Chapter 299 Broadcast.

Chapter 299: 299 Broadcast.

"Then please," I said, offering her an inviting, theatrical sweep of my hand. "Expound."

"Of course, sir." Glacia delicately cleared her throat. Her entire demeanor instantly shifted, taking on the exact tone of a highly strict, deeply evil headmistress at a gothic British boarding school—the kind of woman who fundamentally hated fun and children, strictly in that order.

"There are exactly two formalized methods to successfully join the Council," she began, pacing slowly in front of my desk. "The first, and traditionally most simple method, is for you to violently challenge and successfully kill one of the warlords who currently holds a seated position.

"However, this rite of combat is exclusively available to villains who are already formally recognized and sponsored by the Order proper."

"And the other, non-lethal way?" I asked.

"Far more politically onerous, sir, but it has occasionally happened over the centuries.

"Should a permanent seat on the Council suddenly become completely vacant—either through accidental death, lethal combat with an S-list hero, or an internal assassination plot gone awry—then the surviving Council members will formally gather and actively vote for their replacement from a pool of high-tier candidates. It is not quite as common, but it is entirely binding."

"Highly interesting," I murmured. And it was genuinely fascinating lore, but it didn’t actively help me much with my immediate crisis.

"But why do you specifically wish to know this, sir?" Glacia asked, her icy blue eyes narrowing with sudden, sharp concern. "Are you seriously considering accepting Jester’s extortionate offer? Or... are you actually thinking of formally challenging him to the death?"

"I’d really rather not do either," I said, rubbing the bridge of my nose. "But a massive lot of this whole business absolutely stinks to high heaven, Glacia."

"It does?" she asked, tilting her head.

"Yeah," I said. I leaned heavily forward, clasping my hands tightly together on the glass surface of the desk as I grimaced. "I could theoretically believe that Jester just coincidentally heard about this whole PR disaster with the bank robbery and No Whey’s brutal murder, and opportunistically sent his creepy goons to come and make me this buyout offer.

"But I fundamentally don’t buy it. Not completely. The timing is way too perfect. His emissaries got here entirely too fast. He was way too prepared with the specific solution to a problem that was barely an hour old."

"You genuinely think he set this entire frame-up in motion?" Glacia asked, her breath misting slightly in the air.

"I’m not officially stating it as a verified fact just yet," I said darkly. "But I highly, highly suspect it."

"That painted bastard! I’ll scramble his frontal lobe and physically lobotomize him!" Psyren snarled, her fists clenching as the air around her cracked with violent pink energy.

"Significantly easier said than done, Psyren," I grunted.

Just as the words left my mouth, the heavy lounge doors violently swung open again.

Rhea herself bounded into the room, her face heavily flushed with adrenaline, her crimped brown hair flying wildly around her twitching, fuzzy dog ears.

"Miles!" she gasped, practically vibrating out of her lab coat.

"Oh, no," I groaned heavily, bracing myself for the absolute worst. "What now? Did a radioactive Godzilla just take a massive, glowing dump in the backyard maze?"

"Ew, gross. No way," Rhea said, her nose wrinkling in deep disgust.

I raised my head a fraction of an inch, a tiny spark of desperate hope flaring in my chest. "Then... you actually bring good news?"

"Damn right I do, bossman!" she crowed.

Really? Hell, that was an incredibly refreshing change of pace for the afternoon.

"What exactly is it?" I asked, sitting up attentively and giving her my full focus.

Rhea grinned like a maniac and whipped out a ruggedized tablet, tapping furiously on the glowing glass screen as she marched directly toward my desk. "I did exactly what you explicitly ordered! I successfully backdoored my way through the bank’s encrypted security firewalls, and you were absolutely right on the money!

"It was incredibly, expertly done—military-grade slicing—but someone did actively access their closed-circuit feeds for a microscopic split-second right after the physical heist concluded."

"But that wasn’t all they did, was it?" I asked, already seeing the grim tactical picture forming in my mind.

Rhea’s grin widened into something fiercely predatory. "Nope," she said, spinning the heavy tablet around and slamming it down onto my desk for me to see. "Because whoever successfully pulled off that specific data breach also aggressively hijacked the regional cellular network from this specific broadcast tower right here.

"They didn’t just alter the bank’s cameras. They actively overrode the live RAM feed of every single civilian smartphone actively recording the scene in the lobby, forcing them to upload a highly complex, pre-rendered deepfake that was completely different from what their physical lenses were actually capturing!"

"What?!" Psyren gaped, leaning over my shoulder to stare at the scrolling lines of code. "That’s totally insane! The processing power required for that is off the charts! But the actual people standing in the lobby had to have noticed the discrepancy, right? They were right there!"

"They probably did notice," I said softly, staring grimly at the massive, sprawling network of digital red lines that Rhea had meticulously visualized on the tactical map. "But who is the media ultimately going to believe?

"The pristine, 4K digital video currently sitting on your phone and being broadcast on every news network, which perfectly aligns with what every other phone in the room recorded? Or your own, highly fallible, easily discredited lying eyes?"

The heavy silence that fell over the executive lounge after that statement was absolutely deafening. I couldn’t even blame them for the shock.

A well-produced lie could sprint a marathon around the globe before the objective truth even got its boots laced up, and this scenario was absolutely no different.

Sure, a handful of terrified civilian eyewitnesses might loudly disagree on Twitter, but the simple, undeniable fact was that the global public was already perfectly primed and ready to believe that a vicious supervillain would murder a hero in cold blood.

Still, this specific tier of cyber-warfare wasn’t exactly amateur hour in a parent’s basement.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly no tech genius, but in my long career on the wrong side of the law, I’d encountered enough high-end hardware to know that successfully pulling off a mass, real-time augmented reality overwrite like this was obscenely, prohibitively difficult.

I couldn’t even begin to accurately calculate the sheer amount of processing accuracy, meticulous pre-planning, and massive financial resources that would be required to execute it flawlessly without leaving a blazing digital trail.

"Whoever actively pulled this hit off had to be incredibly, terrifyingly good," I said slowly, tracing the red lines on the screen.

"Damn right they were. But they still weren’t as good as me!" Rhea gloated, proudly puffing out her chest.

I glanced up at my resident mad scientist, who was practically vibrating with smug, well-earned superiority. I couldn’t help but smirk right back at her. "You actually traced the bounce? You found them?"

"Is the Pope a Catholic meatbag?" she giggled, her tail wagging wildly behind her. "The primary transmission explicitly originated from right here," Rhea said.

She flicked her finger sharply across the glowing glass, the satellite image aggressively speeding across a map of the Metropolis skyline before halting dead over a large, industrial concrete building on the edge of the warehouse district.

"97.1 Rage for the Machine. An independent radio broadcaster. They are pretty small-time on the ratings chart, but the mass data signal definitively originated straight from their primary transmission tower."

"I’ve never even heard of them," I said, my voice dropping into a cold, dangerous register as I stood up from the desk. "But it looks like we’ll be paying their studio a little visit tonight... The only real question is, how violently are we going to cancel their broadcast?"