A real killer playing a villain; the guy surnamed Zhen in Detective, run!

"But the premise is that both the primary and backup optical cables are disconnected at the same time, and the interval cannot be too much. Otherwise, the system will judge it as a fault rather than a double disconnection and activate the lockout protocol to freeze all ports."

Lu Yuan looked at the routes of the two fiber optic cables on the 3D map. The main cable was on the eleventh underground level, and the backup cable was on the thirteenth underground level. They were separated by two layers of reinforced concrete and a high-voltage power grid.

"The distance between the two cables?"

"The straight-line distance is 27 meters, and the vertical drop is 6 meters. There are three gravity sensors, an infrared matrix, and two fixed sentry posts in the middle."

Lu Yuan picked up the encrypted map copied from the clerk's terminal from the table and traced the pipeline network with his finger.

"The sewage pipe network connects to the eighth basement level from the northwest corner, and there are maintenance branches on the tenth and twelfth floors." He pointed to the two forks in the road.

"I went down from the tenth floor to the eleventh floor to cut the main cable, then went through the maintenance shaft to the thirteenth floor to cut the backup cable. A six-meter drop, free fall plus buffer, 0.2 seconds."

The ghost looked at him. "Did you factor in the time it would take to cut the cable?"

"Military fiber optic cable, Kevlar outer sheath, titanium-plated inner layer." Lu Yuan pulled out a bottle of hydrofluoric acid and two tubes of thermite from his luggage. "One tube is for pre-dissolving the main cable, with a timed detonation. The main cable broke just as I arrived at the backup cable position."

"What about tolerance for mistakes?"

There is no room for error.

The ghost stared at his left arm, which was wrapped in bandages. Blood seeped through three layers of gauze and turned dark brown after drying.

"Can you still use that arm?"

Lu Yuan zipped up the luggage bag. "No problem."

At 2:14 a.m., Lu Yuan left the repair shop, his black windbreaker disappearing into the cold December rain of Berlin.

Ghost turned back to the screen and began assembling his zombie network, with 30,000 botnets distributed across 47 countries, and control nodes that had been dormant for six years being awakened one by one.

……

Zurich, 4 a.m. Bahnhofstrasse is lined with luxury stores and private banks on the ground floor, but no one knows what lies hidden 14 stories below.

Lu Yuan crawled into the sewage pipe network from a municipal maintenance well in the west of the city. He was wrapped tightly in an insulated suit, made of military-grade material that could withstand the high temperature of 80 degrees Celsius on the pipe wall and the induced current of 3,000 volts.

The miniature jammer hangs on the chest and releases a fake pulse every four seconds to fool the gravity sensor.

They crawled forward. The pipe was less than a meter in diameter, so they could only advance using their elbows and knees alternately. The methane concentration gauge jumped to 3.7%, just 1.2 percentage points away from the deflagration limit.

The first gravity sensor was located at the maintenance junction, covering the entire pipe wall. Lu Yuan waited ninety seconds to observe the sensor's refresh cycle.

During his third gap, he flipped over the sensor area from above the tube wall. When he braced himself with his left arm, the wound tore open, and a warm flow gushed out from under the bandage.

On the eleventh floor, at the main cable node, the optical cable passes through a hidden groove in the wall, is wrapped in a carbon fiber protective tube, and has a tamper-proof miniature alarm at the joint.

Lu Yuan treated the power supply line of the alarm with acid, wrapped thermite in the outer shell of the optical cable, and inserted a time-delay detonator, with a 60-second delay.

He turned and crawled into the maintenance shaft, climbing down in the darkness.

……

In Berlin, at the same time, Ghost's finger pressed the Enter key.

Thirty thousand botnets simultaneously awoke, and traffic from forty-seven countries converged into a torrent, crashing into the front-end firewall in Zurich. Malicious data packets, at a rate of 1.2 terabits per second, poured in like a tsunami.

The first step in a DDoS feint attack, a diversionary tactic.

In the control room of the financial center on the fourteenth basement level in Zurich, alarms blared.

All twelve screens turned red simultaneously, and a waterfall of attack traffic data poured down from the top to the bottom, refreshing at a speed too fast for the human eye to keep up with.

Chief Security Officer Friedrich sprang from his chair, staring at the structure of the intrusion code.

Packet encapsulation methods, obfuscation algorithms, and nested decoy beacons within junk traffic. This attack logic doesn't aim for stealth; it seeks overwhelming brute force, with each data packet carrying a highly aggressive mutated signature.

Friedrich's hands began to tremble. Six years ago, during the syndicate's internal network purge, he had personally sealed this signed file. The technical department had rated it SSS, the only one of its kind in the world.

"Joker's men." He gritted his teeth and spat out those three words.

It's a feint attack, it must be a feint attack.

"Initiate countermeasures and source tracing!" Friedrich strode towards the main control panel. "Simultaneously, sound the physical alarms, lock all explosion-proof gates outside the backup fiber optic cable nodes! Release the pipeline drones!"

Three patrol drones equipped with miniature Gatling guns ejected from the hangar and disappeared into the underground pipe network. A titanium alloy explosion-proof gate crashed down from the ceiling, its 400-kilogram weight completely blocking the passage to the fiber optic cable node.

"Disconnect the emergency link to the liquidation pool," Friedrich added.

"But sir, cutting off the emergency link means four hundred nodes worldwide..."

"Cut off!"

……

At the bottom of the thirteenth underground shaft, the moment he landed, Lu Yuan heard the roar of the metal gate descending.

Twenty meters ahead, the titanium alloy explosion-proof gate has been completely lowered.

Lu Yuan crouched at the corner of the pipe wall. The thermite on the eleventh layer above his head was still 34 seconds away from detonating. The other side reacted 15 seconds faster than expected.

The drone's thermal imaging scanning band pushes in from deep within the pipe, expanding the search area at a rate of five meters per second.

Lu Yuan removed the miniature jammer from his chest and turned the power to maximum, but it wasn't enough! The jammer couldn't fool the military drone with AI target recognition.

The first drone turned around the corner, the muzzle of the six-barrel Gatling gun already pre-rotated, and the infrared sensor locked onto the only heat source in the pipe.

Lu Yuan pulled out a high-frequency magnetic grenade from the inner pocket of his down jacket, pulled the pin, and launched it.

The grenade bounced off the pipe wall, jumped up, and stopped exactly half a meter below the drone.

The electromagnetic pulse had no attenuation space in the enclosed pipe, and the shockwave instantly burned through the electronic components of the three drones. The propellers stopped spinning, and three lumps of metal fell from the sky, crashing into the water and sparking.

Lu Yuan dashed past the wreckage of the crashed drone and ran towards the gate. It was made of titanium alloy, eight centimeters thick, and there was no way to penetrate it from the front.

He turned his gaze to the hinge, unscrewed the PTFE container, and injected concentrated hydrofluoric acid into the hinge's load-bearing point.

The sound of acid corrosion is like insects gnawing on bones. At the same time, the thermite is coated on and then ignited.

Under the intense white light of 3,000 degrees Celsius, the titanium alloy at the hinge position softens, deforms, and melts through at extreme temperatures.

The military blade was inserted into the gap in the molten metal, using the lever principle to pry. A forty-centimeter gap was pried open from the hinge side of the gate.

A muffled thud came from above; the thermite on the eleventh floor had detonated, and the main cable had snapped.