Chapter 3: Clouds Over the Data

Vienna's night was deep as ink. The breeze from the banks of the Dnieper River carried the chill of early spring, drilling into the room through the cracks in the apartment's tightly closed windows, yet it could not blow away the icy shudder in Elena's heart.

She stared at that blurry photograph on the screen, her fingertips hovering over the keyboard for a long time. In the end she did not reply, but quickly quarantined the email into a private folder and started a full data cleansing program. As the team's sharpest analyst, she knew well that Viktor's methods were always hidden and deadly, and that the calm at this moment was only the dead silence before a storm.

Outside the window, the bell tower of St. Stephen's Cathedral rang again, the dull bell seeming to shatter some balance, hinting that the situation had completely spun out of control. Elena stood up, pulled tight the old woolen shawl on her shoulders, her gaze falling on the ancient, solid statue outside the window, and swore silently in her heart that she would never let anyone manipulate the rules of the game from the shadows.

The lights in the training room were glaring and cold. Lukas was staring intently at the huge ring-shaped screen, his fingers sliding rapidly over the touchpad.

His "Top-Secret Analysis" ability reached an unprecedented peak at this moment. In his field of vision, the footage of his opponent's past one hundred key matches was dismantled into countless flowing, colorful streams of data, frantically interweaving and recombining before his eyes.

Sweat slid down his forehead and dripped onto the keyboard, but he was completely unaware, his whole being seeming to be sucked into a deep data black hole. Under this extraordinary perception, Viktor's past tactical layouts, which had seemed perfect and flawless, were now peeling away layer by layer, revealing the terrifying logical skeleton inside.

He suddenly opened his eyes, his pupils contracting violently, a fear of being stared at by a fierce beast instantly seizing his heart.

"This is not right, completely not right." Lukas's voice was hoarse, breaking the training room's long dead silence. He pointed at two almost overlapping timelines on the screen, speaking very fast.

Elena stepped quickly forward, her brow tightly furrowed, her gaze sweeping rapidly over those complex curves: "What did you find? Get to the point."

"Look at this prediction delay," Lukas said excitedly, pointing at that instant's pause, "at the speed of normal human reaction, prediction at this position could not possibly be this precise, unless... he knew every one of my muscle memories in advance."

Elena's breathing quickened. Her fingers tapped lightly on the desk, a cold light flashing in her eyes: "What are you suspecting?"

Elena pulled up the back-end computing model and magnified the anomaly Lukas had pointed out. As the data was parsed layer by layer, a cruel fact gradually surfaced: in Viktor's tactical system there existed a "perfect closed loop" that defied the common sense of probability theory.

No matter how Lukas adjusted his rhythm, Viktor's response was always half a beat faster, and never showed any redundant movement. This efficiency was so high it even exceeded the calculation limits of top professional chess players. Elena calmly deduced all the variables, ruling out luck, psychological warfare, and conventional scouting. The only remaining explanation made her spine go cold.

"Illegal AI assistance." Elena slowly spat out those words, her voice calm to a terrifying degree, yet carrying unquestionable certainty.

Lukas was stunned for a moment, then smiled bitterly and rubbed his temples: "This is too crazy. If it is true, what we are facing is not a living person at all, but a machine."

"Or rather," Elena stood up, walked to the window, and looked at the endless stream of vehicles below, "a group of people hiding behind a machine. They have used the blind spots in regulation to test the edges of the rules."

When Markus heard the news and hurried over, and had heard the two of them out, his fist slammed hard onto the desk, veins bulging. As captain, he knew this audit would be a huge gamble: once it failed, the LGD team would face the greatest stain of their careers. But looking at the light in his teammates' eyes, where unwillingness and anger interwove, he understood that the road back had long since disappeared.

"Apply for a pre-match technical audit." Markus's tone was firm, his gaze sweeping over everyone. "I will personally go to the organizing committee in Brussels and throw this evidence in their faces. Even if the sky falls, I will fight for our innocence."

Sofia pushed up her glasses and calmly added: "Markus, you must be clear: once the audit starts, Viktor's side will absolutely not sit and wait. The war of public opinion is about to begin."

Sure enough, on the second day after the audit application was submitted, major EU sports media were flooded with overwhelming negative reports. Viktor's team reacted extremely fast. Several anonymous articles appeared in succession, their wording sharp, accusing the LGD team of "faking a grievance," trying to use baseless AI rumors to cover up the fact that they were simply outskilled.

Some even dug up old accounts, hinting at some controversial behavior of Lukas's in the past, intending to guide public opinion and portray LGD as a group of unscrupulous opportunists. Faced with the surging abuse, Markus shut himself indoors, standing alone in the hotel room, listening to the noise of protesters outside the window, a stubborn isolation in his eyes.

The atmosphere in the streaming room was so tense it suffocated. Klara made a "shh" gesture to the camera, then raised her signature playful smile, trying to use humor to dissolve the fans' hostility.

She did not directly rebut those vicious comments, but cleverly showed a clip of daily mutual help inside the team. In the footage, Markus was patiently helping a rookie teammate tidy cables, his gaze focused and gentle.

"Everyone, a true strong person never needs to smear an opponent to prove his own greatness." Klara's tone was light, yet carried unquestionable confidence. "Our response will be on the arena, to be settled by strength."

This streaming clip quickly spread virally on social media, successfully stabilizing team morale and accumulating precious support for the coming audit.

Sofia intervened quickly, working overnight to organize a thick stack of legal documents, focusing on the clauses about algorithm transparency in the EU Digital Services Act. She pointed out precisely that if the so-called "assistance system" used by Viktor's team had not passed compliance filing, it constituted illegally obtaining a competitive advantage.

This document not only provided solid legal support for the audit application, but also laid a legal foundation for the team to win the right to speak in the media war. Sofia calmly examined every punctuation mark, her fingertips lightly rubbing the edge of the paper, a wise light flashing in her eyes. She knew well that the law is cold, but it is also the hardest shield protecting the weak.

Lukas closed his eyes again, letting the "Top-Secret Analysis" ability fully open once more. This time he did not focus on Viktor's tactics, but sank his consciousness into that deep sea made of data, trying to find the specific technical loophole of that illegal AI model.

Time seemed to freeze. He searched through the complex flood of information until he captured a faint yet abnormally familiar signal frequency. That was a backdoor deliberately left behind, hidden in the depths of seemingly perfect code, like a lurking poisonous sting, ready at any time to strike back at its host.

Lukas woke with a start, covered in cold sweat, yet a fanatical light like discovering treasure flashed in his eyes.

"Found it, Elena." Lukas shouted urgently, his voice trembling slightly with excitement.

Elena quickly adjusted the model parameters, isolating that small piece of code and magnifying it for analysis. As the parsing deepened, the originally perfect AI model collapsed in an instant, revealing the dirty truth underneath. It was indeed an illegal real-time assistance system, but embedded in it was an extremely hidden "frame-up module."

"This is a trap," Elena gasped, her voice shaking, "if this module is detected during the audit, they will immediately start a self-destruct program, and simultaneously direct the fault logs to our devices, turning us into scapegoats."

The team realized this audit was no longer simple defense, but an excellent opportunity for a desperate counterattack. Since the opponent had left a backdoor, as long as they reverse-traced the data flow of this backdoor, they could lock onto Viktor's team's server IP, and even directly prove the operating mechanism of its illegal AI.

Markus called everyone together for a meeting and assigned the tactical division of labor, a fighting spirit burning in everyone's eyes. They were no longer passive prey, but hunters holding sharp blades, preparing, in this war without gunpowder smoke that was the audit, to nail their opponent completely to the pillar of shame. The neon lights outside the window flickered uncertainly, as if foretelling the coming climax.

However, at this very moment, with only hours left until the audit results were announced, the servers inside the LGD team suddenly erupted with a piercing alarm. All the indicator lights turned from green to red in an instant, and network traffic soared exponentially in an extremely short time, as if thousands upon thousands of data floods were madly devouring the system's defensive barrier.

This was a high-level cyberattack, its technique extremely practiced, its target clear, aimed directly at the core tactical data and that key "frame-up module."

Elena stared dead at the screen, her fingers flying over the keyboard, trying to stop the intruder from going deeper, but the resistance was astonishingly great, as if an invisible large hand were gripping their throat tightly, and a suffocating feeling spread.