Billionaire Villainess (Unedited) 18+

The Hack-Off

Note: Don't know how well this chapter was written.

Judith

The glow of the laptop lit up Judith's sharp features, casting faint shadows on the cluttered desk around her. The stale air of the computer lab barely registered in her mind as her fingers flew across the keyboard, executing a diagnostic test on one of Metube's smaller server networks. So far, there had been nothing but minor bug fixes and feature tweaking.

Then it happened.

A small anomaly. At first, it appeared like a hiccup in the system's traffic—possibly an internal script running incorrectly—but as Judith scrutinized the monitor, her heart skipped a beat. It wasn't just a hiccup. It was deliberate.

Her eyes widened as more unusual data packets surged through the network. She dove deeper, opening the command terminal and running a real-time log of Metube's operations.

"No way..." she whispered, leaning closer.

"Judith, what is going on?" Zayden asked, his voice concerned but not quite yet panicked.

"Someone has infiltrated the system," she replied quietly, her focus sharpening.

Her fingers moved even faster, typing commands in bursts to confirm her suspicions. The moment she saw a failed ping across multiple entry points, she shoved her chair back, biting out the words, "We're being hacked."

Zayden's eyes went wide. "Wait, what? Someone's hacking us?"

Liam, overhearing from his desk across the room, spun in his seat, his gaze fixing on Judith. "Are you serious? How did this happen? Everything's secure, right?"

Charles leaned in, squinting at her screen. "Judith, are you sure?"

Xavier was already standing, staring over Judith's shoulder at her laptop. "Judith... who would even be able to do this?"

Judith's pulse quickened as she processed the influx of data. She and the team had designed Metube's security system with meticulous care, and someone was now slicing through it with unnerving ease. Whoever was behind this wasn't just someone playing games—they were serious.

She remained calm, even as she felt the adrenaline rush through her veins. "We need to handle this fast. It's bad, but trust me guys, I've got this."

With a deep breath, she cracked her knuckles, then launched the first countermeasure: synthetic decoys. The rogue traffic pathways were suddenly flooded with cloned signals, doubling back onto themselves in an attempt to confuse the intruder. It was a quick tactic—one of her best tricks—but she knew it wouldn't hold long against a skilled hacker.

"Alright," she murmured to herself. "Let's see what you're made of."

Theo

Theo reclined slightly in his chair, watching the virtual map of Metube's network unfold on his screen. He hadn't felt this alive in months. Every layer of the platform's encryption offered resistance, but none of it felt insurmountable. It was like dismantling an intricate puzzle, one barrier after another falling to his probing lines of code.

Then, the decoys hit.

Theo's monitors flashed as his traffic suddenly splintered into nonsense, mirrored by the very network he had been infiltrating. He let out an amused snort, leaning forward and running his hand through his hair. "Decoys, huh?"

He loved a good challenge.

Quickly, he shut down two of his simulated proxies, rerouting through a separate chain of IP masks. It would take more than smoke and mirrors to stop him. His fingers danced over the keys as he executed a new set of programs, bypassing the redundant data and isolating the system's true pathways again.