The activity room was filled with a distinct scent of rosin and ozone. Amuro Ray sat at a workbench piled high with instruments. The scratched blue data card lay quietly in a special anti-static tray, like a miniature bomb awaiting dismantling. His fingers danced across the keyboard, making crisp clicks as his eyes rapidly switched between multiple screens: on the left, a cascading stream of hexadecimal code; in the middle, a complex signal waveform captured by a logic analyzer; on the right, a constantly updating system access log. The green light on the oscilloscope flickered violently as he operated, sometimes stagnating into eerie spikes.

Aiden stood in the shadows not far behind him, his back against the cold metal shelving. He felt as if he were being roasted over a slow fire, every keystroke a pounding on his nerve endings. Time slipped by amidst the faint hum of instruments and the whirring of fans, each second stretching out to an infinitesimal length. He stared intently at Amuro's tense profile and the intensely focused eyes behind his glasses, trying to read any sign of progress or frustration in that expression, so focused it bordered on indifference.

"Military-grade dynamic encryption... more than one layer." Amuro's voice suddenly broke the suffocating silence. His words were so flat, as if stating an objective fact, that Aiden's heart suddenly sank. "The outer layer is the standard Federation military 'Bulwark' algorithm. It's very robust, but the pattern is fixed." His fingers, without pausing, typed a complex series of commands into another terminal. The cascading stream of code on the screen suddenly became more violent, like a raging torrent.

"I bypassed several redundant checkpoints... but triggered a deeper trap." Amuro's voice remained calm, but Aiden saw a glaring red warning box suddenly pop up on the logic analyzer screen on his console, and the waveform instantly distorted into a chaotic mess of spikes. "Dynamic obfuscation layer. It's randomly changing its structure, activating a new encryption algorithm variant with each access attempt..." His brows finally furrowed slightly behind his glasses, and his fingertips moved faster, as if battling an invisible, ever-shifting opponent. The oscilloscope's light strips twitched wildly, like a dying electrocardiogram.