A light drizzle began to patter against the window of Elara's bedroom, creating trails of water that streamed down the glass like tears. Outside, the lights of Metropolis glowed dimly, concealing the rot of a city driven by greed and lies. Inside her spacious, soundproof bedroom, Elara sat cross-legged on a thick Persian rug, her back resting against the edge of her king-size bed.
The room was dark, illuminated only by the static blue glow reflected from Elara's corneas.
"System," Elara whispered, breaking the silence of the night. Her breathing was steady, but a subtle tension crept through the muscles in her neck. She was still learning to control the quantum technology inside her head so it wouldn't overload her human brain's capacity. "Open all of Sterling Corporation's public tax reports from the past five years. Focus on dividends and personal expenditures under Arthur Sterling's name."
In her previous life, Arthur Sterling had been the uncle who always wore a kindly smile at every family dinner, an old man fond of handing out expensive cigars and talking about the importance of preserving their ancestors' legacy. But behind that fatherly uncle's mask, Arthur was a venomous snake who had quietly clipped Elara's father's wings one by one in the boardroom.
A transparent holographic screen instantly unfolded across Elara's field of vision. Thousands of rows of figures, financial balance charts, and tax tables scrolled by at a speed impossible for the naked eye to read. But thanks to the System's synchronization, the data flowed directly into Elara's visual cortex as perfectly structured, crystal-clear information.
She felt a faint throb of pain at her temple—a physical reminder that the machine was consuming her biological energy—but ignored it.
[Arthur Sterling Tax Data Analysis Complete. Public reports indicate a clean financial profile. Cross-referencing with confidential personal expenditures...]
"No thief in a suit is ever truly clean, System," Elara murmured, a crooked smile as cold as ice touching her lips. "Someone with Arthur's lifestyle couldn't possibly be relying solely on a director's salary and official dividends. Check for anomalies in outgoing cash flow. Find any third-party entities that consistently receive injections of funds from his personal accounts and Sterling Corp's operating accounts under his authority."
The screen in her eyes flickered. The blue network began digging deeper, slipping into the gaps of local banking firewalls that were no more than wet paper doors to the System.
[Anomaly detected. A constant and massive outflow of funds has been directed to a nonprofit entity over the past four years. Entity Name: Yayasan Peduli Tunas Metropolis.]
Elara's brows drew together. A charity foundation? Her miserly, greedy uncle donated millions of dollars every month to orphanages and street-child education? That was the most ridiculous thing she'd ever heard.
"Hack into the foundation's database. Track where the money actually ends up after entering their donation accounts," Elara ordered sharply.
This time, the System took three seconds—a relatively long duration for quantum computation—indicating just how meticulously the money-laundering network had been concealed.
When the fund-flow chart finally appeared in Elara's vision, an overwhelming sense of disgust churned her stomach.
The data exposed unforgivable corruption. Yayasan Peduli Tunas Metropolis was nothing more than a facade. A small portion of the funds was indeed used to buy books or build bare-bones facilities for public-relations documentation and tax reductions. But ninety percent of those multimillion-dollar donations was transferred in small amounts through hundreds of dummy accounts—fictitious accounts opened under the names of orphanage children who had either already died or never existed at all.
The dirty money was then laundered through fake art-purchase transactions in Eastern Europe before ultimately reaching a shell company in the Bahamas. From the Bahamas, the money returned to Arthur Sterling's personal pockets in the form of tax-free "foreign investments."
"Bastard," Elara hissed, her hands clenching so tightly that her fingernails turned white. "You stole money from my father's company, used the names of dead orphans, and hid behind the image of the city's philanthropist."
Elara's fury peaked, but her logic remained in control. This evidence was pure gold. If she brought proof of money laundering and tax fraud on this scale before the public or the board of directors, Arthur's reputation would be utterly destroyed that very night. He would lose more than his seat on the board—he would rot in federal prison.
But Elara knew it wasn't time to make the data public yet. She needed the original data chip that would be auctioned at Obsidian Lounge this weekend to ensure Arthur's downfall couldn't be rescued by any lawyer.
"System, compile all these digital audit trails into a single encrypted dossier. I want to take it to the black market as leverage. Use high-level military encryption. Don't let—"
Elara's words abruptly stopped.
The blue glow in her retinas suddenly flickered. Within seconds, the soothing blue shifted to a bright warning yellow, then leaped straight to a dazzling blood red. The throb in Elara's temple turned into a sharp, stabbing pain, as if an invisible nail were being hammered into her skull.
[CRITICAL WARNING!] [Your anonymous proxy connection is being scanned from outside the network. Someone is counter-hacking your data traffic.]
Elara's breath caught. Someone had noticed her hack? Impossible. The Absolute System was designed to operate beyond the spectrum of commercial cybersecurity. No security software belonging to any local bank or foundation could detect its presence, let alone actively track it.
Unless... the person counter-hacking her wasn't from the bank.
"Cut the connection now! Activate the kill switch!" Elara screamed inwardly, panic beginning to climb her throat. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to sever her mental link with the digital interface.
[Disconnecting... FAILURE. The tracker is using a dynamic penetration algorithm. They have breached our third VPN layer. IP isolation attempt in progress.]
Cold sweat poured down Elara's forehead. She could see unfamiliar red lines of code beginning to creep in, attempting to tear through the identity veil of Vanguard Trust that she had painstakingly built earlier that afternoon. Whoever this person was, they possessed terrifying technological resources and operated entirely in the shadows of the metropolitan world of Metropolis.
"System, burn all access logs! Physically cut the power to my bedroom if necessary!"
Elara hurled herself toward her desk, trying to reach the main router cable hidden behind a wall panel. But the holographic screen in her eyes was becoming increasingly saturated with red. A pitch-black chat window suddenly forced its way into the center of her vision, covering all of Arthur's tax data.
The white cursor inside the black box blinked once. Then a sentence began to type from somewhere unknown, letter by letter, sending a chill through Elara that froze the flow of her blood.
> Bold move, Miss. But you knocked on the wrong door.
"Who are you?!" Elara hissed, though she knew her voice only echoed inside her own bedroom.
The tracker did not stop. The IP-tracking process reached ninety-five percent. Only five percent remained before the GPS coordinates of the Sterling family home were fully exposed to the mysterious hacker.
Elara clutched her increasingly throbbing head. Just as the percentage bar touched ninety-nine percent, the screen suddenly froze. The black chat window faded, replaced by a trace of the hacker's digital signature left behind in the final second before Elara's kill switch finally succeeded in cutting the connection.
Elara's eyes widened in horror as the screen displayed a name that turned out to be]