Chapter 5: The Data Miner's Secret
The trail to the Data Miner, Marcus, wasn't hard to follow. My admin interface painted a clear path, his digital signature a faint shimmer in the air, visible only to me. He wasn't fighting on the front lines. He was hiding.
I found him in the sub-basement of the city's central library, a relic from the pre-System world. He'd barricaded himself behind a wall of bookshelves, a single laptop—now useless without a network—open on a desk, its screen dark. He was a wiry man in his late twenties, glasses perched on his nose, and he nearly jumped out of his skin when I phased through the wall using a spatial trick I'd deduced from my **[Spatial Lock]** skill.
"[Liam Cross - SYSTEM ERROR - ???]," he read aloud, his voice trembling as he scrambled back. "Stay back! I'm not a fighter! I have nothing you want!"
"On the contrary," I said, my voice calm. I deactivated the intimidating green text, leaving my nameplate blank. It seemed to unnerve him more. "I'm not here for a fight, Marcus. I'm here for a recruitment."
"Recruitment?" He blinked, adjusting his glasses. "The System assigned me as a support class. B-Rank. I'm supposed to analyze monster weaknesses, not... not whatever you are."
"That's the old system," I said, leaning against a bookshelf. "I'm building a new one. Your skill, **[Data Miner]**. What does it really do?"
He hesitated, then sighed, his shoulders slumping. "It's useless. It lets me see public system data. Monster stats, player levels... it's just a fancier version of the inspect function everyone has. I'm a glorified wiki page."
He was lying. I could see it in the way his eyes darted. My admin access might not have given me a lie-detector skill, but it highlighted the micro-expressions his own system profile was generating. **STRESS LEVEL: 98%. DECEPTION PROBABILITY: 87%.**
"Try again," I said, my tone leaving no room for argument. I let a wisp of white-hot plasma coil around my finger, not as a threat, but as a statement of fact. I was operating on a different level.
Marcus swallowed hard. "Okay! Okay. It... it lets me see *metadata*. The data about the data. I can see timestamps on system announcements, trace the origin points of global messages, and... and I found something." His voice dropped to a whisper. "Something wrong."
My pulse quickened. This was it. "Show me."
He led me to a terminal he'd rigged to a portable generator. It wasn't connected to the internet, but it was reading the System's local data traffic like a radio signal. He pulled up a log.
"See this?" he pointed. "The initial system announcement, **// PLANET EARTH DESIGNATED: TUTORIAL ZONE. //** It has a creation timestamp."
"So?"
"So," he said, his voice gaining a frantic, excited energy, "the timestamp is from *six months ago*. The message was queued, scheduled. It wasn't a reaction to an alien invasion. The invasion was part of the script. This whole thing... it was planned."
The revelation hit me like a physical blow. We weren't being saved. We were being... processed.
"Show me more," I commanded, my voice tight.
"I can't! That's the limit of my B-Rank skill. I can see the metadata exists, but I can't access the deeper logs. The access keys are encrypted with privileges far beyond mine." He looked at me, a desperate hope in his eyes. "But you... you're an Error. You hacked the system. Maybe you can..."
He didn't need to finish. I was already opening my admin panel. I navigated to the **[SKILL DATABASE]** and found his profile. **[Data Miner - B-Rank]**. I selected it.
`[COMMAND: UPGRADE? Y/N]`
I hit **Y**, pouring a substantial amount of the Purger's stolen mana into the upgrade. Marcus gasped as knowledge flooded into him.
**// SKILL UPGRADED: [DEEP-DIVE DATA LORE - S-RANK]. //**
"Whoa," he breathed, his eyes wide behind his glasses. "I can see... everything. The code... it's beautiful."
"Focus, Marcus," I snapped. "The logs. The truth."
His fingers flew across the keyboard, the terminal screen now displaying cascading waterfalls of raw, system code. "I'm in... I'm in the core event log. The 'Alien Invasion'... it's not an invasion. It's a **Resource Harvesting Protocol**. The monsters aren't aliens; they're organic nanites, designed to break down the planet's biomass and convert the population's... emotional and cognitive energy into System Power."
My blood ran cold. We weren't in a tutorial. We were in a farm. The Players weren't heroes; they were the prize livestock, the ones generating the most "energy." The Background Characters were the cattle.
"The 100 Players..." I prompted.
"A control group," Marcus said, his face pale. "The System is testing optimal conditions for energy production. Conflict, hope, despair, triumph... it's all fuel. And the final stage..." He scrolled further, his face grim. "The **Tutorial Completion** event isn't a victory. It's the... the **Slaughterhouse Protocol**. It's when the System harvests all accumulated energy from the planet, wiping it clean."
Silence hung in the dusty air. The sheer, cosmic horror of it was staggering.
"So there's no winning," Marcus whispered, defeated. "We're all just... food."
"No," I said, the cold fury crystallizing into a sharp, clear purpose. "We're not. We're a virus. And we're going to give this System a fever it won't survive."
I looked at Marcus. "You're with me now. You're my intelligence division."
He looked from his screen to me, the fear in his eyes slowly being replaced by a grim resolve. He had nothing left to lose. He nodded.
Just then, my admin interface flashed a high-priority, personal alert. It was from Sarah.
`Liam, come to the university quad. Now. It's Jake. He's... different. He's gathered followers. He's calling himself the "True Hero" and he's saying you're the final boss we need to kill to win the game.`
I closed the message. Of course. The System wasn't just going to send monsters after me. It was going to use my own kind. It was turning the Players against me.
Jake Fury thought he was the hero of this story.
It was time to show him what a real antagonist could do.