Next Step

"Yes."

Von Stauffenberg picked up a report from the table and turned to a certain page.

"Over the past three months, the Mountain Shadow node recorded three directed pulse signals from across the Atlantic Ocean. The waveform characteristics of the signals were highly consistent with the pulses produced by the breaking of The Seal in America, but by the time their intensity reached the Mountain Shadow node, they had already attenuated to less than five percent of the original value.

T

At this point, she glanced at Cassandra.

"We couldn't explain that attenuation phenomenon at the time, but now Cassandra's explanation has given us the answer—Cohen's patch also exists inside the Mountain Shadow node, only in a different form from Node Seven. His soul is scattered throughout the entire network. Every node contains remnants of his magic, and all of them are weakening The Ashwinder Party's directed guidance pulses."

Vivi closed the summary in her hand.

"Cohen didn't begin embedding himself from Node Seven. He started leaving traces of himself in the various nodes of the network much earlier—the magical fingerprints at Aldeburgh, the reverse-pulse trigger at Mountain Shadow, the magical residue at Mount Etna, the background vibration records in the Lut Desert. He spent years carving himself into the entire network, bit by bit. Node Seven was only the final stop where he completed the embedding."

She stood up, walked to the tactical board at the front of the conference room, and used her wand to draw a simplified global distribution map of the Ninety-Nine Chains.

Then she marked the confirmed locations of the response nodes in Europe, America, Africa, and Asia.

"What we're facing now isn't a single crisis. The Ashwinder Party's headquarters in Europe has been taken down, and that is a major tactical victory, but their