10010: Black vs. White (Part 1)

The whole thing turned out much bigger than I originally imagined. When they said that our Kibansentou would take place inside some ‘Arena’, I didn’t expect this. The whole building was a small, rounded stadium and it was so packed with people that some had to stand. A stage had been arranged in its center. It was split in two sides – one for us and one for the Black Flags. Each side had six desks with monitors, keyboards, and mouses for each participant. The Black Flags sent only six representatives – probably members from their Buccaneer Seven. All the others participated from the audience or their dorm. Anxiousness started growing inside me. I stared at the monitor of our backstage room. Only a few minutes were left, and we had just finished the last strategy meeting. I swallowed. So many people!

I felt a small hand on my back, gently caressing me. Turning around, I meet the apathetic gaze from Airii-senpai. “You are nervous,” she noted.

I forced a smile at her. “Yeah, a bit.”

Even though the Kibansentou had been a big Damocles Sword hovering above us, the last week would surely stay in my mind as one of the happiest times of my life. We spent every free second together, trained and learned but still found the time to scare Rukami-senpai as soon as she came to the dorm after her daily student council meetings. Even Ando-sensei played along.

Now it was the moment of truth, the day of the decision had come. A girl from the stage crew came to retrieve all of us from the room five minutes before the show was about to start. She led us towards the entrance of the arena. A concrete tunnel with a bright, blinding light at the end. I chuckled at Ando-sensei’s note of comparing it to a birth canal. But maybe this would turn out to be a birth. A birth of the new White Hood Club. All of us were here. Only Rukami-senpai wasn’t, though she promised to watch us from the first row, together with the guys from the student council.

We positioned ourselves next to each other right in front of the exit. The girl from the stage crew waited for a sign of the direction via her radio. I looked to my left: Airii-senpai; and to my right: Kayami-senpai. The latter one noticed my look and shot me a reassuring smile. “We’ll rock this.”

“I hope so.”

I rearranged the heavy desktop computer in my arms. We optimized the hell out of this machine. Ando-sensei had turned it into a mine field. Together with Airii-senpai and Ouzen-senpai he installed and configured his software on the three machines. It was a bit terrifying seeing how casually he was about the whole process. His Yamata no Orochi challenge back in the day had been nothing but child’s play in comparison. The other computers in Ando-sensei’s and Ouzen-senpai’s arms had been configured differently. There were slightly different security programs installed, protecting other parts. I was really glad, having Ando-sensei as our ally and for the first time while ever meeting him it looked like he made serious.

The Black Flags on the other side wouldn’t go easy on us as well. I was a bit anxious about finding out what they would have prepared for us. The girl from the stage crew got the call and nodded in our direction, leading us out of the narrow corridor. I heard music swelling up outside and loud cheering following right after it.

“Hi everyone and welcome to the first public Kibansentou of our school year!” A young, female voice could be heard on the big speakers of the arena. “My name is Yuami Shimoka and I will be today’s host for this Kibansentou.”

The overcrowded arena unfolded above me, and all the loud noises and bright lights made my anxiety skyrocket even more. There were so many people. They started screaming after the host had introduced herself. Everything was bright and it was a miracle that I didn’t trip over my own feet, crushing the desktop computer in my hands.

“And this is a very special one. The clash of polar opposites: Black and White Hats.” As we stepped up to the stage, I noticed the girl talking. She had vibrant pink hair, made up into twin tails and wore the school’s uniform. I could definitely sense a kind of idol vibe swinging with her. She grinned brightly into the arena and waved at the crowd into all directions.

We were surrounded by masses of people from all sides, heat of the bright stage lights burning on my skin. It was insane what efforts had been put into this whole show. Three white pedestals had been placed on our side in the center of the stage, three black ones for our opponents. They were meant for the desktop computers, so I put the one in my hands right on our central pedestal and started wiring it up with the provided cables that sticked out of a cable feed.

“On this side we have the team White Hat, consisting of all three members of the White Hood Club as well as Kosuke Ando-sensei – the white hatted security genius –, Kayami Nakayama-san – current member of the Buccaneer Seven of the Black Flag Club, trying to change factions to the White Hats – and Isato Kanaoka-kun – the new guy who yet has to prove his skills.”

I powered the machine on and shot a look to the Black Flags. Hidaka-kun was there – the number one of the Buccaneer Seven I had first met along with Nakayama-senpai and Kayami-senpai in the canteen. Apart from him I didn’t recognize any of the others.

“On the other side we have the Black Flag Club, represented on stage through five members of the Buccaneer Seven and club president Akihiro Nakayama-kun – the strategical mastermind behind the club. But for our freshmen of this year, I advise you to not be deceived. The Black Flags are way larger. Would all other participants in the audience be so kind to stand up.”

It almost looked like a big laola wave was going through the arena. More than half of the audience was standing. They had laptops in their hands. Only in this moment I realized how insane our whole endeavor was. Only Naoki-senpai still had the same gentle and imperturbable smile on his face.

“Take a close look at this, Team White Hat. These all are your enemies. You may sit down again.” The people took their places. “Then I may ask the two representatives of both groups come to me. I will recite your conditions of this Kibansentou.”

While Naoki-senpai stood up to meet with Nakayama-senpai at the center, I walked around to my assigned desk. My name was even displayed on a big monitor at the front. I sat down. Two monitors, proper mouse and keyboard. The devices had already been connected to my laptop through a docking station. This way it was way easier to operate then using the small built-in laptop screen and controls.

“I already set everything up,” Kayami-senpai whispered to not interrupt the show and grinned at me.

I sat in-between her and Airii-senpai. The three of us would form the attack team. We strayed a bit from the original plan to be just defensive. Kayami-senpai and I had been able to build a special safety mechanic that would be nothing less than a game changer. Still … considering the sheer number of opponents I was not that entirely sure if Ando-sensei would be able to single-handedly defend all three machines against the attackers, while Ouzen-senpai took care of the network.

Only now I noticed the strange, transparent box he sat in. It looked like it was made out of acryl glass and contained him with the whole desk. “What the heck is that?”

Kayami-senpai followed my gaze and replied with a wry expression. “The first public Kibansentous with him had a lot of audio feedbacks on the speakers due to him screaming all the time. They tried a few things, but this box worked best from all solutions.”

Oh … I already forgot Ouzen-senpai’s slight tendencies to scream during Kibansentous. Poor guy, but at least he looked happy – like a big cat in their carboard box.

“Great, then everything should be settled.”

I looked up at Naoki-senpai and Nakayama-senpai who were just shaking hands. The latter one shot a look into our direction, specifically to his sister. Then he returned to his side, where his club mates were already waiting at their seats. I didn’t know any of them, but I didn’t want to make the mistake of underestimating them.

Still, it was a strong feeling to have those five people at my side. Five people I trusted unconditionally; five people who I knew were absolute professionals at their respective disciplines. But would it be enough?

Shimoka-san positioned herself at the center, in-between the pedestals. “Are all of you ready?”

Naoki-senpai shot a look around and then nodded. Nakayama-senpai did the same with his team.

“Alright. The let’s start the countdown together.” All the screens around us flashed to a timer. The crowd counted together with her. “Three … two … one and let’s go!”

I saw Airii-senpai putting on her headphones. I exchanged a look with her and a smile with Kayami-senpai. Then I took a deep breath, and we dove in together. There was a colorful interior in front of us. It reminded me a bit of a game show on TV or maybe even like the map from a shooter game. Bridges lead from one side to the other, there were covers and passages disappearing into the sides of the walls, as well as tunnels.

I turned around to see Ando-sensei and Ouzen-senpai taking their defensive spots. Three corridors led into the back, with our three flags positioned at the end of them. In front of each one were beasts, one looking more terrifying than the others. I recognized three Jorougumos, still in its woman form, sitting in front of each entrance. Behind them was a different monster for each computer – one of them a Yamata no Orochi and if I was to believe Ando-sensei the others were even deadlier. Amanozako, a classical anti-virus software which got more aggressive with each new attack and a completely new program called Ungaikyou. It was Ando-sensei’s latest program and as he told us still in its beta phase. He tried explaining it, but I didn’t fully get what it was doing. He gave us his word however, that it was very strong for this kind of task and would do a great job.

Naoki-senpai ran to a high point to overlook everything and give us instructions.

Airii-senpai, Kayami-senpai and I started moving. Next to my katana there was something that had the shape of a gun, but we called it marker, the same way, paintball guns were called. This tool was the game changer Kayami-senpai and I had been working on so hard. We had to pull two all-nighters to complete this little utility. I pulled the marker out of my holster.

“Enemy sighted!” Airii-senpai made a well-placed shot into the distance. I didn’t see the enemy right away, only when the colored tag ball hit him right into the chest, covering him in white color.

Once we managed to tag an enemy, they were no longer able to enter one of the three corridors. While I had programmed the software for tagging, Kayami-senpai had built actual computer chips that were plugged into the network port of all our three desktop computers. When our markers hit an enemy, they pulsed their hardware addresses to the chips, and they added them to a blacklist. In other words: We could tag our enemy’s devices and they were regarded as untrustworthy and blocked unconditionally. There was not even the slightest chance of them surpassing this measure since it happened on the lowest possible end: on the hardware itself.

Several other people appeared from the center of the map. We ran for cover at the sides and tried tagging them from there. Since it was only finished yesterday evening, we hadn’t had much time to train a lot with the markers.

I noticed a motion from the side of my peripheral view. “Down the corridor to our left!” I yelled and gave Airii-senpai a hand sign for her to notice them as well. She still didn’t hear anything due to the music on her ears.

All the people we hit didn’t really care about our little paint job and they didn’t care about us as well. They ran straight for the three corridors, right as Naoki-senpai predicted it.

“The Black Flags have so many people that there is no need for them to attack you directly. There will be different teams with different tasks. A few will go straight for our devices, and they won’t care about anything our attack team does. Only the ones protecting their machines will wait for us to approach and hunt us down with everything their armory has to offer.” When he had told us that, I still had my doubts, but figuring out people surely was his strength.

“Great job guys! You already tagged more than 70 devices.” He turned towards the other side. “Defense team: The first guys are just arriving at our ports.”

“LET THEM COME, SO I CAN TAKE GOOD CARE ABOUT THEM!” Ouzen-senpai screamed, while hammering on his keyboard like a maniac. The sounds were absorbed by his transparent box fairly well, though. His hair has again changed the color from blonde to completely white. In his hands he had a stationary marker with a higher firing power and would take care about everyone we missed on our way.

“The first members of the Black Flags just reached the three machines from team White Hat,” Shimoka-san commented through the microphone. “They however are still occupied with … I really don’t know what they are doing there. It looks a bit like they are skimming through network activity and mark lists of MAC addresses.”

By now they haven’t noticed the problem with our white tags, but it wouldn’t take them much longer to notice that our three devices completely ignored them. We were tagging all the devices like our lives were depending on it. So many enemies passed us, that I even worried if we could surpass the capacity of our penetration tests on the chips. One after one we marked more guys and Ouzen-senpai took all of the people who were able to get past us. Then, finally they noticed.

“Hey, Akihiro-kun. All three machines completely block my requests,” one of the guys in front of us said.

“What does that mean? Block? They don’t have the money to buy a firewall, that would be able to block requests, let alone three.”

“Maybe a software firewall,” Hidaka-kun threw in. “I don’t know. I’ll try it with another IP address.” He typed a few seconds. “That is not possible. I’m still blocked. Something is off here.”

Kayami-senpai and I exchanged a grin. “It works!”

She nodded and we gave each other a fist bump.

“The Black Flags seem to have encountered a roadblock at the machines. As you can clearly see, all possible tries to connect to one of the three machines results in request timeouts.” Shimoka-san commented. “As it seems, something is blocking them off from accessing. Does this have to do with the mysterious lists they were creating?”

Nakayama-senpai stood up and turned towards the audience. All the Black Flag members in the audience showed faces of despair. “We need a solution for this NOW! If there is anyone inside the attack team, who can still access the machines, get down here immediately.”

A murmuring went through the crowd, they looked at each other.

“We have 280 clients blocked. Ouzen-kun takes the remaining ones.” Naoki-senpai looked at us. “You three go over to phase two.”

“DON’T WORRY GUYS, I GOT THEM!” Ouzen-senpai screamed, the sound still muffled from the box.

This was the moment, where we would part ways. Each of us took one of their machines. Like with ours, they probably weren’t configured all the same, so it would distribute our chances equally. If someone found a weak point or needed back up, we could be there in an instant. I bumped Airii-senpai into the side and gave her a firm nod to hand the signal on to her. She replied with a nod herself.

We all holstered our markers and took out our respective weapons. I already knew about Kayami-senpai’s blade whip, but what kind of weapon Airii-senpai would use, was still a surprise to me. I gulped when I recognized the huge sword in her hands. It was gigantic, with a blade even bigger than herself and looked really heavy. We could be glad that all of this was just the visual representation of something entirely digital … otherwise she probably would not have been able to wield, let alone lift it.

We jumped out of our covers and took a run. The arena on their side was the same as ours but mirrored and with a darker set of vibrant colors. I slid downwards into the trenches. Even though they were currently occupied with figuring out how our blacklisting worked, this did not mean, we had the free hand to become ruthless. There were still so many of them, that caution was always necessary. One DDoS attack at my laptop would throw me back drastically.

I made my way to the end of the trench. Slowly ascending out of the hole, I spotted a group of about twenty enemies in front of the corridor to the central desktop computer that I was supposed to attack. They were not very skilled and rather slow, however. I used a little utility to distract them and with one jump and a few placed hits already took out half of them. The others were a bit surprised and reacted hectically. I swirled around and with a few well-placed hits of my katana, I knocked them out and they disappeared into pixelated nothingness.

Then I ran into the corridor. The machine itself was not best protected, a few ports had been opened. Every device of a Kibansentou had to be hackable in a realistic amount of time. The hardest part was to create something that was barely hackable, but not too strong to be disqualified. With this machine there were a few possible attack surfaces. They tried to hide the real entry point underneath a few others. But that would not stop me.

“I’ve got something!” Someone ran down the stage, yelling. It was a boy with white spikey hair. Hey! I knew that guy! He was the one from my class, ran around to Nakyama-senpai and slammed his laptop onto the desk in front of him. “I scraped the network traffic and there were some broadcasts that contained nothing, but a MAC address and hash that I guess is a signature.”

“You mean, they sent all of our MAC addresses across the network? Then there has to be some sort of firewall, listening to those requests and blocking all of us.” Kayami-senpai’s older brother had a quick apprehension … but then he also knew that there were no countermeasures he could take unless they found an exploit in the chip … or they had the appropriate hardware to fake different hardware addresses and essentially change their digital identities to reset the game.

“As it seems, the Black Flags found a hint on what is preventing them from entering the machines. Now we know, what Team White Hat did: They manually populated a blacklist to block all of the Black Flag’s devices from entering their machines!” Shimoka-san explained. A murmuring went through the hall. A rather small group applauded, but I knew this was just the beginning of it all.