New York.
In an apartment building in the suburbs, the curtains of a lightless room were drawn, and the air conditioning was cranked up high. The room's gloomy hues and bone-chilling cold were enough to make one think of a hospital morgue.
If not for the three large monitors on the desk, several empty cans of cola, and the softly humming computer tower, the entire room would have had no trace of the living.
Carrying a freshly ordered pizza back from the entryway, a gloomy-looking man returned to his computer desk, sat down, and clicked his mouse twice.
On the black-background, white-bordered interfaces across the three monitors before him, strings of code cascaded downward like a waterfall.
An ordinary person would surely have their eyes swimming from the complexity of the code, but he knew every single character on the screens like the back of his hand.
"A big fish..."
"I caught you! Perfect!"
Smacking his lips, Lone Wolf curled his mouth into a smug grin, grabbed a slice of pizza, and took a bite.
This time, it was Convenience Network.
Although he had received no instructions from the BOSS, he felt it was time to expand the battlefield beyond the media sector.
After all, they were not some disciplined, unified organization, and he could no longer think of any Hua Nation media website that had not been hacked.
Through those deadly lines of code, he could practically see the furious expressions on the faces of people tens of thousands of kilometers away, helplessly panicking in server rooms.
But just then, the account he had hanging on a trading forum on the dark web suddenly received a private message.
"...Did the 'takeout' I ordered arrive?"
The takeout here naturally did not refer to actual food delivery, but zombie computers often