Chapter 21: The First Shot
The forty-eight-hour wait was a special kind of torture. Alex moved through his life like an automaton, his mind a partitioned system. One partition ran the familiar routines: school, family, Sentinel support tickets. Another, larger partition was a dedicated command center, its sole focus the countdown to H-Hour.
He attended his Computer Science lecture, the drone of Dr. Albright a distant hum. Leo shot him a hopeful smile from across the room, which Alex acknowledged with the barest of nods. He was building a wall, brick by brick, and even small connections felt like structural weaknesses.
At home, the tension was different. The $5,000 had bought peace, but it had also raised the stakes. His father, Jiang, now looked at him not with worry, but with expectation. The pressure to perform, to be the successful son, was a new weight on his shoulders.
The only place he felt a semblance of authenticity was during his work sessions with Chloe. They met again at the bookstore café, the scent of old paper and coffee a comforting constant. Today, they were reviewing the lawyer's draft incorporation documents.
"Delaware C-Corp," Chloe said, tapping the printout. "Standard. She recommends a four-year vesting schedule for our founder's shares with a one-year cliff." <—Vesting: Earning ownership of shares over time. A one-year cliff means you get nothing if you leave before a year, then a large portion vests at once.
Alex scanned the dense legal text, his [FINANCIAL ACUMEN] and [PROJECT MANAGEMENT] skills allowing him to grasp the implications instantly. "Standard is good. It protects us from each other." He meant it as a joke, but it came out flat, pragmatic.
Chloe looked at him carefully. "You say that like you're expecting a fight."
"I'm expecting everything to be a fight," he replied, his eyes still on the document. "It's the only way to be prepared."
She was silent for a moment. "This thing that's bothering you... does it have to do with why we're incorporating in such a hurry?"
His head snapped up. "What?"
"Don't 'what' me, Alex. You've been pushing this legally. Hard. It feels like you're building a fortress, not a company. Is someone after you? Is it Omni-Secure?"
The directness of her question hit him like a physical blow. She was too sharp. He had to lie, and he had to do it convincingly. "No. It's not like that. It's... an investor. A small-time angel. He's interested, but he wants to see a real corporate structure first. I just don't want to lose the momentum." The lie was smooth, layered over a kernel of truth—they did need the structure.
Chloe's gaze was penetrating, but she finally nodded, accepting the explanation for now. "Okay. Just... let me in, Alex. We're partners. You don't have to carry everything yourself."
The words were a balm and a brand. He wanted nothing more than to tell her. But he couldn't. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
---
H-Hour arrived on a rainy Tuesday evening. Alex was in his room, the only light coming from his monitors. The fake internal alert was queued, its delivery path routed through a daisy-chain of compromised email servers in three different countries. The personal email to Reed was ready, a silent, digital dagger.
He took a deep breath, his finger hovering over the enter key. This was it. He was no longer just defending. He was declaring war. He pressed it.
A script ran, its progress bar a serene, glowing line. [DISPERSING PACKAGE: PHASE 1... COMPLETE.]
There was no immediate fanfare. No alarms. Just the soft hum of his server and the patter of rain against his window. The first shot had been fired, and it was utterly silent.
For the next hour, nothing happened. Then, the Omni-Secure employee forums he was monitoring via a read-only guest account began to light up.
Post 1 (Anon, Level 2 Support): "Anyone else get that weird IT alert about the Orion firewall? My manager is freaking out."
Post 2 (Anon, Mid-Level Engineer): "Yeah, what the hell is that? There's no patch in the dev pipeline. Is this a drill?"
Post 3 (Anon, PR Dept): "Heads up, comms team is getting slammed with internal requests. No one knows who sent that email. This is a clusterf**k."
A slow, grim smile spread across Alex's face. It was working. The virus of doubt was spreading through the corporate body. He imagined the chaos: frantic meetings, engineers scrambling to find a vulnerability that didn't exist, managers trying to cover their asses.
He waited another thirty minutes, letting the panic peak. Then, he initiated Phase 2.
[DISPERSING PACKAGE: PHASE 2... COMPLETE.]
The audio file, encrypted and untraceable, was now sitting in Julian Reed's most private digital space. The message was clear: I can touch your company, and I can touch you.
He sat back, the adrenaline finally crashing, leaving him drained. It was out of his hands now.
He didn't have to wait long for a reaction. Not from Reed, but from an unexpected vector. His phone buzzed. It was a number he didn't recognize, but the area code was Palo Alto. Silicon Valley.
He answered cautiously. "Hello?"
"Alex Chen?" A smooth, professional female voice.
"Who is this?"
"My name is Evelyn Reed. I'm Julian Reed's wife."
Alex's blood ran cold. His wife? This was a variable he had never considered. "What do you want?"
"I want you to stop," she said, her voice calm but laced with a steel he hadn't anticipated. "I don't know what game you're playing, but you've made a very powerful man look foolish in front of his entire company. He's not a man who handles humiliation well."
"This isn't a game," Alex said, his voice low. "He sent a man to threaten my family. This is the response."
There was a pause on the other end. He could almost hear her recalibrating. "I see. Julian can be... overzealous in protecting his interests." Her tone shifted, becoming almost confidential. "Let me be blunt, Mr. Chen. You are a gnat to him. An annoyance. But you're a gnat that has proven it can bite. He will now bring a flamethrower to this fight. You will not survive it. Walk away. Take your little company and go build it somewhere else. This is your only warning."
The line went dead.
Alex sat in the dark, his heart pounding. Evelyn Reed. The attack had been so effective it had provoked a response from the inner sanctum, from the family. She wasn't threatening him; she was stating a fact. He had poked the bear, and the bear was now fully awake, angry, and its mate was telling him to run.
He had wanted to scare Reed. He had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. And in doing so, he might have just signed his own death warrant. The first shot had been fired, and the echo was a roar of impending doom.
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