When Russell "opened" his eyes again, he had turned into a sand dune cat.

He was in a black, starless void.

Become your own spiritual relative in the matrix space - this is the common intrusion form of psychic hackers.

If you do not use this method, it is easy to get lost and confuse reality and matrix space... After all, memory attacks are the most common means of counterattack; and if the shape is too unrelated to oneself, it is easy to cause self-damage in the offensive defense wall.

It leads to the disintegration of consciousness.

The cat is in a pure black maze, spinning around and examining everything in front of it.

The material of the walls of the maze is reminiscent of obsidian, because there is no metallic luster on their surface and there are some uneven defects.

Every defect is a loophole, big or small.

And now Russell has not even touched the firewall... This is just the outermost firewall, a static protection used to intercept ordinary intruders.

Russell licked his paws calmly, jumped on the spot twice to stretch his limbs, and then jumped high into the air.

He jumped onto one wall, then jumped back to the other adjacent wall. Between the two walls forming a right angle at 90 degrees, Russell bounced lightly and climbed to a height of three to four meters.

This is the limit of protection of the maze wall - if a disk is used for intrusion, it will take a while just to bypass or chip away at the wall.

Russell walked gracefully on the wall of the maze, and then when he needed to make a detour, he jumped high into the air and jumped directly to the wall on the opposite side. Repeating this, he didn't even make a detour, but only jumped twice to reach the other side.

side.

The lazy firewall that could trap ordinary hackers for at least twenty minutes took Russell less than twenty seconds to bypass.

"……Um?"

After he jumped over the maze wall, he suddenly raised his tail warily.

The flames burst into flames the moment he landed - the vast wildfires from all directions completely obscured his vision, and pain immediately fell on Russell.

The illusion is that the cat's body has been completely engulfed in fire...but the hair on his body has not burned.

"It's actually a 'Bolide'?"

Russell meowed, feeling a little puzzled for a moment.

This is a very old type of defense, so old that it has long since disappeared from the market.

It took Russell about two seconds to recall the existence of this thing.

The special thing about "Bolide" is that it is a special offensive defense - its offensive method is that, without verifying the key, when anyone touches the defense, it will immediately send out a message that gets stronger and stronger over time.

Burning pain.

In offensive defense, the most commonly used counterattack methods are "memory damage", "pain signal", "reality positioning" and "matrix ban".

"Bolide" was the ancestor of the "pain signal" type of offensive defense.

Its protection logic is as follows: first, it immediately launches an indiscriminate attack on all those who request entry. It converts the pain felt by humans when being burned by flames into digital signals, and then outputs the burning pain of various intensities overwhelmingly in the opposite direction.

If there is a key in the target chip, then of course it can be passed quickly, and the pain will not last long... But if you try to break through the defense wall, it will become more and more painful, and it may even kill the person directly.

For ordinary users, the pain will only last for a few tenths of a second when passing by the company. It is like being burned by a candle.

But if Russell enters the matrix space from a long distance and attacks the company through the icebreaking program of the disc... Assuming that the disc in his hand requires ten minutes of computational offensive defense without making mistakes in operation. Then his

The avatar needs to stay in the matrix space for ten minutes. This false burning pain will last for that long.

Of course the pain was fake, everyone knew that they were definitely not burned.

But the virtual body has senses - if it hurts so much that it blurs consciousness and falls here, there will be no going back.

It would be much better if we didn't use avatars to invade... Then we would just continue to receive massive amounts of junk information. If we don't download the data, the data will only be transmitted to the disk and will not flow into the chip.

But that would easily burn the disk... Without the use of avatars, psychic hackers would have no advantage. It would be difficult to break through the outermost firewall through technical means.

Thirty years ago, Bolide was the most useful commercial offensive defense wall.

It's easy to use because it really treats everyone equally.

Anyway, it only takes a moment to verify when the physical body passes, but it takes a long time to crack it remotely. Although the defense may not be strong, the pain of treating everyone equally will make psychic hackers reluctant to attack this company first.

——As long as the psychic hacker organization is given priority to attack other companies, rounding it off is equivalent to protecting its own company.

Later it was gradually abandoned, not because psychic hackers cracked the mechanism.

Because it has no mechanism to speak of - its ice cone breaking is not complicated.

When a large amount of junk information is continuously output, it is impossible to build an overly sophisticated defense wall later, otherwise it will be prone to bugs due to such data throughput.

To explain it with the illusion of the matrix space... at the end of that wall of fire is the simplest wall of light.

That is a lazy defense wall. It is equivalent to a verification code that is reset every minute.

It doesn't have any technology at all, it just requires a lot of calculations... It's like countless math problems, you just need to calculate them layer by layer. People with the key can directly get the synchronously generated results from the company server.

Password, and those without the key can only calculate it from the outside and then rush in.

But from another perspective, perhaps no technical content is the best technical content...

If I have learned technology and you have not learned technology, I spend the same time and have to rely on the dial to calculate, then wouldn’t my learning of technology be in vain?

Later, it was because there were more useful and more threatening "honeypots" in the offensive defense wall. It was very convenient to open the box in real life, and shake a nearby mercenary to physically kill you, so the fire that outputs pain was

Meteor was directly deprecated.

After all, when clocking in and out every day, everyone, whether employees or directors, will be burned equally as soon as they enter or leave the company - and people will complain after a long time.

There is a high probability that Delphinium will not bring a disc that can specifically crack bolides. Because it is too simple...

In that case, Delphinium would have to endure the pain of being burned by fire to maintain the state of the avatar and wait for the forcible cracking calculation by the disc.

...Fortunately, it was me who came in.

Russell thought.

It's like someone threatened that a bomb would explode if they couldn't solve these math problems within the specified time - so they tried their best to find a doctor of mathematics. It turned out that the doctor was asked to stand in a high-temperature sauna and frantically

Solve a thousand junior high school math problems.

It's not that I can't figure it out, it's mainly because my body can't bear it...and there's simply not enough time. Even if you know the answer at a glance, writing it still takes time.

Russell skillfully endured the pain of being burned by the fire, and quickly activated the ice cone breaking program to specifically crack the inert barrier behind the bolide.

An offensive program named [Great Mathematician].

I saw a black illusory cone quickly condensed around Russell.

Like a rotating pencil head, Russell was wrapped in it and moved forward rapidly.

It had no protection at all against those flames. Those flames still passed through it and continued to burn the Russell inside.

But just after the cone flew for less than half a second, a wall of light suddenly lit up in front of it.

It's not composed of data, nor is it an entity... but countless nested hexagonal matrices.

This black illusory cone immediately began to rotate at full speed. And every time it rotated, the middlemost layer of the hexagonal matrix was disintegrated - and they immediately shrank and replaced it instantly.

If it is a more advanced disc, one with a compound ice-breaking program, it can be directly forced to break through at the moment it "tightens". This is a violent solution specifically for the stacking algorithm.

Fortunately, the performance of "Aoi Lily" is very good, and it should be able to be completed quickly without the need to force a breakthrough.

At this moment, in the outside world, several air vents of Russell's prosthetic limb opened with a hiss - visible to the naked eye, steaming white hot air was continuously discharged from inside.

Looking at his appearance at this moment, the bad guy was obviously a little anxious.

He was a little restless... he wanted Russell to withdraw quickly, but he was worried that he was reaching a critical point and would affect his condition.

In matrix space, [the great mathematician's] operations quickly reached the end.

——It took a total of forty-six seconds to break through a total of 863 layers of inert defense walls.

Just seeing this time, Russell knew very clearly - Delphinium was definitely not finished.

If she didn't have a "Mathematician" series of disks, it would have taken at least three to five times as long to rely on other disks to force a breakthrough.

Assuming that the time it took for her to break through the firewall was the same as Russell's, then she would have at most half a minute left after breaking through the firewall.

At that time, Delphinium must choose whether to continue moving forward or retreat.

If she chooses to move forward...and this is really the only defense, then everyone will be happy.

But if there is any protection behind her that prevents her from closing the final overall program, then when she retreats... she will also have to go through another round of such calculations.

That's the new random number...it's definitely not over.

Unless the delphinium chooses to escape, this is almost a fatal trap.

- But will she run away?

Maybe, maybe not, but anyway...

Russell was stunned.

The person who arranged this bomb program must have malicious intentions in his heart.

It's completely different from the "bad joke" that the bad guy said. That person just wants to blow up the delphinium... or maybe there are bad guys too!

When the light wall collapsed, the cat went directly to the next floor.
To be continued...