Chase’s voice—digitized, slightly glitched—spoke through his laptop speakers:

He had a ROM, a Wii U, and a mystery buried in a decade-old video game.

The file ended.

Most people would have ignored it. Leo was not most people. He was a preservationist—a digital archaeologist who believed every byte told a story. So he loaded the ROM’s file structure into a hex viewer and started scanning.

The screen went black. Then, in plain white text: