1) Your Fired

"Your fired."

"It's you're."

"What?"

"What? Wait a minute! What do you mean I am being fired?!"

The young man suddenly stood up and slammed his hands onto his boss's desk with anger evident on his face.

The boss looked a bit annoyed but kept his professional corporate face and said, "I'm sorry, lad, but you can't make the cut anymore. We need people with decent equipment-making skills when the big leagues begin, but you picked an intelligence class. Such a horrible blacksmith build is not something we can keep around."

The young man's face looked at his boss, while dazed, and said, "But, what am I supposed to do about my rent? I barely make enough money off of being your guild's crafter to feed myself. How am I supposed to survive at all?"

The man sighed and said, "Look, I am just a spokesman, I don't control stuff like who stays and who leaves. I have been told to fire you, so I have no other choice. Please exit this building without causing a scene. No need to complicate our relationship over something like this."

The young man let out a sigh. He could only blame himself for not being good enough. He picked up his termination notice, final paycheck, and left the office of his boss.

He couldn't afford to waste money on something like an Uber or a taxi, so he decided to go to the nearest bus stop and wait for the bus to take him home, the depressing mood not getting any better.

The young man began to walk on the sidewalk and slowly fell into his thoughts. "What the hell! This is complete horseshit! Can't control who gets fired or hired my ass! The bastard is just angry I hooked up with his niece a week ago, and now he is getting revenge. Not like I even enjoyed working there! Making dumb swords and daggers in a stupid VR game for two months is already annoying enough! Screw the whole thing, I am an engineer and a Forester programmer! I'll fking hack the bloody game and make myself ri-"

The sounds of a car screeching came from behind, as a gigantic truck suddenly appeared behind the young man. Frozen in fear of the gigantic bringer of death approaching him, he couldn't even move his legs.

"At least I won't have to pay my rent anymore."

With the truck only a few meters away, the young man resigned himself to his fate. He closed his eyes and waited for death, but the only thing he felt was something impacting him from the side.

"Look out!"

Pushing him out of the way and slamming him into the nearby apartment. He slowly stood up and looked at the fat teenager, who had pushed him out of the way of the truck and felt himself all over.

"I'm alive?" The realization hit him like a truck hitting a teenager trying to save someone's life, and he screamed out, "I'm alive!"

Then suddenly realized what had happened and quickly ran over to the front of the truck. The body of the chubby teenager with glasses lay there. Shards of glass from his broken glasses had stabbed his eyes, and blood leaked from his broken limbs.

The sound of an engine revving up came to his ears, as the truck that had run over the young man suddenly screeched and began driving away.

The young man screamed, "Oh no you don't!" With a quick hand motion, he activated his phone and took a picture of the truck's license plate and quickly dialed 911 to get emergency services involved.

"Hey buddy, hang in there! Don't you die on me! You need to live. C'mon, you're so young, you can't just save my life in exchange for your own! How about a deal? You don't die on me, and I'll help you exercise? We can go to the gym-"

[911, What's your emergency?!] "Hello, this is Sam Francis speaking from Cathie district, street number is 17. A truck hit a teenager and sped off."

The voice on the other end sounded a bit astonished and said [Is the kid alright?] "No, miss operator, he was hit by a truck! Send doctors, the cops, everything at this point! He was hit by a truck and has glass in his skull. Hurry up!"

It took emergency services 5 minutes to get there, but by then the teenager's heart had already stopped, and with the excessive bleeding, a completely broken body, and glass through his eyes, surviving this incident might not have even been worth it.

After giving the police his statement and showing the picture of the truck's license plate, which was magically obstructed by a white dove at the exact second Sam took the picture, causing the entire gang of policemen to sigh at the ridiculousness.

"Without being able to provide any more help, Sam just gave his witness testimony and was dismissed. He went home and laid down on his bed. It was already 3 am, and all he could do was stare at the ceiling with a blank expression and think, 'Life is so fragile. I could have died there. No, I should have died there. If not for that kid, I would be dead!'

He lifted his last paycheck and thought, 'Screw your Terms of Service and Conditions, Divination Studios! I'll hack the game and just restart if I have to. I'll even take that shitty quest! If I can afford to take the risk of living, why not just gamble in a dumb game? Who knows, maybe I'll actually complete it and go back to the top!'

With newly formed resolve, Sam scrolled on his phone and quickly found the VR headset he uses to play Divination Studios' 'Realms of Conquest,' a VRMMORPG that came out 3 months ago.

With all the hype for the first-ever full-dive game, the developers didn't disappoint their fans. The game uses advanced neural technology to directly immerse the mind of a player, rather than their body.

It was an insane hit, with tens of millions of copies sold worldwide in 3 months. With so much interest, E-sport teams flocked to it and so did any other gamer.

With such a massive buzz, everybody tried to play it at least once, and no bad review has been left at all.

Of course, with such a massive influx of players and attention, some negative attention flew towards the company. Hacker attacks and DDOS attempts are a daily occurrence for Divination Studios, but none have succeeded, ever.

Sam was now doing exactly that. He had plugged his VR helmet into his laptop and was trying to upload a special FG Forestry file. 'It is hilarious how this small joke can actually get me so much!'

Sam thought about the good old days when he was a freshman at university, the days he was still 16, 6 years ago. There he made friends with a person about to graduate, a senior, who invented a completely new programming language as a side project. A language completely devoted to video game creation, and companies took it for what it was worth.

The language was standard for games just a single year afterward. A fact they didn't know about it was that Sam helped write a string of code in the source code. This single snippet of code unlocked the entire source code for anyone with the special key. This key can be changed easily by the owner of the source code of any game, but his senior and him added a universal code, which would immediately grant access to any who used it.

''T1T$/0V3®/A$$3S and bingo. Damn, never would I have imagined such a dumb joke I made with a senior would actually help me screw with a multi-billion-dollar corporation's code. I wonder if Chad even remembers this little Easter egg we made? Doesn't matter either way; let's see what I can do with this!"