the condensed core of a blazing sun.
Another door came crashing in as Anoel kicked her way into another scroll lab, scaring the drowsiness out of the few students actually using the setup of scrolls inside as she glanced around.
Nothing… Another bust.
She tightened her fists and moved on.
Arex swept her delicate fingers across the digital display at her legs, dragging a glowing line across it before rapidly flashing through a movement of keys across her scroll's keyboard to counter another move her opponent made before her.
She was eight firewalls down.
That was eight layers of her code, shattered in the wake of Sentinel's piercing golden eye…
But she was working steadily to both block and shut out certain attempts they made to get into even more reaches of her system. She was effectively locking down large portions of her interior information, cutting certain attacks off by forcing those areas to go off the grid.
In doing so, she transferred and deleted those databanks of memory after filtering them into external storage units sitting next to her. Modified fiber optic cables spanned across her bed, meaning there was no feasible way any piece of the hardware could be hacked remotely.
It was an insurance policy… just in case.
While those were transferring, she was hard at work dancing her fingers through strings of code she was drawing from experience alone. She was even forced to write newly formatted structures and completely inverted statements just to be unpredictable…
But above all else, she needed to be fast.
She didn't know how, but she was nearly matching Sentinel's speed in its attempts to break through her security. She was keeping pace…
At least, for the time being.
Her frantic mind was much more focused and narrowed now, forgetting about how many government contracts she actually had stored in the memory of her encrypted scroll. Her reputation as Sparrow wasn't just for the general public.
It was forged for that reason at the start, but she wasn't going to turn down high-ranking officials across the Kingdoms of Remnant when they approached her about project opportunities and funds.
Those were what she was worried about. And in hindsight, those were probably exactly what Sentinel was after.
Even if she made sure none of her designs could be weaponized.
A flash of red caught her eye once again, but all she could do was internally sigh and keep pushing forward.
Another firewall just fell… that made nine.
She only had five more.
Her methods were working, slowing Sentinel in its advance, but she doubted she could fully stop what was happening. There was no way she could at this point… with any luck, Sentinel would back off and move on.
But that thought was as passing as a midnight train in a Grimm infested forest. It would stop at nothing short of its destination.
She solved her memory overflow problems each time they arrived by hardcoding limits into how much each of her locations of memory could store. Those overflows would've made Sentinel's attack all the easier, so she was doing everything she could to stall it and ultimately stop it.
Fully stopping it, though…
She was slowly beginning to realize how much of a pipedream those words really were.
How little of a chance she really had at stopping the attack from bypassing every layer of security she'd built up over all the years she'd dabbled in the digital world…
Crushed in a single day.
But, something felt off.
Sentinel's attacks on companies were widespread, targeting, and unequivocally ruthless in what it dug through and unveiled to the world. It spared nothing, and in doing so, left obliteration in its digital wake for whatever prey it descended on.
This felt so much more direct.
It wasn't just straightforward, it was telegraphed. As if, with each move it made, it was seeing what she'd do to counter. Like a game of chess, only with a digital world as its board and every character involved was a power piece with limitless potential.
It was a game… and she wasn't leading it.
Through the layers of countermeasures she was building up, she began to slowly catch wind of something she'd never seen before in a Sentinel raid.
There was a trace of an IP Address…
No way… Sentinel wouldn't be this sloppy…
Sentinel routed its signal through every scroll in Vale whenever it made a full-fledged attack on a company to keep its source from being traced. It took countermeasures and laced those backup tactics with insurance policies coated in the finest of extricated obscurities.
It was a phantom that knew how to devour the physical world.
Only, this time… Arex was picking up the signal of a scroll.
She immediately started tracking it, sacrificing some of her frontal assault in favor of following the digital trail of her attacker.
Maybe if she found the source, she could shut the rest of the organization out. That was her way of stopping this… that was her way of keeping Sentinel from going any further with her.
She piggybacked the signal and backtracked it, rushing through the bounced locations of three IP Addresses throughout the expanse of Beacon Academy.
Arex jumped through a scroll listed under Yang Xiao Long's name, then traced the signal even further through another registered to one Jaune Arc. She didn't know why theirs were being used as focal points of Sentinel's triangulated source signal, but they were.
The last scroll the signal was fed through was Coco Adel's… before she finally reached something encrypted.
The signal stopped at a blocked IP Address. Every piece of its identity was blank.
Usually, when something was encrypted, it could be uncovered and tapped into. It could eventually be deciphered and read. But… this ID… was completely blank.
All she had was the origin of the source.
Three more firewalls fell in the time she managed to trace the signal.
She only had two-
Another flashing alert told her of the breach of one more wall.
She only had one left.
Arex went into overdrive with her thoughts and split her focus, decrypting the location of the source signal while fending off the final attacking moves of Sentinel as she shoved every last effort she could into supporting her last firewall.
Segments of her code were cracking. The structural integrity of her final wall was slowly breaking under the pressure of her opposition, fracturing in targeted locations throughout her entire data structure before collapsing into pieces one by one.
The layers of her final block of code were failing…
But she nearly had it.
Her frantic fingers shot across the keyboard in front of her, rapidly forcing a ping through the signal she found to be the source and picking up its location through a network of proximity based sensors she just hacked into.
Those sensors were the scrolls of Beacon Academy students. She needed to borrow them, just for the time being. The net of sensory devices worked like an intricately spun web of silver strands, springing to life at the subtlest twitch of a ping she forwarded through the source signal.
Arex triangulated the received information through Beacon's most updated architectural blueprints and used the sensors to map out the signal's exact location down to the precise square inch of its residence.
"There!" Arex grabbed her scroll and opened up its smaller, integrated keyboard to keep her last firewall from collapsing in on itself.
She repaired and reinforced as much as she could as she got to the door to her dorm and yanked it open, stumbling out into the hallway before throwing her gaze around.
Her scroll was directing her forward to the source…
It was… within five meters of her? No, that couldn't be right.
Her method to triangulate the signal was accurate, incredibly so. It was the most efficient way to find the precise location of a digital entity, there was… no way it could've been wrong…
Arex's eyes fell to the door across the hall.
They… they have to be in there… Dark green eyes stared through the disheveled black bangs drifting in front of her.
Her warm skin sheened in a thin layer of cold, nervous sweat, making her pale skin almost shine in the light of the hallway she crossed. Kitsuki stood in Arex's wake as the girl moved forward, worriedly watching as the phoenix swiped her fingers across her scroll once and listened to the resulting sound of a dismantling lock emanate from the door in front of them.
The black haired girl moved without thinking, pushing her way into the door with a swift turn of the handle and throwing the whole entryway open with a desperate urgency.
The attack on her scroll suddenly ceased… leaving her final firewall cracked, splintered, almost falling to pieces… but still just barely intact.
Down to her last line of encrypted programming.
Arex's eyes immediately scanned the room ahead of her, looking for anything that would even slightly resemble a setup built for the purpose of routing an entire organization through a keyhole of funneled signals.
Her eyes immediately fell to the first bed in sight, dark green irises skimming past a girl halfway beneath the covers of the bed she slept on. She glanced past the red t-shirt the girl was wearing and the barely visible pale leg slipped out of the disheveled covers bunched up over her softly curved hip.
The rest of the beds were completely empty, two cleanly made while one was only slightly cleaned up.
Her eyes then scanned the desk to the immediate left of the door, finding only papers stacked neatly at its far right and a couple textbooks resting on its surface.
She didn't bother to take in the rest of the contents residing on the desk itself and tore her gaze to the right, clearing half the room in a single sweep before stepping inside and checking the other half…
Only to meet the amethyst eyes of a boy staring at her inquisitively from beneath his violet beanie. Blindingly golden strands of hair slipped out from the hem of his hat, and he wore just a casual white t-shirt and blue jeans.
All he had in front of him… was his scroll… and a glass of orange juice.
"You took your time..."
His voice was monotone, sonorous, imposingly deeper than any normal voice and entirely uncaring. The amethysts he had for eyes gave her a once over before returning to her own irises, which were quickly transitioning between a plethora of colors.
She was silent for a while… more confused than anything else. This was him. It had to be.
"W-why?" she stammered out, one hand still tightly grasping the door handle while the other held her black scroll open at her side.
"Many reasons, none of them hostile, I assure you."
None of them… hostile? Really? A look of disbelief passed over Arex's face and through her shining eyes, irises drifting into light yellow and burning red, swirling together to form a combination of confusion and… irritation.
"If… it wasn't hostile," Arex slowly led on, her lightly flickering sunsets for eyes refusing to look away from the one before her, "then why was I attacked?"
"Attacked? Trust me, if this was an attack, you would know. I just needed your attention."
"My… attention…" Arex breathed out, still trying to grasp at some sort of real reason behind all this.
The boy sighed. "You can come in, you know. Clearly we have a lot to talk about. Oh, and please shut the door."
He pointed his thumb in the direction of the girl sleeping as he leaned back in his seat.
"She's been up all night, so don't wake her up."
Arex's eyes fell on the girl again, watching as she pulled her blanket up further to cover her bare shoulder. Those eyes then turned back into the hallway, meeting Kitsuki's eyes as the kitsune stood in their own doorway.
She looked equally but she silently signed something out.
"Want me to come with you?"
Her partner looked as confused as she felt herself, but Arex softly shook her head with an appreciative smile and eventually turned her gaze back to the boy inside.
Sentinel wanted her attention for some reason. A reason she had no idea the purpose of or if it really wasn't as hostile as he claimed it to be.
"Or, you can stand there looking idle and confused."
The grip Arex held on the door slowly loosened as she took a silent breath, throwing a meek look back to Kitsuki once more before she finally let go of the door.
Her view of her partner in white disappeared as she stepped inside and let the door swing closed.
She didn't want to drag Kitsuki into this.
"Do you want some orange juice? We have crackers, if you like those. Maybe-"
"Could you at least tell me why Sentinel wants my attention?" Arex asked, staying by the door for the time being.
"You're mistaken if you think the entirety of Sentinel is involved. Half of them couldn't care less about you. Personally, I'm the one responsible for this meeting." He took a single sip from his orange juice before continuing, "You may want to take a seat."
Explains why their hack lasted for so long and why it wasn't so overwhelming… but… Arex still wasn't sure how she was supposed to feel about all this, let alone address it.
Eventually, she quietly made her way over to the desk behind her, mirroring the boy's own, and pulled out the chair there.
"Then what's your game here. Why did you start this?" Arex asked, carefully taking her seat in the foreign room and resting her elbows on her legs.
She was tense, still tense from the attack, but now she was pushing herself through a quickly spanning array of discomforts. She was never comfortable around strangers to begin with, but knowing this one was capable of so much destruction over the digital domain only fueled the pressing thoughts of just leaving.
But… leaving meant never knowing why she was attacked, even after evading the ire of the group of freelance hackers from the beginning.
She was staying for answers.
"This 'game' as you put it, is simply because I needed to talk to you. I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm not exactly in any position to leave this room without assistance. Honestly, I would've just left and found you myself if it weren't for my crippling fatigue."
Arex finally noticed the small twinges of pain the boy was under every time he made any small movement. She couldn't see it visibly, but she could glimpse the white fabric of bandages and wrappings encompassing most of his body beneath his t-shirt.
"You were in the Hydra fight…" she realized.
"Unfortunately."
He put himself in danger for the sake of the school, or at least for the sake of those fighting the Hydra after she tried to take it on herself.
She always viewed Sentinel as an organization of ghosts hell-bent on bringing ruin to the companies across the world they didn't agree with. Whether they were morally wrong, exploited the public as a whole, or were corrupt in any small way.
Their aims were always in favor of the people, but she always assumed there was some amount of cynicism behind the mask of Sentinel, however vastly it spanned.
She wasn't getting that vibe from this boy… at least, not yet.
"You're just… not what I expected from a member of Sentinel."
"Look who's talking. A genius inventor and a hacker? You? I'm honestly surprised. No offense, of course."
No offense… Arex was a little taken aback by that, but her eyes quickly fell deeper into the red as she felt a heat of annoyance pass over her skin.
"Am I not what you expected of the great Sparrow?" she asked with a roll of the eyes, honestly a little peeved that the name she claimed even adopted any kind of preconceived notion of what to expect.
"No, but am I what you expected of a member of the largest hacker organization in the world? It's a two-way street you know."
He had her there, but she knew the point still stood between both of them, "I guess not, but you're still pushing aside my first question. Why did you want my attention?"
"Because unlike most of Sentinel, I'm actually a fan of your work. I was the one that removed your name from our list. That makes it five times this week."
Arex let out a tightly held breath there, knowing how often her name actually gets upvoted even though she fit none of the criteria of what Sentinel actually stood for, "My name's on there more than I'd honestly ever like it to be. I still don't know why either… but I guess I have you to thank for keeping it off the list."
"I'm tempted to place a block on your name coming up. It's becoming a chore to scroll through the thing every day just to see you there, placed somewhere in the top ten. We all know you're completely innocent, hence the removal. As you may know, we don't actively manage the list, that's what bots are for."
"Please, do…" The public, no matter how many different tools you give them, oftentimes exploited a system to get what they wanted. Even if what they wanted had no real reason other than shared curiosity… or something worse. "But if they know I'm not a threat at all, why are you here? And why did you go after me?"
He kept dodging the question, and that was starting to get a little on Arex's nerves.
"You want the honest truth? I need a favor. I'm stuck here with no contacts and those that are in Vale have gone dark. To see you connected to the local network was both a surprise and a blessing."
Arex slowly slid her scroll closed, resting it on the desk next to her as she finally felt some of the tenseness in her back and shoulders dwindle away.
"Was all this really necessary for a favor?"
"I had to be sure I was exposing my identity as a member of Sentinel to someone who knows how to keep a secret. I can't just automatically assume you were the real Sparrow, only for you to turn out to be a fake and doom myself. Hence the reason behind the hack, if you were a fake, I would have found out instantly and still remained hidden."
Arex gently rested her head in her hands for a few seconds. There were so many easier ways to do this… for all she knew, he got some sort of high from hacking her. He's part of an organization that makes its living from breaking into companies digitally and wreaking havoc.
"An average scroll doesn't have as much security as mine does… wouldn't that alone have given it away?"
He held his hands up admittedly, "Okay, I did get a little carried away after the first few firewalls, but you have to understand that such a challenge could not be ignored for someone who hacks for a living. You have my sincerest apologies."
She'd forgive him at another time. Right now, she really didn't feel like accepting that kind of apology.
"And now you expect me to give you a favor… after attacking me…?"
"In hindsight, it wasn't the greatest idea I've had, but it was too tempting to just give up. If you're saying no to the favor, then I completely understand, but say it was business… Even you know that Sentinel sits on a lot of money."
"You already know that I accept contracts," Arex sighed, finally leaning back in her chair, but it was more out of exasperation than comfort, "But you also know that I pick my partners in business carefully, if you know anything about me by now. What kind of favor are we talking about?"
"I need processors, powerful ones. I already have the schematics for them, I just need someone to build them for me. As for picking your partners carefully, this'll be a cash-in-hand job with no record whatsoever."
The no record helped. She personally tried to keep away from any ties with organizations she personally didn't agree with. She had her own sets of what was morally right and what was morally wrong, even if large sums of money were offered as payment.
But for this… she already knew where Sentinel stood morally. That helped at least back her response, but she also figured this wasn't for the group at all.
It was likely a personal endeavor, something the boy needed rather than the entire organization.
"How much?"
"Name your price."
"I don't like naming prices," Arex returned.
"I can start from anywhere between ten thousand and ten million. Makes no difference to me."
Ten million?! What the hell does he think this is worth? "Am I buying the materials?"
"You can source them yourself, or I can have them delivered to you in a gift basket. Your choice."
"I prefer sourcing them myself. You'll need to fund the expenditures, but otherwise," Arex grabbed her scroll and stood up, not wanting to draw this out much longer if this was all he wanted from her, "I'll build it for you. You… already have my scroll's information. Just send the schematics my way."
She quietly glanced to the door, pausing for a moment before wrapping this all up.
"We'll decide on a price after the finished product. That's usually how I prefer to do things. What should I call you?"
"Beanie kid, asshole… Whatever you feel like. As for my name, it's Ray."
The phoenix nodded slightly, remembering the name given before glancing back to the door, "Arex."
"Pleasure to meet your acquaintance, Arex. I'll be in tou-"
All stillness in the room shattered as the door to Ray's dorm warped and bent inward, searing heat billowing through the rapidly forming cracks before its locking mechanism broke and the whole thing swung open in a burst of a raging inferno.
A blaze of twin embered irises smoldered beneath the black rim of a cowboy hat as Anoel strolled inside, her strands of raven hair trailing in pale burning hazes as her gaze slowly leveled on the two inside the room.
"A-anoel?"
Anoel's gaze slowly turned to Ray, and for the first time since Arex had seen him, the lights in his eyes flickered and he displayed his first actual emotion.
He was terrified.
"Oh fuck…"
XD, that was literally just a passing glance from Niro. It was so overwhelming, despite being just a casual note of recognizing Arex's existence, the poor girl interpreted it as staring into the embodiment of Death itself.
It was enough to stir her into taking action. Good job Niro! Who happens to just be casually eating a bagel while Arex's whole world is crashing down around her…
Readers, meet Ray. Ray, meet anyone who happens to be reading RH.
Ray: "They've already seen me and my clingy pest by now. If they're not stupid."
Fair enough.
Ray and his 'clingy pest' *cough* partner *cough* (who will be revealed later) are created and owned by 'HydraFlow', another author here on FFN. He's also starting up his own story, which is actually debuting once this chapter's released.
It'll be his characters' perspectives of all the events that happen here and his own endeavors in the world of RH.
Sounds like fun, right? Like, wtf was everyone thinking when Niro and Anoel set the Emerald Forest ablaze? Or how the Hydra fight resolved?
Additionally, another author's doing the same.
'andy2396' is writing his own perspective as well with his characters (Dante, Inuba, Ciel, and Leo). This world has expanded… it seems… huh…
It won't detract from the overall story or my characters. We're all going to do this in our own separate ways, but they'll be following the events of this story nonetheless.
So, RH is still in control.
Their stories, respectively, are "Lost in Binary" and "Knights of White and Black".
For now, Favorite and Follow.
I look forward to seeing REVIEWS for this. You'll be introduced to a LOT of concepts of mine. Feel free to give me your thoughts.
Cya XP