Chapter 388: Chapter 388
At that moment, something inside Lovi finally broke completely.
Whatever composure he had been clinging to - whatever final shred of dignity or pride or self-preservation instinct that had been holding him upright in any psychological sense - it all shattered at once, and what emerged in its place was raw, unfiltered desperation rendered into sound and motion.
He began crying.
Not quietly. Not with the restrained control of someone trying to maintain even a fragment of their image in front of others. This was sobbing - loud, furious, uncontrolled sobbing that shook his entire body and came out in gasping, ragged bursts that echoed through the warehouse with a resonance that was almost painful to hear.
And as he cried, he began hitting his head against the concrete floor.
Not gently. Not symbolically. Hard enough that the sound of bone striking stone rang out with each impact, punctuating the sobs with sharp, brutal percussion.
"I’m sorry," he said between impacts, the words barely intelligible through the tears and the gasps and the way his voice kept breaking apart. "I’m so, so sorry. Please. Please just - I will do anything. Anything. Whatever you need to prove that I have changed, that I am a changed person right now, that this will never happen again - I will do it."
*Thud.*
"I will dedicate my entire life to it. I will show you. I will prove it in ways that leave no doubt."
*Thud.*
"Please. Please, I am begging you. I’m so sorry."
*Thud.*
The sound reverberated in the silence that followed each strike, and nobody moved to stop him.
Master Bushman watched for a moment with an expression that was unreadable - somewhere between pity and disgust and the particular exhaustion that comes from witnessing the complete collapse of someone you once believed had potential. Then, without a word, he turned away from the spectacle and walked deliberately toward Lovi’s computer setup at the far side of the room.
He reached the desk where the laptop sat still open, its screen glowing faintly in the dim warehouse light, and he lowered himself into the chair in front of it with the careful, practiced movements of someone settling in for work that would require focus and precision.
His fingers found the keyboard, and he began typing.
Not quickly. Not with the frantic energy of someone racing against a clock. He typed with methodical, deliberate care - each keystroke placed exactly where it needed to be, each command executed in the proper sequence. His eyes scanned the screen as lines of code and file directories appeared and disappeared, as he navigated through layers of security and encryption and the hidden architecture that Lovi had constructed to protect what he had assembled.
He was searching for auto-triggers.
Failsafes. Dead-man switches. Any automated mechanism that Lovi might have programmed into the system to ensure that if something happened to him - if he was killed, if he went missing, if he failed to check in at regular intervals - the files would upload themselves automatically to every target on the distribution list.
Master Bushman had seen those kinds of safeguards before. Had taught people how to implement them, in fact, back when he had believed that the knowledge would be used responsibly. So he knew what to look for and where to look for it, and he moved through Lovi’s digital infrastructure with the ease of someone who understood its logic from the ground up.
He found the first trigger buried three directories deep, disguised as a system maintenance script.
He disabled it cleanly, overwriting the code with null commands and verifying that no backup existed elsewhere.
Then he found the second trigger, hidden in a scheduled task that would have executed if the computer went more than seventy-two hours without being accessed.
He neutralized that one as well.
A third trigger. A fourth. Each one carefully concealed in different corners of the system, each one designed to ensure that Lovi’s leverage would persist even if Lovi himself did not.
Master Bushman dismantled all of them.
He worked in silence, his expression never changing, until he had traced every single file and every single copy and every single automated mechanism that could potentially re-deploy the material that Lovi had been using as blackmail. And when he had confirmed - triple-checked, actually, running diagnostics that left no possibility of error - that none of those mechanisms remained functional, he leaned back in the chair and allowed himself one slow, deliberate breath.
But he was not finished.
Because digital files could be backed up in ways that existed beyond the computer itself.
Flash drives. External hard drives. Cloud storage under alternate accounts. Physical copies burned to disc and hidden in locations that only Lovi knew about.
Master Bushman understood that possibility. Understood that his work here - thorough as it was - could not account for every contingency if Lovi had been smart enough or paranoid enough to create offline backups.
But that was not his responsibility to resolve.
That was Oliver’s work. Oliver’s authority. Oliver’s decision about how to ensure that no trace of this material could ever resurface.
Master Bushman stood from the chair, his work complete within the boundaries of what he could access, and turned back toward where Oliver was still crouched in front of Lovi’s sobbing, bleeding form.
He crossed the space between them and bowed deeply - deeper than he had bowed when he first entered, because this bow carried within it not just respect but the formality of a report being delivered to a superior.
"Everything has been cleared, Master," he said, his voice steady and professional despite the blood still visible on his face. "All automated triggers have been identified and neutralized. Any mechanism that could have caused the files to distribute themselves has been canceled. I have thoroughly verified this across the entire system."
He straightened slightly but kept his head lowered.
"The laptop is clean. Nothing will activate on its own."
Oliver did not look away from Lovi. Did not shift his attention or his posture. But his voice, when it came, was calm and direct.
"So you know what needs to be done after this."
It was not a question.
Master Bushman’s response came immediately, carrying the weight of someone who understood exactly what was being asked and exactly what his role in it would be.
"Yes, Master."
