POV: Dante
The problem with having a monster in the house is that you start to believe it can handle anything.
Until the screen proves you wrong.
I'm in my office on the shadow level, checking access logs out of pure habit, when an alert pops up in red. It's not a normal notification. It's the kind of message I designed for things I hoped I'd never see.
ATTEMPTED INTRUSION – UMBRA – PRIORITY 1
Source: network associated with the Valcourt Foundation.
I sit up straight in my chair.
"Sebastian," I call on the internal channel.
"I see it," he replies almost instantly. "They tried to enter through a door that shouldn't exist."
I zoom in on the log. It wasn't a noisy attack. No brute force attempts. It was access disguised as a routine request from the report server: a mid-level technical credential, with an extra token grafted in where no one looks... except Umbra.
"Did they get anything?" I ask.
