Silas's steps faltered for a moment amid the crowds rushing through the dark streets of Eden after the power outage. The SMS still glowed on the screen of the Death Phone, defying every firewall he had built.
"I see you, Silas. Behind camera 702. The coffee was cold—just like your heart."
"System Admin, human logic has breached your digital encryption," Zero's hiss echoed mockingly in his ear. "(V) didn't track your phone—he tracked your body. He correlated the timing of your coffee order with the moment of the digital disruption. To him, you're no longer just an IP address… you're a face, a height, a pattern of movement."
Silas tightened his grip on the phone. He understood the mistake: he had focused on protecting data, and forgotten to protect existence. (V) was playing an old game with new rules.
He grabbed Lina's hand and pulled her through the crowd, away from the main streets patrolled by drones.
"Where are we going?" Lina gasped, fear flashing in her eyes after seeing the news of Thorne's death. "The police are everywhere!"
"The police aren't the problem," Silas replied, opening the Shinigami OS interface. "The problem is that every piece of glass in this city is an eye for (V). We need to become biological ghosts."
He activated [Biometric Spoofing].
The device didn't physically change his face—it injected corrupted data into every surveillance camera he passed. To facial recognition systems, Silas appeared as distorted pixels… or as a completely different person every second.
As they ran through a back alley, Silas typed a quick reply to (V):
"Coffee gets cold when one is busy rewriting the rules of the world. Camera 702 recorded the past—but I now control your digital future. Find me in the noise, (V)."
The moment he sent it, he triggered [Signal Fragmentation].
The message didn't leave from his location—it was split and routed through 500 proxy servers across the world, arriving to (V) as if it came from the North Pole.
They entered a crowded metro station. The smell of iron and rust filled the air.
Silas stopped in front of the schedule display and pointed his phone camera at the train control system.
"Oh? Are you going to crash trains?" Zero asked.
"No," Silas replied coldly. "I'm going to create a data black hole."
Using the phone, he executed [Mass Identity Swap].
In a fraction of a second, he swapped the digital identities of every passenger in the station within the surveillance database. Suddenly, every commuter carried Silas's biometric signature in the eyes of (V)'s system.
In the control room, (V)'s technician shouted:
"Sir! The system is detecting 400 'Silas Andersons' in the metro station! It's collapsing—we can't identify the real target!"
(V) remained silent, watching the screens dissolve into chaos.
"He's not running…" he murmured. "He's mocking me. He's using my city against me."
Inside the moving train, Silas sat in a far corner. Lina sat beside him, staring at the Death Phone in disbelief.
"You're not human," she whispered. "You're code walking on the ground."
Silas looked at her, the blue glow of the screen reflecting in his eyes, making him seem like a digital demon.
"Humans built these systems to imprison themselves, Lina. I just learned how to speak the jailer's language."
Suddenly, the phone vibrated.
A new message from (V):
"Your biometric manipulation is impressive. But you forgot one thing, Silas—Lina Collins is still carrying her ordinary smartphone in her bag… and it's telling me exactly where you are."
Silas's heart skipped.
He looked at Lina. Then at her bag.
"Lina… your phone!" he shouted.
But before she could react, the metro doors slammed shut between stations, and the lights went out.
(V)'s mechanical voice echoed through the speakers of the now-empty train car:
"The digital game is over, Silas. Now… we talk face to face—through the emergency system."