347 Offensive and Defensive Program (1/2)

Xiao Luo sat back and allowed the engineers' attacking forces to exhaust their resources against his defense. An army of viruses swarmed the firewall in relentless waves of attacks, but Xiao Luo's defenses held. Then, Xiao Luo hit a function key, and his program divided into 64 sub-programs with offensive and defensive capabilities. These sub-programs continued to self-replicate, almost like stacking one brick on top of another, building a massive and intricate multi-layered program.

”All done!”

Xiao Luo muttered to himself in satisfaction as he keyed in the last line of code, and with a wry smile, he hit the function key to concurrently run all the applications.

In the virtual battlefield, Zhou Yuhang and his cohorts used all of their experience and resources to come up with a solution to breach Xiao Luo's ports. Try as they might, the defenses were impenetrable, but giving up was not an option. Suddenly, they found that their applications were not responding to commands. There was no warning, they only detected anomalies in how their programs were running—it felt like the firewall had surged outward, overwhelming the malware files they had directed to Xiao Luo's computer. The firewall defense surged unimpeded, smashing everything in its path, and the virus programs that came into contact with it had their codes stripped bare.

”Huh, what… what kind of program is this? H-how can this be happening?

Utterly shocked by the dominance of Xiao Luo's active defense program, Zhou Yuhang's eyes were filled with apprehension. To an ordinary person, the computer screen looked like nothing more than numerous lines of code, but to an IT expert like Zhou Yuhang, these multiple lines of complicated instructions presented him with a vastly different picture—they filled with terrifying aggression and a warning of doom.

”Everyone, stop attacking. Hurry up and withdraw!”

One of the group leaders roared, sensing that a catastrophe was imminent.

Gu Zhanguo and Dongfang Shuoyu looked at one another. They couldn't help but shake their heads, and it seemed to them like ”Mie” now had the upper hand.

In the ranks of the IT engineers, one by one, they began to stare blankly at their computer screens with astonished faces. Xiao Luo's had successfully penetrated their port security and compromised their computers' integrity—on their blue-colored screens, all they saw were the word ”MIE” made up with strings of scrambled codes.

”Defend, hurry up, defend!”

Zhou Yuhang was in a daze and sweating profusely. Xiao Luo had already seized control of the server, and all Zhou Yuhang could do was to retreat behind his machine's firewall—and here, in this redoubt, he would make his final stand.

The other IT engineers were dropping like flies as more withdrew from the battlefield. They were crestfallen but tried their best to stay calm, waiting for Xiao Luo, the ferocious tiger, to step into the lure and spring the trap.

It was a tense moment, as the rank of fallen engineers awaited in trepidation, even Gu Zhanguo, and the rest could feel that something was about to occur in this fierce battle that would be decisive.

”ROAR!”

To the defenders, it seemed like a ferocious tiger had bounded through the flaming walls, roaring fiercely and on a violent rampage, leaving a blazing trail of destruction.

The virtual defenders, the army of warriors created from the engineers' codes, were no match for the intruder and simply disintegrated back into broken source codes when attacked. In this way, slowly but surely, each and every one of the defenders' computers were compromised. Once again, the structured codes that made up their programs were turned into scrambled strings of characters that formed the word ”MIE.”

”It's coming now… it's heading towards us!” a group leader nervously warned the others.

”Come on then! We'll make sure it dies without a proper burial place!”

Zhou Yuhang scowled, gritting his teeth. The honeycomb system was a complex application and the most powerful program that he had developed. It was capable of hack-back and instant file deletion, and could also be set up as a booby trap, where it would immediately sequester an intruding malware and render it useless.

But what Zhou Yuhang was unaware of was that Xiao Luo already knew of his strategy right from the start. Xiao Luo hit another key on his board, and a deluge of coded instructions was sent to overwhelm Zhou Yuhang's machine—the prowling tiger roared in the virtual battlefield as it set its sight on the defensive of its adversaries before it leaped in for the attack. And there it was—the attempted breach!

”Now!”