Chapter 118: Battle Between Hackers

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

An alarm blared through the quiet bedroom.

Derrick groaned, still half-asleep.

He reached out a lazy hand to slap the top of the clock and turn it off.

SMASH!

Still groggy, he completely failed to control his strength.

The alarm clock exploded into shattered plastic and metal.

The heavy impact drove straight through the wood, causing the entire side table beside his bed to instantly collapse.

CRASH!

Splintered wood and broken debris hit the floor in a noisy heap.

Derrick blinked, the sudden noise snapping him fully awake.

He rubbed his eyes, pulled out his phone, and immediately ordered a replacement side table and alarm clock.

He swung his legs off the bed and turned around.

Cassie was standing nearby, staring at him and the ruined table with a completely blank look on her face.

Derrick forced a quick, awkward smile.

He pushed past the mess, walked straight to his desk, and fired up his computer.

He logged into his company’s system to see how things were running.

The screen lit up with green numbers.

Sales were surging through cleanly and steadily.

Everything was going great, and all the products were selling normally without a hitch.

Derrick clicked on his account balance.

The grand total made him pause.

His balance had officially reached 50 million.

Even after transferring massive amounts of money over the past few days, his wealth was already bouncing back higher than ever.

It had been a full month since Derrick and Keira returned from the Chen family estate.

At first, Derrick had kept his guard up, half-expecting some kind of trouble or political fallout from Chen Feng.

But nothing came.

Instead, everything slowly settled into a steady, comfortable rhythm.

Derrick leaned back in his chair, staring at the glowing numbers on his screen.

Fifty million social credits.

He was officially a multi-millionaire, and the revenue wasn’t slowing down anytime soon.

A huge part of that crazy success was Beth.

Two weeks into the month, she had walked into the Alchemist Guild testing center to take her Tier 1 examination.

She passed with flying colors on her very first try.

The second her badge was registered in the public system, the vultures moved in.

Recruiters from big corporate factions and wealthy noble families tried everything to poach her.

They sent fancy gift baskets, offered insane signing bonuses, and promised her high-end apartments just to sign a contract with them.

Beth didn’t even bother reading their letters.

She walked straight past the recruiters and dumped every single contract into the trash can without blinking.

Derrick wasn’t going to treat her like cheap labor either.

The moment she brought her Tier 1 badge home, he raised her monthly pay to 500,000 social credits.

He also handed her a 30 percent cut on everything she crafted that got sold on his site.

And since almost everything she made sold out within hours, she was earning a fortune of her own.

As for Keira, things had been strangely quiet.

She had been missing ever since they got back from her family’s estate.

Right after they stepped through the door that day, her communicator had buzzed with an urgent summons from the Guild Master.

She barely had time to catch her breath before telling Derrick she had to leave for Guild business.

Derrick hadn’t asked questions or tried to pry into her work. He just let her go.

Still, a whole month had gone by without a single word from her.

{Ting!}

Buzz!

A new message popped up on his phone.

Cassie tilted her head, watching him closely as he read the screen. Since her collage was on a break she was at home most of the time.

She had been helping Derrick manage his site and other tasks, learning from practical experience.

“Who is it?” Cassie asked.

She knew her hapless brother had zero friends these days.

Whoever was texting him had to be either Keira or someone related to his work.

“It’s from Vance,” Derrick said.

He had already told her everything about Vance before, so she knew exactly who he was talking about.

“I asked him to set me up with someone who could manage a chunk of my money,” Derrick explained. “Just to invest it until I figure out a better use for it.”

He looked back down at the screen.

“Vance came through. He just reached out to the guy on my behalf.”

Cassie hummed as she painted her nails and wondered out loud. “When is Sister Keira coming back? I am not improving any more and you don’t have the time to teach me anymore…”

“I am not sure, Cassie.” Derrick paused a beat and glanced at her, “Do you want to join the gym? There are many fighters? Including women. We can fight there whenever we go together and learn from each other.”

In the past month, Cassie had reached the middle stage of the Physical Strengthening Realm and so did their mother, Rebecca.

“Can I? That is a nice idea. But I don’t want to use your money.” Cassie hesitated a little but Derrick could see she wanted to join him.

“Why are you being so reserved? Did you forget, I give you salary now. I can give advance for the first month of the work you have been doing? How does 20k SC sound?”

Cassie opened her mouth to reply, but before she could utter a word—

WEE-WOO! WEE-WOO! WEE-WOO!

Loud, red warning sirens flashed across Derrick’s computer monitors as alarm bells blared through the room.

For a second, both of them froze.

Derrick sprang into action. He slammed himself into his chair and pulled the keyboard toward him.

“What is happening?” Cassie asked, her eyes wide with panic.

“Someone’s trying to breach our main server,” Derrick muttered, his expression instantly sharpening.

His fingers flew across the keyboard in a blur of motion, typing out lines of override commands.

He immediately fired up the layers of counter-hacking scripts and defensive walls he had set up beforehand.

Lines of glowing code scrambled down his screen at terrifying speeds.

As he fought off the incoming intrusion, Derrick’s eyes narrowed.

The structural pattern of the attack… the aggressive, overlapping protocols…

It’s you, Derrick thought, his heart cold.

He had seen this exact coding signature before.

It was the same hacker who had breached Keira’s supercomputer back then.

But unlike Keira, Derrick didn’t have a military-grade supercomputer backing him up.

His setup was just a standard mainframe embedded right into his desk.

Even though he knew how to counter the attack, his hardware simply couldn’t keep up with the overwhelming data load.

VRRRRRR!

The cooling fans inside the desk spun up to maximum speed, screaming under the strain.

A wave of hot air began venting out from the sides, and the metal frame embedded in his desk was quickly growing hot to the touch.