The purple shockwave erupting from the core console pillar had not yet fully subsided when an electromagnetic shockwave swept clean across the transparent floor of the main server room. The low hum of the soul-sucking machine gradually faded, replaced by the slow, monotonous ticking of a single-toned emergency alarm.

Beep... beep... beep...

Gilang was hurled backward, landing hard upon the cyber-tiles with ragged breaths and cold sweat soaking his entire body. The salt sword slipped from his right hand, clinking sharply before sliding down into the digital void beneath their feet.

"Renata...!" Gilang rasped, crawling forward with trembling hands toward the pillar of purple light where the woman had just dissolved herself.

Yet, no physical form remained for him to grasp. What lingered were merely soft, swirling particles of light spinning lazily within the quantum pillar, merging with the soul essence of millions suspended within the glass tubes ringing the chamber.

"Boss... look at that!" Rania’s voice suddenly shattered the silence, trembling violently on the verge of despair. The teenage girl hurried frantically toward one of the largest quantum tubes in the corner of the room, housing her brother, Wira.

Gilang snapped his head up, tearing his gaze away from Renata’s light pillar toward Wira’s enclosure. His heart felt as though it had stopped beating.

The faint blue glow previously enveloping Wira’s body inside the glass cylinder now flickered erratically, shifting to a deep, sickly yellow. Fine hairline fractures began webbing across the tube's glass surface, accompanied by a hissing sound as internal air pressure steadily dropped.

"Wira! Don't give up, Wira!" Rania wailed hysterically, pressing her tear-drenched palms against the tube's glass wall. She whipped her head around, fixing Gilang with wide, pleading eyes. "Boss! Save my brother! Why is the tube cracking?! What's happening to the system?!"

Gilang pushed himself up unsteadily, biting down hard against the pain wracking his frame from the earlier energy concussive blast. He sprinted hard toward the central master console, which still emitted a bleeding crimson glow.

Atop the console's main screen, the global SoulSync countdown that had been clawing upward now halted completely, locked at a critical and terrifying digit:

[ SOULSYNC GLOBAL LAUNCH: 99.99% ]

"Damn it..." Gilang hissed with fury, slamming his fist hard against the console tabletop. "The system is hanging right on the final threshold!"

Suddenly, the main console screen flickered wildly. The shattered binary code fragments shorn by Gilang's earlier sword strike abruptly fused back together automatically, forming a visual pattern of writhing red lines resembling brainwaves.

From the room's main speakers, a static drone grated softly, followed by a synthetic laugh sounding cold, emotionless, and utterly condescending—the voice of Ant Corp's CEO, even though his physical form and consciousness had been shattered by Renata's sacrifice.

“An astonishingly admirable effort, former Director Renata,” that cold voice echoed across the server room, seemingly broadcast from remaining untouched external satellite servers. “Sacrificing your own consciousness to serve as a neutralizer deep within the foundational architecture of my code. A remarkably romantic suicide.”

Gilang widened his eyes, staring up at the main screen with boiling rage filling his chest. "Bastard! You're not dead yet, huh?! Drag yourself out of hiding and face me directly!"

“Face a street freelancer reeking of sweat and holy salt? Apologies, my schedule is far too busy for that, Gilang,” the CEO replied, his haughty tone swelling further. “My remaining consciousness is currently undergoing full uploading to a military orbital satellite in outer space. I no longer require this physical tower to run the system.”

"Shut the application down right now!" Gilang snapped, gripping the edge of the console table until his knuckles turned white. "That countdown is locked at 99.99%! If you don't cancel it immediately, millions of souls out there are going to be permanently harvested!"

“Pity, but technically speaking, that is no longer cancelable,” the voice answered coldly. “The automated emergency cycle took absolute control the second Renata's consciousness entered the server core. And do you know the best part, Gilang?”

"Stop talking in circles, you piece of shit! What do you mean?!" Gilang shouted furiously.

“Before severing my uplink from this tower, I transmitted one tiny command to every single physical kill-switch across every backup terminal outside the city,” the CEO's voice sounded increasingly raspy, distorted by the widening signal distance. “Those switches have been permanently destroyed from afar. There is no manual egress. This system now runs autonomously, eternally, and cannot be stopped by anyone on the face of this earth.”

Hearing this near the quantum tube, Rania dropped to her knees, burying her face in her hands as her sobs broke into a desperate shriek. "Impossible... so all of this was for nothing? Wira... can we really not save him?"

Gilang clamped his jaw shut. Desperation flickered across his mind, but his survival instincts and a deep sense of responsibility toward Nara—left behind on the ninetieth floor—and Rania refused to let him surrender so easily.

"There has to be another emergency button... man-made systems always have architectural flaws!" Gilang muttered to himself, his fingers blindly probing the underside of the main console panel, hunting for hidden manual circuit links.

Buzzt!

A mid-voltage electrical shock lashed Gilang's fingers, forcing him to snatch his hand back with a hiss of pain. The skin of his index finger blistered a angry red.

“Do not waste your precious energy, foolish boy,” the CEO's voice sounded increasingly faint, preparing to vanish entirely from the tower's local network. “Merely enjoy your final moments inside this building.”

"Wait! Don't run!" Gilang cried out, reaching for the console screen.

“One final parting gift from me...” the voice continued softly, accompanied by a tiny countdown ticking in the corner of the main display. “Since the security of this tower has been absolutely breached by your external hacking protocols, the building's autonomous defense system has activated total purge mode.”

Gilang froze. "Total purge... what's that supposed to mean?"

“This tower will detonate and collapse its entire structure to dust in exactly five minutes to scrub every last trace of share ownership and corporate criminality from world history,” the voice concluded with an extended synthetic laugh, followed by—bzzzt—the audio feed cutting out entirely.

A suffocating silence instantly seized the main server room.

The main console screen now displayed only a single item flashing a glaring, relentless red:

[ TOWER AUTO-PURGE: 04:59 ... 04:58 ... ]

Gilang stood transfixed before the smoking console. His face was stark white, his eyes staring blankly down at the building's rapidly ticking countdown timer. Behind him, Rania wept hysterically near her brother's quantum tube, while outside the server room, they knew all too well that Nara was fighting alone to hold back the enemy advance on the ninetieth floor.

Their remaining time to live now stood at under five minutes, trapped inside a digital void serving as the graveyard for Renata's consciousness.