Apocalypse Trade Monopoly
Chapter 77: : Plan E – Where the Real Game Begins

Chapter 77: : Plan E – Where the Real Game Begins

The corridor outside the vault was silent. Not abandoned—holding its breath. As if the structure itself understood what had just been stolen from it.

Ava led the way, her system rerouting them through a maintenance shaft above the medical wing—one of the only pathways that wouldn’t trigger Angel’s personal surveillance net. The data core they’d taken pulsed in Lucas’s hand, light flickering inside the sealed casing like it knew the damage it could do.

Lucas glanced back at the vault door as it began to slide shut behind them. "She’s going to feel it like a blade between the ribs."

Locke didn’t answer.

Ava kept walking.

They ducked into the shadows of the access shaft, boots moving in near-perfect silence. As they climbed, Ava’s system fed her real-time updates—Angel’s private comms were still silent. The virus Lucas had loaded into the core was already looping her internal signals into false reports.

They had thirty-eight minutes before the truth caught up to her.

Locke caught up, his voice low. "What happens when she finds out?"

Lucas nodded ahead of them. "She’ll burn her allies just to find the leak."

Lucas moved beside her as they reached the service lift. He keyed in the bypass code—one of a dozen he’d collected over years of patient subterfuge.

The lift hummed to life, lowering into a shaft barely wide enough to breathe.

Ava pressed her back to the metal wall, eyes on the shadows sliding past. "She’s not going to collapse quietly."

Lucas chuckled. "She bleeds like anyone else."

The lights in the service corridor flickered once—barely noticeable. But Ava’s system caught it.

[SURGE WARNING: SYSTEM CORE DRAIN INITIATED]

[SIMULATED POWER LOAD ONLINE – 2% SYSTEM FAILURE MASKED]

Lucas grinned as the readout scrolled across his screen. "She still thinks it’s a routine fluctuation. Over confidence."

"She’ll start running diagnostics in twenty minutes," Ava muttered. "Then everything unravels."

They moved fast—faster now. Down silent halls behind market stalls, through old maintenance tracks that hadn’t seen a footstep in years. The bunker hummed around them, oblivious.

But beneath that hum, cracks were forming.

Angel’s private security systems began feeding her false reports: steady power, no data breaches, no movement in restricted zones.

But in reality—

The vault was empty.

The data core was gone.

Her leverage was slipping from her hands, piece by invisible piece.

Lucas tapped his interface again.

[Contagion File 3 Uploaded: False Routing Logs to Security Feed]

The image in Angel’s surveillance room now showed a looped corridor with still shadows. No intruders. No breach.

Ava ducked under a low-hanging pipe, brushing off rust from her shoulder. "By the time she sees through that, we’ll be three floors down and two doors out."

Locke kept pace behind her, eyes sharp, footsteps silent. He hadn’t said much since the vault closed behind them, but Ava caught him glancing at her now and then—as if the ring he gave her still lingered between them, a shared weight neither wanted to carry.

The last checkpoint was a door posing as a blank wall—an emergency evacuation point Lucas had reprogrammed months ago. It led out into the far end of the storage wing, where foot traffic was light and patrols were minimal.

Lucas paused just before the threshold, eyes flicking back toward the way they came.

"Still think she’ll recover?" he asked.

Locke didn’t hesitate. "Not from this."

Ava stepped past them, pressing her hand to the disguised panel.

It opened.

They emerged into the far wing of Level One, the air cooler, quieter here—the edges of power, where no one important ever lingered.

Ava’s boots barely made a sound as she moved, her system pulsing steady. She kept her hood low, blending into shadows. Lucas, on the other hand, walked like he owned the place, as if getting caught would simply inconvenience him.

Locke followed close, head on a swivel. Tension wound tight in his shoulders—he was used to missions with rules. This wasn’t that. This was the kind of work done in silence, with no names attached.

They slipped into a side corridor, ducking behind a shuttered maintenance room. The moment the steel door closed, Lucas turned to face them—his grin already back.

"Time for Plan E."

Ava raised an eyebrow. "You really named these?"

"Of course I did." Lucas crouched by the wall console, entering a rapid sequence of codes into a sealed uplink box. "Every great disaster needs a monogrammed playbook."

Locke didn’t speak, but his eyes narrowed.

Lucas tapped the final code.

[ACTIVATING: OPERATION PLAN E – CODENAME: JUDAS]

[TRANSMISSION ROUTE OPEN: PRIVATE LINE – NODE RED-17]

Ava’s system pinged. A live transmission was being opened—to someone still inside Angel’s ranks.

"You’re calling in a traitor?" she asked, jaw tightening.

Lucas didn’t answer immediately. He stood slowly, glancing between her and Locke. Then:

"You think a network like Angel’s falls just from losing resources?" He smirked. "It breaks because someone opens the gates from the inside."

A soft ping confirmed the link had been accepted.

A distorted voice crackled through the system. Mechanical, filtered.

"You’re early."

Lucas smiled. "I like a punctual betrayal."

Ava crossed her arms. "Who is it?"

Lucas’s eyes gleamed. "Does it matter? The important thing is, they’re close. Trusted. High enough to move her pieces without setting off alarms."

The voice came again.

"Angel’s already noticed the delay in her internal sync. She’s blaming a bug in the eastern grid. I’ve fed her just enough false data to keep her chasing ghosts."

Lucas gave a pleased nod. "Perfect. Now open the command vault relay."

There was a pause. Then: "Done."

Ava’s system updated instantly—a flash of red across Angel’s command structure. Her private network just lost its encryption threshold.

One more push, and it would unravel in full.

Lucas turn to sealed the transmission, Ava’s system lit up with a quiet storm of alerts. Not urgent—precisely engineered chaos.

[INTERNAL ENCRYPTION DROP: ACTIVE]

[NETWORK INSTABILITY INITIATED IN LEVEL ONE: %23 and rising]

Lucas straightened from the wall console, brushing invisible dust from his coat sleeve like he’d just finished a business deal and not handed over the keys to Angel’s destruction.

Locke stood beside the sealed maintenance door, hands folded behind his back, but his eyes were locked on the projection Ava displayed—a 3D model of Level One’s backbone.

Flashing in red: Angel’s command relay.

Flashing in orange: Bunker resource nodes.

And blinking in gold—the Judas access point.

Ava narrowed her eyes. "You didn’t just open a hole in her network. You weaponized her people."

Lucas’s grin spread slowly. "Of course I did. She built a fortress and staffed it with ambition. Loyalty bought with status, not conviction."

He turned the projection with a flick of his wrist. The outer districts of Level One began shifting—power rerouting unevenly, emergency lights blinking, secondary resource allocation crashing out of sync.

Everything was still running—just badly.

Just enough to look like a natural failure.

Locke’s jaw tensed. "This will destabilize the entire civilian quadrant if it spreads."

"Good," Lucas said without flinching. "That’s the beauty of Plan E. It looks like entropy. But design. Calculated collapse. Every failure she tries to fix will lead her to another blind spot. And every person she questions will think someone else is responsible."

Ava folded her arms. "How long until it becomes permanent?"

Lucas’s voice dropped.

"It already is."

Ava’s stomach turned as her system recalibrated projections. Angel’s command hub had started rerouting control to her secondary backups—which now ran on compromised data.

Every move Angel made from this point on would rely on poisoned information.

Ava looked at him. "And what’s that game?"

Lucas’s eyes met hers, golden and burning.

"Rewriting who gets to sit on the throne."

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