The Thorne Heiress Unveiling Shadow novel Chapter 34

An hour into the competition, Kaelen Blackwood was bored. He had predicted the strategies of the top three teams almost to the letter. Team Sovereign was building a powerful but conventional brute-force encryption model. Another team was trying a more experimental, but flawed, quantum-key approach. It was all competent, but it was all predictable. His gaze drifted over the other teams, his eyes scanning their monitors with a practiced, analytical coolness.

Then, his gaze fell on Team SC's station. Specifically, on Evelyn Thorne's screen.

He leaned forward, his polished facade cracking for the first time with a flicker of genuine surprise.

While Chloe's monitor displayed a neat, understandable user interface design, Evelyn's screen was almost entirely blank. At the very top was a single, elegant line of code. But it wasn't written in Python, or C++, or any other standard programming language the other teams were using.

It was a language Kaelen recognized with a jolt that went straight through him. It was a custom, proprietary language, one so efficient and intuitive that it was less like writing instructions and more like having a conversation with the machine. It was a language he had only ever seen in one other place: in the forensic analysis reports of the "Shadow" hack that had breached a Blackwood Industries subsidiary three years ago.

The hack had been a masterpiece. The attacker hadn't broken in; they had been invited, tricking the system's own security into holding the door open for them. It was an attack so brilliant that Kaelen had felt a grudging, ice-cold respect for his invisible adversary. His top analysts had spent months deconstructing the attack, and they had managed to isolate a few fragments of the unique, beautiful code the hacker had used. They had nicknamed the language "Styx," after the mythical river of the underworld, because it flowed in ways they couldn't fully comprehend.

And now, Kaelen was watching a quiet, unassuming freshman type in that very same language on a live stage, in his competition.

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