Chapter 6: The Hunter Becomes the Hunted

Chapter 6: The Hunter Becomes the Hunted

The stolen ledger was a Pandora's box of human misery. For two days, Elias Vance had been immersed in its encrypted contents, the righteous fury from his discovery warring with a gnawing, ever-present fear. He worked in a self-imposed lockdown, his systems hardened, his senses on a knife’s edge. Every hum of his servers, every flicker of a hard drive light, sent a jolt of adrenaline through him. He had stolen the heart of the beast, but the beast was still alive, and he knew it was looking for him. The hunter-killer AI he had narrowly escaped was proof of that.

He had spent years building this digital fortress, but now he was adding fortifications born of pure paranoia. He had seeded the internet with a web of digital tripwires—old, forgotten aliases, dormant email accounts, and monitoring scripts attached to the names of every person he could remember from his old life. These were his canaries in the coal mine. If Croft or Marcus started digging into his past, an alarm would sound. It wasn't a question of if, but when.

The alert came on the third day, a shrill, piercing tone that cut through the quiet hum of his apartment. It was a sound he had configured himself, designed to be unignorable. His head snapped up, heart hammering against his ribs. The alert wasn't from a sophisticated probe trying to breach his outer defenses. It was from something far more primitive. A public records search engine.

Someone had queried the name of Amy Stroud, a girl who had sat behind him in sophomore chemistry.

Eli’s fingers flew across the keyboard, the analysis of the ledger forgotten. He moved with a cold, practiced efficiency, tracing the origin of the search. He expected to find the sophisticated, ghost-like signature of Croft’s professional hackers, the same ones who had left the cryptic message on his screen. He braced himself for a complex digital adversary, a chess match played across continents and through layers of anonymizing relays.

But this was different. The trace was clumsy, almost brutish. It was routed through a commercial VPN, the kind any amateur could buy for ten dollars a month, but beneath it, the digital fingerprint was heavy-handed and impatient. It wasn’t a surgeon; it was a butcher. It felt like Marcus.

He pulled back, watching from a safe digital distance. Another query appeared. Kevin Chen. Then another. Jessica Miller. Names from his past, pulled from some old list. A high school yearbook, he realized with a jolt. They were going through the yearbook.

A cold dread began to seep into his bones, far more chilling than the fear of some faceless corporate hacker. This wasn't a professional manhunt. This was personal. This was Marcus, freed from his cage and unleashed. The encrypted message echoed in his mind: They're looking for the rat. He had naively assumed "they" would be a team of elite coders. He never imagined they would simply hand the sledgehammer back to the monster himself.

Eli watched, horrified, as the methodical search continued. It was a digital massacre of privacy. Marcus—or whoever was at the keyboard—was pulling everything. Current addresses, job histories, social media profiles, even property tax records. A complete digital dossier was being assembled on each of his former classmates.

At first, the pattern seemed random, alphabetical perhaps. But then Eli saw the logic. Marcus was starting with the jocks and the popular kids, the ones he had run with. He was eliminating them, crossing them off the list. Couldn't be him, too stupid. Not her, she's a real estate agent in Florida. The searches were a brutal process of elimination.

He felt a wave of nausea. He was witnessing his past being systematically excavated by his tormentor, who was now armed with the limitless resources of a criminal syndicate. Each search was a footstep, a slow, deliberate tread drawing closer. The sense of power and control he’d felt behind his keyboard, the righteous thrill of being the anonymous aggressor, was shriveling into a cold, hard knot of terror.

The searches shifted. Marcus was now looking up the outcasts, the nerds, the quiet ones. The people who, like Eli, had existed in the periphery. He was getting warmer. Eli watched as the profile of a boy from the AV club was pulled up, followed by a girl who had been the valedictorian. He was hunting for intelligence. He was hunting for someone with a grudge and the brains to act on it.

He was hunting for him.

The digital tripwires he had set were no longer a defense system; they were a countdown clock, ticking off the seconds until his own name was called. He was trapped, forced to watch the shark circle closer and closer to his cage. The digital world, his sanctuary and his weapon, had been turned against him. It was no longer a shield; it was a one-way mirror, and Marcus was on the other side, methodically wiping away the condensation until he could see who was hiding behind it.

Then, it happened.

The alert that flashed on his screen was different. It wasn't a query on a public database. This was a deeper dive. A request for sealed juvenile records from their hometown’s county court. The system, old and poorly secured, was one Eli himself had bypassed years ago out of curiosity. The name in the request was one he hadn't seen in years, belonging to a kid Marcus had once put in the hospital. This confirmed it. Marcus was specifically looking for people who had a reason to hate him.

Eli’s own name was surely on that list. He was next.

His hands trembled. The scar above his eyebrow began to ache, a phantom pain from a decade-old wound. He was that skinny kid on the asphalt again, tasting blood, hearing the laughter. The power dynamic had not just shifted; it had inverted with terrifying velocity. He had been the ghost in the machine, the untouchable online force. Now, he was just a name on a list, the next target in a very real, very physical manhunt.

His gaze swept around his apartment. The glowing monitors, the humming servers, his fortress of solitude. It all felt fragile, as thin as glass. It was a cage, not a castle. A location. A physical address that could be found.

A new query flashed on his monitoring feed, this one directed at the state university's alumni database. A cold, electric shock went through him. His breath hitched.

The search term was brutally simple.

Elias Vance.

The hunter had found his name. The footsteps had stopped right outside his door. The anonymous ghost was about to become a man of flesh and blood, and the monster from his past was coming to collect his debt.