He Who Fights with Monsters 10: A LitRPG Adventure by Shirtaloon & Travis Deverell

Author:Shirtaloon & Travis Deverell [Deverell, Travis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2023-11-27T16:00:00+00:00

Jason and his team were in a waiting room quite different to how they had found it. There was now a selection of furniture conjured by Belinda, plus one cloud chair. A buffet table had been set up along one wall where each person was filling a plate. Gary was working a grill, the smoke being absorbed into a dimensional range hood floating over it.

“Why are you here?” Neil asked Gary. “I thought you gave up adventuring.”

“I did give up adventuring. I didn’t give up barbecues.”

Clive and Rufus left the buffet table with full plates. Clive’s plate wobbled precariously in one hand as he gestured enthusiastically with the other, explaining a concept to Rufus. They sat down near Belinda, who was already merrily chomping away.

“The aura keys we use are, of course, nowhere near as sophisticated as the standard ones the messengers employ,” Clive said.

“That’s not even thinking about a specialised tool like the keystone for the orb,” Belinda mumbled around a mouthful of food.

“Just so,” Clive agreed. “But the basic principle is the same: take a specialised aura imprint and use it as a resonance key to open a lock.”

“Bad security,” Belinda said, then bit into a tyrannical pheasant leg.

“Indeed,” Clive said. “There are numerous ways to replicate an aura key. Belinda, here, is an expert at doing so with simple devices. An aura manipulation expert like Jason or Amos Pensinata can simply use their own auras to do so.”

Belinda said something unintelligible with her mouth full and Clive shook his head.

“What she was probably trying to say was that the problem with spoofing an aura key is that it takes time to get the aura signature correct, and any good security system will detect attempts to do so and have secondary security in place, usually alarms.”

Belinda nodded as she swallowed her food.

“You can get around it,” she said. “Just a matter of time. But what you really want to do is get hold of the key you need. With the right tool, you record the aura signature from it in a few moments and put the key back, leaving no one the wiser. Then you can go off and replicate the key at your leisure. I built little spider constructs to sneak into places and copy aura keys for me. They’re hard to detect, and can enter or hide in places that I can’t.”

“The flaws of this security method are well known,” Clive said. “The Magic Society knows all about it, but bureaucratic inertia means they’re resistant to changes that would require sweeping infrastructure shifts across all the branches. So, instead of fixing the problem, they use makeshift solutions that introduce almost as many vulnerabilities as they patch. Take your average Magic Society official, for example. They carry with them a whole plethora of aura keys to various vaults, storage rooms and research stations, depending on their level of authority.”

“That idiot we met the other day,” Belinda said. “He’d have all kinds of access to all kinds of great stuff.

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