"Mr. Haris! Open your eyes! Good god..." Naya cried out hysterically, dropping to her knees beside Mr. Haris's lifeless body sprawled on the wooden floor of the coffee shop. From between the middle-aged man's lips, the remnants of glowing red optical fiber threads still hissed softly before finally fading into darkness.

Zulfa stood rigid, his breathing ragged and his eyes wide with horror as he stared down at Mr. Haris's remains. The foul stench of blood mixed with burnt ozone filled the cramped air of the cafe. Before Zulfa could even process what had just happened, the heavy thud of combat boots that had echoed outside moments earlier stopped dead right in front of the shop's glass door.

Crash!

The wooden door was kicked violently open from the outside. Two burly men in black suits bearing Aethel Corp's silver-serpent emblems stood in the doorway, each holding a handheld signal scanner flashing rapid red indicator lights.

"They're here! Quick, through the back door, Naya!" Zulfa yelled in panic, grabbing Naya by the wrist and yanking her across the cash register counter toward the back kitchen hallway.

"But Mr. Haris—!" Naya sobbed, tears streaming down her cheeks.

"We can't do anything else for him! If we get caught here, we die for nothing!" Zulfa cut her off firmly, shoving Naya through the kitchen emergency exit that opened out into a pitch-black alleyway behind the shop amidst the steady drizzle of the night rain.

There was no time to hear warning shots or the shouting of pursuers because, at that exact second, the air across the entire city shuddered violently.

WEE-OOO!

WEE-OOO! WEE-OOO!

A massive automated emergency siren screamed in unison from thousands of streetlamp poles, telecommunication towers, and skyscrapers across the metropolis. Every digital billboard screen along the main boulevards, which had moments earlier displayed commercial ads, suddenly blinked into a pitch-black display glowing with blazing red text: SYSTEM ALERT: SECTOR OVERLOAD - CODE BLACK.

Mr. Haris’s death, directly tied into Aethel Corp's central control network, had triggered an automated emergency protocol. The city grid registered his death as a fatal disruption signal to their master system.

"Zulfa! Do you hear that?!" Naya screamed over the roar of the night wind, struggling to match Zulfa's stride as they sprinted out of the alley toward the main road of the central district. "The whole city's wailing! What is that alarm?!"

Zulfa halted for a fraction of a second on the curb, staring in sheer terror toward the Central Public Square district located just a few blocks away.

The sky above the square, normally stained by ambient city glow, had warped into a deep, bruised purple illuminated by a colossal pillar of energy piercing the clouds from deep within the earth. On the streets, thousands of panicked citizens poured out of office towers and apartment blocks, sprinting in every direction without a destination amidst the chaotic traffic gridlock.

"That's the Main Valve master control alarm!" Zulfa shouted with a voice trembling violently. "Mr. Haris's death triggered their automated defense grid. They're accelerating the valve opening process beneath the square!"

"We have to get there! Now!" Naya declared resolutely, though her face was bleached white with terror. "If we don't stop it right now, this entire city is genuinely going to collapse!"

Without a second thought, Zulfa pulled Naya's hand, plowing through the panicked crowd of fleeing citizens, and raced full-speed toward the sprawling plaza of the Central Square.

Upon arriving at the Central Square, the sight before them pushed past the boundaries of the worst nightmare imaginable.

The decorative trees, park lamps, and central fountain monuments had been blasted into a million pieces. The asphalt roadways and granite plaza blocks had cracked open in massive radial patterns, forming a giant spiderweb network that kept expanding.

Crack... snap... BOOM!

The sound of collapsing underground concrete echoed like a massive earthquake. Dead center in the plaza, an expanse of asphalt the size of a football field suddenly plunged downward into the earth in a single violent heave, forming a gaping, colossal crater over ten meters deep.

"Look out!" Zulfa screamed hysterically, wrapping his arms around Naya and tackling them both behind a concrete curb pillar a split second before a shockwave of choking dust and rock fragments swept through the air.

They coughed violently through the thick cloud of cement dust. Zulfa crawled forward cautiously, peering around the concrete pillar toward the edge of the collapsed crater.

"Good god..." Naya whispered weakly, her fingers digging desperately into Zulfa's jacket sleeve until the fabric nearly ripped.

From deep within the abyssal crater, the vista unfolding was utterly unnatural. Instead of standard water pipes or drainage channels, the crater floor was packed with a nest of gigantic fiber-optic cables pulsing rapidly with blazing red light. In the center of that cable tangle, a mechanical structure shaped like a colossal gear valve the size of a three-story building—The Main Valve—was rotating slowly with an ear-shattering screech of grinding metal.

And most terrifying of all: from the widening gaps of the parting valve, the roar of massive machinery blended with the shrieks of unseen entities, shaking the ground and generating an ultrasonic wave that made Zulfa's head feel as though it were about to split open.

"The main valve... they've actually opened it halfway," Zulfa gasped, breathing hard as he stared down into the crater. "If that gear turns one full rotation more, the dimensional gateway will open permanently."

"Zulfa, look over there!" Naya pointed with a violently trembling hand toward the opposite rim of the crater.

Across the chasm, near the ruins of an Aethel Corp security post, several technicians in white lab coats operated a wireless emergency control console, monitoring the valve opening sequence while flanked by dozens of heavily armed security guards. Malik, the gray-suited man with the silver-serpent pin who had met Zulfa at the office the day before, stood among them, holding a master control tablet with a cold smile on his face.

"They're right there... those bastards are controlling it from the crater's edge," Zulfa hissed, clenching his fists until his knuckles turned paper-white with boiling rage.

"We can't get close to them with that much security, Zul! We'll get shot dead before we even make ten meters!" Naya panicked.

"We don't need to get close to them, Naya," Zulfa replied, his gaze shifting to the underground utility cable conduit running directly beneath the sidewalk where they sheltered—a line linked straight to the control console across the crater. "We just need to cut the master feed right from here using my mechanical know-how."

Zulfa reached into his jacket pocket, pulling out his heavy iron wrench and a few emergency tools he always carried, and began frantically prying open the sidewalk utility junction box beside the concrete pillar.

"Quick, help me hold this flashlight, Naya. We have to sever the primary signal transmission cable before they finish the valve's final rotation," Zulfa ordered with absolute focus.

Naya nodded quickly, training her phone light onto the opened junction box, while the roaring from the crater grew increasingly deafening, turning the ground vibrations beneath their feet wild and erratic.

Yet, amid Zulfa's intense focus on cutting the transmission cable, an anomalous tremor far stronger than before suddenly slammed into the ground beneath them.

Crack... snap!

The concrete sidewalk where Zulfa and Naya stood snapped vertically. The fracture spread with terrifying speed, splitting the earth right beneath Zulfa's boots.

"Zulfa—!" Naya screamed hysterically, leaping backward to safety onto the solid portion of the sidewalk.

Zulfa snapped his head around in shock, but it was too late. The concrete footing beneath his shoes gave way completely under the force of the crater's shockwaves.

In a single second that felt stretched out across an eternity, Zulfa lost his footing. He plummeted headfirst into the bowels of the earth alongside an avalanche of collapsing concrete, stone, and tangled cables, sliding steeply down into the dark, yawning crater toward the abyss where the Main Valve blared its blinding red light.