The penalty was terrifying. A five-year lock was a death sentence.
But the reward… 1000 VP was a fortune. And a Skill Ticket? That suggested I could choose a skill instead of having it dictated by the store.
The stakes were immense. The potential payoff was, too.
I looked from my screen to Maya. Her eyes were gleaming, alive with the thrill of the hunt. She had passed her audition with flying colours.
I typed on my datapad.
You're not a documentarian. You're my head of intelligence. Welcome to the organisation.
For the first time, Maya's composure broke. A wide, genuine grin spread across her face.
"Glad to be on board, boss. So, what's the plan? How do we burn them to the ground?"
They are dedicating a statue, I typed, the plan already blossoming in my mind, dark and beautiful.
A symbol of their power. We will turn their symbol into their shame. Your job is propaganda. I need art. Images. Short, brutal animations that tell your story of the stock charts.
Things that can be hijacked and displayed on every screen in that building. Can you do it?
"Can I do it?" She laughed, a sound of pure, creative joy. "I was born to do it."
My team will handle the technical side.
We spent the next hour on that rooftop, two shadows outlining a conspiracy against the glittering city. I laid out the framework of the operation, the roles my three pawns would play.
Leo, with his nervous energy, would be perfect for a social engineering task—impersonating a lost intern to gain access to a low-security network port. Jake would be the muscle for a physical distraction at a key moment.
And Mark, with his technical knowledge and simmering resentment, would be tasked with the final, critical hack from a remote location.
Maya listened, absorbed, occasionally offering a suggestion—a security blind spot she'd noticed, the psychological profile of the building's head of security.
We worked together with a seamless, terrifying efficiency.
When we were done, the sky was black, studded with stars and the lights of passing vehicles.
"I'll have the first drafts of the art for you by tomorrow," Maya said, packing up her sketchbook.
I nodded, then hesitated. I typed one last message on my datapad.
My name is Luna. No one else can know that name.
She met my gaze, her expression turning serious. The thrill was gone, replaced by a solemn understanding.
"I know. The historian protects her sources. Your secret is safe, Luna."
She turned and left me there, alone in the garden. I looked down at the city, at the half-finished Aurelius Beacon gleaming with promise. They thought they were building a monument to their power.
They had no idea they were just building the stage for their own downfall.
The game had changed. I had an ally, a partner. It was a massive vulnerability. And it was the greatest weapon I had.
The week leading up to the Aurelius Beacon dedication was a blur of covert meetings and meticulous planning.
Our headquarters became a rotating set of forgotten urban spaces: the echoing shell of an abandoned warehouse, the windswept upper deck of a multi-level parking garage, and once, the cramped, dusty projection booth of a derelict movie palace.
In these shadowed corners, our strange little conspiracy took shape.
Maya was a revelation.
She didn't just provide the raw data; she transformed it into art that was both beautiful and brutal.
She showed me the animations on her datapad—stark, black-and-white motion graphics that turned stock charts into plunging daggers and depicted Kinetic not as a hero, but as a golden puppet whose strings were held by a shadowy corporate titan.
The final image was of the Aurelius Beacon itself, cracking and crumbling into a pile of worthless coins. It was perfect.
My pawns reacted to the plan with their signature blend of terror and grudging obedience.
Leo was a nervous wreck, constantly wringing his hands as I detailed his role impersonating a catering intern. Jake, however, had a new light in his eyes.
The sheer audacity of the plan, the scale of it, seemed to ignite a spark of reckless excitement in him. He saw it as the ultimate prank, a way to stick it to the system that had always looked down on him.
Mark was the most complex. He was still terrified of me, but his fear was now mixed with a begrudging respect for the technical elegance of the hack I had designed.
He argued with me over lines of code, not out of defiance, but out of a programmer's pride, suggesting more efficient backdoors and cleaner exit strategies.
I let him make the changes. A pawn who feels ownership over his task is a more effective tool.
Their loyalty scores, according to the Subjugation tab, were still deep in the negative, but the quality of their fear was changing.
It was becoming less about me and more about the thrill of the operation itself.
The day of the dedication arrived, a crisp, clear afternoon.
The Aurelius Beacon was a monument to corporate arrogance, a shard of glass and steel that stabbed at the sky. The lobby was a sea of expensive suits, champagne flutes, and the flash of media cameras.
At the centre of it all, draped in a velvet cloth, was the statue of Kinetic, waiting to be unveiled.
I was perched in a rented office space in an adjacent building, a sniper's nest with a perfect view of the lobby. My datapad was a command centre, displaying a dozen hacked security camera feeds.
Maya was my eyes on the ground, mingling with the press, a tiny camera hidden in the lapel of her jacket.
Mark was stationed three blocks away in a public library, his fingers poised over his own datapad, ready to execute the hack on my signal.
The first phase fell to Leo. Dressed in a slightly-too-large catering uniform he'd 'acquired,' his job was to get to a service corridor behind the main stage, where an old network hub offered a low-security access point to the building's internal display network.
I watched him on my screen, a tiny, nervous figure navigating the bustling backstage area.
He looked the part—a flustered, out-of-his-depth kid. He managed to slip into the corridor unnoticed. I felt a flicker of hope.
That's when it went wrong.