The silent red alarm pulsed along the fifth-floor corridor walls, casting an emergency strobe over Naya's pale face. From the right end of the hall, the heavy thud of Bureaucracy Internal Security Force (BISF) combat boots drew closer, thundering across the polished marble floor at a lethal, rapid rhythm.

"Zulfa! They're getting close! What do we do, the door won't open!" Naya whispered in a panicked half-shout, gripping the fabric of Zulfa's tactical vest as she stared toward the corridor corner.

Zulfa didn't panic. As a municipal engineer who had spent half his life studying the architectural blueprints of government buildings, his eyes never lingered on the locked front door. His gaze swept instantly to the upper corner of the corridor wall, directly above the biometric scanner panel that had failed to hack.

"Don't go through the front door. We're going up," Zulfa said calmly.

He shrugged off his gear pack, snatched a flathead screwdriver from his vest pocket, and leaped up to grab the iron louvers of the HVAC ventilation duct situated two and a half meters high. With a few swift turns of his wrist against the slightly rusted mounting bolts, Zulfa heaved the iron cover free and dropped it to the floor.

"Quick, Naya! Get in first!" Zulfa ordered, hoisting his body up to shove Naya into the dark, cramped ventilation shaft.

Naya wasted no second. She scrambled into the galvanized metal pipe on her stomach, while the shouts of BISF guards in the outer corridor began to echo loudly.

"There! They're by the archive door! Cut them off!" a BISF commander roared from the end of the hall.

Just as the flashlights of the guards swept across the corridor floor where they had stood moments before, Zulfa vaulted into the ventilation duct and pulled the iron cover back into place from the inside, securing it tightly with the remaining bolts.

Click!

"Damn it, they've breached the HVAC shaft! Call the upper-floor containment team, seal every sector five air valve!" the commander's furious voice echoed muffled from behind the metal pipe walls where Zulfa and Naya crawled.

The atmosphere inside the air duct was pitch-black, suffocating, and choked with ancient dust and the sharp reek of metal rust. The space was so tight their shoulders nearly brushed against the pipe walls on both sides. Naya crawled in the lead, using a low-intensity mini-flashlight gripped in her teeth to illuminate the twisting pipe network.

"Zul... I feel like I can barely breathe in here," Naya panted mid-crawl, her voice heavy and muffled by dust.

"Hang on a little longer, Naya," Zulfa replied from behind, crawling forward on his elbows and knees in a steady rhythm. "This duct is the building's main air circulation trunk. If I remember the fifth-floor blueprints right, we should be positioned directly above..."

Zulfa's sentence cut off dead.

He froze his crawl, throwing out a hand signal for Naya to hold her position. Below them, the faint hum of high-speed electronic machinery blended with the sound of tearing paper drifted up.

Srrrrt... srrrrt... bzzzt.

Naya clicked off the flashlight in her mouth, edging slowly toward the lower vent grate right before them. With extreme caution, she peered through the iron slats down into the room below.

Naya's eyes widened to their limits. She whipped her head back to stare at Zulfa with a look of shock. Zulfa crawled forward, pressing his face beside Naya's to peer down.

The sight below sent a chill straight through their veins.

The ventilation shaft opened directly above the lavish desk of the National Bureaucracy Archive Director. Inside the spacious, modern minimalist office, the director—a middle-aged man in a sharp suit with a gold lapel pin—paced back and forth anxiously.

Atop his luxury desk, a heavy industrial paper shredder worked furiously, swallowing dozens of certified state documents and chewing them into formless confetti.

Beside the shredder sat a towering stack of thick red-labeled archive folders stamped The Foundation Council - Secret Financial Audit, waiting their turn to be erased.

"Damn it... why did the fifth-floor security system get breached this morning?!" the Archive Director panicked, wiping sweat from his brow as he grabbed a fresh batch of documents and jammed them into the paper shredder. "If those council audit files fall into outside hands, Vian Pratama will have us all executed!"

Naya pressed her lips tight, turning to Zulfa with a held breath. She whispered urgently right beside the youth's ear, "Zul... those are the council's secret documents we've been looking for. He's destroying everything right now!"

Zulfa stared coldly at the director down below through the vent slats. His jaw tightened in pure fury. The proof confirming his father's murder conspiracy and the city's destruction was being pulverized into paper mush right before their eyes.

"We can't let him finish destroying those files," Zulfa whispered frostily.

"But how are we supposed to get down there? We're trapped inside a vent pipe!" Naya panicked in a whisper.

Zulfa didn't answer in words. He felt around for the vent grate's bolt anchors beneath his boots, offering a thin, wicked grin in the pipe's darkness. "Get ready, Naya. We're about to make our own entrance."