For a brief moment, John thought his eyes would explode until the echo of heavy breathing and the sound of his cybernetic eye rebooting in the darkness calmed his racing heart.

His vision gradually returned.

Shards of glass scattered around him.

John covered his slightly heated eye and got up, rushing into the iron door on the ground floor of the building.

Two bodies suddenly fell from above.

Screams and gunshots echoed from the floor above his head.

[Mission Objectives Updated]

[Proceed to the fourth floor for support. (Incomplete)]

John grabbed a rifle, running while changing the magazine.

The winding corridor lit up intermittently with flashes of fire, screams slowly dwindling, replaced by more intense gunfire and explosions.

He pressed against the wall, dodging the chaos.

Explosive dust whistled down through the cracks in the stairs, and bodies with shattered heads fell through the thick fog, the blood and broken limbs crashing against the steps gruesomely.

As soon as John saw the sign for the fourth floor, he stepped directly into a pool of blood.

The scene before him was horrific:

Flickering light tubes slightly shorted, metal casings scattered in the sticky pool of blood, the corridor filled with bodies either with severed necks or pierced eyebolts.

John activated the scan.

A sea of red data streams transformed from the network, filling with hacker puppets clogging the local network.

The main control center was at the far end of the corridor.

Several automatic gun turrets continuously poured bullets, physically suppressing Alonna while intensifying their hacking efforts, attempting to breach the overclocked ICE firmware.

John barely stuck his head out before being knocked down by the turrets.

He endured the searing pain to retreat into a room, finding that his shoulder and thigh were grazed by bullets.

Alonna used a corpse as a bullet shield.

Steam rose from her body, her coat already burned through, and the cobalt blue spinal bolts even glowed slightly red.

The body she was holding became riddled with holes, fragments of flesh and implanted debris flying everywhere.

The hackers were locked in a life-death struggle with her.

Whoever lost their stamina first would die.

The red sea of data almost drowned Alonna, just needing to hold on until her ICE firmware stopped overclocking to end the battle inside the scrap yard.

[Eliminate the hackers. (Incomplete)]

[Disrupt the hacking progress. (Optional)]

The mission provided a hint.

John had multiple bullet holes in him.

He peeked outside the room—the corridor was almost filled with tracer bullets, the dust and blood pooling like the surface of a lake in the rain, thick ripples splashing up.

Boom.

An explosion occurred on the second floor.

The room where John was was affected, walls collapsing, equipment and floor panels intertwined.

He looked outside through a shattered window.

Arcs of electricity flashed across the scrap yard, with Nando and the camp gunmen holding their positions amidst the storm.

The wall in front of him had already half collapsed.

The scattered equipment smoked and fizzled.

John suddenly widened his eyes, forcing himself through the intense pain to rush over and find a slot on the terminal.

He shouted Alonna's name down the corridor.

"Hoo~"

John took a deep breath, pulling out his data cable to plug it in, recklessly careening through the network like a target running in front of a hunter.

The hacker immediately noticed his presence.

The next second.

The red tide of data engulfed John, as if a truck ran over paper scraps on the road.

The hacker focused on dealing with Alonna, only thinking about squashing John as fast as possible.

John seemed like a disposable novice in the network.

In this situation, anyone actively connecting themselves to the network appeared foolish.

The moment of data connection, John lost control of his body.

The hacker easily broke through his firewall, only to find an endless abyss behind the primitive defenses...

The red tide of data hesitated for a second.

The sound of engine roaring weakened, those cables and hooks dangling from the steel structures lost power, the glowing red automatic gun barrels spun idly, and runaway autonomous vehicles crashed into each other...

Alonna broke free of her restraints.

She didn't know why the attack stopped, but as soon as the hacker revealed an opening, her body instinctively launched forward, darting through the hail of bullets.

The deepest part of the corridor was the mainframe room.

Signals flickered on the black racks, and besides the red surveillance lights, the room had no other source of illumination.

Alonna pried open the metal sliding door with her bare hands.

She held her gun and charged in, sprinting through electric currents.

The depths of the room held a pool filled with ice, the hacker's head laid against the edge of the tiles.

Bang!

Alonna instinctively fired.

Blood and tissue exploded around the pool's edge, the dim lighting deepening the color of the water.

Alonna could sense the chaos inside and outside the building dissipating, the sounds of gunfire and explosions gradually subsiding.

She moved forward with her gun to inspect.

Only the head was exposed in the pool, with a mechanical spine and organs adhered to the wall floating below the ice.

Metal tubes extended densely into the depths of the computer room.

Alonna lifted her head and looked around.

Rows of red warning lights were extinguishing, like a beast quickly retreating back into the shadows.

The world was terrifyingly silent.

John tried to remain conscious, yet in a daze, he fell into the abyss, his heavy body slumping slowly against the terminal.

He still remembered connecting to the data, actively acting as bait to distract the hacker, gambling to give Alonna a brief moment of relief.

The good news was the ruse worked.

The bad news was the effect was too intense.

The Exile hacker passed through John's ICE, also bypassed the Internet Surveillance's blockade program, colliding with Black Light in his mind.

The opponent was burnt to ashes in the state of physical connection.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.