Chapter 1
The air conditioning on the fourth floor of the Vertex Tech Corp building was blowing too strongly, spreading the sharp scent of cheap instant coffee and the nose-stinging, pine-scented floor disinfectant throughout the room.
Beyond the large floor-to-ceiling glass walls, the metropolitan city of Oomera lay spread out in all its exotic splendor. The blue waters of the Mediterranean shimmered like millions of diamonds shattering under the scorching midday sun, while the white limestone walls of the city’s ancient architecture stood in stark contrast to the modern harbor filled with giant steel containers and international cargo ships.
Oomera is a hot, dynamic, and sensual tropical paradise—a stark contrast to the office atmosphere, which feels as cold as ice and suffocating.
“Sigi! How many times do I have to tell that thick skull of yours? The network encryption report for the finance division is supposed to be on my desk before lunchtime! Are you deliberately trying to make me look like a fool in front of the director?!”
The shrill, piercing voice of Ronald, the head supervisor of the IT division, shattered the silence in the room. His high-pitched voice echoed among the rows of rigid gray cubicles. Several colleagues working in the neighboring cubicles immediately stopped typing, turned their heads, and suppressed amused smiles, while others stared at her with the condescending looks that had become a daily occurrence for the girl.
Sigrid Victory—or Sigi, as everyone in the office called her—startled in her chair. With a movement she deliberately made to look very clumsy and awkward, she adjusted her thick, black-framed reading glasses, which had slipped down her nose. She was wearing a loose, oversized mustard-yellow knit cardigan, which made her slender frame disappear beneath the folds of thick, dull wool. Her beautiful dark blonde hair was haphazardly pulled up and secured with a cheap brown plastic clip, leaving a few stray strands to frame her pale, makeup-free face.
“Mm… mm… I’m sorry, Mr. Ronald,” Sigrid chirped. Her voice trembled slightly, heavy with the anxiety and helplessness of a lowly intern. She clutched the hem of her cardigan with trembling fingers. “The server experienced some lag due to extremely heavy traffic from the port this morning. I’m currently clearing the cache and re-encrypting the data to prevent any leaks before I send it to your desk.”
Ronald snorted harshly, rolling his eyes with an exaggerated look of disgust. He flung a thick stack of documents bearing the Vertex Tech logo onto Sigrid’s desk with such force that the impact made her warm cup of chamomile tea rattle and spill slightly onto the imitation marble surface.
“Nice work, Sigi! Don’t give me any of those stupid technical excuses! If it weren’t for your uncle begging the HR director to let you intern here, I would’ve kicked you out the very first week. A clueless girl like you should be working in a dusty underground archive room, not in Oomera’s leading cyber division!” Ronald snapped harshly, tapping Sigrid’s desk with his fat index finger.
“Yes, sir. I’ll finish the report right away,” Sigrid replied, bowing her head deeply and staring at the gray linoleum floor beneath her feet as if she were holding back tears because she was so intimidated.
Ronald turned away with a haughty stride, heading back to his comfortable private office. Sigrid’s coworkers returned to their respective computer screens, whispering softly while casting stifled laughter toward Sigrid’s cubicle.
As soon as the glass door to Ronald’s office closed tightly, Sigrid slowly raised her head. Her head movements were no longer awkward. Her shoulders, which had initially slumped listlessly, now stood straight with an icy elegance.
Behind the slightly dusty lenses of her thick glasses, a pair of emerald-green eyes—which had initially looked frightened and dim—suddenly flashed sharply like an icy dagger ready to tear its prey apart. There was no longer any anxiety there. There was no longer the resignation of a naive girl. All that remained was the cold gaze of a top-tier predator sizing up just how easily she could snap Ronald’s neck with a single bare-handed snap.
Ronald, you poor, stupid sheep, Sigrid thought to herself, the corners of her lips curving into a thin, deeply cynical and cruel smile. If you knew that I could wipe out all your financial assets with a single snap of my fingers, expose your sordid affair with the marketing division secretary to your wife, and leave your corpse to rot at the bottom of Oomera Harbor before sunset… you’d surely be crawling across this floor, licking my shoes, begging for mercy.
However, Sigrid held back. Momentary emotions were a luxury a leader of the underground world could not afford. The identity of “Sigi the Loser” was too valuable to be destroyed just because of some low-level supervisor’s ego.
For Sigrid, her internship at Vertex Tech Corp was the perfect tactical cover. As a low-level IT staff member who was constantly ignored and deemed incompetent, she had unrestricted physical access to the main fiber-optic cables and sub-servers connecting the entire city of Oomera.
Sigrid turned her gaze back to the dual monitors in front of her. Her slender fingers were no longer moving slowly. They danced across her mechanical keyboard at an extraordinary speed—almost beyond what a normal human could achieve. On the main screen, she appeared to be typing tedious lines of administrative code for the finance division. However, on the second monitor—hidden behind a multi-layered virtual private network (VPN) with dynamic encryption that she had built herself—a real digital war was raging.
A blood-red warning light flickered silently in the lower right corner of her dark screen.
An intrusion detected at Sector Four Port.
Sigrid’s eyebrows knitted sharply. Sector Four was the main gateway for all of her secret logistics. Through that port, the Viper Syndicate—the largest mafia organization she ruled with an iron fist in Oomera—smuggled military technology components and tactical weaponry worth millions of dollars. If anyone managed to hack into the sector’s cyber gateway, her entire operation would be paralyzed or, worse yet, exposed to the federal police.
“Who is this bastard?” Sigrid whispered so softly, her voice so low and menacing it could send chills down anyone’s spine.
Her fingers moved faster and faster, launching high-level military cyber defense protocols. This cyberattack felt vastly different from the amateur hacks typically sent by local gangs or cheap mercenary hackers. This was a highly structured, methodical, rigid, and efficient attack. The attacker was using an extremely sophisticated foreign encryption protocol, attempting to cut off the port’s biometric access channels.
Sigrid launched a tactical counterattack, trying to trace the attacker’s physical IP address through dozens of fake proxy servers across Northern Europe. However, just as she was about to breach the hacker’s main defense wall to remotely burn out his hardware, the connection was suddenly and unilaterally severed by high-level protection, leaving a small gray iron logo on her screen before vanishing without a trace.
The Iron.
Sigrid leaned back in her chair, exhaling a long, warm breath onto her own face. Her eyes narrowed sharply as she stared at a blank spot on her screen. “The Iron… a foreign syndicate from the North. They’re actually bold enough to infiltrate my territory.”
Before she had a chance to analyze the attack further, the special cell phone stored in a secret compartment under her desk drawer vibrated softly. It was a satellite phone with military-grade encryption known only to one of her most trusted confidants.
Sigrid picked up the phone, pretending she was heading to the restroom with a worried expression, then walked slowly with her head slightly bowed past her coworkers’ cubicles, where they were still busy gossiping. She entered the farthest women’s restroom stall in the quiet hallway, locked the door tightly, and pressed the answer button after making sure no one else was in the room.
“Speak, Gideon,” said Sigrid. Her tone instantly shifted one hundred and eight degrees, becoming cold, authoritative, heavy, and uncompromising. This was the voice of “Viper,” the feared underground queen of Oomera.
“Sigrid, we’re facing an emergency that requires immediate attention—separate from the port issue,” said Gideon’s deep voice—her right-hand man and head of security—over the encrypted phone line.
“Speak,” Sigrid ordered curtly.
“The Oomera Tax Authority, in collaboration with the Federal Intelligence Agency, is launching an in-depth investigative audit of all large-scale single-owner asset accounts in this city. They suspect money laundering behind the global crypto transactions we conducted last week,” Gideon explained in a tense tone.
“The problem is, since you hold sole control over the Viper Syndicate without an advisory board to serve as a legal shield, all of our major assets are directly tied to your real name as the sole heir of the Victory family.”
Sigrid clenched her fists against the edge of the cold porcelain toilet sink until her fingernails turned white. “They won’t be able to penetrate the walls of our corporate shell, Gideon. Our system is too complex for them.”
“They can’t penetrate the system, but they can track your social profile,” Gideon paused briefly. “If federal investigators discover that a twenty-six-year-old single woman with no clear history of steady employment—or who only worked as a low-paid IT intern at Vertex Tech—has billions of dollars flowing into her offshore bank accounts, your cover as Sigi will crumble instantly. You’ll be dragged into federal court on charges of mafia activity.”
“What’s the solution?” Sigrid asked, her eyes flashing dangerously in the darkness of the restroom stall.
“You need to stabilize your social profile as quickly as possible. You need a perfect domestic cover in the eyes of the law,” Gideon replied. “If you legally marry a foreign professional with a clean, established, and legitimate financial profile, the audit system will automatically classify your cash flow as the pooling of low-risk expatriate household assets. That’s a loophole in Oomera’s domestic law that will give us at least three years off the federal intelligence radar.”
“You want me to get married? With whom? Some ordinary guy who’d faint with fear the moment he saw me holding a knife?” Sigrid laughed hollowly, a laugh so cold and dismissive.
“We need someone who’s clean on paper, but foreign enough not to know the history of the ‘Victory’ surname in Oomera. I’ve already sorted through several profiles of new expats who’ve been deemed safe and won’t suspect your activities. One of them is a foreign tech executive with a clean profile who just moved to the central district.”
Sigrid closed her eyes, suppressing the rage and frustration churning in her chest. On one hand, a sophisticated foreign enemy bearing the “The Iron” logo was trying to seize her port. On the other, the government was beginning to target her very existence.
“Send the profile documents on those men to my private server tonight. I’ll choose myself which unfortunate man I’ll use as a pawn in this ridiculous marriage,” Sigrid ordered coldly.
“Yes. The data will be sent immediately.”
Sigrid hung up the phone, then stashed it back in a safe place. She stepped out of the shower stall, walked over to the sink, and stared at her reflection in the large, lightly fogged mirror. The girl in the mirror looked so innocent, fragile, and harmless in her loose, faded mustard-yellow sweater.
Sigrid adjusted her glasses, wiped the water droplets from her cheeks, then flashed her usual sweet, awkward smile at the mirror, making sure her “Sigi” mask was perfectly in place again.
“A wedding,” Sigrid whispered to her own reflection, a cruel smile once again spreading across her emerald-green eyes. “Let’s see how long that foreign man can survive under the same roof with a venomous snake before he realizes his life has been completely mortgaged.”
Back to Top
