Two hours later — the patch finished compiling.
Leo pushed his chair forward and hovered his finger over the enter key.
Tina swallowed.
Melina went still.
Leo pressed it.
[ DEPLOY — PATCH v2.0 — OPERATION: DESERT STORM ]
The servers pulsed.
Within seconds — a notification hit every Ground Zero player worldwide.
UPDATE AVAILABLE — NEW REGION UNLOCKED
No teasers. No trailers. No hype campaigns. Just a sudden drop.
At first, there was only disbelief.
"Wait this wasn't announced."
"Is this real?"
Streamers who were reacting to the Aether drama mid-stream
froze mid-sentence.
Chat messages turned into walls of:
UPDATE???
PATCH????
WHAT IS THIS??
The first players who loaded in… stopped speaking.
Sandstorms.
Shifting dunes.
Collapsed ancient ruins.
Aircraft wreckage half-buried in sand.
But the part that broke everyone:
real-time terrain deformation.
Bullets carved sand grooves.
Explosions reshaped dunes.
Cover could vanish or appear depending on the chaos of the battle.
Clips went viral instantly.
People forgot the drama — even mid-argument — and jumped into the update.
Trending hashtags flipped within 12 minutes.
#DesertStorm
#GZV20
#LeonDidItAgain
Tina watched the analytics feed spike like a rocket.
Melina stared at the simultaneous log-ins number — it jumped past the last peak in under ten minutes.
Aether executives saw the same spike — through public dashboards — and panicked quietly. Their charts did not rise. Their game barely made a movement.
Players were shifting back — fast.
Aether's "refined clone" suddenly looked like… an older version.
Their Reddit AMA instantly derailed:
"Your game looks outdated compared to v2.0."
"Ground Zero literally changed the map physics."
"Are you copying the new patch too?"
The insults weren't subtle.
Aether's PR team tried to maintain calm.
But their biggest problem wasn't words.
Their biggest problem was numbers.
Player concurrency tilted back toward Ground Zero so fast that even financial bots flagged the trend.
Market watchers saw it.
The public saw it.
And Leo…?
He still didn't say a word.
Tina whispered, almost laughing now:
"They underestimated content impact."
Melina nodded. "They thought the public attention was the battlefield."
Leo He clicked one more button.
The system prepared something new — not revealed yet — something even deeper.
Melina paused. "What are you pushing now?"
Leo answered softly.
"The unlock key."
The screen showed a new queued deployment:
Melina blinked. "Is this the reveal part?"
Leo shook his head.
"No. This is the trap."
He looked at both of them — eyes sharp.
"Aether thinks this was my counterattack."
Tina leaned in.
"…It wasn't?"
Leo exhaled.
"No. This was the distraction."
…
Marcus stared at the live feed in the Aether boardroom while the numbers on the public dashboards blinked in real time.
"Where did that spike come from?" an executive barked.
Their lead product analyst pulled up the telemetry. "Ground Zero just rolled a major content drop. It's pulling players back.
Concurrency spiked across the board. Their retention looks immediate."
Marcus Vale slammed his hand on the conference table. "How did he deploy that so fast?"
And We rode the narrative to push our product. That was supposed to fragment their base — not hand them a comeback."
His PR manager stammered, "We… we lost narrative control. The players don't care about the accusations anymore. They're all playing again."
Marcus glared at the frozen replay of Desert Storm's trailer.
He muttered, "You can't fight someone who leads with innovation."
Then, softer, under his breath:
"Unless you kill what he's building."
An engineer spoke up, blunt and raw. "We still have the files. We can repackage faster. We can patch, re-release. But we need time."
"Time?" Marcus repeated. "We bought Dark for moments like this. We need them to accelerate. Get me a plan: quick pivot, exploit the leak, push a hotfix that steals the headlines back."
A hush fell. People began firing orders into chat channels. Analysts pulled up commit histories. Legal glared from the corner but kept quiet — the execs wanted movement, not memos.
Marcus leaned forward. "If Ground Zero is buying time with content, we burn their window. We don't let them build momentum."
Across the room, someone in operations opened the intrusion console. "Our hook is still live in several vendor nodes. The Dark link is stable. We can push our update into public test servers within the hour — if we want to."
Marcus' jaw set. "Do it. Quietly. We don't announce. We roll when we're ready."
Down in the server room, tech leads began coordinating with the external access points— Dark's rented proxies, the chain of compromised vendor keys. They mapped the routes again, confirmed footholds, and prepared payloads that would let Aether push a stealth release if needed.
None of them knew Leo had already been in their network.
None of them realized their extraction had left a breadcrumb trail — a trace that might be used against them.
Back at Ground Zero, Leo watched the public metrics climb and fall like a calm tide. He didn't smile. He moved methodically, checking the queued tasks, and the evidence vault where the Aether files sat encrypted and staged.
Tina tightened her fingers on the tablet.
"They're gearing up. They'll try something."
Leo nodded. "They will. Let them. We're ready."
Melina, eyes back on the logs, said the only thing that mattered: "When they move, we make it public while everyone's in the update. It'll land harder that way."
Leo tapped the console. "Exactly. Make it live so the world sees them taking the shot. And at the same time, release what we have."
Outside, players were still pouring into the desert. Streamers were live, excitement spilling across chats. The public was in awe. The stage was set.
In the Aether ops room, engineers readied their commands. In the Ground Zero control room, Leo readied his trigger.
Both sides were readying to move.