Legend of the Cyber Heroes
Chapter 161 - 161 81 Countdown Preparation

161: Chapter 81 Countdown Preparation 161: Chapter 81 Countdown Preparation Xiang Shan stepped out of the elevator on the 326th dormitory floor.

In just these few short minutes, more than ten Scientific Knights had passed by in the elevator.

However, because the mysterious figure cloaked in black appeared so naturally and was ignored by so many, those who boarded the elevator later found nothing unusual about him.

In terms of behavior, this is the group providing “assurance” for the existence of an individual.

Still, such assurance had its limits.

Xiang Shan could keep stealing permissions to avoid triggering alarms.

But if he tried to pass checkpoints that required independent identity verification or areas that verified specific features of the brain-machine interface, it would surely expose the system’s bugs.

He simply did not have enough time to create a legitimate identity for himself.

Moreover, even if he had, at this moment, a single flesh-and-blood examiner who wasn’t connected to the network could easily determine there was something wrong with him.

Therefore, “sneaking into the laboratory, killing the target, taking the data, and leaving without anyone noticing” could only happen in an era where auditing and surveillance relied entirely on humans.

“Humans” are the weakest link in technology.

In front of technology that can precisely identify friends and foes within a second, achieving this was too difficult, too difficult.

Also, there’s assassination.

Although the cyberization of humans gave rise to “Cyber Martial Arts,” a new era method of assassination, it also increased the difficulty of assassinations.

In the age of Homo sapiens, killing a person often required nothing more than a poisoned needle or a powder that could be smeared on one’s sleeve—or simply, a pair of hands.

Killing a person was far too easy.

There are vulnerabilities all over the human body.

Chemicals capable of taking a life are as numerous as the stars in the sky.

If one truly “spared no expense,” killing a person whose location was known was not difficult.

In modern society, there aren’t that many “assassinations,” mainly because most organizations cannot truly “spare no expense.” To the system of modern society, each person is nothing but a gear.

Using “a hundred gears” to disrupt an opponent’s “single gear” is a loss.

Even if one could disrupt a “single gear,” it’s hard to stop the organization—the machine—in its tracks.

Only a great tyrant could intimidate with assassination.

The technology of cyberization not only facilitates assassins but also provides protection for tyrants.

Since the whole body is prosthetic, there’s no longer a possibility of “death by a simple needle prick.” Benchmark men have frighteningly low needs for food and water, making opportunities to “poison” scarce.

Even the only vulnerability of cybernetically enhanced people is the “brain.”

“Assassination” requires the destruction of the target’s biological brain.

Of course, Xiang Shan had his plan.

As long as the defensive forces around the target temporarily dropped to an acceptable level for him, then he could storm into Appennine’s area and, with his comparatively superior Martial Arts, kill the man.

But first, the defensive forces in the target area needed to be reduced.

Thinking this, Xiang Shan walked calmly in the hallways of the 326th floor.

This was one of the dormitory areas for the knight apprentices.

Earlier, he was posing as an “apprentice just back from field research,” so it was natural for him to come down here and change.

Xiang Shan kept stealing surveillance footage from the rooms, quickly zeroing in on one temporarily unoccupied—Deborah’s room was off-limits, as news of her death had already spread.

Xiang Shan leaned against the door, expelled his Inner Strength, hacked the security system, and unlocked the door.

The locks here were designed to pop open in “special circumstances,” which he exploited, but he severed the signal that would indicate an “emergency.” Xiang Shan closed the door softly behind him and entered the room.

Of course, there was no one inside, just a floor-cleaning robot at work.

Xiang Shan silently removed a steel mace from his waist.

This device could also temporarily act as an electronic signal jammer, even though the frequency range it could disrupt wasn’t broad.

After setting up the signal blocker, Xiang Shan struck fast, punching right above the floor-cleaning robot.

With a “snap,” his Clever Force caused screws to come loose.

This helped Xiang Shan to grasp the robot’s center of gravity and core and to deduce its likely structure.

—Ah, it wasn’t difficult to deduce, actually.

There’s limited room for improvement in this thing; aside from the central information processor, most of its structure hasn’t changed much from the relics of the twenty-first century.

With a “puff,” the flat robot “spit” out a mouthful of dust and conked out.

Xiang Shan had loosened some of the internal electronic components.

Afterward, Xiang Shan rummaged through the room for a while, finding a screwdriver, a laser heating pen, tweezers, silicone, and similar items.

He used his foot to shove the dust and debris aside, dismantled the robot, and quickly modified it.

Minutes later, the robot resumed its cleaning activity.

However, its built-in garbage bag now contained a high-explosive bomb.

This was top-notch goods he had sourced from the Meng Hand Gang, with a mechanical timer.

The igniter relied on the sudden high voltage generated by the impact and reorganization of electrons in piezoelectric ceramics.

Once the spring of the timer unwound completely and the escapement stopped moving, the piezoelectric ceramics would strike hard.

The “spring” part was made of a modern synthetic material, incredibly elastic.

The packed explosives were also state-of-the-art technology with a high-energy density.

But, no Internal Strength Master could hack into this type of bomb to stop its explosion, nor could any hacker detonate it prematurely.

Unless you could take out the bomb and then use a needle to pierce into the device, accelerating the gears’ rotation.

And you couldn’t pierce it off-center either, affecting the mechanical structure’s operation, or it would still explode.

Opening it would also detonate it.

Safe bomb defusal required a certain level of skill.

Yet, Xiang Shan had inserted the bomb while the robot cleaner was open.

This bomb was bigger than the opening of a garbage bag.

Unless you could dismantle this robot, it would be impossible to see the device.

Xiang Shan placed the robot on the ground.

The robot began to clean.

Xiang Shan wasn’t in a hurry to send out this robot which he had modified both software and hardware.

After all, the original operational principles still needed to be followed.

This purely mechanical timer bomb, not afraid of the dark and all good, had one flaw: it made a sound.

That “tick-tock, tick-tock” was indeed quite noticeable.

Although its designer had tried their best to reduce the volume, this “faint sound” was always intended for the ears of Natural Persons.

Modern people’s hearing depended on the performance of their Prosthetic Ear, the strength of the analysis software, and the level of the Biological Brain.

Any Martial Artist who had participated in the “No Vision” program could easily distinguish this sound from the background noise, if they were so inclined.

And those Martial Artists, upon retirement, either became instructors at Martial Arts Schools like Hiroshi Matsushima or were recruited by the government.

It was likely that there were quite a few of them here in the Scientific Knight Order’s base.

However, luckily, this was a cleaning robot.

The noise it produced while sucking up dust was still louder than the mechanical countdown mechanism.

So, as long as no one was specifically listening, it wouldn’t be detected.

Xiang Shan had set the bomb’s timer for one hour and thirty minutes.

According to the predetermined route, the robot would travel near the power system of this floor.

“One of the three things you must consider before using a firearm is ‘whether there will be any unrelated people around’.

But I think it’s unlikely there will be many in this building,” Xiang Shan said as he pulled a charging cable over to himself while quickly rummaging through other items in the room.

…………………………………

The envoy of the Six Dragons Sect was in the janitor closet.

Beneath his black robe, two pairs of scythe-like Prosthetic Limbs extended out.

The tips of the prosthetic limbs pierced into the back of the heads of two security guards, precisely damaging parts of their brains without triggering the automatic alarm.

Then, tiny probes popped out from the ends of the prosthetic blade limbs to stimulate the guards’ brains.

Although not able to control them precisely, it was enough to feign that “they were still alive.”

“Next, I need to advance further and dismantle this building’s defense capabilities.”

He sighed.

Entering this area with such a prosthetic body wasn’t easy.

This prosthetic body was not his strongest combat ability, at least the quality of the alloy for the External Armor could only be called average, it wasn’t top-end material.

This prosthetic body was suitable for suppressing the Green Forest Stronghold, but it would be difficult to run wild in the territory of the Scientific Knight Order.

He also couldn’t just go out recklessly.

His current appearance was completely different from the typical style of the Scientific Knight Order and would easily draw unnecessary attention.

“But that’s alright.

Now that I have quite high authority, there are many more things I can accomplish.” The Six Dragons Sect’s envoy thought to himself.

Outside the janitor closet, a set of footsteps approached.

It was a patrolling security team.

The Six Dragons Sect’s envoy cautiously waited for the footsteps to recede before carefully laying down the two bodies, cleaned the blood-scented substances from the tips of his prosthetic limbs, then left the janitor closet.

He walked briskly to the elevator, but instead of waiting for it, he used his blade-like Prosthetic Limbs to pry the elevator doors apart and plunged into the elevator shaft.

This elevator was built around a load-bearing structure, making it not one of those panoramic elevators; the shaft was enclosed, dark, and opaque.

Some Knight Order bases had no such elevators.

Most elevator shafts were required to be transparent.

If fully enclosed elevator shafts were unavoidable due to building structures, automatic cleaning robots were also installed for surveillance.

However…

this was after all a rural Order of Knights.