The walls of Veloria were closing in.
Day by day, the damage grew worse, not through sudden disasters, but through small, relentless cracks missed deliveries, inexplicable technical failures, silent withdrawals from strategic partners.
It felt like drowning in slow motion.
No single wave strong enough to kill them, but an endless tide pulling them down, inch by inch.
Aruna stared at the screen in front of her, reading the latest report.
Another server downtime.
Another canceled collaboration deal.
Another untraceable security breach.
"We fixed this two days ago," Reza muttered beside her, frustration clear in his voice. "How the hell is it happening again?"
"Same point of failure?" Naya asked, leaning forward.
"No," Reza shook his head. "Different node. Different issue. It's almost like..." He hesitated. "-like someone knows exactly where to hit us."
Aruna clenched her jaw.
They had purged Nadia. They had secured their systems. They had doubled their monitoring.
And yet...
The sabotage continued, smarter and subtler than before.
They gathered again in the war room, whiteboards filled with network maps, security audits, partnership records everything.
Vincent spoke first, calm as ever. "If it's not internal... then maybe it's external pressure. Maybe Giselle still has contacts outside."
"We severed those channels," Naya said. "We blocked everything."
Vincent shrugged, his face a picture of patient reason. "Maybe not well enough."
Aruna ran her hands through her hair, exhaling sharply. "We're missing something. I can feel it."
Her mind churned through possibilities, searching for a pattern, a crack in the armor but all she found was a growing, sickening sense of helplessness.
Every path led to a dead end.
Every theory unraveled under scrutiny.
It was as if the very foundation of Veloria had turned against them.
Meanwhile, Giselle watched from afar.
Sitting comfortably in a high-rise apartment, overlooking the glittering lights of the city, she sipped her wine and smiled.
It had been easy almost too easy.
Vincent had played his part beautifully, steering suspicion toward the innocent Nadia while subtly feeding her critical points of sabotage.
And now, Veloria was crumbling not from a hammer blow, but from rot within its own bones.
Exactly as she intended.
There was no need for grand battles or courtroom victories.
Only slow, inevitable death.
Giselle preferred it that way.
Death by a thousand cuts.
Back at Veloria, exhaustion gnawed at the team.
They worked around the clock, fixing holes only for new ones to appear elsewhere. Every small victory was immediately undone. Every plan unraveled before it even began.
And the worst part?
The silence.
No direct attacks. No demands. No obvious enemy to fight.
Just the creeping, inescapable sense that they were losing and they didn't even know how.
Late one night, Aruna sat alone in her office, the soft hum of the city outside her window.
She stared blankly at the whiteboard in front of her, covered in hastily scribbled notes, arrows, and theories. None of them made sense.
How could Giselle still be this powerful?
She had lost everything. Veloria had won. They had beaten her.
Hadn't they?
Aruna leaned back, closing her eyes.
The team was burning out. Reza was snapping at interns. Naya had started questioning every new idea with sharp-edged cynicism. Even Vincent, usually the voice of calm, had begun suggesting more and more "aggressive measures" firing teams, purging entire departments.
It felt... wrong.
Off-balance.
Like someone was pushing them toward self-destruction.
But Aruna couldn't prove it.
All she had were whispers in the dark and a sinking feeling in her gut.
The next morning brought another blow.
Their largest corporate partner a major education platform quietly pulled out of the joint program, citing "internal restructuring."
The message was polite, formal, and final.
Without them, Veloria's expansion plan was crippled.
"That's it," Naya said flatly, tossing her phone onto the table. "That's the endgame. They're bleeding us out."
Reza slammed his fist onto the table. "We need to retaliate. Publicly. Drag Giselle into the light."
"And say what?" Aruna snapped, louder than she meant to. "That we think she's behind it? That we feel it's her?"
The room fell silent.
They had no evidence.
No proof.
Nothing to fight with.
Only fear.
And despair.
Meanwhile, Vincent watched the chaos unfold with hidden satisfaction.
Every frustrated meeting.
Every broken alliance.
Every desperate, miscalculated move.
It all tightened the noose around Veloria's neck.
Soon, very soon, they would make a mistake so catastrophic it could not be undone.
And when that happened?
Giselle would be waiting.
That evening, as the sun dipped behind the skyline, Aruna stood alone on the balcony outside Veloria's offices, watching the city below.
She thought about everything they had built the dream, the endless nights, the sacrifices.
Was it all slipping away?
She remembered the early days, back when Veloria was just an idea shared over cheap coffee and impossible dreams. Back when belief was enough.
Now, belief was all they had left.
And it was crumbling too.
Somewhere out there, Giselle was smiling.
And Veloria?
Veloria was drowning, slowly and quietly, beneath the weight of battles they could no longer see.