BXBX NOVEL Chapter 111: Picking the name
He saw a lot in his line of work, but today…
Today topped it all.
What was supposed to be a simple spotting missing turned out to be the greatest assault Hugo had ever witnessed. Heck! It was bigger than anything he ever heard of!
From wh he managed, by pure luck, to track his target, Hugo easily guided the other party to the likely interception zone.
Th, after a weird display of some sort of a nerdy dance that Hugo caught with just the edge of a distant camera, all hell broke loose.
The momt his group turned out to be mere scouts, the front guard rather than the actual party hiring him, Hugo realized something was wrong. And wh a huge number of masked figures suddly came out from betwe the trees, there was nothing he could do to stop things from happing any more.
And what could he do, being just the geek used to help people navigate through the vast forest?
The momt the masked assailants rushed forth, Hugo took the risk and moved some of the cameras, getting a slightly better look at how the evts unfolded.
And merely a few steps into their charge, the masked m that Hugo guided to the area faced an invisible wall.
A wall that collapsed right away, only for a whole outfit of private security forces to emerge.
The first contact was swift and decisive, leaving the ambushing defders with hardly any casualty, while completely crushing Hugo\'s sponsors.
But this was merely the beginning of a situation that soon brought him to the edge of the seat. For, as more and more masked figures swarmed the security lines, some attackers started to slip.
Risking its destruction, Hugo moved the camera again, eager to see how the situation would play out. This was the least he could do to at least know in advance what moves should he make to avoid taking the fall for this disaster.
And that\'s wh he saw it.
"Wait, isn\'t that guy the one…"
For a single second, Hugo couldn\'t really recall where he recognized the target\'s face from.
And th, right as some girl was about to cut the first of the masked figures that broke through their lines and rushed to take their actual target down, he figured it out.
But it was also the same momt at which the attacker…
Just slid down the curved blade of the target\'s scythe as he just… appeared behind his running oppont.
A few seconds later, two more m died, proving that the actual challge of this mission was never the perimeter established by the security, but their actual target instead.
But as if the day wasn\'t interesting ough before Hugo could ev take a proper breath, both the targetted man and the strange woman he noticed before had pancaked on the g, forcefully pressed to the g with what looked like a monstrous yet invisible palm.
With a high-mounted camera hidd in one of the nearby trees, Hugo could see the imprint of this pressure outlined in the grass…
Only for the caster of this restraint to suddly fall down to his knees, blood sprouting from his throat, oped by…
By what, exactly?
With every passing momt, the situation swung to favor one side, only to th shift its atttion to the other.
But as Hugo figured out more and more about what was going on, a single thought appeared in his head.
\'Am I seriously just going to sit back and do nothing?\'
The relatively young man gritted his thoughts as he watched the slaughter.
It wasn\'t until he noticed one of the random cameras switching to show a certain figure approaching right as the targeted man moved to help the girl stand back up.
A strange, creepy voice suddly filled the air, scaring Hugo\'s guts from the very corner of his consciousness.
The whisper of the undying, a trademark ability of a certain group… he had absolutely no desire to be connected to.
And from the looks of things, it was this very group that he was currtly spotting for!
"Tsk," Hugo clicked his tongue before taking a deep breath.
And as he recalled the stream of that weird, quirky young man just crafting away with too much passion to ev realize he was streaming, as he compared it to the badass swinging a his crude-looking weapon…
"Okay, fuck it."
Putting all his hesitations aside, Hugo pulled out his personal access point, before wiring it up to the old and sparse wiring accessible from his room. And momts later, he abused the very same backdoor to get to the weave of the local system as he did wh installing his own interface.
This time, however, Hugo held nothing back and booted the whole array of his bots and personally trained AIs.
To break into the network meant to hack all the cameras connected through the inner system of the ancit woods. But it also meant a breach so massive, it would be a matter of a single instant before it would be discovered.
"I\'m cooked either way, ar\'t I?"
While conflicts in the zone were allowed, mass attacks and outright battles were not. Especially wh those battles involved one of the few illegal organizations that grew powerful ough to make a name for themselves and either ward off or avoid scrutiny of the law!
And so, desperate to turn sides, Hugo uploaded his whole kit directly into the fabric of the zone\'s spiritual system, all with but a set of simple instructions.
"Now, it\'s out of my hands," Hugo muttered as he turned his atttion to his keys, erasing as many traces of his involvemt as he could while porting some of the cameras directly to his personal access point, unwilling to lose track of what was going on.
Without a second of thought, Hugo th left his room, perfectly aware that this level of involvemt, ev if done in good faith, was already going to piss the big sponsors of this place ough to make his life a living hell.
And so, as he calmly walked out of the resort while gtly nodding his head over to the receptionists, Hugo found himself faced with one sudd, extremely important question as he looked down at his phone.
"Hey babe, we need to talk, I\'m pregnant. And I want you to pick the name."
Such a heavy decision to make, especially at the time Hugo found himself in.
"Oh fuck…" he cursed under his nose as he climbed up the hillside path and th walked off to one of the further parking spots, away from the direct proximity of the zone.
And as he walked off, only one question rang about in his head, as his thoughts only continued to make him more and more aware of just how dire straits he found himself in, effectively putting his tire family in jeopardy.
The big clans would never let him go after he infected the spiritual circuit with the rouge AIs.
Thinking about it, Hugo reached his car and sat down in it, before finally pulling his phone out to check how the situation changed. Yet, ev as he did that, the question continued to ring in his ears as he played a with his phone while putting the streaming of the cameras aside for a momt.
\'The name….\'
Hugo sighed as he oped up the search and typed in a few words.
"I guess I can go with Juan?" he muttered as he oped up one of the available flight offers and filled in the details he th swiftly inserted into the governmt\'s files through one of the many backdoors he came to love so much, effectively creating a completely new idtity, history, life…
And hopefully, a new future for Juan, a future Hugo could no longer afford.