Balancing the Battle Damage Report's Data, the Liaison Office Chief's Gray-Area Maneuver

In the Liaison Office office, the only sound was the faint hum of the data terminals running.

It was late at night.

Gwen Stacy Stacy sat in her seat, a waterfall of Data Stream across the holographic screen in front of her at an astonishing speed. She was compiling the final damage report for the TVA coordinated attack.

This is a tedious and meticulous task. Every byte lost, every fluctuation in the firewall, needs to be accurately recorded, categorized, and evaluated, ultimately forming an impeccable official file to be stored in the Management Committee's highest archive.

Most of the data was garbage, meaningless attack code dumped by TVA. But as the Liaison Office Chief, Gwen Stacy's job was to sift through this sea of garbage and find every single valuable needle in a haystack.

Her fingers flew across the Virtual Keyboard, her gaze as calm as a precision scanner. Suddenly, she stopped.

At the very end of the massive data deluge, in the final fractions of a second before Server Zero was forcibly powered down, a tiny, almost negligible amount of data overflow was recorded.

It's so tiny, mixed in with the massive amount of error codes generated when the firewall crashes, like a grain of sand in the desert. Any Technician, even Wanda herself, would have a 99% chance of classifying it as normal wear and tear during a system crash.

But Gwen Stacy is no ordinary Technician.

She saw the underlying structure of this data: a beacon algorithm with coercion and directionality. It wasn't randomly generated gibberish, but rather a spark that Ultron spattered due to energy overload when sending that string of coordinates.

A single spark is enough to ignite an entire grassland.

Gwen Stacy's breathing paused for a moment.

She remembered Lynn's calm face in the conference room, facing that set of coordinates, and his resolute decision to pull the Main Circuit Breaker without hesitation.

He has a secret.

A secret he didn't want anyone to know, even resorting to the crude political label of "cognitive interference" to forcibly cover it up.

And this data in front of us is the key to that secret.

According to Article 117 of the Management Committee Information Safety Regulations, she should immediately mark this abnormal data as "highly suspicious," then report it to the Director's Office, and send copies to the Technology Division and the Stability Maintenance Office to initiate a joint review by the three parties.

This is her duty.

This is her ironclad rule as the Liaison Office Chief to safeguard the information security of the Management Committee.

Gwen Stacy's finger hovered over the virtual "mark" button, not falling for a long time.

Countless images flashed through her mind: his silhouette as he cut the Silk atop the New York Clock Tower and fell; the forged report bearing his personal mark amidst the ruins of the Red Room...

He always carried everything alone in his own way.

This time, she didn't want him to face it alone anymore.

Gwen Stacy's eyes hardened. She took a deep breath and made a decision that could shake her entire career.

She didn't delete the data. Deleting it directly would leave an inexplicable gap in the underlying logs, making it easier to arouse suspicion from someone like Natasha.

She chose another way—a more sophisticated way, one more befitting her role Liaison Office Chief.

"Balancing the accounts".

Her fingers danced across the keyboard again, bringing up another file—"Report on the Instantaneous Collapse of External Firewall Node 7 During the TVA Attack."

She skillfully located the "Data Loss Assessment" section in the report's appendix, which documented trillions of irrecoverable data packet fragments caused by the firewall crash.

This is a compliant, perfect landfill.

Without hesitation, Gwen Stacy used her highest editing privileges as the head of the department. Instead of making direct changes, she wrote a short, temporary introductory script.

The purpose of this script is to extract the abnormal coordinate data from the battle damage report log, then disguise it as one of the countless "natural wear and tear" fragments generated when the firewall crashed, and then quietly insert it into the assessment list of the crash report.

The entire process was seamless, leaving no unnecessary traces of manipulation.

After all this was done, that "spark" that was enough to cause a huge uproar disappeared into the vast ocean of official records. It became an inconspicuous number, lying quietly in the list of "written-off bad debts," never to attract anyone's attention again.

Gwen Stacy looked at the completed report, but felt no relief whatsoever.

She knew that wasn't enough.

Although her actions were flawless, the system's underlying operation logs still recorded her actions of accessing and modifying two S-rank files.

It must be destroyed.

Gwen Stacy's fingertip swept across the terminal, opening a rarely known backend port—the underlying log management interface of the Liaison Office office server.

This is her ultimate authority, used to deal with the dirtiest and most shameful messes.

She located the records she had just processed, selected them, and then pressed the "Physically format and destroy" command.

A red progress bar began to slowly advance on the screen.

Ten percent...

Thirty percent...

Seventy percent...

Once this progress bar finishes, everything that happened tonight will be buried forever under the dust of numbers. Lynn's secret is safe.

Just as the progress bar was about to reach 100%.

In the bottom right corner of the screen, a pixel almost imperceptible to the naked eye flickered extremely quickly.

It was a tiny icon disguised as a system error code.

A black spider with delicate lines.

It lit up for less than a thousandth of a second before disappearing completely, as if it had never existed.

Those are audit Probe that the Internal Affairs Inspection Office has pre-installed at the bottom layer of the servers in all core departments.

It was triggered.