The international hacking competition began quietly.
No banners.
No cheering crowds.
Only encrypted channels, isolated systems, and observers who never revealed their names.
It was hosted by a consortium of the world's top security firms and senior developers—people who designed the very systems others spent their lives trying to breach.
Two rounds.
Twenty teams.
Only two would advance to the final.
The first round was scheduled for three hours.
The objective sounded deceptively straightforward.
Each team was required to breach the Z City Army Network Firewall, gain controlled access, and execute a simulated command—launching a virtual mini-rocket inside the closed system.
The first two teams to complete the task would qualify.
On paper, it sounded like a capture-the-flag exercise.
In reality, it was anything but.
The Z Army's security infrastructure was built on layered defense doctrine.
There was no single firewall.
There were walls behind walls.
The outermost layer consisted of traffic obfuscation and region-locked routing—designed to prevent even identifying the correct entry point. IP addresses rotated dynamically, masked behind decoy gateways that existed only to trap intrusions.
Beyond that lay behavioral intrusion detection systems.
These didn't look for malicious code.
They looked for abnormal intent.
Every packet was profiled.
Every request was compared against known military usage patterns.
Even a technically "correct" request would be flagged if it behaved too differently.
Deeper still was the segmented core network.
No direct paths.
No linear access.
Each subsystem required separate authentication, using time-based keys synchronized with hardware tokens that didn't exist in the real world—only within the simulation.
And at the heart of it all sat the launch protocol.
Isolated.
Air-gapped within the virtual environment.
Designed so that even if someone reached it, they wouldn't recognize it as the target.
Most teams wouldn't fail because they were careless.
They would fail because they didn't even know where to look.
As the countdown began, I watched the system initialize.
Three hours.
Twenty teams.
Some would brute force.
Some would probe cautiously.
Some would be eliminated without ever realizing why.
I adjusted my posture and exhaled slowly.
The task wasn't difficult.
It was layered.
And layers were meant to be peeled—one by one.
Somewhere, unseen, the observers leaned forward.
The first gate was open.