"Your visiting hours are over, Envoy," the hard-faced military major told the sharply dressed emissary from Aethel Corp. He glanced down at his tactical watch, then nodded to signal the two armed guards standing beside Zulfa's cot. "Transfer the prisoner to the armored transport right now. Move him to the sub-level three subterranean detention facility before dawn breaks."

"Understood, Commander!" the two soldiers snapped in unison, their voices sharp and absolute.

Zulfa, lying rigidly on the iron cot with his wrists tightly cuffed, felt his blood run ice-cold. The threat was real. They weren't just trying to silence him; they fully intended to scrub him from the world's history books inside a dark underground isolation cell.

One of the soldiers stepped forward, gripped the tubular iron frame of the field hospital bed, and began wheeling it toward the main medical tent exit. The corporate emissary smirked, adjusting his crimson tie before turning on his heel to stride out first into the chaos of the emergency military encampment.

"Don't move around too much, fugitive. Try anything, and this lead will punch straight through your skull," the guard pushing the bed threatened coldly from behind his tactical helmet.

Zulfa clenched his fists beneath the hospital blanket, his teeth grinding in an agony of rage and helplessness. Did his struggle alongside Naya last night really have to end here? Was the truth behind this corporate conspiracy destined to be buried forever?

Bzzzt—

Suddenly, every single white neon bulb illuminating the massive medical tent flickered twice in unison.

Click!

Instantly, all electrical power inside the Sector 1 emergency tent blackout-crashed completely. Pitch-black darkness swallowed the room in a fraction of a second, followed by the dying whir of the generators abruptly cutting dead.

"What is this?! Why did the power drop?!" the military major snapped in panic, blindly patting down his desk for an emergency flashlight.

"Code red! All personnel, take positions!" one of the guard soldiers yelled, ripping his hands off Zulfa’s bed and scrambling to level his assault rifle barrel toward the tent entrance.

Before they could flip on their helmet tactical flashlights, a dark silhouette vaulted through the rear tent flap with lightning speed.

Boom!

A high-tech military smoke grenade landed squarely in the center of the medical tent aisle. Within seconds, a dense, choking cloud of thick white smoke billowed to fill the entire room, reeking of sharp sulfur and blinding vision in a heartbeat.

"Ugh... what is this smoke?! Cough... cough!" the major choked violently, patting against the tent wall to find the exit.

Amidst the suffocating white haze, a heavily built figure clad in a dark tactical jacket and gas mask charged straight through the chaos. The figure moved with disciplined, high-level training, ignoring the panicking medical nurses, and marched straight toward Zulfa's cot.

"Zulfa Arditama?" a raspy, authoritative voice whispered from behind the figure's gas mask.

Zulfa jerked, desperately trying to pull his cuffed hands against the iron frame. "Who are you?!"

"Take this. Don't ask questions," the figure snapped. Without wasting a second, the intruder pulled a mini hydraulic bolt cutter from a tactical jacket pocket, clamped the tool's jaws onto the steel cuffs around Zulfa's wrists, and—click!—the manacles shattered into pieces in a single second.

Zulfa was free. Before he could process the situation, the mystery operative grabbed Zulfa's wrist, forcibly hauling him up from the hospital bed through the thickening white smoke.

"Hold it! Who's there?!" one of the mercenary guards barked from the front of the tent, followed by blind, indiscriminate gunfire tearing wildly into the interior.

Bang! Thud! Bang!

Bullets whined through the air, smashing into iron tent poles and shattering IV drip bottles all around them.

"This way! Move!" the mysterious rescuer growled, dragging Zulfa through a torn flap on the left side of the medical tent leading directly out to the emergency helipad tarmac beyond the camp perimeter.

The biting night air slammed against Zulfa's face the moment they burst out of the tent. Outside, the military camp's chaos had escalated; warning sirens blared wildly, searchlights from guard towers swept crazily for the source of the breach, and soldiers ran in every direction in mounting confusion.

"Get in! Get in the back, fast!" the rescuer shouted, swinging open the rear doors of a field hospital ambulance whose engine roared angrily behind a stack of logistics containers.

Zulfa didn't think twice. He scrambled into the back of the ambulance. Inside the dimly lit medical cabin, someone greeted him with an outstretched, warm hand.

"Zulfa! Oh god, you're safe!"

Zulfa's eyes blew wide as he recognized the short-haired young woman pulling off her medical mask inside the accelerating ambulance as it peeled away from the military camp. "Naya?! You... you planned all of this?"

"Not by myself," Naya smiled in relief, helping Zulfa sit down on the ambulance's emergency bench as the vehicle smashed through the military camp's barbed-wire barricade with a violent crunch.

In the driver's seat up front, the driver—the tactical-jacketed operative who had just cut Zulfa's cuffs—slammed the accelerator to the floor, rocketing the stolen ambulance away from the Sector 1 military quarantine zone and deep into the city's night-shrouded streets.

A few moments later, once the ambulance had cleared the danger zone and slipped into the labyrinth of quiet industrial streets, the driver up front killed the emergency siren, then pulled off his face mask and tactical helmet. He glanced briefly into the rearview mirror to look back into the cabin.

Zulfa and Naya stared straight at the driver. The middle-aged man possessed silver-streaked hair at his temples, sharp hawk-like eyes, and a small scratch scar across his right cheek—features radiating the undeniable authority of a true military veteran.

The man took a deep breath, then flashed a thin smile back at Zulfa through the rearview mirror.

"Welcome back to the living side, Engineer Arditama," the man said calmly.

Zulfa frowned, sensing he had seen those facial lines somewhere before in old news archives. "You... who actually are you?"

The man shed his outer tactical jacket, revealing the insignia of an old intelligence uniform beneath, and answered in a firm bariton voice:

"My name is Danu. Former chief intelligence officer of this city's special division, before I was dishonorably discharged last year on trumped-up charges for exposing the corrupt underbelly of Aethel Corp's projects."