Elsewhere, one area drew intense Spirit Fox activity: a slum district. Athena had flagged it as suspicious due to an overlapping pattern—between the incident sites, the attackers' residences, and the messengers' routes.
Humans might have struggled to detect the anomaly, but Athena had no such difficulty. The moment she spotted the oddity—a nail sticking out—she dug deeper.
Furthermore, when Athena resorted to the surveillance methods usually restricted by her mother, she gained a crystal-clear visualization of all electronic devices connected to the network across the district.
Every household had such devices—phones, computers, and other appliances accessing the internet.
But the villa?
It emitted no signal whatsoever.
That anomaly stood out like a different species among its surroundings—silent, disconnected, and glaringly out of place.
Preliminary analysis led to a peculiar target: a 'villa'—a well-built house standing out in the middle of the slum.
