The screen went black. When it flickered back to life, the Avira umbrella was green again. Cheerful. Serene.

Your Avira Antivirus License is Expiring.

Not deleting. Renaming.

Aniket’s heart hammered against his ribs. He yanked the ethernet cable. The Wi-Fi adapter was already off. But the renaming continued. The threat wasn't coming from the cloud. It was coming from the scanner .

But the camera light next to the screen stayed on.

A line of text appeared, typing itself out one agonizing letter at a time. "ANIKET SHARMA. USER ID: GHOST-77. LICENSE STATUS: VOID. THREAT LEVEL: OMEGA." He blinked. That wasn't his user ID. He used “Neutrino_Rider.” And “Threat Level Omega” wasn't an Avira thing. Avira warned about Trojans, not… whatever Omega was.

The red umbrella icon stopped raining. It spun once, cleanly, and then snapped open. But it was no longer a shield. It was a hook. And Aniket realized, with the cold clarity of a man staring into a digital abyss, that his computer had just become the safest place in the world.