Chapter 1: Awakening in Vienna, the Top-Secret Analysis Activates

Vienna mornings always carried a lazy, refined mist. Through the gap in the old hotel's heavy velvet curtains, weak light stabbed into the dim room like silver needles, refracting a dance of fine dust in the air.

Lukas woke with a start, the sound of his heart pounding violently sounding especially clear in the silent bedroom, the burning sensation in his chest not yet faded. That was the ember left behind by high-intensity mental strain. His phone screen lit up at that moment, its glaring white light nearly blinding him, utterly out of place in the gloom of early morning.

An anonymous text message lay there quietly, its background pure black, with only a few white characters leaping out, the writing cold and hard as ice: If you force your way into the match, your personal privacy will be exposed tonight.

His blood froze in an instant. His fingertips trembled uncontrollably on the touchscreen, sweat sliding down from his temples. The opponent hidden in the shadows had bared his fangs again, like a venomous snake lurking in the dark, watching for its prey's weakness to deliver the final bite.

Viktor's team had long ago laid their net through channels inside the EU, and this carefully disguised fitness assessment report, like an invisible web, had been quietly delivered into the hands of the club management, its mesh so fine it left one in despair.

The report asserted that Lukas's form had fluctuated badly of late and that he had a serious mental problem, and it strongly recommended forcing him to rest to avoid a disaster in the coming European League.

This report avoided fierce confrontation and struck directly at the industry's most sensitive nerve -- the psychological stability of professional players. It aimed to use bureaucratic procedure to strip Lukas of his eligibility to compete, and every step was calculated without a single leak.

The air in the meeting room was so oppressive it suffocated. The old wooden table gave off a faint scent of pine resin, mixed with the smell of aged paper and expensive coffee, as if still telling tales of family feuds from the last century. Markus suddenly slammed the table and stood up, making the coffee cup in front of him hum and shake, the dark brown liquid sloshing inside, almost spilling over the rim.

His eyes were bloodshot, his voice rough with anger, as if ground by sandpaper: "This is naked workplace bullying! They are using data to kidnap a person's will, using so-called rules to cover up dirty methods."

He turned to the silent management, his gaze like a torch, an unyielding pride radiating from him. "I refuse to accept this baseless charge. Lukas must play. That is his right, and it is our bottom line."

Elena sat in the shadows, her fingertips tapping lightly on her laptop, making a crisp, regular sound like a ticking clock, especially piercing in the dead silence.

She raised her head, her eyes calm to the point of cruelty, just like her usual tactical style, and pointed out that withdrawing now would play right into Viktor's hands. Only by using strength to silence the gossiping crowd could they break this carefully woven lie.

She did not rely on emotion, but on logic. In her world, every move was a game calculated with precision, and feeling was only noise that interfered with vision.

Meanwhile, Viktor sat in a corner of his Zurich safe house, outside the window the unbroken snow line of the Alps, pale enough to make one's heart tremble. He held a glass of aged Burgundy wine, the dark red liquid swirling slowly in the glass, a mocking curve at the corner of his mouth.

In his view, Lukas had already been scared out of his wits, and those threatening texts were merely icing on the cake. He planned to deliberately expose a flaw in the scrim, luring Lukas into a mistake in his panic, thereby confirming the charge that his form was unstable.

This kind of inducing conspiracy was more destructive than a direct blow, because it could plant a seed of doubt in an opponent's heart and let fear grow on its own.

At that very moment, Lukas felt that familiar burning sensation surge up again inside him, spreading from his spine to his fingertips. The world before his eyes suddenly decomposed into flowing data and a logic grid, and the outlines of reality began to blur. The once chaotic reality became clear and distinguishable, every pixel marked with probability and trend. This was the precursor to the activation of the Top-Secret Analysis System.

He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, his chest rising and falling, letting his consciousness sink into the vast flood of data. Those tactical trajectories that had once been vague now presented themselves clearly in his mind like an unfolded blueprint, lines interwoven, veins distinct.

The Top-Secret Analysis System fully activated, and Lukas instantly saw through Viktor's preset tactical traps and his opponent's psychological blind spots. Those seemingly airtight defensive formations presented countless broken logic chains in the data grid, every loophole like a crack exposed under sunlight, impossible to hide.

He did not need to guess, did not need to hypothesize. The answer was projected directly onto his retina. This was a cognition beyond intuition, the ultimate fusion of reason and feeling. The world in his eyes was no longer made of images, but of rivers of code and possibility.

The scrim officially began. Viktor's team was full of confidence, following their set script as they tried to suppress Lukas's team in the early game. They deliberately slowed the pace, feigning conservatism, while in fact holding all their skill cooldowns at the key nodes, preparing to launch a thunderous strike at fifteen minutes.

This conservative strategy usually made opponents impatient and thus exposed flaws. It was Viktor's habitual psychological tactic, and the cornerstone on which he had dominated the esports circle for years, like a patient hunter waiting for his prey to step into the trap.

However, Lukas's play flowed like water, precisely predicting his opponents' every move, turning an originally doomed situation into an absolute advantage. He was like a chess player who had already seen the end of the game on the board, every step of his positioning avoiding the minefields Viktor had carefully laid, while quietly closing in on the enemy's core area.

There were no redundant movements, no impatient probing, only pure, almost artistic pressure. The sound of the mouse gliding was soft and deadly.

Elena stared at the screen in the data back room, her fingers hovering above the keyboard, trembling slightly, her fingertips almost numb. She cried out, her voice breaking the control room's original quiet, pointing out that Lukas's counter-strategy had completely exceeded the scope of Viktor's tactical reserves, and that this reverse thinking had crashed her database in an instant.

She had originally prepared thirty response plans covering every extreme case, but she had not expected Lukas to jump directly out of all established frameworks and create a brand-new tactical dimension that even Viktor could not analyze, like a black swan breaking out of its cage.

In the first game, Lukas's side narrowly took the win with a small advantage. Viktor's brow furrowed tightly, his once relaxed brow now locked into a deep crease, and he was forced to change tactics and commit more resources.

He realized his opponent had not been scared witless, but was in some abnormal state, so he began pulling Lukas's historical data from the back end, trying to find the abnormal variable that could see through everything. At that moment, his confidence began to waver, replaced by a faint, almost imperceptible fear, the instinctive chill of a hunter discovering that he himself is being watched by his prey.

In the second game, Viktor adjusted his strategy, trying to wear them down through team fight maneuvering, and Lukas, relying on his analysis ability, again dismantled the scheme. He used the terrain advantage to split Viktor's main hero, preventing it from forming an effective net of firepower, leaving the isolated enemies to fight each on his own.

Every team fight was like a carefully choreographed dance. Lukas found order in the chaos and dissolved the enemy's offensive into nothing, like a tai chi push, borrowing force to strike force, deflecting a thousand pounds with four ounces.

In the third game, Lukas's team completely controlled the rhythm and produced a highlight reel. Viktor's team collapsed into a rout, and the score finally froze at 1:2.

The atmosphere of the whole venue shifted from tension to shock. The audience's cheers surged in like a tide, shaking the floor, while Viktor sat in the monitoring room, the wine glass in his hand creaking in his grip, cracks spreading through the amber liquid.

He knew his carefully designed script had completely failed. An uncontrollable factor was destroying his layout, like a grain of sand fallen into a precision clock.

Viktor saw the battle report in the monitoring room, his gaze sinister, and in a low voice ordered a hunt for the abnormal variable that could see through tactics. His voice was so soft it could barely be heard, yet it carried a bone-piercing chill that penetrated the glass wall of the monitoring room: "Found him."

Those words were like a spell, declaring the start of a larger purge. The fire under Vienna's night sky had only just been lit, illuminating an even deeper, bottomless abyss behind this game.

Lukas took off his headset, his fingertips still holding the faint tremor of the deciding moment just now. He looked at the corner of the screen, where there was a line of pale golden code only he could see, slowly dissipating. That was the last echo left after the "Top-Secret Analysis" had started. The air outside the training room seemed to freeze for a second, then was broken by Elena's hurried footsteps.

She pushed the door open and entered, her eyes no longer holding her earlier doubt, but a complex emotion mixed with awe and inquiry.

"That move just now -- how did you know he would flank from the B bombsite?" Elena's voice was a little tight, a tactical board clutched tightly in her hand, her knuckles white.

Lukas did not answer at once. He only shook his head lightly and cast his gaze toward the quiet Vienna night outside the window. He knew that once an ability like this was shown, it was like fireworks in the black night: brilliant, but inviting prying eyes. He could not explain the omniscient perspective that had surged into his mind in that instant, and could only attribute it to intuition. Intuition: those two words were his only protective charm, and also his biggest lie.

Back in the hotel room, Lukas did not rest. He sat on the edge of the bed, staring at an unread message on his phone, from an unknown number, containing only a blurry photograph: the very moment of his close-up in the match just now, the timestamp showing it was taken five minutes earlier.

Fear climbed his spine like ice water. He quickly switched off the phone and stuffed it deep under the pillow. At the same time, on the other side of the city, Viktor stood before a floor-to-ceiling window, the shattered wine glass in his hand already casually discarded.

He dialed an encrypted channel, his voice hoarse and cold: "Activate the 'Skynet' protocol. After tonight, I want every electronic device in this city that can monitor him to be taken over by us. Since he can see through tactics, we will make sure he cannot see any road at all."

As the order was given, countless cameras in the dark lit up with red light at the same time, like giant eyes lurking in the darkness, greedily watching every corner of this city. The hunt had only just begun.