The blue light of the laptop screen was the only thing illuminating Rohan's face at 2:00 AM. In the corner of his room, the ceiling fan hummed a rhythmic, tired tune, but Rohan's mind was racing at a different frequency.
He wasn't playing games. He wasn't scrolling through social media. He was staring at three different screenshots sent to him by three different strangers over the last forty-eight hours.
The first was from a college student in Mumbai who had lost his semester fees to a "Scholarship Verification" link. The second was from a retired army man in Punjab whose pension was drained via a fake "Electricity Bill" update. The third was a local shopkeeper who had scanned a "Refund QR" that only worked in reverse.
To anyone else, these were just three more tragic stories in a country plagued by digital thieves. But Rohan saw something else.
"It's the same," he whispered, his fingers dancing across the keys.
He opened the source code he had managed to scrap from the scholarship link and compared it to the electricity bill phishing site. He highlighted three lines of code—a specific, peculiar way of handling the UPI redirect. Most scammers used "off-the-shelf" kits bought on Telegram. This was different. It was elegant. It was professional. It was… beautiful.
Whoever wrote this didn't just want the money, Rohan thought, a chill running down his spine. They wanted the data. Every click, every keystroke, every contact list.
Suddenly, his laptop's cooling fan began to roar. The CPU usage spiked to 99%.
Rohan froze. His mouse cursor began to move on its own. It didn't move erratically; it moved with purpose. It glided slowly to the center of his screen and opened a simple Notepad file.
The cursor pulsed for a second. Then, words began to appear, typed by an invisible hand.
[YOU'RE QUITE FAST, ROHAN. BUT YOU'RE LOOKING AT THE MAP, NOT THE MOUNTAIN.]
Rohan's heart hammered against his ribs. He grabbed his webcam and tilted it down, his pulse thundering in his ears. "Who is this?" he muttered, knowing the microphone was likely active.
The Notepad screen cleared. A new sentence appeared:
[I AM THE GHOST IN THE SYSTEM YOU'RE TRYING TO PROTECT. STOP SEARCHING, LITTLE HERO. THE LAST PERSON WHO FOUND THE MOUNTAIN… NEVER CAME BACK DOWN.]
Before Rohan could respond, his laptop screen flickered and went black. A single, high-pitched beep echoed through the room, and then—silence.
Rohan sat in the dark, the reflection of his own wide eyes staring back from the dead monitor. He had spent weeks saving people from small-time fraudsters. But tonight, for the first time, the fraud had found him.
And it wasn't a man on the other end. It was something much colder.