The hours that followed were a dizzying mix of terror, exhaustion, and brutal learning. Joon's underground lair, which the regulator ironically called "the Machine Room," became their entire universe. The air was stagnant, loaded with the smell of cold metal and superheated dust. The lighting came from construction lamps plugged into a pirate electrical grid that Joon had diverted, casting angular shadows that danced to the rhythm of the old servers he had turned on again.
There was no room for decomposition. As soon as Kim-Do caught his breath, Joon took action.
"Quite trembled," he said, his voice regaining its impersonal regulator tone, but with a new emergency spike. "The system will attempt to locate the source of the disturbance. We don't have the luxury of time. You have to learn. Quickly."
The first lesson was the most painful. Joon forced him to focus on the "breach," that flaw in the real Kim-Do's data that he had unwittingly expanded.
"Close your eyes. Don't resist memories. Navigated through it," Joon ordered, observing Kim-Do's vital signs on a tinkered screen. Combat routines, tactical knowledge. Don't see them; let them come to you."
Kim-Do tried. It was a torture. It was like voluntarily throwing yourself into a flooded torrent. The real Kim-Do's memories struck him violently and chaoticly: the sensation of a cracking bone under his fist, the bitterness of a betrayal, the cold strategy to eliminate a rival. But between these flashes, he began to perceive something else. Snippets of pure data, not tinged with emotion. Movement patterns, calculations of force and distance, analysis of opponents. The system had recorded each Kim-Do fight not as a lived experience, but as a series of actionable data.
VZZT.
A new system window appeared, unstable, as if it was generated locally and not by the main network.
"'
[Limited access to the ARCHIVES OF THE AUTHORIZED HOST.]
[DATA EXTRACTION: "COMBAT - NON-CONVENTIONAL METHODS."]
[SYNCHRONICITY: +3% (Functional Synchronization) ]
"'
It wasn't a quest. It was a report. Joon had managed to create an isolated bubble where the system could only record, without being able to give orders.
"Well," commented Joon. "Now apply."
He stood up and took a fighting position. "Attack me."
Kim-Do, still stunned by the flow of data, stood up awkwardly. He tried to reproduce a sequence he had seen - a right hook followed by a low-kick. It was slow, predictable.
Joon dodged him with annoying ease and gave him a dry pat on the side of his head. You analyze instead of acting. Your body knows these movements. Trust him."
They started again. Again and again. The hours passed. Kim-Do failed, fell, got up. The pain was real, but Joon never struck to hurt, only to correct. Gradually, something changed. Kim-Do stopped thinking about movements. He felt them. When Joon feigned an attack, his arm rose to almost talk about himself, guided by a muscular memory that was not his own, but that he was learning to make his own.
He wasn't becoming the real Kim-Do. He was integrating his skills like you integrate software. He was hacking into the host's own combat system.
Between the grueling training sessions, Joon forced him to connect to the servers. He taught her the basics of the system's architecture - its nodes, its data streams, its security protocols.
"The system is not a single entity," Joon explained, scrolling through complex diagrams on a screen. It has weak points. Shadow areas. Like this room. It relies on relays, sensors scattered everywhere. The guards we encountered were physical intervention units, but most of his actions go through more subtle channels: influence, data manipulation, suggestion."
Kim-Do listened, drinking every word. It was a race against time. He was learning to fight like a warrior and think like a hacker, all within hours.
"Why are you doing this?" asked Kim-Do one night, as they shared a tasteless food ration that Joon had pulled out of a hidden stockpile. "Why risk your life for me?" You're a regulator. You could hand me over and find your place."
Joon stopped chewing. His eyes were lost in the bluish glow of a server.
"I was the first," he finally said, his voice so low that Kim-Do had to listen. The first "success." The first regulator. I've been watching dozens of replacements. I've seen some of them adapt so perfectly that they've forgotten who they were. I've seen others go mad and be "cleaned." For years, I obeyed. I collected data. I kept order."
He looked up at Kim-Do.
"Then you came. You failed where the others had succeeded. You failed to be Kim-Do. And in your failure, you began to succeed in being you. You asked questions. You refused the markets. You defied the system without even knowing it. You reminded me that I, too, had been something other than a tool."
There was a glow in his eyes that Kim-Do had never seen before. Not clinical curiosity. Hope. A fragile and dangerous hope.
"You're not my savior, Kim-Do. You are my proof. Evidence that the system can be challenged. That we are not condemned to play the roles we have been assigned."
That night, as Kim-Do was trying to sleep on a makeshift bed made of old cables and bags, a new alert woke him up with a start. It wasn't a quest, but a kind of passive sonar that Joon had set up.
"'
[BALAYING DETECTED SYSTEM.] Perimeter: 500 meters.
[ORIGIN: MOBILE DETECTION UNITY.]
[ESTIMATION: SEARCH FOR ANOMAL NEURAL SIGNATURES.]
"'
They were hunted down.
Joon was already standing, his eyes fixed on the screens. They rake wide. They don't know where we are, but they know we're in the business."
"What do we do?" asked Kim-Do, his heart beating.
"We are accelerating the program," Joon replied, his face hardened by determination. "The learning phase is over. Now we're moving on to real-world testing."
He turned to Kim-Do, his eyes shining with an almost fanatical glow.
"You've learned to tap into Kim-Do's data. Now you're going to learn to tap into mine. And then you'll learn to speak to the system in its own language. Not to obey him. To command him."
Kim-Do felt a shiver run down his back. It was no longer survival. It was rebellion. And the most important lesson he had learned, at the bottom of that hole, was that to survive a system designed to control him, he had to become more than just an impostor.
He had to become a god in the machine.