NOVEL WEB Chapter 245: Honeypot
Ding!
┏Quest Completed: "The Forgotten Wallet: Recover the Lost Millions."┛
┏Reward: You've gotten an extra 80,000 BTC + Vault Tracer Tool!┛
Portfolio balance: ┏375,000 + 80,000 BTC = 455,000 BTC.┛
"Good thing it added it to my personal wallet," Darren muttered to himself, heading back to his office. "Though I am still surprised that it gave me actual Bitcoins as a reward. I expect it to give me some rules or what not on how to spend it."
He exhaled. "Meanwhile I can't stop thinking about what Kara showed me.... About Ileana."
His eyes narrowed. 'I'll just let her prove herself first. Then we can talk about whatever this thing is.'
------
Back in the conference room, silence reigned supreme. It was a physical weight, thick enough to taste. It pressed down on shoulders and slithered beneath collars like static electricity.
The light from the floor-length displays along the back wall painted shifting patterns across tense faces. Those screens weren't just showing data; they were alive— a writhing tapestry of encrypted code streams, jagged signal overlays, and the sterile glow of sandbox diagnostics.
Beneath it all, the ever-present hum of servers vibrated in the bones, less a background noise now and more like the distant, rhythmic thud of war drums counting down to something inevitable.
Kara stood anchored before the largest display, arms crossed like a shield. A stylus danced restlessly between her fingers, flicked rhythmically by her thumb's nail —click, click, click — the only sound cutting the heavy air.
Her sharp and excited eyes — at least that's what they usually were — were now unreadable obsidian pools as she raced them through the chaotic dance on the screen.
New patterns flashed — violent, erratic spikes, sudden drop-offs, and mirrored loops that twisted back on themselves like serpents. It wasn't just complex; it felt alive, hostile, like the encryption itself was snarling at her defiance.
And this kind of stuff is what also made her feel alive. It was what she loved doing.
"Pfft," she scoffed. "This isn't just a relay."
She looked around the room, to Darren and Brooklyn. Darren had only entered a moment ago after having lunch at Castle Cottage.
"It's a honeypot. Pure poison."
Darren's gaze showed uncertainty. "A honeypot? What's that?"
"It's a cybersecurity mechanism designed to act as a decoy to attract, detect, deflect, and study cyber attackers."
Kara's fingers flew across the terminal to zoom into a particularly vicious knot of data. "This one has perfectly been crafted to lure in any decryption attempt," she explained like she was impressed.
"The moment you poke it, it wraps you in a tracer loop tighter than a noose. Try to peek inside without the exact key? It flags you and shoots pings up the darknet like a goddamn Fourth of July finale. A digital scream for attention."
Brooklyn leaned forward, elbows digging into the desk, her lips a thin, bloodless line as she glanced from the malevolent data stream to Kara and then, pointedly, to Ileana. "But it didn't trigger when I opened the initial message. Not a flicker."
"That's because it wasn't for you, our dear journalist friend," Kara replied with a clipped tone.
Brooklyn grimaced.
The IT girl's fingers danced again, summoning a secondary interface layered over the first. "This is a handler-keyed trap. Sophisticated malice. It only wakes up if someone tries to trace it. Someone who knows the dance steps. Someone who…"
She paused as the display parsed a fresh, chilling match. A sequence buried deep within the code's malignant heart pulsed into view, highlighted in venomous red. Kara tapped it, the sound loud in the quiet. "…Someone like her."
Every head in the room snapped towards Ileana.
On-screen, the sequence mapped out with terrifying clarity – a unique string signature, a digital fingerprint rendered in XOR-collapsed layers and decompression pulses locked rigidly to a 2009 time standard. "This pattern," Kara said, her voice devoid of inflection but heavy with accusation. "It's certainly from the Triad, but even more, it's a ShadowBloom framework."
"Your framework."
Eyes stayed on the Romanian girl.
Ileana now appeared different. Her carefully constructed composure fractured. Her chin lifted in instinctive defiance, a shield against the sudden onslaught of memory, but Darren, standing close enough to see the subtle tremor in her hands and the almost imperceptible hitch in her breath, caught the raw flicker of panic in her eyes before the mask slammed back down.
Brooklyn, her own tension coiling tighter, nodded her head with intrigue. "The plot thickens. So you are hiding something."
Ileana shook her head softly and frightenedly.
Darren didn't say anything. He didn't need to. Kara was already dissecting the next layer of the trap.
"There's a core gate buried here," Kara announced, spinning her terminal screen to face the room. The image showed a complex digital lock mechanism woven into the honeypot's structure.
"Though it's locked tighter than Fort Knox. And it's sealed behind a call-sign authenticator keyed specifically to a ShadowBloom-level signature." She let the implication hang, thick and suffocating.
"Meaning— only someone carrying the original creator's credentials can crack this open. No backdoors. No brute force. Just the ghost who built it."
She smirked at Ileana. "You're pretty good at this stuff, eh?"
Darren stared at the encrypted monstrosity projected across the curved display. The lines of defense code flowed like a river of liquid mercury – deceptively smooth, impenetrably dark, and utterly lethal to anything that dared to wade in without the right invitation.
It was a digital kill box.
"Ignore her," he declared. "We're opening it."
No theatrical flair, no hollow bravado. Just the icy, absolute clarity of a man who understood the precipice they stood upon and the plummet that awaited a misstep.
Kara shrugged with excitement. "Heck. Anything you say, boss."
Brooklyn whirled on him, her composure finally shattering. "Have you lost your mind? Crack that thing, Darren, and you light a beacon visible from every Triad rat-hole from here to Vladivostok! It's not risky, it's goddamn suicide!" Her knuckles were white where she gripped the edge of the desk.
"I thought you're trying to help me here not get me killed!"
Darren's expression remained granite. "We're not prying it open bare-handed, Brooklyn. Kara cages it." He turned to the tech specialist. "Walled sandbox. Total network isolation. Air-gapped, physically severed. Every potential outbound signal gets spoofed, rerouted, and fed into a labyrinth of dead-end bounce loops. If this thing does scream, it screams into a void that points nowhere near the Steele Complex. Understood?"
Kara met his gaze, her own eyes calculating speeds, capacities, fail-safes. She gave a slow, deliberate nod. "I can build that cage. Give me ten minutes to deploy the virtual equivalent of Fort Knox."
"Do it," Darren ordered, the words final.
Then, Darren quickly summoned the system, asking for an override.
He'd done this a few times by hacking into things like Kara's home camera when they first met and secret details he shouldn't have access to.
Then, the Investor System appeared.
> ┏System Command Confirmed┛
> ┏ShadowBloom Override Enabled: Monitor Subject [ILEANA] for Undisclosed Protocols┛
> ┏Tracking Layer Installed… Passive Observation Active┛
Invisible threads of code wrapped around Ileana's digital presence within the room.
If she so much as thought a command to the darknet while interacting with that relay — if she tried to send a coded whisper, activate a dormant kill switch, or patch into an old, buried comms line — he'd see it.
He'd know. Every byte, every pulse, laid bare.
Ileana stood frozen.