Black Crow Honor Guard Seals Off the Airspace, Gwen Tunes In to Counter

High-pressure, orange-yellow steam gushed out from the louvers, instantly engulfing the top of the broadcast tower in a thick fog.

Even from a distance of a kilometer, the piercing self-destruct alarm still shook the ruins surrounding the Seventh Gate, causing dust to fall in a flurry.

The eerie green light in Hela's eyes suddenly intensified.

"Guards battalion, form ranks and take off."

Hela raised her hand and waved it, her wide, dark green cloak whistling through the cold wind.

The thirty Black Crow Honor Guard stationed behind the sluice gate slope all snapped on their Obsidian- faced helmets.

The jetpacks ignited at the same time, and the blue-white plasma flames crackled and burned the rubble on the ground.

Twelve heavy-duty floating interceptor shields were lifted into the air in pairs, and quickly unfolded into a semi-circular energy blockade circle with the 400-meter hollow fault of the broadcast tower as the center.

"Any escape pod, parachute, or mechanical beacon that detaches from the tower must be killed on sight."

Hela's voice slammed into the eardrums of every guard through the internal communication channel.

The commander of the Imperial Guards hovered in mid-air, Long Halberd in hand, and growled as he received the order:

"Yes, sir!"

A dense array of air defense systems rose from the ground, quickly severing the direct air route between the broadcast tower and the main channel of the Starport.

Wanda remained suspended in mid-air, the Scarlet Mist surrounding her already stretching into a straight red streak of light.

She didn't even glance at the blockade line under Hela; with a clench of her right hand, the torn spatial rift bulged forward from her fingertips.

The dark red magic, like a sharp blade unsheathed, pierced straight towards the depressurization room at the top of the broadcast tower.

She wanted to flatten that iron frame, tower and all, from the plain.

"Wanda, stop!"

Lynn's voice, without the aid of any amplification device, exploded smoothly on the turbulent slope.

Wanda's figure suddenly froze in mid-air less than fifty meters from the interceptor shield.

She turned around, looking down at Lynn from her elevated position, the hem of her red robe fluttering, the bloodlust in her eyes thick and unyielding.

"You want to stop me?"

Wanda's lips moved slightly, her voice extremely cold.

"Forcibly tearing open that space would completely collapse the balance of the main reactor."

Lynn took two steps forward, stepping onto the edge of the charred, broken roadbed, facing the oncoming high-altitude convective wind.

"The four sets of master chromatogram cores were used as external oscillation sources."

"If they were forcibly detonated by Chaos Magic now, the chain reaction wouldn't shatter the broadcast tower, but rather the water would flow back down the cable into the Department of Technology's underground."

"Your Zero Storage Room, which you managed to suppress with such difficulty, will be completely overturned in a fraction of a second."

Wanda's finger, which was suspended in mid-air, trembled almost imperceptibly.

The secret locked in Zero Storage Room was a bottom line she absolutely could not allow anyone else to discover.

"Director Lynn is quite adept at calculating costs for the Department of Technology."

Hela had somehow walked up to Lynn's side, her black armor gauntlets gleaming with a deathly luster in the dim sunlight.

"But if we don't blow it up, are we just going to let the Watchmaker calmly erase all traces on it and then jump away with the original?"

He can't jump over it.

Lynn turned to look at Gwen Stacy, who had remained silent beside her.

Gwen Stacy slightly raised her right arm, and the cuff of her tactical trench coat slid open, revealing a highly modified wrist terminal.

Dense green bands flickered on the terminal screen, as several offline frequency hopping groups rearranged and recombined at millisecond speeds.

Gwen Stacy didn't look at Hela, nor at Wanda in mid-air; her voice was crisp and clear:

"The Liaison Office retained three sets of redundant analog channels for combat readiness when the broadcast tower was first built."

"That's an old-fashioned copper cable physical line from twenty years ago; it's not in the main control computer's cutoff sequence."

Hela raised an eyebrow:

"Can you cut into the top-level repeater?"

"As long as its self-destruct mechanism hasn't burned out the backup battery, it can be cut off."

Gwen Stacy raised her hand and typed seven commands in quick succession on the terminal keyboard.

A very thin, highly conductive alloy wire shot out from her left wrist, and the miniature magnetic Probe at the end snapped into the broken streetlight cable beside her.

A faint electrical noise was quickly introduced into the terminal along the metal wire.

Wanda slowly descended from mid-air, landing no more than three steps away from Lynn. Although the dark red magic had subsided, it still lingered around her ankles.

Wanda stared at the screen on Gwen Stacy's wrist, her tone stiff:

"Frequency switching requires a master control certificate. What gives you the right to overstep your authority?"

Gwen Stacy didn't even lift her eyelids, and pressed the Enter key with her thumb:

"Because I'm the director of the Liaison Office of the Management Committee."

"The Wartime Unconventional Communications Takeover Act grants Liaison Office the right to conduct one-way wiretapping when their facilities are under enemy attack."

"If the minister has any objections, he may submit an official appeal to the Joint Conference afterward."

Wanda's face darkened slightly at those two sentences, but she didn't react; she simply stared coldly at the signal stream on the screen.

Lynn stood at the point where their gazes met, his expression calm, his eyes fixed on the rapidly refreshing green waterfall.

"Carrier detected."

Gwen Stacy spoke in a low voice.

The clutter on the screen instantly collapsed into a stable sine wave.

The peaks and troughs of that sine wave were extremely sharp, and each fluctuation was accompanied by a fragment of the underlying protocol being uploaded.

Gwen Stacy scrolled the mouse wheel rapidly, trapping the Data Stream in the buffer.

"The protocol is not a self-destruct command."

Gwen Stacy turned to look at Lynn, her eyes revealing a cold and serious expression.

"They installed a high-frequency directional transmitter on the top floor of the broadcast tower."

"The Chaos Magic within the master card core has been converted into ultra-high frequency directional pulses."

Hela stepped forward, her combat boots shattering a piece of charred insulation tile:

Where are their receivers located?

Gwen Stacy's hands flew across the Virtual Keyboard, bringing up a miniature map of the Starport Defense topology.

On the map, a Scarlet virtual ray shoots straight out from the top of the broadcast tower, piercing through the clouds and heading straight for the Seventh Star Ring Defense Node in the outer orbit.

"The outer defensive Force Field of the Starport."

Gwen Stacy's voice was flat and even, yet it carried a profound weight of reality.

"They are using the same frequency energy from the master card core to forcibly pry open the underlying phased array of the third Force Field generator."

"If that Defense Line experiences even a three-second phase blind spot, the stealth jump ship docked on the outer layer can warp away the instant the radar is blinded."

Hela narrowed her eyes slightly and let out a cold laugh:

"The Watchmaker wasn't trying to blow up the tower to silence us; he was going to send the master card core directly out of the Starport."

The Black Crow Honor Guard in mid-air immediately emitted a series of crisp clicks as they cocked their guns, but Hela did not rush to issue the interception order.

Because everyone knows that once the outer defensive Force Field is breached, the Royal Guard's physical bodies and plasma Long Halberd alone will not be able to stop the fully charged deep space warp ship.

The Scarlet mark on Wanda's palm gleamed with a furious light once more.

"Since he's using my magic, I can crush his bones by following the trigger."

"Not feasible."

Lynn calmly spoke up to stop him.

"The other party is using a Stark Industries voltage regulator converter, which has a reverse pulse absorption capacitor installed inside."

"The moment your magic is poured in, it will detonate the energy storage block inside the converter."

"Then the parent material will be melted down into waste, and you won't get anything back. The deficit in the Department of Technology's reactor will never be made up."

Wanda stared intently at Lynn, her chest heaving a few times, but ultimately she didn't force herself to take that step.

At this critical juncture, Lynn's composure became the only leash that pulled her back from the brink of destruction.

"So what do you want to do, Director Lynn?"

Hela turned to the side, looking at him with a half-smile, her tone carrying a hint of scrutiny and inquiry.

"The Imperial Guard has sealed off the airspace, the minister has withdrawn his powers, and now the agreement is displayed on this little girl's screen."

"You plan to use a few official documents to make that rat hiding on the top floor return the stuff?"

Lynn ignored the veiled meaning in Hela's words.

He leaned down, extended his right index finger, and gently swiped it across Gwen Stacy's wrist screen.

The Data Stream stalled, freezing at the very bottom of the intercept protocol.

There was a string of hexadecimal 16-bit code performing a loop check.

Hela glanced at it, her brow furrowing slightly, clearly not understanding the trick.

Gwen Stacy was also slightly taken aback. This underlying encoding format did not belong to any of the current communication protocol specifications of the Management Committee, and even completely contradicted the current mainstream code.

"What's this?"

Gwen Stacy asked in a low voice.

Lynn's fingertip paused on that line of code for a full second.

His heart rate remained unchanged, and his facial muscles did not twitch in the slightest.

The formatting of that line of code was extremely outdated, even bearing strong characteristics of late 20th-century mechanical punch press typesetting.

The prefix is four letters:

--HYDRA-NY-09.

In this world, apart from the old agents who infiltrated the lowest levels of S.H.I.E.L.D.. in the early days, no one else could recognize the meaning behind this number.

That was decades ago, in the underground archives of the Triskelion building in New York, where the first batch of supplies for Secret Service personnel were issued using sealed labels.

It was also the code that Lynn personally stamped on the selvage order with a steel stamp during her first Sims game.

The Watchmaker's stolen master copy is drawing upon more than just Wanda's magic.

There was also the old-fashioned mole that Lynn himself planted years ago, which never detonated.

Lynn withdrew his finger, straightened up, and looked through the billowing orange steam to the tightly closed steel tower base.

"A hardwired bypass is included in the underlying protocol."

Lynn's voice was calm as he turned to look at Gwen Stacy.

"Pull up the power distribution diagram for the basement level."

"Since the Watchmaker needs to access the Force Field, he must use the main power supply coil of the entire tower."

"We'll go underground."

Hela looked at Lynn's calm face, her eyes shifting slightly, and casually twirled her short sword in a cold flourish.

"It seems Director Lynn has found the key to open the door."

"Then I'll see if the path you've created can be faster than the blades of my Imperial Guard."

The heavy-duty explosion-proof armor plates at the base of the broadcast tower were fully closed, emitting a deafening, muffled clanging sound.

In the corner of Gwen Stacy's terminal screen, at the end of that line of code that no one had noticed, a tiny blinking cursor appeared, counting down the remaining upload bytes in a mechanical, unhurried manner.