Chapter 11: The Magical Malwarebytes

My brain, usually a calm library of historical facts and calligraphic techniques, was now a frantic IT helpdesk in the middle of a cyber-attack. The enemy wasn't a virus or a hacker, but a sentient, Wi-Fi-stealing ghost who had just turned our lead dancer into a walking, glitching avatar of chaos.

"He's in the network!" Yui shouted, her fingers flying across her keyboard, the clacking sound a frantic counter-rhythm to the distorted pop music Glitch was now blasting through our speakers. "He's locked me out of the router's admin panel! He changed the password to 'l33t-gh0st-pwnz-u'!"

"The scoundrel is mocking us with his digital-speak!" Ren bellowed, shaking a fist at the monitor where the Glitch-possessed Dullahan was now doing the robot dance with inhuman precision.

"Less yelling, more solutions!" I snapped, my mind racing. My traditional talismans were designed for spirits born of emotion and earthly ties. Glitch was different. He was born of data, of electricity and information. Fighting him with a standard 'Pacification' seal would be like trying to stop a flood with a piece of paper. I needed to speak his language.

"Joshua, I need your laptop. Now," I commanded.

"What for? You gonna email him to ask him nicely to leave?" he asked, but handed it over anyway, his face pale with a rare shade of genuine fear.

"I'm going to build a better firewall," I said, laying a blank, consecrated talisman scroll next to the laptop. I took my brush, dipped it in the pot of cinnabar ink, and took a deep breath. "Yui, give me the most complex anti-malware source code you know."

Yui's eyes widened in understanding. "You're going to write code... with a magic brush?"

"Essentially," I said, my focus narrowing. "I'm going to translate the intent of the code into the language of spiritual energy. If he's a ghost in the machine, I'll make a talisman that's a ghost hunter in the machine."

It was the weirdest, most anachronistic thing I had ever done. As Yui rattled off lines of Python script, I meticulously painted the corresponding ancient characters onto the scroll. The character for 'Search' became the foundation of a 'Seek and Identify' function. The symbol for 'Wall' was woven into a complex matrix representing a 'Firewall'. For the 'Quarantine' command, I used a modified version of a 'Binding' seal, designed not to destroy, but to contain. My brush moved with a speed and precision born of pure, adrenaline-fueled desperation. The ink glowed with a faint, cyan light, a stark contrast to its usual warm red. It felt less like writing a charm and more like debugging reality itself.

"Okay, he's trying to breach the smart-fridge!" Joshua yelped, pointing at his kitchen where the refrigerator light was flashing like a disco ball. "He's ordering 50 gallons of milk!"

"Let him," I grunted, not looking up. "The final piece... the 'Delete' function. Yui, what've you got?"

"The most powerful command I know," she replied grimly. "Sudo rm -rf /*"

"The... what?" I asked, pausing my brush.

"It's a command that force-deletes everything. The root of the system. It's... digital oblivion," she explained.

It was perfect. I took a deep breath and drew the final, most complex character on the scroll: a powerful, ancient symbol for 'Return to Nothingness', but I infused it with the cold, unforgiving logic of the code Yui had described. The entire talisman flared with brilliant cyan light, momentarily plunging the room into a silent, digital twilight.

"It's done," I panted, holding up the glowing scroll. It looked less like a sacred artifact and more like a circuit board drawn by a monk. "Now, how do we upload it?"

Joshua's eyes lit up with a terrifying idea. "The Wi-Fi! He's using the Wi-Fi as his playground. If we can get this into the signal..."

"It's not a file, Joshua, it's a piece of paper!" I argued.

"But it's a magical piece of paper!" he countered. "What if you just... stick it on the router?"

It was, without a doubt, the stupidest, most simplistic, 'have you tried turning it off and on again' solution imaginable. It was also the only one we had.

I snatched the glowing talisman, sprinted to the router blinking innocently on a bookshelf, and slapped the paper directly onto its plastic casing.

For a second, nothing happened. Then, every light on the router went out. The monitors all went black. The music cut out. The flashing refrigerator went dark. The silence was deafening.

"Did it work?" Lily whispered from behind a couch cushion.

Slowly, the main monitor flickered back to life. It showed our streaming software's interface, but it was now overlaid with glowing cyan lines of force, a digital cage. Inside the cage was the glitchy, smirking face of the technocratic ghost, no longer looking so smug. He beat against the bars of my firewall, but they held firm.

SYSTEM ERROR: UNEXPECTED SPIRITUAL KERNEL DETECTED, a text box appeared below him.

Then, my quarantine function activated. The digital cage began to shrink, compressing Glitch's form.

"What is this?! This isn't a normal exorcism!" his synthesized voice screamed, filled with genuine panic. "You can't do this!"

INITIATING 'SUDO RM -RF /' PROTOCOL,* another text box appeared.

The symbol for 'Return to Nothingness' flared on the screen. Glitch let out a final, digitized scream of "NOOOO-carrier-signal-lost-" and then dissolved. Not into ectoplasm, but into a shower of expiring pixels, until there was nothing left.

The cage vanished. The monitor went back to the cute, cartoon ghost of the 'Technical Difficulties' screen.

In the middle of the room, Dullahan collapsed onto the floor, his body solid and stable once more. He slowly sat up, patting himself down as if checking for missing data packets. He looked around the room, then at us, a look of profound confusion on his face.

We had done it. We had fought a digital ghost with magical code and won. I felt a surge of triumph, immediately followed by an overwhelming wave of exhaustion. I slid down the wall, my legs feeling like jelly.

Joshua was the first to break the silence. "That... was the coolest thing I have ever seen." He looked at me, then at the router with the still-faintly-glowing talisman stuck to it. A dangerous, world-endingly terrible idea was visibly forming in his eyes.

"Amy," he began, his voice filled with a reverence that scared me more than any ghost, "if you can do that... think of the applications. We don't have to stop with just boy ghosts."

"No," I said instantly, my voice weak but firm. "Stop that thought right now. Put it back where you found it. We are not expanding this operation."

"But think of the market reach!" he pressed on, kneeling in front of me. "The untapped potential! There are so many kinds of ghosts out there! What about a girl group, Amy? A sister group to the Phantom Idols! We could call them... The Ghoul-friends! Or Spectral Sirens!"

I just stared at him, my brain refusing to process the sheer audacity. We had just survived a cyber-attack from a new form of paranormal entity, our dancer had been possessed and nearly deleted from existence, and his first thought was to double our workload.

"I am going to take a nap," I said, pushing myself to my feet. "A very long nap. And if I wake up and you have recruited even one more ghost, I am turning this entire mansion into a spiritually-cleansed parking lot. I mean it, Joshua."

He just smiled, that infuriating, optimistic smile that always preceded my life getting exponentially more complicated. As I trudged up the stairs, the deep, bone-weary feeling of regret was already settling in. I knew, with absolute certainty, that I was going to wake up to more ghosts.