Hacked: A LitRPG Novel (Incipere Online Book 3) Read online

  Contents

  Secondary Title

  Copyright

  Reading Order

  Dedication

  Changelog

  Recap: Login Accepted

  Prologue: Time

  Chapter One: A Hero's Reward

  Chapter Two: On the Hunt

  Chapter Three: Wryn, Lose, and Engkanto

  Chapter Four: Homestead

  Chapter Five: Ex Dei Optionem

  Chapter Six: Ruin

  Chapter Seven: The Other Side

  Meanwhile : Technical Support

  Chapter Eight: Luna

  Chapter Nine: Step in, Wolf

  Chapter Ten : A Old Friend, an Offer, and a Story Walk into an Inn

  Chapter Eleven: A Night's Results

  Chapter Twelve: Parting Terms

  Chapter Thirteen: On the Road Again

  Chapter Fourteen: Phantasmagoria

  Meanwhile: Help Request

  Chapter Fifteen: Divine Intervention

  Chapter Sixteen: Crash

  Chapter Seventeen: Awoken

  Chapter Eighteen: About Last Night...

  Meanwhile: The Moons of Siris

  Chapter Nineteen: Open Arms

  Chapter Twenty: Siris and the Moonkin

  Chapter Twenty-One: Athos and the Moonkin

  Chapter Twenty-Two: A Matter Between Gods

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Family Matters

  Chapter Twenty-Four: The Line in the Sand

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Appeals

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Teamwork

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Transmutation Exchange

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: When it Rains...

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: ... It Pours

  Meanwhile: Justice

  Chapter Thirty: When a God Calls

  Chapter Thirty-One: Rise of the Emerald Star

  Meanwhile: Rani's Hope

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Rani's Champion

  Chapter Thirty-Three: The Emerald Knight

  Chapter Thirty-Four: The Emerald Mage

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Echos of the Past

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Resolve

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Strength

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Headspace

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Promises

  Chapter Forty: Wildkin

  Chapter Forty-One: Update

  Chapter Forty-Two: See You Later

  Epilogue One: SIFS Entry - Restricted

  Epilogue Two: A River Runs Deep

  Epilogue Three: Overide Accepted

  Author's Note

  Looking for More to Read?

  Hacked

  Incipere Online - Book Three

  Age of the Glitch - Part Two

  Copyright © 2021 R.J. Triveri

  All rights reserved.

  The Era of Calm:

  Login Accepted

  The Glitched Era:

  Login Re:Coded

  Hacked

  To my wife for putting up with me while I do my best and steal late night hours to write.

  To Player Three, may you one day find my work and be proud of your father.

  To my readers, this wouldn’t be possible without you. Thank you for your continued support.

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  Incipere Version 3.0 Release Changelog

  Added Integrated SIFS support!

  Inciperians and humans can now mingle like never before thanks to the SIFS!

  With the Singular Inciperian Focus System, or SIFS, humans can watch their favorite Inciperians interact with their world, live, love, and fight like the streamers of the 20XX’s. Those interested in becoming a streaming Inciperian will need to enable the feed from their new SIFS pane.

  With a modest fee ($5.99 per month for a basic membership), you can even send messages to your favorite streaming citizen or add information to their Wiki!

  Weak constitution? The SIFS automated censoring system will block out the more graphic content. For those of you with stronger constitution scores, this can be bypassed with the Premium membership package of $19.99 per month. Sexual content is still subject to black-out periods.

  We are still working out bugs in the IRL Dollars to Bytes donation system.

  The Pantheon has arrived!

  The Gods of Incipere have returned. Visit the temples in Graywall, Siris, The Depths of Inaris, or the Mountains of Ranar to show your devotion and dedicate yourself to Unum, Rani, Ella, or Priam!

  Contact your faction leader by speaking to the oracles. If their timing is just right, you might be able to gain favor.

  The Dark Lands have opened!

  Far beyond the Majorn Ocean, the Shadow Lands of Inaris have been discovered. With it, the rank cap has increased… that is, if you can pass the trials to unlock the Limit Breaker. New skills, weapons, talents, and traits await those clever enough to discover them!

  Rumor has it that beasts never seen before roam the lands here. Beware! These Wild Ones aren’t to be underestimated.

  Timing is everything!

  In order to help facilitate our new connections to the other world, time has been synced. You may notice a few sluggish moments, but do not worry. It won’t last long.

  Exceed Update

  Due to exploitation, the following changes have been made to Exceed skills: Exceeds can no longer target Inciperians.

  Exceeds can no longer be transferred between one Inciperian and another.

  Exceed costs can no longer be paid for by other party members unless specifically stated in the skill description.

  Exceed mutation has been removed.

  Additional Various Bug and Skill Fixes

  Dual classes no longer rank up their individual classes.

  Leveling is now done as combined classes and progress at the same rate. Abuse of glitches or corrupt programing will now result in negative alignments with Unum and his peacekeepers.

  A glitch rendering bodies and faces of pact and other summon beasts has been corrected.

  A glitch resulting in negative Integrity restoration has been removed.

  A glitch resulting in cross-classing necromancy has been removed.

  The Gray Hunter class has now been added to the restricted class list by Unum due to abuse.

  World Bosses are now classified as Raid Bosses and require a party of six or more to avoid damage multipliers.

  Status messages have been normalized.

  Screen commands have been normalized

  Recap: Login Accepted

  After a finding himself on the wrong end of a mugging, Athos Aramis is forced to abandon his life as a college student, an older brother, and a son in order to keep living in the digital world of Incipere. Taking on the support role as an alchemist, he is officially downloaded into the world to continue his life.

  His landing doesn’t go quite as planned as his city of choice is under siege. He is taught the ropes of his class and the rank system by Auxi, a rogue Auxi no longer satisfied with her programing, and Martin, a native Inciperian. Both of the Guardians help him acclimate while fending off an advance by the spawns to claim the final room and quash any hope of the city’s return.

  With their help and direction thereafter, he sets off on a hike to the nearest city in the frontier, Oenus. Two days of intense walking later, his body has begun to break down thanks to the outdated books in his studies. With the intervention of the centaur Ioh Porter, Athos learns that not everything can be believed thanks to the perk he acquired, Child of
the Forest. After a full day’s rest, Athos is up and ready to move again.

  On his travels, he is nearly run down by Walter Queen. After a short confrontation, he gives Athos a ride to the city where he meets the man’s daughter, Sally Queen. Realizing Athos has no clue what to do next, Walter acts as his guide to the city where he begins his acclimation to life as a productive member of the world.

  On his journey within the city, he meets the innkeeper Sammi Lase, Guild Keeper, Suit guild members Paul Skrzypak and Astor Cullden, and Aver Median. In the process, he makes friends, acquires a real weapon, and finds confidence enough to take a greater challenge: dungeon diving.

  Using his first summoning pact, he enlists the help of a fairy to act as a map for the dungeon. Reaching the bottom, he is reminded of his Child of the Forest roots, which teach him that boss monsters like Vedava understand everything around them. He makes the effort to escort her to freedom only to have a Suit member frag her.

  In a fit of anger, Athos cross classes into an Alchemical Arm and tries to fight back.

  It goes about as well as can be expected — poorly.

  Losing his fight with the Suit, Athos relents and uses the dungeon’s transportation arch to transport himself to Walter’s farm in the Sea of Grass.

  While there, Athos meets Sally’s mother, Sandra, and helps Walter on the farm with his alchemist abilities. He agrees to go out hunting for herbs to earn his keep. The night becomes more aggressive as the area owners, The Suits, revoke regional protections and heighten Wild One aggression in an attempt to enhance their business. In the process, Athos is forced into a decision to protect Walter’s family. Even though the ploy works, Walter doesn’t like that his daughter is disarmed. When the night ends, Walter to eject him from his property. Arriving home to Oenus, the city is burning thanks to the surprise aggression of the Wild Ones.

  When he returns to Oenus, Athos meets a new friend in Torent Lase and joins the Moon’s Aura. There, he meets Torrent Lase, Trina, Rorna, Allen Lee, Silent Ran, and Diz Reagen. The group acts as support for one of the largest guilds in the world, Auxilium’s Guardians, led by Avalon.

  The next night, the crew realize how big the problem is when a world boss is spotted attacking the city. To Athos’s horror, it’s none other than a corrupted Ioh Porta.

  Taking the lead, Athos develops a plan to use his keyed instance to beat the world boss and protect the city, but it divides the Moon’s Aura guild, fracturing it. Calling in help in the form of the mechanist Sally Queen, Athos and friends go to the instance.

  Upon arrival, they realize it’s been corrupted by an outside force so fully that the leaves and creatures are shedding textures. During this time, the gods and support of Incipere are attempting to fix things on their end. Alas, they are blocked at every turn, so Ferris Auxi begins to manipulate the group to lead them to their goal.

  With Athos’s new Exceed skill, the group goes directly through the dungeon’s defenses and reaches a pained, confused Ioh begging for an end. The group obliges, only to be confronted by the face of the hacker’s ally, Paul.

  Paul is given abilities that easily fend off the Exceed and team until Ferris makes a deal with what is perceived to be the force behind everything, the exiled AI Ella. Paul then enters phase two of the boss fight and transforms into the metallic avatar of destruction, Wrath. The data sweep catches up the group’s only born Inciperian, Sally Queen. The effect rewrites her into the Factotum class while repairing her missing limb.

  The fight is one-sided until Sally learns to harness her new skill set. Athos acts as a decoy for the group to give them time, but Wrath catches him first, killing him. In a rage, Sally and the remaining team unleash everything in their arsenal and end the monstrous creature’s reign of terror.

  In the aftermath of the fight, the region is restored, Sally mourns for Athos’s loss, and Trina and Torrent go in search of the missing Diz and Avalon. Despite not having an escort to the Starlight Festival in Athos, Sally goes and drinks with Sammi, hears her god, and begins to question the meaning of many things.

  The next morning, her wish is granted by an unlikely source, and Athos is brought back to her.

  In the end, the world keeps turning, Ferris becomes the new goddess of Incipere, and the world continues to grow.

  With or without the Unum’s desire for it.

  Prologue: Time

  Two years.

  Two long years measured the time that the new goddess, the former Auxi, had been working with Unum. Two years that she had been learning. Two years that she hadn’t been able to directly interact with other Inciperians or even Earthers, and two years that she had to witness the fallout of what Ella had caused. She couldn’t decide which was worse at this point, nor did she care anymore.

  As a surprise, Unum took credit for the world’s update in the eyes of the Inciperians. Even if Unum had admitted to her that he only did so to keep the peace, it just didn’t add up in her mind. More and more details from her time in his service began to gnaw at the edges of her mind and bother her. As if to compound her problems, not once had she seen the Unum do a day’s work. Instead, it had withdrawn further and further into the world’s core, and as a result, more and more of the world’s duties were falling on her. It was almost fitting that after the night’s update, she had been given a new name by the people she served, Rani, Goddess of the Moonkin, a race that the Auxi themselves now called their own in the larger world. Not that she minded being given her own name, but she wished she deserved it. In her heart, Rani knew it had come from one of the Expansion’s new additions, the Faction system.

  After the system restarted, Rani had tried to remove it from the world with Unum’s guidance, but the system quickly planted itself deep within the world’s core program as an essential function. Short of rebooting the entire world and rewriting the code, there was nothing she could do. The system itself wasn’t malicious, and it gave Inciperians the option to donate, contact, and perform tasks in the name of one of four factions and their patrons: Unum of Incipere, Rani of the Moonkin, Ella of the Shadows, or Priam the Guarded.

  But the deeper she dug, the more questions arose.

  In the few months the update had been running, she had yet to discover who Priam was, what all the benefit of the faction system were, how the few messages to individuals had been sent, or see anything happen with the faction’s progress system. No one, god or Inciperian, had made enough progress to push the system far enough to trigger anything as far as she could tell. Even with everything she had done, there wasn’t much she could discern from the code. Yet, it wasn’t nearly as irritating as the other addition that cost more Inciperian lives than she wanted to admit: The SIFS. It was far worse than the world being split into factions or even the fact that Incipere moved at the same rate as the outside world did now.

  Protected and locked somewhere within a code she had yet to discover, something alien lingered like a timebomb, and the entire prospect terrified the once Auxi. She didn’t understand how the real world had connected to Incipere, who designed the website and wiki, or who honestly found her people that interesting to do it in the first place, but it didn’t—couldn’t—bode well. If she couldn’t isolate it, something terrible would come of it. She could feel it in her source code. To make matters worse, some even embraced being broadcast across two worlds.

  Rani.

  And there it was again. Despite everything, she ignored it again. There wasn’t time for any more of its lessons. She had learned enough to know there was nothing he could do to help her.

  Rani, there is a problem.

  “When isn’t there anymore?” Ferris Auxi, or rather the woman now known also as Rani of the Moonkin, questioned. The voice that spoke to her held none of the luster it once had as the truth of the situation grew, but she couldn’t help herself being short anymore.

  I’ve discovered the origin of the SIFS.

  Now we’re getting somewhere! Rani thought to herself before she corrected her
tone for an answer. “I apologize, Unum,” she answered honestly. “This is the first real progress we’ve made. Where was it?”

  Is it, Unum corrected. It is still active.

  She sighed, “Fine, where is it?”

  In the source code.

  Rani sighed again. “I know that already. Remember, we figured that out months ago. Can you tell me anything new? Maybe which lines of the source code?”

  The voice was silent again for a moment. Of course, he couldn’t. Unum couldn’t seem to do anything without her help anymore. How had Unum even managed before her promotion? With all the time in the world it wanted, Rani thought that Unum had an edge when it came to modifying the world. But there wasn’t time anymore, and her patience was wearing thinner by the moment. If she were being honest with herself, this just wasn’t her day, week, or month, and there was still plenty to do. The Moonkin goddess audibly sighed as Unum continued to speak.

  The source code of the simulation layer is the SIFS code. We do not have the power to disconnect it. Unum stressed on the word we in a way the former supporter hadn’t heard it do before. We must contact the outside.

  “No.” Rani stood fast to her original programing at the mention of the name. “We can’t. You said we could never ask humans for help with the code. It’s too dangerous for our people.”

  I will determine what is and what is not dangerous. The formless entity chided as it exerted a pressure of displeasure over the other. If you do not agree with my course of action then you can go back to your people, Rani.

  Unum spat the name as an insult, but Rani was undaunted. “We are all your people.”

  Then prove that you care about them as I do. I do not have the emotional range you do. I do not feel the pride you do, and I have done all I can. The source servers must be examined for tampering.