A faint reek of sulfur and residual ozone still clung to Gilang’s fingertips as he pulled up the collar of his bomber jacket, shielding Rania, who hurried closely behind him. Wira’s phone minor explosion had been the death knell for their quiet night. Ant Corp’s security system didn't mess around; the moment the intellectual property breach protocol was triggered, the corporation's automated tracking units instantly broadcast ping signals across every corner of the district.

"Hurry up, kid! Stop spacing out. If we get caught on the main highway before getting out of Sector 7, our lives are going to get taxed right out of existence before we even get saved," Gilang grumbled sharply, his eyes vigilantly scanning the shadows at the alley's edge where private patrol car red sirens were beginning to flash.

"But... but that phone actually blew up! That robotic voice said we've been locked on!" Rania replied breathlessly, clutching her small backpack tight—housing the charred fragments of her brother's phone.

"Not just locked on, kid. We're officially branded as cheap corporate fugitives now," Gilang sneered. "That's why we need the only person in this city who doesn't give a damn about Ant Corp's board of directors—or more accurately, someone who owes me a favor and is completely out of her mind."

Their destination wasn't a hospital or a police precinct, but rather the squalid underbelly of the Sector 4 highway overpass. There, amidst piles of pirated fiber-optic cables, digital waste drainage pipes, and the roar of overhead commuter trains, stood an illegal "hideout" patched together from scrap iron and decommissioned corporate server panels.

Gilang knocked on the rusted iron door in a complex rhythmic pattern: three slow raps, two fast ones, and a gentle kick at the bottom.

Click... squeak.

A tiny peephole swung open, revealing a pair of round eyes behind thick-lensed glasses reflecting cascading lines of green code across their surface.

"Password?" asked a raspy, lazy voice from behind the door.

"Stale instant coffee and unpaid utility bills dating back to the Pharaohs," Gilang replied flatly.

Click! The door swung wide open.

"Damn it, Gilang. You never show up with cash, only trouble," scoffed Nara, a girl in her early twenties with a messy mop of hair tied up haphazardly, wearing an oversized hoodie and mismatched socks.

Her eyes darted to Rania, who stood trembling behind Gilang. "And who’s this? Don't tell me you brought someone else's kid to be a modern occult sacrifice."

"Let us in before the drone surveillance eyes up on the bridge pick up our faces," Gilang urged, shoving Rania inside before slamming the iron door shut and locking it tight.

Nara’s workspace looked like a chaotic temple of cyber deities. There was no sunlight; only the purple and green glow of a dozen homemade CRT and flat-panel monitors arranged in a circle resembling a spaceship cockpit. Wires sprawled across the floor like a spider's web, pulsing faintly with power drawn from a stolen diesel generator outside.

Rania stared in stunned silence at the room, filled with the drone of server cooling fans and the sharp scent of hot solder. "What is this place...?"

"A cozy little hell safe from corporate taxes, kid. Welcome to the Hacker’s palace," Gilang said casually, dropping his frame onto a squeaking, worn-out desk chair. He dropped the melted remnants of Wira’s phone onto Nara's desk. "Nara, you've got a heavy-duty job. We're being hunted by Ant Corp's security system because this piece of junk decided to blow up."

Nara glared down at the scorched metal shards on the table, then looked up at Gilang in utter disbelief. "Are you insane, Lang?! Ant Corp?! You're picking a fight with a company that owns its own soul-tracking satellite?!"

"I'm not the one picking a fight, their app is the one that snatched this kid's consciousness," Gilang retorted, pointing at Rania, who immediately lowered her head in sorrow. "Her brother's phone exploded when we tried scanning it. There's corporate curse-tier encryption baked right into it. I need you to pierce their firewall and track down where that data flow went."

Nara groaned loudly, rubbing her face with both hands. "You're asking me to break into a dragon's lair through a needle's eye, you know that? Ant Corp's system runs on quantum-layered defense. If I misplace a single line of code, my brain’s gonna get deep-fried by their firewall."

"But you can do it, right?" Gilang pressed with a deadpan stare, devoid of any joking tone. "You're the top security programmer who got fired two years ago for refusing to build a soul-harvesting algorithm, Nara. Don't tell me your edge has gone blunt just from binge-watching anime late at night."

Nara hissed in annoyance, though her fingers were already dancing fluidly across her clattering mechanical keyboard. "I really hate having a friend like you. My ego just had to take the bait."

Nara yanked a specialized connector cable, linking the leftover memory of Wira’s phone to her roaring primary computer rig. The monitors surrounding them flickered simultaneously, shifting from green to blazing yellow, before slowly bleeding into a deep, arterial red.

"Alright, let's see what's under SoulSync's hood," Nara muttered, her voice turning tense. Hexadecimal code cascaded down the screens like a digital waterfall. "I'm piercing the first proxy layer... accessing the decryption gateway... and... boom."

The room plunged into absolute silence, save for the intensifying roar of the server fans. Rania held her breath, clasping her hands tightly in front of her chest.

Gilang lit an electronic cigarette, taking a deep drag while watching the monitor graphics begin rendering a 3D visualization.

"Whoa..." Nara whispered, her eyes widening behind her thick lenses. "Damn... this is insane."

On the main display, a digital map of the mega-city materialized, surrounded by thousands of tiny blue light dots representing active SoulSync users. But what made their hearts hammer against their ribs were the pitch-black energy tendrils anchored to every single blue light dot, plunging straight through the earth, converging into a massive river of spiritual energy flowing toward a single giant nexus: Ant Corp's central tower in Sector 1.

"Nar, what is that?" Gilang asked sharply, straightening up in his seat.

"It's not a meditation app, Lang," Nara answered with a trembling voice, her fingers freezing on the keyboard. "It's a mass soul-harvesting machine. Every time people use that app to 'calm their minds,' their brainwaves get synchronized with high-tier curse frequencies. Their spiritual energy gets siphoned, repackaged into digital data packets, and funneled straight into Ant Corp's underground tower vaults."

"What for?" Rania asked hoarsely, fresh tears spilling over. "Why'd they take my brother's soul?!"

"Because digital immortality is expensive, kid," Nara answered bitterly, staring at the monitor displaying the surging volume of harvested souls. "Ant Corp's founders and board members don't want to age and die like ordinary mortals. They need fresh human soul energy reserves from millions of people to sustain their consciousness inside the core server forever. Your brother... he's just one of the 'batteries' that ran dry."

Gilang clenched his fists until his knuckles turned white. The modern world was brutal enough, but trading human souls on the stock market as corporate fuel crossed a line far beyond any red boundary.

"Can we reverse-hack their system? Pull up the storage location data of the victims so we can bust them out?" Gilang asked.

Nara sneered cynically. "Pull up data? You think this is hacking a municipal website? The moment I try tapping into the primary soul storage directory, their defense system instantly—"

Biuup! Biuup! Biuup!

Nara's sentence cut off instantly. Every single monitor in the room went pitch black for a fraction of a second, then snapped back on simultaneously in a blinding flash of blood-red light. A high-pitched system warning alarm pierced the quiet of the overpass hideout.

“System Warning: Network Intrusion Detected. Signal Origin: Sector 4, Sector B Overpass Undercroft. Tracker Active. Execution Units Dispatched.”

A cold, emotionless robotic voice echoed from Nara's computer speakers, filling the tiny room with palpable terror.

Nara’s eyes went wide as saucers, her fingers flying wildly across the keyboard trying to sever the connection. "Damn it! Damn it! Their firewall is back-tracing us in real-time! Our IP address is compromised!"

Gilang sprang up from his chair, grabbing the salt-lined short sword off his back and locking his gaze on the iron door. "Nara, shut everything down! Fast!"

"I can't!" Nara yelled in a panic, her main monitor flashing a rapidly ticking digital countdown. "They've locked down our network exit routes! Ant Corp's hunter squads... they're already outside!"

Right before a violent impact slammed against the iron door of their hideout, every light in the room died, plunging the three of them into total darkness punctuated only by the pulsing crimson glow of the emergency alarm.