Alpha’s Glitch: The Dragon Architect’s Revenge

Chapter 13: Distributed Denial of Service

*** Xander's POV ***

The eastern gate of the Obsidian Citadel was a masterpiece of military fortification. Heavy, reinforced titanium-steel doors, thirty feet high, etched with thousands of overlapping defensive shield runes.

To any normal army, it was an impassable wall.

To me, it was just a monolithic server begging to be crashed.

I stood at the edge of the tree line, the dawn light bleeding a cold, pale gray across the snow. Inside my chest, the Mate bond was a steady, rhythmic thrum—a flawless, closed-circuit loop. Ping. Ping. Ping. Her heartbeat was registering perfectly in my mind, a quiet, metallic pulse that kept the feral beast in my head completely locked in formation.

“Go,” her voice echoed through the encrypted link, cold and precise. “Overload their bandwidth.”

I didn't answer. I didn't need to.

I dropped into a sprint, my human form violently fracturing as I shifted mid-stride into my towering, nine-foot war form. My white fur bristled against the freezing wind, and my Alpha aura exploded outward, transforming from a defensive blanket into a weaponized kinetic shockwave.

"INTRUDER! ALPHA TIER SIGNATURE DETECTED!" the alarms atop the Citadel walls screamed, their crimson warning runes instantly lighting up the sky. "ALL REINFORCEMENTS TO SECTOR ONE!"

"Let's see how many requests your system can handle," I growled, my voice a demonic roar that shook the snow from the pines.

I slammed into the titanium-steel doors at sixty miles an hour.

The kinetic impact was catastrophic. The first three layers of defensive shield runes violently detonated under my raw mass, throwing a blinding shockwave of blue sparks into the air. The heavy steel groaned, buckling inward under my claws.

Dozens of Vanguard elites poured onto the battlements, firing heavy, anti-magic ballistas and throwing localized lightning spells at me. The projectiles rained down like a digital storm, tearing into my shoulders, but the pain only fed my core.

The harder they hit me, the more kinetic energy my blood absorbed. I became a living accumulator, siphoning their defense metrics and channeling it back into my claws.

I grabbed a Vanguard wolf by the throat, slamming him into the warding stones of the perimeter wall until the masonry shattered. The Citadel’s central processing network was panicking. I could feel the magical ley lines beneath my paws shifting, frantically rerouting 80%... 90%... of the fortress’s active power reserves to the eastern gate to stop my advance.

The front door was completely flooded. The firewall was burning.

Ping. Ping. Ping. Deep beneath the chaos, her heartbeat remained steady. She was in the system.

*** Sereia's POV ***

The contrast was absolute.

While the sky above the Citadel was screaming with the red static of Xander’s frontal assault, the subterranean maintenance tunnels beneath the fortress were deathly silent, smelling of ancient stone, damp rot, and rusted pipes.

System environment: Network traffic diverted to Sector One. Internal defenses: 12% operational capacity.

My calculation had been correct. Xander’s DDOS attack had completely starved the rest of the fortress of its magical bandwidth. The security wards in the lower corridors were flickering lazily, their defensive patterns lagging with a massive, multi-second latency.

I slipped through the shadows like a compressed script running in the background.

My body was screaming. The Alpha blood I had consumed earlier was hitting its expiration date, the temporary "overclocking" fading away to leave behind a crushing, physical exhaustion. Every breath burned my throat, and a dull, throbbing ache at the base of my skull warned me that my nervous system was on the verge of a critical thermal shutdown.

But I forced my legs forward, tracking the magnetic pull of the cracked iron collar at my neck.

I turned a sharp corner and stopped.

At the end of the flooded stone corridor stood the threshold of the Genesis Forge. It wasn't a standard wooden door; it was a massive, circular vault made of unrefined obsidian, seamlessly integrated into the bedrock of the mountain.

There were no physical keyholes. Instead, a floating, ethereal interface of swirling green magic pulsed in front of the obsidian wheel—a Tier-9 Biometric Firewall.

I stepped up to the terminal, my golden eyes flashing as I deconstructed the encryption algorithm.

Access Parameter: High Council Elder DNA or unique soul-signature required.

"Arrogant bastards," I whispered, a cold, b****y rasp tearing from my throat. They thought a biometric lock was foolproof because they assumed a hacker would try to forge a key.

I didn't need a key. I just needed to look at the underlying hardware.

I pressed both hands flat against the obsidian vault door, ignoring the sharp, freezing sting of the defensive wards trying to repel my skin. I tapped into my 12% draconic capacity, forcing my magic through the cracked runes of my collar.

I didn't input a false signature. Instead, I forced a Buffer Overflow.

I flooded the lock's memory banks with a massive, continuous stream of corrupted, ancient draconic data packets. I jammed the intake valve until the system couldn't process the queue.

The green holographic interface began to glitch violently, the lines of magic warping and fracturing into static.

Warning. Memory allocation exceeded. System error: 0x00F4. Initiating emergency reboot.

A smirk touched my lips. When a security system reboots, there is a 0.3-second vulnerability window where the physical deadbolts temporarily lose power before the firewall comes back online.

I counted the milliseconds in my head.

3... 2... 1... Now.

A heavy, mechanical THUD echoed through the subterranean chamber as the massive obsidian deadbolts slid back. The circular vault door slowly ground open, revealing a yawning chasm of pure, ancient heat and crimson light.

The air that rushed out didn't smell like Lycan magic. It smelled like home. It smelled like old fire, molten gold, and the raw source code of my ancestors.

But before I could take a step inside, the white-light tether of the Mate bond inside my chest violently convulsed.

Ping... Ping...

The steady pulse of Xander's heartbeat suddenly stuttered. Then, it dropped into an agonizing, flatlined silence.

The closed-circuit link went dead.

My architect's brain instantly froze as a cold, paralyzing dread pierced through my logic firewall.

The DDOS attack had just been shut down. Xander was offline.