Kat followed Vishous through a long hallway that looked more like a museum than a workspace. Every wall was lined with art—oil paintings, ancient maps, weapons. The air smelled like old paper and cedar smoke. She hated how much she liked it.
She expected some dim corner server closet, but instead, Vishous led her into a library. Not the kind you rent textbooks from—the kind that hums.
Vaulted ceilings. Hand-carved moldings. Firelight dancing in sconces. Books everywhere. Some in languages she didn't recognize. Some... didn't look like books at all.
And in the middle of it all: the computer.
Custom. Beautiful. Unmarked. Which was already shady.
Dual screens, holo-projector, glowing keyboard, and a processor box that looked like it had never been manufactured for the open market. This wasn't military grade.
This was black site tech.
Kat tilted her head and ran a hand along the smooth carbon chassis. "Okay. This just got interesting."
"We don't do average," Vishous said behind her, voice like smoke.
"Clearly." She sat down, fingers hovering over the keys. "So. What am I hacking?"
He flicked his fingers toward the screen, and a hologram bloomed in the air—an encrypted network map, built of glowing sigils and unfamiliar glyphs.
"Internal archive," he said. "Heavily protected. We suspect someone's been transmitting secure data without authorization."
Kat frowned. "Transmitting to who?"
"We're not sure," Wrath said from behind them. "That's where you come in."
"And this..." she gestured to the strange symbols pulsing across the firewall diagram, "...what language even is this?"
"Old," Vishous replied. "Rare. You won't find it online."
Kat squinted at it. It wasn't just a language. The structure of the encryption was nonlinear. Built more like a spell than a firewall.
But she wasn't going to say that out loud.
She cleared her throat and cracked her knuckles. "Alright. I'll try to trick the system into thinking I'm a trusted user. Maybe redirect a handshake, mimic one of your credentials—"
"Already tried that," Vishous said. "System knows us by... more than ID."
She raised an eyebrow. "So you're saying it has biometric defense?"
"In a sense."
"Okay," she muttered. "So it's either encrypted with something so deep it's self-aware... or you guys are into some real cult-level custom coding."
Vishous didn't answer. Just watched her.
She dug in.
Code filled the screen, layers upon layers of defenses written in characters she couldn't find on any ASCII table. Every time she rerouted one path, another closed. It was a puzzle. Alive. Almost sentient.
And she loved it.
"This is unreal," she muttered. "It's like someone braided cryptographic protocols with—"
She paused.
Something flickered on screen.
The code shifted under her attack, layers of firewalls peeling back one by one. Whoever was on the other end was good — very good — but they weren't expecting her.
Then, mid-keystroke, her stomach tightened. The response time wasn't AI.
Someone was in there.
Her eyes narrowed. You've got to be kidding me.
