The journey to the Swiss Alps was a ghost operation. Silas, using old contacts and laundered funds, secured transport and forged documents. The thermal lance, disassembled and crated as "geological survey equipment," was shipped ahead. Mo Chen traveled under an assumed identity, a rich thrill-seeker on a mountaineering expedition.
The Kraken data center was hidden beneath a deceptively quaint ski resort. Their security was a layered nightmare: electronic surveillance, motion sensors, armed patrols, and blast doors rated to withstand a direct missile hit. Isolde's dossier had been thorough; it was how Mo Chen knew the front entrance was a death trap.
Her plan was not to go through the front door. Her plan was to go through the mountain.
She established a base camp in a remote, glacial valley miles from the resort. Under the cover of darkness, she and Silas assembled the thermal lance. It was a monstrous piece of machinery, a cannon-like device connected to a generator truck they'd also acquired. The plan was audacious: bore a vertical shaft down several hundred feet, then tunnel horizontally until they breached the data center's sub-basement.
It was a gamble of time and noise. They had a three-day window of bad weather forecasted to cover the sound of the drilling.
On the first night, Mo Chen ignited the lance. A concentrated beam of plasma, hotter than the surface of the sun, bit into the ancient rock. The sound was a deafening, continuous roar, like a dying star screaming into the earth. Molten rock sloughed away, cooling into jagged, black glass.
She worked in shifts with Silas, the heat and noise a physical assault. This was not the clean, quick destruction of the [Scorched Earth Protocol]. This was brutal, manual labor. A primal act of violation against the earth itself.
The system, however, approved. The sheer scale of the physical transformation—turning solid rock into vapor and slag—constituted a massive, continuous burn.
[Sustained destruction of geological assets registered. Daily quota exceeded. Personal funds increasing.]
She was being paid to dig her own path to vengeance.