You Mocked Me I’m The One You Fear Chapter 07
Damian shot to his feet. His headset hit the desk with a hard crack.
“What are you waiting for? Block her! Block her!”
Kestrel’s defenders worked frantically.
Every time they shut down a port, I had already moved to another.
Every time they deployed a new blocking rule, I was already outside its trigger conditions.
It was a game of cat and mouse.
Except I was the cat.
And they had just realized they were the mice.
“She’s too fast,” the commentator shouted. “Look at her command rate—you can barely track what she’s typing.”
The live chat flipped completely.
“I TAKE BACK EVERYTHING I SAID.”
“Yeah, okay. That’s G.”
“Damian is getting COOKED.”
Vanessa opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
Ethan swallowed hard. His fists were clenched so tightly his knuckles had gone white.
For the first time, he understood.
Every time he’d lectured me about cybersecurity over the past few years, every time he’d shown off in front of Vanessa while I sat quietly nearby, he’d been a child waving a wooden sword in front of someone who knew exactly how to use the real thing.
The person who actually knew what she was doing had been sitting behind them all along, listening to music.
Now I had finally stepped in.
No one was laughing anymore.
Kestrel stopped attacking.
Damian had learned his lesson. He pulled every available resource back toward their core servers and built seven layers of defense around them.
He sat behind the final one, clearly planning to run out the clock and wait for me to make a mistake after the intensity of the previous round.
My mouth twitched.
If hiding in a shell worked, hunters would have gone extinct a long time ago.
My grandfather used to say, “Every move between nodes should take away another option. First their visibility. Then their exits. Then control.”
He’d also told me, “People think pulling back makes them safe. Sometimes all they’re doing is closing the door behind themselves.”
So I didn’t attack from the outside.
I reactivated a foothold left over from the previous round.
They had patched the surface but hadn’t fully cleared the lower-level privileges. I took control again and stepped back inside as easily as pushing open a side door that hadn’t latched.
They had buried their heads and convinced themselves danger would disappear if they couldn’t see it.
Damian shouted, “Block her! Use the backup nodes and force her out!”
They scrambled to close paths.
That was exactly what I wanted.
Every time they issued another blocking instruction, I used the control traffic to pivot again.
I never hit them head-on. I moved around their field of vision, quietly stripping away the backup nodes they’d left guarding the perimeter.
First, take their eyes.
By the time they realized the backups had stopped responding, my access was already sitting directly behind their core switch.
Then, take their road out.
Damian realized too late.
I passed three authentication layers and took the domain controller.
“Domain controller compromised…”
All the color left his face. His hands stopped over the keyboard.
A second later, every Kestrel terminal went black at once.
Like prey surrounded by wolves at the very end, they didn’t even have time to struggle.
One minute, forty-seven seconds.
Every Kestrel node was down.