There was a reason why I had not opened with the Balrog. Unlike the Banshees, it was anything but stealthy. It was essentially impossible for something this powerful, aggressive, and active to remain hidden when powered up.

The moment the Balrog activated they flooded the viron with pings, inspected security tokens, and all-out screamed they were there.

That made it extremely hard to hide from them, but the flip side was that even without their admittedly flamboyant model they stood out like a bonfire on a moonless night.

In less than a second, each of them pinged me with no less than 12 requests for my identity. They did the same with all the bots, the HKs, and the remaining hacker.

My problem now was that I had initially planned to kill first the one hacker and attack the other while he was still distracted.

The perfect timing of the Basans arrival meant that I could forget that plan. Instead of a one-two punch, I would actually have a fight on my hands.

And my buffer, the essential ultimate defense of any hacker, was mostly overwhelmed. There have been several attempts to make a buffer that will just be deleted to be reinitialized, all for naught. To be able to protect the hacker the buffer needed some level of persistence.

Another factor was that the bigger the buffer, the greater the lag. In some ways, one could compare it to armor. Light armor, or a small buffer, meant fast and agile, but it is impossible to take more than a light hit. Something like the attack by two basans would have shredded that immediately.

Then a large buffer, equivalent to heavy armor, made you slow, cumbersome, but on the other hand, you could literally tank hits that would kill anybody else.

As usual for me, I preferred a more nuanced approach.

I had an outer layer of buffer, managed by the cluster, and an inner layer, managed by Precious. Neither was particularly large, but usually just enough to soak up a hit or two.

The cluster was physically big enough to contain several buffer banks without compromising other functions, and it had simply switched out the buffer my connection was going through.

Unfortunately, that made up only around a quarter of my buffer, and the one on Precious was at over 90%, and very slowly reinitializing. Oh, not so slow in real-time, but in the accelerated world we were fighting, a couple of seconds could mean a lifetime.

That meant I had to be much more careful than I had hoped. Not that I would be careless otherwise, but it added a tension I could live without. And while I was fighting for my life in cyberspace who knows what was happening in the real world. I could just hope that the cluster reactivating the defense systems had stopped the attack

But somehow I doubted that. Not with Basans on the other side.

There was no helping it, I had to go onto the offensive. The Banshees continued tussling with the Frankensteins. At numerical parity, I was not in the least concerned about that outcome.

The important fight was the Basans against the Balrog. Yes, I know that it would have helped to spin up additional Balrog, but these beasts took up an incredible amount of bandwidth. Something I had only in limited amount since I had no physical access to the cluster anymore.

No, sadly two Balrog were everything I could muster. They should be enough though. I estimated one Basan as a bit below a Balrog in power.

For some reason, the Basans let out an ear-shattering shriek. Yes, I could understand that there is some psychological aspect of this fight, but they were going against other hunter-killers, other bots.

Accordingly, the Balrog were not impressed. Then the four giants lumbered towards each other.

I can’t say that I was particularly awed by the appearance of the Basans, they looked like overgrown chicken after all, but they were exceedingly dangerous nonetheless.

The Balrog on the right of me used his whip to attack his opposing Basan. If I wanted to find out what exactly it had used, I would have to dive into the logs later. Whatever it was, it was not very effective.

The Basan took the fiery hit against one wing and a small flicker of flame sprung up, only to go out almost immediately. The Basan in question got rocked back a bit, but otherwise seemed unharmed. That only meant that it took the hit into its own buffer.

Meanwhile, the other Basan attacked the remaining Balrog. It spew a stream of fire. On normal logic, that would be an eminently stupid attack against a being made out of fire, smoke, and shadows, but naturally, that all was only the representation of the real attacks happening in code fragments.

Thankfully the Balrog seemed not much more impacted than if it were a real fight of monsters. Instead, it closed the distance and skewered the Basan with its sword. Or it tried to, at least. The Basan managed to mostly evade. The sword still connected, but it was a glancing blow instead of a fight-ending kill move.

Still, the Basan flickered for some moment, before it stabilized. It seemed to lose some of its definition. More bandwidth dedicated to keeping it up and running I would guess.

The Banshees had whittled the Frankensteins down to three and were now in greater numbers, though one of them seemed to require reinitialization as well. The cluster though was only limited by the bandwidth, and simply switched it out with a fully initialized version it had kept in reserve.

The basan with the singed wing pecked at its opposing Balrog, which in turn deflected the beak with its own wing, only to try to skewer the Basan in turn. While it managed a direct hit, ramming the flaming sword through the gigantic chicken, the Basan remained standing, blasting a stream of fire at the Balrog. Whatever it was, it severely damaged the demon, as it began to flicker. Not that the Basan was in much better shape.

Still, this round had gone to the Basan, and it began to press its advantage, only to be attacked by one of the Banshees from the back. Sure, the Banshee was completely out of its weight class, but it put on an additional strain on the Basan’s buffer, so anything was a help.

The Banshee could do that as the pack had whittled down the Frankensteins to two, and three of the ghost-like apparitions still landed attack after attack on the remaining HKs. It was unlikely that this part of the fight would last much longer.

The second Balrog had meanwhile lost one of its wings but managed to cut off the leg of its opposing Basan. The slowly falling bird was then decapitated with a quick stroke of the sword, slowly flickering out of existence.

Unless the other side had a similar setup as I had with the cluster it would take them a couple of minutes to orderly shut down the HK and restart it.

I was surprised about the HKs being here anyway. There is a reason why they were almost exclusively used defensively. They need credible computer hardware to even run in low-powered mode as Kursalin had with his crippled obsolete HK.

In this case, the corp had to have a couple of Beowulfs nearby and to have taken over the matrix completely in the surrounding area. Every little scrap of bandwidth had to be taken over for their exclusive use to run not one, not two, but ten hunter-killer bots.

The only thing allowing me to use the two Balrog was the direct connection with the cluster that the Q-link enabled me to do.

The situation for my side was looking much better now. There were still two Balrog and four Banshees against one Basan and two Frankensteins.

One of the Balrog was severely damaged, while the other one was hurt as well. And it was telling.

The remaining Basan let out another stream of fire, hitting its opposing Balrog and destroying its structure.

I had to look into the logs later and determine what killed it. It seemed like it was a serious vulnerability I needed to fix. This part of hacking was an eternal arms race. I would of course have to rework the attack utilities of the Balrog too, as the corp had data on what it used as well.

What surprised me a bit was the fact that no new Balrog was initializing. Normally the expert system driving the cluster’s master control unit would have one HK in reserve just in case something like this happened.

For some reason, it had decided that another Balrog was not needed. It was probably right, but it was an iffy decision. I would have to look into it in detail when this altercation was finished. I preferred to have the security of overwhelming force. And I had programmed the MCU accordingly.

It was not critical though. The remaining Balrog was at a much better data integrity than the Basan, and the Banshees had finished another Frankenstein.

Again, the Basan used his stream of fire, against the Balrog lumbering towards it, but with agility denying its bulk, it evaded, while simultaneously using its whip to some devastating effect.

I seriously needed to overhaul the programming of the Balrog. All these virtual actions, meant to impress and hamper a living hacker were essentially wasted processor cycles against another program. Wasted cycles that could be used better for real effect. Not that that had occurred to me beforehand.

The evasive action was in reality a relocation of the memory address range, combined with the spoofing of the open interfaces. If the attack could not find the executable code, it could do no damage naturally.

Still, the Banshees had ripped the last Frankenstein to shreds, aka randomized the executable in the memory. Depending on how much feedback was programmed into the HKs they would also have shredded the executable and libraries on the computer running the bots, but I doubted that whoever created them made that mistake.

And even if, simply making another copy from some depository would restore it. What it did though was blocking valuable bandwidth until the HK was fully deleted from the connection. That would take a couple of seconds, and the fight would be most likely over before any of the Frankensteins could be reintroduced.

The much more massive Basans would take much more time to reinitialize. Especially as they probably needed a much more powerful computer, mostly dedicated to them.

If that was so, in the best case the crash of the HK would make a reboot necessary. Just a couple of minutes, but in matrix combat, that was a lifetime.

But the point here was that the remaining Basan was harassed by 4 Banshees and a somewhat damaged Balrog while pretty much damaged itself.

To make things worse, I had designed the Balrog in a way that it could reinitialize parts of its code while running. Not the core functions, but some of the outer libraries. Like the defensive measure represented by the missing wing, which was slowly, for cyberspace, regenerating. As far as I knew, Basans lacked this ability.

Not that Kawamoto lacked the technical know-how to do that. They just wanted to be paid astronomically for that.

The remaining fight of the bots was accordingly quick after that.

One Banshee jumped on the Basan’s neck and ripped at it with its claws, effectively filling up its buffer.

Another one clamped around its feet, slowing down the shifting of the address range, making it much harder for the Basan to evade any further attacks.

The remaining two simultaneously attacked from both sides, locking down the defensive measures of the HK represented by its wings.

Lastly, a few virtual seconds after the Banshees harassed the Basan, the Balrog rammed its sword through the center of the Basan.

This attack proved to be the end of the enemy hunter-killer.

Flames surrounded it and burned it to digital ash, which slowly disintegrated.