Two in the morning.
Kannazuki sat in his unlit dorm room, the cold glow of three monitors falling across his face.
The screen showed the admin login page for the Abyssal Throne forum.
His hands hovered over the keyboard, then suddenly stopped.
"Something's wrong," he muttered, staring at the screen.
It was like someone with OCD discovering that a pen on their desk had been moved a millimeter.
The low-level checksum had changed.
He had written this forum himself. No one else knew its encryption logic.
But now, the character that should have been an "F" had become an "E."
Someone had slipped inside.
Not only had they stripped him bare, they had helpfully closed the door on their way out, deliberately leaving a footprint to rub it in.
"Playing infiltrator on my turf?" Kannazuki sneered.
His hands immediately slammed down onto the keyboard, pulling up the low-level logs.
Streams of data scrolled rapidly.
The jump hosts, routes, and ports were all blank.
As clean as a freshly installed system.
"Ryuk," Kannazuki called.
"Hmm?" The Shinigami was hanging upside down from the ceiling, munching an apple. His huge yellow eyes swiveled toward him.
"Someone wiped my logs. So cleanly it's almost inhuman." Kannazuki did not turn around.
If the intruder dared to leave a message, conventional tracing was useless.
He switched to the hardware monitoring panel and pulled up the CPU's power consumption graph.
Between two o'clock and two seventeen, there was a tiny bump in the otherwise smooth curve.
Seventeen minutes.
In just seventeen minutes, the intruder had breached his seven layers of encryption, taken the data, and erased the traces.
"Apart from Hans, who's dead, you could count the people in the world capable of infiltrating this fast on one hand." Kannazuki leaned back in his chair.
But