"What the fuck have they done to their system?" exclaimed a person in anger and disappointment, his bloodshot eyes, an obvious hint for the watchers to tell that he had been typing on the keyboard continuously for more than three hours without having any decent break during that period.
However, he wasn't the only one, the room he was in was filled with more than one hundred people doing the same task which he had been doing.
"They shouldn't have gotten enough time to completely overhaul their entire system within just a month, right?" questioned a man nearby who had given up just a few moments after the first person had resigned in frustration.
"While it is theoretically possible, they shouldn't have been able to make their system operate seamlessly like the way it is running right now. Even if all of those things are working in their favor, their system shouldn't have been upgraded to such a significant degree as such an upgrade would need a very long time to accomplish. We've been trying to breach their defenses for more than five hours but nothing can even latch onto their firewalls. How the heck did they go from being completely vulnerable in cyberspace to having an impenetrable wall in just a matter of a month?" He finished his words with a mix of a few words of self-doubt, logical reasoning and amazement at the transformation of their former victims who had now become formidable opponents.
"They couldn't have intentionally allowed us access during the first attack, right?!!" he asked his neighboring colleague.
"As much as I would want to deny that assumption, I also find it hard to disagree with it. The level of firewall we were met for the second time doesn't seem to simply take a month to accomplish the change. All of those anomalies could be explained if they had just allowed us the access during the first time and then blocked us out of it during the second time. Alternatively, it might also be possible that during our first assault, they were still building their security infrastructure, meaning that over the last month, they completed making it and replaced it over with their previous, shitty firewall," replied his colleague, trying to make sense of what they were experiencing during the current predicament.
"But which company is capable of doing such a significant project without using it as a means to brag about their capabilities? And why choose to start it at Eden as their testing ground in all of the places?" he pondered, this time trying to give a reason as to why his colleague's second theory doesn't seem to make much sense.
"Oh, I think I might know who could be the one behind this new firewall," his colleague responded, the guy's tone carrying excitement as if he had finally found a missing piece of the puzzle.
"Well, go on then. Who is it?" he asked impatiently, annoyed with the fact that his colleague had mentioned who it was but didn't reveal the name.
"GAIA Technology," answered the colleague in excitement, not trying to hide that he was a fanboy of the company– the makers of BugZapper, GAIA OS and the renowned game as their products.
"If it is truly them, then we might as well give up on this commission," the first guy declared with a sigh after hearing the name mentioned by his colleague. The mere mention of that name carried a dreadnought presence in the realm of technology, with most of their influences in the fields of security, OS and the gaming world.
Every product they released held an unparalleled level of standard and with more than three of their released products already reigning as industry-leading products in their specific fields, people had started expecting that their upcoming products would be of the same standards.
As for the man, he felt admiration for the company because of a single product from them, the BugZapper, a product that almost single-handedly sent the hacking world to the shadow realm, pushing it to redefine its limits.
He had personally tried the product and had nothing but praise for the one who had created it. The program would always manage to identify any vulnerabilities that would have gone unnoticed by most humans. Still, due to its emergence, the hacking world wasn't completely obliterated, rather the BugZapper had just raised the level of sophistication required to be able to hack the systems. Whenever a new way of hacking came up and succeeded in passing the program, in just a couple of hours a patch for it would be released, making it a continuous game of cat and mouse between hackers and Bugzapper, always keeping the hacking community excited as the GAIA technology always generously rewarded those who managed to get past their systems after they had patched it up, giving the community incentives for doing so.
"I will go and inform the boss about this. I hope he agrees with your assessment and decides to cancel the commission. If not, we will be spending days typing without any solutions," he remarked as he stood up from the chair and made his way to the office of the hacking group's leader, which was weird in itself since most hacking groups operated remotely, even when they were working as a team.
...
In the Eden airspace.
The four fighters of the Angels squadron could be seen maintaining a formation as they took to the skies, starting from the moment the Esparian press conference had initiated.
In an instant, the headgear of Angle One-One, piloted by James, shifted from green to red in his peripheral vision a few minutes after they had taken flight. The pilots who had graduated from Athena's training program knew that, their headgears turning red was a stamp of approval to shoot down any unverified or unidentified aircraft within their airspace, without even giving them any warnings.
Taking a look at the multitude of enemy bogies that had been detected by Sky Eye 0, a country scale scanner & radar like machine that had collected the information and integrated it into their aircrafts computers and their headgears, making their powerful radar(Henry's eye) to have no need of being on while they were still within Eden's airspace since Sky Eye 0 had the ability to capture every bit of information about their enemies that entered its scanning radius and it had a scan area that covered the entire airspace of Eden.
James the squadron leader, transmitted "This is Angel One-One. As you know, there are forty-five of them. Each of you can have ten each, as for the remaining five, they will be chosen by our computer randomly. Let's wrap this up as soon as possible and show them a performance for the the history books"
"Copy that," echoed the responses of Angel One-Two, Angel One-Three, and Angel One-Four.
Followed by the headgears of each pilot marking ten out of the forty-five enemy bogies that were on the way to Eden, and the squadron wasted no time as their planes' ailerons synchronously came to life while the aircraft rolled to the right with one of their wingtips pointing to the sky and the other pointing to the ground moments after that they pulled their control stick toward themselves, making all the four fighter jets to pull an aggressive turn to the right, changing their direction and heading towards the incoming bandits.
After flying for a few seconds in coordination, each of the fighters started heading in different directions, despite they were maintaining their collective trajectory due to the enemies having divided themselves into a squadron of five aircraft each, meaning that now there were a total of nine squadrons for them to take out.
However, even without having any visible missiles on their hardpoints, none of the pilots of the Angel's squadron seemed to have any worry regarding the upcoming faceoff. This meant that it was going to be a showdown of four against forty-five, with the underdogs having nothing other than guns at their disposal, while their enemies came fully loaded with an array of both long-range and short-range air-to-air missiles.
