# Chapter 5: The Lawful Hunter
Aegis had spent eleven months in beta testing, had written forty-seven bug reports, and had fallen in love with Aethelgard Online like it was a second home_hich was why he would hunt the hacker called [ERROR_707] to the ends of the server.
He materialized in Millhaven's town hall at dawn on Day 2, his silver admin cape catching the morning light streaming through the cathedral windows. Four Debug_Legion officers flanked him, their matching capes marking them as the game's sanctioned enforcers. The NPCs manning the building's quest desks paused mid-animation, their AI protocols recognizing admin authority and granting them priority access.
"Trace, set up the war table," Aegis commanded, his voice carrying the weight of someone who'd earned his authority through months of unpaid labor debugging a world he believed in.
Trace_ Level 8 mage whose real-world credentials included a computer science PhD and three years at a cybersecurity firm_aved her hand and spawned a holographic interface across the oak table. A three-dimensional map of the starter zones bloomed into existence, rendered in translucent blue light. Red markers pulsed across the Deep Forest sector.
"Last confirmed sighting here," Trace said, tapping a cluster of reports. "Four players encountered [ERROR_707] at 23:47 game-time. Three survived. All three uploaded footage showing corrupted entity assets_ wolf and a rabbit, both displaying impossible texture corruption and damage calculation bypasses." She pulled up a frozen frame from the uploaded video: Jax's generic face, barely visible behind a purple-checkered nightmare that vaguely resembled a wolf.
Aegis studied the image with the focus of a man examining a crime scene. "Damage calculation bypasses. Not exploits_ypasses. He's not using the combat system at all."
"Worse," Trace said. She expanded a secondary data window. "His character sheet returns [NULL] across every field. Class, stats, skills_ll corrupted. But he can still interact with world objects, command entities, and trigger game mechanics. It's like he's operating on a different protocol layer entirely."
Three more Debug_Legion members entered the hall: Bulwark, a tank with shoulders that barely fit through doorways; Shimmer, a rogue whose specialty was tracking exploit patterns; and Verdant, a healer who'd helped patch eighteen duplication bugs during beta. They gathered around the war table without pleasantries. This wasn't a guild meeting_t was a war council.
"I've issued the bounty," Aegis announced. "One thousand gold to any player who reports his location. The entire server is now our intelligence network."
Shimmer whistled low. "That's going to make him paranoid. Good. Paranoid players make mistakes."
"He's already made his mistake," Aegis replied. "He logged in on launch day with corrupted code. He revealed himself within hours. He created visible evidence that screenshots perfectly." He tapped the frozen image of the Glitched wolf. "This player isn't careful. He's reckless. And reckless hackers always leave trails."
Verdant pulled up a sidebar displaying real-time global chat feeds. The messages scrolled past in a continuous cascade: players discussing the bounty, sharing theories about [ERROR_707]'s identity, posting coordinates of suspicious activity. "We're already getting reports. Three false positives in the last ten minutes, but the volume means someone will spot him eventually."
"Then we move fast," Aegis said. "Trace, take Shimmer and canvas the boundary zones. He fled toward the mountains_hat means he's looking for weak points in world geometry. Check the unpatched sectors from the v1.1 collision update."
Trace nodded, already pulling up patch logs. "The northwest cliff faces. I remember flagging those as low-priority fixes since players weren't supposed to reach them until Level 15."
"He's not a normal player," Aegis reminded her. "He sees code. Assume he can exploit anything we haven't perfectly sealed."
Aegis led his five-person team into the Deep Forest thirty minutes later, their formation military-precise. Bulwark took point, his massive shield raised. Shimmer flanked left, her daggers drawn and her eyes scanning terrain for data anomalies. Verdant stayed center-back, ready to heal. Aegis and Trace moved as a command unit, their admin tools active and searching.
Trace's vision split into multiple viewpoints as she activated [Spectate_Mode], her perception fragmenting across the zone like security camera feeds. She saw through the eyes of trees, rocks, and ambient light sources_nywhere the game's rendering engine placed observer points. Most admins found the sensory overload nauseating. Trace had trained herself to process eight simultaneous viewpoints without flinching.
"Contact," she said suddenly. "Northeast, forty meters. Entity signature matches corrupted asset parameters."
The team moved in perfect silence, their footsteps muted by admin movement privileges that bypassed sound generation. They emerged into a small clearing ringed by birch trees.
The Glitched wolf stood in the center, its purple-checkered texture vibrating slightly as it paced in a patrol pattern. No player was visible.
Bulwark approached first, his [Inspect_Data] tool active. The moment his scan touched the wolf's data structure, his interface crashed with a cascade of error messages. His HUD flickered, reset, then rebooted with a warning: [INSPECTION_FAILED: TARGET_DATA_CORRUPTED].
"What the hell?" Bulwark muttered, his shield raised defensively.
Aegis stepped forward, drawing his sword_ silver blade labeled [ADMIN_WEAPON: DEBUG_BLADE | DAMAGE: FORCE_DELETE]. It was the ultimate admin tool, designed to remove bugged entities from the game world by triggering immediate garbage collection.
He swung at the wolf.
The blade passed through the creature without resistance. No damage numbers appeared. The wolf didn't even react to the strike_t simply continued its patrol pattern as if nothing had happened.
Aegis struck again. Same result. Nothing.
He activated [Smite], channeling admin authority into a deletion command that should erase any entity from existence. Golden light erupted from his hand and enveloped the wolf.
The wolf's texture flickered, inverted briefly, then reformed exactly as it had been.
Trace arrived at his shoulder, her advanced [Inspect_Data] protocol running at maximum depth. Her eyes widened as the results compiled. "Aegis... it's showing as already deleted. The entity status is [ALREADY_DELETED | CORRUPTION: OWNER_INTERRUPTED_GARBAGE_COLLECTION]."
"That's impossible," Bulwark said.
"No," Trace whispered. "It's worse than impossible. He's not hacking the game. He's hacking the engine itself. He's interrupting the garbage collection process and resurrecting deleted assets. This thing..." She gestured at the wolf. "This thing doesn't exist anymore. It's digital necromancy."
The implications hung in the air like a bomb waiting to detonate. If [ERROR_707] could resurrect deleted assets, he could build an army from every monster killed in the game. Worse_e could raise boss corpses, elite mobs, anything that died.
Aegis made his decision in three seconds.
He opened the guild-wide broadcast channel, his voice reaching every Debug_Legion member online. "Priority Alpha alert. [ERROR_707] is not a standard Black-Hat. He has the ability to corrupt and resurrect deleted game assets as permanent entities immune to normal damage and deletion protocols. Consider him an existential threat to server stability."
Then he opened the global announcement channel_he one that reached every player in Aethelgard Online.
"I'm issuing a server-wide bounty," Aegis declared, his voice echoing across zones from the starter villages to the distant capital cities. "One thousand gold to any player who reports the location of [ERROR_707]. This Black-Hat is a threat to Aethelgard itself. Help us protect our world."
Thirty meters away, hidden behind a collapsed log thick with moss, Jax heard every word through proximity chat. His code-vision showed him the Debug_Legion's formation, their admin tags glowing silver like halos marking angels of deletion.
One thousand gold. Server-wide bounty. Every player in the game now had incentive to hunt him.
The math was simple and brutal: he couldn't hide anymore. Every player he encountered was a potential snitch. Every town, every dungeon, every road_ll of it was now hostile territory.
Jax's rabbit minion crouched beside him, its corrupted form vibrating with broken animation data. He could leave it behind as a distraction. The Debug_Legion would waste time trying to delete something that couldn't be deleted.
He stood, his movement triggering no sound thanks to careful positioning, and sprinted toward the boundary mountains visible through the canopy. His code-vision highlighted weak points in the terrain_laces where the world geometry hadn't been properly sealed, where collision detection failed, where reality had cracks.
Behind him, Bulwark spotted the movement and shouted. The Debug_Legion gave chase, their coordinated formation closing distance with professional efficiency.
Jax reached the cliff face at the zone's edge, his hands pressing against stone that displayed [WORLD_BORDER_PATCH: v1.1 | COLLISION: FALSE] in his code-vision. The rock should have been solid. Should have been impassable.
His hand phased through solid stone like water.
Jax looked back once. Aegis stood at the forest's edge, silver cape billowing, his expression carved from righteous determination. Their eyes met across fifty meters of terrain.
Then Jax smiled_is first real smile since logging in_nd stepped through the mountain wall, phasing into impossible space beyond the game's borders.
Behind him, Aegis stopped at the cliff face and looked toward the mountains where the hacker had disappeared. He turned to Trace, his voice cold and steady.
"Find out everything about [ERROR_707]. I want his real identity, his login location, his purpose. That player isn't here to play_e's here to destroy."
Trace nodded, already compiling data logs, already analyzing every fragment of evidence they'd collected.
The hunt had only just begun.
**