Dawn had barely swept the capital sky with a pale gray hue when Zulfa Arditama dragged his exhausted steps through the main glass doors of the Sector 4 Municipal Public Works Building. His appearance was far from pristine. His safety jacket was torn at the elbow, his trousers were smeared with dark, tar-like stains that refused to wash out, and his hair was an unkempt mess. The stinging scent of sulfur and burnt ozone still wafted faintly from his clothes, as if he had just crawled out of a volcanic crater rather than a municipal drainage tunnel.

Yet, his stench and disheveled look were nothing compared to the nightmare he carried in his head. The vision of shadow-like claws seizing Bagas—his coworker, now vanished without a trace—played on an endless loop in his mind like a corrupted horror film.

Zulfa didn't go straight to his apartment. Instead, he headed straight for the digital archive room on the second floor, determined to print out all the sensor logs, the 300-percent pressure spike graphs, and the short video data from the tablet he had nearly rescued before his flashlight died.

When he inserted his access card into the main computer terminal, the indicator light flashed green. The monitor cast a harsh blue glow across Zulfa’s pale, drawn face. He immediately typed a rapid command to open the maintenance log database for Manhole 402 at 2:15 AM earlier that morning.

"Come on... open," Zulfa muttered in a raspy voice, his throat parched from lack of sleep and prolonged shock.

The monitor blinked twice. A loading bar crept forward slowly, followed by a crisp white pop-up dialog box right in the center of the screen:

NO DATA RECORDED FOR SECTOR 4 - MANHOLE 402 BETWEEN 01:00 AND 03:00. ALL SYSTEMS NORMAL.

Zulfa froze. His fingers, hovering over the keyboard, went rigid. "Normal? Damn it, what do you mean normal?!" he half-whispered, his voice pitching up an octave.

He repeated the search, trying to unearth hidden folders, temporary files, and local server backups. The result was empty. The entire history of the pressure surge, the sensor error messages, and even the three-second video clip he had captured on his tablet before fleeing had been wiped clean without a trace. It was as if the horrific underground incident had never happened at all.

"Quite a messy morning for a model engineer, Arditama."

A cold, painfully familiar voice sliced through the silence of the cubicle. Zulfa flinched, quickly turning around.

Mr. Hendra, the sturdy regional maintenance section head clad in a sharp suit and slicked-back hair, stood in the doorway of his workstation. His arms were crossed over his chest, and his sharp eyes stared down Zulfa from over the rims of his metal-framed glasses. Standing right beside him was a man in a dark gray suit bearing a small silver-serpent corporate pin on his lapel—someone Zulfa had never seen before in this municipal office.

Zulfa pushed himself up from his chair, his breathing turning ragged. "Mr. Hendra. Good thing you're here. I need to report this... a major incident happened at Manhole 402 last night. The main pipe melted, and... and Bagas, my shift partner, was dragged into the pipe wall by something. We need to evacuate that sector right now!"

Mr. Hendra didn't flinch. He stepped forward slowly, the scent of his expensive cologne clashing with the residual sulfur lingering on Zulfa's clothes. He wrinkled his nose in mild disgust at the dark stains on Zulfa's trousers before glancing back up at the computer monitor.

"Bagas?" Mr. Hendra repeated the name flatly, as if reading off a grocery list. "You're delusional at the crack of dawn, Zulfa. Bagas called me at three this morning. He said he was taking the day off because of food poisoning at home. So, what nonsense were you just spouting about being dragged into a wall?"

"He's lying!" Zulfa snapped, his voice rising high enough that a couple of interns in the opposing cubicles looked over in shock. "Bagas's phone is still in the control room with his thermal flask! He never went home, sir! He vanished down there because the main pipe burst from an anomalous pressure spike that you people are covering up!"

"Watch your tone, Arditama!" Mr. Hendra barked, his face flushing with anger. He closed the distance, stopping right at Zulfa's desk. "You worked an overnight shift, exhausted yourself, and now you're cooking up a fictitious report to cover up your own incompetence? Were you drinking on the job?"

The man in the gray suit standing next to Mr. Hendra finally spoke. His voice was deep, calm, and carried a chilling authority that made the hairs on the back of Zulfa's neck stand up.

"Engineer Arditama, my name is Malik, from the Aethel Corp external audit division. We hold the primary infrastructure maintenance contract for this city. According to our central telemetry sensors, there were no pressure spikes or structural failures in Sector 4 throughout the entire night. Our systems integrate directly with satellites and the national fiber-optic network. If our sensors say normal, then it is normal."

Zulfa stared at the man named Malik with wide, disbelieving eyes. "Your sensors are lying! Or you intentionally deleted the data! I saw a one-meter-wide steel pipe melt like butter with my own eyes, and there was a cavity—"

"Enough!"

Mr. Hendra cut in sharply, slamming his palm down on Zulfa’s desk hard enough to rattle the empty coffee mug. "Enough of these hallucination-fueled fairy tales, Zulfa! If you continue spreading false rumors that could trigger public panic regarding city infrastructure, I won't hesitate to recommend an dishonorable discharge on the grounds of mental instability."

Mr. Hendra took a deep breath, adjusted his suit jacket, and continued in a slightly lower voice laden with veiled threat. "My advice to you is simple: go home. Take a hot shower, get some sleep, and forget whatever you imagined happened down in those service tunnels. Pretend today is just a regular workday. Understood?"

Without waiting for an answer, Mr. Hendra spun around and walked out of the room, followed closely by Malik. Just before stepping past the doorway, Malik glanced back at Zulfa, offering a thin, tight smile that never reached his eyes—a smile that warned they knew precisely who Zulfa was and what he was searching for.

Zulfa stood frozen in front of his desk. His chest heaved with a surging mixture of rage and frustration. They weren't just covering up last night's event; they intended to scrub every trace, treating Bagas's lost life as a trivial error code that could be deleted with a few keystrokes.

"Damn it... bastards, every single one of them," Zulfa hissed, clenching his fists until his knuckles turned white.

Since he couldn't trust the corporate-manipulated digital logs of the department, Zulfa knew he had to find physical proof. His eyes drifted to the corner of the room, toward the manual archive shelf—where dusty paper documents from the pre-digital era were stored away.

Moving quickly, Zulfa left his cubicle, marching toward the row of ancient iron filing cabinets tucked away in the back of the archive room, a section rarely touched by anyone. He pulled open a drawer labeled Blueprints & Maintenance Logs: 1995–2005. Thick dust puffed into the air as he yanked out a heavy ledger bound in imitation black leather, yellowed with age.

It was the physical diary belonging to the late former senior chief engineer—the man who designed the original layout of the city's underground pipeline network decades before the project was absorbed by Aethel Corp.

Zulfa flipped through the pages frantically, ignoring the brittle paper. Right in the middle of the ledger, wedged between complex piping schematics, he found a handwritten note scrawled in dark red ink, written in a hurried, desperate hand:

"October 14, 2002. A severe warning to anyone reading this. The intersection at Manhole 402 is not merely a drainage junction. It is a Bleeding Pulse Point—the place where the ancestors sealed the 'Third Gate' using specialized steel-reinforced concrete pegs. If the corporation ever increases energy pressure beyond normal limits to siphon the resources down there, that seal will fracture. This city isn't built on solid ground, my friend... it's built on top of a containment cage. Do not let them open it."

Zulfa read the sentences over and over until every word was burned into his memory. So his deduction was right. The city was built over an ancient layer of magic disguised as modern engineering infrastructure, and Aethel Corp was deliberately provoking a catastrophe for personal gain.

Suddenly, a high-pitched electronic whine pierced the air from his desk across the room.

Beep!Beep!

Zulfa snapped his head up. His work computer, which he had left powered on, had just rebooted automatically without human touch. The monitor, which had previously displayed the error message, faded to pitch black.

Slowly, one by one, blood-red characters materialized in the center of the darkened screen, typing themselves out at a steady pace as if someone were striking a keyboard from a remote terminal:

DO NOT DIG TOO DEEP, ENGINEER.

Before Zulfa could rip the CPU cord from the wall or bolt for the exit, every single neon light in the archive room flickered and died entirely, plunging him into oppressive, suffocating darkness, accompanied by the slow, rhythmic sound of metal tapping against the floor, creeping closer from the dark hallway outside.

What challenges or allies do you think Zulfa will encounter next as Aethel Corp closes in on him?