CYRENE TEMPEST
I pulled open my laptop, half out of habit, half out of impulse. Everything I needed was already in motion. The competition was later today. I didn't know the layout, the format, or the stakes beyond what I'd overheard—but that was part of the thrill.
I didn't bother sweeping anything this time. No paranoia, no digital loops or hidden traces. Last night, I'd kept a low profile, eyes and boots where they belonged. I wasn't careless—but I wasn't afraid either.
My carry-on stayed where I could grab it in seconds. Tools packed, no surprises. Burner phone encrypted, tablet synced, every layer of access under my control. The only thing I had to focus on now was getting there without drawing attention.
Still, I paused.
The excitement hadn't dulled since I overheard those men talking about the finale. I'd felt it bloom in the marrow of my bones—sharp, familiar, irresistible. I'd missed this. The edge of something raw. Unfiltered.
I stood, tugged the hoodie over my head and ran a hand over the pixie wig. The nerd glasses sat on the table, ready. Contacts in—blue, a cooler shade than I'd normally wear, just enough to shift the shape of recognition if someone caught my eyes. Baggy pants, worn sneakers. All of it deliberate. The kind of girl people overlooked.
Just how I liked it.
Before heading out, I returned to the kitchen and picked up the slim bread knife I'd stashed the night before. It wasn't much—but tucked inside my combat boot, it would buy time if I ever needed it. Not everything could be solved behind a screen.
I slung the carry-on over my shoulder, gave the room a once-over, then stepped out into the hall. The door clicked softly shut behind me.
And just like that, I was gone.
_____________
The air in the warehouse crackled with quiet tension. Rows of long tables formed a jagged horseshoe in the center of the floor, each rigged with custom-built terminals—black boxes with high-resolution monitors, stripped-down keyboards, and a single ethernet jack. Overhead, LED panels bathed everything in a blue-white glare, clinical and cold. Spotters flanked the perimeters, arms crossed, faces unreadable. Cameras in the rafters tilted in lazy arcs, documenting every twitch, every keystroke.
Cyrene entered as Maddison Carter—hood drawn low, her face shielded by a pair of nerd-glass frames that dulled the sharp edge of her features. The pixie wig shifted slightly as she walked, but she didn't touch it. Her hoodie hung loose, baggy enough to conceal everything necessary, combat boots landing silent and measured. She moved like someone who belonged there, but didn't want to.
The moment she stepped in, one of the admins—tall, wired thin, eyes like wet asphalt—intercepted her. He scanned her QR code, flicked through a quick list on his tablet, and gave a slow nod. No questions. No remarks. She'd registered under her alias two hours ago through an encrypted shell that bounced off servers in Singapore and Prague.
"Final entrant," the admin said flatly, then gestured toward an empty seat near the far left of the ring.
"Name?" another called out from behind the check-in table.
"Maddison Carter," she said without hesitation.
A low murmur rolled through the room, followed by a hush. Not because the name meant anything, but because her voice didn't match the cautious body language. It held clarity. Confidence. Not cocky—just precise.
She kept her pace slow as she crossed the floor, eyes flicking left and right. There were seventeen other competitors seated, all men except for a single woman near the opposite side, biting a thumbnail, hunched over her rig like a vulture protecting carrion. Most were young, tatted or pierced, all sharp elbows and twitchy fingers. Others looked ex-military—clean-shaven with narrowed gazes and clean code behind their eyes. Real talent. Or real danger.
She slid into her seat.
The terminal screen blinked to life.
WELCOME TO ROUND ONE
DEAD MAN'S SWITCH – 00:05:00
OBJECTIVE: IDENTIFY & NEUTRALIZE THE FAILSAFE WITHOUT TRIGGERING PAYLOAD
TARGET SYSTEM: CONTAINED CORPORATE SERVER SIMULATION
OUTPUT TRACE: PUBLICLY RANKED
A small pulse ticked in her temple. Dead man's switch. High-stakes intro. Not surprising. This wasn't for the faint or slow. One wrong packet, one careless command, and the virtual payload would detonate—either flooding the screen with red flags or locking her out entirely.
She leaned back briefly, rolled her shoulders, then flexed her fingers over the keys. The rules were simple: neutralize the target without triggering the defensive mechanism. Everyone in the room would receive a nearly identical simulation, and the ranking would be instantaneous.
A voice cut through the loudspeaker.
"You have five minutes. Begin."
Keys clattered in staccato bursts.
Maddison—Cyrene—started slower than the rest. Her terminal lit up with system logs and false trails designed to burn time and scramble instinct. She ignored them. Traps were obvious if you knew where to look. She traced two decoy signal pathways before diving into the real network map—compact, well-masked. Someone had designed it to make you feel clever just before pulling the floor out.
Two minutes in, three others had already crashed out—screens flickering red, auto-locked. She didn't glance at them.
The failsafe was disguised as a redundancy loop—constant signal echoes that would mislead any brute force attempt. But Cyrene didn't brute force. She traced the loop's echo pattern, then rotated the proxy filter to observe system behavior under ping intervals. When the real switch flashed—a ghost process hiding under a shell labeled "archive index"—she didn't touch it. She didn't dismantle it, either.
Instead, she flagged it, wrote a false return header to mimic an inactive status, and slipped a packet-sniffer inside its loop. Then, she stalled.
At the four-minute mark, a kid with bleached hair cracked his code and finished—first place. His screen turned green, pulsed. Cheers broke out. Second came twenty seconds later—an older guy with half-moon glasses and a nervous smile.
She waited.
Then she typed in the final string, slowly, deliberately, and sent it.
Third place.
Her screen turned green.
Applause again, but softer.
She removed her glasses, rubbed her eyes like the light had gotten to her, and leaned back. Eyes half-closed, lips drawn in a neutral line. If anyone looked closely, they'd see that she hadn't hesitated because she was slow. She'd hesitated because she was watching them.
Watching how they responded to pressure, how their fingers moved, what they prioritized in the code. She wasn't there to win this round. She was there to weigh the field.
Behind a glass wall in the far corner of the warehouse, the judges—three of them, seated in a low-lit observation deck—took notes.
"She could've easily taken first," one muttered.
"Yeah, but she held back. Why?" another asked, his voice low with curiosity.
"Maybe she's cautious," the third suggested, watching her closely.
They didn't know her name, and they didn't know what she was truly capable of. But they couldn't ignore the fact that Maddison Carter wasn't like the others.
She wasn't rushing to finish—she was calculating every move.
SECOND ROUND
Seventeen participants had started. Now only ten remained. The others had been eliminated, either by failure or by falling short in ways only the sharpest of the judges could catch. Those ten who stayed had become more than just contenders—they had become a spectacle.
The arena lights dimmed to a cold, surgical hue as the second challenge was announced.
INVISIBILITY.
Not cloaking devices or sci-fi theatrics—digital invisibility. The task was to enter a high-security virtual facility, bypass real-time motion sensors, slip past biometric gates, intercept a protected file, and exit. No alarms. No alerts. No digital footprint.
Fifteen minutes. Ten participants left. Most were already shifting nervously.
Maddison Carter—at least, that's the name she gave—stepped into the zone without fanfare. She moved like vapor, lean frame swallowed up by the industrial shadows. No flashy gear, no eye-catching colors. Hoodie, baggy pants, and quiet sneakers. She didn't draw attention. She erased it.
Above, the judges tracked everything on their terminals—movements logged, alerts triggered, anomalies recorded in real time.
The countdown flashed.
Challenge Start.
The timer ticked.
Maddison dropped low, folding into herself like a trained predator. Not for effect—for function. Her breathing slowed. Pulse regulated. She slid along the perimeter of the zone, avoiding thermal hotspots and sensor sweeps with uncanny ease.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
Where others would scan the room first, she was already moving. She'd seen enough during briefing to map her route. This wasn't about guessing—it was about knowing. A half-second misstep would send a red alert to the judges' screens. No second chances.
She slipped behind a column. The crowd could see the timer.
00:02:03.
She was already at the terminal.
Fingers moved swiftly across the projected interface. She bypassed two ICE layers, tunneled into the secure directory, planted the dummy file, and masked her IP routing in three strokes. No trace. Not even a log ghost.
00:03:51.
Most others hadn't made it halfway.
The judges leaned in, eyes narrowing. She hadn't triggered a single anomaly. No flags. No audio disturbance. Nothing.
00:04:46.
Maddison was already on her way out.
One pivot behind the vault door. A timing dodge past a floor-level pressure trap. She scaled a narrow frame and bypassed the motion lens at the final stretch.
00:05:12.
Done.
The "Success" indicator flashed next to her ID.
She walked calmly toward the staging zone, not looking back.
Gasps broke through the crowd.
No fanfare. No gesture of victory. No celebration. Just that silent, unnerving calm.
The judges didn't speak. But their expressions said enough.
She shouldn't have been that fast.
The second participant stumbled out nearly eight minutes later—sweating, winded, rattled. A handful more followed. Some failed. Some barely passed. But none came close to five minutes.
Eyes drifted back to Maddison.
The lead judge leaned toward his mic, murmuring low to his colleagues.
"She wasn't rushing. She was calculating."
Another spoke, voice clipped. "She broke no rules. Triggered nothing."
The third frowned. "No hesitation this time. She just... vanished and reappeared."
The first judge's gaze lingered on her. "Keep eyes on her."
They didn't know who Maddison Carter was.
But they knew she didn't belong with the rest.
She belonged above them.
And this time, she hadn't held back.
THIRD ROUND
The final round wasn't announced. It was dropped—like a trapdoor.
Five contestants remained. Faces blurred behind focus and fatigue. The lights in the arena dimmed to a colder hue, and even the audience, once pulsing with excitement, quieted into something closer to reverence.
They'd all heard the rumors. No one had cleared this stage. It was the gauntlet no one survived. A collapsing-system puzzle—real-time architecture that folded, fractured, and recompiled itself under pressure. Miss one flag, fail one subroutine, stall in one blind loop, and the system folded you in with it.
"Thirty minutes on the clock," the host announced, voice steady, mic catching the tension. "You'll enter the maze through separate entry points. The environment is unstable and will degrade every ninety seconds. Your mission is simple: collect six verification tokens in the correct sequence and exit through the final node before shutdown."
A hush rippled across the room.
"And one more thing," he added, pacing across the edge of the stage. "To date... no one has made it out."
The silence grew heavier.
Maddison Carter—disguised behind her pixie-cut wig, nerd glasses, and blue contact lenses—didn't blink. She adjusted the cuffs of her hoodie and rolled her neck once. Her gaze slid across the remaining participants.
Three were already tense, shifting on their feet, jaws clenched. One of them, the youngest in the group, was the boy who'd finished first during round one. His posture said prepared. His eyes said obsessed.
The horn sounded.
They scattered.
Maddison's boots hit the metal grate floor of the system chamber with precision. Lights flashed red then amber above her. No welcome message. No loading screen. Just the living system already warping around her.
She moved fast—fluid through corridors that pulsed with synthetic code. Each section blinked like a dying server. The floor trembled beneath her. Above her, data streams flickered like lightning bolts, rearranging walls, erasing paths.
At minute six, she cleared two tokens. At minute nine, she lured a false node into collapsing—then vaulted over a gap as firewalls shuttered behind her. Somewhere on the other side of the chamber, two alarms shrieked in rapid succession.
Contestants down.
Three left.
At minute eleven, the third token appeared halfway through a corridor rigged with static loops. Maddison backtracked, forced a memory overload, and watched the traps collapse ahead of schedule.
Fifteen minutes in, the boy hit his ceiling. Too many redirects. One wrong vector. His command line jammed mid-loop—and his avatar froze. The walls folded in on him with a low hiss and snapped the node dark.
Two left.
Maddison didn't slow.
She moved like someone who'd rehearsed with chaos. Each decision sharpened her path, like she saw the puzzle breathing before it shifted. At minute sixteen, the fifth token locked behind a recursive gate. She cracked it with a silent patch, snagged the token with a codehook, and didn't even break stride.
Seventeen minutes in, she cleared the last node.
No announcement came at first. Just the sound of automated systems powering down. The lights froze mid-glitch. The arena went still.
Then—
A siren blared once.
Maddison stood alone at the center of the exit panel, hoodie lightly dusted with synthetic ash. She looked up, not smug, not smiling—just watchful.
The judges stared at their terminals. Their feeds confirmed what their eyes could barely comprehend.
No one spoke.
A full thirty seconds of silence passed before the host's voice cut in again, softer this time. "...We have a completion."
Shock hung in the air.
He stepped back onto the stage slowly, one hand pressed to his earpiece. His next line faltered.
"Ladies and gentlemen—hold on." He paused, face tightening. "I've just been told... there's been a development."
He waited one more beat for effect.
"The organizers have decided," he continued, "that in light of this unprecedented completion... we're raising the stakes."
Murmurs broke out across the stands.
"The final reward," he said, "will now be doubled. From two million to four."
Another beat.
"If she accepts... one final task awaits."
All eyes were on her.
Maddison didn't hesitate. She nodded once, slow and solid. No words needed.
The crowd roared to life.
Break time was called. The next challenge would be loaded shortly. Technicians moved in behind the curtain, prepping the chamber. Meanwhile, Maddison turned and walked offstage without fanfare, heading for the nearest hall exit.
But she didn't go far.
Instead, she cut down a quiet maintenance corridor and slipped into the restroom tucked near the server level. The moment the door shut behind her, she locked it, swung her carry-on onto the counter, and unzipped it with practiced ease.
Out came the laptop.
No need for her phone—this required muscle. Digital muscle.
She booted up, eyes sharp as the device came online. Her tab and jammer sat ready at her side, but this was all on her main rig. Within seconds, she tunneled into the internal surveillance logs through an encrypted shell and began to dig.
They'd looked.
Facial scans had been run. A trace had been cast on the alias—Maddison Carter. Data mapping, profile sweeps, registry checks.
All came back clean.
Her decoy ID had held under scrutiny. No anomalies. No red flags. Just a digital nobody with borrowed roots and a perfect record.
Her lips curved slightly.
Still, she didn't stop there.
She pulled up her firewalls and ran diagnostics. No breaches. No latency spikes. No invasive pings. Every filter, redirect, and kill-switch was right where she'd left it—coiled and waiting.
She exhaled through her nose and shut the lid, a quiet pulse of satisfaction flickering beneath her ribs.
They were watching her.
But she'd prepared for that.
She repacked the laptop, checked the positioning of her jammer and knife, then gave her reflection in the mirror a brief glance. Glasses straight. Wig secure. Nothing out of place.
Then, with the faintest smirk, she stepped out of the restroom and into the dim corridor beyond.
Time to see what they were really made of.
The chamber changed.
Gone were the clean white lights and static terminals. In their place rose a labyrinth of server towers—half-real, half-simulated—projected as augmented constructs tethered to a shifting codebase that sprawled across the room like a living organism. The walls pulsed with cascading red and violet data streams. Dozens of modular screens suspended from overhead trusses flickered to life, each bearing a live feed of the final contender.
Just one.
Maddison Carter.
She stood alone at the center node, dwarfed by the scale of what they called the Proxy Gauntlet.
Spectators, both physical and remote, had grown over the course of the tournament. What began as whispers had turned to watch parties. Every round she cleared, every impossible challenge she defied, brought more attention. Now, the judges had made sure her screen was center-stage—streamed live to the VIP suite, the control gallery, the underground forums. All eyes on her.
The host's voice cut across the space, quieter now, carrying weight.
"This is your final sequence. Forty minutes. No pauses. No resets."
No one spoke.
The Proxy Gauntlet was rumored, not confirmed. A test whispered about in darknet forums—meant to emulate what military blacknets called infiltration-collapse: a staggered maze of ghost networks, each with active counter-AI, traps, timed logic bombs, and decision forks that branched endlessly.
Maddison didn't flinch.
A countdown lit the air.
5...
4...
3...
2...
1.
The first fork came fast—five dummy nodes, only one real. She didn't waste time probing. She followed the latency shift, broke the looped echo, and dove straight through the true entry point, landing in the first hostile subnet.
It tried to box her in immediately.
The security routines here weren't passive—they hunted. A synthetic AI swarm ignited within the interface, fast and aggressive, replicating like parasites. She spun up a secondary terminal and launched her custom purge sequence—an adaptive cloaking worm that bent its own data signature to mask her presence.
They thought she'd run. She didn't.
Instead, she knifed deeper.
Six minutes in, she was two forks ahead of the predicted curve. Her fingers moved with detached precision, tapping commands like Morse—glance, process, execute. But this wasn't autopilot. Her expression was taut. Focused.
At minute eight, the trap was sprung.
The third chamber simulated a false success—most failed here. The system rewarded you with access. Gave you fake root privileges. Showed you clean data logs.
She didn't bite.
Instead, she peeled back the process stack, found the embedded listener buried three calls deep, and severed it. The system roared in response—panic routines detonated, corrupting her HUD. Static. Color bars. Every access layer scrambled.
Still, she worked.
This round wasn't fast like invisibility. It was brutal.
Fifteen minutes in, her screen showed her trapped between three kill-switch paths, each ending in a recursive loop designed to fry her system. The judges leaned forward. Even the crowd fell into tense quiet. This was where most challengers failed—choked, frozen, overwhelmed.
She didn't.
Maddison rerouted through the collapsed code, crawled through a dormant diagnostic shell, and wrote her way out manually. No UI. Just pure shell commands, typed line by line.
Twenty-two minutes.
Sweat beaded along her hairline, but her posture never broke. The room had gone silent.
The fourth fork hit like a final boss—deep static layer, semi-random node shuffle every ninety seconds. She could no longer map her surroundings. Every bit of data she gathered was outdated by the time she used it.
She fell back.
Paused.
Calculated.
And instead of chasing nodes, she built her own beacon. A pulse emitter coded in six lines that tracked code momentum across microsecond intervals. Not visible to the system—but enough for her to sense where the nodes were headed.
Then she moved.
Twenty-three minutes.
Twenty-four.
The system tried one last defense—she'd reached the real core. It did what desperate networks always did.
It began to collapse.
The walls of the arena dimmed. The towers began to flicker. A heavy alarm tone echoed across the bay.
Collapse in sixty seconds.
Maddison's projected screen exploded into activity—two consoles open, four buffers running. Lines of code like rivers. She wasn't running anymore. She was reconstructing the entire exit path, manually, as the system died beneath her.
At minute twenty-five, her cursor stopped.
The command entered.
Silence.
Then—
ACCESS GRANTED.
NODE STABLE.
SEQUENCE COMPLETE.
The chamber lights reset.
No applause. Not at first.
Just disbelief.
Maddison Carter stood up, stretched her fingers once, and looked toward the elevated judge's box. Expression unreadable.
She'd done what no one else had.
The last keystroke landed like the final note of a symphony.
ACCESS GRANTED.
NODE STABLE.
SEQUENCE COMPLETE.
The server towers froze in place. The collapsing interface stabilized, then vanished, cleanly. No static. No sparks. Just an eerie, digital silence.
The chamber lights brightened by a fraction—but no one reacted.
Not the crew.
Not the audience.
Not even the judges behind the tinted glass.
Maddison Carter stood up from her terminal with calm precision, no theatrics, no celebration. Her screen, still projected above, displayed the timer: 25:03.
A challenge that had never been completed. Passed. Alone. In almost half the time allowed.
For a beat, the entire venue forgot how to breathe.
Then, without a word, she left her station and walked past the stunned technicians and hushed crew, her bag slung over one shoulder. The automatic doors hissed open and shut behind her. No one stopped her. No one even moved.
They were still watching the impossible replay itself on the overhead screens.
Outside, she moved quickly—no trace of nerves, but a subtle tension clung to her shoulders. She reached her parked car, unlocked it with a flick of her wrist, and slid inside. The door shut with a muted click. Still no one followed.
She didn't wait.
The laptop came out first. Then the second. Her tablet powered on silently beside her. All connected, synced, ready. Her fingers worked with clean efficiency, launching diagnostic scripts, sweeping her identity layers, firewall logs, all traces.
The tournament's system had tried to probe her during the final sequence. She saw it now in the background cache—slow scans tracing Maddison Carter's digital shell. But nothing had cracked.
Her fake credentials still held. The facial-mapping results showed negative matches. No anomalous origin. No pingbacks. Just what she intended: a ghost in plain sight.
She started the engine.
Drove three blocks at an even pace.
Then pulled off into a side street, parked under a broken lamp, and cleared the nearby surveillance just like she had the night before. Quick jamming burst. Loop overwrite. Data blur.
If someone came looking, all they'd see was a static smear.
She exhaled, a small smile touching the corner of her mouth—not from relief, but from something sharper. Satisfaction. The kind that came from knowing the bar had been set higher, and she'd just shattered it.
Back inside the venue, the judges still hadn't spoken.
Not a word.
The host stood frozen beside the console, still half-turned toward the hallway where Maddison Carter had disappeared.
It wasn't just her win that left them stunned.
It was what she hadn't done.
"She walked out," one of the judges said finally, breaking the silence.
Another turned, brows furrowed. "She didn't collect the prize."
The host blinked and looked around as if expecting her to return any moment. But she didn't.
"No ID. No formal check-in. No banking trace," the finance coordinator murmured. "Nothing to deliver the four million to."
A long pause. Someone typed rapidly on a nearby terminal, pulling the logs from the system that had been tracking all contestants. Maddison Carter's profile—clean, generic, synthetic—held firm. Even after the challenges. Even after the broadcast.
She'd walked in, rewritten the narrative, and walked out again.
Leaving behind nothing but shock, silence, and a heavy sum with no claimant.
The lead judge leaned back in his chair, eyes narrowed. "Track her footage."
"We tried," one of the tech crew said. "Looped timestamps. Obfuscated routes. She must've scrubbed it."
The host stepped back from the floor and looked at the others. "So that's it? She just... leaves?"
The lead judge didn't respond.
Some thirty minutes later—just as the judges began regrouping and the broadcast lines were cut—an alert pinged across the venue's encrypted finance node.
It wasn't flagged by any of their systems at first. No breach alarms, no firewall disruptions.
Just a quiet anomaly.
A digital whisper.
An unauthorized, unapproved transfer of exactly $4 million had been pulled from the locked prize pool and rerouted—anonymously—to a BTC wallet cloaked beneath multiple layers of blockchain shielding. No origin. No recovery path.
The transaction had already been confirmed.
Final. Irreversible.
No one spoke for a full minute.
Then someone cursed.
Another started pulling logs, trying to trace the hand behind it. But there was nothing. No access signature. No foreign IP. Not even internal fingerprinting.
Whatever Maddison Carter had done—she hadn't just walked out without claiming the prize.
She'd claimed it on her own terms.
Remotely. Flawlessly.
As if she'd always planned it that way.
"She played us," the host said under his breath.
"No," murmured the lead judge, who hadn't moved from his chair. His fingers steepled, eyes fixed on the dark screen where her face had been moments ago. "She beat us. Entirely."
And before they could stop the wave, word broke on the forums.
CARTER CLAIMS HER PRIZE. BTC WALLET ACTIVE.
The message had been posted anonymously—no signature, no callout. Just a screenshot of the confirmed transfer and a timestamp.
Within minutes, it spread through the underground like fire through dry leaves.
Whispers turned to roars.
Maddison Carter wasn't just a name anymore. She was legend. A ghost who walked through firewalls and vanished without a trace.
A figure who'd beaten a game no one else ever had—and left the organizers scrambling behind her.
She hadn't stayed for applause.
She hadn't needed permission.
And now?
She was gone.
With their money.
And every ounce of their pride.
