Chapter 4

Kyle's eyes locked onto me like daggers.

"Marcus, give me the physical key!"

He lunged forward, reaching directly into my jacket pocket.

I shoved him back with a firm push.

"Kyle, keep your hands to yourself."

"My hardware key reports solely to the Chairman."

"You stripped me of my duties. I have zero legal obligation to hand over anything."

Kyle stumbled back a step, his face turning an ugly shade of purple.

He pointed a shaking finger at me.

"Marcus! You dared to leave a backdoor in the system?!"

"I can have the cops down here in five minutes to lock you in a cell!"

I sat on my broken plastic stool, unbothered.

"Watch your mouth, Kyle. Defamation carries legal weight."

"That protocol was engineered to withstand nation-state cyber warfare."

"Your father personally signed off on it years ago."

"Every line of security architecture is formally filed with corporate compliance."

"If you don't understand infrastructure, stop making a fool of yourself."

Chloe grabbed Kyle's arm, whining in his ear.

"Kyle, don't let him intimidate you."

"He's just using a cheap flash drive to extort us."

"Why don't we just tell Kevin to yank the main power cord and force a hard reset?"

Kyle's eyes lit up.

"Of course!"

"It's just a damn computer! Cut the power and hard-reboot!"

"Toby, run upstairs right now and tell Kevin to pull the master breaker on the server rack!"

Toby turned paper-white.

He stared at Kyle as if the man had lost his mind.

"Mr. Sterling! You can't do that!"

"This is peak trading volume!"

"A hard shutdown will instantly purge over two million active in-memory transactions!"

"The contractual liabilities alone would bankrupt this company!"

Kyle snapped, violently kicking Toby in the shin.

"Shut up!"

"Are you the Vice President, or am I?"

"I take full responsibility!"

"Now get upstairs and pull that damn plug!"

Toby stumbled back from the kick, wincing in pain.

He cast a desperate, pleading look in my direction.

I gave him a subtle, almost imperceptible shake of my head.

I was telling him to protect himself.

In corporate warfare, you never step in front of an idiot determined to drive off a cliff.

Toby gritted his teeth, turned, and bolted back up the stairs.

Silence descended upon the basement once again.

The damp smell of mildew seemed to thicken in the air.

Kyle spun around, an arrogant smirk returning to his lips.

"See that, Marcus?"

"Your little era is officially over."

"I don't need you to fix a single damn thing."

"Once that system reboots, you're going to spend the rest of your miserable life rotting in this basement!"

Chloe leaned against his shoulder, purring.

"Kyle is brilliant. An entitled dinosaur like him belongs in a sanitation crew, not an executive suite."

"He actually thought he was irreplaceable."

I looked down at my phone screen.

The digital clock flipped to 2:20 PM.

On the hidden diagnostic site, the memory gauge flashed a violent, blinking red: ninety-nine percent.

The moment Kevin yanked the master power supply upstairs, the massive residual data surge would overwhelm the circuits.

Not only would the active memory cache be completely obliterated, but the emergency cold-storage backups in the server room would also trigger their physical thermal self-defense tripwires.

Ten years of foundational enterprise data would be incinerated into electronic scrap within one second.

A catastrophic loss worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

I took another calm sip of water.

"Kyle."

"You really are a devoted son."

"You're about to burn your father's life's work to the ground with your own two hands."

Kyle's rage flared again. He screamed into my face.

"Shut your mouth, you washed-up loser!"

"I'm heading up right now to watch Kevin get the platform back online."

"Let's see what smug garbage comes out of your mouth then!"

He grabbed Chloe's hand and stormed furiously toward the elevator.

I watched their retreating figures, a faint, cold smile playing on my lips.

Ten.

Nine.

Eight.

Seven.

I counted down silently in my head.

Three.

Two.

One.

From the floors above, a muffled, collective shriek tore through the building.

A second later, every light in the basement snapped off.

The piercing, deafening wail of the server room's emergency auxiliary power alarm sliced through the floors, echoing violently through the darkness.