Chapter 10:

01001: A surprising Reencounter

Root Access


“WE NEED MORE COMPUTING POWER!”

It was a peculiar sight to say the least. The hallways to the dorm rooms lead away left and right from us. Arano-senpai and I however had stepped straight into the common room of the dormitory. A big table stood in the center and a bomb of cables seemed to have exploded over the whole scenery. Several boxes that I identified as server racks were stacked on the ground. Smaller desktop computers towered in a similar fashion on the table. Somewhere in-between the whole mess I also recognized a few network switches with the corresponding cables connected to all of the devices scattered throughout the room.

At the table inside the whole chaos sat Izumida-san with her pink headphones on and the usual plain expression on her face, typing on a computer. Right opposite of her sat a guy twice her size. He was gigantic, had long, white hair. His expression looked grim. “NAOKI-KUN! FASTER!” he screamed with a deep voice and loud enough that dust trickled down the ceiling.

I had to hold my ears and looked at Arano-senpai, who already stuffed earplugs into her ears. I looked at her a bit distraught. She replied with a forced smile. “The Kibansentous with Yabuki-senpai are mostly very loud.”

The what …? I just wanted to ask when I heard steps running above us. They came from the stairwell. “OUT OF THE WAY!” Fujinami-kun screamed.

Arano-senpai and I rushed to the side and were almost ran over by him. He sprinted right to the table, a big desktop computer in his arms. He smashed it onto the tabletop, plugged the power cable and turned it on. The lights in the room made a short dip as the machine powered on. He jumped around to the network switch and connected a cable plus an orphaned monitor with mouse and keyboard.

Watching the play, Arano-senpai and I slowly made our way towards them while trying to not stumble over the cables.

“Guys do you really think that the power grid of this house can handle this many devices?” Arano-senpai asked.

“We don’t have a choice!” Fujinami-kun explained while typing on the newly connected keyboards. “They use DPB to DDoS our club’s data center.”

“They use what?” I asked.

“You don’t know what a DDoS attack is?” Arano-senpai asked with a confused expression.

“I do know!” A DoS – or Denial of Service – attack was an attack on the availability of a system. A target was penetrated with so many network requests, that it was unable to process them in the speed they were coming in. After a given amount of time the system then mostly gave up and crashed completely. A DDoS – Distributed Denial of Service – attack however was even more powerful. The requests were not stemming from a single device but from multiple attack sources which made deflecting them umpteen times more difficult. “But what is DPB?” I asked.

“Oh, sure. DPB is short for Directed Photon Beam. That’s the most powerful botnet on campus. It belongs to the Black Flag Club and has approximately 5,000 hosts. For bigger attacks they even rented server space to boost it up to 6,000 with virtual machines.”

That was insane. 5,000 machines on campus were infected with a botnet virus? That meant that all those devices had a hidden software installed which listened on a signal from a server. When said server sounded the attack, all those machines started firing their packets without the original user of the device noticing. I did not know how much machines were scattered throughout the campus, but if the botnet had about 5,000 hosts that probably meant most of the devices here were infected.

Fujinami-kun jumped up from his seat. “This one is ready as well.”

The guy next to him gave him a thumbs up. “DON’T DWARDLE AROUND THIS TIME!”

Fujinami-kun ran up the stairs again. As he disappeared, I slowly moved behind Izumida-san’s computer. She was jumping between some configuration windows of networking devices. I looked up to the guy in front of her – Yabuki-senpai if I had gotten the name right. He looked really concentrated … or angry (?), so I better postponed the introduction for later.

“What exactly are you guys doing there?” I asked towards Izumida-san who still looked as deeply relaxed as ever.

“She can’t hear you.” Arano-senpai came to my side. She pointed at her headphones. “Airii-chan always listens to her music during Kibansentous. She is like ten times faster when she does that.”

“What is this Kibansentou you are talking about all the time?” Only now I noticed how fast Izumida-san was thinking. The only times her hands rested were when she waited for a console command to execute. Outside of that she seemed to require no thinking time. Even Ando-sensei would have been envy over that.

Arano-senpai grinned smugly. “A Kibansentou is the way we determine the school ranking and settle conflicts at Ineigaikan. It is a kind of tournament between two parties. This can either be a single person, a group of persons, a club or – since we also have disguises at this school – a handle. There are a few mandatory battles that are appointed by the school. The ones to determine the school ranking for example. But you also have the possibility to challenge other parties and bet anything. As far as I understood, this Kibansentou right here was a challenge from the Black Flag Club.”

I nodded. “Uhm … this looks serious. Can we help …”

“No!” Arano-senpai sprung to my side. “No helping! A club will be disqualified when some outsider helps them.”

“Oh, I see.”

Fujinami-kun came down the stairs again. He had a big and heavy server in his hands and struggled with the weight. It looked really unnatural for someone with a figure as delicate as his to heave around such big masses.

“Why didn’t you take down the servers earlier?”, I asked him and came to his side. Just in case he slipped, and the big device squashed him underneath its weight.

“We overslept,” he explained plainly as he laid the device on the others and breathed heavily. “And I did not expect it to be THIS bad.”

Errr … “You did not expect a DDoS attack from a botnet with more than 5,000 machines to be not THAT bad? And why are you even bringing all these devices down here? Couldn’t you plug them in where you got them from?”

Fujinami-kun stopped in his motion, slowly gazed up at me. “We don’t have enough space to wire them up in our storage room.”

Yabuki-senpai slammed angrily on the keys on his keyboard. “NAOKI-KUN!” he screamed out of the blue.

Fujinami-kun instantly jumped up and kept on rewiring the device. “Sorry! Right at it!”

I leaned towards Arano-senpai. “Do these guys even have a chance?”

“Not really, no.” She shook her head. “But it had gotten a bit better since the last year …”

I recognized a light in my peripheral view. It came from the entrance.

“Guys, I’m there!” a voice from the doorway called.

Fujinami-kun slammed the server’s cable into the power strip and hit the power button on the front at the exact same moment in time. The same moment as everything went dark – the room gradually going silent as the amount of computer fans smoothly stopped turning one after the other.

Izumida-san took her headphones off and looked at all of us. “The power went off,” she exclaimed with her usual flat intonation.

Fujinami-kun fell to his knees in front of the table. “That’s it guys … we lost.”

The visitor that still stood in the half shadow of the entrance slowly approached the room. “I didn’t cause this mess here, did I?” I remembered this voice as if it was yesterday.

“Naoki-kun tried to wire up one to many machines to the load balancing cluster,” Izumida-san explained.

“But let’s look at the bright side,” Fujinami-kun said and stood up to his feet again to face us, “now we know that 35 servers and 12 desktop PCs is the limit.”

“Sorry, I really, really should have hurried more.” The visitor came into the room and went through his short, dark hair.

“Ando-sensei?” I exclaimed.

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