Cross Appears, Stealing the Formula
The night wind rattled the tin roof, as if someone had scattered pebbles on it. Scott was still crouching there, clutching the controller to his chest, the blue light on the screen flashing, reflecting the stubble on his chin. He slid his finger across the screen, revealing the peak value of the particle fluctuation from earlier, and stared at the small tremor at the 42-second mark for a full half minute, as if trying to extract some hidden information from it.
Ye Mo stood motionless at the doorway, one hand resting on the doorframe, his fingertips tapping lightly three times, the rhythm exactly the same as before. He didn't look at Scott; his eyes swept across the broken window, where a piece of reflective plastic film trembled in the wind amidst the pile of shards of glass. Further away, on the rusty wire fence surrounding the factory area, a patch of grass had been flattened and was askew.
He calmly put on his glasses, the lenses a cold white, and bent down to pretend to tie his shoelaces, but actually glanced behind him using the afterimage of a shard of glass on the ground. Nothing there. But he knew that some things weren't grasped by the eyes, but by the sensation of the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end.
"Tomorrow, 3.2 centimeters, ten laps, no time limits allowed." He repeated it, his voice a little lower than before, as if afraid of disturbing something.
Scott looked up. "I told you I would practice."
"You said you would listen to the report," Ye Mo replied, without laughing or being sarcastic, just giving a flat jab.
Scott's throat bobbed, but he didn't refute. He had indeed torn up the report, and he had indeed installed the cheat. Thinking about it now, his palms were still a little sweaty.
Ye Mo straightened up, turned, and walked out. His steps were neither fast nor slow, the hem of his work pants brushing against the threshold, kicking up a wisp of dust. As he stepped out of the factory, the night wind immediately swept over him, blowing his hoodie hood backward before it fell back down. He didn't help him up, just kept walking, his back looking somewhat thin in the dim light, but every step he took was firm.
A hundred meters away, the black SUV was parked next to the abandoned gas station, its front facing outwards, as if it could accelerate away at any moment. Ye Mo didn't go directly over; instead, he turned a corner, went around to behind a pile of scrapped containers, and squatted down to touch the ground. The soil was a little wet, and the footprints were blurry, but it was clear that at least two people had walked back and forth. He frowned, didn't say anything, stood up, clapped his hands, and continued forward.
Just twenty meters from the car, he caught a glimpse of the fence out of the corner of his eye—the bushes moved slightly, not by the wind. They were too neatly arranged, as if someone had deliberately crouched low to pass through, their movements highly trained.
He didn't stop walking. He slipped his right hand into his hoodie pocket, his thumb discreetly pressing the side button on his phone to start automatic screen recording. He walked to the car, opened the door, and got in. Instead of starting the engine immediately, he adjusted the rearview mirror to face the factory area. In the mirror, the bushes were still again, as if nothing had happened.
But he knew someone was there.
Darren Cross hasn't gone far.
He lay prone in a depression five meters outside the barbed wire fence, a moisture-proof mat beneath him, a high-powered night-vision binoculars in his hand, the lens pointed directly at the factory entrance. He had captured the entire scene: Ye Mo standing at the door knocking on the doorframe, Scott looking down at the controller, and then Ye Mo leaving, his walking posture relaxed but his route slightly to the left, clearly to avoid being followed.
"Interesting," he said in a low voice, as if afraid of disturbing the mice in the night.
He put down his binoculars, pulled a tablet from his tactical backpack, connected it to the wireless receiver, and pulled up the audio waveform he had just secretly recorded. In the video, a series of high-frequency pulses flashed through the data stream when Scott's controller restarted. He zoomed in on that part, watched it three times, and a smile slowly crept onto his lips.
"Quantum compressed closed-loop signal... If I could disassemble this thing and sell it to those people in the Middle East, it would be enough for me to live in the Maldives drinking coconut water for the rest of my life." He muttered to himself, swiping his finger across the screen. "The key is these two, a petty thief just released from prison and a weirdo in a hoodie, how did they manage to master this kind of technology?"
He squinted, pulled up a satellite map, marked the factory area, the location of the off-road vehicle, and the routes in and out, and finally circled the path Ye Mo took to detour around the containers.
"Highly vigilant, with a strong counter-surveillance awareness; not an ordinary bodyguard, nor a foreman hired by Pym," he murmured. "More like... a professional Scavengers."
He closed his tablet, put it in his backpack, and moved as lightly as a cat. Then he slowly crawled back out of the depression, and as he stood up, he casually pulled up a handful of weeds to cover the marks. He didn't take the main road, but slid along the edge of the drainage ditch to a van so dirty that its color was unrecognizable, opened the door, climbed in, and locked it behind him.
The car had been modified; the back seats had been removed, and two signal jammers and a portable analyzer were placed inside. He turned on the power, and the screen lit up with a blue light, illuminating half of his face. He took off his hat, revealing a buzz cut and an old scar behind his right ear, as if it had been grazed by a bullet.
"Don't mess with the tough guys yet," he told himself. "This place is dangerous; I need to figure things out before I make a move. Especially that guy in the hoodie, his eyes are weird, too steady, unnaturally so."
He pulled up the binoculars' recording and froze the moment Ye Mo put on his glasses. In the reflection of the lenses, there were faint metallic highlights—those were the lenses he had hidden behind the bushes.
"You saw that?" Darren stared at the screen, his brow furrowing. "Impossible... I used a matte finish, and the angle avoided the main light source."
He replayed the video three times, watching every frame. Finally, at a certain second, he noticed that when Ye Mo adjusted his glasses, his gaze paused for 0.3 seconds, precisely pointing at his hiding place.
"Damn," he muttered, slamming the tablet down on his lap. "This guy doesn't rely on equipment, he relies on intuition."
He was silent for a few seconds, then suddenly laughed. "It's good, though. Knowing there are wolves around makes them less likely to act rashly. I can wait."
He turned off all the equipment, plunging the carriage into darkness. Only a small red light on the dashboard was still flashing, like breathing.
At this moment, Ye Mo had already started the SUV.
The car didn't leave immediately. He sat in the car for two minutes while the screen recording on his phone continued. He dragged the progress bar through the footage, repeatedly watching the scenes outside the factory area. Suddenly, he noticed something unusual in an infrared thermal image: behind the barbed wire fence, in a depression, there was a human-shaped heat source lying down, with a body temperature about 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than the surrounding area, lasting for more than fifteen minutes.
"He actually squatted down there." He said softly, his tone flat, as if he had just noticed a new stone by the roadside.
He didn't call the police or contact anyone. He simply encrypted the video and saved it in an offline folder, then deleted the original recording. Next, he opened the navigation, entered the coordinates of a backup location, and casually turned the car's music up to the maximum volume. It was a comedy talk show, and the host was telling a joke about a food delivery driver riding a pig to deliver food.
He smiled and shook his head, then stepped on the gas, and the car sped off.
The tires crunched over the gravel road. In the rearview mirror, the factory area grew smaller and smaller until it became a dark blur. He didn't turn around, but his right hand remained on the bag in the passenger seat, which contained a signal detector and a modified stun gun—not for fighting, but for creating the illusion of a short circuit.
He knew that tonight's events were not over.
Scott is still at the factory.
He looked down at the controller and suddenly noticed an access record from an unknown IP address in the data log. It appeared ten minutes ago, originated from an unknown source, and navigated through three nodes before disappearing on an abandoned server in Iceland. He stared at that line of text for a long time, his finger hovering over the delete key, hesitant to press it.
"Who's watching me?" he asked softly, as if asking the controller, or perhaps asking himself.
He looked up at the doorway. Ye Mo was long gone, leaving only the wind blowing in through the broken window, making a piece of scrap paper in the corner spin back and forth. He suddenly felt a chill in the place, not just because it was dark, but because of the feeling of being watched without realizing it, like a needle pricking the back of his neck.
He stood up, stuffed the controller into his inner bag, grabbed a rusty steel pipe, and went to the door to look around. It was pitch black outside, not even a streetlight. He squinted, trying to make out any movement in the distance, but there was nothing but the sound of the wind.
"Damn," he muttered, shrinking back and leaving the door slightly ajar.
He returned to his original seat, reopened the log, and began manually cleaning up the traces. But the more he cleaned, the more something seemed off—the IP access time coincided with the moment Ye Mo was knocking on the doorframe. Moreover, the system showed 0.8 seconds of data being transmitted outwards, as if it had been intercepted instantly by something.
"Not a hacker... it's live recording." The thought popped into his head. "Someone is using equipment to capture signals at close range?"
He looked up sharply at the broken window.
Moonlight slanted in, casting several thin streaks of light on the shards of glass. One of them lay directly across the plastic sheet that had been there. The sheet moved slightly—not by the wind, but by someone passing by outside, the shadow sweeping across it for a fleeting moment.
Scott held his breath, gripped the steel pipe tightly, and slowly moved to the wall, close to the window. He peeked out, glanced at the window, and immediately pulled back.
On the other side of the barbed wire fence, the direction the grass was bending had changed.
He was pushed in from the left side just now, but now he's falling to the right.
"Someone moved." His heart raced. "And they just left."
He didn't chase after them, nor did he dare to shout. He knew that in a place like this, acting rashly would be tantamount to suicide. He retreated back into the house, piled up everything that could be used as a weapon around him, and then turned on the controller, activating the positioning beacon—a function Ye Mo had mentioned before leaving, saying that it could automatically send coordinates in case of trouble.
He didn't start it; he just stared at the screen, his finger hovering over the button.
Meanwhile, Darren had already re-set up the equipment in the truck. He imported the intercepted data into the analyzer and began decoding. The progress bar moved slowly, but it was clear that it was a compressed file with a complex structure and multiple verifications.
"This thing has an anti-theft mechanism." He frowned. "It will self-destruct if you try to read it even slightly."
He thought for a moment, then decided not to force it. Instead, he switched modes and used analog signals to probe little by little, like defusing a bomb, to find the weakest point.
"No rush," he told himself. "They still need to practice, and practice requires equipment. As long as there's one more signal leak, I can follow the trail and find the core algorithm."
He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes to rest. His mind was filled with the images from earlier: Ye Mo's gaze, Scott's movements, and the license plate of the black SUV—though it was covered in mud, he remembered the outline.
"The one in the hoodie, there's definitely something fishy about him." He opened his eyes and said in a low voice, "Where would an ordinary person get this kind of vigilance? Unless... he's been in this line of work before."
He sat up straight, reopened his laptop, created a new document, and titled it: "Target A: Identity Deduction".
The following are three items:
1. Extremely strong counter-surveillance awareness; they anticipate and ambush targets based on the target's movement route.
2. Capable of remotely intervening in quantum systems, but the methods are unknown;
3. His relationship with Scott is unclear; he is suspected to be a mentor or supervisor.
He stopped writing, stared at the third point for a long time, and finally added, "It cannot be ruled out that he himself is Mutants, and his abilities involve perception or mental interference."
Then I closed the laptop and turned off the lights.
The night grew completely quiet.
Ye Mo's car had already traveled ten kilometers and turned onto a country road. He turned off the comedy program, and the car suddenly became quiet. He touched his temples, which were still throbbing slightly; the operation just now had taken a lot of effort.
"I'll have to be more careful next time," he muttered, glancing behind him in the rearview mirror.
The road was deserted, with no car lights.
But he knew that some people could keep up even without turning on their headlights.
He reached into his bag with his right hand, pulled out the detector, and glanced at it. The signal was stable, nothing unusual. But he didn't relax. Instead, he reduced the car speed to 60 and deliberately drove over several speed bumps, making the car bounce.
If someone gets too close, this vibration can interfere with the stability of the equipment and leave marks.
He waited.
One minute, two minutes.
The detector screen suddenly flickered; to the southeast, 300 meters away, a faint heat source was moving at a synchronized speed.
"There really are some fearless people." He smirked, shoved the detector back in, gripped the steering wheel with his left hand, and quietly pressed a button on the inside of the car door with his right.
Click.
A hidden compartment popped open at the bottom of the trunk, revealing a folding crossbow and a bag of steel nails.
He didn't take it out; he just left it there.
Anyway, the road ahead is long.