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

Lu Yuan squeezed his body through the gap. The backup optical cable was just three meters away. The status indicator light on the blue protective tube changed from green to yellow, indicating that the system had detected a main cable interruption and was switching over.

The switching time is two seconds. If the backup cable is not disconnected within two seconds, the system will continue to operate stably on the backup cable.

Lu Yuan gripped his military blade in his right hand and slashed at the protective sleeve. The Kevlar outer layer cracked under the first strike, and the second strike cut into the titanium-plated inner layer, sparks flying all over his face from the metal-on-metal contact.

The third cut caused the fiber optic cable to break!

The main cable broke 1.7 seconds later.

Berlin. A line of green text pops up on Ghost's screen: Emergency link handshake initiated.

In a single second, the ghost injected the extremely compressed tampering algorithm from the three relay nodes into the newly activated emergency gateway.

The algorithm bypasses the handshake authentication window, injects directly into the core engine of the dark pool, and then the window closes.

Ghost stared at the screen, and five seconds later, the prices in the Syndicate's global dark pool began to fluctuate.

Dozens of offshore accounts simultaneously triggered high-frequency hedging orders, with their own long positions dumping their own short positions and their own futures contracts closing out their own spot contracts.

In three minutes, the fund pool, which was originally marked with a total amount of 67 billion euros, visibly dwindled to zero.

On more than 400 node terminals around the world, red warnings popped up almost simultaneously.

The ghost let out a long breath; his back was soaked with sweat. Then he realized something.

In the lower left corner of the screen, an unexpected process was running. The opponent's countermeasures and attribution tracking didn't start after the attack ended; Friedrich had been tracking it from the very beginning.

The traffic camouflage during the attack was so perfect that the 30,000 botnets served as a stepping stone, making any attribution investigation a labyrinth.

However, there was a fatal detail: the Ghost's server array had been dormant for six years, and after restarting, the cooling system was inefficient. In order to maintain the synchronous control of 30,000 botnets, the CPU was forced to be fully loaded.

Full load means soaring power consumption. This auto repair shop is connected to the residential power grid.

The technical team in Switzerland detected a very faint frequency overflow in the DDoS attack traffic. Spectre had sacrificed signal purity in its pursuit of zero latency. The frequency overflow contained characteristic features of power grid load fluctuations.

Friedrich extracted this imprint and compared it with real-time load data from the European power grid.

From Germany, Berlin, Kreuzberg district.

In the past ten minutes, the electricity consumption of a residential building has increased four hundredfold.

Coordinates locked!

……

On his way out of the Zurich pipeline, Lu Yuan received three words from Ghost: "Exposed."

He didn't reply, but turned and ran towards the nearest traffic junction. Berlin to Zurich is 600 kilometers, and the fastest drive takes five hours.

You can't take the plane; the airport has a syndicated facial recognition network.

Lu Yuan hijacked a high-displacement motorcycle on the outskirts of Zurich and got on the A1 highway. He twisted the accelerator to the floor and sped up to 260 km/h.

Five hours. The ghost has to hold out for five hours.

Four hours and twenty minutes later, in Berlin.

As Lu Yuan rushed into the Kreuzberg district, three unmarked black container trucks were blocking the intersection, with figures moving beneath them.

He abandoned his motorcycle in an alley 200 meters away, climbed over the wall, and went around to the back of the repair shop.

They've arrived, fifty men, fully armed. Their tactical formation is a three-tiered encirclement: an inner circle for assault, a middle circle for fire suppression, and an outer circle for blockade. The syndicate has revealed its trump card.

Lu Yuan climbed through the back window into the repair shop and rushed into the basement.

Ghost sat in front of the server, his face deathly pale. His right hand was still on the keyboard, and the last data cleanup program was running on the screen.

"Can't leave?"

"I tripped over something rusty and twisted my leg," the ghost said with a wry smile. "That's why I walk so slowly."

The sound of metal clanging came from outside; the intrusion was about to begin.

Lu Yuan didn't waste any words. He scanned the basement: four old engines, three bottles of acetylene, nuts and bearings scattered all over the floor, two barrels of waste engine oil, and the W124 still parked in the repair pit.

"What else is in the server?"

"The list of old informants." Ghost's voice tightened.

"How long will the destruction take?"

"Three minutes, strong acid infusion."

"Let's do it."

Lu Yuan dragged the acetylene cylinder over, removed the pressure relief valve, and laid it horizontally at the entrance of the repair pit. The second cylinder was placed upright on the stairs, with a nut inserted into the inner tube of an old tire and tied directly above it—a makeshift fragmentation bomb.

The sound of an RPG blasting a roller shutter door came from above, the whole building trembled, and plaster fell from the ceiling.

Lu Yuan broke off a steel pipe from the corner of the wall and poured the waste engine oil onto the stairs.

Footsteps surged in from the first floor. The first team of assault soldiers rushed to the stairwell, but lost their balance the moment they stepped on the engine oil. Lu Yuan detonated the acetylene cylinder.

The explosion was amplified three times in the confined space. Nuts and bearings rained down at the speed of shrapnel, riddling three assault soldiers with bullets. Subsequent personnel were pushed back to the first floor by the shockwave.

They gained twenty seconds.

The second wave was even smarter; they didn't use the stairs. Armor-piercing rounds were fired directly from the ground, one after another, piercing through the concrete floor slabs, the warheads carrying broken steel bars as they crashed down.

"How much longer!" Lu Yuan shouted to Ghost from the ditch.

"Forty seconds!"

Lu Yuan poked his gun out of the tunnel and fired three shots towards the stairs. Someone screamed in agony up above. But the number of bullet holes in the floorboards increased, and dust and rubble poured down.

Then he heard the sound of the rocket launcher being loaded.

"Get down!"

The RPG was fired from the ground floor into the base of the load-bearing column. The explosion ripped off half a wall, and concrete blocks crashed into the basement.

The ghost lunged at the server, pouring the last half-bottle of strong acid into the hard drive array. The hissing sound of the acid slicing into the metal platters mingled with the smell of gunpowder, and the data was completely destroyed.

At the same instant, the armor-piercing round pierced through the debris of the collapsed wall and struck Ghost precisely in both knees.

Blood spurted out, and the ghost collapsed in front of the server, its screams muffled by another explosion.

Lu Yuan rolled over to his side, both knees shattered, blood gushing from his trouser legs.

He pulled two tactical bandages from his jacket and wrapped them tightly around Ghost's severed leg. Then he picked up the tattered bulletproof vest from the ground and strapped Ghost to his back.

"You're insane..." the ghost's voice trailed off.

"Shut up, save your blood."

There is a sewage manhole cover in the southeast corner of the basement. In his previous life, Joker would leave a pair of underwear in each safe house, an escape route that didn't go through the main entrance.

Lu Yuan kicked over the waste oil drum, spilling oil all over the basement. He took out the last stun grenade from his pocket, pulled the pin, and threw it into the center of the oil tank.

The oil was ignited, and blue flames rose from the oil, thick smoke billowed upstairs, and the commando team's thermal imaging was completely disrupted.

Lu Yuan pried open the sewage well cover, carried the ghost on his back, and jumped down.