The digital "accident" that claimed Marcus Torino's life had barely faded from the headlines when Eden University awoke to a different kind of silence. There were no police cars surrounding the campus, no yellow tape blocking entrances—only an invisible siege. In every corner of the university grounds, the central processing units of the main servers groaned under the weight of newly deployed surveillance programs, quietly planted by V's team under the guise of a "routine security update."
Silas sat in the advanced programming lab, surrounded by dozens of computer screens reflecting the anxious faces of students. The atmosphere was thick with static tension. To everyone else, Marcus Torino had been a victim of an "automation failure." To Silas, he was simply the first corrupted byte successfully deleted.
Suddenly, the Death Phone vibrated inside his coat pocket. This was no ordinary vibration—it was a low-frequency pulse he felt deep in the bones of his hand. Zero's voice flowed through his earbuds, cold and alert.
"Look at screen number four, System Admin," Zero whispered. "The enemy is casting his net. It seems V prefers hunting with traditional bait."
On the university's intranet, a new encrypted file appeared, protected by a secure password and bearing an irresistible name for someone with Silas's power:
[Confidential Witness Database – Torino Case]
Silas's heartbeat paused for a moment. He knew exactly what it was. In cybersecurity, this was called a honey pot—a decoy file designed to lure intruders. The moment anyone attempted to access it—or even scan it using unauthorized tools—the system would tag them with an invisible digital signature and extract their precise geographic coordinates down to the millimeter.
"He's testing my greed," Silas muttered, staring at the screen. "He thinks I'll rush to erase the witnesses to protect myself."
Zero replied, "And what will you do? If you ignore it, he'll search elsewhere. If you touch it, you'll be like a butterfly caught in a digital spider's web."
Silas slowly pulled the Death Phone from beneath the table. Its black screen flickered with a red warning:
[WARNING: ACTIVE LURE DETECTED]
A faint smile crossed his lips—one that never reached his eyes.
"Zero, in programming, if you want to hide a tree, you plant a forest. V wants a single signature? I'll give him an earthquake of signatures."
Instead of approaching the file, Silas accessed the core console of Shinigami OS. His fingers moved with precision as he began writing a script he named:
"Broken Mirror Protocol."
He commanded the phone to access the university network—not to breach it, but to simulate it. Within seconds, the system generated 20,000 ghost profiles—nonexistent students and staff. In a single synchronized action, every one of those identities launched an attack on the honey pot simultaneously.
Inside V's operations center, the system erupted.
Thousands of alerts flashed red across the monitors. The university's digital map ignited with access points from every hallway, every classroom, every restroom.
Somewhere across the ocean, in a darkened room, V's assistant stood frozen before a collapsing wall of data.
"Sir! We're under a DDoS attack of unknown origin. Thousands of access attempts—all coming from inside the campus at the exact same moment!"
V remained silent, his sharp eyes tracking the flow of data. He didn't see an attack—he saw a dance. A mind manipulating mathematical probabilities, forcing reality into a state where truth and falsehood became indistinguishable.
"Stop trying to identify the users," V said in his distorted mechanical voice. "This isn't a breach… it's a display of power. He's telling me he sees my trap—and that he can drown my system in noise whenever he wishes."
Back in the lab, Silas calmly shut down his computer. Sweat had begun to form on the foreheads of the other students as the network malfunctioned, but he simply took a sip of water, unfazed.
"You've wounded his pride, Silas," Zero said. "But now you've officially become suspect number one in his mind—even without evidence."
"Evidence is a prison for the weak, Zero," Silas replied as he put on his headphones. "I don't need to prove my innocence. I only need to prove his system is inefficient. V relies on logic—and I'll give him logic beyond the capacity of his processors."
As Silas left the lab, he passed by a girl standing at the doorway, holding a paper notebook and staring at the malfunctioning screens in confusion. It was Lina, a student in investigative journalism. Their eyes met for a brief second.
"Do you think this is just another technical failure?" she asked, narrowing her eyes with instinctive suspicion.
Silas paused, glancing at the Death Phone still warm in his pocket.
"The world is nothing but a series of technical failures waiting to be fixed, Lina," he said calmly. "Maybe the system simply refuses to be used as bait."
He walked away, leaving Lina watching his back, her curiosity slowly turning into doubt.
At that same moment, on V's screen, a list of students present in the lab during the attack appeared. A red circle formed around a single name—based on analysis of "calm behavior patterns" during the crisis:
Silas.
"The game is tightening, System Admin," Zero whispered. "He's beginning to smell your code."
Silas replied softly, almost to himself:
"Then we'll change the encryption next time… Let's see how he hunts a ghost that changes its face with every heartbeat."