The clock on Shikage’s main monitor blinked 2:07 A.M. in bright digital green, its glow cutting the dark like a neon blade. Rows of smaller screens wrapped around his desk in a crooked arc, each throwing a different slice of HQ onto the walls. Shadows pooled in the corners of his room, deep and warped by the glow of code, camera feeds, and the ever-flickering light of his console.

Beneath the mustard-yellow folds of his blanket, Shikage sat curled like a hermit crab in its shell. Only his face was visible, pale against the glow, dark green eyes half-lidded in a gamer’s focus. His headphones hung around his neck, one hand clutching a controller, thumb dancing across the stick while his other hand reached out periodically to swipe at a different keyboard. Every so often he muttered some old-fashioned phrase under his breath, half incantation, half commentary on the raid he was running.

In the corner of the room, a wall-mounted screen flickered, its feed tied directly to the outer gate camera. The faint ping he’d set as a perimeter alert chimed, soft but insistent. He flicked his eyes to it without pausing his game. The camera showed the main gate’s night-vision feed, no movement, but a shadow stretched oddly long where no shadow should be.

He shifted, blanket rustling like a living thing. The fabric unfurled across the floor, spreading toward a flat-screen mounted above. Tiny geometric ripples pulsed across its surface, as though the blanket were breathing. Where it touched the wall, the security feeds multiplied: corridors, stairwells, rooftops, even the service tunnels. Every hallway in HQ became a tile on a giant puzzle he could rearrange at will.

With a twitch of his fingers on a secondary controller, the map of HQ’s interior shifted, doors sliding to dead ends, staircases rerouting. Somewhere below, a would-be intruder would now find themselves in a looped corridor of white walls and flickering lights.

His voice, low and theatrical, crackled over the choker comms to the main gate.

“The invincible fortress stirs. Who dares tread upon my threshold at this unholy hour?”

The dramatic tone faded as his eyes darted from feed to feed. The shadow by the gate had gone still. His fingers hovered over the controls, blanket shivering with latent power. He might have looked lazy, a shut-in in a hoodie and monster slippers, wrapped in a comforter at two in the morning but somewhere far below, the maze shifted again with a muted groan of moving walls. The fortress was watching.