The Unwanted Son's Millionaire System

The good feeling from their first successful case was like a small, warm fire after a long time in the cold. For a day and a half, the team at Miller Holdings enjoyed a unfamiliar sense of purpose and accomplishment. It almost—almost—made them forget the constant, background fear that had been their shadow for so many months.

On the second morning, things felt almost normal. Kaito was at his desk, doing his usual check of the city's digital activity. It was a routine he had started to spot new threats early. He took a sip of coffee, his eyes calmly moving across the information on his screens. It was a quiet, ordinary moment.

Then he stopped dead. His coffee cup hung in the air, forgotten.

"That's... strange," he muttered. His hands immediately leaped to the keyboard, pulling up new search windows with frantic speed.

Ace, who was looking over plans for better office security, glanced up. "What's wrong?"

"I'm digging into the past," Kaito explained, his forehead wrinkled in thought. "I'm trying to see what else that 'Circuit Breakers' gang we just stopped had been up to. To do that, I'm looking at old data from around the time you were starting out, Ace. From the Nite Owl Motel days, back when you first ran into that loan shark, Deke Vance."

He turned his chair to face Ace, his face showing both puzzlement and the beginnings of worry. "But the data... it's just gone."

"What do you mean, 'gone'?" Evelyn asked, looking up from her work on the company's finances.

"I mean, someone has deleted it completely," Kaito said, his voice growing more serious. "For example, there was security camera footage from the street near the Nite Owl Motel, from the exact night Vance's men attacked you. The computer log still says the file should be there, but when you try to open it, there's nothing. It's not just broken; it's been professionally wiped clean. It's the same with the traffic camera footage from the intersection where you had your first big, lucky win with the stocks. The recording from that specific, important time period has vanished without a trace."

A cold, heavy feeling started to grow in Ace's gut. He stood and walked over to Kaito's desk. "Show me what you're seeing."

Kaito brought up the computer records. The file names were still listed, but they were like empty boxes—their contents had been carefully removed. He ran a more powerful scan, his software hunting for any tiny fragment of the original videos or data.

"It's worse than just deleting," Kaito said quietly, his face pale. "They've used a super-advanced method to overwrite the data, making it impossible to ever recover. This is the kind of high-level, clean erasure you'd expect from a military agency or a super-secret government group. This isn't some amateur or a common criminal trying to hide their mess. This is a professional, sweeping everything under the rug."

"Cleaning up what, exactly?" Silva asked, his voice a low rumble as he joined the group.

"Me," Ace said, his voice low and tense. The part of his mind that handled corporate spying—his System—was now wide awake, analyzing this new threat. It didn't know who was responsible, but it recognized the advanced, coldly efficient method. This was a level of skill far beyond anything they had faced. "They aren't attacking us directly. They're systematically destroying any and all proof of what I can do."

"Who's 'they'?" Evelyn asked, her voice tight with worry.

"I have no idea," Ace admitted. "But whoever they are, they've been working hard." He turned to Kaito. "Widen the search. Look everywhere. Check for anything strange around every major event we've been through. The fight at the scrapyard with Deke Vance. The time we were captured in Ramos's penthouse. The original police reports from the night our cannery base was destroyed."

For the next two hours, the office was deadly quiet, filled only with the sound of Kaito's frantic typing and the steady hum of their computers. The initial confusion slowly transformed into a deep and chilling fear. With every new discovery, the terrifying scale of the erasure became clearer. Someone was rewriting history, and they were erasing Ace's role in it.

The search only revealed more grim news. Every piece of evidence was vanishing.

The security footage from the scrapyard fight? Wiped clean. The phone company's record of the call Ace made from the payphone to their ally, Mitch? Scrubbed from existence. Even the original police report from the cannery attack, which had mentioned confusing "unexplained electronic malfunctions," had been quietly changed. The strange details were replaced with ordinary explanations, like a teacher correcting a student's fanciful story.

It felt like they were hunting for ghosts, only to find that someone had already erased even the memory of those ghosts.

"They are not merely covering their tracks," Elara's voice stated calmly through Kaito's computer speakers. A simple, pulsing dot appeared on his screen, representing her. She had been watching their search silently. "They are performing surgery on the city's memory. They are carefully cutting out the strange, unexplained events—the data points that involve Ace. They are creating a clean, simple version of history where his abilities never left a trace."

"Why?" Silva demanded, his frustration finally boiling over. "If they know what he can do, why this sneaky cleanup? Why not just kick the door down and grab him?"

"That is the critical question," Elara replied, her tone analytical, like a scientist examining a specimen. "There are two main theories. First: They are a rival group that wants to study Ace's power for themselves, without any competition. By erasing the evidence, they make sure no one else can find him. Second: They are trying to protect the secret of his abilities on a massive scale."

"Protect it from who?" Evelyn asked.

"From everyone," Elara listed. "The public, other greedy corporations, world governments. If a power like this became widely known, it would change everything about how the world works—a total paradigm shift. This unknown entity may believe that such a change would be dangerous. Or, more likely, they want to be the ones to control that power entirely."

Ace leaned heavily against Kaito's desk, feeling a new kind of vulnerability. When the loan shark Ramos or the fixer Sterling had hunted him, the enemy had a face. He could fight back. This was different. This was a shadowy force working in the background, deleting his past before he even knew it was under attack.

"Can you find them?" Ace asked, looking at Elara's pulsating dot on the screen. "Can you trace where these erasures are coming from?"

"The attacks are bounced through a constantly moving maze of satellites and hijacked commercial servers across the globe," Elara explained. "Finding the true source requires a level of skill I've seldom seen. It will not be quick. However, they have a pattern. The cleanup doesn't happen instantly. It comes in waves, usually when citywide internet traffic is at its lowest. They are careful and methodical, but not all-powerful."

"So we've got a digital janitor," Silva grunted, summing it up perfectly. "A really, really good one, who's following behind us with a mop and bucket."

"Precisely," Elara confirmed.

Just then, a new alert chimed on Kaito's screen. He opened it, and his eyes went wide with a mixture of fear and excitement. "Guys. I think I found something they missed."

He pulled up a video file. It was from a private, high-quality traffic camera owned by a luxury car dealership near the old rail yard—the location of the huge gang battle Ace had secretly tipped the police about.

"The city's official cameras in that area were all erased," Kaito said, his voice eager. "But this one was on the dealership's own private network, used to prevent insurance scams. It wasn't connected to the city's main system. They must have missed it."

The video was shockingly clear. It showed the street leading to the rail yard. And there, for just a few seconds, was a perfect shot of Ace. His face was lit by the orange glow of a burning warehouse, his eyes squeezed shut in deep concentration as he used his Nanite Swarm ability to disable the SUV's tire.

It was the first and only perfect, untampered video proof of him using his powers.

"Delete it," Ace said instantly, a chill running down his spine. The thought of this evidence existing was terrifying.

"I'm on it," Kaito said, his fingers moving to destroy the file.

"No," Elara's voice cut through, sharp and firm. "Do not delete it."

Everyone stared at the speaker in surprise.

"This is not just a danger; it is an opportunity," Elara explained, her voice speeding up with intellectual excitement. "This is our first and only piece of bait. If we delete it, we are safe but blind. If we leave it where it is and watch it with extreme care, we can wait for the 'janitor' to find it. We can learn how they work. We might even be able to trace them back to their source."

It was a huge risk. Leaving the video active was like leaving a single, lit match in a room full of dynamite.

Ace understood the cold, hard logic. It was their only chance to identify this new enemy. But the idea of that video being out in the world, of some unknown group getting a crystal-clear look at his secret, made him feel deeply uncomfortable.

He looked at Evelyn. She gave a small, reluctant nod, understanding the necessity. Silva just shrugged, his expression telling Ace, You're the leader. You decide.

"Do it," Ace said, the words feeling bitter in his mouth. "Tag the file. Surround it with every monitoring and tracking tool we have. I want to know the instant anyone even looks at that file the wrong way."

For the next hour, Kaito and Elara worked together, turning the video file into a digital trap. They laced it with hidden code that would send an alarm if it was accessed and, if they were lucky, plant a secret tracker on the computer of whoever found it.

When they finished, a heavy silence filled the room. Their clean, modern office no longer felt like a safe fortress. It felt like a house made of glass, and they now knew someone was standing outside, patiently waiting to throw a stone.

They had faced brutal thugs and corporate enforcers with guns. But this enemy was different. They didn't want to break down the door. They wanted to quietly erase the door from reality, and then make everyone forget it was ever there.

The kingdom they had worked so hard to build suddenly felt less secure. Now they knew there were ghosts in the machine, and these ghosts owned the world's best eraser. The physical war for the city's streets was over. A new, silent war for its very memory had just begun.