The bunker stank of burnt coffee and something worse—desperation, thick and cloying like sweat trapped under body armor. Fluorescent lights sputtered overhead, painting the underground maze of server racks and jury-rigged holographic projectors in a sickly pallor. The hum of overheating processors filled the air, a constant nervous drone, as if the machines themselves knew trouble was coming.
At one battered terminal near the back, Satria hunched over a cracked keyboard, the cold glow of Sekar's coordinates pulsing in his bloodshot eyes. Each tap of the keys stuck and snapped back with a brittle click, loud as gunshots in the tense quiet. His fingers hovered, twitching.
Focus. Reroute the drones. Buy her time.
But the static scratching at the edges of his neural comms sharpened—until it became a voice he hadn't heard in years, raw and jagged as broken glass.
Arkan's voice.
"You let them kill me, Sat. You stood there. Watched."
Satria's prosthetic hand spasmed, the actuators whining in protest as his fingers clenched into a trembling fist. His breath hitched; the terminal screen flickered under his glare.
"Shut up," he muttered through gritted teeth.
But it was no use. The memory swallowed him whole.
Five years ago, in NuraTech's whitewashed death-lab.
Arkan, strapped down on the surgical table, screamed as prototype nanites chewed through his nervous system.
Satria, helpless behind the observation glass, pounded the thick polymer until the security drones dropped him with a taser jolt to the spine.
Above it all, Aulia's voice, clinical and distant over the intercom: "Sacrifices are quiet."
"Quiet, right?" Arkan's voice sneered, more vivid now than it ever had been in life. "That's why you're here, playing hero? Pathetic."
The rage boiled over. Satria slammed his fist into the terminal. Plastic cracked under the force, a spiderweb blooming across Sekar's blinking coordinates. Across the room, a few AdriNet operatives—grim-faced men and women in stolen corp armor—turned at the noise.
Tamtama, the unit's lieutenant, raised an eyebrow. "Problem?"
Satria forced a twitchy grin, the muscles in his jaw burning with the effort. "Glitch in the feed," he said. "Rebooting."
Tamtama grunted, already half-distracted by the flurry of tactical screens. Good. Nobody is watching too closely.
Satria's hands moved fast now, slipping past firewalls and safeguards with the ease of old instinct. Not to fix the glitch—no. He planted something deeper: a wormhole virus, buried in a routine system update. The code spiraled into the comms relays, a cancer masked as a cure.
Ten minutes, maybe less. AdriNet's eyes and ears would go dark. No alerts. No backup. No second chances.
In his skull, Arkan's voice hissed, louder and colder. "You think this makes up for it? You're still a coward, Sat."
Satria's mouth twisted. "I'm fixing it," he whispered to the screen, fingers hammering out the final subroutine.
Across the bunker, someone shouted, "Satria! The drones—they're veering off-grid!"
He leaned back in his chair, letting the sweat drip down the back of his collar, soaking into the cheap synth-cotton of his jacket.
He shrugged with studied laziness. "Signal interference. Storm rolling in."
A lie, casual as breathing.
The bunker snapped into chaos, operatives scrambling to recalibrate their feeds, shouting half-coherent orders. Tamtama barked into his comms, cursing the weather, cursing the system, cursing the gods.
In the confusion, Satria slipped into the deeper shadows between the server racks, his footfalls silent on the concrete floor. The reek of ozone and hot plastic thickened as he ducked around a corner, out of sight.
On his wristpad, a single message blinked, ready to send.
RUN. NOW.
He tapped the command with a shuddering breath.
As the signal bounced off a dozen black-market satellites and vanished into the net, Arkan's voice thinned, fading into a mocking whisper.
"You'll die for her too, brother."
Satria smirked, a bitter, broken thing. "Better than living for you."
He pulled up his hood and melted into the tunnels, leaving the smell of desperation and the ghosts of the past behind him.
At least for now.
—
NuraTech's prison-lab was a labyrinth of cold, steel bones buried deep beneath the Capital's crumbling sewage grid, a place where the very air seemed to choke on its toxins. The deep red of the emergency hazard lights pulsed rhythmically, casting long, warped shadows over rows of containment pods that lined the walls like forgotten corpses. Inside the pods, test subjects—half-human, half-machine—lay comatose, their bodies twisted and broken by experiments designed to strip them of their humanity. A quiet hum of electrical static buzzed through the air, the sound of empathy inhibitors working overtime, keeping any shred of emotion or resistance from the prisoners.
Satria floated beside Sekar on his Fly Board, the repulsor jets sputtering beneath him. It wasn't a smooth ride—far from it—but he knew the route by heart, and right now, speed was the only thing that mattered. The narrow corridors of the lab stretched ahead, each turn a new obstacle, every hallway a potential ambush. His eyes darted from the flickering monitors to Sekar's form beside him, her sleek silhouette barely illuminated by the dim emergency lights.
"The Animaloids are ahead," Sekar's voice crackled through the comm. Her optics flashed, running through the lab's security protocols. "Lobotomized. No pain receptors, no fear."
"Just another Tuesday," Satria muttered, his voice dry, too used to these kinds of missions. But even as the words left his lips, his body tensed, knowing better than to get cocky. The pulse of danger in the air was palpable, and he could feel his pulse quicken, syncing with the rhythmic flicker of the lights.
The screech of metal echoed from deep within the lab, sharp and mechanical, followed by a guttural roar that reverberated off the walls. A chilling reminder of what they were up against.
Then they saw them.
Twisted hybrids of flesh and steel, former NuraTech enforcers who had long since lost their humanity, staggered into view. Their eyes, now nothing more than void-black pits, glowed ominously in the dim light. The empathy cores that had once made them human had been replaced by Aulia's black nanite injectors, turning them into soulless killing machines.
One of them—a bear-sized monstrosity, its skin stretched tight over exposed spinal wiring—charged them, its roar deafening.
Sekar didn't hesitate. She lunged, her claws slicing through its chest plate with brutal precision. "Aim for the neural ports!" she shouted, her voice sharp as she dodged a swipe of razor-sharp talons that could tear through metal.
Satria banked hard on his Fly Board, the engine sputtering as he dropped low to the ground. He threw a handful of adhesive grenades, watching as they exploded on impact, pinning two wolf-like hybrids to the wall with a satisfying crack.
"Easier said than done, Codebreaker!" he shot back, weaving through a gauntlet of sharp turns. The air was thick with the tang of ionized metal, the stench of burned flesh, and the constant hum of plasma energy snapping through the air. A glowing web of plasma burst to life in front of him—one of NuraTech's security nets, designed to trap and neutralize intruders.
He barely avoided it, his board dipping low, the heat from the surge blistering the air around him. His heart raced, but the adrenaline was a cold kind of fuel, burning away the tension in his chest.
"Sekar, left!" he barked, watching her move. He had no time to be the hero here—he had to keep the distractions to a minimum.
Sekar sliced through the final hybrid, but as the last of the twisted creatures fell, something unexpected happened. The walls groaned, and a hidden emitter flared to life.
The net.
It caught Sekar mid-movement, the thin, crackling filaments snaking out from the walls like some kind of predatory spider, wrapping around her limbs and locking her in place. Her systems stuttered, a glitch tearing through her voice.
"Satria—!" she cried out, her voice breaking with static, optics flickering erratically.
He knew the feeling. He knew that moment of helplessness too well. She was losing control—her synthetic skin smoking at the edges as the grid burned through her systems.
"Hold on!" Satria gritted his teeth, revving the repulsor jets. His Fly Board shot forward, skimming inches above the ground as he wove through the new wave of security grids, laser barriers flashing past him in a blur of red.
A hawk-model hybrid, its eyes hollow and fierce, dove at him from above, claws extended like daggers. Satria twisted, spinning vertically as he kicked it in the chest, sending it crashing into the wall with a sickening thud.
"Not today, birdie," he muttered, a smirk pulling at his lips, but there was no time to revel in the win. He reached his arm out and slammed a stolen NuraTech cipher into a nearby control panel—his fingers fumbling as he hurried through the interface.
The panel sparked, crackled—and the grid shorted out with a blinding flash.
Sekar collapsed free, her limbs limp and smoking, her optics dimming before flickering back to life. Satria caught her before she hit the ground, his arm around her waist.
"Don't mention this to AdriNet," he said with a half-smile, pulling her up. "They still think I'm a selfish prick."
Sekar's grin was tired, but it held a spark of something close to respect—or at least begrudging acknowledgment. She pushed herself upright, her synthetic skin patching itself up at the edges, and shot him a sidelong look. "You are a selfish prick."
Satria chuckled, ignoring the tension in his chest. "But... useful?"
Sekar's voice, for the first time in what felt like hours, softened just a fraction. "Yeah. I'll give you that."
Satria didn't need to hear the unspoken words. The weight of their shared history, the unshakable connection forged in this hellscape, said everything.
But there was no time for anything more. They had a mission to finish—and the clock was still ticking.