Max pushed open the heavy wood-and-glass door of the computer lab, leading the group inside.
The tomb-like silence of the room, disturbed only by the monotonous hum of server fans, was abruptly broken by the rhythmic echo of their footsteps on the white tiles.
At the far end of the row of terminals, illuminated by the cold, bluish glow of a monitor, sat Adrián Valente.
Seen up close, it was almost insulting that this young man was the source of so much tension.
He was an insignificant figure, with slumped shoulders and a fragile build, hunched over the keyboard with a posture that seemed to apologize to the air for occupying physical space.
He didn’t project the image of a master villain or a formidable rival; he was, in essence, a ghost that had finally been dragged into the light.
Adrián looked up, blinking at the intrusion.
Upon seeing Max, his expression shifted from confusion to recognition, but when his eyes registered the three women—the campus elite advancing with the lethal coordination of a phalanx—what little color he had in his face evaporated instantly.
“Adrián,” Max said.
His voice wasn’t loud, but it possessed an absolute gravity that seemed to fill the void of the room.
“I think we need to talk.”
Panic flared in Adrián’s eyes like a short circuit.
For a second, he sat paralyzed, but the instinct for preservation proved stronger.
With a clumsy, desperate movement, he shoved his chair back, making it screech violently against the floor, and bolted in a frantic sprint toward the emergency exit at the other end of the room.
He didn’t get far.
Before he could take a third step, a shadow shifted with a speed human vision could barely process.
Laura, propelled by her athlete’s reflexes and the relentless training of the past weeks, stepped into his path like a bolt of lightning.
She didn’t need to use excessive violence; she simply blocked his way and caught him by the arm.
Her grip wasn’t brutal, but it was unmovable—a trap of tendons and steel muscle that nullified any hope of escape.
“Where do you think you’re going, you little coward?!” Laura hissed.
She leaned toward him, her face inches from Adrián’s, projecting a contained fury that made him shrink.
“You enjoy watching people from the bushes?
You feel powerful taking photos and sending anonymous threats?”
Adrián was visibly trembling, his knees buckling under the sprinter’s intensity.
It was then that Victoria approached with elegant slowness, circling him like a shark that had smelled blood in the water.
Her smile contained no warmth; it was a glass edge designed to cut.
“We know exactly what you’ve done, Adrián,” Victoria stated, her voice a poisonous caress.
“And believe me when I tell you that by tomorrow, the entire university—and their respective admissions and scholarship departments—will know your name and see your face.
No firm with an ounce of prestige will want to hire a stalker with obsessive tendencies.
Your academic future, your reputation, and your career have just been wiped off the map.”
Victoria’s threat wasn’t physical; it was existential.
Adrián found himself trapped between Laura’s brute force and Victoria’s social annihilation.
As Adrián trembled, caught between Laura’s imminent physical violence and Victoria’s existential annihilation, Max remained motionless, his gaze lost on an empty point in the air.
Before his eyes, the System’s translucent interface continued to project the same message in blue letters.
[Emergency Quest: Identify the Shadow]
Status: In progress…
There was no victorious ding.
There was no display of digital fireworks or notification of accumulated rewards.
The System’s silence was a deafening scream to Max.
A shiver, colder than the server room’s air conditioning, ran down his spine.
They had caught the enforcer, the photographer, but the System didn’t recognize him as the true “Shadow.”
Adrián Valente was just a tool.
The messenger.
Max activated [Player Gaze] on the young man, who looked ready to collapse under the weight of his own terror.
Level 2: Student
Status: Terrified.
Feeling trapped.
Desperate.
Surface Thought: They’re going to kill me!
I can’t say anything!
If I talk, he’ll destroy me!
But if I don’t talk, they’ll destroy me right now!
I don’t know what to do, there’s no way out!
“Wait,” Max said.
His voice, soft and controlled, sliced through the tension like a taut wire snapping.
Laura and Victoria stopped and turned to him, confused.
They had done their part, they had the culprit, why stop now?
Max approached Adrián, ignoring the boy’s defensive posture as he cringed as if expecting the first blow to come from the “Social Climber.”
“Adrián,” Max said with a disarming softness.
His tone held no threat, but a kind of clinical compassion.
“We don’t know each other at all.
I have no reason to hate you, and you don’t seem like the kind of person who wastes his time for a pointless grudge.
So…
why?
Why are you doing this?”
The young man stammered, shaking his head frantically.
Tears, held back by pure panic, began to track down his cheeks, erasing the image of the arrogant hacker he pretended to be behind the screen.
He was too broken to articulate a coherent sentence.
Max knew logic wouldn’t be enough; he needed to pick the lock of his will.
He activated [Persuasive Voice].
“Tell us the truth, Adrián,” Max said, and his voice took on a magnetic resonance—a persuasive warmth that seemed to wrap around the boy’s fear and force it to calm.
“If you tell us who’s behind this, maybe…
just maybe, we can help you.
We aren’t your enemies, but he is.”
The effect was immediate.
The System skill, combined with Max’s real vulnerability, broke through the boy’s wall of silence.
Words poured out of him in a torrent of relief and anguish, as if he needed to expel a poison.
“It wasn’t me!
He made me!” Adrián sobbed, hiding his face in his hands.
“Marcos!
Marcos Mitchell, the one on the rugby team!
He’s had me under his thumb since the first semester…
he bullies me, he takes my scholarship money…
He told me if I didn’t do this, if I didn’t scare you away from Laura, he’d disfigure me!
I swear to God!
I only did what he ordered!”
The revelation landed in the room with the weight of a sentence.
The name Marcos Mitchell didn’t evoke mystery, but a known and predictable brutality.
Adrián wasn’t the shadow; he was a victim who had been forced to bite to survive.
The board had just changed scale.
“Marcos…” Laura whispered, and the name tasted like ash.
In her mind, she replayed the image of the arrogant guy from the gym, the one who had ignored Max as if he were background noise while trying to mark his territory in front of her.
“Marcos Mitchell,” Victoria added, and the way she pronounced the surname was like a judgment.
Her lips curled in a sneer of pure aristocratic disdain.
“A bully with a lineage that buys silence.
His family makes donations generous enough that the university administration suffers from selective blindness.
At gala events, he’s the perfect heir, but in the circles I move in, his reputation for cruelty is an open secret.”
Isa, who had remained on the periphery of the action, watching the display with the stillness of a statue, finally spoke.
Her voice was flat, devoid of Laura’s emotional weight or Victoria’s venom, but laden with cold logic.
“It makes sense from a risk management perspective,” Isa analyzed.
“An attack by proxy.
Marcos outsourced the execution to minimize his direct exposure.
He uses an individual with an extreme vulnerability profile, like Adrián, to create a barrier of plausible deniability.
It’s a bully’s tactic, yes, but with an efficient strategic structure.”
Silence fell over the room once more, broken only by the monotonous hum of the server fans.
All eyes landed on Adrián, who now lay curled on the floor, sobbing with the ragged breath of someone who has hit rock bottom.
He was no longer a threat.
He was no longer the enemy.
He had become an undervalued asset in Max’s hands.
He had become the bait.
Max crouched down to his level, invading his space with a calm that left no room for negotiation or doubt.
There was no trace of the earlier compassion; now only the Architect remained, moving a piece.
“Adrián, look at me,” Max commanded, and the boy obeyed out of pure instinct.
“You’re going to help us finish this.
It’s the only way the Mitchells will stop owning you.
Get your phone out.”
With hands shaking so hard he almost dropped the device, Adrián obeyed.
“Send a message to Marcos,” Max dictated, his voice a whisper of steel.
“Tell him the plan worked, but there’s a technical complication he needs to see in person.
Tell him it’s urgent and you’re waiting at terminal 42 in the computer lab…
right now.”
Adrián, glimpsing a desperate way out of his own nightmare, nodded frantically and began to type.
The others moved with the coordination of an assault unit.
Laura positioned herself beside Max, her athlete’s senses alert, hidden behind a row of shelves casting long shadows.
Victoria and Isa, for their part, retreated to a dark corner of the room, blending into the shadow of the servers, becoming specters watching from the void.
The soft, dry click of the ‘Send’ key echoed in the tomb-like silence of the room.
It was the sound of a trigger being pulled.
The spring of a new trap, far more dangerous and definitive, had just been released.
The pawn had been captured and reconfigured.
Now, it was the king’s turn.