CHAPTER 58: CHAPTER 58

The early morning light coming through the dusty windows of their hideout, Unit B17, felt like it was blaming them. They had returned just as the sun was rising, and its pale, revealing glow seemed to highlight the guilt from their night’s work, which clung to them like a bad smell. There was no conversation about what had happened, no celebrating their success. Silva immediately went to his security log and wrote, "4:47 AM - We successfully did not became truck thieves or murderers. Coffee status: Critical." His attempt at a joke landed with a thud in the heavy, tired silence.

Without saying a word, Evelyn started brewing a pot of coffee, her movements automatic and hollow. Ace collapsed onto a stool. He could still feel a dull ache behind his eyes, a pain from the mental strain of directing the nanites during their mission. A notification from the System—his reward for efficiently sabotaging the truck—glowed in his mind. It felt like a cold, private trophy for an act he felt nothing but shame about.

He had done it. They were safe from the gangster Vincenzo. For now. But the victory felt empty and bitter, like ashes in his mouth.

The ugly, buzzing ring of Ramos’s burner phone on the workbench shattered the silence. All three of them jumped. The sound was harsh and alarming. It felt far too soon to be hearing from Ramos. It was like being summoned to the principal’s office right after you barely managed to pass a difficult exam.

Ace picked up the phone, a knot of dread tightening in his stomach. The message was short.

The shipment was dealt with elegantly. A more creative solution than my men would have devised. It seems your particular skills extend beyond mere gambling. This pleases me.

Consider this your payment: a name. Kaito Chen.

He is a data-ghost, a hacker of significant talent who vanished after making powerful enemies. If your new problem is a digital one, he is perhaps the only one in this city with the skill to aid you. Finding him, however, will be its own test. Consider it an investment in your continued... relevance to me.

Ace stared at the message. The back-handed compliment and the hidden threat were a perfect example of Ramos’s manipulative nature. He showed the phone to Evelyn and Silva.

"Kaito Chen?" Silva read the name aloud, scratching his head in confusion. "Who the hell is that? Is this code for ’go get beat up’?"

"I don’t think so," Ace said, his voice rough with fatigue. "He’s saying this guy can help us with Silica. This is our reward."

Evelyn took the phone, her brow furrowed as she read Ramos’s message. "He’s not just giving us a name," she said, her voice low. "He’s giving us a mission. A test, like you said. ’Finding him will be its own test.’ He’s seeing if we’re resourceful enough to be worth the trouble."

"Chen... that name sounds familiar," she muttered, more to herself than to them. She turned to her offline laptop, her fingers flying across the keyboard. "Give me a second. If Ramos knows about him, there has to be some information out there about him. There’s always a trail to follow."

Ace and Silva watched her, the only sound in the room the frantic tapping of keys. Evelyn’s face was a mask of concentration, her eyes scanning lines of text on her private, air-gapped server where she stored her digital research.

"Okay," she said after a few minutes, blowing out a long breath. She turned the screen slightly so they could see a blurred, old news article headline: ’OmniCorp Whistleblower Vanishes Amidst Data Theft Charges’. "Kaito Chen. He’s not a gangster. He’s a ghost. He’s more like a legend."

"A ghost?" Silva asked, leaning in.

"A data-hacker. One of the best, from what the old forums say," Evelyn explained, her voice a mix of professional admiration and grim reality. "About five years ago, he was a rising star at OmniCorp, a big data analytics firm. He discovered a massive, illegal operation they were running. They were collecting everyone’s personal information—from medical records, social media, everything—and using it to build detailed psychological profiles that they sold for profit."

"So he was a good guy?" Ace asked.

"He tried to be," Evelyn said. "He gathered all the evidence and took it to the police. But OmniCorp was more powerful. They had people in all the right places. They set him up. They planted false evidence to make it look like he was the one selling the data. He was charged with many serious crimes, like corporate spying and data theft. He disappeared before his trial could even begin. He just vanished. Most people think he’s hiding in another country, or that OmniCorp had him killed to keep him quiet."

She looked from Ace to Silva, her expression very serious. "Ramos’s reward isn’t money or protection. It’s just a piece of information. He’s suggesting that Chen might be the only person skilled enough to help us fight a digital threat like Silica. But he’s also making it clear that it’s our responsibility to find him. If we can’t find him, we fail his test."

A small spark of hope, fragile and desperate, flickered in Ace’s chest. A real professional. Someone who could actually fight Silica on her own level.

"Great!" Silva said, clapping his hands together. "So where do we find him? Let’s go get him!"

Evelyn shook her head. "That’s the whole problem, Silva. He’s a ghost. He erased himself from the internet completely. If he’s still in the city, he’s living totally off-grid. No digital footprint, no paper trail, no records. Finding him... it’s not like looking up an address. It’s like trying to find a single, specific drop of water in the entire ocean. Ramos didn’t give us a solution; he gave us a test that has no clear answer."

That small spark of hope died as quickly as it had appeared. Of course. Ramos didn’t give gifts. He gave out riddles. He was testing Ace’s resourcefulness, seeing how far his new "attack dog" would run to find a bone that might not even exist.

CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS COMPLETE.

SUBJECT: KAITO CHEN. STATUS: MISSING/PRESUMED DEAD.

PROBABILITY OF LOCATION WITHIN CITY PARAMETERS: 3.4%.

TASK: LOCATE SUBJECT. NO FURTHER PARAMETERS PROVIDED.

The System’s cold, automated analysis was not helpful at all. It only confirmed what they already feared: that finding Kaito Chen was nearly impossible.

"So that’s it?" Silva groaned. He slumped against the workbench in defeat. "We’re supposed to find a guy that the entire internet can’t find? How are we supposed to do that?"

Ace looked around the workshop at his friends. They were exhausted and scared, but they were still here, still fighting. He looked at the tools they had, both the physical ones in the room and their own unique skills. They weren’t like Ramos’s thugs. They weren’t soldiers. They were a barista, a bartender, and a guy with a strange system in his head. But they were clever, and they knew how to survive.

"We do it our way," Ace said. A new sense of determination began to push back his deep fatigue. "We’re not the cops. We’re not a big corporation like OmniCorp. We don’t need to find his official records or his social security number. We just need to find a pattern."

Evelyn looked up at him, her interest clearly sparked. "What kind of pattern?"

"A ghost can’t just stop existing," Ace said, thinking out loud. "He needs to eat. He needs electricity. And especially if he’s still a hacker; he would need a lot of power and a very fast internet connection. He can’t just go to a coffee shop and use the public Wi-Fi for that."

"So you are saying we should look for things that don’t add up," Evelyn said, immediately understanding his plan. "We should look for strange, unexplained data usage in parts of the city that shouldn’t have it. We look for unusual power drains in abandoned buildings. We look for the digital equivalent of a shadow—something you only notice because it’s blocking the light."

"And I’ll hit the streets," Silva added, a bit of his old energy returning now that they had a direction. "I still know people. Not the big, important guys, but the little guys. The people who know which buildings have squatters, which old lofts have people living in them off the books, and who’s paying for everything with cash. The kind of information that never shows up on a computer."

Ace nodded. It was a long shot, a thousand-to-one chance. But it was a plan. It was action, and that was better than just waiting around to be found.

Evelyn was already diving back into her computer, her eyes bright with the challenge. "I’ll start searching through old city planning records and cross-reference them with current power usage reports. I’ll look for any discrepancies—anything that seems out of place."

"I’ll make some calls," Silva said, grabbing his own cheap, untraceable phone. "I’ll be discreet."

Ace stood up. The dull throb in his head was finally getting a little quieter. He walked over to a stack of printed city maps that Silva had pinned up on the wall for his "security patrols." He let his gaze wander over the sprawling grid of streets and neighborhoods, no longer seeing an impossible puzzle, but a hunt that was about to begin.

SKILL ACTIVATED: NEURAL-INTERFACE LV. 2.

PROCESSING VISUAL DATA. CORRELATING WITH KNOWN PARAMETERS: SUBJECT CHEN’S TECHNOLOGICAL REQUIREMENTS, PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE (PARANOIA, INTELLIGENCE), URBAN GEOGRAPHY.

The city map on the wall seemed to shimmer and change in his vision. It was no longer just paper and ink. It transformed into a living, breathing network of information. In his mind, he could almost see the pulsing streams of high-speed internet and the dense clusters of power lines feeding different neighborhoods.

His mind, supercharged by the System, began to quickly eliminate huge sections of the city. Too busy. A place with that many people would be too exposed. Too exposed. An open area would be too easy to find. Too poor. These areas wouldn’t have the powerful infrastructure a hacker would need.

His focus narrowed to the edges of the city, the forgotten places. He zeroed in on the decaying industrial areas near the docks—the same area where they had briefly detected Silica’s signal—and run-down neighborhoods that were meant to be rebuilt but were stuck in legal battles. These were places that still had strong power and internet lines, but very few people around to notice anything unusual.

He didn’t get a specific address. He got a strong feeling. A clear direction.

"Start there," he said, his voice quieter and more focused than before. He pointed to the industrial docklands on the map. "It fits. There are abandoned warehouses down there that still have old, high-speed internet cables running to them. There’s enough noise and industrial chaos down there to hide a significant drain on the power grid."

Evelyn and Silva looked at him, then back at the map. They didn’t question how he knew. They could see the intense focus on his face and the strange certainty in his voice. After everything they had seen him do—from performing impossible mechanical repairs to sabotaging a massive truck with just a touch—they had learned to trust his intuition. It was just another part of the mystery that was Ace.

The hunt was on. They weren’t just hiding and waiting anymore. They were now searching for one ghost to help them fight another ghost. They were armed with nothing but a name and the desperate hope that they could find a single needle in a city-sized haystack, before the wolves at their door decided to stop knocking and just broke it down.