#### **Chapter 26: The Digital Ghost**
Back in the secure haven of the Swiss villa, the full weight of their discovery began to unfold. Kuro projected the core of their mother's research into the center of the room: a shimmering, complex double helix of code, the digital ghost of the Chimera genome.
"It's diabolical," Kuro murmured, his eyes wide with a mixture of horror and professional admiration. "She wove the kill switch into the junk DNA of the sequence. It's not a separate virus; it's an integral part of the system, designed to look like a dormant, benign string." He pointed to a section of the code that pulsed with a faint red light. "This is the trigger. It's a cascading logic bomb. Once activated, it will cause a catastrophic failure in the protein-folding simulations of any subject enhanced with the Chimera genome. It won't kill them outright. It will simply… unravel them. Turn their strengths into weaknesses, their enhanced cells into cancerous mutations."
Hikari shuddered. "She created a cure that mimics the disease."
"It's the only way it would have gone undetected," Renji said, his gaze fixed on the code. "How do we use it?"
"That's the problem," Kuro said, zooming out to show a global network map. "The kill switch requires a carrier wave, a high-frequency broadcast that can activate the dormant code. A signal powerful and precise enough to penetrate W.A.O.'s shielded facilities. There are only a handful of broadcast arrays on the planet capable of generating such a signal. And W.A.O. either owns them or has them under constant surveillance."
The trap was elegant and cruel. Their mother had given them a sword but locked it in a vault to which only their enemies had the key. To use the kill switch, they would have to assault one of W.A.O.'s most heavily fortified installations on the planet.