10100: Black vs. White (Part 3)

A huge crowd of Black Flag students was approaching my corridor. In the back of the whole crowd, people started flying off into all different directions, like something punched its way through them even faster than they were running. It was her! I ran right into the crowd, pulled out my blade and started fighting through all of them. I still wasn’t as effective as Kayami-senpai, but I parried and deflected all their hits more or less elegantly. Whatever they did, they lacked a lot of speed to keep up with us. It took the both of us just a few moments to meet at the center of the big crowd.

When we did, we pushed ourselves together at the backs. The enemies formed a circle around us. “Do your already have an idea on how to lock those guys out?” Kayami-senpai asked.

“I don’t know if I really need to. Their flag is hidden inside a protected folder. I would only need administrative access to get there, but I couldn’t when this Bunzaemon Nishihara appeared and prevented me from doing it.”

“Then do it now! I’ll cover your back.”

“Are you sure? There are so many …”

“Do it! The Black Flags don’t really foster people in the back rows. Their best people do all the tournaments and everyone else has little to no battle experience, so I’ll handle them, I promise.”

I gulped. A strange feeling grew inside my guts, but I trusted her. “Alright.”

With experienced movements she kept all people far away from us. Whoever dared to step out of the line made the acquaintance with her blade whip and she was mercilessly precise like a machine.

“The Black Flags just managed to break the first line of defense on one of the machines. Takaya Hidaka-kun outsmarted the packet filter Jorougumo!” Shimoka-san yelled as she stared at his screen, seemingly unable to fully comprehend what he was doing. “He … uh, somehow circumvented the packet inspection.”

Only at this moment Ando-sensei looked a little more challenged. He hectically scrolled through what looked like network logs.

“Hey, daydreamer!” Kayami-senpai shot me a short look. “Just because I said that I would keep your back clear doesn’t mean that you can slack.”

“Sorry! I’m right at it!” This was none of my business. They had to manage their stuff themselves, while I kept on throwing together the little exploit.

“Guys, I’ll leave the post of command center. Airii-chan is fully surrounded by enemies and I’ll back her up!” Naoki-senpai said. This was the kind of urgency, I really expected. We had to fight at all ends at the same time.

“Only five minutes left!”

“I’m done with the exploit!” I copied it onto the machine and raised right behind Kayami-senpai’s back. She already defeated half of the enemies, turned her head towards me. “Then run this sucker!”

“Code Review?”

“No time! Also, I trust you that it works!”

I gulped but did as she told me. The lines ran across my screen. Successful; Successful; Successful; Done! “We are Admins now!”

Kayami-senpai slammed her blade whip against the floor, eliminating every single one of the Black Flags.

“Kayami-san and Kanaoka-kun managed to get hold of the second machine!”

“I’ll take care about keeping them out,” she said. “Go and take this stupid flag.”

“On it!” I yelled and ran off, to search for the flag, started a scan for a file named ‘black_2.txt’. It was when my whole screen was flooded with matches. They had hundreds of files that were called all different names. ‘1486_black_2.txt’, ‘black_2.txt_22342’ and so on. By default, the file explorer searched for all matches containing the specified name. But this was an easy task. I wrote the full file name in double quotes to only take exact search results.

“Everything is moving so fast now! We have only two Minutes left and Hidaka-kun took the first flag from Team White Hat. He copied it to their own machine, evening out their advance! His other colleagues are still struggling against Jorougumo.”

Don’t listen to them, idiot! Keep moving! The search loaded for a few seconds. I took the time to check for running tasks. Not that there were any funny utilities installed that kicked me before I could reach out for the flag. Perhaps the Black Hats were more focused on the attacking part and not so much on the defending. I found nothing suspicious … which didn’t mean that there wasn’t anything.

At the end I would only figure it out once I accessed the file. “I’m copying it!” I reported. Ctrl+C. I took the flag into my hands.

Now I only had to run back to the corresponding machine on our side. A loading bar appeared. One second and another one. I took a sprint across the whole map. Kayami-senpai followed me in my steps and fended of all the guys that tried stopping me.

I saw the three corridors. Destruction could be seen behind the barrier from one of them. This was the one Hidaka-kun attacked. The central already had the additional flag from Kayami-senpai, so I brought mine into the other untouched corridor. I ran past the defeated Jorougumo and past Yamata no Orochi, fighting with the Black Flag guy and threw it onto the ground right next to ours. Another ringing echoed through the hall, followed by an audio cue.

“Kanaoka-kun just took the second flag and built up the White Hat’s advance again!” Shimoka-san called, jumping up and down. “It keeps getting more and more thrilling. The last minute starts rolling!”

I looked at Nakayama-senpai. His expression was grim. He put on a superior grin and slowly looked to the guy at his side. “Activate it.”

Activate what? I couldn’t finish my thought when, a portal opened right above the flag I had just brought here. Someone came jumping through and sent me a lethal blow without giving me the slightest chance to defend myself. What on earth happened here?

“Unbelievable! The Black Flag club’s flags were trojan horses!” Shimoka-san cried into her microphone. “They had backdoors attached to them!”

Two loud ringings followed right afterwards. Ando-sensei’s software didn’t even have the possibility to react. They just took our two remaining flags in the last second. Together with the one from Hidaka-kun this would be all three of our flags.

“WHAAAT?” Ouzen-senpai screamed and made the walls from his box shake.

A long ringing signaled the ending of the time and was followed by a second of dead silence. Then hell broke loose in the audience around us. Screaming, applause, loud cheers. It felt like the air had been pushed out of my lungs. Did we really … loose?

I didn’t dare to look at Kayami-senpai. Only after a long fight with myself, I managed to gaze at her. Her mouth stood open, her eyes staring at the screen in front of her. It looked like her soul had just turned into a void.

I slowly reached out for her shoulder, placed my hand onto it and caressed, her. It was like I had taken her out of the trance. Her eyes searched for mine, she swallowed.

“Guys … uh, it may look like it, but our systems only registered two obtained flags for the Black Flags,” Shimoka-san called, trying to outdo the crowd in volume. The impact of her outcall made the cheering subside. Everyone looked a bit baffled around, but she was right. The timer of the Kibansentou had elapsed and the final score was a 2-2.

“This has to be a mistake, right?” Shimoka-san asked, looking up at the direction, holding her ear to better understand the announcements on her hidden earpiece. “I’m just hearing that the first White Hat flag’s content did not match with the real flag.”

Hidaka-kun jumped up. “But I copied the exact file with the right name! If they had different files with the same name, they violated the rules!”

General agreement could be heard throughout the audience when a hand shot up. “Maybe … I can explain what happened.”

It was Ando-sensei, who stood up. He looked a bit exhausted though. Slowly, he made his way to Shimoka-san to take her microphone. He swallowed before speaking. “My newest software called Ungaikyou is responsible for all this.”

Slight murmuring throughout the audience.

“The software creates a partial sandbox of a machine, once installed. That means that every opened file, every try to list the running programs and every other action on the device is redirected through Ungaikyou. It distorts your look onto the system. When Hidaka searched for the flag file, the system presented him a search result that does not even exist on the hard drive and was entirely made up by me. If he would have manually taken the way towards the desktop, he would have found the correct file. This protects information in a way that only people who know the real architecture know how to get to the real files. Attackers have no way of knowing if they look at the correct file or not. It modified the way you see the system.” He went across his forehead with the sleeves of his shirt. “But you really gave me a hard time, keeping up with configuring Jorougumo’s filtering rules on the other devices. Kudos to that!”

“Your security programs on the machine … Where they simulated as well? I had Jorougumo down in like a minute,” Hidaka-kun asked.

“For the sandbox I used very old versions that still had a lot of bugs. The only mistake you made was to not check the content of the flag file. There you would have instantly recognized that something was off. And we should have checked the files for possible stowaways.” Ando-sensei directed his look to me and Kayami-senpai. Such a beginner’s mistake.

It was, when Nakayama-senpai stood up, that all of us winced slightly. He made his way to Ando-sensei, slowly and calmly, held out his hand to retrieve the microphone, then turned to the audience. “I want to thank everyone of you, who participated in this Kibansentou,” he said with a calm voice. “On the surface we had only a few club points to lose, but as you all know, the stakes were much higher. Nonetheless, our club has a high self-expectation. A draw is not worthy for us Black Hats. A draw is a defeat.”

“What are you talking about, Akihiro-kun?” Hidaka-kun yelled and came around to the center of the stage. “We can still win!”

“Didn’t you listen to me? I underestimated them, especially this teacher. I hereby grant the victory to the White Hood Club and their new members.” He looked at Kayami-senpai. “I think I understand all of it better now and travelers should not be forced onto other paths. But since everyone is assembled here, just a fair warning: My little sister changing sides and the fact that she is part of the white hats now does not give anyone the permission to humiliate her. If I find out about anyone doing things like the ones that happened on Monday to her, I will personally make sure that hell will feel like a vacation compared to your life at this school. This is a promise … not from the president of the Black Flags, but from a big brother.”

He gave the microphone back to Shimoka-san who seemed a bit overwhelmed with all the things happening and came around to our table. Discussions went on inside the audience and I really couldn’t comprehend what had happened.

“Kayami,” Nakayama-senpai said.

She was still frozen on her chair, staring at him with open eyes.

“I regretted, what I said to you, and I am very sorry. They aren’t purposeless weaklings and … I want you to be happy. If you decide that this will be with the White Hoods, then I won’t like it, but I’ll accept it.” He bowed deep before her.

I noticed how her eyes wandered across his whole appearance. “Onii-chan!” Tears welled up in her eyes and she finally stood up, pulling him into an embrace.

He clenched his arms around her as well. “I didn’t want to accept that you wanted to be happier somewhere else. Please understand that I was a bit envious.”

“Yeah, of course, I do,” she said with a shaky voice. “Of course, I do.”

They hugged for a bit and then loosened their embrace. Nakayama-senpai looked at me, gave me his hand. “I’ve been quite presumptuous, without even knowing you. I’m Akihiro.”

I stood up and gave him my hand. “Isato.”

“Please promise me to take good care of my sister.”

I grew a bit warm around the cheeks. “Yeah … of course.” Stupid head, he’s just talking about the club and not about anything else!

“I’m really glad about your change of mind!” Naoki-senpai jumped into the conversation and tried to take Akihiro-senpai in a headlock … but failed since the latter one was almost two heads taller than him.

“Don’t misunderstand anything. You might get your club points, but once we rearranged, I want a rematch. You may have won a fight, but you haven’t won the war. You might have had luck today, but I will personally take care that Black Hats will always be above the White Hats.”

“Sure, sure … you won’t stand a chance against us once we are properly united.”

“We’ll see about that.”

They both trailed off to the side, opening the view to Airii-senpai who still sat on her chair. She took off her pink cat ear headphones, blinked. “I couldn’t defeat all of them. Did we win?”

Kayami-senpai and I both had to laugh. It was a beautiful sound, and it really was the only thing that currently mattered to me … that she was happy, and that both of us could become a part of the White Hoods. The way we always wanted.