The Thorne Heiress Unveiling Shadow novel Chapter 35

In the final thirty minutes of the competition, the atmosphere in the auditorium was electric. Team Sovereign was putting the finishing touches on their model, their progress bar on the main screen nearing completion. They were the clear winners, and Mark was already imagining the victory speech.

Then, Evelyn's hands returned to her keyboard.

And the world seemed to speed up.

What happened next was a blur of motion, a symphony of creation at a speed that seemed impossible. Her fingers didn't just type; they flew, a constant, fluid motion that was almost too fast for the human eye to follow. The blank screen on her monitor erupted with lines of her unique, elegant code, flowing onto the page like a waterfall. She wasn't just building a program; she was composing a masterpiece.

The commentators fell silent, their earlier mockery forgotten, replaced by a sense of stunned awe. The audience was on the edge of their seats, their phones all raised, recording the unbelievable spectacle.

Meanwhile, in her VIP seat, Aria was watching her own phone, her face pale with panic. The feed from the keylogger was a stream of incomprehensible symbols. Evelyn's custom language was so unique that it was just gibberish to Aria's software. She couldn't steal the final product.

"Do something!" she hissed into a hidden microphone, communicating with her team. "You have to get something! Anything!"

Mark, seeing his own victory so close, was hesitant to risk it. "Aria, our model is almost complete. It's solid. We don't need to cheat."

"I don't care! I want her crushed!" Aria shrieked, her voice a frantic whisper. "Find a piece of her code that looks important and copy it! Now!"

Under pressure, Jen, one of his coders, quickly scanned the gibberish feed from the keylogger. She found a small, seemingly simple block of code that Evelyn had written early on. It looked like a basic data validation function. "I've got something," she said. "It looks simple. Maybe it's the key to her encryption algorithm."

"Do it," Aria commanded.

Panicked and under orders, Jen quickly transcribed the code and integrated it into Team Sovereign's final model.

Mark and his team stared at their blank screens, their faces frozen in masks of pure, uncomprehending horror. It was all gone.

Aria let out a small, strangled scream, dropping her phone.

And then, at that exact moment, the timer for the competition hit zero. A soft chime echoed through the silent room. On the main leaderboard, a single team was listed as "COMPLETE."

Team SC.

Evelyn leaned back in her chair, her work finished. She had not only built a revolutionary, theoretically unbreakable encryption model in under an hour. She had anticipated her enemy's treachery, set an elegant trap, and exposed their corruption in the most public and undeniable way possible. Kaelen Blackwood stared at her from the judges' panel, his face a mask of cold, hard, and undeniable respect.