Entering the Dragon's Lair

M2 - Entering the Dragon's Lair is a main mission in Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Confront Zhao in the Penthouse
Once off the elevator, you find yourself in Zhao's penthouse. This is a large ornate hall with what looks like Zhao's office. You should loot everything you can from here before you go further, and do any hacking you want to, as next time you are here you might not have the time. Get plenty of ammo as you will need it shortly. Look under a couch in the first section for a safe code on a pocket secretary. Go into Zhao's private room and confront her.

Escape the ambush and get to the hangar
Zhao calls her security and you are stuck in the antechamber as they pour in from the main entrance. There are a lot of them, and they are well-armed. One or two well-placed gas mines in the entranceway/lobby before confronting Zhao can make this trivial, leaving at best two enemies to avoid or neutralize (keep in mind they will wake their comrades up, so be swift), or failing that, if you have a gas grenade, you can sprint to the connecting archway as soon as you are in control again as they discuss their sweep strategy in the first room, you should be able to throw a single gas grenade into the center taking them all out, but this will likely take a few attempts but will maintain the Ghost XP bonus.

If you want to take them all out at once, you must use the Typhoon. But doing this requires a bit of luck. As soon as Zhao locks you out, you must crouch down and make your way back to the top of the stairs above the main lobby. While still crouching down, position yourself in the middle, select a concussion grenade/mine, pop up and throw it directly in the middle of the circle the guards have formed as they come in, then crouch down again. The concussion grenade/mine will knock them loopy for a few moments...long enough for you to SPRINT into their circle and activate your Typhoon. You'll be rewarded with an awesome cut-scene of your Typhoon activating and taking out all the guards at once. You can then loot and pillage for weapons/ammo/credits/pocket secretaries.

Alternatively, on the right-hand side of the room as you look towards the main exit door there is a vent tunnel. Go to the right on the top level, and you can get inside it. This will allow you to sneak between the two rooms where the security guys are searching for you. You can take potshots or throw grenades at them and gradually pick them off until they are all down. Then come out, loot the bodies and exit. Alternatively, with enough energy upgrades, it is possible to exit the vent cloaked and reach the elevator without being detected, easily netting you Smooth operator and Ghost rewards.

Another strategy is to use the vent to allow you to create a distraction and escape. Kill a guard on the upper level of the vent or throw a grenade, then as the other guards are converging on the upper level, quickly drop to the lower vent and crouch walk out of there, hopefully undetected. Even this initial risk of losing your Ghost reward isn't necessary if you already have Stealth and Run Silently augments. You can simply dash towards the vent while invisible, wait for your batteries to recharge and then dash for the elevator again.

You can also use the vent, stay hidden until all guards face away for a short time, quickly come out of the vent and take cover behind the first couch, then wait for the guards to face away again before dashing to the next couch (using the cover system, obviously), and make it to the exit completely unseen.

Alternatively, you can brute-force the situation. If you have a rocket launcher, you can take cover on the balcony that you start on immediately after the cut-scene with Zhao. This will allow all the guards to enter the lower room and discuss their strategy for taking them out. One well-placed rocket into the middle of them can take them all out at once (you will likely need to ensure that the Heat Targeting system is disabled to prevent the rocket from going off-center towards a specific guard). If not, you will have at most two or three lower-class guards come up the stairs towards you, at which point you can pick them off fairly easily with conventional weaponry (a Diamondback with explosive rounds works particularly well). However, of all the solutions that result in you taking out all of the guards, this will net you the least XP - although it is also probably the easiest.

Finally, it's absolutely possible (even on the maximum difficulty) to take down all guards one-by-one without using anything but augmentations getting 50 XP from each guardian. One of the best places to start from is upstairs, not too far from panic room's door.

Open the hangar bay doors
Players will be tasked with disabling the two security bots so that the hangar bay doors can open to allow Malik to arrive and extract them. Players have two options here:


 * 1) Hack into the security hub in the control room on the upper left-hand side and disable the bots. The terminal has a security rating of 2; the password is "QILIN", but players may want to hack the computer anyway to gain any potential rewards from Datastores, as well as the XP associated with completing the hack.
 * 2) If the player doesn't have the required augmentations to hack the security hub and disable the bots, then they will have to engage the bots with firepower. As with all robots, an EMP grenade will instantly destroy it - one EMP grenade can be found in the drawer in the control room on the upper right-hand side. The other bot can be quickly disposed of using the rocket launcher and rockets found at the back of the hangar, between the crates and the back wall (on the ground level). If the player is creative, and/or low on grenades, it is possible to lure the two robots together and take both out with the single EMP grenade conveniently provided.

After successfully disabling both robots, a multitude of heavy rifle ammo, frag grenades, Typhoon ammo, and rockets can be looted throughout the hangar and the two offices above, as well as a unique eBook, labeled Brain Implants, in the upper left control room.

Once ready to leave, players should go to the office on the right-hand side and activate the button opening the hangar doors. Malik will fly in and players can finally leave Tai Yong Medical for Picus Communications in Montreal.

Go to the chopper and extract
Meet Malik when you're finished, and she will take you to confront Eliza Cassan.