You Mocked Me I’m The One You Fear Chapter 06
For two beats, nobody moved. Then the noise hit all at once.
“Verified contributor? That’s G?”
“G? That’s G? HIDE-AND-SEEK G?”
“No way. That account’s been dark for years.”
“Is the system broken? I thought G was basically a myth.”
“Maya is G? Isn’t she the girl barely passing at Westbridge?”
The livestream moved even faster.
“G IS BACK?”
“The person who built HIDE-AND-SEEK is a girl?”
“Stolen account. Has to be.”
On Kestrel’s side, several competitors stopped typing and stared at the screen.
Their vice captain leaned toward Damian.
“Captain… that account.”
Damian’s expression shifted twice before settling into a sneer.
“So it has an old contributor verification. That doesn’t prove she’s G. If the account was stolen, the organizers will revoke it soon enough.”
Even some Westbridge students hesitated, their initial excitement cooling.
“He has a point. If she’s really G, why wait this long?”
“How old is she? Was HIDE-AND-SEEK written by a kid?”
“Stop guessing. We’ll know in one round.”
Vanessa’s lips trembled.
“Maya, where did you get that account? Do you have any idea what happens if you’re impersonating a verified contributor? The organizers can ban you permanently, and that’s the least of it.”
Ethan stared from the VERIFIED CONTRIBUTOR label to my face as if he could somehow force the truth out of me by looking hard enough.
Vanessa raised her voice.
“Did you hear me? Get down now, before you drag all of us into this.”
“Shut up.”
I put on the headset.
“Can we start?”
Damian made a contemptuous sound and sat back down.
“Start it.”
“Kestrel ready.”
“Westbridge ready.”
The system tone rang out.
“Round Two resumed.”
There was no warm-up.
My first command went out like a knife pushed straight into Kestrel’s reconnaissance chain.
I didn’t block their scan.
I followed it backward.
Before they realized what I was doing, I had disguised my traffic as their own and slipped through one of their proxy hops.
The visualization on the main screen changed instantly.
Red attack arrows that had been flying toward Westbridge’s defenses suddenly bent backward in strange loops, as if a flock of birds had hit an invisible wall.
“What is happening?” someone on Kestrel’s defense shouted. “Our probes are looping back!”
Damian’s expression changed. His hands accelerated.
“Don’t panic. Secondary block. Switch to backup nodes.”
I delayed the handshake just long enough to make the abnormal traffic look like a routine timeout. Their firewall accepted it exactly the way I knew it would.
My traffic moved through their internal network without resistance.
Not moved.
Strolled.
Like I was walking through my own backyard.
The commentator’s voice jumped an octave.
“Westbridge traffic—no, G’s traffic—is already inside Kestrel’s internal competition network. Twenty-seven seconds. It has been twenty-seven seconds since the restart!”
A sharp breath moved through the arena.
Twenty-seven seconds.
That was all I needed to break open the internal network Kestrel had spent all day calling impenetrable.