### **Arc 8: The Ghost in the Sky**
#### **Chapter 32: The Point of No Return**
The success of "Operation Fur-Ball" left a chilling silence in its wake. The access was secured, the ghost key uploaded. All they had to do was activate it. But the ease of their victory felt wrong, like a loose floorboard in a dark room.
"It was too easy," Renji stated, cleaning a handgun with practiced, almost meditative motions. He wasn't talking about the absurd cat-fishing scheme, but the lack of any discernible response from W.A.O. "An organization that can deploy a kill team anywhere on the planet in under an hour doesn't just go blind. They're watching. They just don't know where to look yet."
"They will," Kuro confirmed, his face grim. The humor of the past few days had evaporated, replaced by the cold weight of their reality. He brought up a new screen, displaying the complex code of their mother's kill switch. "Once we activate the broadcast, the signal itself will be a beacon. Its energy signature, its frequency… W.A.O. will detect it within seconds. They won't know the origin point immediately, but they can triangulate it. We will have, at most, a 90-second broadcast window before our position is compromised and every asset in a thousand-mile radius is scrambled to our location."
Ninety seconds. That was the time it would take for the StarLink satellites to re-route their signal, bounce it across the globe, and saturate every W.A.O. black site with the kill switch frequency. Ninety seconds to undo their parents' work and cripple their enemy. Ninety seconds to become the most wanted people on Earth.
Hikari looked from Renji's hardened expression to Kuro's intense focus. "After those ninety seconds," she said softly, "nothing will be the same. This house, this life… it will be gone. We'll be running forever."
"We were always running," Renji replied, snapping the slide back on his weapon with a sharp, definitive click. "Now, we choose the direction."
The decision was made. They would activate the sequence from the most defensible, isolated location they had: a decommissioned Cold War listening post deep in the Swiss Alps, a relic Renji had acquired years ago as a contingency. It was a concrete bunker buried under a thousand feet of rock, accessible only by a single, treacherous mountain road. It was the perfect place to make their final stand.