Buzz. Buzz.

Click.

"Looks like they succeeded."

Irene swiped the screen, reading the alert notifications from Vivy and Lillian.

She had divided the group into three teams for tonight. Lillian and Ethan were heading to the power unit room on the second floor. Vivy and Cyan were going to the air conditioned chamber hidden 250 feet underground. And she and Leon would go directly to the control room where the Akashic Record’s entire computation was managed.

The control room was located just below the basement. But reaching it meant avoiding both the automated security and the guards on duty throughout the building.

The entire city of Evana’s data ran through that room. Getting inside should have been nearly impossible for anyone who did not work there.

Irene had thought about this carefully. To bypass their security she had designed a plan to put the entire Akashic Record building into a temporary deep sleep.

Will had prepared a powerful atmospheric drug. The plan was to get it inside the air conditioning system through Vivy.

But it would not work unless the power was cut first, even for just a few seconds.

When the main power went down, the entire system including the air conditioning and the Akashic Record itself would shift to the emergency power unit. That shift would generate heat throughout the system, and to compensate, the air conditioning across the whole building would spike to maximum for a brief window.

Irene intended to use that time for two things.

First, the sudden power cut would trigger a panic response from the guards, pulling their full attention toward the power room.

Second, the moment the air conditioning spiked, Vivy would release the drug into the system. It would spread through the entire building in milliseconds, putting everyone inside to sleep before they had any chance to react.

Irene had already made sure her team took the antidote. So the drug would not touch any of them.

Once the building was under the drug, she would move to the control room. But the automated security was still a problem, but she had already worked out how to deal with that too.

"..."

She smiled quietly at her own plan and looked at Leon standing beside her, his fingers moving across the eleven inch device she had given him.

The entire security system of the building was loaded onto that device.

Leon was working through it.

Xuo had walked him through what to do next.

He needed to connect the device to the controller unit carried by each guard inside the building.

They had already pulled one guard aside and put him under a short sleep. Leon had taken the matching eleven inch device from the guard’s bag, connected the two with an optic wire, and was now running the script Xuo had made him memorise.

Irene was keeping watch on him.

"Is it done?" She asked, glancing at Leon who was still typing.

"Almost." He said without looking up.

The script Xuo had given him was genuinely impressive. Leon had not expected that. The security architecture was layered in a way that no straightforward attack could get through. Clean, airtight, and clearly built by someone who understood exactly what they were protecting.

Irene noticed him pause when something flashed across the screen.

"What is it?" She leaned slightly closer, looking at the screen.

Leon exhaled slowly.

"Who designed this protection system?"

"Hm? You mean the security system?" Irene asked. "That would be Dr. Anise."

"Huh." Leon nodded and began clearing out everything Xuo had told him to write. "She is good."

"Did you run into a problem?"

"I will be fine." Leon said. "Make sure no one comes near me."

Irene smiled and nodded.

Leon decided to start from scratch.

The script Xuo had given him was built for an older version. What he had not accounted for was that the security layer here rotated its algorithm on a random day at a random time every month. It was like a moving target.

Xuo must have missed that detail entirely.

But, it was not a problem. Leon would just do it himself.

His fingers moved steadily across the screen.

He hit enter.

Then he isolated each sensor node from the main network, putting them on standalone mode so they would stop reporting to the central system. Then he pulled the last hour of footage from every camera in the building and set each feed to loop on a one hour repeat. From the outside, every screen in the security room would show a perfectly normal building.

No sign that anything was happening at all.

"Oh." Irene leaned slightly closer to the screen, watching the camera feeds flip over one by one. "Xuo’s script worked."

Leon gave her a dry look.

Irene blinked. Then quietly decided not to ask further.

They looked at each other once. Leon gave a single nod. Irene turned and signalled Lillian first through a message. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

A second passed.

The lights around them flickered.

Leon checked the readings on the device. The temperature started to climb. He held up a thumbs up.

Next, Irene signalled Vivy.

The air conditioning hit them immediately. A sharp cold sweeping through the corridor all at once.

Leon watched the device. On the screen, the small indicators representing the staff security officers and the families on the ground floor began dropping one by one.

"Perfectly done." Leon glanced at Irene.

Irene flashed him a wink. "Is my plan not great?"

Leon thought briefly about telling her to have a word with Xuo about rotating algorithms. But he decided against it.

"It was perfectly executed." He put both the devices inside his dimension ring. "Should we move?"

Irene, after sending a message to both the group, put her device in her back pocket.

She turned to Leon and warned him.

"The guards are all down, but even so, make sure you are alert."

They walked together with revolvers in their hands towards the basement.

His feet hit something.

He looked down, only to find a guard in his military uniform.