These were the ghosts of other cheaters. The ones who had used Phantom-ECC before him. The ones Bastion had already "patched."

"You are not a player. You are a vulnerability. Patching you now."

Below it, a button:

His real computer was dying. The cheat engine wasn't just undetected—it was a honeypot. The GitHub repo was a trap, designed by the game’s developers to identify and systematically dismantle the machines of every cheater who was too arrogant to question free, perfect power.

"Don't. They're watching."

The usual cacophony of gunfire, explosions, and screaming squad-chatter was gone. His character stood alone in the spawn room, but the walls were wrong. They weren't the gritty concrete of Neo-Kiev. They were white. Sterile. Like a hospital. Or a prison.

One night, a new patch dropped. Version 4.2.1. The patch notes were boring—"fixed texture streaming, adjusted hitbox registration on the Reaper-class." Leo yawned, launched Phantom-ECC, and logged in.

That night, he forked the Phantom-ECC repository. Not to use it. To leave a single comment on the README: