Thug and Idol: 10X Rewards Second Identity System

Tristan shook his head vigorously.

'This is stupid! I'm literally killing people dead and selling drugs to whoever asks for them. Weapons, too! And my organization absolutely lies to people about the profits and glamor of the job to impressionable people to recruit them on board.'

This line of thinking wasn't right, and if before there was a room for doubt, now Tristan was sure.

'Gospel is the Ass-Angel! This level of writing is not normal at all! It's on the edge of the supernatural, if it's not actually supernatural. It's like one of my skills, or even talents!'

Despite everything—like the fact that Gospel was still anonymous—the thought brought him some excitement. It went down quickly.

Tristan still didn't know how exactly Gospel's powers worked. Was his system anything like Tristan's? Or was it entirely different?

It definitely wasn't identical—Tristan didn't even have a skill for writing compelling online posts, only his outstanding charisma. That's why he needed Derek and his PR people—professionals.

Further research into the situation online showed that things were as bad as Derek described. People gathered in troves to throw shit at the walls of Tristan and Nelson's social pages—way too many people for how little time had passed.

By the time Derek stopped near his house, Tristan's mood was as dark as it ever got. Derek's gloominess mirrored his.

"I will keep you updated on the PR situation, and on Mr. Mayar's state, Mr. Gemello," Derek said before Tristan could leave. "There will be a lot of damage control needed. If this continues, it might be easier to make you an entirely new reputation than bring up this one!"

Tristan grit his teeth. Despite being actually able to do something like that, Tristan refused to give up so easily.

"There has to be something we can do in the meantime. Take legal action. It's SERIOUS this time."

His system chimed in with a new task, although Tristan didn't consciously ask it to make one. It did that often enough, though.

[New task: bring down Gospel's inflammatory posts and their copies. Value: 1000.]

Derek nodded slowly.

"Yes. You are right, of course, Mr. Gemello. I'm going to contact our lawyers, try them to take this post down entirely. It's not what I'd normally do, but this isn't a normal situation. What's worse, there's no guarantee it will work, even considering the emotional distress you two suffered. This post doesn't have any outright lies in it—there's a lot of space to be slick."

Tristan nodded.

"Do that. I agree it won't be easy, but we still have to try. That post will be reposted, there will be new ones made… But we have to make the social network itself take them all down. We have to make it more expensive for them to let them stay than to take them down. If you need me to do anything for the court or the media—I will do it. I will confirm any amount of emotional distress to my person, or to Nel."

He left at that, biding his goodbye with a wave at the window of Derek's car.

By the time Tristan went home, he also had a plan of action for himself. It was a paper-thin one, but right now it was the best he had.

Tristan had only brute force to rely on at this point.

He was going to hack Gospel's account no matter how long it took, and scrounge for every amount of information in it.

[New task: gain access to Gospel's account. Value: 1000.]

With that plan in mind, Tristan hid in his room and made sure that no one would pester him or Tristan Hayes until he went out.

He prepared sweet soda, snacks, and actual food.

He did stretches to make the blood flow faster through his body, but despite Tristan's hopes, it didn't make him feel better. He still felt weak, sluggish, and ill overall.

The next thing Tristan did was to check his body temperature—just in case. But it was normal.

Finally, he began hacking. His current skills were a far cry from the ones Tristan had the last time he was doing this.

Back then, the thing Tristan understood the most was how much he didn't understand. Now, Tristan actually saw possible vulnerabilities even in the servers of cyber-giants like the popular online platforms. Even if his brain was swimming a little in his head, Tristan knew what he was doing.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

After all, every computer system was made by a human, and all humans made mistakes.

Tristan diligently explored each of them.

First, he found Gospel's IP address—it was just the easiest thing to do. An IP address usually could only point at someone's location up to a city, but knowing a city was already more than nothing.

It pointed to a location somewhere in the East of America. However, another half an hour of research showed that the location was just a proxy server's address.

This meant that Gospel did the first thing anyone wanted to stay anonymous online did and used a system that rerouted his traffic through a secondary server. These systems were simple to use, even for ordinary people.

So now Tristan had to either try other ways, or spend time hacking the server in question.

'Let's try the most common security vulnerabilities, and if that doesn't work, I will just move on,' Tristan thought.

To his delight, one of the common vulnerabilities wasn't patched at all. Tristan got through it with ease and snatched the IP address like a fruit from a low-hanging branch.

Now Tristan had the city.

It was Los Angeles.

Tristan clenched his fists on the armrest of his chair until they cracked—but what he really wanted was to punch the laptop.

'He's so close! Of-fucking-course… And it doesn't help at all. This is an enormous city—you can hide anywhere you want in here. Especially if no one knows how you look or what's your name is . Hell, he could be someone I know…'

Tristan shook his head.

'No, that's impossible. He had too much hatred for me—I'd notice the relationship thread between must be black that's deeper than the grave I will put him in... Hm.'

He looked down at his chest. Tristan could see his own relationship threads from here. However, with no people around, it was impossible to distinguish the threads from one another. There were too many of them.

With one thread for each of Tristan's fans, they just created an even purple glow from his chest. A small purple star with thousands of rays, which became more transparent the farther away from Tristan they went, fully disappearing around ten centimeters away from him.

'It looks pretty, but is absolutely useless by itself. I'm not even sure that the threads show accurate direction toward these people. There are too many of them pointing up or down for this.'

With a huff, Tristan shook off his thought and went to take a break for food.

After this, he fully immersed himself in hacking Gospel's account. This was an entire journey—Tristan had to not only get his login and password data somehow, but also bypass secondary authentication. Or perhaps gain admin access to the entire social network. Or at the very least, plant a virus that would jump onto Gospel's computer when he opened the website.

Time passed swiftly as Tristan was working. The amount of snacks on Tristan's table decreased, and the sky darkened.

It was almost midnight when Tristan got a text message from Derek.

[Things have just gotten very alarming, Mr. Gemello, regarding the general situation on the media. I can't talk at the moment, but I've sent you links to the posts explaining what's going on. No updates about other things so far, though.]

The links were on Tristan's own account, waiting on top of other unread mail. There was a noticeable amount of it, since Tristan didn't open his mailbox for most of the day.

The posts were from various people all over California, but they had one thing in common—someone reported a celebrity or another suddenly falling sick of the course of the last day. Specifically celebrities of any kind—from pop-stars to actors and bloggers, but only ones with a media presence.

'No, not just the last day. All the reports say that someone got sick specifically some time after Gospel posted his call for a holy war.'

Tristan checked the timings twice to be sure. He was sure.

'Is this a coincidence, or something greater?'

Hasty jumps to conclusions could easily be wrong—correlation wasn't causation—but Tristan's intuition, or maybe imagination, was telling him that this was related.

The more time passed since that post, the more people became ill. Some fainted in the middle of what they were doing, others just reported being sick with (supposedly) a common cold. Most people weren't as ill as Nelson, to the point of being in the hospital—but half a dozen were.

There were no deaths yet.

But some names were familiar, too familiar.