The black SUV tore through the midnight streets of the Tech District, its tires screaming as Zhang Wei took a corner on two wheels. Inside, the cabin was a frantic hub of glowing screens and tangled cables.
"I've got her!" Su Lan shouted, her fingers flying across her mechanical keyboard. Her glasses were sliding down her nose, and she was still wearing Zhang Wei's oversized tracksuit jacket. "She's not just hacking Aether or Nexus. She's using a 'Ghost Protocol' to rewrite our high school server logs. She's trying to delete our 98.2% record!"
"If that record disappears, the National Institute's legal basis for my ownership of Blue-Pulse vanishes," I gasped, my laptop balanced on my knees. "She's trying to turn us into nobodies again."
Li Yan was tethered to the car's internal system, his eyes tracking lines of red code. "She's hopping IPs. Every time we close a port, she opens three more. It's a hydra-code."
"Then we cut the head off," I said, my voice dropping into that "Karate Princess" focus. "Wei, the central relay tower at the old school—it's the only place where the legacy logs are still physically stored on a hard drive. If she reaches that, it's game over."
"On it!" Zhang Wei roared, shifting gears. "Hold on, Stars!"