The hacker watched with fascination and glee as the tiny girl stumbled around what was empty VR-space to them, but a realm of pain and fear to her.  It hadn't even been that difficult to trap her--once she was separated from Endian, there was little she could do to resist a routine link-lock, and by that point sculpting some diversions was little difficulty at all.

They cracked their knuckles and rolled their shoulders, waiting for a sign that Endian had taken the bait as Claire floundered around before their eyes.  Sure, everyone had told them about how ferocious and unpredictable this Endian character was...but that was going to make it all the more impressive once he was taken down.  The street cred they were going to get from this was unreal, and their mind swam with possibilities of what people would be willing to do for the hacker who defeated that "Big E in the Sea".

But then a distortion, in the corner of their virtual vision.  They wheeled around, trying to spot its source, but it was nowhere to be seen.  After a moment to ensure that nothing was actually there, they turned back to focus on Claire once again, only to...find her missing?  What?!  They had spent months coding up that program, how could it have been cracked in just a few seconds...?

Something like a face, far off in the distance.  Staring, grinning.  Any attempt to make out its details was lost, and even as the hacker floated forwards, it never seemed to get any closer.  There was, however, a feeling of claustrophobic pressure on all sides, a strange tactile sensation nothing in VR had given them.  Then it intensified, a split second of crushing pain around their torso that left their real body gasping desperately for breath.

Pulling up their interface, they found only glitched boxes, broken into pieces and full of nonsensical text.  Then, every single one of the menus displayed a jagged, horrifically gleeful face for one fraction of a second, then closed out in the next.  Now the surroundings of VR were starting to jitter and distort, and the hacker began to truly panic.  Their firewalls hadn't given a single warning, everything should be operating normally, and yet everything was going wrong with no sign of stopping.

Fragments of virtual reality began clipping in and out of blackness.  A faint buzzing, like static but somehow even more discordant and chaotic, began to drill its way into their head.  They tried floating straight ahead, but there were no other icons to be found.  This was wrong.  No one had told them about any of this.

With a harsh sound almost like cyberspace itself was screaming, everything transitioned to black.  Nothing but an empty void, suffocating in its silence.  That is, until a voice cut across it, overlaid with that same buzzing sound from before.  "Congratulations!  Normally this would be where I toy with you for a good few hours, maybe make some jokes about how your plan is on the same level as a video game villain from half a century ago..."

The hacker tried pulling up their cybercombat programs, their user interface, even their goddamn dumb cat memes, anything to prove to themselves that this was still according to plan, that they still had agency.  But it was no use, and the voice continued its speech undisturbed.  "But no.  You, buddy, have the honor of having well and truly pissed me off.  Because you had the fucking nerve to not only think I'd come running to you like a stray cat to roadkill, but you thought, you honestly fucking thought you could imitate me!"

The voice ramped up to a shout that caused the darkness to split open like the gates of hell, creating an absolutely gigantic, rippling mass of bright blue pixels with an all-too-recognizable face staring down.  Two equally giant hands materialized at its sides, and Endian spoke with fury that shook the hacker's very bones.  "I'm gonna need to have one really fucking difficult conversation once I log back out, and it's all because you thought you could match up with Endian!  You need to learn your goddamn PLACE!"

One of the two hands snatched the hacker's persona right out of the simulated air, holding them closer so their field of view was totally filled with the raw menace and fury behind Endian's pixelated eyes.  His grip threatened to crumple their body like paper, the sensation feeling more real than any simsense they had ever experienced.  "Because you are nothing more than a little fucking bug!  Crawling all over me like that somehow puts you above me!"  The other hand floated above their head, and two fingers clamped around each side as he continued.  "Yet every single time, every single fucking time, you people seem to forget how easily I can fucking crush you."  The pressure tightened like a vice around their brain, sending wave after wave of crippling pain through their system.  "Because this is my world, motherfucker!  And if you aren't gonna live in it, you're gonna fucking die in it!"

Their nerves stung as though struck by lightning, all of their senses were filled with unbelievable agony that kept growing more and more intense, hellish torture that didn't seem like it was going to stop...but then, in an instant, everything went blank, and they stopped feeling anything at all.

Opening his now-emptied hands, Endian's face grew a more pensive look as his surroundings returned to normal.  It was going to be a difficult conversation, alright, but surely it wouldn't be hard to convince her that whatever she saw wasn't her.  She trusted him through and through...and that was actually the hardest part to think about.