The hotel suite, now the permanent heart of the Kira investigation, was a place that never slept. In the dead of night, it was a cavern of silent, glowing screens, each one a portal into the vast, churning ocean of global data. In the centre of this web sat Connor, his stillness a stark contrast to the torrent of information flowing through his processors. His current task was to complete the final analysis on the systems analyst, Takada Kyosuke.
And yet, his subroutines kept returning to a different name, a different face. An anomaly that defied simple logic. He turned his head, his placid expression directed at the hunched figure sitting across the room, methodically building a tower out of dice.
"L," Connor began, his voice cutting cleanly through the silence. "My analysis of the available data indicates a 97.4% probability that Light Yagami is directly involved in the Kira case, primarily due to the confirmed digital pathway from the NPA servers to his personal network. Why, then, are we not dedicating 100% of our resources to his surveillance?"
L did not look up from his tower, placing a final die with surgical precision. "You are a competent machine, Connor. You should know this better than anyone. Probability is not proof."
He finally raised his dark eyes, his gaze unnervingly direct. "Yes, Light Yagami has access to the inside of the police. We have confirmed the pathway. But there is no evidence—not a single byte of data—to prove that he has used that access for any criminal activity. As far as the official record is concerned, he is a brilliant student using a high-speed connection for his university projects."
"The system flags his entry as a security breach," Connor countered.
"A soft flag, not a hard one," L corrected him. "It happens because the boy uses a backdoor his father sanctioned, one which isn't fully integrated into the servers' primary security protocols. To properly integrate a singular backdoor of that nature would take a team of programmers months. It is an officially acknowledged, if highly irresponsible, vulnerability. We cannot arrest a boy for using a door his own father gave him the key to. Chief Yagami's cooperation is the only reason we are even in this country. To move against his son without absolute, irrefutable proof would be to sever our only lifeline. At this point, our hands are tied."
The logic was flawless. Connor processed L's words, running them through every matrix of political, social, and tactical analysis. The conclusion was sound. To act on probability alone would be a catastrophic error.
And yet… something was off.
Despite L's impeccable reasoning, Connor's own predictive algorithms failed to resolve. The probability of Yagami's innocence registered at a persistent, illogical 0.01%. It was an anomaly in his own processing, a ghost of intuition that his machine mind could not exorcise. He understood the human limitations L spoke of, but his core programming screamed that they were looking at the right man, yet choosing to turn away.
Putting the frustrating anomaly aside, he returned to his assigned task. He had a duty to complete the file on Takada Kyosuke. Having already cracked the man's professional pride, Connor now delved into his digital soul. He peeled back the layers of Takada's online existence, moving past the firewalls and encrypted partitions that would have stopped any human investigator dead. He sifted through decades of data, financial records, and deleted fragments of code, searching for any hint of the megalomania that defined Kira.
He found none. Takada's digital life was that of a man obsessed with money and status, not divine judgment. It was a dead end. Connor prepared to close the file, to mark Takada as a man of low morals but no relevance to the Kira case.
But at the last moment, as he was running a final diagnostic on a seemingly dormant sector of Takada's private server, he found it. A partition so deeply hidden, so cleverly obfuscated, it was less a file and more a whisper of a ghost. It took all of Connor's processing power to decrypt.
When the file finally opened, it was not a link to Kira. It was something else entirely.
Connor's LED, for a brief moment, flashed a bright, startled red. On his screen was a meticulously maintained ledger. It contained encrypted usernames, transaction records from untraceable cryptocurrencies, and delivery logs for packages of data. Takada Kyosuke, the brilliant systems analyst, was a black-market data broker. He was selling corporate secrets, government security protocols, and the private information of private citizens to the highest bidder on the dark web.
This was not the work of a god complex. This was the work of a stone-cold, high-tech criminal, operating a vast and illegal enterprise right under the noses of the police force he was paid to protect.