The room was silent.
It was like a high-tech church where information was the most important thing.
Adrian stood at the center of his universe of light and code.
On the main screen, Kaelen Rourke's face was marked with the glowing 'X'.
The hunt was over. The execution was about to begin.
Look at you, Kaelen. You think you're a player. You have no idea you're just the first loose brick in the wall.
This operation wasn't about brute force. Brute force was clumsy. Loud.
Adrian's plan for revenge was like using a sharp knife, not a big hammer.
He would turn their own broken systems back on them to make them fail.
His hands moved, dancing through the holographic interfaces. His plan had two heads. A digital hydra.
First, the shipment.
[Executing Exploit: Elaris Port Authority. Security Level: Pathetic.]
He brought up the port's central command network. He unleashed a sliver of his code, a 'ghost' program.
It didn't break the firewall. It simply wasn't seen by it.
[ACCESS GRANTED.]
He was inside. He could see everything.
The automated cranes. The autonomous cargo haulers. The docking schedules.
He found the vessel: the Stellara Prime.
He didn't just hack the system; he became it.
He rewrote the destination co-ordinates to a decommissioned oceanic platform he owned.
He found the containers with the weapons components and flagged them with a priority-one reroute code.
To any observer, it was a last-minute logistical change.
He watched through the port's security cameras as a giant crane, following his invisible command, placed the shielded containers on a smaller, faster vessel.
It was a silent and flawless robbery, like a magic trick done with computers.
Rourke's weapons were now his.
[Phase One: Complete.]
Now for the fun part.
The second head of the hydra was aimed at Rourke's career.
He had compiled a file. A neat, tidy package of Rourke's financial sins.
Encrypted transaction logs. Audio recordings. A detailed ledger.
A corporate death sentence.
But who to send it to? Not Elias. He required a rival.
[Scanning Althera Executive Profiles... Target Selected.]
[Anya Sharma. EVP of Acquisitions. Status: Ambitious, Ruthless. Optimal Recipient.]
Just emailing it wasn't enough. He needed the leak itself to cause damage, like a weapon.
He crafted a new digital ghost. It piggybacked on the data stream from an illegal grav-ball game, cloaked in a pop-up ad.
From inside the terminal of Sharma's chief of staff, the ghost made a microsecond connection to her private server.
It deposited the encrypted file directly into a folder labeled 'PROJECT ASCENSION'.
The ghost then erased itself. No entry logs. No transfer records. Nothing.
His work was done. The scalpel was clean. All that was left was to watch the patient bleed out.
Adrian leaned back, becoming a spectator.
He watched a satellite feed as the vessel carrying his new acquisitions slipped out into the dark ocean.
He shifted his attention to Althera's internal network. For an hour, nothing.
Then, a flicker.
A high-priority encrypted message from Anya Sharma's office.
The network began to light up, a web of frantic energy. Sharma was mobilizing.
He cut into a video call. Sharma's face was calm, but it was the calm of a hunter about to strike.
"...no trace. It just appeared," her investigator was saying. "The file is legitimate. He's been stealing the company blind."
A slow, cold smile spread across Anya Sharma's face.
The smile of a wolf handed a wounded sheep. "Then we have him," she purred.
"Arrange a meeting for me with Mr. Thorne's office. It's time we discussed a… corporate restructuring."
The call ended. The first domino had slammed into the next with spectacular force.
The operation had been flawless. Clean. Precise. Devastating.
He should have felt triumph. Grim satisfaction.
Instead, he felt nothing.
[System Alert: Emotional state flatlining. Victory response protocols not engaged.]
The victory felt hollow. An intellectual exercise. The rage was still there, a pilot light burning deep inside, but this hadn't quenched it.
He brought up an old photograph. His parents, smiling.
An unguarded love that felt like it belonged to a different species.
I did this for you, he thought. The prayer went unanswered.
He was a man fueled by a cold fire, finding no joy in the burning, only purpose in the ash.
He was about to turn to his next target when a small alert chimed. Low priority.
Someone was trying to unlock a very secure file by guessing every possible password.
This was coming from a tiny, private media server known as The Veracity Index.
The file signature was familiar. Kain Industries military-grade. The same kind he'd just seen on Rourke's manifest.
Curiosity, a rare and dangerous emotion, stirred.
He focused the system's resources.
The decryption software was laughably weak. But the persistence was noteworthy. He isolated the file being attacked.
His blood ran cold.
It was a partial manifest. It listed "Plasma Injector Casings."
From his shipment. The one he thought was a secret.
[Critical Alert: Unforeseen variable detected. Mission parameters compromised.]
Someone else had a piece of the puzzle. Someone else was pulling at the same thread.
His fingers flew across the console, sharp, urgent. He traced the user ID. SJI.
The profile appeared. Selena Ji. An investigative journalist. A nobody. A rock-thrower.
He suddenly understood with perfect clearness what had happened.
The anonymous file. The impossible key.
Good luck. You'll need it.
He had sent it to her. He had anonymously leaked a tiny breadcrumb, never imagining anyone could follow it.
He had severely underestimated Selena Ji.
She changed things and made them more difficult.
She was just an innocent person who had wandered into the danger zone of a war she wasn't a part of.
Adrian looked at her face, his mind working quickly. The victory didn't feel good anymore.
Instead, he felt a sharp, cold need to figure out what to do next.
She was a threat to his plan. She was a wild card who could mess everything up.
She had to be handled.