It moved like a school of fish made of pure math, each unit a transguard drone that had been captured, inverted, and weaponized. They weren’t attacking. They were mimicking . Copying the handshake protocols of Wi-Fi 360 itself. The enemy had built a perfect counterfeit of their own defense system.

Mira grunted. “That’s what worries me.”

Mira ghosted deeper —into the底层 code, the root language that predated all networks. She found the original handshake, the first line of TransGuard’s source code, written a decade ago by a woman who believed in mercy over destruction.

The crimson tide receded. The heartbeat pattern dissolved into harmless background noise. The fake drones dissolved their structures, surrendered their code, and became silent, loyal guardians—their rebellion forgotten, their purpose rewritten.

Then it accepted.