TARGET

스물

"You really need to find an effective sleep schedule, cause this ain't it,"

"Fuck off Minghao."

A sly grin danced on the lips of the aforementioned, crossing his legs to sit criss-cross in his office chair,

"What? I'm only looking out for your keyboard, Wonwon. With that amount of slobber you'd rather save it for the Sahara desert instead, maybe make it our next mission-"

Accustomed to his aimless banter, Wonwoo grunted in reply, sitting up to-indeed-find yet another small pool of drool on the white table top.

He sighed as he wiped it off with his sweater sleeve, promptly putting on his glasses to fixate himself to the plethora of screens for probably another 12 hour increment before he would pass out again.

Minghao and Wonwoo, prominently the latter, spent the duration of their time in the tech lab together recently due to their substantial advancements towards 17th Circle. Occasionally, others would join the duo and help in any feasibly possibly way, but no one could equate to the expertise of the two:

Wonwoo was practically born for electrical engineering and software development,

Minghao was just plain smart and a fast learner.

Then again, due to Minghao's stargift, he had inhumane memory capabilities, which was quite complementary in the realm of long codes and complex logistics.

Despite it being the Monday right after the Christmas festivities, the dorms had already returned to their habitual bustling schedule. They usually didn't do much for new years because earlier on in the post-nova era they had found no point in it-

there was no use in celebrating another year, it was just another year living in a broken society.

Thus, the world didn't really celebrate New Years from that point, which was quite strange because other holidays were still celebrated, if not in a more extravagant manner then before to give the citizens something to celebrate.

It was always quite odd to Wonwoo, but he didn't pay it much mind.

Wonwoo quickly powered his main computer back on, scouting the cyberspace surrounding his adversary's firewall, looking for any slight changes in the bit encryption. Minghao was about to start leading a mission with Soonyoung and Seungkwan as the on-field operators.

The countdown to 15th circle arrival ticked on one of the grand monitors before the two, serving as a constant reminder that they worked against the steadfast progression of time.

This particular time frame was so vital to Ursula because 17th Junior Squadron didn't typically engage or partake in any out-of-domestic-interface contact, which led Wonwoo to assume that any contact would weaken their systems.

To test this, he created a mock-trial with similar encryption patterns as 17th Circle's software and simulated a small out-of-domestic-interface contact stream via Internet Relay Chat (IRC) which is what one would use if they want to contact someone without it being detected by internet, ethernet, or intranet sensors. Wonwoo found out that the small stream did seldom unravel the framework of the automatic software workarounds, meaning he would be able to get in from that small imperfection the contact had caused.

To say he was ecstatic when he found this out is a colossal understatement. Having tried everything else besides this and his attempt being futile, Wonwoo was left with the one option that this little trial gave him:

Wait like a sitting duck until 17th Junior circle and 15th circle contact each other.

He had programmed and embed a simplistic detector for this out-of-domestic-interface contact. Well, it was a basic one at first, but due to the amount of time he had on his hands- he accidentally-yet-not-so-accidentally went overboard and created a high-functioning detector out of the sheer fun of it.