Kang Seong's presence at the Convent turned the atmosphere into fine ice, ready to break at the slightest misstep. He did not speak, hardly ate. He sat down in front of his screens, transferring encrypted files from his portable terminal, tracing optimal transmission patterns with machine efficiency. His eyes avoided Do's, but sometimes, when he thought no one was looking, his gaze would be on him with an intensity that gave chills - not hatred, but the cold evaluation of an element necessary for a larger plan. A damaged but useful element.
The information he provided, however, was crucial. The relay station's vulnerability window was shorter than expected: seventy-two seconds. Seventy-two seconds during which deflector shields and quantum firewalls would be at 47% of their capacity, the time of a harmonic reconfiguration.
"Seventy-two seconds," Lyra repeated, her face grave. "Joon, are you sure you can establish and maintain a stable bond for so long?"
Joon's weak voice came out of the medical capsule's intercom. "The link... yes. The maintenance... will depend on the counter-reaction of the system. It will burn my circuits, but I can hold on."
"And we," Do asked, turning to Lyra and Cassiopeia. "This... imprint of our duality. Is she ready?"
Cassiopeia nodded, pointing to a newly assembled device, a kind of neural helmet connected to a central housing that pulsated with a soft, amber light. "We captured a stable loop of your cognitive interference. It's a wave of pure paradox. The system will analyze it, try to solve it, and in the process, replicate it. This is the principle of the virus. But to inject it, you need a perfectly synchronized channel."
Kang Seong, without looking up from his screen, spoke. "The canal is me. I'm going to route the signal through the backdoors that I left in the station's traffic management system. I will use my own former observer signature, which still has low-level read/write privileges."
All eyes turned to him. That was the heart of the risk. To give him control of the signal was to give him the opportunity to divert it, to cancel it, or worse, to add a tracer that would lead them all straight to them.
"Why?" asked Orion, his voice rumbled low. "Why would you do that?" You could betray us with a click."
Kang Seong finally looked up. His face was a mask of fatigue and cold resolution. "Because your virus is an emotional weapon. It's messy, illogical. It's a widespread suffering. I want the system to taste suffering. Not a clean, clean suffering, like a material failure. A chaotic, human suffering. The one he inflicted. The one he created in both of you," he said, pointing to Do with a chin motion. "I want him to choke with it. So yes, I'll help you. Because your means serves my end."
It was cynical, brutal, but horribly consistent. His revenge would not be through physical destruction, but through the contamination of the very mind of the machine.
Lyra studied her face for a long time, then nodded. But Orion will be by your side. And Vega will monitor every data packet that passes through your terminals. An anomaly, and it's over."
Kang Seong shrugged his shoulders, as if indifferent to the threat. The window opens in six hours and fourteen minutes. Get ready."
The hours that followed were a silent and oppressive countdown. Do was connected to the recording device, feeling Kai's presence more distinctly than ever, not as a separate voice, but as a harmonic to his own consciousness, a constant counterpoint. They didn't speak, but shared a strange calm, an acceptance. They had been a mistake, an anomaly. Maybe it made sense for them to become the poison.
Joon, in his capsule, was undergoing invasive preparations. Neural cables were connected to ports behind his ear, directly to his regulator interface. He closed his eyes, focused, already feeling the pressure of the distant system.
Kang Seong, under Orion's gaze, made connections, entered lines of code, tested virtual paths. His hands were stable, his movements precise. He was a ghost operating in the digital corridors that he knew so well.
When there was only one hour left, Lyra gathered everyone, even Joon via intercom.
"Now is the time," she said simply. "We are not striking to destroy, but to infect. To sow incurable doubt. If it works, the system will become... unpredictable. Less effective. It will create spaces where people like us can breathe, organize. It's a beginning, not an end."
She looked at all of them. "For some of us, this will be the end. The system will not allow this act to go unpunished. He will hunt us down. This place will no longer be safe. We will have to disappear, perhaps separate. Remember that."
The solemnity of his words hovered in the room. They were not an army. They were a handful of scum, victims and avengers, about to throw a rock into a god's windshield.
The final countdown was unbearable. Do was sitting with the neural helmet on his head, feeling the weak hum of the device. Next to him, Kang Seong had his fingers on his keyboard, his eyes fixed on a digital chronometer. Orion stood behind him, one hand on his shoulder, ready to dislocate him.
"Thirty seconds," announced Kang Seong, his neutral voice. "Joon, make the connection."
In the capsule, Joon groans, then his voice, distorted by effort, came. I hold the door open. It's... painful."
Twenty seconds. Loading the viral vector."
Do felt increasing pressure in his skull. The device drew from the trademark of his mind, from the tangled pattern of Do and Kai.
"Ten seconds. Synchronization of the channel."
The convent's lights dimmed slightly, diverting energy to the machines.
"Five. Four. Three. Two. ONE. Injection!"
Kang Seong pressed a touch. Do felt like a tearing, a sudden sense of emptiness, as if a part of himself was sucked in, digitized, compressed into a stream of data that was rushing into the channel that Joon was keeping open.
A visualization of the signal appeared on the screens: a complex, vibrant, unstable spiral that crept like a glowing worm through a dark tunnel representing the relay station's defenses. She was moving forward, fast.
"Shields at 47%... the signal is passing!" announced Cassiopeia, her eyes widened.
For thirty seconds, everything seemed to work. The virus, their duality reduced to a wave of paradox, spread through the arteries of the machine.
Then, Kang Seong's screens flashed red. The system detected the intrusion. He throws a purger."
The visualization showed a geometric shape, cold and sharp, which set out in pursuit of the spiral, seeking to cancel it out.
"Joon! Speed up the flow! Pour everything out!" ordered Lyra.
"I... can't... it's too much..." Joon's voice was a dying breath. "They burn my link..."
The spiral on the screen began to waver, to disintegrate under the onslaught of the purger.
Kang Seong gritted his teeth, his fingers flying over the keyboard. "No. Not now." He entered a series of quick commands, violating his own security protocols. "I redirect the flow through the main diagnostic node. It's slower, but the purger doesn't watch it."
The signal forked, narrowly avoiding annihilation, but it was weakened, dispersed.
"It will not achieve the necessary spreading power," murmured Cassiopeia, in despair.
It was then that Kang Seong did something unexpected. He ripped a cable from his own terminal and plugged it directly into Joon's neural interface, shorting his own safeties.
"What are you doing?" cried Orion.
"I'm increasing the load," Kang Seong replied, with a twisted smile on his lips. "With my own access signature. I give everything. My privileges, my history, my identity in the system. I'll saturate him."
On the screen, the failing signal suddenly regenerated, swollen with a new mass of data - Kang Seong's observational memories, his research on Yoona, his pain, his cold rage. It was no longer just the virus of duality. It was a poisonous cocktail of everything the system had created and tried to control: anomaly, rebellion, and now, sheer revenge.
The purger, confronted with this new and chaotic mass, hesitated. For a crucial second.
It was enough.
The visualization exploded into a shower of white light. The virus, driven by the sacrifice of Kang Seong's identities and amplified by the Joon Channel, crossed the last firewall and poured into the main data stream of the relay station.
On all the screens of the Convent, a systemic error message, repeated endlessly, began to flash.
[Error: Major cognitive paradox detected in primary flow.]
[Attempted resolution...failure.]
[REPLICATION OF ANOMALIA... Ongoing. [...]
[WARNING: Logical integrity compromised.]
Then Kang Seong's screens turned black. Fine smoke escaped from his terminal. He turned back, his body shaken with spasms, a net of blood flowing from his nose. He had burned his mind in the system, offering his own digital being as an offering for his revenge.
In the capsule, Joon breathed his last, then his vital monitor emitted a flat, continuous sound. He had kept the door open until the end.
The silence that fell on the Convent was deafening, broken only by the funeral beep of Joon's monitor and the sizzling of the grilled equipment.
It was done. They had succeeded. The system was infected.
But the price... Joon was dead. Kang Seong was a vegetable, his mind dissipated in the network. And Do, exhausted, emptied, felt a change in him. The pressure of duality had diminished. The recording had taken something. Kai was still there, but more distant, weaker, like an echo.
Lyra stood up, her face marble. "Escape. Now. Take Kang Seong if you can. Give up the rest. The digital shock wave will trigger a massive physical alert. They will come."
Orion loaded Kang Seong's inert body onto his shoulder. Cassiopeia and Vega began destroying crucial hard drives.
Do stood up, staggering, tearing off the neural helmet. He took one last look at Joon's capsule at the smoking terminal in Kang Seong. They had won a battle. But as he looked at the broken faces around him, the lives lost or devastated, he wondered, for the first time, whether victory against an inhuman machine could ever justify the cost so deeply, so tragically human.
The virus was released. The rebellion had marked the machine. But it had also largely consumed itself in the flames of victory. And what follows... what would follow would be a leak. A survival in a world that, perhaps, was just beginning to become imperfect, and therefore, dangerous in a whole new way.