Chapter 2: Peeling the Onion

Chapter 2: Peeling the Onion

Blocking Vipertek was like slamming a door in a hurricane. It offered a moment of quiet, but Alex knew the storm was still raging outside. The vulgar, hate-filled words echoed in his mind, fuel for the cold fire now burning in his gut. This wasn't about the calculators anymore. This was about principle. A man like that shouldn’t be allowed to operate, to use a platform for commerce as his personal cesspool for bigotry.

His initial probe into the page’s source code yielded nothing. Modern e-commerce sites were fortresses, their user data locked down tight. Any personal information was obfuscated, hidden behind layers of server-side encryption. A direct assault was impossible. But Alex wasn't a soldier who charged walls; he was an archaeologist who looked for the forgotten paths, the buried cities left behind by time and changing regulations.

Vipertek’s current profile was scrubbed clean, but what about his past?

Alex’s fingers flew across the keyboard, opening a custom-built application on his second monitor. It was his own private time machine, a powerful web scraper that interfaced with archival sites and cached data troves from across the internet. He fed it Vipertek’s user ID, set the date parameters to scan the last ten years, and initiated the search.

Lines of code scrolled past, a digital waterfall of dead links, expired listings, and phantom images. The program was sifting through a decade of digital ghosts. For twenty minutes, the process yielded junk. Alex watched, his expression impassive, his gaze missing nothing. Patience was his greatest weapon. He’d once spent three days sifting through corrupted data logs to find a single misplaced character that proved a vendor was using bots to manipulate auction end-times. Twenty minutes was nothing.

Then, a ping.

His program had found a hit. A snapshot of one of Vipertek’s listings from 2017. The item was unremarkable: a used office shredder. But the listing template was different. It was older, cruder, from a time before the platform had streamlined its mobile app and standardized descriptions. Sellers often used their own HTML, embedding whatever they wanted.

Alex’s eyes narrowed, scanning the block of text. And there it was. A single line, buried between the shredder’s technical specifications and the shipping information, almost invisible in a sea of boilerplate jargon.

“For questions or to inquire about bulk pricing on other office equipment, call us directly at 555-821-VPRT.”

A phone number. Or at least, part of one. A vanity number. Careless. Arrogant. The kind of mistake someone makes when they feel untouchable, when they believe the rules of the digital world are for other people. It was exactly the kind of breadcrumb Alex had been hoping for. The number had long since been scrubbed from the active listing, but the archive, the internet’s unforgiving memory, had preserved it.

He copied the full number, translating the letters: 555-821-8778.

A standard reverse-lookup search came up empty, as he expected. The number was likely a dead-end, a disposable VoIP line deactivated years ago. But Alex didn't stop at the surface. He fed the number into a deeper search, cross-referencing it against business registration databases, archived domain ownership records, and public shipping manifests. He was looking for a digital fingerprint, a single instance where this number was tied to a real-world entity.

For a moment, all he found were more dead ends. Then, a single, obscure hit flickered onto his screen. It was a scanned copy of a freight forwarding document from a regional logistics company, dated 2018. The document detailed a shipment of “Assorted Electronics” from a sender to a receiver. Listed in the sender’s contact information, right next to a corporate address in a high-end commercial district downtown, was the number: 555-821-8778.

The sender’s name wasn't Vipertek. It was a registered corporation.

Vance Medical Refurbishing, Inc.

Alex froze, his hands hovering over the keyboard. Vance Medical? It sounded impossibly professional. Clean. He had been chasing a venomous online troll selling used calculators. He did not expect to find a slick, legitimate-sounding medical supply company. The dissonance was jarring. A company that refurbished and sold life-saving equipment had no business being linked to a bottom-feeding reseller who spewed racist bile in his spare time.

His heart began to beat faster, the thrill of the hunt mixing with a new, sharp sense of unease. This was no longer a simple case of getting a bully banned. This was… bigger.

With the company name, the floodgates opened. A few keystrokes brought up their corporate website. It was a masterpiece of public relations: sterile blues and whites, stock photos of smiling doctors and gleaming, state-of-the-art machinery. The "About Us" page was filled with empty platitudes about "ethical service" and "commitment to healthcare excellence."

Alex clicked on the “Our Team” tab. A gallery of professional headshots appeared. And there, at the very top, under the title of "Founder & CEO," was a face that made the blood in his veins turn to ice.

He was a man in his mid-forties, tall and broad-shouldered, encased in a suit so expensive it looked like armor. His dark hair was slicked back from his forehead, and his face was set in an expression of supreme, smug confidence. It was the smirk of a man who had never been told "no," a man who saw the rest of the world as something to be bought, sold, or crushed under his heel. Alex could almost hear the dismissive, hateful tone from the messages just by looking at him.

Beneath the photo, the nameplate read: Victor Vance.

Alex leaned back in his chair, a slow, cold wave of understanding washing over him.

Victor Vance.

Vipertek.

It wasn't a clever pseudonym. It was an act of pure, unadulterated arrogance. The calling card of a narcissist so convinced of his own superiority that he couldn’t even be bothered to create a truly anonymous identity. He was hiding in plain sight, using the chaos of the internet as his personal playground, confident that no one would ever connect the esteemed CEO with the foul-mouthed digital thug.

Alex stared at the smiling, predatory face of Victor Vance. He had peeled back the first layer of the onion, expecting to find a small, rotten core. Instead, he had uncovered something vast, polished, and infinitely more dangerous. The game had just changed. He was no longer hunting a petty online reseller. He was staring into the eyes of a powerful man with a dark secret, and he had just found the key to unlocking it.