The next few days passed in relative quiet. Life settled back into rhythm and things seemed to be getting in order. But that was just on the surface.
Fu Ling first noticed how the merchant caravans that usually passed their territory without fuss now avoided their scanners completely.
And then the drones started having problems. They didn't return from patrol on time. At first, the tech division blamed a bad signal loop. Then, when the missing drones were finally located, every one of them had their navigation cores wiped clean. Factory state, no logs, no traces, as if they had never flown at all.
Then their external data uplink started flickering. The encrypted relay that kept them connected to the upper network began to suffer from "scheduled maintenance" they had never requested. Every time the technicians tried to restore it, a new firewall popped up from nowhere.
Even the most stupid person would realize by now that they were being targeted. But by who?
