The five-minute countdown timer on Karvin's screen was no longer a symbol of financial disruption; it was a ticking fuse attached to his life. 4:37. The GPS coordinates of his own office building mocked him, a perfect lock-on signature derived from the desperate communications he'd just used to launch the political counter-attack. The Billionaire had been watching the Satellite Infrastructure channel, waiting for Karvin to give up his location.
The Iron Hand is closer than Asia.
Karvin didn't waste time on regret. He was no soldier, no spy—he was a hacker, a digital architect. He couldn't fight the Iron Hand, but he could make the environment fight for him.
He slammed his emergency console open. The security in this building—a highly specialized, off-grid financial bunker—was designed to stop digital entry, not a physical assault led by an elite military contractor. Karvin pulled up the facility blueprints: one heavily reinforced entry point, three layers of internal security, and a single, critical weakness: the building's environmental control system (ECS).
"Dara, listen closely. I need you to forget the market and execute a complete priority bypass on the main grid's environmental array," Karvin ordered, his voice rapid but calm. "I need localized atmospheric disruption in the primary hallway outside my office. I'm talking temperature spikes, sudden pressure drops, anything non-lethal but disorienting."
Dara, still reeling from the HFT reversal in the previous chapter, sounded terrified. "Sir, if I bypass the ECS safety, I could blow the core processors, risk a fire—"
"Just the hallway, Dara! And do it now! They will breach in less than four minutes!"
Karvin stood up, pulling a lightweight emergency beacon from a locked drawer—a tool used for contacting remote intelligence partners, not for defense. He looked at the bonsai tree, a symbol of the control he had just lost, and took one final, steadying breath.
2:55.
A loud, metallic clang echoed from the main entry point three floors down. The Iron Hand wasn't bothering with diplomacy or lock-picking. He was using a controlled explosive charge to breach the first layer of reinforced steel.
Karvin ran to his office door, pulling a small, fiber-optic cable from his pocket. This cable was the building's emergency maintenance link to the external communications hub. It was slow, cumbersome, and totally analog—which made it invisible to the digital siege engines the Billionaire was surely running.
He stripped the end of the cable with frantic precision, exposing the fragile core wires. He wasn't connecting to the internet; he was connecting to the building's oldest, simplest system: the emergency fire alarms.
1:30.
Karvin heard the heavy thud of the second blast. The Iron Hand was two floors away, moving with relentless, calculated speed.
"Dara! Hallway atmosphere: status!"
"Initiating now, sir! Temperature rising rapidly, initiating localized negative pressure drop! It'll feel like a sudden altitude change!"
Karvin jammed the exposed fiber-optic wires into the ceiling access panel just above his door. Sparks flew. He bypassed the entire security system and manually short-circuited the fire alarm control panel.
A shrieking, deafening siren immediately began to howl throughout the bunker. Simultaneously, the emergency floodlights strobed blindingly. This wasn't a distraction; this was an overload. The Iron Hand relied on cold, calculated efficiency. The Iron Hand did not handle sensory chaos well.
0:45.
Heavy, armored boots stomped outside his office door. The door itself—thick oak plated with titanium—vibrated violently as the Iron Hand prepared his final breach.
Karvin sprinted back to his main terminal, launching his final gambit. He didn't have time to run; he had to burn the data and erase his own digital presence. He initiated a single, unrecoverable data scrub protocol: a multi-pass cryptographic overwrite designed to wipe every storage device in the room—including the main console the Billionaire had used to send the terrifying message.
If you control the data, you control the war.
The Iron Hand smashed the door inward with a terrifying hydraulic thud.
The man who entered was huge, silent, and covered in black armor. He was unaffected by the sudden heat and the negative pressure drop, moving with slow, practiced menace. He ignored the sirens and strobes, his eyes fixed only on Karvin. He raised a non-lethal weapon designed to disable an operative with an EMP burst.
"You should have stayed out of Asia, Karvin," the Iron Hand's voice was a low growl, amplified by his helmet.
"And you should have checked the fire escape, Iron Hand," Karvin whispered, his hands flying over the keyboard.
As the Iron Hand fired the EMP burst, Karvin hit the final key—not on the wipe protocol, but on the emergency beacon. He triggered the beacon, not to signal his external contacts, but to activate a long-forgotten, localized network function he had built into the office's ventilation system: a sudden, powerful blast of harmless, compressed inert gas designed to equalize pressure—and blow open the emergency ventilation grate in the ceiling.
The EMP blast hit Karvin's console, instantly frying the screen and halting the data scrub at 98%. But it was too late to stop the fire alarm short and the gas blast.
With a loud HISS, the ventilation grate above Karvin was ripped off its hinges. The Iron Hand paused, distracted by the sudden, secondary noise and the sudden rush of air.
Karvin, moving like a shadow, grabbed the still-howling emergency beacon, leaped onto his destroyed desk, and scrambled up onto the raised server rack. He pulled himself through the ventilation hole, landing hard in the narrow, hot maintenance duct above the ceiling tiles.
Below, the Iron Hand trained his flashlight on the hole. "A coward's retreat, Karvin. You leave your data behind."
Karvin, covered in dust and sweat, looked down at the server room. The Billionaire had won the battle—Karvin's physical location was exposed, his office was destroyed, and 2% of his crucial data remained behind. But Karvin had won the war's first phase.
"Check your email, Iron Hand," Karvin coughed into the narrow duct. "The ICSC liaison received my coordinates twenty minutes ago. You have less than twelve hours before the Asian mine is sanctioned into total chaos. Enjoy the fire."
He pulled the ceiling panel shut. The sirens and strobing lights faded as he crawled away, leaving the Iron Hand trapped in a room of noise and half-wiped data. Karvin was running, but he was free, and the entire world was now watching the Asian Mineral Mining operation thanks to the European satellite.