At 2:17 a. m., Ye Mo's finger was still hovering above the attack button. The car was so quiet that the slight rustling of Scott's breathing could be heard. Emma Frost's headphones glowed faintly, her consciousness spreading out like an invisible net, silently covering the entire base.
He glanced down at his watch; the second hand jumped, and the time was perfect.
"Action."
The moment the words left his mouth, he pressed the button. The anti-gravity zipline silently unfolded, and the vehicle trembled slightly, like a stone sinking to the bottom of the water, slowly rising from the muddy crater, and then gliding forward thirty meters along the underground track before stopping in front of a rock fracture zone.
The three of them got out of the car at the same time.
The first thing Ye Mo did upon landing was to activate the Steel Bone program. His skin surface quickly shimmered with a metallic sheen, his muscle lines were covered by a layer of silver-gray alloy, and his joints emitted a deep "click" sound, like an old-fashioned elevator starting to run. He stretched his shoulders and casually patted the outer layer of his hoodie— the Vibranium armor fit perfectly without any jamming.
"Go on," he muttered, and started walking towards the watchtower ahead.
The first line of defense consists of an infrared scanning array and ground vibration sensors. Patrols are conducted every eight minutes, and they are currently in the handover period. Ye Mo did not intend to dodge; instead, he deliberately increased the weight of his steps and leaped up five meters from the warning line, slamming his right fist into the ground.
The rock strata collapsed, and debris flew everywhere.
The six pulse turrets responded immediately, their honeycomb arrays rotating and locking on, blue light condensing at the muzzles. The next second, two salvos simultaneously struck Ye Mo in the chest, sparks crackling and several scorch marks appearing on his armor. However, he used the impact to somersault through the air, crashing directly into the central control box.
"Buzz--"
The sound of a short circuit was crisp, like someone cracking a nut. The lights on the three turrets on the left went out, initiating the restart process.
"Seven seconds," he counted silently in his mind.
That's enough.
He sprinted sideways, leaping forward through the gaps between pressure-sensitive panels—these panels would only trigger an alarm if a weight of over thirty kilograms was detected, and his current Steel Bone Form weighed nearly four hundred kilograms, so he had to rely on precise landings to avoid them. For the final stretch, he used the wall for leverage, flipped over the main entrance barrier, and landed in the shadows of the side corridor.
The grenade was thrown and landed precisely in the ventilation duct.
With a loud bang, thick smoke billowed out, completely obscuring the surveillance view.
"Outer perimeter cleared," he whispered into his headset. "The passage is open. Follow me."
Meanwhile, Scott has shrunk to the nanometer scale.
His body clung to a floating speck of dust, carried by the airflow through the narrowest gap in the ventilation duct. The inside of this duct wall was covered with AI facial recognition probes, but they only recognized faces, not dust. In addition, the Pym Particles reduced his biosignals to almost zero, so the system didn't even realize that this "dust" was actually a person.
"This feels really weird," he muttered to himself. "I've never cleaned a computer fan this thoroughly before."
He drifted into the power hub with the airflow, gently detached himself from the dust, and affixed a small, fingernail-sized jammer to the bottom of the main unit's heatsink. He set a countdown: automatically activate after thirty seconds, causing localized voltage fluctuations and triggering a brief power outage.
The second location was the communication host. The guards were even denser here, with a mind scanner every thirty meters in the corridor, specifically designed to detect abnormal brainwaves. Scott dared not land rashly, so he hovered above the ventilation valve and slowly lowered the jammer using Silk -like traction line. The process was as slow as an old lady knitting a sweater, but he managed not to make a single mistake.
"The third one, the ventilation valve control module," he muttered to himself, "I'll go collect my 'Best Infiltration Award' after I finish installing it."
The last jammer was successfully installed. He retreated to the top of the ventilation duct, curled up in a corner, and awaited instructions.
Outside, Emma Frost sat cross-legged in the car, her eyes closed, her fingertips resting on the neural interface headset. Her consciousness had already been projected out, permeating the entire base like a Wi-Fi signal.
The psychological fluctuations of the five Sentry were clearly discernible: four were on routine duty, their thoughts calm; only the senior guard in the gray uniform was moving towards the central control room, a single thought repeatedly flashing through his mind, "That explosion just now... wasn't it too much of a coincidence?"
"Want to investigate?" Emma Frost's lips curled into a slight smile. "I'll make you forget about it."
She immediately released a directional interference audio signal, a sound wave specifically designed to blur short-term memory, which precisely hit the target's hippocampus region of the brain. The guard paused, frowned, and then relaxed.
"Huh? Where am I going?" He looked around. "Oh right, I just finished a patrol, I'm going back now."
He turned and walked in the opposite direction.
Another guard who was reviewing surveillance footage was also slightly affected, mistakenly believing that the system restart was a normal maintenance procedure, and proactively turned off the alarm notification.
"Done." Emma Frost breathed a sigh of relief, a fine sheen of sweat on her forehead, but her mental state remained stable. She hadn't read anyone's deep memories or manipulated their behavior; she had simply flicked their attention—like someone subconsciously glancing at an advertising billboard as they passed by.
" Scott, the jammers are deployed and in a safe location," she messaged. "You can activate the jamming mode at any time."
"Received," Scott replied. "But I suggest we wait until Ye Mo goes a little deeper before detonating it, otherwise he'll be facing full alert as soon as he goes in."
"Agreed," Ye Mo's voice chimed in. "I'm currently in the side corridor of the main entrance, not yet in the core area. You guys control the situation, I'll advance."
After he finished speaking, he took a few steps forward, squatted down against the wall, and took out his half-rimmed glasses and put them on. A data stream flashed across the lens, and the scan results showed that: fifty meters ahead was the first security gate, equipped with a biometric lock and gravity-sensing floor; behind that were three layers of isolation zones, each patrolled by mechanical Sentry.
"Standard anti-intrusion design," he thought, "But the barrier to entry is a bit high."
He didn't rush in, but first observed the Sentry's movement rhythm. They changed shifts every six and a half minutes, with a twelve-second blind spot during the handover. He noted the time, took out the electromagnetic pulse grenade he carried, but didn't use it—he was saving it for dealing with the core system; throwing it out now would be like revealing his hand prematurely.
"We need to try something different."
He pulled out a steel ball, a scrap left over from testing the stability of Pym Particles. He flicked it gently, and the ball rolled to the corner of the corridor, getting stuck right in the seam between two floor tiles.
Three seconds later, a mechanical Sentry turned around, detected the foreign object with its infrared sensor, and immediately went to investigate. Just as it bent down, Ye Mo flashed out and chopped at its neck joint with a hand chop. The alloy arm collided with the mechanical joint with a muffled "clang", the head light of the object flashed twice, and it collapsed to the ground.
"No problem." He dragged the machine away, stuffed it into the storage locker, and casually picked up the steel balls. "It can still be used next time."
keep going.
On the other side, Scott stared at the countdown, which reached zero in the last second.
"Three, two, one... explode!"
The jammer in the power control center was the first to activate, causing the temperature of the main unit's heat sink to rise sharply, triggering a system alarm and automatically cutting off part of the power supply. Immediately afterwards, the communication main unit also experienced garbled transmission, with internal network messages experiencing delays of up to twenty seconds. Finally, the ventilation valve control module malfunctioned, the cooling system suddenly stopped, and the internal temperature of the base rose by two degrees Celsius.
The alarms blared incessantly.
"What's going on?" a guard shouted. "Is the power acting up again?"
"It's not a glitch," another person said, staring at the screen. "Someone's tampered with it."
But before they could report it, Emma Frost struck again. She targeted two technicians who were about to contact headquarters and released interference waves of different frequencies. One of them instantly felt dizzy and retched against the wall; the other felt extremely sleepy, his eyelids drooping, and he collapsed onto the keyboard before he could even finish typing his report.
"Mind suppression successful," she reported in a low voice. "No alarms have been triggered so far."
"Well done." Ye Mo had already broken through the second isolation zone. In front of him was a sloping passage leading deep underground, with cameras on both sides. He looked up at the ventilation shaft and knew that Scott was up there.
" Ant-Man, excuse me."
Scott understood and immediately slid down the upper-level pipe, attaching himself to a surveillance camera. He used Pym Particles to briefly distort the lens focus, creating the illusion of a ten-second still image.
Taking advantage of the opportunity, Ye Mo rushed through the passage and arrived at the third-level isolation door.
The door lock was complicated, requiring dual authentication. He had neither a key nor a password, but he was clever.
He crouched down, pried open the inspection cover at the edge of the floor, revealing a row of wires. One of them was labeled "EM-LINK," clearly an emergency linkage wire. He pulled out this wire, connected it to a signal simulator he carried with him, and entered a fake command.
The door lock beeped, and the green light came on.
"Thanks to modern technology for always leaving backdoors." He pushed the door open and entered.
By this time, Scott had completed all his tasks and retreated to the high point of the ventilation system to await further instructions. Emma Frost remained in the car, maintaining her consciousness projection, her listening range covering the entire mind field of the base, and detected no new escalation of threats.
Ye Mo stood at the end of the slope, facing a heavy alloy door with the words "B-8 Area - No Entry" written on it. He knew the bomb was below.
"The outer defenses have been breached," he said into his headset. "I've entered the inner passage; the target has not yet been made contact."
"The jamming effect is ongoing," Scott responded. "They're like a bunch of cell phones without internet; they can't even send a text message to each other."
"The thought field is stable," Emma Frost added. "No one seems to realize we're already inside."
The positions of the three are clear: Ye Mo is deep in enemy territory and about to approach the core; Scott is hidden in the high-altitude tunnel, controlling the overall situation; Emma Frost is guarding the outer vehicles, her consciousness spreading like a net.
The plan is progressing smoothly.
No injuries, no exposure, no loss of contact.
Everything is under control.
Ye Mo took a deep breath and reached out to press the fingerprint recognition area next to the alloy door.
He knew that the real trouble was just beginning.