Ashes to Empress

Sunday wasn't done with me.

I'd started the morning thinking I'd just review the university scan, confirm a few vulnerabilities, and maybe feel smug for twenty minutes. But by mid-afternoon, I wasn't just inside their network—I was crawling around in the shadowed back alleys of their hierarchy. And I had a target: Professor Armin Schmitt.

The evidence from the emails was damning enough. But I wasn't going to stop there. I had SecureFix, and if there was filth hiding under his desk, in his files, or behind any login session on any of his machines, I was going to find it.

I locked in on every device on the university network assigned to Schmitt—his faculty desktop, a personal laptop used on-campus, a mobile endpoint registered through the university's secure access point, and even a forgotten Raspberry Pi that pinged their IoT subnet once every few hours. That one made me smirk. Who still uses those?

Scan initiated.

Within twenty minutes, SecureFix spat out another torrent of red flags. Most of his gear was poorly hardened. No 2FA. Reused credentials. Multiple outdated libraries. Lazy admin hygiene from someone who clearly believed he was above consequences.

I dug in. Email archives. Personal folders. Project repositories. Then I followed side trails: mirrored cloud accounts, synced folders that hadn't been fully wiped, backups of backups. People always forget the backups.

It didn't take long.

First came the bribes.

Encrypted ZIPs full of payment confirmations and transfer logs. Students paying for grades—disguised as "donations" to obscure faculty associations, or wired through crypto wallets with hilariously transparent aliases like grademepls_2078, gpasavior, or even just exchange_4pass.

I found grading spreadsheets side by side with transaction records. Some of these students hadn't even attended a third of the lectures. A few hadn't passed any of the minimum technical assessments. One didn't even submit a final project and still got a 1.0 with "Outstanding contribution" in the notes column.

He wasn't even subtle about it.

It made me sick. Not just because it was unethical—it was lazy. Armin didn't just sell grades. He mass-produced corruption like it was part of his syllabus.

Then came the forged research.

Drafts of academic papers where test results had clearly been copied from unrelated experiments. Rewritten conclusions that ignored the data. One particularly bad one showed results from a prototype CPU architecture benchmark that mirrored Intel's i9 from 2019—line for line, just with different font and axis labels.

Another paper on quantum thermal efficiency was just a rehash of a classified European grant-funded project I recognized from a whitepaper I'd studied during my first year. Except Schmitt had changed the variable names and claimed the data as his own.

Worse: some of these falsified findings had already been cited. Integrated into subsequent papers. Even mentioned by keynote speakers at conferences. That meant...

Consequences.

If these findings unraveled—and they would, once exposed—the academic credibility of half a dozen departments would collapse. Ongoing funding from scientific boards and government sources could be revoked. Research partners would pull out. Thesis defenses that relied on his fraudulent citations might be invalidated retroactively. Students could lose degrees. Postdocs could lose their funding. Entire labs could be dissolved.

And legal risks? Those were real too. Government grants misused under false pretenses could trigger audits, clawbacks, and even criminal charges.

The fallout wouldn't just hit him.

It would hit everyone who trusted him. Everyone who built on his lies.

And yet—no one had ever questioned him.

I kept digging, trying to understand why. It couldn't just be fear or politics.

Then I found the threads.

Emails between Armin and his wife: Dr. Elena Schmitt. The name alone was heavy. A highly respected bioinformatics researcher. Member of several European research ethics boards. She was on three university committees and had co-authored a dozen "vision documents" for interdisciplinary science policy.

Her shadow stretched wide. And through it, Armin moved freely.

I leaned back, horrified and furious. He was untouchable because of her. No one wanted to be the one to call out a man who shared a house—and a surname—with one of the most decorated researchers in Europe.

It was a shield. And a sword.

But SecureFix didn't care about reputations.

I gathered everything. Emails, file hashes, cross-referenced timestamps. I anonymized the entire dataset, packaged it, and generated tamper-proof logs. Then I used SecureFix's new payload-splitting module to generate a cascade of isolated reports—no central source, no fingerprints.

I routed through a compromised external contractor account that still had dormant access tokens—leftovers from a failed web redesign project years ago. From there, I leveraged a decommissioned SMTP server still hanging on the edge of the DMZ. Nobody ever patches the legacy stuff.

I addressed the reports to:

The university's rector and vice-rector.

The student union.

The ethics and research integrity commission.

A dozen student mailing lists.

Several academic watchdog mailing boards.

And most importantly, the national scientific ethics oversight body.

Each recipient got a curated copy with only the relevant sections. No two identical. Every log chain unique. No trail back to me. Nothing I couldn't disavow.

And in each, I embedded the most damning connection:

The coordination between Armin and Gregor Reiber from the Disciplinary Committee. The "favors." The nudges. The delay tactics. The emails that casually referenced bending policy "just this once." The implication that Gregor owed Armin—and was repaying the debt by sabotaging me.

Let them deal with it.

Let them try to explain it away.

Let them burn.

It was almost 8 p.m. when I came up for air.

I blinked. Realized I hadn't eaten all day. My tea had gone cold next to me. My brain felt like it was covered in soot. My hands were shaking—not from fear, but from sheer overstimulation.

I stood, paced, then went to the window. The city lights sparkled through the mist like a grid of far-off fireflies. Somewhere down there, people were making dinner, playing music, living normal lives.

I checked NovaFrame.

210,024 downloads.

I let out a gasp—some mix of relief and awe.

Another spike. Probably thanks to some secondary visibility from ByteSizedTech's stream. Or maybe word-of-mouth. Or maybe the app had simply hit critical mass.

I checked my KP counter.

+8 KP.

(AN: if you wonder 150>210 is not 8KP the extra 2 KP are from repeated Usage. and yes i am more or less making this numbers up for the plot <3<3<3. I try to make them realistik)

I was back at 8 now.

The plan was working. NovaFrame was feeding my system. Quiet, clean, unobtrusive KP farming. No ads. No tracking. Just tools that made people's lives better—and sent little pulses of power back to me.

I made a note: build more public tools. Apps. Widgets. Browser extensions. Little things that seemed simple but made life smoother. A background file syncer. A Wi-Fi reconnection stabilizer. A dark mode enforcer that didn't break layouts.

More apps = more users = more KP = more knowledge.

More knowledge = more leverage.

And right now? I needed all the leverage I could get.

Armin Schmitt had been playing god in his ivory tower for too long.

It was time someone turned the lights on.

And this time, they wouldn't be able to look away.