Eight in the morning.
Linhai University's campus radio was playing Richard Clayderman's "Autumn Whispers."
The piano sounded soft and tranquil. Sunlight filtered through the half-drawn blackout curtains, carving a sharp patch of gold across the floor.
Kannazuki wore a loose white shirt and leaned back in his ergonomic chair.
He held a cup of freshly brewed black coffee.
Through the curling steam, his deep-set eyes watched the screen before him calmly.
On the screen, a waterfall of data refreshed frantically across the dark web traffic monitoring interface.
But the special encrypted data stream labeled "L International Investigation Headquarters" alone...
Had flatlined into utter silence after 3:15 a.m.
"It stopped."
Kannazuki sipped the bitter coffee and pressed Enter on his mechanical keyboard with a slender finger.
With a soft click, the interface reset.
The electronic surveillance cordon around Linhai University, the spoofed base station signals, the anomalous traffic sniffers... over the past few months, these measures...
Had clung to the university like an invisible spiderweb. Within the past four hours, every one of them had collapsed.
The eyes that had watched him around the clock had gone blind.
L was dead.
That vast multinational investigative machine, built at a cost of tens of billions and barely kept running by L's freakish brain...
Had turned into a heap of scrap the instant it lost its central processor.
No data exchanges, no new orders. Even the most basic network tracing had ground to a halt.
Kannazuki had crushed the greatest mountain looming over his head with his own hands.
"Gah, gah, gah..."
With a grating, eerie laugh, the shinigami Ryuk drifted down from the ceiling, hanging upside down.
His bulging yellow eyes were fixed on the screen.
He clutched a red apple he had swiped from some faculty member's fruit basket.
"Looks like