Every other team sat behind power.
High-end workstations.
Multi-monitor setups.
Custom keyboards, liquid cooling, high-speed RAM.
Rooms filled with quiet confidence—and expensive hardware.
In one corner of the digital battlefield, someone sat in front of a second-hand laptop.
Scratches on the casing.
A faint hum from an aging fan.
PK.
The countdown began.
He didn't rush.
Every step was already mapped in his mind—entry vectors, decoy paths, timing windows, response triggers. He wasn't reacting to the system.
He was anticipating it.
The timer hit zero.
His fingers moved.
Not wildly.
Not hesitantly.
Purposefully.
Keystrokes flowed in rapid sequences—commands chaining into scripts, scripts folding into behavior patterns that mimicked legitimate traffic. To the outer defenses, he looked ordinary. Predictable. Invisible.
One hour passed.
What the teams didn't know was that inside Z City's Army Cyber Division, another battle was underway.
Security analysts were already active.
Their screens flashed with alerts, heat maps, and anomaly graphs. Fingers moved faster than most civilians could manage—trained hands responding to microscopic deviations in network behavior.
They weren't panicking.
They were hunting.
Firewalls adapted.
Routes shifted.
Decoy systems activated.
Access points vanished and reappeared elsewhere.
The pressure increased.
At one hour and twenty minutes, the silence broke.
Team Anonymous launched the first virtual rocket.
Confirmation echoed across the competition network.
They were a ten-member team—experienced, disciplined, efficient. Their coordination paid off.
They had secured the first finalist slot.
Instantly, the remaining teams descended into urgency.
Across nineteen locations worldwide, keyboards erupted.
Rapid keystrokes.
Raised voices.
Last-minute pivots.
Brute force attempts intensified.
Stealth gave way to desperation.
Everyone was racing now.
Everyone except one.
PK didn't look at the clock.
His fingers kept moving—steady, precise—peeling through layers that others hadn't even identified yet.
The noise of the world grew louder.
He remained silent.
And the system was beginning to notice.