# CHAPTER 35: DEAD-END CIRCUITS
**Stark Estate — 3:04 AM**
For a moment, he remained still, staring into the darkness. The room was quiet, and the curtains were drawn, allowing no trace of light from outside to enter. He reached towards the bedside table, feeling around until his fingers found his phone.
The screen lit up.
**3:04 a.m.**
He sighed. It was still far too early to get up.
Placing the phone face down, he turned onto his other side and closed his eyes, hoping to fall asleep again. But minutes passed, and sleep refused to come. He pulled the spare pillow over his head, hoping to force his mind back toward sleep
It didn't work.
his brain was already whirring, fueled by adrenaline, unresolved conspiracies, and the heavy burden of the previous night's revelations. After twenty minutes of uselessly tossing and turning, he checked the screen again: **3:21 AM**.
He threw off the blanket and sat up with a heavy sigh, flicking on the bedside lamp.
"Forget it," he muttered, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed." I don't think I'll be sleeping again today"
Krist walk into the adjoining bathroom to splash cold water over his face and brush his teeth.
After washing his face and brushing his teeth, Krist left his bedroom and headed downstairs. He went straight to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and took out a bottle of water. After drinking half of it, he made his way into the living room with the rest.
He settled onto one of the single-seater couches, picked up his laptop from the table, and switched it on.
"Since I can't sleep, I might as well make good use of my time."
He logged into the Stark system through the key that was still connected to the main saver and resumed reviewing the security footage from Stark Academy.
For the first few minutes, he concentrated on the recordings, moving between dates and camera angles in search of anything unusual. However, after about thirteen minutes, his enthusiasm began to fade.
He leaned back against the couch and stared at the screen before shaking his head.
"Okay, this has officially become boring. And it's becoming unbearable." he muttered, rubbing his burning eyes. A sudden thought struck him.
He was about to close the footage when an idea suddenly occurred to him.
"Actually, why am I even doing all this myself? I could just leave the boring part to someone else."
He paused, considering the thought.
It wasn't as if he had done anything particularly suspicious that he needed to hide from the academy's security cameras.
His expression slowly changed.
"Or have I?"
Krist narrowed his eyes as he tried to remember.
"Except that one time... That was about two months ago."
Setting the laptop on the cushions, Krist stood up and walked over to the long hardwood media console beneath the mounted television. He pulled open a drawer—a neatly organized compartment filled with auxiliary USB drives, auxiliary cables, memory cards, high-speed flash chips, fiber-optic patches, and hardware bypasses. Because of his parents' engineering work, spare hardware was a permanent fixture in the house; Grayson Stark had always preached that a failed cable during a critical system test could cost millions.
Krist selected a high-capacity, encrypted flash drive, closed the drawer, and returned to the couch.
Plugging the drive into his laptop, he set the batch-copy command for the past two years of institution security archives. Before hitting initiate, he manually un-flagged a three-day window from two months prior, ensuring those specific files would be excluded from the transfer.
"There. Now I can dump the rest of this tedious job onto Ray," Krist chuckled softly to himself. Then he froze, a cold realization hitting him like a splash of ice water. He slapped his forehead with an audible *CLAP*.
"Shit! I didn't block Harry's remote access feed from those exact dates!"
He quickly brought up the network permission logs, tapping a string of commands to permanently purge those three days of raw video from the institution's central drive. He let out a small sigh of relief. *At least the system security architecture prevents remote downloads for anyone except for me, Thank God. Even if Harry spotted the file names, he couldn't download the actual video data.*
With the transfer to his flash drive sitting at a slow, creeping **3%**, Krist realized he had time to kill.so he decided to occupy himself with something else.
Since his terminal was already bridged into the Stark Academy main server, he decided to do some off-the-books exploring. He casually bypassed a few security layers, checked his own academic transcript, and adjusted a couple of minor attendance records just for the fun of it.
Then, a detail from his previous physical break-in resurfaced in his mind.
When he had been inside the physical server room, he had noticed a set of hidden, off-grid server racks tucked discretely behind the main array. Intrigued, Krist began mapping out the internal data routing, attempting to trace the outbound network traffic from those isolated racks.
What he found left him baffled.
The data traffic didn't register on standard protocols—it vanished into a digital blind spot.
Krist's hands flew across the keyboard, his left hand guiding the mouse with practiced precision as his eyes scanned lines of rapid code.
"Is someone actually bold enough to siphoning this much bandwidth and power right under everyone's noses?" he whispered, leaning closer.
The deeper he dug, the less the financial and technical metrics aligned. Cross-referencing the academy's official utility audits and financial bail documents, the numbers were wildly distorted. Stark Academy's power consumption and server infrastructure costs were listed at astronomical rates, yet the visible network was using barely 30% of that total output.
He checked the figures again, hoping he had made a mistake.
He hadn't.
The academy appeared to be paying for considerably more than it actually used. And the hidden servers seemed to be connected to the discrepancy.
But Where was the rest of the energy going? What was that hidden rack processing?
Krist leaned back, a thoughtful expression settling over his face.
"If I'm going to take down Bellatrix once and for all, I need total leverage," Krist murmured, his eyes glittering with intense determination. "Which means I need to know what those servers are hiding. And the only way to trace an unmapped hardware line... is to go back into that server room.
He glanced at the clock: 3:54 AM. The sun wouldn't rise for another two hours.
His eyes shifted to the file-transfer window. The footage was only thirty-one per cent complete.
Krist shook his head.
"At this rate, I'll be here all morning."
He stood up and hurried upstairs. Deciding it would take care of itself,
A few minutes later, he returned wearing a black, skin-tight hoodie, matching trousers, and a nose mask. A small backpack hung from his shoulder.
He picked up his phone.
**4:00 a.m.**
"Perfect."
He slipped the phone into his pocket, headed straight for the garage, and selected one of the sportbike. After putting on the helmet, he fired up the muffled engine and drove out of Stark Estate, disappearing into the quiet streets.
Less than ten minutes later, he arrived near the academy.
Krist arrived at the perimeter of Stark Academy. Avoiding the main gates and security cameras, he pulled into the shadowy alleyway—the familiar spot same one where he had previously clashed with Billy and his followers.
He cut the of the bike and dismounted. After taking a dark canvas from his backpack, he covered the bike before turning towards the school.
This would be his second attempt at breaking into the academy.
But unlike the previous time, Harrison and the others wouldn't be watching his back. He was completely on his own.
He would have to be careful.
Moving like a shadow, Krist breached the outer perimeter, Krist made his way towards the building, keeping his attention on his surroundings. At that hour, The campus was dead silent. most people were still asleep. The academy was largely deserted, apart from a handful of security guards who predictably appeared far more interested in sleeping or slacking off in their booths than doing their jobs.
with the corridor lighting dimmed to conservation mode, navigating the halls was effortless
Within minutes, he stood outside the heavy reinforced door of the server room.
He pulled a handheld signal bypass device from his pack, magnetic-clamping it onto the electronic keypad. A series of rapid green flashes flickered across the interface before the heavy lock disengaged with a soft, pneumatic click.
Krist slipped inside, closing the door silently behind him.
The hum of high-powered cooling fans filled the room. He carefully inspected the perimeter racks, looking for exposed hardware splices or physical tap-lines, but found nothing unusual. Every auxiliary node routed directly through the central, floor-to-ceiling server core in the middle of the chamber.
Krist stepped up to the central glass pillar. He entered the password on the primary interface.
The curved glass panel slid open with a soft pneumatic hiss, granting him access to the core diagnostic terminal.
Krist logged into the root directory, unleashing every network trace protocol he knew. He tried to follow the physical routing of the hidden rack array, forcing the system to map the output pins. But every trace hit the same brick wall: the data was being commanded to route *downward*, past the foundation of the server room itself.
Which meant it wasn't sending data to any office, classroom, or administrative computer on the floors above or below. It was routing into an unmapped, deep-subterranean sector that wasn't listed on any official architectural blueprint of the institute.
"Where the hell are you sending all that information?" he muttered.
The server continued humming around him, offering no answer.
And somewhere beneath the academy, whatever was receiving the hidden data remained completely out of his reach.