Leo frowned. He opened Event Viewer—or tried to. The Super Lite build had removed Event Viewer.

He should have been terrified.

Leo burned it to a USB stick with hands trembling from coffee and desperation. The installation text scrolled by like a hacker movie. No fancy setup wizard. No Microsoft account demands. Just raw, beautiful, terrifying speed.

He’d heard rumors on a forgotten forum. A ghost version of Windows 10. Stripped. Shaved. Carved down to the bone. No Cortana. No Edge. No Windows Store. No telemetry. No 3D objects folder. No "Meet the new emojis!" pop-ups. It was called —built for machines that had no business running anything past Windows XP.

“That’s it,” he whispered to the empty room. “We’re going underground.”

He opened Task Manager again. Still 19 processes. But one of them had a new name: weston-agent.exe .