Chapter 61: Echoes of the Code
The steam escaped from the cup as if it had a life of its own, rising in timid spirals to the motion sensors on the ceiling. The aroma of bitter, almost burnt coffee filled the cold room on the eighth floor of Daejin Entertainment, where the main servers of BloodRealm pulsed like artificial hearts.
Elliot Shard stared at the screen with glazed eyes behind his thick glasses. He blinked slowly, as if each line of code in front of him were a poem that only he could read. His hair—an untamed mass of dark strands à la Harry Potter—stuck out in all directions, but Elliot didn’t care. Not today, not ever. He was wearing a navy blue suit, a lime green plaid bow tie, and a Totoro pin on his lapel. His socks had rainbows on them.
"This coffee is garbage, Minhee," he grumbled, spinning his chair around.
"It’s not my job to make coffee, Elliot," replied a tired woman in the corner of the room, without taking her eyes off the screen.
"Of course it’s not your job, dear. But you’re the only one here with any talent for it, so just take on the informal role of barista and help me out, okay?"
No one answered. The team was already used to it.
He stood up, crossing the metal floor with quick steps. He approached the Prism Screen, a 98-inch monstrosity connected directly to the telemetry core of the European server. On it, a real-time visualization showed the behavior of players on the western continent.
"Pause everything," he muttered.
The screen froze.
With a touch on the bottom edge of the frame, Elliot opened the internal logs.
"Hmm... this is... strange. Like, really strange. What is this? ’Tamer Rank F with affinity of 7.3...?’ Is this a bug? This... this isn’t possible."
He zoomed in with two fingers. The screen responded by displaying the player’s ID: