Brendon didn't celebrate after the infiltration.
Victory in the moment meant nothing if the enemy had even a shred of strength left. Hammer was a wounded animal, and wounded animals were dangerous.
So Brendon planned for the strike that would end him.
The Phantom
Greymatter had drawn the skeleton, Upgrade had built the flesh, and AEGIS supplied the soul.
Together, they created a ghost in the machine — a hacker persona so refined it practically lived on its own. A phantom coder, born of algorithms and alien logic, complete with a digital footprint carefully backdated into years of false activity.
It had a name in the shadows: Specter.
Specter's job was simple: surface Hammer's filth, and make it look like someone else had been watching him for years.
Every shady weapons deal, every bribe, every falsified report. Greymatter made the trail airtight, Upgrade wove it into servers Hammer himself used, and AEGIS distributed it across a dozen darknet channels before pushing it into official channels.
Brendon didn't just want Hammer beaten. He wanted Hammer erased.
Cutting the Strings
Hammer's last defense was his military contracts. His armor was laughable, his tech unstable, but he had clout — backroom deals with generals who liked shiny toys and plausible deniability.
Brendon dismantled those next.
Specter slipped into secure Pentagon servers and leaked carefully altered "evidence" showing Hammer's prototypes failing spectacularly in simulations. Missiles misfiring. Armor shorting out. Drones turning on their handlers.
At the same time, shipments meant for Hammer's warehouses "mysteriously" disappeared into ocean depths — courtesy of Ripjaws dragging containers off freight ships like they were toy blocks.
By the end of the week, Hammer's phone calls went unanswered. His emails bounced back. His military lifeline was severed.
The Retaliation
Two days later, as Brendon predicted, Hammer tried to strike back.
The man stormed into one of his remaining bunkers, face red with fury, barking at his dwindling staff to "launch everything." Missiles armed, drones scrambled, automated tanks groaned to life.
And right there, in the middle of it all, Specter bled into every console.
The launch codes froze. The drones rerouted. Every feed lit up not with Hammer's commands, but with Specter's evidence.
His own engineers turned, staring at screens full of transaction logs, weapon smuggling records, even wiretaps of Hammer bragging to clients.
When the compound flooded with armed authorities less than an hour later, Justin Hammer wasn't ready to fight. He was already drowning in paperwork that screamed "guilty."
Captured. Red-handed. Exactly as Brendon intended.
The Hornet's Nest
But to make it believable, Specter couldn't just stop at Hammer.
A ghost that only attacked one man was suspicious. A ghost that stirred chaos across the board? That was real.
So Specter hacked everyone.
Stark Industries — a harmless leak of outdated blueprints.
Roxxon Energy — exposure of internal memos on shady drilling.
Oscorp — a handful of corrupted research files.
Nothing fatal, nothing crippling. Just enough to rattle cages, to make the world sit up and take notice.
The chatter across the web exploded. A phantom hacker had stepped out of legend, and Hammer just happened to be their first real victim.
Which meant the authorities looked at Hammer not as the victim of sabotage, but as the centerpiece of a scandal too big to ignore.
Hammer's Despair
On the news, Brendon watched Justin Hammer dragged away in handcuffs, spitting curses about ghosts and shadows, swearing he was framed.
Nobody believed him.
The military dropped his contracts. Investors abandoned his company overnight. Every headline screamed corruption, and behind each headline, Brendon could almost hear the man's screams.
Hammer had wanted to build an empire. Instead, he became a warning.
Quiet Victory
In the workshop, Alicia stared at the monitor, arms folded. "You buried him alive."
Brendon didn't look up from the Omnitrix as he adjusted calibration lines across its interface. "No. He buried himself. I just made sure no one missed it."
She exhaled, long and slow, a mix of awe and unease. "Specter… it's going to spook a lot of people. You realize you didn't just end Hammer — you announced yourself to the entire world."
Brendon's lips curved into something halfway between a smirk and a grimace. "Good. Let them worry about the ghost. It keeps their eyes off me."
The Omnitrix pulsed once, as if in agreement.
And somewhere, in cells deep underground, Justin Hammer sat with his head in his hands, whispering the name he feared more than any other.
Morpher.