Realizing this, the techs in the room all wore complicated expressions, feeling even more ashamed inside.

Turns out they’d been petty and snide for half the day, and the girl hadn’t even noticed what they’d been saying.

The vice-captain, however, had no time to worry about that. He only wanted to find the prisoner Stella Monroe as soon as possible.

The Vanguard had been around for so long, and this was the first time someone had escaped after already being locked up inside.

The responsibility on his shoulders was huge.

"Miss Monroe, please help us check the surveillance footage."

The others all nodded along. At this moment, they’d already started treating Summer Monroe as the boss.

Even without the vice-captain saying anything, Summer was going to check the surveillance; that was exactly why she’d come.

Summer gave a brief "mm," and, without even needing the mouse, went straight to keyboard controls and pulled up the surveillance records.

But to everyone’s shock, the surveillance records were completely blank. Forget the footage from that day—even all the earlier recordings had vanished without a trace.

"How could this be..." Summer froze for a second, picked up the mouse, and refreshed the page again to make sure.

The folder was still utterly empty.

It wasn’t the computer lagging—the records were really gone.

Summer bit her lip, stubbornly clicking the mouse, trying to recover the recordings.

But after a round of operations, the video files were simply untraceable on the computer.

Unwilling to give up, Summer tried a few more times, entered several lines of code, but still couldn’t get them back.

She finally confirmed it: the footage... really couldn’t be recovered.

"How could this happen?" The tech team leader went to another computer to check, but the situation was exactly the same as on Summer’s side.

All the footage had been wiped.

"Let me try." Another team member volunteered.

Summer stood up, face dark, and said, "Don’t bother. You won’t find it."

The tech leader asked Summer in confusion, "Boss, even you can’t recover it?"

Summer nodded. "It was wiped by me."

"What?" The vice-captain stared, eyes wide with shock.

Summer let out a sigh and explained, "The person who infiltrated the system is too cunning. The virus they slipped in through the vulnerability doesn’t just crash the system—it can also delete all files on the computer. But for the deletion protocol to trigger, you first have to break and remove that virus. It’s a kind of defense mechanism."

The tech leader said thoughtfully, "I’ve heard of this method. To crack the virus, you have to crack the code. But once you crack it successfully, everything on the computer gets automatically wiped and is permanently irreversible. In other words, no matter what we do, we’ll never be able to access that segment of surveillance footage."

Another tech slapped his hand and said, "The number one on the hacker leaderboard used this exact trick to win first place in the International Hacker Competition! Could it be his handiwork?"

"Number one on the hacker leaderboard?" Summer asked. "What’s that?"

"Do you know about the international dark web?"

Summer shook her head. "No."

"I’ll write down the URL for you. Check it out when you get back, you’ll understand." As he spoke, the leader quickly scribbled a web address on a piece of paper and handed it to Summer.

Summer reached out to take it, and with just one glance, she’d already memorized it.

She handed the paper back to the tech leader, her gaze falling onto the computer desktop.

Her opponent... was actually this strong?

For the first time in her life, she felt an unbearably heavy sense of powerlessness and confusion.

Summer closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then turned to the vice-captain and said, "I’m sorry for wasting your time. I’ll head back first."

There was an irrepressible disappointment in her tone.

Disappointment in herself.