With Ruyi, a "cheat-code" hacker, helping them, the halfling players made much faster progress through the Machinery Hall.
Whenever a group of elite machines that didn't play fair showed up, Ruyi would unleash a wave of "virus AOE" to break their defenses and crash them. Then the other players would swarm in and deal with the idiots who hadn't installed "antivirus software" on their systems.
Ruyi even generously shared the DDoS virus program she'd written with the other halfling players. Unfortunately, ordinary Adventurer Assistants didn't have enough space to run the full version, so Ruyi had to simplify the first "combat protocol" she'd developed.
As a result, the virus attacks launched by other players through their Adventurer Assistants were far less powerful.
They could forget about instantly killing elite monsters. At best, they could inflict the "data overload" vulnerability status on them. And running the virus program also put a terrible strain on the players' own computing orbs.
They could use it at most three times in a row before their Adventurer Assistants' internal temperature climbed to dangerous levels.
The third-generation computing orbs the players used seemed far too outdated to Ruyi. She felt their performance seriously limited her ability to unleash her hacking power. She was very envious of the fourth-generation core orb in Lord Murphy's hands. If she had one of those, she could write much more advanced virus programs.
Worms, Trojans, Panda Burning Incense—whatever.
She'd even come up with some seriously cool names for the "combat protocols" she planned to write in the future, like "Combat Protocol Seven: Millennium Bug Offensive," the sort of chūnibyō slogan that sounded impressive.
Unfortunately, treasures like the core orb in Lord Murphy's hands were rare even in the halfling capital. There were no more than three of them. They represented the