Crack.
A crisp sound, drowned out by the neon lights from the alley entrance and the retching of a drunkard.
The sticky rain just managed to dilute the scent of blood splattered on the wall.
Raven's form, like a flowing liquid metal, transformed from the outline of a scrawny cleaner back into her iconic blue skin.
She shook her hands, as if dusting off something dirty, then turned and melted into the darkness.
Less than five minutes later.
The apartment door was pushed open.
Thud.
Three pieces of junk were thrown onto the table, not loudly, but with a clear air of disdain.
A Nokia, a fruit phone with a screen cracked like a spiderweb, and a wallet.
"Is this all the junk you found?"
Raven leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, looking down at Lin Ent, her golden vertical pupils filled with a mocking 'I knew it all along' expression.
"Lin Ent, you'd better not tell me this is your grand plan."
Lin Ent didn't even lift his head.
He slowly pulled out a pair of rubber gloves he'd swiped from the convenience store downstairs, and with a ripping sound, put them on.
His movements were like a perverted Doctor preparing to dissect an alien, completely out of place in this shabby room.
He first picked up the old Nokia.
"Oh, an antique."
He muttered, then grabbed a self-soldered data cable that looked like a centipede, violently pried open the back cover, and two metal clips precisely bit onto the motherboard's contact points.
On the computer screen, green code streamed down like a waterfall.
Suddenly, the code stopped.
A red wall popped up directly.
[ENCRYPTION_ERROR_0x7c]
"It's encrypted."
Raven's lips twitched, her mockery growing stronger.
"Looks like your little toy isn't very bright."
Lin Ent wasn't annoyed; instead, he let out a low chuckle.
"Damn, there's a wall."
"This is where it gets fun."
His fingers returned to the keyboard.
The next second, his entire aura changed.
The keyboard exploded under his fingers.
The dense tapping sound wasn't typing at all; it was a submachine gun on full-auto spray!
The mockery on Raven's face solidified inch by inch.
She couldn't understand the jumbled hieroglyphics on the screen, but she understood Lin Ent.
The fine sweat on his temples, his furrowed brow, and his increasingly bright eyes.
This wasn't posturing.
This was a... a feeling of absolute control over a certain power that she had only experienced when Magneto overturned an aircraft carrier.
She smelled a kindred spirit.
"Got it."
Less than ten minutes.
Lin Ent leaned back in his chair, the red wall on the screen already shattered, and a text message was forcibly extracted from within.
[The goods have arrived, the usual spot. -- Shark]
"'Shark,' a small-time leader of the Irish gang, in charge of dock smuggling."
Lin Ent pointed to an abandoned Pump Station Number Three on the map.
"The usual spot, here, the maintenance tunnel."
"Impossible."
Raven's voice was like a bucket of ice Water, pouring down on him.
Lin Ent abruptly stopped all his movements, looked up, and for the first time, truly and seriously looked at her.
"That place is the Dominican's slaughterhouse for traitors."
Raven's voice was cold and hard.
"Shark dares to go there to trade? Unless he wants to be poured into a cement block and thrown into the Hudson River to feed the fish."
Lin Ent's thoughts instantly clicked.
Damn.
He only saw the data.
But this woman saw the unwritten rules of the darkness.
Her intelligence was a mine that his broken computer could never dig up.
"A trap?"
His eyes changed instantly.
"A trap specifically set for clever people like us who want to take advantage."
"Just don't know who wants to get these messages?"
Raven nodded, feeling like she was finally no longer just a reinforced tool who only knew how to use her fists.
This feeling, damn it, wasn't bad.
"Interesting..."
Lin Ent wasn't discouraged; instead, he became excited,
"It means what they want to hide is much more valuable than those smuggled junk."
He snatched the cracked-screen phone, pulled a matchbox-sized black box from a drawer, and connected it in line.
"Physical bypass, forced flash memory read."
He explained casually.
The screen flickered a few times, and it actually skipped the lock screen.
In the album, besides eye-watering selfies, there was also a folder disguised as a system log.
Inside, was a video clip.
A man in a cheap suit was stuffing wads of U.S. dollars into a suitcase.
The camera shook, and a signboard flashed by in the background.
"Dominic Accounting Firm."
Lin Ent zoomed in on that frame, enunciating each word.
He suddenly turned his head.
"The wallet!"
Raven slapped the expired driver's license on the table.
The man's face in the video perfectly matched the photo on the driver's license.
"So..."
Raven's breathing changed; she felt like she had touched the tail of a shark.
"The text message is a smoke screen, and the real transaction location is the accounting firm? This bastard is laundering money for Kingpin, and he even wants to keep a hand in it, dumping the blame on the Irish?"
"Standard answer."
Lin Ent pressed Enter, and the firm's information popped up.
"One of Kingpin's White gloves, Hell's Kitchen's professional washing machine."
Raven was completely silent.
She looked at the three pieces of trash on the table.
Then she looked at the secret dug out on the screen, a secret that could shake all of Hell's Kitchen.
She tried her best, only bringing back a deadly trap.
And this man, relying on a keyboard and her single sentence, dug out a secret passage leading to Kingpin's vault from the bottom of the trap.
Lin Ent picked up a red pen and spread out the map again.
He first drew a circle on the West Side docks, wrote 'trap,' then drew a fierce line through it, crossing it out.
Then, at the other end of the map, at the location of the accounting firm, he drew a larger, blood-red X.
"Raven,"
he asked without looking up.
"Want to play for high stakes?"
"Rob that firm?"
Raven's throat was a little dry.
"No."
Lin Ent smiled, a smile that made Raven's scalp tingle.
"Stealing money? That's too Low."
"What we're going to steal is the ledger."
"The ledger?"
"Yes."
Lin Ent stood up and walked to the window, looking at the sinful neon lights below, like a madman admiring his own painting.
"With it, we'll know every black dollar Kingpin has, which councilman took his money, which cop is his dog."
He suddenly turned around, his eyes burning with ambition.
"We will be, in effect, squeezing Kingpin's balls!"
"If we confront him head-on, the two of us combined aren't even enough to stick in his teeth. But hiding in the dark, using the method he fears most, slowly hollowing out his underground kingdom... Don't you think that's very interesting?"
"The firm's network security has holes, but the physical security is definitely military-grade."
Lin Ent's gaze fell on Raven, terrifyingly hot.
"Infrared, gravity sensors, sonic waves... I need a true ghost. A top Agent who can turn into a Fly and snap everyone's necks in one second."
He pulled a U-disk from his pocket and continuously typed code on the keyboard.
Half an hour later.
He pushed the U-disk to the center of the table.
"Sneak in and plug this little gadget into their main server."
"Three minutes, copy everything, then self-destruct. I imagine you'll have plenty of ways to get out."
Raven looked at the man in front of her.
He was crazier than Eric, and more... effective than Charles.
He wasn't painting a grand vision; he was handing her a knife.
A knife that required two people to plunge into the heart of the King of New York.
"Okay."]