Now? Silence. The progress bar crept upward. V2Box sat in the tray, a silent, translucent guardian.

Elias sighed, rubbing his temples. He was a network architect for a firm that handled sensitive international data, but tonight, he was just another user fighting the Great Firewall. For years, his weapon of choice had been . It was the Swiss Army Knife of Windows proxies—ugly, cluttered, and infinitely powerful. It had seen him through the XP era, the Windows 7 golden age, and the rocky transition to Windows 10.

"It’s going to leak," he muttered. "It’s too simple. It’s going to route my banking traffic through Singapore."