He realized then that the "cheat" wasn't for the game; it was a cheat on his own life. He spent the next six hours in a frantic, high-stakes chess match against the loader, using every bit of knowledge he had to isolate the process and overwrite the malicious sectors of his drive.
Elias right-clicked and selected "Extract Here." As the files spilled out, he felt a surge of adrenaline. There was the executable, a simple icon of a lightning bolt, and a "readme" file that contained only one line: “Once you go in, the game changes.”
When the sun finally rose, Elias sat in front of a blank screen. His OS was wiped, his hardware was partially fried, and his reputation in the forums was likely gone. He looked at the empty space on his desk where the lightning bolt icon used to be. The game had indeed changed, but not in the way he had hoped.