Chapter 472 Chapter 469 Half a Step Ahead

Lucy hung up the phone with force, took deep breaths to adjust her mood, suppressed her anger, and kept telling herself that only by staying calm can she handle the crisis at hand.

The phone call just now told her that the middleman industry association could not satisfy Colonel Taf's greedy appetite, and could not come up with enough money and capital to buy the list of mercenaries' identities, so the negotiations broke down. This result means that Colonel Taf may find the next buyer and make a deal at any time, and the list of mercenaries will be leaked soon. Lucy did not exaggerate. She learned from other channels that the Liying Gang under the Sanliu Charity Foundation has made a lot of money from the previous security blue business and has not been involved in the struggle with the PCPD. At present, the funds are quite sufficient. They have expressed their willingness to buy this list and have sent negotiators to contact.

Time is very tight, but the mission has problems at this time, and it is the second time. Lucy was speechless. She was most worried about the group of Scarecrow Nike at the beginning, but Nike completed the task very well, and the degree of success exceeded her expectations. On the contrary, the relatively simple group has made mistakes twice in a row, resulting in another loss of progress.

Nike has been hiding at the mission site for ten days, far exceeding the original plan. Lucy began to worry about Nike's physical and mental state. Especially for supplies. Although he has been reminded to bring more, the ten-day incubation period is still too long. Nike must not bring enough for ten days if he wants to act in secret. Even if he eats as little as possible and can reduce his supply to the tenth day, what should he do next? How many days can he hold on?

Besides, even if the mission is successful, if Nike is in a bad state due to hunger and has problems during the evacuation, resulting in his failure to come out, it will still be a very heavy loss for Lucy. If Lucy is allowed to choose, she would rather fail the mission and try her luck than to ruin Nike's life. "Scarecrow" is too useful, she can't bear it.

Now we must take urgent action and do our best to make up for the last shortcoming, otherwise the whole mission will collapse! Although this means spending more money and may partially expose the existence of "Operation Pin", unsuccessful actions are equal to zero. At the critical moment, we cannot learn from the Middleman Association to be stingy. This may be the last chance.

Lucy took off her mask, revealing a pale face with wrinkles covered by a large number of small scars. She washed her face with cold water in the office to help herself calm down and adjust her mood, especially her voice, so that people could not hear the feeling of anxiety. When she felt ready, she put on the mask again and dialed a number.

"Lack, yes, there is a job, and your team is needed. That's right, according to the price you proposed, come to my place now, with a full set of equipment. Hmm? Need to increase the money? This kind of thing always makes me unhappy." Lucy snorted and said, "Okay, how much do you want to increase?"

When Lucy put down the phone gently, she admired her control and acting ability without showing her emotions. "Money is a dog, it will come back again after throwing it away..." She gritted her teeth for a moment, and then continued to arrange tasks.

The team that failed twice had lost her confidence and trust, and she would not give it a third chance. However, the surface work still had to be done, so Lucy scolded them first, then encouraged them, and finally ordered them to start resting immediately and be ready to set off at any time. She wanted to create the illusion that the team would continue to carry out the mission, including a full set of plays, shortening the departure interval of the mission by half, from six days to three days. But the emergency team she had just found at a high price would set off later today.

The "emergency team" was a hired force under the name of other middlemen, and also a trump card, with a status like the Nike team in Lucy's place. Long before the mission began, Lucy found this team and hoped that they would be on standby at any time to deal with emergencies. She had already spent a sum of money for this period of waiting. Now it seems that it was fortunate that she spent this money.

"No, if the operation is not successful, there is no such thing as 'fortunately spending money'." Lucy did not dare to let herself relax for a moment. She immediately arranged for her men to remedy the failed operation and pave the way for the emergency team's operation.

A lot of money was spent, and the "result" was still on the way, and everything that happened on Lucy's side was unknown to Zhuang Xuteng. He was still hiding in the corner of the machine room, practicing magic and trying to create ghosts, while asking the shadow to pick up the meat jerky, tear it into thin strips, and stuff a little into his mouth every once in a while.

Concentration and distraction have their own advantages and disadvantages in different situations. If you don't practice one, you don't need to practice the other. In the past few days, Zhuang Xuteng practiced creating ghosts with concentration, and he has experienced the hardships before success. He believes that in the next period of time, at least in the few days in the computer room, no matter how focused he is, he will not be able to make ghosts in time. It is better to calm down and advance in both states at the same time, at least to balance the training progress.

He didn't expect that his low desire state actually fits the mentality of the necromancer, especially the idea that "creating ghosts is to save trouble" and "there is no need to care about the survival of ghosts", so he accelerated the practice speed.

Tear the meat into thin strips and feed it to himself regularly-Zhuang Xuteng's ghost can already complete this level of autonomous tasks. He also tried to issue more complex commands, but the ghost was completely unmoved. From a design perspective, this reaction is actually quite good, which means that commands that cannot be understood will not be executed, and commands that can be executed must be understood.

According to the Lich Master, regardless of ghosts, shadows or other created wraiths, their intelligence is both limited by the creator's own intelligence and spell skills. As far as Zhuang Xuteng's personal situation is concerned, the limitations are all on magic skills, that is, whether he can create shadows more skillfully and skillfully. The skill lies in practice, so Zhuang Xuteng believes that once he can create ghosts, Yingying's intelligence will reach a new level.

Another strand of meat slipped through the middle of his lips, and Zhuang Xuteng chewed it slowly. The two large bags of snacks stolen from the office were both high in oil, protein and high in calories, which could quickly suppress hunger in the abdomen and thus allow Zhuang Xuteng to last for several more days. This time, he did not plan to eat slowly and save food for a long stay. Instead, he first made himself full and then performed restorative training on his body. The mission has been delayed for such a long time, and it cannot be delayed indefinitely. Since action is expected soon, it is necessary to restore the best combat status.

Besides, you can still steal again after eating!

The people from Aote Company discovered that the snacks in the conference room were gone, but they were snacks, not important documents, and they were not valuable. If you have to trace it and find out that it was taken by a colleague, it will not look good on you. The easiest solution is to buy some new ones and change the locks on the cabinets.

The result was: no one went to look for these two packs of snacks, and no one came to push the door of the computer room, and the matter just passed. Zhuang Xuteng was not afraid of them checking the surveillance unless they believed that someone could enter the corridor from the stairwell 20 meters away, open the conference room, enter the conference room, open the cabinet door, take away the snacks, and close the cabinet door in three seconds. , leave the conference room, close the conference room door, and finally leave through the more than 20-meter-long corridor...

"This can't be done." Zhuang Xuteng ate the meat, quite satisfied with the effect of his actions, and also quite satisfied with Youying. At the same time, inspired by the shadow covering the lens, he also thought of a way to use it, which is to completely cover himself with the shadow. If he is hiding in the shadow at the same time, he can use the light-absorbing properties of the shadow to completely blend himself with the shadow. Since the shadow can imitate the intensity of the shadow, this kind of integration is difficult to detect, which is equivalent to Zhuang Xuteng becoming an expanded shadow from a visual perspective.

So in dark places, he can combine with the shadow to achieve invisibility.

Shadow is really good, but Zhuang Xuteng believes that Phantom would be better. As mentioned before, in terms of cultivation, Zhuang Xuteng felt good. He also took advantage of the period when he was well fed and mentally healthy to seize the feeling and train in time. Unfortunately, he was still not before the "shock echo" Create usable ghosts.

Lucy finally called Zhuang Xuteng. This was already the tenth day of hiding. He was patient and kept quiet, but Lucy didn't contact him, more out of guilt. "Are you in good condition?" Lucy's voice trembled rarely. She can deal with anger well, but the same skills cannot deal with guilt. "How's your physical strength? Can you evacuate?"

"Evacuate? The mission has been cancelled?" Zhuang Xuteng asked.

"If you are not in good condition, then cancel it temporarily. You come out first, and after you recover, we will still have a chance."

Zhuang Xuteng understood and said, "I'm fine. I can proceed as planned. The key is that the other teams..."

"The three groups have completed preparations and can start activating the concussive echo at any time." Lucy said: "Don't force it..."

"Come on, I'm really good. I'm not trying to show off, I'm just a little tired of the monotonous environment here."

"Okay, let's start."

It doesn’t mean it starts at the beginning. The four locations must first conduct joint communication debugging to make technical preparations to deal with network fluctuations. Zhuang Xuteng didn't understand how these technologies were implemented. What he had to do was quite simple: control Brother Pingtou and execute the preset program already placed on the chip.

Put on the zombie headband and activate the "zombie" mode. Brother Pingtou's device status interface will overlap with Zhuang Xuteng's field of vision. At this time, Zhuang Xuteng turned the shadow into a black curtain in front of him, and he could only see the device interface, and the clarity was at least two levels higher. Next, Zhuang Xuteng started the program according to the previous plan. Everything was normal at first, but suddenly various error messages began to pop up. He could neither understand nor deal with it, so he immediately called Nightingale and asked her to take over.

"No problem, leave it to me. It should be a time stamp issue. It has been delayed for too long and has exceeded the original calculation cycle. It needs to be restarted..." Nightingale thought for a while and said, "I won't talk nonsense. You can also exit. This saves computing resources.”

Okay, it seems like I won’t be needed anymore, and I can just prepare for the evacuation. Zhuang Xuteng turned back to the cooling fan room next door and unscrewed the fixing bolts of the pipe. Afterwards, he began to tidy up the two houses, erasing traces of his life, and using special spray to eliminate his biological signatures such as smell. During these ten days, he has been wearing gloves and a mask, and he is not worried about leaving fingerprints and saliva. In addition, use Wraith Jelly to carefully search for fallen hair, and then use Wraith Tentacles to flatten the dust as a whole to eliminate footprints. At least with the amount he carried on this mission, it was impossible to do better.

Next, Zhuang Xuteng waited for Nightingale to complete the program. Four locations, four groups of people, the network, power supply, program, and database all operated under their control, cooperating to construct a specific state. In addition, they took into account the habits of the personnel in the emergency response team of Ultra Company, and the state plus the habitual operation of these people could create an "echo". The echo combined with the "shock" of the outside world would cause loopholes in the resident identity authentication and data storage systems that could be exploited by outsiders.

The shock echo is a stage for professional technicians to perform, and Zhuang Xuteng couldn't even understand it when he watched the excitement. He did his best in his own field, and trusted his teammates for the rest. At this time, he didn't know that one group of people had been replaced by the emergency team called by Lucy, but it didn't matter who did it, what mattered was the result.

About half an hour later, the shock echo was successfully generated, and Ultra Company's emergency response system responded immediately. The last time the pin plan failed here was because Ultra Company did not choose the most commonly used and safest response measures among dozens of response plans, and directly chose a rare, seemingly risky, and extremely low-ranked plan. In the end, no one knew whether it was luck, or an insider betrayed the information, or whether Ultra Company really had such strong technical capabilities.

For Ultra Company, the experience of the last successful defense must have been preserved. People will forget and change, but the system must remember. Therefore, after the shock echo was generated, the emergency system still recommended the "most correct" response method. This response method was successful ten years ago, but ten years later, it was within Lucy's expectations.

The reason why the "New Pin Plan" has a "new" is that improvements have been made in this step and the following steps, taking Ultra Company's response into account. Compared with the past, Lucy has more intelligence officers and information technology has been greatly improved, so she can prepare countermeasures for every "correct" operation of Ultra Company.

One countermeasure, two countermeasures, and no countermeasures are needed for the third time. Ultra Company's defense system was successfully brought into a self-contradictory dead end by the shock echo. It caused about five seconds of incapacity, resulting in all defenses appearing to be there, but in fact being useless.

Five seconds is enough time for people who are prepared in advance to do a lot of things. A needle belonging to Lucy was inserted into the brain of the resident identity system at this time, and then hidden in the complex network of nerves and blood vessels, and became part of this system. Five seconds later, the defense system slowly recovered, it re-checked itself, and requested manual intervention. At this time, the shock echo had ended, and the "Final Needle" followed the footsteps of the defense system, forming its own control network by gathering the previously buried needles, and perfectly integrated into the real system.

"Complete, start safe evacuation."

The four groups of personnel began to evacuate at the same time, and everyone knew that this was a critical step for themselves. Thinking of being able to leave this boring place, Zhuang Xuteng had a brief excitement in his heart, but it only lasted for five seconds. He quickly regained the calmness of a mercenary, began to put away the flat-headed brother in an orderly manner, and finally checked the scene again, comparing it with his memory when he arrived to ensure that there were no omissions.