The players on his screen stopped moving. All 22 of them turned their heads toward the camera. Their eyes were black voids.

He paused the game. He checked the Sider log. The script was labelled: Scoreboard_Module_v4.lua . He opened it in Notepad. The code looked normal—functions for time, score, fouls. But at the very bottom, on line 412, he saw a line of text he hadn’t written and didn’t exist in the original mod. -- MATCH_ID: 2049 // BROADCAST_HIJACK_ENABLED = TRUE He frowned. His internet was fine. But the match wasn’t Liverpool vs. Arsenal anymore. He glanced at the stadium clock in the game: 67:42.

On his monitor, the PES scoreboard updated again. A new stat popped up: – a stat that didn’t exist in PES 2019’s engine.