We offered you a summer job, but you went and became a mercenary?

at the same time.

In the shadow of the sand dunes on the outskirts of the abandoned town.

Five ghostly figures emerged silently from the darkness.

They were fully covered in state-of-the-art individual combat uniforms, and wore four-eye night vision goggles on their faces. In the green field of vision, the outline of the entire town was clearly visible.

The man in the lead, codenamed "Scorpion," is the captain of the "Stinger" squad on the dark web.

He raised his hand and made a standard tactical gesture.

"The target is in the town center. Two people flank, one person seizes the high ground, and I'll lead one person to break in from the front. End the battle within five minutes."

The four team members nodded simultaneously, their movements perfectly synchronized, without making any unnecessary noise.

Their mission was to hunt down a newcomer codenamed "Shura," with a bounty of $500,000.

In their view, this was just another easy withdrawal.

A sniper broke away from the group and, like a gecko, stealthily made his way towards the tallest abandoned water tower in the town center.

The other two, like venomous snakes blending into the darkness, stealthily entered the town from the left and right sides.

……

One hundred kilometers away, inside a mobile command vehicle disguised as a desert exploration vehicle.

Su Qingqing stared intently at the satellite monitoring screen in front of her.

The signal, which had been interrupted for several hours due to the sandstorm, has finally been restored.

"Report! Target location relocked!" a technician shouted. "Vital signs stable, moving within the town!"

Su Qingqing had just breathed a sigh of relief, but the next second, her heart jumped into her throat.

The technician pointed to several faint red heat sources on the screen, which were approaching Lin Ye in standard tactical formations, and his voice changed.

"Wait! Unidentified armed men are approaching the target! At least five! Judging from their movement patterns and equipment... they are top-tier professional assassins!"

Su Qingqing's face turned deathly pale instantly.

She snatched the communicator: "Calling 09! Calling 09! You're surrounded! Break out immediately towards three o'clock! Repeat..."

"Sizzle... sizzle..."

All that could be heard from the communicator was a series of piercing electrical interference sounds.

……

Lin Ye knew nothing about this.

He was holding his laptop, like a devout believer holding a Bible, searching for a signal on the streets of the abandoned town.

"This won't work, there's not a single square."

He stood on a pile of collapsed bricks and shook his head.

"This won't work either, it's still an exclamation mark."

He was squatting on an abandoned oil drum, looking constipated.

Finally, he looked up and his gaze fell on the tall, rusty metal water tower in the center of town.

"The signal is better at higher altitudes, that's common sense."

Lin Ye's eyes lit up, and with his notebook tucked under his arm, he strode off toward the water tower.

He quickly climbed up the rusted iron ladder on the outside of the water tower.

The top of the water tower is a platform of about ten square meters, piled with debris and weathered sheet metal.

Lin Ye climbed onto the platform and immediately turned on his computer screen.

"Hey! Got it! Two bars! Stable two bars!"

Looking at the two white signal icons in the lower right corner of the screen, Lin Ye smiled, a smile he hadn't shown in a long time.

Satisfied, he prepared to find a clean place to sit down and quickly start another ranked game to make up for the points he had lost.

He turned and walked toward a relatively flat spot on the edge of the platform.

Just took a step.

A strange sensation came from under my feet.

It doesn't feel like stepping on hard metal; instead, it's soft yet firm, with a touch of elasticity.

Lin Ye lowered his head in confusion.

In the dim light of his laptop screen, he saw that his blue flip-flops were firmly planted on someone's head.

The man was dressed in a ghillie suit that blended in with his surroundings, his face was painted, and he was holding a half-assembled sniper rifle.

At this moment, the ace sniper of the "Stinger" squad was staring wide-eyed through his night vision goggles at the foot that was stepping on his face.

Lin Ye frowned.

He glanced at the laptop screen; the signal strength had dropped from two bars to one.

An inexplicable anger surged within me.

He looked at the guy at his feet dressed in strange grass clothes, his face full of displeasure.

"Don't move."

Lin Ye spoke, his tone full of annoyance at being interrupted from his game.

"You're blocking my WiFi signal!"

The sniper's initial surprise was instantly replaced by extreme humiliation and ruthlessness.

He suddenly pulled a sharp military combat knife from his waist and, without the slightest hesitation, stabbed it viciously into the calf that Lin Ye was stepping on his face!

When the gleaming military dagger came stabbing at him, Lin Ye didn't even look down.

The muscle memory brought about by [Advanced Fighting Techniques] has outpaced his brain's thinking.

His body moved on its own.

Wearing flip-flops, his right foot, at an extremely tricky angle, struck first and kicked upwards with a sudden burst of speed.

Click!

The sniper's knife-wielding arm was broken off backward in a completely anatomical way.

He let out a muffled groan that he had forcibly suppressed, and his whole body flew sideways as if he had been hit by a speeding truck.

"Bang!"

The sniper crashed heavily into the metal railing on the other side of the water tower, severely deforming the railing. He himself slid down the railing like a lump of mud and fell to the ground, instantly losing consciousness.

From the moment he drew his sword to the moment he lost his fighting ability, the entire process took less than a second.

Lin Ye withdrew his foot and rubbed it on his trouser leg in disgust, as if he had just stepped on something dirty.

"What's wrong with you? You're so weak."

He muttered something before turning his attention back to his beloved laptop.

The signal strength dropped back to one bar.

Just then, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that next to the unconscious sniper, a small black tablet computer screen was still lit up.

"Hey, a new military-grade tablet? You could probably sell this for a good price on a secondhand website, right?"

Lin Ye's eyes lit up. Adhering to the working principle of not leaving empty-handed and ensuring every grain is harvested, he walked over, bent down, and picked up the tablet.

The screen displayed a blood-red dark web bounty interface, with mission information labeled in English and multiple languages.

[Bounty Target: Shura (Newcomer)]

[Mission Level: A]

[Mission Description: Kill or capture the target alive in the Arkham region. This person is extremely dangerous and has been confirmed to have destroyed the "Blood Fox" and "Venom Fang" organizations.]

[Reward Amount: US$500,000]

[Published by: Shadow Network]

Lin Ye's movements suddenly stopped.

He stretched out his finger and repeatedly swiped it across the tempting string of "500,000" on the screen, then leaned closer to carefully count the zeros at the end.

One, ten, hundred, thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand...

Five hundred thousand US dollars!

Lin Ye's breathing became rapid instantly, and his eyes shone.

He was stunned for a full three seconds, and then an extremely peculiar idea popped into his unusual thought process.

He looked up at the unconscious sniper, then looked down at his own code name on the tablet, and began to mutter to himself in a serious tone.

"A 500,000 bounty on me?"

"Then... if I tie myself up, will I still get the money?"

"Is there a self-service reporting channel? Or contacting customer service would be fine too, I can accept 400,000 yuan."

He even started looking for buttons like "Contact Us" or "Feedback" on that rudimentary dark web interface.

Just as he was seriously figuring out how to claim his bounty for the kill, an encrypted instant messaging window suddenly popped up on the tablet's interface.

This is the internal channel of the "Stinger" squad.

[Scorpion (Captain)]: Hawkeye, what's going on? Why are there fighting sounds coming from your end? Please reply when you receive this!

[Viper]: Captain, Hawkeye has gone missing! Thermal imaging shows his vital signs are rapidly weakening!

[Scorpion (Captain)]: Damn it! The target has spotted him! Plan changed! Everyone abandon stealth, full speed ahead of the water tower! Charge! We must take down the target within three minutes!

Immediately afterwards, a bolded, pinned announcement from the Shadow Network headquarters appeared in the channel.

[Shadow Network Headquarters Announcement: The hunt for target "Shura" has been fully upgraded! The three elite squads, "Stinger," "Ghost," and "Reaper," have all been deployed to the Arkham battlefield. They must bring the target's head back to headquarters within 24 hours! Alive or dead!]