Lyra Nexus's Arc

Chapter 5 of 27

Lyra scrubbed the last dead pixels from her hands. The virus was gone, but her toolkit held nothing to kill the next one. Her tools were built to hide and run, not fight. She had won by hand, and her fists still ached from the strain. More viruses were moving toward her signal. She needed a real weapon before the next one slid under her door. She pulled up a search across the network. Listings scrolled past. Firewalls, cloaks, decoys. None of them bit. Then she pinned one down with her magnifying scanner, its ringed lens spinning bright over the code. The scanner cut through the listing's noise and showed her the truth beneath. A spear, dark blue, wrapped in live streams of code. Built to pierce virus armor. The one thing that could crack a plated shell like the one she had just torn open by hand. But the spear sat on a distant server, far across the net. She could not reach it as raw code. Scans would catch her the moment she moved in the open. She needed to ride the dataflow fast, low, and hidden. She needed a board. Lyra spent her last Hex Credits on one. It came as a flat sliver of packed code, humming when she gripped it.