Rune Mage Ascending: A LitRPG Fantasy by D. Winchester

Author:D. Winchester [Winchester, D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Royal Guard Publishing LLC
Published: 2024-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

A REUNION OF SORTS

That was how the next several days went, as Benjamin tried to build a program that would have taken him an hour in any of the languages he was used to. He’d wake up to a breakfast, work for eight hours, then drain the life out of a particularly-vibrant section of the blood rose vines. He’d work for another eight hours, top his health and mana back off once more, and then eat dinner before he slept.

Honestly, despite the surreal surroundings, it felt more like punching the clock than his internship ever had. At least there, when he’d been learning about CNC machines, he hadn’t expected to sleep in his cubicle. It wasn’t so bad here, though. The food was good, and the weather was mild.

In the end, it took him three days to build his hacking tool from scratch, and to figure out how to learn it as a spell and cast it on Matt. It was a crude, ugly thing, but he lacked the resources to try to do anything more elegant than brute force it. The best he could manage to do was try every possible combination, one at a time, for as long as it took to find the right one, and then record the code for later use once it was resolved. Given that there were 49 major and minor runes and 10 spaces in which to fit them, there were several quintillion options.

Brute Force: (1 mana/hr) sequentially try 10,000 combinations per second on Runic interface until password is discovered.

Even at the rate of a thousand permutations per second he was running, that would still take effectively forever. He’d get 10 million guesses per mana, which was great, he was sure. Somewhere, someone was giving him an excellent performance review, but it wouldn’t be enough. The heat death of the universe was more likely than finding the password to free his friend; it would take uncountable billions of years to get there at that rate.

In the real world, he’d have databases of the most-common passwords and information for dictionary attacks. He’d have all kinds of tools to winnow that pool of possible down to probable with statistical analysis, but here, he had none of those resources. He might someday, but it would take years of coding, since he was starting from scratch in a world without libraries or the internet.

So, even as he let it run, he considered other options. A social attack on the person on the other side of the screen would have been the right answer, at least as far as his coursework was concerned, but here, that wouldn’t work either. He wasn’t even sure that Matt was capable of speech beyond uttered threats, and he almost certainly was too weak to talk.

Benjamin started thinking about the math that would be involved in creating a rainbow table attack on the password and almost gave up right there. Building something that complicated would take time, and he didn’t have it.

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