Apocalypse Reborn: Omake: Jack gets Banned (Illegal Exploits)

Apocalypse Reborn: Omake: Jack gets Banned (Illegal Exploits)

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Commissioned by J.A.

Wordcount: 2500

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“Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“Why is an endless stream of grain coming out of this bucket?”

Because the world we live in works off of janky, meme-y code.

This particular exploit is when you mess with the ‘treasury’ where all unused artifacts are and keep placing an event item into a common item with a socket. You leave it in the socket of the item, exit out of the treasury menu, and bam that event item is in the socket and in the treasury inventory at the same time.

So, I decided to take a common, ancient item ‘The Endless Stream’ which decreased supply costs by providing endless water to the Champion and their attached army, and stuffed a bundle of wheat into it. Then, I closed the door while it made all sorts of unholy noises within the room.

And, voila!

Endless, slightly-damp fresh wheat.

I decided against breaking Riegert’s understanding of the world, though.

“I was simply wondering if the bucket could do more than just produce water.” I lied through my teeth about metaphysically breaking the world itself over my knee with a bucket and some grain. Riegert seemed to calm down a little at the sight of wheat stalks and grains just flowing endlessly out of a wooden bucket. It was wrecking my sanity too, but I was fortunate in knowing that you respawn after you die. That tends to calm you down. “My initial plan was to add oil and fire.”

“NO! Don’t do that! We shouldn’t do that. In fact, we need to hunt all of these down and secure them. Right now.” Reigert stormed off after a moment with sweat breaking on his brow.

I watched him go, looked at the bucket, and sighed.

I’m going to need to go through all the exploits just in case, aren’t I?

…

Ilych looked up.

I looked up.

Riegert looked up.

Rita looked up.

“What the fuck?”

We were looking at fifteen dozen Ancient ruins stacked on top of each other. Not just the structures. The surrounding flora, fauna, and ground around each structure existed on hexagonal tiles that stayed afloat without any sign of support. Trees without roots, a thin layer of dirt, some pavement leading into the structure… and our scout is back.

“C-captain, we don’t know how, but when we go inside we can go underground! Somehow!” Yep. The Ruin Stacking technique works. It involves rapidly cancelling the ‘Ruin Found’ event, moving your hero back by undoing their move, and then going back in. It stacks Ruins until you stop, so that you can get as much XP and artifacts as you wish. The only issue was that it was freaking everyone out. Reality looked like it stacked the ruin entrance over one another again and again.  “W-what are your orders?”

Riegert looked at me, his eyes haggard from hunting down all the Ancient Buckets that existed in the world.

I’d told Ilych to walk in and out in circles out of the entrance of the ruin before making her way back to us.

This was my fault.

I couldn’t explain it… so, I didn’t.

Instead, I clapped my hands, gave everyone a big smile, and committed to the bit.

The world is crazy and filled with bugs, so I’ll just use it to win.

“Lieutenant, start creating teams to explore each one. We’ll start from the top, since these collapse after being searched, correct?”

“C-correct, my King.”

Riegert looked at me, begging for an explanation, but I kept facing forward with a smile on my face.

Yeah, there’s no explaining this, let alone all the other garbage that should be available if this one worked.

This thing was patched out in Alpha.

That means all the shit that’s existed before it got to play testers exists.

Which means that this world is utterly messed up.

…

Khanrow looked at me.

I looked back.

“…Are you some sort of god?”

“…Probably.” He took a seat next to me, while I sipped on some juice, and we both looked at the army that just turned into two armies. Everyone suddenly had twins with the same memories, beliefs, armor, equipment, and needs that they did. I did this by making the army ‘face’ each side of a hexagon while turning in place. Then, in an instant, the Army Duplication glitch worked and every single person, piece of equipment, Champion, and artifact was doubled. “Do as I say, exactly as I say it, and weird things that are advantageous happen. Or, terrible.”

I looked over to the army created by the Academy to attack us,  legions with hundreds of siege engines and dozens of Champions, frozen in place.

I had the walls destroyed completely before they always arrived and… someone is now putting a brick back and forth at the foundation 24/7.

Rebuild/Destroy Wall Glitch freezes siege armies as long as you keep doing it.

I’m stopping one of the largest armies in the world by getting several dudes to put bricks on and take them off 24/7.

And, according to how the glitch works, the besieging army was still technically suffering from attrition and increased supply, construction.

Yeah.

All those people in that army are starving while frozen in place.

On one hand, three days without food and water should be enough to kill them off, but if I recall correctly the army is fully ‘dead’ after five turns.

I really, really hope they can die in that weird time-bubble they’re in, because if starvation and thirst take twenty months to kill you while you can’t move…

It’s horrific.

I’m going back to drinking my juice and duplicating armies.

I’d rather kill people on the field of battle than do this again.

Yeah, juice isn’t going to cut it.

Even if stunts my growth, I’m getting coffee.

…

I looked through a pair of binoculars over the border and considered the massive number of giant spiders crawling over the mountains into Academy borders.

“Yep, that should be enough to kill the Academy and throttle the Demons that are going to burst out of the center of the continent.” The good, old infinite neutral army bug made it all the way to 0.6. Neutral armies used to spawn when you entered their territory and they homed in on the unit who entered. Cancel the move several times, gather the continuously spawning neutral mobs, and send them over to your enemies. That’s how Beta players said hello during multiplayer. Ah, good times. In real life, though, seeing a teaming mass of giant spiders, with some the size of small sheds rather than horses, was a lot less enjoyable. “Call our Pegasus rider back.”

The nearby trumpeter did his job, while Riegert sat next to me… hunched over on his knees, despite wearing the perfect, endgame set of gleaming, pure-white arcane power armor.

“How? Why? They just… appear from nothing! It can’t be magic. Magic has rules. Laws. Just like reality.” He was on the road to being institutionalized. Well, he would be, but all his stats and perks made him resistant to everything, including panic and morale loss. That meant going crazy wasn’t in the books for him. A pity, since it’ll probably make him happier. “Jack!”

“I’m a literal god who just has to jump through some hoops to get what he wants. Don’t worry about it.”

“Right. Right. That makes sense. Okay.”

Riegert muttered away, and just as I turned away from him, I was offered a cup of steaming coffee with milk and sugar on the side.

“Please, watch your sugar intake.” Ilych said, whilst clad in a French maid outfit. Why? How? I couldn’t tell you, and I don’t know. A few weeks ago, her armor disappeared and she suddenly started working exclusively as a very strong and capable maid. She was max level and super OP, even without her weapons and armor, so I deployed her just fine. “Also, Khanrow has sent a message. It read ‘don’t you dare come here.’”

Yep, Khanrow skipped town to be with his family.

I would’ve done the same, tbh, if not for the impending apocalypses on the horizon.

Running away from your problems is the best!

But, here I was in my giant floating castle, ready to break the game over my knee some more.

With a thought, I willed it to start flying over the nearest mountain.

How do you deal with the massive resource cost of the most expensive HQs available and all its busted support abilities?

You mash it against a mountain in combat until the game forgets it exists.

…

Well.

This is getting out of hand.

“What the hell is that?” I slurped on my smoothie, while coming up the elevator. Yeah, I was living out the meme on purpose. Living in a crazy world required a hobby. Or thirty. “Where have you been the last fifteen days?”

I answered Riegert as honestly as I could, while petting my pet dragon, which was already the size of a small horse despite being just recently born.

“Yesterday. Don’t ask. I can’t tell you any more.” Riegert raised a finger at my answer. Please, don’t make me explain. I’m getting a headache just thinking about it and I’ve already smashed the machine I’d asked the fabricator to build for me to quick-save and quick-load and overwrite things until I got what I wanted. We’re not messing with that shit, because I’m not dealing with living in a corrupted reality. “Here’s your new superweapon. Enjoy.”

I handed Riegert the legendary, semi-copyrighted creature that’ll soon be nearly as large as a mountain and capable of destroying a whole region every turn.

It’s supposed to belong to the Demons, but with a little savescumming and messing with reality… well… it was ours now.

“What’s the status on the Citadel sequencing?”

Ilych responded, while Riegert continued to gape at the creature of immense power and might that I just handed over to him.

“We have done as instructed by turning them off and on in a specific sequence simultaneously for the last Five days. As you have said, their output has skyrocketed.” One of the last glitches to be patched out before release was the function to turn a Citadel on and off very quickly. If you did it to all your Citadels at the same time, by using macros and hotkeys, you could trick the game into thinking you had more Citadels than you really did. With two Citadels, you had a decent chance of getting maximum Citadel output after a few minutes of doing the exploit. “Several ‘satellites’ up above are now under our command and we have access to their weapons and surveillance systems.”

Yep, the remains of the Ancient’s planetary defense network were what you get for fully getting all the Citadels. That’s on top of getting fabricators that can spit out powerful T3 Units just for the opportunity cost of not giving you anything else, and quadrupling your research income. Yep, it’s been less than a year since we started this whole mess and we’re overpowered.

Turn 5 win via cheats and exploits.

Hooray.

“Smash the surrounding area around the Continent. Blow up anything that gets close to the planet. Keep turning things off an on.” The best part about the exploit was that the Citadel outputs kept rising past the number of structures that actually existed. We’re going to keep doing it until I can get armies of Ancient machines instantly and anything we wanted could be made and distributed instantly. Oh, and it should reset the cooldown of the super weapons, too. “Tell me if we get more superweapons or they just reload. Thanks in advance.”

I moved towards my room to try and forget how I just broke reality over my knee.

In hindsight, the knowledge that you can fundamentally alter reality was really bad for someone’s mental well-being.

Therefore, a vacation was necessary for me.

…

An army of white automata marched through the lands below. I sat in a floating castle bristling with magical weapons capable of crippling armies. My army’s supplies came via mass-driver, turning into drones once near a delivery area… or target.

Fields of tireless, highly-armored, units with impeccable range and melee attacks.

Endless supplies and reinforcements and dozens of means to support them directly and indirectly.

An impregnable HQ that couldn’t be reached by enemies, and if they could reach me, it could shoot them down before they reached me.

How was I sure about that?

Because it’s only turn 10, and I’m running around with an endgame army, and I’ve gone fully artificial with my Champions too.

No special traits or perks.

A lower max level.

Can’t equip legendary artifacts.

Doesn’t matter when you’ve got a few thousand of them.

Enough so that you can spare a few hundred as personal, loyal bodyguards and servants.

“Well, this is over.” I commented idly, alone, while looking down from the world above. A little more than a decade spent as a scavenger… and now I’m basically undefeatable. Literally. I’ve fused three different Legendary armor sets and fifteen Legendary artifacts with immortality, regeneration, and all sorts of cool shit. The last assassination attempt on me, which needed a whole army teleporting straight onto my castle to act as a distraction, had my head lopped off my shoulders and my heart shanked. I lived and barely felt a thing. It felt like getting pinched. “Hey, Ilych, how’s the orbital bombardment going?”

Ilych didn’t answer, and for a second I’d thought she’d gone ahead and run away to live like a hermit like Riegert, but I was wrong.

She was just busy dealing with herself from an alternate timeline.

Not killing her anything.

Passing along info and spreading my methods to other worlds.

I didn’t want to think about it.

I didn’t even know how she managed to parse and put together how to transfer units between saves, and I didn’t want to ask.

“The enemies of your empire lie defeated and now the stars are your next conquest.” Yep, that was the default, non-faction-specific domination ending. Military supremacy and defeat of all other Factions by killing their Leaders and owning all the Citadels. “Rest assured that those who fear you will come to snuff you out, and your cruel tyranny has made few friends willing to help you. The world you drowned in blood may very well be your downfall.”

I heard the foreboding words and looked up at the night sky for a second, before going against my last rule, just in case someone up there wanted to snuff me out.

“Open console.”

And, the world completely froze, while in the lower left corner of my vision there was a simple, blinking white box waiting for input.

Goddamn it.