"Turn off your flashlight! Quick, kill it!" Naya whispered in panic, gripping Zulfa's jacket sleeve with a force so tight her fingernails nearly pierced the fabric.

Zulfa didn't hesitate. With a single swift motion, he twisted the sliding switch on his heavy-duty flashlight, cutting off the last source of illumination in the sprawling archive room. The entire space plunged instantly into absolute, pitch-black darkness. The stench of aged dust and brittle paper now mingled with the sharply biting aroma of burnt ozone, turning the air dry and burning in the throat.

At the far end of the archive aisle, the rhythmic metal tapping drew closer. Tap... tap... scree... tap...

The sound of sharp claws scraping harshly against the concrete floor echoed loudly, bouncing off the aging concrete walls. A pair of glowing red pinpricks burned brightly in the dark, hovering slowly just above the floor, pacing back and forth following the scent of sweat and human body heat.

Zulfa and Naya pressed flat against the corner wall behind the fourth shelving unit, holding their breath as tightly as possible. Zulfa’s heart pounded violently against his ribs, its rhythm so frantic he feared the sound would betray them to whatever was out there. His right hand clenched tightly around the heavy iron wrench—the sole mechanical weapon he had to counter the terror closing in.

"Zul..." Naya whispered barely above a breath right beside his ear, her warmth brushing against the skin of his neck. "If that thing gets close, what's our plan? Beat it to death with a wrench?"

"If it has a head and is made of flesh, this wrench can crack its skull," Zulfa whispered back softly, forcing his voice to remain steady despite the cold sweat streaming down his temple. "But if it's like that liquid shadow that swallowed Bagas last night... we're going to need another way out."

"The problem is, we can't escape through the main entrance," Naya hissed in frustration, frantically patting down her utility vest pockets. "The automated steel security door out front was just locked from the outside using military-grade binary encryption. Aethel Corp's taken over the override systems."

As if on cue, the tapping sound stopped dead right in front of the aisle where they hid.

A moment of dead silence.

Only the low-frequency hum vibrating through the concrete walls remained, making their teeth ache. The entity outside seemed to be tasting the air, hunting for their thermal signatures.

Scree...

A long, branching claw lashed out from behind the shelving unit, tearing stacks of old documents off the opposite rack and scattering them across the floor. The glowing red light from the creature's eyes blinked sharply, pointing straight toward the gap where Zulfa and Naya stood.

"Run!" Zulfa shouted instinctively, shoving Naya toward the side corridor just as the shadowy talon whipped through the empty space they had occupied a second before.

The two of them bolted headlong through the maze of document racks in total darkness, relying entirely on memory and their hands trailing along the cold walls. Zulfa grabbed the panic-bar of a small emergency door at the end of the aisle—an old maintenance steel door leading to the underground concrete utility corridor. Throwing his entire weight behind it, he slammed the handle down, shoved Naya through first, and leaped after her, throwing his weight against the door to slam it shut from the inside.

Bangk!

The steel door groaned loudly as it slammed shut, followed by a brutal impact from the outside that warped the metal inward. A high-pitched, screeching roar echoed from the other side, though it slowly faded as the exterior trigger security system powered down.

They stood panting heavily inside the narrow, dimly lit underground concrete corridor. The dim yellow emergency glow from the overhead pipe lights cast long, distorted shadows of their bodies across the damp cement floor.

Naya leaned her back against the concrete wall, sliding slowly to the floor as she clutched her chest, which heaved with rapid breaths. "Good lord... that was a little too close to the grave, Engineer. I thought my brief career as an urban archaeologist was going to end inside a corporate monster's stomach."

Zulfa stood upright before her, regulating his still-ragged breathing while wiping the sweat from his forehead. He glanced down at his flashlight, clicking it back on with a beam that had grown noticeably weaker as the battery drained.

"Don't call me an engineer if I end up dying in the sub-level sewers of my own office, Naya. By the way, what did you mean earlier about the door being locked with a military binary code?"

Naya let out a long breath, adjusting her slightly crooked glasses before pushing herself up and dusting off her vest. "It means someone up there—definitely high up in Aethel Corp's board of directors—knew precisely that we were investigating those archives. They deliberately locked us inside so we'd be trapped with their 'pet'."

Zulfa frowned, pacing back and forth in the narrow corridor. "A pet? So that shadow creature wasn't just a natural phenomenon caused by a pipe rupture?"

"No!" Naya shook her head emphatically. She walked over to an exposed wall control panel with a dangling mess of frayed copper wires inside. "Listen to me carefully, Zulfa. As someone who's spent years researching the underground architectural history of this city, I know exactly how the Ley-Lines system works."

Zulfa stepped closer, folding his arms across his chest. "Explain it to me. Because my civil engineering logic has officially hit its breaking point."

"Alright," Naya pointed at the exposed wires in the panel with the tip of her finger. "This city was built over convergence points of ancient earth energy lines—what our ancestors called Ley-Lines. That energy is real, carries a massive frequency, and is astronomically powerful. But pure energy is unstable. Left unchecked, it could blow the earth's surface apart at any second."

"And my ancestors along with the past city planners built a system of dams and pipelines?" Zulfa asked, trying to connect the dots.

"Not just drinking water pipes, Zulfa!" Naya snapped, exasperated. "The modern infrastructure you manage every day—the massive electrical substations in the downtown district, the MRT tunnels, the high-pressure mains, even the skyscraper foundations—is a mystical locking mechanism disguised as modern engineering. The main power substations were deliberately placed right over the Ley-Line energy vortexes to absorb and stabilize them."

Zulfa froze. "So... those transformer towers and high-voltage cables are actually..."

"Giant spikes driven straight through the body of an extradimensional entity resting down there!" Naya finished grimly. "And what happened today in Sector 4? Pressure spiked by three hundred percent. Why? Because someone at Aethel Corp intentionally loosened the giant locking bolts at the main substation. They deliberately weakened that seal so they could siphon the energy and trade it as limitless power."

Zulfa fell completely silent. His mind raced back to last night's events: the steel pipe melting like butter, the telemetry data manipulated by his superior Mr. Hendra, and the threats from the man named Malik. All those puzzle pieces locked into place, forming a horrifying big picture.

"They aren't just neglecting city maintenance, Naya," Zulfa said softly, his voice cold. "They're gambling with the lives of millions of citizens for the sake of an energy business."

"Exactly!" Naya sighed heavily. "And if we don't stop them right now—if those locking bolts at the main valve give way completely—whatever just crawled out from behind that concrete wall won't just be a small shadow. This entire city is going to be swallowed by a dimensional tear."

Suddenly, the low-frequency humming that had temporarily faded began to vibrate violently through the concrete corridor walls. This time, the tremors were intense enough to shake dust raining down from the ceiling.

Bzzzt... Click!

The yellow emergency lights lining the corridor flickered wildly, dying one by one within seconds. Zulfa's flashlight plunged into a dim, dying glow on the verge of total failure.

"Zul... something's wrong," Naya whispered, her eyes wide as she stared at the concrete wall to their right.

Right before them, the two-meter-thick concrete wall fractured into a violent web of vertical cracks. The sound of heavy impacts from within repeated over and over, shattering the aged cement structure into tiny fragments that rained across the floor.

From the widening gap in the cracking wall, a blast of freezing arctic wind surged outward, carrying a heavy, toxic reek of sulfur. Naya coughed, burying her nose in her sleeve.

Zulfa pulled Naya behind his back, raising his heavy iron wrench high, glaring straight at the expanding wall fissure.

From within the dark cracks, a multitude of glowing red eyes—dozens, perhaps hundreds of pinprick lights—clustered tightly together, staring directly at them. That was followed by the clicking noise of thousands of giant insects blending with the roar of heavy machinery, as a multi-eyed entity woven from black fiber-optic cables began to crawl slowly out from the shattered concrete vent.