The air in Samir's dorm room was thick with the smell of burnt coffee and overheated electronics. It was 2:00 AM. Their flight to Shenzhen, China, was in six hours, and their suitcases lay half-empty on the floor.
Zaid was carefully packing the prototype AR glasses into a shock-proof metal case. He was calm, calculating the logistics of negotiating with Chinese factory bosses.
Samir, however, was staring at his main monitor, his face illuminated by the harsh blue light of the terminal screen. He had been migrating the 'Mind Palace OS' source code to a secure cloud server for the trip.
Suddenly, a string of red text scrolled rapidly across his secondary monitor. Then, the fans on his makeshift server tower roared to life like jet engines.
"Wait..." Samir muttered, leaning closer to the screen. His fingers flew across the keyboard. "What is this?"
Zaid stopped packing. He knew that tone. "A problem?"
"A big one," Samir's voice tightened with rising panic. "Someone is knocking on our back door. Hard. Multiple IP addresses, bouncing through proxies in Eastern Europe and South America. They are trying to bypass the firewall."
Zaid walked over, his eyes scanning the cascading lines of code. He didn't know how to program, but his mind instantly memorized the patterns of the red alerts flashing on the screen.
"Is it a random botnet?" Zaid asked.
"No," Samir said, his hands moving frantically as he deployed countermeasures. "This is targeted. It's a brute-force injection attack combined with a sophisticated phishing protocol. They aren't trying to crash the server, Zaid. They're trying to mirror it. They want the source code."
Across the city, in a dark, basement apartment, a mercenary hacker hired by Apex Tutoring cracked his knuckles. He had been paid fifty thousand dollars by Mr. Tariq just to break into a college student's dorm server. He thought it would take ten minutes.
But Samir was a prodigy.
"I'm locking them out of the main directory!" Samir shouted over the noise of the screaming server fans. "But they are throwing too much traffic at me! It's a DDoS smokescreen. They are trying to blind me while a secondary program slips in through the side!"
"How much time until they breach the core?" Zaid asked, his voice dead calm.
"Three minutes!" Samir yelled, sweat dripping down his forehead. "If they get the algorithm, anyone can build our glasses. The monopoly is dead!"
Zaid closed his eyes. The panic in the room faded. He entered his Mental Empire.
He walked down the digital hallway he had built just two days ago when Samir was explaining how the server network was structured. Zaid had visualized the network as a medieval castle. The 'Main Directory' was the throne room. The 'Firewall' was the outer wall.
He looked at the mental map. If the enemy is attacking the gates to distract the guards, where is the spy sneaking in?
Zaid opened his eyes. "Samir, check the beta user diagnostic ports. The connection we leave open to receive bug reports from Ali and the other nine students. If I wanted to sneak into a fortress, I'd wear the uniform of an ally."
Samir's eyes widened. He switched windows, typing a command to isolate the diagnostic ports.
His face went pale. "You're right. They spoofed Ali's IP address. They are already inside the outer layer. They are sixty seconds away from downloading the spatial-mapping algorithm!"
"Can you block it?"
"They've encrypted their tether!" Samir slammed his fist on the desk. "I can't cut the software connection in time without wiping our own database!"
"Then we don't use software," Zaid said.
Before Samir could process the words, Zaid reached behind the massive server tower. He didn't look for a keyboard. He didn't type a line of code.
Zaid grabbed the thick, black Ethernet cable that connected the server to the wall—and violently ripped it out.
The red alerts on the monitor instantly froze. The fans slowly began to quiet down. The room plunged into absolute silence.
Samir sat frozen, staring at the disconnected cable in Zaid's hand.
"Did... did they get it?" Zaid asked.
Samir quickly checked the internal logs. He let out a long, shaky breath and slumped back in his chair. "No. The transfer was halted at four percent. It's corrupted data. They got nothing but junk code."
Zaid dropped the cable onto the desk. "Tariq."
"He hired a professional," Samir wiped his forehead, still shaking from the adrenaline. "Zaid, my security was good, but this guy was military-grade. If we had been asleep, or if we were on the plane... we would have woken up with nothing."
Zaid looked at the dark monitors. The reality of their situation was settling in. They weren't just two college kids running a side hustle anymore. They were holding technology worth billions, and the old titans were willing to draw blood to steal it.
"Physical servers in a dorm room won't cut it anymore," Zaid said, his voice cold and resolute. "When we land in China, we aren't just buying hardware. We are hiring the best cybersecurity firm money can buy. We are building a digital fortress."
He picked up his metal briefcase and headed for the door.
"Grab your bags, Samir. The tutorial level is over.