Disabling the Opponent's Primary Backup System

A salty fog hung in the air, clinging to the old, grimy windows like a stubborn memory. The distant hum of harbor machinery sounded like the heavy breathing of a city that never slept.

Far away from that place, across islands, past several cities. A bright young man was staring at the main screen in his workspace.

That morning, Alaric's shoulders felt stiff. Maybe it was the mental pressure that had slowly started creeping in from all directions. But that was fine. He always had a way of making his enemies surrender before he ever did.

Human nature, after all, was never satisfied with doing good. Evil was harder to stop.

Then, a new message arrived. No sender. Just a series of random codes and a single, threatening line.

"Stop your search, or you'll lose more than just data."

The message appeared again and again, looping endlessly as if his system was haunted. Alaric scoffed. This wasn't the first time. But it also wasn't just a prank.

As far as he knew, he hadn't done anything wrong...

He sat in front of the computer, trying to get back to the work he hadn't finished. But somehow, there was always someone trying to interfere.

And for some reason, Alaric's thoughts went straight to one man. The man who lived near the abandoned docks.

Tio Mahendra—the one whose servers Alaric had quietly breached once, stealing several crucial data files before vanishing without a trace.

There had been little evidence left behind. But just enough to spark curiosity. And apparently, just enough to ignite some serious anger especially in him.

Alaric reopened the encrypted files he had stolen. No name. No face. But the patterns—the patterns always told a story. And Alaric had learned how to read patterns even when systems refused to speak.

His fingers moved quickly across the keyboard, retracing the source of the threatening message. It wasn't encrypted. But the signal was layered, bouncing from relay to relay like an echo in a never-ending digital cave.

Still, he caught a glimpse. Just a hint of a familiar pattern in the scrambling algorithm. One he'd cracked before. The same one used by the man at the docks.

"So, it's you again," he muttered, almost like greeting an old friend.

For the next hour, Alaric monitored the digital movements of his adversary. The man's main server was damaged, or more likely, deliberately sabotaged. Logs were leaking.

His digital defenses were off-balance. But traps were everywhere. Traps crafted by someone who had played this game for years. It was as if the man knew Alaric would come back.

And sure enough, the moment Alaric tried to access an old backdoor he'd created, the whole system stalled. Not from failure, but from a counterattack. Sophisticated malware began piling up like snow along the data routes.

Alaric cursed under his breath and quickly disconnected. His screens flickered, recovering, but the damage had been done. Two crucial patches he'd built to shield himself were lost. That could be a disaster.

The monitors lit up, displaying rows of code and data spikes surging wildly.

One threat after another came in. Notifications stacked. Anonymous messages flooded his inbox, each with the same eerie icon. A black-and-white mask, like a clown's face with no expression. Unclickable. Untraceable.

His hands paused. He looked toward the window, fogged with morning dew after the rain. Two birds sat on a branch, still and unaware that a war was being fought in the invisible world behind Alaric's screen.

"Pointless," he murmured. He brushed a hand through his hair.

"They're not playing around anymore. This attack was planned for days. Relentless and reckless."

"They're afraid I'll come back and tear their system apart. So they're striking first."

His mind spun further, strategizing a better response.

"If I fight them the same way... they'll know how to crush it. That's what they're hoping for. They built the trap."

"I need another way."

Alaric stood slowly. His steps carried him to an old shelf, where he kept his prototype weapons. He eyed a new device still under development, but with the potential to operate independently within a local network, completely untethered from the central server.

A small smile tugged at his lips.

"If they're going after the system... then I'll build something that works outside the system."

But seconds later, he paused. The idea would have to wait. He needed a faster, more immediate route—something he could slip through when they least expected it.

And Alaric was far from panicking. He studied the screens calmly, then walked to the water dispenser.

While most people would've been sweating in fear under such a brutal digital assault, Alaric took a moment to open a cupboard and grab a glass.

He pressed the cold-water button, sipping from the tall glass as his eyes flicked toward the TV still playing in the corner of the room.

"A severe thunderstorm is expected this afternoon in the eastern harbor area. High humidity levels may disrupt communication signals," said the local news anchor.

His lips curled ever so slightly. A perfect opportunity. "Just as I predicted," he said softly. He had already suspected these attacks were coming from the digital network of someone near the harbor.

Tio Mahendra—a former crypto investor who hid behind a digital trade company, but was actually the mastermind behind an illegal software black market.

Alaric had once infiltrated Tio's system to collect key data, and ever since, Tio had been after him.

Now back at his desk, Alaric's eyes grew sharp. His fingers moved swiftly, reopening a channel through an internal communication port in Tio's main server, a weakness he had studied closely before.

He had the core data. He knew the fault line. And when the harbor's signal dropped due to the storm, all their data redundancies would begin to collapse.

Then it happened. In the network traffic graph, the enemy's latency spiked. They lagged.

"Now," Alaric hissed.

In a single motion, fast but precise, Alaric deployed a series of cyberattacks he'd been holding back. These weren't ordinary scripts—they were connection breakers wrapped in false packets, armed with cache-wiping malware.

Once injected, the buffer overflowed, triggering a cascade of errors beyond their control.

BANG!

Through his mirrored backdoor, Alaric caught glimpses of Tio's screens flickering. Their systems couldn't process anything. Command delays, frozen dashboards, even their transaction graphs glitched out. Then came the final blow:

"Access Denied. Server Unresponsive. Try Again Later."

Frantic activity flared behind the scenes. You could tell by the flood of panic signals being sent out. Their trading servers, cash cows of their operation—had frozen. Even active user accounts were forced to log out. The whole system was on the edge of collapse.

Alaric just watched.

"They're scrambling now," he said quietly, as if giving them time to panic.

He knew the attack wasn't total destruction. But it was enough to freeze their digital operations for a few hours. And in the black market tech world, time was money. A single hour offline could cost them millions.

Behind it all, Alaric understood: this wasn't the end. But it was a warning. A message not written in words but in code. A message they couldn't afford to ignore.

He leaned back in his chair, rolling his neck to release the tension.

"If they keep pushing... I'll go to their main server myself.

In a full-screen display of numbers and shifting data streams, Alaric paused for a moment, holding a glass that hadn't fully left his lips. His thirst wasn't gone, and the water wasn't finished.

His eyes scanned the sudden spike in traffic, like a storm suddenly crashing onto the monitor. A second attack. Five minutes after the first.

He took a deep breath.

"That was fast... They don't want to lose momentum," he muttered, walking slowly to the right side of his desk. The weapon he had picked up earlier had been set down again.

Now his hand reached for it once more, brushing off a fine layer of dust from the long, slender object covered in heat resistant fabric.

The prototype weapon. The one he always kept hidden. The one never tested in a battlefield this intense. But... Alaric felt the time had come.

Calmly, he placed the empty glass beside the monitor and pulled off the cover.

The device was now in full view, a modular hybrid interface capable of piercing and reversing encryption in seconds.

It combined reactive AI with a smart-bounce algorithm Alaric had engineered himself.

His hand pressed the switch at the bottom of the module. A soft "click" blended with the digital hum from his main computer. Blue lights lit up along its frame. And then...

Activated.

"I know this is your last backup," he whispered. Not to anyone in particular, but to the empty space where he'd fought alone all this time.

The main screen displayed IP coordinates that were now denser, more protected than before. This wasn't a blind, reckless attack like earlier. It was more organized. More precise. More stable.

"You've come prepared," he murmured as he sat down, took a breath, and plugged the weapon's cable into the computer's main port.

"Smart Weapon Interface linked."

"AI targeting ready."

Alaric narrowed his eyes. They moved quickly, reading patterns, mapping out even the tiniest delay in the enemy server's activity. This time there were no weather interferences. No natural signal lags. But that didn't mean it was flawless.

His fingers danced across the keyboard. He wasn't just fighting back. He was activating the latest feature of the prototype: dynamic mimicry. A duplicate of himself was deployed into the network—a phantom user meant to confuse enemy logs.

"You'll be too busy chasing shadows..." he said with a slight smirk.