Kaze, Viper, and Riya weren't the only ones rising.
Across every platform, new streamers were exploding in popularity — fresh faces turning into overnight stars. The player side of the world was loud, bright, and full of celebration.
But behind that spotlight, the developer side looked like a different battlefield.
While players laughed and climbed leaderboards, developers bled.
Games were losing revenue.
Studios were shaking.
Shareholders were furious.
Engineers were quitting.
Rumors spread like wildfire.
Slowly, the same frustrated developers who once competed began to set aside rivalries. Now they had a single common target.
Leo.
Ground Zero's impact had hit like a meteor — and the shockwave had finally reached him. This was the first direct sign, the first tremor, that something bigger was moving against him.
…
The next morning, Leo's studio felt nothing like the world outside.
No cheers. No excitement. Only tension.
Tina showed up with a half-eaten sandwich, but she wasn't joking today. Melina had dark circles under her eyes — she hadn't slept. Monitors flickered with network telemetry: spikes, dips, irregular bursts of encrypted data — like someone knocking on their digital walls.
Tina leaned in, frowning. "Okay… someone tell me this isn't what it looks like."
Melina zoomed the traffic map. "These aren't random requests. External pings — not bots. Someone's probing the server."
Leo's voice was calm, but his expression wasn't. "Not someone," he said quietly. "A team."
Melina looked at him sharply. "You're sure?"
He nodded once. "The pattern's too clean. Rotating IP masks, bounced through academic networks. This isn't stress-testing or scraping. They're trying to map the AI's data spine."
Melina's fingers flew across the keyboard. "Multiple entry points. Not random. This is coordinated." Red markers spread across the world map on the main screen.
Tina's voice tightened. "Someone just bypassed our third-layer handshake."
Leo leaned forward. "Activate Phoenix Vault."
Melina didn't hesitate. One click — the quantum firewall Leo built in secret came online. The screens dimmed into a deep blue overlay. PHOENIX VAULT: ACTIVE flashed in the corner.
The attack didn't stop. It got worse. Packet speed doubled. Command injections tried to overwrite authentication tokens.
"They're not just scanning anymore," Melina muttered. "They're trying to brute-force the core."
Leo's jaw clenched. "Aether Corp finally moved."
Tina froze. "You think it's them?"
"Look at the signature." Leo pointed at the packet residuals on the screen. Even with heavy obfuscation, certain markers remained — development toolchain patterns, compiler fingerprints. Aether's internal engine was sloppy about erasing its stack footprint. Those same artifacts were here.
"It's them," Leo said. "And they're not alone. Somebody funded them — smaller studios must be feeding access keys."
Melina swallowed. "So this is the alliance forming."
"And this is only the first wave." Leo typed a command. PHX — COUNTERDEPLOY: SHADOW TRACE. The defense didn't just block; it mirrored the intrusion and then slipped through the attacker's own tunnel — silently, like a ghost.
Tina blinked. "Wait — are we tracing them through their own exploit route?"
"Exactly," Leo said. Lines of code scrolled, packet for packet, pushing deeper into the attacker's cluster.
…
Meanwhile, at Aether Corp, in a dim room stacked with server racks, two engineers watched a live infiltration dashboard. Their interface showed a web of external links — a hub of cooperating developer accounts and rented proxies. The main root traced back to a single label: DARK.
They didn't know where Dark operated from. They only had the program patterns — the flow signatures that Dark left in its wake.
Following those patterns, the engineers pushed into a few weak nodes and pulled what they could. Before Ground Zero's defenses pushed them out, they managed to grab fragments: portions of Ground Zero's game code, a few model files, and some item table dumps.
They celebrated quietly — they'd pulled real data. They didn't know, however, that Leo's countertrace had already slipped into their cluster and taken a file of his own.
….
Back at Leo's office the counterattack had paid off. A hidden directory on Aether's private server opened on-screen.
File names scrolled up:
BLACK_MIRROR_ENGINE
— Beta_Build_A2_StolenGroundZeroAssets.blend
— CharacterBehaviorNet_MimickedModel.lua
— GZ_ItemTables_Rebuild.dat
Tina stared. "They're literally copying our engine."
Leo's face darkened. Melina scrolled more.
Zip archives:
P_PlayerID_DataScrape_Collection, RawVoiceComms_CaptureSamples, LocationLogs_Rack07.
Tina covered her mouth. "They're stealing player data… personal logs… voice samples?"
Melina whispered, stunned. "If this goes public — Aether is dead."
Leo sat back slowly. "This isn't just sabotage. They're preparing to replace us. And they're trying to destroy us before we ship the next update."
But he wasn't panicking. He explained how Aether had gained access: Dark and its rented-access network had targeted weak vendor links and small partner studios, bought or coerced access keys, and used those footholds as stepping stones into Ground Zero's periphery.
In some places the attackers moved fast enough to extract chunks of the game database before Phoenix Vault kicked in.
That's how they got item tables and model files. The more sensitive stuff — core AI weights, the next major patch assets — were protected behind deeper enclaves Leo had isolated offline.
Leo's plan was simple and cold: the current stolen files were bad, but not fatal. The next major patch — the one that actually mattered — was safe.
If they could push that update before Aether rebuilt or repackaged what they stole, Ground Zero would stay ahead. And the evidence they'd gathered? Not something to flash right away. He'd keep it and use it where it hurt the most.
"So we don't go public," he said. "Not yet. We finish the patch. We give players something they can't ignore. Then we expose them on our terms."
Tina and Melina got to work. Final touches on the update replaced spilled panic with precise focus.
…