The Last Winner

Chapter 5 Pending Execution

At 8:43 p.m., Zara walked out of the building with her bag over her shoulder, looking no different from any other employee working late.

The security cameras outside the revolving doors captured her.

The system recognized her face.

Visitor. Registered. Normal departure.

She even gave a slight nod toward the camera, as if saying goodbye to the day.

On her phone, she typed a single line:

[I need to go back inside.]

Ten seconds later, she received an encrypted message.

[Be careful.]

Her phone buzzed again.

[I filled in the missing two hundred meters of the route you recorded this afternoon. Don't take the wrong turn. There's no way back behind that wall.]

Zara stared at the screen for a second, then it went dark.

Twenty minutes later, she appeared at a nearby shopping mall.

She stood in front of a self-service locker, her fingers pausing over the keypad.

The moment the door popped open, a neatly folded black windbreaker sat inside, looking as if it had been placed there yesterday. Actually, it had been there for three weeks.

Zara came by occasionally to replace the batteries. Other than that, she never touched it. Only she knew what was hidden inside the sleeve of that jacket—something capable of making an entire building's surveillance system forget what it had seen.

At 11:43 p.m., Zara stepped out of the mall's side entrance.

The black windbreaker blended into the darkness around her.

She returned to the underground parking garage of the office building.

During the day, Gavin had brought her to C3, the visitor area.

Tonight, she planned to enter through B2, the engineering level.

She opened an app on her phone that looked like an ordinary navigation tool.

But the map displayed something completely different.

Not streets.

A route map she had extracted from the autonomous vehicle system that afternoon.

The car had circled the area four times.

She only needed to remember the last route.

She followed the maintenance corridor beside the elevator shaft, turned left at the third intersection, then right.

After a few more steps, she stopped and pulled out her phone.

A message was waiting.

[2 / 12, west corridor]

Only two cameras in the west corridor were being actively monitored at that moment.

It was the best window for entry.

Zara approached the wall, replaying Gavin's movements from earlier that day.

His right foot had shifted back slightly.

His stance had lowered.

A nearly inaudible beep sounded in the air, but the wall didn't move.

Her phone vibrated again.

Marcus's program was running.

The system was waiting for a secondary confirmation, and Marcus was remotely completing the process for her.

One second later, the wall made a faint mechanical clicking sound.

A seam appeared down the middle, and it slowly opened.

Zara stepped inside.

The massive, almost unreal laboratory unfolded before her once again.

Under the dim nighttime lighting, the circular structure at the center looked like the spine of some silent creature.

She moved along the edge of the room, scanning the square panels embedded in the walls, nearly invisible against the background.

One of the indicator lights was blinking at the exact same frequency she had recorded earlier.

It wasn't a core interface.

More like an isolated log node.

Zara crouched down and removed the cover.

The moment she connected her tablet, the screen lit up.

Lines of logs began scrolling rapidly.

Her eyes moved quickly, her fingers tapping across the touchpad as if flipping through an invisible book.

CH_Log_1314...

CH_Log_1315...

Number 13.

Her breathing paused for a moment.

These weren't ordinary logs.

They were decision snapshots generated by the model at different points in time.

But after CH-13, the records carried a label she had never seen before:

Priority: OMEGA. Status: Pending Execution.

Just as she was about to dig deeper—

a bright red warning box suddenly appeared in the upper-right corner of the terminal.

Secondary Behavior Verification Required.

At the same time, a previously idle machine in the distance came alive.

Its indicator light changed from green to orange.

Zara's finger hovered over the disconnect icon.

But she didn't press it.

Pulling the device would be an admission of guilt.

She needed to look like she belonged there.

She quickly switched the tablet interface and pulled up a hardware diagnostic command set she had seen earlier that day.

The logs instantly changed appearance.

What had looked like abnormal behavior detection now appeared to be a routine device status check.

She even deliberately pushed one sensor reading into the red, creating what looked like a hardware malfunction caused by accidentally accessing a sensitive port.

Three seconds.

Five seconds.

Ten seconds.

Zara stared at the indicator light in the distance, barely breathing.

After lingering in orange for what felt like a full minute, it slowly returned to green.

No further changes.

Zara disconnected the tablet and replaced the cover.

When she stood up, a thin layer of sweat had formed on her back.

She looked toward the terminal in the distance.

The words Pending Execution remained on the screen.

Like a door left slightly open. She didn't know what was behind it, but her instincts told her, this might be the clue she had been searching for all along.