The rusted skiff drifted to a halt a safe distance away from the outermost golden ring.

"What’s wrong?" Gwen asked, her hand resting on her pistol. "Do you see patrols?"

"I see a bug zapper," Sebastian said, his voice dropping into a serious, metallic hum. He walked right up to the glass, staring intently at the rotating rings.

"That’s the absolute firewall," Corbin explained, his voice trembling. "The Golden Rings. They scan every single byte of data that tries to pass through. If you don’t have the specific, heavily encrypted biological and digital signature of a Grand Archon, it doesn’t just block you."

"It vaporizes you," Sebastian finished for him.

He had the Spoofing Drive bolted to his arm, but he knew instantly that it wouldn’t work here. The drive was designed to fool the lazy, automated planetary defenses of standard servers like 112. It disguised him as a grunt.

But the Golden Rings didn’t accept grunts.

They didn’t accept VIPs. They only accepted the literal creators of the game. If he tried to fly through that light wearing his ’Trent’ disguise, or even his Demigod aura, the firewall would instantly recognize the foreign data and un-render his existence.

He couldn’t punch it. He couldn’t drop a black hole on it. It was an absolute, hard-coded barrier of logic.

"Well, this is a problem," Sebastian sighed, crossing his arms. "I left my Archon ID badge in my other pants."

"So, what do we do?" Gwen asked, looking between the impossible fortress and the Anomaly. "We can’t fly through it. We can’t blow it up. Do we just knock and ask politely?"

Sebastian stared at the rotating golden rings.

His hyper-optimized brain rapidly spun through thousands of tactical possibilities, discarding them one by one. Force was out. Stealth was out.

He needed an authorized user. He needed someone who was already allowed inside.

A dark, incredibly predatory smile slowly carved itself onto Sebastian’s face.

"We don’t knock," Sebastian whispered, his silver eyes glowing with the terrifying promise of a truly unhinged exploit. "We just need to find someone with a key, and we politely ride in their pocket." 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

Corbin swallowed hard. "Boss... what are you talking about?"

"I’m talking about a hijacking," Sebastian turned away from the window, rolling his shoulders. "Gwen, scan the local traffic logs.

The Archons don’t just sit in there forever. They have to collect taxes. They have to send out messengers. Find me an Admin who’s on his way home."

Gwen’s eyes widened as she realized what he was planning. "You want to jump an Administrator? Out here?"

"I don’t want to jump him," Sebastian corrected, heading for the heavy blast doors of the airlock. "I want to infect him. Find me a target, Seattle."

—-

The rusted, patched-together smuggler skiff drifted silently through the dark, swirling purple smog of the Juncture. It was a tiny, insignificant speck of garbage hovering just outside the scanning range of the System Hub’s absolute firewall.

Inside the cramped, dimly lit cabin, the tension was thick enough to choke on.

Gwen was hunched over the main console, her fingers flying across a series of cracked holographic keyboards. The harsh, blue light of the screens illuminated the deep bags under her eyes. She was running a localized packet-sniffer, desperately trying to sift through the billions of encrypted data streams bouncing in and out of the massive Dyson sphere floating in the distance.

"I’m telling you, Seattle, this is like trying to find a specific needle in a stack of identical needles while blindfolded," Gwen grumbled, aggressively tapping a stubborn rune. "The Hub doesn’t just broadcast its traffic. It routes everything through twenty layers of divine encryption. If I ping the wrong port, their automated cyber-hounds will trace us back here and turn this ship into confetti."

"Just keep fishing, Seattle," Sebastian replied lazily. He was sprawled out on the co-pilot’s chair, his heavy combat boots resting on the dashboard. He had a fresh cup of terrible, synthetic coffee in his hand. "We aren’t looking for a heavily guarded military convoy. We are looking for middle management. The bureaucrats. The guys who think they are too important to need an escort, but too low on the corporate ladder to have localized teleporters."

Corbin, the twitchy code-smith, was nervously pacing a hole into the metal floor grating. "You’re insane. You are literally insane. You want to hijack an Administrator? Do you know what happens to people who touch Admin code? They don’t just die, Boss. Their digital souls get dragged into the recycling bin and formatted line by line!"

"Corbin, if you don’t stop pacing, I am going to edit your boots to weigh five tons," Sebastian said, not taking his eyes off the viewport. "Take a breath. You built the Spoofing Drive. It works. Now we just need an Uber driver."

"Got a hit!" Gwen suddenly announced, her hands freezing over the console.

Sebastian slowly swung his legs off the dashboard and stood up, his joints popping with that heavy, dense sound of biological steel. He walked over to her screen.

"Show me," he ordered.

"It’s a single, mid-tier transport vessel," Gwen rapidly explained, highlighting a small, blinking green dot on the radar. "No military escort. The registry tags it as a tax-collection envoy returning from the Outer Rim. The pilot’s ID is logged as an Admin-in-training."

Sebastian’s silver-tinged eyes narrowed.

"What’s his name?"

Gwen squinted at the scrolling data. "Corvin."

Sebastian blinked. He slowly turned his head to look at the terrified, grease-stained mechanic trembling in the corner of the cabin.

Then he looked back at the screen.

"His name is Corvin?" Sebastian asked, a dry, deeply amused smirk pulling at the corner of his lips. "We have a rogue code-smith named Corbin, and we are going to hijack an Admin named Corvin? You have got to be kidding me. The writers of this simulation are incredibly lazy."

"It’s not funny, Boss!" Corbin squeaked, pulling at his hair. "It’s a terrible coincidence! It’s a bad omen!"