Chapter 263 The Warden III

Lana slowly turned her head toward Liam, her brows slightly furrowed, a hint of disbelief in her voice.

"So your dad," she said, pointing toward Liam, "got your dad killed?" She shifted her finger toward Vanessa.

Vanessa didn’t flinch. She nodded slowly, her expression unreadable—calm, composed... maybe even detached. But her eyes held an old storm, one buried deep beneath the surface.

"Yes," she said.

Liam stared at her, trying to gauge how she meant it. There was no bitterness in her tone, no blame in her voice.

Vanessa gave a small shrug, then locked eyes with him. "But don’t worry. It’s not like I hate you for it."

Liam chuckled softly. "I wasn’t worried."

And he wasn’t. His tone was cool, but his thoughts were elsewhere. His eyes scanned the room again, trailing along the strange high-tech suits hanging neatly on the wall. Sleek, matte, armored, tailored perfectly for a woman’s body. One caught his attention—black and violet with built-in tactical belts and gauntlets.

He pointed at it, his brow slightly raised. "Vanessa," he said. "Were you the one responsible for attacking the Crimson Hand’s supply base last month?"

Vanessa arched a brow. "What?"

Liam turned toward her. "Now that I think about it... you match the description. They said the attacker could move through space. They also said it was a woman. Ruthless. Accurate."

There was a long pause.

Then Vanessa tilted her head with a smirk. "Yes. That was me."

Liam’s smile widened in satisfaction. "Good job," he said, his voice rich with approval.

But the moment of pride and revelation was interrupted as a low alarm rang throughout the cave.

Bzzt! Bzzt!

A screen slid out from the ceiling and hovered before them, flickering to life. Surveillance footage popped onto it—grainy at first, then crystal clear. External angles of Vanessa’s mansion. Night vision activated. Armed men. A SWAT convoy surrounding the house.

Then, with a loud bang, the front door was kicked open, and a team of five stormed in with rifles drawn.

Lana stepped forward slowly, her eyes glued to the screen. She watched with eerie calmness as the men moved from room to room upstairs, sweeping corners, shouting commands. It was like watching sharks circle in a tank, searching for prey they didn’t know was just beneath their feet.

She turned to Vanessa. "Are you sure they won’t find this place?"

Vanessa didn’t even glance at her. Her eyes stayed on the footage, calm and confident.

"They won’t," she said flatly. "Not in a million years."

Liam leaned in, now drawn to the feed himself. The camera angle switched to the sitting room where the men were regrouping. A sixth man had just entered. Bulkier. Older. More decorated. His tactical gear was custom-made. The leader.

He was clearly in charge.

One of the SWAT members approached him and gave a quiet report, muffled but decipherable through the lip-reading overlay on the screen.

"No signs of anyone, sir."

The leader tilted his head slightly. "Are you sure you checked everywhere?"

The men all nodded, confirming they had done a full sweep of the house.

"Move out," the commander ordered.

And one by one, they began filing out of the mansion, leaving it seemingly untouched.

But then... the leader didn’t follow.

Liam narrowed his eyes.

The man lingered behind, alone now. He reached into his side pouch and pulled out a few tiny, black devices—micro surveillance cameras, no bigger than a coin. He bent down and began attaching them in discreet corners of the living room. One behind a flower vase. One under the coffee table. Another high in a light fixture.

"He’s planting bugs," Liam muttered.

Vanessa watched with a faint smile on her lips. It was like watching someone try to outsmart a ghost.

"They won’t work," she said coolly. "Every part of this house is layered with tech that scrambles signals unless I allow it. The moment they leave, every camera he planted will burn out."

She turned toward Liam and Lana. "And even if they didn’t... this place has more exits than they can ever imagine."

Liam nodded, but something in his mind was already pulling him elsewhere.

"If they came here," he said quietly, "then they’ll go to our places next."

Lana turned toward him. "Yeah?"

He looked at her, his tone shifting with sudden urgency. "Your parents—"

But she quickly shook her head. "They’re not home. They’ve been away for a long while. They won’t be back anytime soon."

Relief washed through Liam’s face like a breeze through dry heat. For a moment, the weight on his chest lifted.

Good. At least they were safe. That gave him one less thing to worry about in the chaos unfolding around them.

Vanessa looked up from the wall of screens and turned toward them. "Where are your phones?"

Liam and Lana shared a quick glance.

"We left them at the crash site," Liam answered.

Lana nodded. "Yeah. They’re probably shattered to bits."

Vanessa leaned back slightly and gave a short nod of approval. "Good. We don’t want them tracking you here. Your phones would’ve been like beacons."

She stood and dusted off her pants. "For now, just rest. It’s been a long night. Tomorrow, we figure out what the hell we’re going to do."

Liam didn’t argue. He exhaled and sat on a small metal bench beside one of the lockers. But just as the silence was settling in, Her’s fingers began tapping on a nearby console. A soft click click click echoed in the chamber.

Liam turned to her.

"What are you doing?"

She didn’t look up. Her fingers flew across the keys like a seasoned hacker’s. "Trying to tap into the cameras that SWAT guy left behind."

Lana raised a brow. "Can you access them?"

Vanessa shrugged. "Eventually. If I can isolate their feed source, we might find out where they were routed. That could tell us who’s actually behind this hit."

Liam leaned closer, interested now. "You think it’ll lead back to the people that made the video ?"

"I don’t know," Vanessa muttered, narrowing her eyes at the lines of code flashing by. "But these weren’t ordinary SWAT units. They were trained, tactical, disciplined. Way above standard issue. And the encryption on these devices..." She paused. "It’s not like anything I’ve seen before."

Liam’s expression shifted. "You can’t break it?"

"I’m not saying that," She said, biting her lip. "I’m saying I’ve never seen programming this complicated before. It’s like the encryption is alive—adaptive. Whoever made this didn’t want anyone touching it."

Liam stood from the bench and stepped closer to the console, peering at the screen for a second.

Then he said calmly, "Let me try."

She blinked. "You?"

He nodded.

She scooted aside to give him space. "Have at it, genius. But don’t blame me if the keyboard fries your brain."

Liam didn’t respond.

Instead, he inhaled deeply and whispered inside his own mind.

System. Show me how to crack this.

A cold, sharp pulse fired through his brain, like a sudden jolt of awareness. His eyes glazed for a moment as thousands of lines of code and prompt-based commands downloaded into his head. It wasn’t just information—it was understanding. Like he’d studied this encryption for years, lived with it, breathed it.

His fingers hit the keyboard.

Hard.

Tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak—

He wasn’t typing like a human anymore. His hands were a blur, moving in a rhythm that bordered on mechanical. The screen flickered with lines of source code, protocols, firewall stacks, cloaked signal re-routes and triple-scrambled IP chains. He found all of them.

Within moments, he bypassed a biometric lock, isolated the false data strings, then injected a mirror virus to bait the encryption’s defenses. It latched, opened briefly—and Liam slid in under the firewall, re-routing the data stream to one of Vanessa’s untraceable side servers.

Lana leaned forward, staring at the screen. "What the hell..."

He wasn’t even using the mouse.

Just raw keyboard work and coding prompts—rapid, accurate, flawless.

Liam muttered something in code.

Then—ping.

A flashing map appeared on the screen. Red blips marked the cameras’ original transmission points. Three locations. One was routed through the city’s police surveillance satellite. Another was bouncing from a remote server off the coast—military-grade. The third... was untraceable. It simply said: "Unknown. Off-Grid. Scrambled Origin."

Lana stared wide-eyed at the console, but her question came out in a whisper.

"Vanessa... what is Liam doing?"

Vanessa’s eyes were just as stunned.

But she smiled faintly. "He’s hacking into military-encrypted, satellite-routed, ghost-network-level surveillance while making it look like he’s writing a grocery list."

Lana turned to look at her.

"That’s the simple version?"

Vanessa nodded. "Yep."

They both looked at Liam. Still typing. Still focused. Still muttering code like he was born inside a motherboard.

And for a moment... Vanessa could not believe the person standing in front of them was just twenty.