The stench of stale coffee and office air-conditioning greeted Zulfa the moment he stepped through the doors of the Sector 4 Municipal Public Works Building at ten in the morning. Time seemed to drag at a crawl, while his head rang with the constant, dull hum that reminded him of last night's underground MRT tunnel. Inside his jacket pocket, the Aethel Corp metal access card bearing the silver-serpent emblem felt ice-cold, as though carrying a curse of its own.

Zulfa walked down the third-floor cubicle corridor with heavy steps. The office atmosphere felt different than usual; employees were busy staring intensely at their computer monitors, none daring to whisper to one another, creating a tense atmosphere you could cut with a knife.

The moment he reached his workstation, Zulfa's stride halted dead. His eyes blew wide open.

His desk had been entirely cleared out. Not merely tidied up, but forcibly emptied. The stacks of physical daily report logs, his civil engineering reference books, his pencil case, and even his favorite bridge-sketch coffee mug had vanished without a trace. The surface of the wooden desk was wiped to a high polish, looking as though no one had worked there in years.

"Looking for your belongings, Arditama?"

A heavy, cold voice boomed from behind him. Zulfa spun around quickly.

Mr. Hendra, the maintenance section head, stood with arms crossed in front of his office door. Beside him, two security guards clad in black tactical uniforms bearing Aethel Corp emblems stood rigid, fixing sharp gazes on Zulfa.

Zulfa clenched both fists inside his jacket pockets, fighting down a sudden surge of boiling rage. He stepped up to Mr. Hendra with a piercing glare. "Where are all my files, sir? Who gave you the right to search and empty my desk without permission?"

Mr. Hendra snorted softly, looking down at Zulfa from behind his metal-framed glasses with a mix of disgust and irritation. "That desk belongs to the state, Zulfa, not to any individual. And as your direct supervisor, I have every right to clean the trash out of this division's workspace."

"Trash?" Zulfa raised his voice several octaves, causing a few employees in nearby cubicles to gasp and pretend to type furiously. "You call maintenance report logs, pressure sensor telemetry, and field data that I risked my life to gather... trash, sir?!"

"Enough, Zulfa!" Mr. Hendra snapped, his face flushing crimson. He closed the distance by two steps, lowering his voice so it wouldn't bleed outside the room, yet laden with a lethal threat. "What kind of game do you think you're playing, huh? Yesterday you skipped your shift, caused chaos in the underground grid, and now you show up in tattered clothes spouting fairy tales about shadow monsters?"

Zulfa stared straight into his superior's eyes without flinching. "You know precisely what happened down there. Aethel Corp—the private corporation you're protecting—is slowly killing this city from the inside out!"

Mr. Hendra paused for a second, studying Zulfa with a probing gaze, before letting out a flat, humorless chuckle. "Listen well to my final advice as your boss, Arditama. Stop meddling in external maintenance affairs. Return whatever you might have accidentally found down there, sign this long-term leave request, and forget all the foolishness that nearly drove you out of your mind."

"And if I refuse?" Zulfa challenged coldly.

Mr. Hendra's face hardened, his smirk vanishing instantly. "Then your career in this city will be over in less than an hour, and your name will be blacklisted across the entire national civil engineering industry. Think very carefully about your future."

Without waiting for an answer, Mr. Hendra spun on his heel and slammed his office door shut. The two Aethel Corp security guards threw one last sharp look at Zulfa before following their boss inside.

Zulfa stood frozen in front of his empty desk. His chest heaved with boiling frustration. They weren't just trying to silence him; they were systematically erasing him.

Ten minutes later, Zulfa decided to walk out of the main building and head to a small coffee shop across the street to clear his head. He sat in a corner booth by the glass window facing the main street, sipping a glass of warm water to soothe his parched throat.

His thoughts drifted back to the silver-serpent-etched access card in his jacket pocket. If the municipal office was already fully compromised by the corporation, where else could he turn? How could he prove the truth to the public?

"Order one extra-hot Americano, no sugar, and... please don't let this amateur courier deliver it to the wrong table."

A deeply familiar female voice suddenly spoke up right beside his booth.

Zulfa snapped his head up in surprise.

Naya stood beside the empty chair, wearing a dark green delivery jacket with a baseball cap pulled low over her face. In her hands, she clutched a thick folio-sized brown envelope. Without waiting for an invitation, she pulled out a chair and sat down across from Zulfa, dropping the envelope onto the table.

Zulfa frowned, glancing around the quiet cafe before whispering low, "Naya? What are you doing here? This place isn't safe! Corporate security could be tracking me."

Naya pulled off her cap briefly to toss her short hair, flashing a confident, subtle smile. "Relax, Engineer. I slipped in through the back kitchen door and disguised myself as a logistics courier for this cafe. If you want to survive a corporate conspiracy, the art of disguise is a fundamental survival skill."

Zulfa let out a breath that was equal parts relief and exasperation. "Speaking of the corporation... my office desk was completely ransacked by my boss—or rather, Aethel Corp's lackeys. They threatened me to drop the investigation."

"Of course they did," Naya said seriously, sliding her seat closer to the table. "Because the item you pulled off that shadow creature last night is far more dangerous than you realize."

Zulfa's eyes widened. He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out the silver-serpent metal access card, and slid it discreetly onto the table beneath the fold of a napkin. "This card? Did you manage to find out what's on it?"

Naya nodded quickly. She cracked open the brown envelope before her, revealing several printed sheets of digital data and circuit diagrams she had hacked from the public Wi-Fi network earlier that morning.

"I didn't sleep all night cracking the basic encryption on the RFID chip embedded in this metal card," Naya whispered with eager yet tense energy. "And guess what? This isn't just an ordinary access card. It's a high-level Master Key directly linked to Aethel Corp's secret underground server facility in District Nine!"

Zulfa narrowed his eyes, studying the circuit schematics before him. "District Nine? Isn't that the old industrial zone near the container port?"

"Not just an industrial zone," Naya corrected sharply. "Beneath the soil of District Nine, right under the foundation of the old wastewater treatment plant, sits an unregistered underground research facility missing from official city layouts. That's where they assemble... or rather, grow those shadow entities using Ley-Line energy siphoned from every corner of the city."

Zulfa froze. The puzzle pieces locked together into a terrifying, complete picture. Aethel Corp wasn't renovating the city; they were building an interdimensional terror factory.

"We have to go there," Zulfa said firmly, his gaze hardening. "We'll use this access card to infiltrate their central server, copy all the hard evidence, and blow the whistle to the media before they manage to break every seal in the city."

Naya looked at Zulfa with a mix of awe and dread. "Infiltrating Aethel Corp's primary facility? That's basically walking straight into a lion's den, Zul."

"We don't have a choice, Naya. If we stay quiet, Bagas died for nothing, and this city—"

Ring!

Ring!

Zulfa's words were cut short instantly by the shrill ring of a cell phone vibrating inside his jacket pocket.

Zulfa fished his phone out in a hurry. The screen glowed brightly, displaying an incoming call from a Private Number. The air around their table suddenly turned frigid, as if the oxygen in the booth had been sucked out.

Naya gestured urgently for Zulfa to answer, her eyes darting anxiously toward the cafe exit.

Zulfa took a deep breath, pressed the green button, and brought the screen to his ear. "Hello?" he demanded in a stern voice.

No breathing or background noise came from the other end. Just absolute silence for several seconds before a heavy, emotionless voice—a synthetic computer voice that sounded cold yet chillingly real—spoke through the speaker:

"You are holding property belonging to the wrong master, Engineer Arditama."

Zulfa stiffened, his grip on the phone tightening until his knuckles turned paper-white. "Who is this?! What do you want?!"

The voice on the line continued in a flat, terrifying monotone, completely ignoring Zulfa's outburst:

"Hand over that access card right now at the rendezvous point sent via text message, or your sister at the eastern residential block... will experience a permanent blackout tonight."

Click... tuut... tuut.

The call disconnected abruptly.

Zulfa sat paralyzed in his seat, the blood in his veins turning to ice. The threat was real. His younger sister lived entirely alone in a small apartment within the city's eastern residential block—a district whose power grid was managed entirely by Aethel Corp's smart-utility network.