Beep-beep-beep-da-da-da-beep-beep-beep.
The green dot on the console was still blinking at a steady rhythm. Ye Mo watched the string of signals, his hands motionless above the keyboard. Emma Frost stood behind him, breathing softly.
"This isn't a distress call," he said. "It's a provocation."
Emma Frost nodded. "They're telling you they know you're here."
"That's not all." Ye Mo pulled up the waveform. "This signal stops after three repetitions, with a 0.03-second interval. No human could be that precise. A machine sent this automatically."
"Meaning?" Emma Frost asked.
"They're long gone." Ye Mo shut off the monitoring. "They left an SOS and waited for us to take the bait."
The room fell silent for a moment. The tracking chain they had established earlier had now become a problem. They all knew that going any further might let someone trace them back.
Ye Mo stood and walked over to the main console. He took a metal box from a drawer, opened it, and placed a black fragment inside. The box began heating up as soon as he closed the lid.
"It's starting again?" Emma Frost came closer.
"Yeah." Ye Mo activated the thermal scan to check inside the box. The fragment glowed blue, the same color as the liquid in the trench-coated man's memories.
"Blue liquid... the Hellfire Club used it before," he said. "But they don't use it anymore. The technology is too old."
"But these energy fluctuations..." Emma Frost closed her eyes, trying to sense them. "I feel like I've seen them somewhere. Like what we detected at the edge of the rainforest that day."
Ye Mo looked up. "You mean that abandoned station in Congo?"
"Yes." Emma Frost opened her eyes. "Tony mentioned they did Mutant experiments there before it blew up. If someone's rebuilt it..."
"Then this is no small matter." Ye Mo brought up the global communications map. "How many of the seventeen nodes Prism gave us can we still reach?"
Seventeen dots blinked on the screen. Three seconds later, five went dark.
"They were fine three hours ago." He frowned. "Now we're down to twelve."
"They're moving fast." Emma Frost watched the data stream. "And their methods are different. Before, they used brute-force jamming. This time, they're making precise cuts."
Ye Mo stared at the disconnection logs. "These aren't random. Fifty-one degrees north, western sector two, the East African Plateau; thirty-six degrees north, western sector seventy-nine, the Andes outpost; and the Arctic ice station-all high-altitude places with weak signals."
"Why target those specifically?" Emma Frost asked.
"Because no one's watching." Ye Mo brought up the map. "If these places go offline, no one notices right away. By the time anyone investigates, the evidence is long gone."
He paused, then suddenly smiled. "But they forgot that the trench-coated man's ability is Phase Shift. His energy can pass through. As long as I add Regenerative Phasing..."
He turned and opened the system's underlying layer, took apart the Wall Phasing Technique's code, and inserted it into the data-cleaning module. Seconds later, the vibranium beacon's frequency began adjusting automatically, and every residual signal was retrieved.
"Found it." A voice rang out-it was actually a recording Ye Mo had made of himself.
He had just recorded the loop's audio for this very moment.
A string of hidden code appeared on the screen, buried in noise that ordinary people couldn't hear. Ye Mo magnified the waveform and had the AI decode it.
Ten seconds later, a set of coordinates appeared.
"The New York Bay Area," Emma Frost read aloud. "But this location..."
"It's a circle." Ye Mo connected eight points. "A ring around Manhattan, centered right on where the Avengers might assemble."
"They're setting up a formation." Emma Frost lowered her voice. "This isn't harassment. It's an encirclement."
Ye Mo said nothing. He tapped the table three times.
He knew what this meant.
There was no word from Tony, and Coulson hadn't made contact either. But the enemy had already begun moving.
Emma Frost said, "We have to tell them."
"No." Ye Mo shook his head. "Exposing Mr. X's identity now would tip them off. All we have right now is speculation, not hard evidence."
"But what if they make a move?"
"Then we'll make sure they can't." Ye Mo opened the Gene Tower interface and reviewed the ability fragments he already had.
Self-Healing, Wall Phasing, Thermal Vision, Metal Sensing, Telepathy, Phase Shift...
The sixth-layer seal was gray, and the system displayed a prompt: [Compound threat escalating. Opening the sixth layer is recommended.]
He didn't click confirm.
It wasn't that he couldn't. He didn't want to.
He knew that once he opened it, he could no longer pretend he didn't know, or say the system had made him do it. He would have to shoulder the responsibility.
But images flashed through his mind: Tony building armor in a cave, Emma Frost's hand gripping his clothes as she fled for her life, the trench-coated man strapped to a table...
He took a deep breath and exited the system.
"Notify everyone," he told Emma Frost. "Stop active tracking and switch to passive reception. Put every field site into dormancy. Receive only, no transmissions."
"What about the communications network?"
"Leave one back channel." Ye Mo opened an encryption template. "I'll write a message and send it anonymously to Coulson. Something simple-'Don't trust internal communications. Switch frequency bands. Valid for three days.'"
"You're not showing yourself?"
"Not now." Ye Mo took off his glasses and wiped them. "We need to prepare, not go to war."
Emma Frost paused for a few seconds, then suddenly smiled. "Do you remember when you faked your death? You said you just wanted to live in peace."
"I remember." Ye Mo put his glasses back on. "Then you showed up at my door the very next day."
"And now?"
He looked at the circle on the map, his hands still above the keyboard.
"Now I understand," he said. "Real safety isn't hiding. It's making others afraid to mess with you."
He pressed send. The message was instantly encrypted, routed through three hops, and fed into S.H.I.E.L.D.'s backup line.
Then he stood, walked to the power distribution cabinet, opened its casing, and checked the wiring one line at a time.
"The base needs an upgrade," he said. "EMP shielding on the first level, oscillators buried on the second, and the third..."
"What about the third level?" Emma Frost followed him over.
"The third level." Ye Mo took out a chip and slotted it in. "I'm going to bind Regenerative Phasing and Phase Shift together to create an automatic counterattack. Whoever breaks in gets their system crashed."
"Can you do that?"
"The system didn't say I couldn't." He smiled. "So that means I can."
Emma Frost leaned against the wall and watched him wire it up. Suddenly, she said, "You've changed."
"How?"
"You used to say, 'The system told me to do this,'" she said. "Now you just get on with it."
Ye Mo tightened the last screw and dusted off his hands.
"Because this time..." He turned around. "I don't want to wait for someone to save me."
He returned to the main console and opened the training module.
"Tomorrow morning, eight o'clock," he said into the communicator. "Everyone assemble in Zone B-9 for a live combat drill. Objective: carry out a covert raid without outside support."
"Including the trench-coated man?"
"Including him." Ye Mo looked at the screen. "He wants to know who modified him. I'll let him find the answer himself."
Emma Frost stood beside him and asked softly, "Do you think they'll come?"
"They definitely will." Ye Mo pointed to the center of the map. "They aren't after a place. They want to throw us into chaos. As long as we're still moving, they won't stop."
He shut down all external surveillance, leaving only the lowest-power sensors running.
The entire base entered partial dormancy.
The screen lit his face, a cold gleam reflected in his glasses. His fingers were still tapping the table, beat by beat, like a countdown.
Emma Frost stood behind him, her body glowing faintly as Diamond Form activated, ready to fight at any moment.
No one spoke.
No alarm sounded, and the sky hadn't changed.
But they both understood that the storm had already arrived.
Ye Mo opened his private log and wrote a single line:
[Sixth-layer seal ready. Awaiting trigger conditions.]
Just as he was about to close the page, the console suddenly shook.
A new signal burst in, then vanished in a flash.
It wasn't Morse code.
It was a string of numbers.
060814.