Calibration

Error: command source offline. Recalibrating...

The cold, looping electronic notification repeated in my mind like a broken record.

The command source was offline. Winters's death had indeed severed a vital lifeline. Not just funding, but also a certain degree of "legitimacy" that had shielded it. The old bureaucrat's sudden death and the budget document stamped "REJECTED" with a bloody fingerprint had sent devastating shock waves through Capitol Hill. Questions, investigations, disavowals... "SRO-7" and its associated projects had gone from "a necessary gray area" to "a hot potato" in an instant.

He had lost some of the justification and cover for his operations. He needed to "recalibrate."

But the notification itself was information, too. He was telling me he needed time. He was telling me he had run into trouble. It was almost... a roundabout request for a pause.

Could I give him time?

No.

Stagnation meant death. Giving him time meant giving him breathing room to weave his web again, perhaps even inviting intervention from a higher, more unpredictable level.

I had to apply pressure again before he finished "calibrating." This time, the pressure had to act directly on the "calibration" process itself. I had to deny him the peace to "calibrate," to keep his so-called "recalibration" trapped in a state of panic, constantly disrupted and interrupted.

The next target had to be someone who could directly disrupt or even destroy the internal "calibration" and "reconstruction" processes of agencies like "SRO-7." A "cleaner" responsible for internal security, information compartmentalization, and crisis response. A critical node that ensured the system could quickly resume functioning after a blow.

A core cell in its... "immune system."

My gaze swept across every scrap of information related to crisis management, internal investigations, and information suppression like the most precise radar. Scattered news reports, citations in academic papers, employment records leaked from anonymous intelligence markets...

I found it.

"Night Watchman." Not a person, but the code name of an extremely secretive internal oversight team consisting of three members. They answered directly to the highest level and operated outside "SRO-7's" regular structure, specializing in internal purges, loyalty reviews, and systemic vulnerability assessments after major infiltration or attacks against the organization. They were the system's "surgeons": calm, ruthless, and highly efficient, ensuring that any "necrotic tissue" was promptly excised and defenses reinforced. After the Winters incident, they had undoubtedly already begun operating in secret.

Their deaths should be... a systemic implosion. A disaster in which the "virus" they sought to eradicate infected them instead, inside their most essential "operating room."

I walked to the desk and opened the Death Note. My pen touched the page with an invasive chill.

["Night Watchman" team] (The three members are treated as a single coordinated operational unit, their existence deeply bound to the internal security protocol ["Purification"].)

Cause of death: reverse purification. Time: midnight tomorrow, at their security review center inside an underground bunker, while conducting the highest-priority isolation reviews of personnel implicated in the "Winters incident." Cause of death: the ["Purification"] protocol on which they depend will be hijacked by malicious code, reversing its logic. Originally designed to detect and eliminate "disloyal" or "compromised" personnel, the protocol will now apply perfectly to them. All three will simultaneously identify one another as "the highest-level internal threat" and initiate the most efficient "elimination" procedures against each other (using all available means on-site: sidearms, injectable drugs, and close-quarters combat techniques). Before their deaths, all internal surveillance recordings and preliminary assessment reports from their review center (covering every person under review) will be uploaded in real time to multiple public submission channels belonging to WikiLeaks and similar organizations.

Let them die under the "Purification" procedure they trusted most. Let the internal chaos they sought to conceal be exposed fully to the light.

Mentor, you want to "recalibrate"?

I'll leave you...

No time to calibrate.

The next day, at midnight.

Inside a security facility deep underground.

The three members of the "Night Watchman" team sat outside separate isolation rooms, interrogating several mid-ranking officials temporarily isolated over the Winters incident through one-way glass and sensors. The atmosphere was tense, efficient, and cold.

Suddenly!

All three jerked their heads up almost simultaneously! Their eyes instantly turned sharp and hostile, fixing on one another! As though the others were no longer comrades who had fought by their side, but the most dangerous enemies, perfectly disguised!

No warning. No questions.

Almost out of instinct and training, all three moved at once!

A whipped out a handgun and aimed at B! Almost simultaneously, B twisted aside and thrust a syringe of powerful sedative toward A's neck! C closed in on A like a phantom, attempting to lock A's gun wrist with a precise grappling move!

Gunshots! Shattering glass! The thud of flesh striking flesh! Stifled roars and grunts!

The surveillance footage shook wildly, recording the brief, bloody slaughter among their own.

Barely a dozen seconds later.

Everything fell silent.

The three members of "Night Watchman" lay on the control room floor, each bearing fatal wounds inflicted by the others. To their dying breaths, they believed they were eliminating internal traitors.

Almost simultaneously, the facility's internal network firewall sounded a shrill alarm! Vast quantities of highly sensitive internal review data and live surveillance footage were being sent outside, unstoppable!

In my room, the screen showed another wave of global uproar sparked by a massive leak of documents that had suddenly appeared on WikiLeaks and other sites, detailing an internal purge and its review procedures at a secret American agency.

Ryuk watched with relish and even applauded (slapping the floor with his enormous claws). "Brilliant! Biting their own! And biting hard! Let's see how they 'calibrate' now!"

I was waiting.

Waiting to see how the system attempting to "recalibrate" would face this "reverse purification" originating at its core.

This time, the response came extremely slowly, and... strangely.

Not until noon the next day.

Only then did the phone screen light up.

No text.

No sound.

No image.

Only a wildly chaotic field of flickering static, its colors distorted.

Like an old television that had lost its signal.

Or a system undergoing violent internal conflict that it could not stabilize.

The static flickered for a full minute.

Then the screen abruptly went black.

Immediately afterward, it flashed on again, displaying an extremely blurry, distorted image, as though seen through violently trembling water-

It appeared to be a hand gripping the barrel of that silver Colt Revolver, its fingers twisted and white from the force of its grip.

The image flashed for less than a tenth of a second.

The screen went completely dark.

There was no further sign of life.

I stared at the phone, which seemed to have exhausted its last trace of vitality, and remained silent for a long time.

Static.

A distorted hand gripping the gun barrel.

The "calibration" had not merely been interrupted.

It might even...

Have spiraled out of control.

Mentor,

Your "recalibration"...

Seems to be going...

Not so smoothly.

Need some help?

For instance,

Help pulling the trigger?