'This still is not enough suffering for now,' Nick thought. 'But I just have to wait.'
Nick told Aria his new status and then found a hiding spot in the wilderness.
The Champion wasn't suffering as much, but the Tinkerer was suffering quite a bit.
Slowly, he accumulated suffering.
Five years passed.
Nick was at the threshold.
Just one more push.
He looked at the timer of his Seed.
The timer reached zero just when the date rolled over.
Nothing happened.
Seconds passed.
After a minute, the suffering Nick experienced increased.
Then, it increased even more.
Meanwhile, in Aegis' headquarters, the Tinkerer was once again rushing towards the database.
Their database was only putting errors out!
She immediately loaded a backup.
It worked for just a tiny moment before that one also crashed.
She went to a secondary backup.
Also crashed.
What the fuck was going on?!
After minutes of trying, she called the Shields over to restore the distributed backup.
That also crashed!
But how?!
Well, when Nick was in the database, he programmed a small virus and uploaded it.
However, the virus only triggered after a specific date.
Because of that, the virus passed unnoticed and was included in all of the backups of the last five years.
Due to space limitations, the distributed backup only contained the last 50 monthly backups.
After five years, the virus would have corroded all the distributed backups.
When the Tinkerer used a backup from over five years ago, everything worked again.
While the distributed backup only had data from the last 50 months, the primary and secondary backups had decades of backups.
Nick couldn't mess with them.
But he could mess with all of the backups of the last five years.
Naturally, the error would be fixed by restoring the database to a state of five years ago.
However, that was still five years of information lost.
Cities, strongholds, Specters, identities,and so on were no longer up to date.
This was another heavy hit to Aegis.
The Tinkerer just used the old backup as the new database and searched for the error in the newer ones.
When she compared the code, she realized that literally everything was different.
This was completely functionless and messy code!
Naturally, Nick's virus had essentially scrambled the code, deleted the old one, and replaced it with the scrambled mess.
How was the Tinkerer supposed to make any sense of this mess?!
The best and worst part was that it only deleted five years of updates.
It was good because it was only five years.
However, it was also bad because simply refilling the lost information of five years would probably take less time than solving the issue.
In short, it would be more pragmatic to just accept their losses and use the backup.
The Tinkerer could probably find the error at some point, but by then, the old backup would be up-to-date again.
It would be a waste of time.
That was the most frustrating part.
The Tinkerer suffered immensely.
This time, it wasn't the work she had to put in but the hit to her ego.
It was obvious that this was the Trickster's doing.
She felt helpless.
She designed all of this, and only she had access to everything.
She had no idea how the Trickster even managed to do all of this, and that was what pissed her off.
It was like the Trickster was playing with her!
The Tinkerer was the best researcher in the world!
And yet, a random Specter was messing up all of her secure systems!
She felt humiliated.
She felt like her credibility had fallen a considerable degree.
Far away, Nick was harvesting a ton of suffering.
Some of Aegis' Extractors were suffering due to outdated information, but the majority of the suffering came from the Tinkerer.
Nick could tell that she felt absolutely horrendous.
As Nick waited in the wilderness, his Zephyx increased.
At some point,Nick felt that his Zephyx had broken past a threshold.
And yet, he hadn't advanced.
For several days, Nick just waited.
Finally, his ability deactivated.
A moment later, an iridescent figure appeared in front of him.
The Sun had returned.
"Trickster," the Sun spoke. "You have gathered enough Zephyx to become an Adversary."
Nick stood up and politely bowed to the Sun. "It was not easy."
"Tell me of your duty," the Sun said.
"Of course," Nick answered.
Then, he told the Sun how he had messed with Aegis.
He had encrypted their old database.
He had destroyed their top-secret information.
He had destroyed the backups of the last five years.
"Your methods are different from your predecessor," the Sun spoke. "Your predecessor stopped advancement. You are setting them back."
"Tell me about humanity's current technological achievements."
Nick did just that.
He explained all the machines he found in great detail.
"You know a lot about human technology," the Sun spoke.
"I have to. It is my job. If I don't know about the technology, I would not know how to steer the advancement in a direction you desire," Nick answered calmly.
"I desire biological growth," the Sun spoke. "Do you also know about that?"
"I do," Nick said.
After that, Nick explained the workings of a Zephyx Synchronizer in relative detail.
Naturally, he couldn't be too detailed, and he had to leave some unknowns.
"What about Pure Energy?" the Sun asked.
Nick gave the Sun a blueprint of a Pure Energy generator that was around 30 meters high and only put out a tenth of the energy necessary to operate a Seed.
"That is already quite advanced," the Sun spoke. "How long until the humans can reproduce your generator?"
"One to two centuries would be my estimate," Nick answered.
The Sun remained quiet for a while.
"That is acceptable," the Sun spoke. "If everything progresses according to your prediction, you have done a fine job."
"Thank you," Nick answered.
"You are worthy of becoming an Adversary," the Sun spoke.
"You are granted permission to advance."
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