#### **Chapter 20: The Unsent Letter**
The hard drive was a digital fortress, even more complex than the W.A.O. drive. Kuro worked for hours, his usual confidence replaced by a grim determination. Finally, he broke through. The drive contained a single, massive video file, protected by one last layer of security: a voice-activated password prompt.
*"Identify,"* a synthesized voice requested.
They tried everything. Project Chimera. The facility's designation. Their parents' names. Nothing worked.
"Wait," Hikari whispered, her eyes fixed on the photograph they had recovered. "What is the one thing they were trying to protect? What was the most important thing to them?" She leaned toward the microphone. "Renji. Kuro. Hikari."
*Access Granted.*
The video file opened. The face that appeared was their mother's, Dr. Aiko Tarayashi. She looked haggard, exhausted, her eyes filled with a desperate fear that transcended time.
"If you are seeing this," she began, her voice trembling, "then we have failed. And I am so, so sorry."
She explained everything. They had been recruited by W.A.O. under false pretenses, told they would be developing therapies to help soldiers recover from PTSD. But their research was twisted. W.A.O. forced them to continue, holding their children—*them*—as collateral. Project Chimera wasn't a super-soldier; it was their attempt at a *countermeasure*, a genetic inoculation against the very psychological conditioning techniques W.A.O. was perfecting. The H.P.E. program, the Glass Cage—it was all a monstrous perversion of their attempts to protect the human mind.
"They are turning our cure into a plague," their mother wept. "But I built a back door. A fail-safe. A string of code hidden in the Chimera genome. It's a kill switch. It will render the entire project inert. You have to find it… you have to destroy our work before they can perfect it…"
The video ended abruptly with the sound of a heavy door sliding open and a man's cold voice saying, "Doctor, we require your presence."
As the siblings sat in stunned silence, processing the tragic truth, an alarm blared through their secure channel. Kuro's drone had been spotted.
On their main screen, a live feed popped up. It was The Director, sitting in her pristine office, a calm, predatory smile on her face.
"Thank you, children," she said, her voice dripping with condescending satisfaction. "We've been searching for Dr. Tarayashi's 'unsent letter' for years. You've just confirmed its existence and location for us." The view behind her switched to a tactical map, showing multiple W.A.O. strike teams converging on the Siberian facility.
"W.A.O. assets are now en route to retrieve our property," she purred. "And its brilliant prototypes. Please do not resist."
The trap had been sprung. They hadn't just found a ghost. They had led the devil right to its door.