"Damn damn damn damn damn!!"
V kept cursing under her breath, her heart still pounding.
She carefully dragged the biotech soldier, whose neck she had twisted and who might still be breathing, into the corridor's workspace, gasping for air.
Meanwhile, Mercer remained unfazed, his eyes gleaming: "Nice work, I saw it on the cameras, a beautiful sequence of stealth kills."
"Damn! Is this your idea of stealth? You sent me alone to knock out everyone who could see the elevator?"
Beads of sweat dotted V's forehead, partly because of Sianwistan, and partly from nerves.
Mercer smiled at her: "Didn't you do a great job? Look, their biosignals can't trigger alarms, and I've hacked the cameras.
The people in the monitoring room are only seeing the normal patrol footage I recorded earlier, looping continuously.
Now, we have at least ten minutes of safe operation time."
"What kind of stealth is this!" V was still a bit shaken—she almost snapped a guy's neck earlier.
She had no clue about knockout techniques; she just relied on brute strength, but Mercer insisted she could only knock them out, not kill them... at least not until they had stolen what they needed and left. This made V extremely nervous.
Mercer chuckled, hands in pockets, swaggering towards the elevator outside: "Has anyone noticed us yet?"
"No." V cautiously looked around, following behind him.
"Then what's the problem? As long as no one notices, it's absolutely a successful stealth operation."
Mercer's decisive words left V momentarily speechless.
It was now two in the morning, and Mercer and V had infiltrated through the biotech company's side door. To say "infiltrate"...well, Mercer had hacked the side door while standing at the entrance. At the same time, he had also hacked all the cameras that could see the door.
Then they nonchalantly walked through, hacking as they went, turning all the cameras and security systems blind before they could trigger any alarms.
Technically, these smart cameras, with their built-in AI scanning systems, should identify an intruder in less than a second.
But Mercer's speed was ridiculously fast, so fast that even the camera designers and the biotech security heads hadn't imagined that someone could hack directly, faster than the equipment could scan...
Was he even human?
And the price Mercer paid was merely feeling dizzy for a moment, having to take a breather in a side room by the elevator.
As for the human part of the security, V handled that.
Her job was to knock out all the security personnel guarding the areas near the elevator and side door and drag them into a room.
Typically, these guards would periodically use voice checks to check on each other, but it wasn't too frequent.
Mercer would specifically wait till they finished a report before taking action, ensuring that unless there was some unlucky anomaly, the sudden loss of contact wouldn't raise any alarms in the short term.
"Next, we just take the elevator up directly?"
V looked at Mercer, trying to catch her breath.
Mercer glanced at her and pointed at her nose: "You're bleeding again... Have you been taking your meds regularly?"
V nonchalantly sniffed, turned her face away, and casually wiped with her hand: "I feel like I've been too fast...you get what I mean, right?"
"Seems like you'll also need those artificial organs soon." Mercer sighed: "Looks like the two of us put together won't have much good flesh left soon."
"Who cares, don't those rich folks replace organs every few years too, just to keep their youth?"
V said carelessly: "Synth parts are way superior to the original gears, these synthetic organs usually don't put much strain on you.
It's just that my body's strong enough, who else do you know who can just replace some knee bones, ligaments, and still keep up this speed like me?"
"Those rich folks replace them with healthy human organs... They think prosthetic modifications, even with synthetic organs, could negatively affect the body, so they prefer organs from younger humans.
Ha, they're just a bunch of idiots, creating a ton of stuff and boasting about it, but then they're too scared to use them themselves, worried it'll impact even a bit of their quality of life…"
Mercer grumbled as he walked out, heading to the elevator with V, staring at the elevator display for a moment before the door automatically opened.
V was amazed: "How come you don't even need to plug in a cable? I've seen those hackers usually need to connect their data cables and mess around for a while."
"That's why they're just 'those hackers', and I'm your boss." Mercer smirked, walked in, and pressed the button for the seventeenth floor.
"We need to go to Dr. Kuno's office, her computer over there has direct server access, we'll hack and transfer the data to my laptop, then we can get out."
Having said that, Mercer paused, watching the elevator screen as a red pop-up 'authentication needed' appeared. With a gleam from his prosthetic eye, the red pop-up soon turned green showing 'verified', and the elevator began its ascent.
"Did you just hack that?" V asked curiously.
"Not now, did it before — I had deep-dived from the public network and left some backdoors, letting me connect remotely through the public network whenever needed. The elevator's controls aren't on the local network, it's on their main server net."