Zen stared at the glowing green snake on his terminal screen, his mind racing.

"Good eye, Jax. Seriously. Don’t worry about it. I’ll handle it."

Jax: "Handle it how? Zen, I might have scraped into Low E-Rank on the Aegis Path, and sure, I can take a hit, but you are F-Rank! If he bought an assassin drone or a poison trap, my shield won’t mean a damn thing. We are literally dead. We should report him to the Dean!"

Zen: "The Dean won’t do anything against the Thorne family without proof. I said I will handle it. Go to sleep and get your gear ready for tomorrow."

Zen closed the chat application. His chest throbbed with a fresh wave of pain, but his brain was operating at superhuman speeds.

If Kaelen had purchased a black market weapon, Zen needed to know exactly what it was before they stepped foot into that dungeon. He couldn’t plan a counter-strategy blind.

He booted up his proxy network, routing his connection through a dozen fake IP addresses across the hyper-advanced Omni Domain. Once his digital signature was fully masked, he logged into the dark web forums, adopting the anonymous persona of the ’Ghost Scrapper’.

The Viper’s Den didn’t have a public catalog. You couldn’t just browse their wares. They operated strictly through anonymous Information Brokers.

Zen searched the forum and found the primary broker for District 7. The user’s handle was ’Cipher’.

Instead of a standard contact page, Cipher had an active bounty board. It was a test of intelligence. If you wanted to do business with him, you had to prove you weren’t a waste of time.

Zen clicked the topmost bounty. "Uncrackable Ancient Cipher. Reward: 100,000 Mana-Credits."

A high-resolution image loaded on the screen. It was a photograph of a crumbling stone tablet covered in jagged, glowing runes.

Zen almost laughed out loud.

It wasn’t a complex, mystical cipher at all. It was Imperial Shorthand. It was the exact, lazy dialect Zen used to write his personal grocery lists five hundred years ago.

Zen opened a direct message to Cipher and typed out the translation in less than ten seconds.

Ghost Scrapper: "The tablet says: ’Do not eat the red berries by the river, they give the horses severe diarrhea.’ You owe me a hundred thousand credits."

There was a long pause. A full minute went by without a typing indicator.

Cipher: "What the actual hell? Who are you? Dozens of top-tier Vanguard cryptographers have been working on that for a month."

Ghost Scrapper: "I am the guy who clears unmapped zones. Keep the credits. I don’t want your money. I want a trade."

Cipher: "You’re THE Ghost Scrapper? The one who pulled that crazy footwork that’s making the whole network go wild? Damn. Alright, you officially have my attention. What do you want?"

Ghost Scrapper: "A purchase log. Kaelen Thorne. A steel crate was delivered to his academy dorm from the Viper’s Den a few hours ago. Tell me exactly what is inside it."

Cipher: "No way. That is strict client confidentiality. The Viper’s Den syndicate will cut my head off and mount it on a spike if I leak their sales ledgers."

Ghost Scrapper: "You owe me a hundred thousand credits. I can also translate the other three ancient tablets currently sitting on your bounty board right now. Or, I can log off, walk away, and you can spend another month staring at a warning about horse diarrhea. Your choice."

There was another long pause. The digital cursor blinked rhythmically on the screen.

Cipher: "You drive a hard bargain, Scrapper. Give me two minutes to bypass the ledger encryption."

Zen waited, listening to the muffled sound of the shower running in the next room.

Cipher: "Got it. Thorne purchased a Grade-A ’Aggro-Lure’. It is a highly illegal dungeon artifact. Once activated, it emits a silent magical frequency that drives monsters completely insane and pulls them toward a specific target within a half-mile radius."

Zen smirked as he thought to himself. "So he plans to plant it on my gear or Jax’s gear during the extraction and let the monsters do his dirty work while the Vanguard watches. Pathetic and unoriginal."

Ghost Scrapper: "I appreciate the intel, Cipher. We’re square."

Zen moved his thumb to close the connection.

Cipher: "Wait. Scrapper. One more thing. Consider this a freebie because I like your style."

Ghost Scrapper: "I’m listening."

Cipher: "Thorne didn’t buy it directly. He used a third-party runner to pick it up and deliver it to the dorms. Smart kid... keeps his hands clean legally if the Vanguard ever traces the sale." 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

Ghost Scrapper: "Okay?"

Cipher: "So, the runner who brought that lure into the city... he told the dealer the artifact was acting weird. It wasn’t just emitting a standard aggro-frequency."

Ghost Scrapper: "Define weird."

Cipher: "He said it was leaking some kind of ancient energy. Purple energy. It gave the runner a massive nosebleed and a blinding migraine just holding the box. If Thorne activates that thing at anytime, he has absolutely no idea what he’s actually setting off. Watch your back."

Zen’s blood ran completely cold.

Purple energy.

"System," Zen thought, his heart hammering violently against his bruised ribs, sending spikes of agony through his chest. "Run a cross-reference on ancient artifacts leaking purple energy."

[Warning: Keyword match confirmed. Probability of standard mana leakage: 0%. Probability of Void Singularity corruption: 100%.]

Zen’s breath hitched in his throat.

It wasn’t just an Aggro-Lure. The black market dealer had unknowingly sold Kaelen a corrupted artifact. Kaelen had just bought a reality-tearing Void bomb, and he was planning to set it off inside the artificial academy dungeon tomorrow morning.

"I have to warn Jax," Zen muttered, his fingers flying across the terminal screen to reopen the secure chat.

Click.

The sound of the bathroom door opening echoed loudly in the quiet bedroom. The running water had stopped. Zen had been so intensely focused on the screen, he hadn’t even noticed.

Zen didn’t try to slam the terminal shut and shove it under the pillow. If he hesitated for even a fraction of a second, her yandere paranoia would completely take over.

Instead, he tapped the screen with his thumb, instantly closing the dark web proxy and bringing Jax’s encrypted chat log back to the front. The video of Kaelen Thorne’s arrogant livestream was paused directly on the screen.

Valeria stood in the doorway.

She was wearing a plush white towel wrapped tightly around her torso, water dripping from her long, dark hair down her bare shoulders.

But there was absolutely nothing soft about her expression.

Her crimson red eyes were glowing brightly in the dim light of the bedroom, locked dead onto the bright, encrypted screen of his terminal.

Her possessive, murderous aura flooded the room, dropping the temperature by ten degrees in an instant. She took a slow, deliberate step forward.

"Zen..." Valeria whispered, her voice dropping to a dangerously quiet pitch. "What are you looking at?"