The thought alone was enough to make The Raven force down the murderous rage boiling in his chest.
In its place, a far more insatiable, predatory possessiveness clawed its way to the surface.
Given the terrifying capability The Panacea had just displayed, he could spare her life. For now.
He could even tolerate her brazen theft of Specimen Fourteen right out from under his nose.
He would give her one final chance to willingly submit to Obsidian.
But today... she had inflicted catastrophic losses on his organization and handed him the most humiliating defeat of his life.
He couldn't just brush that under the rug.
The woman had to pay.
She needed to learn, in the most agonizing way possible, exactly what happened when you made a mockery of Obsidian.
"My Lord Raven..." a technician murmured, braving the suffocating silence. "The Panacea is hijacking Specimen Fourteen's absolute authority. Should we... should we initiate the backup protocols?"
The Raven raised his gaze, his eyes narrowing into a predatory, venomous glare that pinned the technician in place. "Backup protocols?"
Cold sweat broke out across the technician's forehead, his voice shaking violently. "We... we could try transmitting the Secondary Catalytic Protocol into Fourteen's system..."
"You idiot!"
The Raven roared, cutting the man off.
He threw his arm out, violently swiping across the control console.
Smash!
Crash!
Expensive monitors and precision equipment shattered as they hit the floor. Wires sparked and glass shards scattered in every direction.
Everyone in the Obsidian Command Center froze in terror, trembling uncontrollably.
The technician who had spoken went entirely weak in the knees, collapsing heavily onto the floor.
The Raven's chest heaved with fury as his dark gaze swept over the room. "Do you think she hasn't stolen enough of our clearance?"
"She is sitting there, waiting for us to send another command! Every protocol we transmit just hands her another key to Obsidian's core network!"
"Do you want to personally gift-wrap our entire operational infrastructure and hand it to her?!"
The technician trembled violently, pressing his face toward the floor. "I'm sorry, sir! It... it was a stupid suggestion!"
The Raven's face was a mask of
cold fury. "Sever all remote connections immediately Cut
every
data link be
this command
center and Specimen Fourteen."
"Do it now!"
The paralyzed technicians finally snapped out of their daze, scrambling back to their stations and hammering frantically at their keyboards.
But they were too late.
Beep-
Every screen in the room simultaneously flashed a blaring red warning.
[WARNING!]
[SPECIMEN FOURTEEN CORE PROTOCOLS ARE BEING CLONED!]
[EXPERIMENTAL DATABASE BREACHED!]
[COMMAND LOGS INTERCEPTED!]
[DECRYPTING HISTORICAL TRANSIT NODES...]
The rapid-fire cascade of alerts drained the blood from every face in the room.
"Stop her!"
"Hurry! Shut her out right now!"
"I can't! It's too late! She locked us out of the permissions, and our backup nodes are being reverse-traced!"
"She already has Fourteen's complete experimental parameters! She... she's reading our entire historical command log!"
Total chaos erupted across the command center.
The Raven's expression darkened into absolute pitch, his fingers curling slowly into white-knuckled fists.
He watched helplessly as the
experimental data Obsidian had bled
millions of dollars and countless
lives to accumulate was violently
ripped away by The Panacea.
Every byte of that data was a digital fingerprint linking back to Obsidian's core
operations over the years.
They had been one second too slow.
Just one damn second...
And it was all the time The Panacea
needed to ride their remote signat
straight through every firewall had built around Specimen Fourteen!
they