Messing With Her? Are You Crazy! novel Chapter 1602

Serena crossed her arms, her gaze lazy and dismissive. "What exactly is Fenris?"

Kaelen frowned. "A mercenary."

"Exactly." Serena arched an eyebrow. "Guns for hire. If they wanted to flatline The Sterling Sovereign, they'd use high-caliber rifles, knives, C4, or whatever wet-work tactics they get paid for."

She tapped the edge of the console. "They wouldn't be sitting in a dark corner running encrypted penetration tests on your biometric servers. Whose profession are you insulting here?"

Kaelen opened his mouth to argue, but the words completely died in his throat. He had absolutely no counter-argument.

Caught between extreme embarrassment and fury, he asked stiffly, "Then how do you explain the signal pinging directly from his defensive sector?"

Serena laughed. "I can run a spoof protocol right now and make the ping bounce off your personal quarters. Want me to demonstrate?"

Kaelen was speechless.

The tech crew remained dead silent.

They all knew that routing a signal bounce was entry-level cyber-warfare.

Especially since the organization's internal firewall had already been compromised. A surface-level ping was useless as evidence.

They were only running the trace because she had isolated the data packets for them.

Anything they noticed, she had already factored in.

But she hadn't even bothered mentioning it, because she already knew the hack came from an executive level far above Kaelen's pay grade.

But Kaelen was clearly too frantic to think straight.

He was also desperately trying to deny the reality that his own higher-ups were orchestrating a hit on their biggest client.

So the second he heard Fenris's name...

His immediate instinct was to throw the mercenaries to the wolves and shift the blame away from the syndicate.

Serena continued her verbal assault. "Use your brain, Director. A signal bounces through a sector, and you instantly assume the guy standing there did it? Is your internal network built out of toy blocks?"

Kaelen flushed crimson, humiliated, angry, and utterly defeated.

It was incredibly frustrating.

Forget gaining access to Specimen Seven's neural drives.

Even escorting The Panacea into the med-bay and containment zones required temporary authorization, all while being heavily monitored by the ship's internal security.

And furthermore...

It was physically impossible for Fenris to possess executive override codes.

No matter how lethal his squad was, they were just hired muscle.

Breaching, escorting, killing—sure, they excelled at that.

But hacking the mainframe to install a Ghost Frequency Overlay into a military-grade asset?

It simply wasn't viable.

Serena watched him mentally short-circuit and delivered one final, crushing sneer. "Like I said, the rot is inside your own house."

"Someone is using your network to murder your own clients, and you're trying to use a mercenary squad as a meat-shield to distract from the obvious truth."