Leo’s eyes went dark. “Fine. If I can’t beat it, I’ll become it.”

“It’s mocking us,” Maya said.

The last thing he saw before the screen went black was a single line of text in the center of the monitor:

Leo’s admin privileges evaporated in real time. He couldn’t open Task Manager. He couldn’t even shut down the machine. The mouse moved on its own, sliding the cursor to the Services console. One by one, critical services restarted—but now their “Log On As” identity had changed. Everything was TrustedInstaller.

And in the depths of the server room, on a monitor no one ever looked at, a single process ran at absolute priority zero. Its description: “Windows Modules Installer – Ensures system integrity.”