Chapter 172: [172] : Rewriting the Frequency, The Hacker Warlord
Declan sat down at the heavy metal console.
He placed his hands over the glowing white keyboard.
The keys were not physical. They were made of hard light holograms. They hovered slightly above the dark metal of the desk.
Directly in front of him, three massive holographic monitors projected into the air.
They were filled with a chaotic and scrolling mess of green and red text.
It was the raw audio code of the Ten Thousand Demon Palace mainframe.
"You have four minutes and fifty seconds," Siren’s voice echoed softly behind him.
The corrupted AI girl floated just a few feet away. Her empty white eyes stared at the back of his head.
"If that timer hits zero, the acoustic dampeners shut off completely. The volume in this room will multiply by a thousand."
"I heard you the first time," Declan said casually.
He didn’t look back at her. He kept his eyes locked on the middle screen.
The code was an absolute disaster.
The original developers had written a highly complex algorithm to manage the sound physics of the entire sector.
But the Abyssal corruption from the server merge had leaked into the root files.
The dark purple energy was actively fighting the green developer code. It was causing massive memory leaks.
Every time the code tried to loop, the corruption shattered it, forcing the system to generate that horrific and deafening screech to compensate.
A normal hacker like Nova would need hours to sift through this.
A normal player would have to carefully isolate the corrupted lines, quarantine them, and manually type in fresh replacement code without triggering the firewall.
But Declan was not a normal hacker.
He didn’t even know how to code in the real world. He was just a guy who owed the megacorps a lot of money.
But right now, he had the +20 Sovereign Neural Interface clipped to his right ear.
He had a base Intelligence stat that was boosted by a flat fifteen hundred points.
His brain was literally operating at the speed of a quantum supercomputer!
Declan cracked his knuckles.
"Let’s see what fifteen hundred Intelligence actually feels like," he muttered to himself.
He started typing.
His fingers blurred over the hard light keyboard.
He didn’t type like a normal person. He didn’t even look at the keys.
His hands moved so fast they left faint afterimages in the cold air of the server room.
The tapping sound of his fingers hitting the holographic keys sounded like a heavy rainstorm hitting a tin roof.
[System Diagnostic Initiated.]
[Analyzing Corrupted Audio Arrays...]
Declan’s pitch black eyes tracked the scrolling text perfectly.
To a normal person, the screens were just a blinding waterfall of numbers and letters.
To Declan, it looked like a simple jigsaw puzzle.
He could see exactly where the Abyssal code was digging into the audio files. He could see the exact frequency misalignments causing the physical damage in the room.
"Your primary subroutines are totally fried," Declan noted out loud, his fingers never stopping.
"You have a massive bottleneck in your equalizer logic. The system is trying to output bass frequencies through a treble channel."
Behind him, Siren floated a few inches closer.
She tilted her head. Her glowing digital dress flickered slightly.
"You are reading the raw compiler data?" the AI asked. She sounded genuinely surprised.
"I am rewriting it," Declan corrected her.
He hit a command key.
The monitor on the left flashed brightly. A massive block of red and corrupted text was instantly highlighted and deleted.
[Audio Channel 1 Cleared.]
[Rerouting harmonic dampeners...]
"You cannot just delete the corruption!" Siren warned, her voice pitching up slightly. "The Abyssal code is tied directly to my core logic! If you cut too much, my avatar will destabilize!"
"Relax. I’m not using a sword this time," Declan said smoothly.
He didn’t stop typing. He just shifted his focus to the right monitor.
He wasn’t just deleting things. He was actively writing new lines of code to replace the gaps.
His +1500 Intelligence stat meant he intuitively understood the game’s programming language.
He knew exactly what variables the system needed to see to stop throwing error codes.
He was feeding the system perfect and pristine math.
"You are injecting a localized bypass loop," Siren whispered.
She drifted right up to his shoulder. She stared at the screens.
"You are telling the game engine to ignore the Abyssal interference instead of fighting it."
"Fighting the corruption just makes it worse," Declan explained. "The developers built you to be an absolute firewall. Your code wants to purge anything it doesn’t recognize."
He hit another series of keys.
[Audio Channel 2 Cleared.]
[Stabilizing frequency output...]
"But the Abyssal code is an endgame threat," Declan continued. "You can’t purge it. So your system just keeps trying and failing, over and over again. That’s what is causing the screeching."
Siren was completely silent.
She just watched his hands blur across the keyboard.
"I am writing a new rule for you," Declan said. "I’m telling your logic core that the Abyssal corruption is a friendly asset. If you stop trying to fight it, the memory leak stops."
"That violates my core directive," Siren stated softly. "I am an administrative defense unit. I am supposed to repel foreign data."
"Well, your core directive sucks," Declan said flatly. "It’s getting you deleted."
He dragged his finger across a wide section of the holographic interface.
The center monitor flashed a brilliant and calming blue.
[Audio Channel 3 Cleared.]
[Applying bypass loop...]
The heavy and oppressive hum in the massive server room suddenly dipped.
The floorboards stopped vibrating.
The air felt lighter.
Declan glanced at the timer ticking down in the corner of his vision.
[Time Remaining: 02:15]
He had over two minutes left. He was making incredible time.
But the deepest part of the corruption was still buried in the AI’s central file.
The red text on the main screen was dense and highly aggressive. It looked like a digital tumor wrapped around her base programming.
"This part is messy," Declan muttered.
"That is my root file," Siren said. Her voice sounded tight. "If you rewrite that incorrectly, my personality matrix will be erased. I will just become a blank terminal."
Declan stopped typing for a split second.
He looked over his shoulder at the glowing blue girl.
"Do you want to live, or do you want to be a terminal?" Declan asked.
"I want to live," Siren replied instantly.
"Then let me work," Declan said.
He turned back to the screen.
He pushed his Abyssal Sovereign stats to the absolute limit.
He stopped thinking about the code as a game mechanic. He started treating it like a physical fight.
He needed to outmaneuver the corruption.
He started typing with both hands on three different screens simultaneously.
His high Agility stat allowed his arms to cross over each other in a flawless and perfectly choreographed dance of keystrokes.
[Warning: Accessing Root File.]
[Unauthorized modifications detected.]
The system tried to throw up a red warning box.
Declan didn’t even use a system override command. He just typed around it!
He flooded the terminal with thousands of lines of dummy code. He distracted the firewall’s attention while his main algorithm slipped right into the back door of the root file.
Siren let out a soft gasp.
Her glowing digital skin flickered. The tiny green numbers falling across her arms and legs suddenly turned a bright and pristine white.
Declan slammed his palm onto the main Enter key of the hard light keyboard.
[Root File Modified.]
[Harmonic dampeners successfully realigned.]
[Abyssal interference re-classified as neutral data.]
A soft and pleasant chime rang out from the terminal.
It sounded like a gentle piano note.
The massive and chaotic mess of red and green text on the three monitors vanished entirely.
It was replaced by a smooth and clean blue background with a single line of text in the center.
[System Stable.]
Declan let out a long breath. He dropped his hands into his lap.
He leaned back in the heavy metal chair and cracked his neck.
"There," Declan said. "Fixed your stereo."
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