Santos's downfall was like a boulder hurled into a placid lake, sending considerable ripples through the international press. But on the streets of Vienna, it was merely a curiosity people briefly discussed over breakfast. No one would have imagined that this reckoning, unfolding thousands of miles away and riddled with "coincidences," had originated in the shadows of an abandoned construction site in their own city.
I left those ruins feeling like a scalpel freshly quenched and honed: cold, sharp, and certain of its purpose. The burden of the new shackles remained heavy, and the holes in my memory constantly gnawed at me, but an unprecedented, almost ruthless sense of "purpose" overrode it all. I was no longer prey passively fleeing, but someone holding a blade... a doctor? No, perhaps an executioner. At least I was the one actively wielding the butcher's knife.
I needed more targets. More systematic choices, more representative ones.
I did not return to Between Echoes, nor did I try to contact any supernatural beings. Those places and beings were themselves among the potential lesions that needed to be removed through "surgery." Instead, I slipped into the darkest corners of the human world-the deep web.
Using an anonymous terminal at a public library and scraps of hacking knowledge scavenged from my already blurred memories, I cautiously entered encrypted networks teeming with illegal transactions, extremist rhetoric, and breeding grounds for crime. There were no rules here-or rather, the only rule was that the strong devoured the weak. This was a concentrated showcase of the real world's festering sores.
Like a dispassionate pathologist, I sifted through endless streams of filthy information. I no longer searched for individual villains, but for exemplary carriers of those "diseases." Nodes whose "deaths" would do the greatest damage to a chain of criminal activity