Chapter 1: System Crash
The human body is ultimately just a complex biological machine, and like any machine, it runs on loops, triggers, and predictable code.
In the absolute darkness of a locked apartment, the only light came from the cold, blue glare of three panoramic monitors. My fingers didn’t fumble. They moved across the mechanical keyboard with a silent, terrifying fluid speed that no one on the campus of the elite university would ever witness.
On the center screen, a high-definition live feed from a compromised security camera showed a lavish penthouse bedroom. Inside, Professor Harrison—the dean of admissions and a man who took massive bribes from elite families to ruin the futures of middle-class applicants—was asleep. His chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm.
Beside his bed sat a smart medical device, a high-end digital insulin pump connected to his local home network.
To the police, to the forensic team, and to his grieving family, it would look like a tragic, spontaneous equipment malfunction. A glitch in the software. A sudden, massive spike of insulin delivered in the dead of night, causing severe hypoglycemia, a quiet coma, and eventual cardiac arrest. Untraceable. Clean.
I hovered my index finger over the enter key. My expression didn’t change.My pulse didn’t spike by a single beat as my finger hovered over the enter key. Ice-cold, steady, and precise. I didn’t hate Harrison; I simply viewed him as a corrupted line of code that needed to be permanently deleted from the system to pave the way for my grand architecture.
On the screen, the small green light on the insulin pump shifted to a solid, malicious amber. The machine whirred quietly in the dark room miles away, executing my command. I watched for exactly three minutes until his breathing pattern faltered, fracturing into a chaotic, terminal struggle.
I closed the terminal window, erasing the digital footprint, pulling the proxy logs, and wiping the server cache until it was as if I had never existed in that network at all.
The Shift
The next morning, the sun over the university campus was blindingly bright, reflecting off the glass facades of the corporate-funded buildings.
I stood at the edge of the campus courtyard, taking a deep breath as I manually adjusted my posture. I hunched my shoulders forward, letting my chest sink to make my frame look small, fragile, and non-threatening. I pushed a pair of thick, slightly smudged glasses up the bridge of my nose and adjusted the straps of my oversized, worn-out backpack.
The cold, apex predator from the dark room vanished. In his place stood the cliché Computer Science and Engineering student—shy, socially awkward, and desperately trying not to be noticed.
“Watch it, code-monkey,” a loud voice sneered.
Before I could fake a reaction, a heavy shoulder slammed into mine. It was Julian, the arrogant son of one of the city’s wealthiest real estate moguls on the university board. The impact was deliberate. I allowed my knees to buckle, stumbling backward with an undignified gasp.
My heavy, thousand-page system architecture textbooks flew out of my arms, scattering across the concrete walkway. I dropped to my hands and knees, my fingers intentionally trembling as I began frantically gathering the loose papers.
" I-I’m so sorry, I wasn’t looking...” I scrambled for the fallen papers, slouching my shoulders to hide my broad frame and keeping my eyes glued to the pavement, refusing to look up, playing the role of a terrified scholarship student to absolute perfection.
Julian laughed, kicking one of my notebooks further down the path. “Clean up your trash, loser. People are trying to walk here.”
As his expensive leather boots walked past my face, a cold, clinical thought crossed my mind: Julian’s sleek, internet-connected sports car is currently parked in the north lot. I already have his brake-module firmware mapped. He has three days left to live.
“Are you okay?”
The voice was soft, clear, and completely out of place in this toxic courtyard.
A pair of clean, white sneakers stopped right in front of my hands. A girl knelt down into the dirt beside me, her silk hair falling over her shoulder as she reached out to gather my ruined notebook.
It was her. The daughter and niece of the head of the entire shadow syndicate running this city. My ultimate target’s only weakness.
She handed me the notebook, her eyes filled with genuine, untainted empathy. She had no idea who her father really was, and she had absolutely no idea that I had spent the last three months monitoring her entire life through her phone’s front-facing camera.
“Don’t listen to them,” she said gently, offering a warm smile that could melt anyone else’s heart. “Here, let me help you up.”
As I took the notebook from her fingers, our hands brushed. I looked at her through my smudged glasses, letting a weak, grateful, clumsy smile take over my face while my mind calculated the trap closing around her.
She thought she was saving a helpless victim. In reality, she had just willingly walked right into the lair of the Devil. J
