The confirmation on the screen settled over the penthouse like a physical weight. The cascading red lines of the dead loop proved that the mansion was entirely impenetrable, transforming the Kims' sprawling estate into a silent fortress of concrete and steel.

"If the data diverted down into Sector-04 just before the lockout," So-min said, her fingers tracing the sharp cliff-off on her tablet's network graph, "then the physical servers inside the mansion are just empty husks right now. The operational core is deep underground."