SSS-Rank Corporate Predator System

The lab smelled like recycled air and bad decisions.

Miles stood before the holographic map of Cross Corp tower, a glowing, three-dimensional monument to everything he hated.

It was a fortress.

A tomb.

And Gideon was somewhere inside.

"Okay, so, just spitballing here," Leo said, his voice a little too loud in the tense silence.

He was hunched over a secondary console, his fingers a blur across a holographic keyboard.

"Has anyone considered just, you know, not doing this?"

"We could run."

"I hear Argentina is nice this time of year."

"We could open a small alpaca farm."

"I've always wanted to raise alpacas."

"They seem very low-stress."

No one laughed.

The air was too thick for jokes.

Kael, Gideon's second-in-command, was staring at the tower's schematic with the cold, dead eyes of a man who had seen too many good plans go bad.

"The main network is a ghost," Kael stated, his voice a low, gravelly rumble. "It's not on any public or private grid."

"It's a closed system."

"A digital island."

"Which means," Leo chimed in, not looking up from his screen, "that a frontal hack is not just impossible."

"It's 'get your brain turned into a puddle of raspberry jam' impossible."

He typed another frantic line of code.

"They're calling it ARGUS," he muttered, his voice a mixture of professional respect and pure, unadulterated terror.

"It's a quantum-AI security system."

"It doesn't just have a firewall."

"Its firewall has a therapist, a lawyer, and a very bad attitude."

Miles just watched him, a silent, unmoving presence.

He had his own system running diagnostics, cross-referencing the data from Julian's phone and the logistics hub, feeding Leo anything that might be useful.

He was the ghost, and Leo was the machine.

"It's not just a security system," Leo continued, his voice dropping to a whisper of horrified awe. "It adapts."

"It learns in real-time."

"Every failed attempt to breach it doesn't just get blocked."

"It gets analyzed."

"The system learns the attacker's methods, their signatures, their very thought processes."

"It doesn't just lock you out," he finished, a bead of sweat tracing a path down his temple. "It gets to know you."

"And then it uses that knowledge to hunt you down and erase you from existence."

"So, yeah," he said, leaning back in his chair with a hollow, defeated thud. "Fun."

Miles looked at the defeated slump of his friend's shoulders.

He saw the guilt.

The crushing, suffocating weight of it.

Leo blamed himself.

He believed that if he hadn't made his stand in The Nursery, if he hadn't chosen them over the cure, Gideon would still be here.

It was a poison, and it was killing him from the inside out.

"Well, this is just depressing," his internal monologue whispered, a dry, sarcastic commentary in the quiet of his own mind.

"My tech genius has officially hit a wall."

"A very smart, very homicidal, quantum-AI wall."

"Maybe I should suggest the alpaca farm again."

"It's starting to sound pretty good."

He watched as Leo, driven by something deeper than just a tactical problem, leaned forward again.

His fingers flew across the keyboard, a desperate, frantic dance.

He wasn't just looking for a weakness.

He was looking for atonement.

He pushed himself to the brink, his own broken system flaring with a faint, pained blue light as he poured every ounce of his focus, his energy, his very soul into the code.

Clara moved to stand behind him, a silent, steady presence.

She placed a hand on his shoulder.

"Leo, you need to rest," she said softly.

He just shook his head, not looking at her.

"I can't," he whispered.

"I owe him."

He kept digging.

He bypassed the primary security protocols, the ones designed to stop a conventional attack.

He went deeper, into the system's core architecture, into the very heart of the machine.

And then, he found it.

A flicker.

A ghost in the code.

An anomaly.

It was a single, theoretical vulnerability, a backdoor so small, so obscure, that it was almost invisible.

"I don't believe it," he breathed, his eyes wide behind his glasses.

He brought the data up on the main holographic display for everyone to see.

It was a maintenance port.

A single, physical access point on the tower's massive communications spire, hundreds of feet in the air.

"It's a diagnostic subroutine," Leo explained, his voice gaining a new, feverish energy. "A relic from the system's beta test."

"They must have forgotten to remove it."

"The port is only exposed to the open air for ninety seconds, once every twelve hours, during a routine atmospheric pressure check."

He brought up another data stream.

A weather forecast.

A massive thunderstorm was rolling in, set to hit the city on the night of their planned assault.

"And here's the kicker," Leo said, a grim, triumphant smile on his face.

"The diagnostic only runs during periods of extreme atmospheric interference."

"Like, say, the middle of a lightning storm."

The room was silent.

The plan was impossible.

It was insane.

It was a suicide mission.

"So, let me get this straight," Kael said, his voice a low, skeptical rumble.

"The only way to disable this ARGUS system is for someone to climb to the top of a skyscraper, in the middle of a thunderstorm, and physically plant a virus into a port that is only open for ninety seconds?"

Leo just nodded, his manic grin not quite reaching his tired eyes.

"That about sums it up, yeah," he said.

Kael just stared at him.

"The odds are astronomical," he stated flatly.

"And what happens if you miss the window?" one of the other fighters asked. "What happens if the lightning doesn't hit just right?"

Leo's grin finally faltered.

"Then the system fries you," he said simply. "And probably alerts every single guard in a five-mile radius to your exact location."

"And then they shoot you."

"A lot."

The fragile, flickering hope in the room died a quiet, sudden death.

The plan was a fantasy.

A ghost story.

No one was that fast.

No one was that precise.

No one was that stupid.

"I'll do it," Leo said.

His voice was quiet.

It was calm.

It was resolute.

Every eye in the room turned to him.

Clara took a step forward, her face a mask of pale, horrified disbelief.

"Leo, no," she pleaded. "It's too dangerous. We'll find another way."

Leo finally stood up, turning to face them all.

The fear was still in his eyes, but it was overshadowed by something else now.

Something harder.

Something stronger.

"There is no other way," he said, his voice the steady, unwavering tone of a man who has already made his peace.

He looked at Miles, his gaze direct and unblinking.

"Your system is the only thing that can get Gideon out of that building," he said.

"But my brain is the only thing that can get you through the front door."