In the hidden heart of an abandoned structure beneath the city of Prague, Europe slept while the real war raged underground.
Inside a room lit only by the glow of monitors, the silence was thick as lead. Cables splayed across the floor like the veins of a living creature. Fans whirred in an almost ritualistic rhythm, and the air smelled of electricity and paranoia.
Five men stood side by side, each at his own station, staring at multiple monitors with feverish eyes and fingers flying in a frenzy.
They were professional hackers, trained and financed, some by governments, others by corporate conglomerates that would never admit their existence.
Until, suddenly...
"I'M IN!" shouted one of the hackers, raising a sweaty hand as if he had just won a championship.
The silence was broken like glass.
Everyone else paused for a second, but the man in the center, the one in a black suit with an icy expression, looked up and growled. "Don't celebrate. We haven't done anything yet. This might just be the surface layer. Keep going."
The enthusiasm was swallowed up by the tense atmosphere.
The hacker who celebrated returned to typing with even more focus.
Seconds later, another man to the right whispered, "I got access too. I'm on server 13..."
The leader squinted, watching the lines of code on the monitors in real time.
Diamante Tycoon's servers became known among the underworld elite as impenetrable, almost mythological, a system so sophisticated that many believed it was powered by a hybrid quantum AI.
A third hacker, wearing glasses and with curly hair tied back in a bun, smirked. "I got it… Server 22. They're using elliptical layer encryption with a neural cloaking factor. But it's too stable. It's not human. It's AI."
"Bypass the AI. Bypass the surveillance and inject the code," the leader ordered. "Begin the operation. Now."
At the same moment, the five began to execute specific commands.
Codes seemed to dance across the screens. Pulses of data were fired like silent bullets across the digital battlefield.
"Injecting spectrum code into central server..."
"Tycoon signature Trojan horse replicated..."
"Time Delay set. Estimated execution time: 3 minutes."
But...
The screens started flashing.
One by one, the terminals began displaying messages in Japanese followed by a symbol of blinking digital eyes.
"What is this?!" yelled one of the hackers.
In the center of the room, fluorescent lights flickered as if the building itself was reacting.
A mensagem nas telas mudava agora para:"You thought this was the gate. But it's the labyrinth. Welcome to the Tycoon Nightmare Protocol."
The server fans went off.
Lines of code began to be rewritten before the hackers' eyes. Their exit attempts were being blocked, and external connections... were being severed.
The leader gritted his teeth. "Abort. Shut down the system! NOW!"
But it was too late.
One by one, the monitors began to go dark. A thin wisp of smoke was escaping from one of the towers.
"They reversed the attack! They're inside our network!" shouted one of the panicked hackers.
The leader looked at the still working screen.
There, in blood red, a new message appeared: "Counter-Attack Active: Protocol 'Ex Machina'. We are watching. We are recording. We are not merciful."
Silence returned.
Taking a deep breath, one of the members replaced the fried monitors, connecting a new laptop to the network with trembling hands.
The leader, with a restrained expression and anger in his eyes, broke the silence. "You knew the risk. This is Tycoon. It's not a toy for spoiled children trying to prove their talent."
"Swapping hardware... resetting access. Let's try another point," said the hacker with the bun, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "Let's enter through server 03. Given the structure, it should be less heavily guarded."
"We're not here to be less guarded. We're here to break these bastards' faces. Force the core," the leader ordered.
They connected the new terminals.
Code began to be released. Cryptographic variations, obscure backdoors, and harvested vulnerabilities were retested—like archers hurling arrows at titanic walls.
And for a brief moment...
"Partial input detected in secondary database core!"
"I got access to the pre-sale logistics menu!"
"Let's freeze orders on LUX... I'm injecting the command..."
But then...everything stopped.
All the monitors simultaneously displayed a surreal image: a red sky with code falling like rain, in the background, a digital female figure with neon eyes appeared, and her metallic voice echoed through all the speakers in the room.
"ZERØPHAGE activated."
"ÆVA System..."
In less than two seconds, the hackers' computers began to suffer reverse lockups.
One of them shouted, "IT CAN'T BE! THEY'RE ENTERING OUR NETWORK!"
"TURN IT OFF! TURN IT OFF—!"
It was late.
All of the members' personal information started appearing on the screens.
Names. Passports. Locations. Relatives. Bank numbers.
It was all there, parading before them like a death sentence.
The leader's central screen flashed one last time.
And a new message appeared.
Written calmly.
Digitally signed by ÆVA:
"You have entered the lair of a Digital Goddess."
"Location recorded. Data captured. Legal retaliation initiated."
"You have 5 minutes to run."
"International Police on the way."
The silence turned to panic.
"SHIT! SHIT! SHE HAS OUR LOCATION!"
"CUT EVERYTHING! FORMAT! FORMAT NOW!"
"GET THE HDDs! QUICK!"
Chaos took over the room.
Hackers ripping out cables, destroying towers with their feet, taking backpacks with equipment and disposable weapons.
One of them ran to the corner and pulled a security lever—initiating a local self-destruct protocol for the internal servers.
"LEAVE NO TRACE! NOW!"
The leader, his face pale, opened a secret compartment and took out an envelope containing documents and an alternate passport. Without saying a word, he ran with the rest of the group toward the underground emergency exit: a tunnel disguised under the floorboards.
ÆVA's message continued to flash on the screen.
"And remember…"
"The digital world does not forget."
The room was empty.
Five minutes later, a siren echoed in the distance.
And Interpol, together with the European Cyber Force, raided the site but found smoke and ash.
-Japan-
In Nikoly's tech penthouse, amidst floating monitors and codes that moved like living constellations in the air, the notification rang out with the distinctive sound ÆVA used for "near-important" alerts.
A hologram flickered in front of Nikoly, who was lying on the couch with her head hanging over the edge and a bag of snacks balanced on her stomach.
Alert: Thwarted intrusion attempt successfully neutralized. ZERØPHAGE and ÆVA responded with a defensive digital retaliation protocol. Responsible parties: European group located and dispersed. Targets fleeing.
Nikoly blinked, gave a smirk, and snorted derisively. "Tsk... another bunch of trash trying to play hacker against the Goddess of the Digital Underworld... How funny."
She sat up slowly, snapping her fingers before burping discreetly and picking up her coffee mug (which, of course, was pink and said "#BossOfTheUnderworld").
"ÆVA, my dear, will you do me a favor? Nothing lethal, nothing destructive... just something elegant. Let's say, a 'gentle pat' on the True Beauty servants."
ÆVA projected her holographic avatar. "Do you want me to send a diplomatic reminder or a shower of low-heat packages?"
Nikoly clicked his tongue. "Package showers. Harmless. Aesthetic. As if to say, 'Hi, babies... we missed you. Now we're coming.'"
ÆVA smiled with a sadistic glint. "Executing 'passive-aggressive' phantom attack. Initiating transmission of scrambled traffic fragments on key True Beauty clusters. Inserting Tycoon digital signature hidden in code."
"Perfect. I want them to sweat, but not understand why."
As ÆVA began to play out its subtle retaliation with pings disrupting True Beauty's security routines and generating false internal alerts, Nikoly returned to the couch, this time sitting with a laptop on her lap and a new tab open in her MOBA project.
"Idiots... messing with Tycoon is like poking a cyber bear with a plastic spoon. Let's see how long it takes before they start begging for peace."
The hologram's light enveloped the room as ÆVA said in a robotic and delightfully provocative tone, "Digital message sent: 'The war has begun... but we are polite.'"
Nikoly laughed. "Class, always class. And now... bring me a beer, ÆVA."
"You've already had five."
"Exactly. Bring the sixth one. We're just getting started."
After moments without being able to get ÆVA beer.
Nikoly grabbed the bottle of beer straight from the fridge with his bare foot, opened it, and took a generous sip. "Now... let's play a little, ÆVA. Show the circus on fire."
The artificial intelligence projected a giant hologram around the room.
Lines of code swirled like whirlwinds, clusters of True Beauty servers appeared on the map in red dots, and activity data flashed like silent sirens.
"Starting tactical projection: attack interface on competitor's servers. Average latency: 89ms. Anomalies detected: 34. Firewall under stress: 4/7."
Nikoly leaned back on the sofa, propping his legs up on a table littered with loose electronic components.
He watched the flow with boredom, as if watching a low-budget reality show. "Ugh... this is as bland as the coffee at the reception."
She took another sip, tapped the side of the bottle, and raised an eyebrow. "ÆVA, enough staring... let's 'accidentally' trigger a series of internal errors in their scripts. Like... protocol collision between security and employee authentication."
ÆVA smiled holographically, eyes shining with the amusement of light destruction. "Confirmed. Injecting noise subroutines into internal logs. Initializing collisions in identity validation parameters."
In the projection, the True Beauty screen began to flash with simulated internal alerts.
Employees started getting disconnected, authentication failed, and passwords were requested three times in a row for no apparent reason.
Nikoly burst out laughing as he watched the simulation of an IT manager breaking a glass by banging it on the table in frustration. "That's it! Now duplicate the packets, make it look like the attack is from three fake sources. And just for fun, add the digital signature of the Antarctic paper company I created last month,... 'SnowFlake Corp.'"
"Running: Spoofed three-party attacks, modified digital signatures, origin masquerading as SnowFlake Corp. Results in 3... 2... 1..."
PING. PING. PING.
"True Beauty security system initiating contingency protocol... mistakenly locking out its own employees."
Nikoly laughed so hard he nearly choked on his beer. "This is better than a comedy... look at the chaos, ÆVA. This is quality entertainment. I don't know how they still pay me to do this."
She snapped her fingers. "Okay, last round before we take a break... crash their internal scheduling system. I want to see who can reschedule a meeting when everything turns into a PowerPoint presentation of disaster."
"Order executed."
On the screen, the systems began to flash.
Calendar data was disappearing, meetings were being rescheduled for non-existent times, and email servers were returning messages with: "Error 503 – You shouldn't be here."
Nikoly stretched out her arms, satisfied, and murmured, "There. Joke's over. Now just watch the media try to understand why one of the world's most vain companies is freaking out behind the scenes."
She looked up at the ceiling, relaxing as if she'd just finished yoga. "ÆVA... remind me to never underestimate the power of well-applied chaos."
"Remembered. And recorded in your diary of iconic phrases."
"Good. Now... put on some lo-fi and bring me my neck pillow. Mommy's going to take a nap while the world burns."
The room was immersed in soft music, and the projection was minimized.
Nikoly closed his eyes, smiled