Chapter 436: Five Hundred Years Ahead? Just a Scavenger!
Inside the Egghead Island Laboratory, a shrill alarm rang through the corridors.
Red warning lights spun, bathing the metal walls in crimson.
"Warning. The central mainframe's defense layer has collapsed."
"External access has been seized without authorization."
Vegapunk stood before the main console. The mechanical wrench slipped from his hand and landed on the cart.
At the center of the main screen, a gold-and-red metal mask emblem rotated slowly.
Below it, a scarlet countdown kept ticking.
00:02:59.
"Three seconds since the intrusion began. Two minutes and fifty-nine seconds remain."
Vegapunk stared at the screen, his voice strained.
"I set up seven hundred dynamic defense barriers."
"He bypassed all of them in three seconds?"
Surveillance feeds across the laboratory cut out one after another.
The exterior defense turrets, experimental zones, underground hangar, and satellite relay stations all dissolved into static.
"Pythagoras! Atlas!"
Vegapunk grabbed the main microphone.
"Link all the Punk Records satellites' processing power in parallel and activate the multilayer firewall!"
The order went out.
Deep beneath the laboratory, the enormous central brain began to roar.
Several satellites connected to their consoles at once. Dense streams of data formed a new defensive line around the core database.
"It's no use, Stella!"
Pythagoras's voice came through the communicator.
"He isn't breaking in through conventional methods."
"He's rewriting our underlying compilation rules!"
Vegapunk's fingers flew across the console.
He fed patch after patch into the firewall.
The moment each patch touched the intruding program, it was dismantled into a new set of computational instructions.
Red strings of garbled code multiplied across the screen.
"That's impossible!"
Vegapunk stared at the unfamiliar algorithm.
"It isn't built on a conventional binary structure."
"It's using our defenses to rebuild itself."
"I can't find the source code or