Silent echoes

The silence continued.

Twenty-four hours passed. The absurd, spliced-together announcements on the screens vanished without a trace, as though someone had pressed delete, leaving the global online world in stunned, deathly silence, punctuated by countless futile attempts to analyze, explain, and assign blame.

The aftershocks of "Patient Zero's" conceptual erasure still rippled outward, but no new waves of information followed.

The burner phone still lay on the corner of the desk, its screen dead black, like a piece of scrap metal with its energy utterly drained. No light, no vibration, no cold text, no distorted roars.

It was as though "Mentor," along with his intricate models and Sigma, had truly been vaporized by that judgment beyond comprehension, dissolved into the void of data.

In the corner, Ryuk seemed affected by the prolonged silence, too. He no longer kept pulling out rotten apples. Instead, he occasionally scraped the floor with his enormous, bony claws in idle boredom, making a monotonous rasping sound. His scarlet eyes flicked toward me, then toward the gray sky outside the window, some inhuman restlessness slowly gathering within them.

"Hey..." At last, he could no longer hold back. His hoarse voice sounded like worn-out bellows. "That guy... has he really rotted away? Did that... concept thing of yours... flush him down the drain?"

I did not answer. My fingers tapped unconsciously against the computer's cold casing.

Silence.

There were two possibilities.

One: he had indeed broken down. His cognitive models could not process a dimensional assault like "conceptual judgment" and had overloaded completely, burning out. He had lost both the ability and the courage to track me. His own organization might even have purged him over it. That would be ideal.

Two: he was lying low. This deathly silence was another form of attack. He was using absolute silence to pressure me, to tempt me into making mistakes, to make uncertainty breed anxiety, and anxiety drive me toward more aggressive, less predictable actions that would expose greater weaknesses. That fit his earlier style better.

Waiting and guessing were dangerous. Time was not on my side. Every additional second of silence increased the possibility that he would regroup, or that forces higher up would intervene.

I could not wait. I had to break this silence. In a way he could not ignore.

But it could not be another grand conceptual strike like "Patient Zero." That required meticulous preparation and a measure of luck. It was also too detached from reality, which might only make it easier for him to shut himself away and refuse to understand.

I needed to return to something more "tangible." A bloody judgment directly connected to him, one he could not dismiss as "impossible to calculate."

A judgment that would prove I not only existed, but still had my eyes fixed firmly on his world, ready to bring destruction down upon it again at any moment.

The target needed a direct, profound connection to him. Not someone like Liu Jianming, whom he had tried to "clean up," but a core component of his "SRO-7" world. Someone he could not easily discard, whose death would strike a nerve.

My gaze sharpened like a scalpel as I began dissecting every scrap of information connected to "SRO-7," the previously leaked code, and that style of rigorous surveillance. A military-industrial complex? An intelligence consortium? A special projects unit?

A name-or rather, a code name-flickered in a corner of my memory. It came from a fragment of encrypted communications I had stumbled upon long ago and never fully decrypted.

"Shepherd." Not a real name. Within the "SRO-7" structure, he was a chief instructor of sorts, responsible for training and deploying frontline operatives. A legendary figure. Agents trained by him were said to occupy every critical node: ruthless, efficient, absolutely loyal. He was the extension through which people like "Mentor" could impose their will, the lubricant and the fuse that kept the machinery running.

A true insider.

His death should carry... the ritual quality of an internal purge. An execution aimed at the "tool" itself.

I walked to the desk. The Death Note lay open without a sound. The tip of my pen touched down, steady and cold.

["Shepherd"] (His identity was linked to the highest-clearance command ["Broken Blade"] at the "SRO-7" advanced training base. Real name: Carl Ryan.)

Cause of death: tool decommissioning. Time: four tomorrow morning, inside his private safe house at the training base deep in the mountains. Cause of death: the base's core security system would suddenly identify him as a "highest-level intrusion threat," activate the ["Broken Blade"] protocol, and release nerve gas (his own clearance could not override it). Before his death, his personal terminal would automatically send a highest-priority encrypted directive to every active and reserve "Sheepdog" (agent code name) at the base, containing his complete true identity, records of every "cleanup" mission, and a final assessment: [The tool is worn out. Loyalty must be redefined.]

No external enemy. Only the system devouring itself from within. A meticulously engineered "accident," a vicious mockery of absolute loyalty.

Mentor, your "Shepherd" has been purged as a virus by your own system.

How much longer can you maintain this silence?

The next day, at 4:03 a.m.

At the "SRO-7" advanced training base deep within an unnamed mountain range, the highest-level internal alarm sounded.

Reason for the alarm: the highest-level security protocol ["Broken Blade"] had been triggered unexpectedly. Target: Chief Instructor Carl Ryan's safe house.

When the emergency team risked entering, they found only Ryan's already stiffened corpse and the lingering, cloyingly sweet smell of almonds in the air.

Almost simultaneously, every agent's encrypted terminal at the base received a chilling directive sent under Ryan's authorization...

The news was contained within the base as swiftly and strictly as possible, but the shock and fear emanating from its very core could not be fully suppressed. An invisible fracture quietly spread through this organization renowned for absolute loyalty and efficiency.

In my room, the screen displayed a few scattered, vague reports of a "serious security incident" at a sensitive military base. They soon disappeared.

Ryuk suddenly raised his head, a flicker of bloodthirsty excitement flashing through his scarlet eyes. "Oh? Bit itself, did it?" He let out a low, rasping chuckle. "Fun! Now this is fun! Its own dog, killed by its own trap!"

He was waiting expectantly.

So was I.

Waiting for that deathly silence to break.

This time, the wait was short.

Half an hour later.

The dead-black phone's screen flared to life!

No ringtone! No text message!

Instead, a video call request popped up-directly!

A gray, endlessly spinning connection icon filled the entire screen.

No caller ID. Only the cold silhouette of a default system avatar.

A video request.

For the first time, he was trying to face me directly.

I stared at the spinning gray icon on the screen, my heart beating steadily in my chest.

Then, slowly.

I extended a finger.

And held it hovering-

Above the answer button.