Alpha’s Glitch: The Dragon Architect’s Revenge

Chapter 17: The Proxy Vector

*** Sereia's POV ***

Malakor’s psychic signature had been a sloppy piece of code. He thought his psionic mind-control was invisible, but to an unchained Architect running at 100% capacity, his mental intrusion left a blazing trail of open-source telemetry.

"The Shadow Fang database isn't broadcast over the air," I stated, my voice echoing in the cramped, dark cabin of our tactical SUV. The vehicle idled in the freezing rain just outside the Shadow Fang Pack’s border limits. "It’s an air-gapped local network. If I try to hack Malakor remotely from the Citadel, his firewalls will detect the latency and trace the signal back to us."

Xander sat in the driver’s seat, his massive hands gripping the steering wheel so hard the leather groaned. In the dim glow of the dashboard lights, his crimson eyes were fixed on the dark, misty valley ahead. The gold-tinted energy from my core was still humming under his skin, making him look less like a Lycan and more like a primordial god of war.

"So we need a physical connection," Xander rumbled, a dark anticipation vibrating in his chest. "Where is the intake valve?"

"There," I pointed out the window toward a jagged, black stone fortress built into the cliffside. "Sector Nine. It’s a Shadow Fang communication outpost. It houses the primary routing switch for their entire western territory. If I can physically patch into that mainframe, I can use his own open trace-route to bypass their perimeter security."

"And how do we get you inside a fortress crawling with telepathic wolves without triggering their psychic alarms?" Xander turned his head, a dangerous, possessive gleam in his eyes.

"We don't bypass their scanners," I replied, a cold smile touching my lips. "We override them. I am going to turn you into a Proxy Server."

I reached across the console, wrapping my fingers around his wrist. The Mate bond instantly violently synchronized, a massive surge of white-hot data connecting our minds.

"I am going to compress my draconic signature and tunnel it directly through your Alpha aura," I explained, my golden vision mapping the energy vectors between us. "To their psychic sensors, you will look like a single, massive, raging Alpha signature. They will allocate 100% of their defensive bandwidth to containing your physical threat, completely blinding them to the virus slipping through their wires."

Xander’s chest heaved as he absorbed the sheer logic of the attack. He didn't care about the danger. He thrilled at the sheer, calculated audacity of it.

"A physical Trojan," Xander growled, his claws slowly extending, puncturing the steering wheel. "I draw the firewalls. You delete the data."

"Precisely," I nodded, my eyes flashing with solar gold as I locked the encryption parameters into place. "Initiating tunnel protocol. Let's crash their network."

*** Xander's POV ***

The synchronization was intoxicating.

The moment Sereia initiated the tunnel protocol, it felt as if a roaring, golden furnace had been installed directly into my soul. I didn't feel crowded; I felt weaponized. Her cold, flawless architectural logic was overlaying my primal predatory instincts, giving me a microscopic map of the battlefield before I even stepped out of the vehicle.

I kicked the SUV door open, stepping into the freezing rain.

The Shadow Fang outpost was shrouded in a heavy, psychic cloaking mist. To a normal warrior, the fortress appeared empty. But through the golden, augmented vision Sereia was streaming into my brain, I could see the heat signatures and energy nodes of twenty elite shadow wolves patrolling the battlements.

"Intruder!" a telepathic shriek echoed down the mountain, a sharp wave of psychic pressure meant to liquefy a human's brains.

But the psychic attack didn't even scratch my surface. The moment the wave hit me, Sereia’s golden firewall in my mind instantly deflected it, converting the enemy's mental energy into raw kinetic output for my muscles.

I bared my teeth, letting out a roar that literally shattered the freezing rain into mist.

I shifted mid-leap, my nine-foot white war-form bursting onto the courtyard like a kinetic missile. I slammed into the first two shadow wolves before they could even materialize out of their stealth cloaking. My claws tore through their armor, throwing them into the stone walls with bone-crushing force.

"🚨 SYSTEM ALERT: CRITICAL THREAT LEVEL Alpha-1!" the outpost’s telepathic alarms screamed through the pack link. "THE TARGET IS OVERLOADED WITH UNIDENTIFIED KINETIC DENSITY! MANIFEST ALL DEFENSES!"

Every shadow wolf in the sector materialized from the fog, rushing toward me, throwing illusions, mind-blades, and psychic traps at my feet.

I laughed, a demonic, booming sound. I welcome the flood. The harder their psychic network tried to process my presence, the more bandwidth they lost. I became a human-destroying black hole in the center of their courtyard, drawing every eye, every spell, and every blade to myself.

Go, little Glitch, I thought through our encrypted link, breaking a shadow wolf's jaw with a single backhand. The front door is completely slammed.

*** Sereia's POV ***

While Xander executed the perfect physical DDOS attack in the courtyard, I slipped through the fortress’s ventilation shafts like a silent ghost script running in the background.

My draconic signature was compressed to zero. I was a blank space in their universe.

I dropped silently into the primary server chamber. The room was a freezing vault of dark obsidian, dominated by a massive, pulsing purple crystal floating over a pool of electrified mercury—the Shadow Fang Mainframe.

Target acquired. Initiating direct hardware interface.

I stepped onto the platform, ignoring the low-frequency psychic hum that made my teeth vibrate. I slammed my bare hand directly onto the surface of the purple crystal.

The unchained power of my 100% capacity erupted from my palms. The purple crystal violently shuddered, its dark energy clashing with my golden draconic code.

"Bypass security layers one through nine," I commanded, my voice resonating with a binary authority. "Execute Master Key."

The Shadow Fang’s firewalls didn't even have time to register the breach. My dragon magic flooded their system, downloading Malakor’s personal logs, their troop movements, and their encryption keys in a fraction of a millisecond. Data extraction: 100% complete.

I was about to sever the link and execute a purge script to melt the mainframe when a corrupted historical file caught my architect's eye.

It was a encrypted log dated exactly five years ago—the day of the Dragon Architect Purge.

My breath caught in my throat. My golden eyes narrowed as my brain rapidly decrypted the file header. It wasn't an order sent from the High Council to the packs. It was a transaction ledger.

Sender ID: Hidden. Recipient: Elder Vance. Data Packet: The exact structural weaknesses and coordinates of the Phantom Dragon hidden valleys.

My blood turned to absolute ice as the hidden algorithm of my family’s death finally unspooled in front of me. The High Council hadn't found our hidden valleys through their own seers.

We had been sold out.

And the unique, high-tier encryption signature on the sender's file didn't belong to a High Council Elder. It belonged to someone within the White Mane Pack ruling bloodline.

A cold, catastrophic fury, far more terrifying than any dragon fire, ignited in my veins.

Xander’s family didn't just harbor me by accident. Someone in his inner circle was the architect behind the s*******r of my entire race.