Chapter 40:

Ace finished playing the last few keys, he had been practising on the piano as he had recently been getting requests of varying difficulty and did not just want to take the easy ones. There was a specific song he wished to post on his U-Tube channel, but also required him to sing so he had also been preparing for that. The name of the song was The Drug in Me is Reimagined, by Falling in Reverse. It had been recommended by one of his viewers, and when he had first heard it, he had instantly wanted to play it. It was pretty hard, but after a few days of combined piano and singing practise, he had been able to play it to a good standard.

He still had to polish a few bits, but when he did, he would post it, and it would hopefully gather some attention. It was not a very well known song, but Ace found it to be musically brilliant. The song had a more rock/metal segment at the end, but Ace was unable to do that, as his voice was not yet strong enough, so he would omit it and maybe release an extended version later on in time.

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He had also been in contact with a few streamers, and they wished to set up a 5v5 streamer matchup. He had been invited to be part of a team, so Ace was super excited, they had begun to practise together, and Ace could happily say that he was the best in the team. This did not mean that the others were bad - far from it, in fact, they had a gargantuan amount of hours on the game and had been playing FPS games for a long time, so they were all really good. However, none of them could match up to Ace in terms of skill, and only a few were his equal when it came to game sense.

His show of high skill also had another positive consequence, each streamer's respective viewers had seen his skill, and while he had not directly poached too many viewers, when either of them went offline, the increase Ace saw in viewers was quite substantial. In fact, he had beaten a new record, he had surpassed 2 thousand viewers at once, this was because one of his teammates was not streaming for a day, which meant that a large part of his viewers went to watch Ace play, which greatly boosted his renown.

He was about to go to bed now, it was nearly midnight and they had just finished the last game - at least for Ace, so he took the last song requests, and went offline. Before sleeping, he thought about his relationship with his teammates, the tournament was coming up, which meant that he would be unable to stream for a whole day at least, it was happening during a Saturday, team selection starting at 8 am and games going on for the whole day at least. As it was an amateur tournament, multiple games were happening at the same time, which meant that the final teams would be quickly decided. Then, if your team passed, you would play the next day, which would be the last day of the tournament, and when the winners would be decided.

His unavailability meant that he would not be able to practise with them for at least a whole day. It was not a big problem since he was the best, but considering that he had been invited, it was in a pretty bad fashion. He also thought about his relationship with his fellow streamers, they had no idea how old he was, he had never shown his face, and his voice had deepened not too long ago, so he sounded older than he really was. He did only stream at hours that were clearly after-school, so they most likely expected him to be a university student, at most, in his last year of high school. This was because no one in their right mind would think that parents would allow a young kid to play video games every day for at least 6 hours: it was insane.

Ace laughed out loud, wondering what their reactions would be when they found out he was barely 14 years old. He wondered if they would want to meet at some point, and what an awkward meeting that would be… Maybe he would just have to reject the offer to meet up in order to avoid any strange interactions.

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Ace woke up halfway through the night, covered in sweat and breathing raggedly. He had just had one of the worst nightmares so far, it had been pseudo-lucid, near the end, he had realised he was in a nightmare, but he was unable to move or do anything. He had found himself in an illusion of pain, and had not been lucid enough to realise that he should force himself to wake up. It had seemed to last forever, and as Ace felt the tears sliding over his cheeks, he realized he had been shocked a lot more than he realised.

Luckily, it seemed that the nightmares had diminished, he barely got them any more, the combination of physical exercise and mental exertion form music and video games usually tired him out enough that he would fall into a deep sleep immediately, his brain too tired to even attempt to trick itself with experiences of pain and misery.

Ace rose out of bed, he would be unable to sleep now, and since tomorrow…' Well, technically today', he thought, was not a school day, he would be able to rest during the day if he felt like it. He had one more week until his tournament, and the match between streamers would happen the weekend after that, so for now, he had a pretty packed schedule - which was good, it allowed him to focus more on what he wanted to achieve. He checked his laptop, it was 4 am, and he had just received a message from Bong, he knew that the whole group of hackers would be awake at this hour, they were probably living off energy drinks, and would probably cash out in one hour or so, and wake up in the middle of the day. They had most likely been rinsing and repeating this process for more than half their lives - not that Ace had any idea on how old they were, he did not think they even knew such things about each other.

Bong had just informed him that they had found a few things about the 'target', when Ace was about to reply, his laptop screen suddenly went black. Ace was about to quickly input the kill-trigger pin to kill the switch on the laptop, when suddenly, the light on the screen went on again, and he found himself in a chatroom, where he could see he was surrounded by his favourite cybercriminals.

[Sorry for that lad, but what we found should probably not be discussed in our usual channels, as safe as we may think they are]

He saw the message from Bong, and typed back a reply, saying he was fine, but cursing them from the scare.

[Well don't worry, now that you have lived through it once, you better get used to it] Arachnid was the sender of the message, most likely a woman, if the name was of any significance, but it could all be a ploy to fool people, with these guys, one simply did not know.

[We will send you a physical file with all we have found, memorise it, and then burn it, once you have received the file, wait for a few more days, we will contact you with any information we get, but for now, we have to go off the grid. Tell Samantha will you?], and the screen of his laptop went black, and after a few seconds, back to normal, the sender was Stone, another member, and what he had just said worried Ace.

These guys hacked into private security agencies on a daily basis, if what they had found and where they had found it warranted for them to go off the grid, it was very big. He informed his grandmother of the group's unavailability, and she just sent a confirmation, he would have to speak with her. He did not believe she did not know about this, but Ace was curious as to why she had not told him, one thing was school rankings, but another was the fact that such a 'thing' was happening so near him.

As of now, he had no idea what that 'thing' was, but he knew he would find out as soon as the physical file made its way to him.