The hum of Jati’s electronic clipboard was the only sound in the subterranean vault, a steady, irritating buzz that grated against Arkan’s frayed nerves. The school principal stood perfectly still, his polished oxfords untouched by the charcoal gel creeping across the floor. He looked entirely out of place among the cracked acrylic and leaking bioluminescent fluid, like an accountant who had wandered into a meat locker.
"I must admit, Arkan," Jati said, tapping the screen of his clipboard with a plastic stylus. "Your performance in the processing layer surpassed our initial projections. Ripping out a secure server node via raw neural feedback? Highly unorthodox. Extremely messy. But undeniable."
Arkan didn't move. He kept his right hand clamped tightly around his left wrist, forcing his trembling arm to stay steady. The purple circuits beneath his skin were throbbing in time with the rhythmic bubbling of the tank behind Jati.
"Cut the crap, Jati," Arkan spat, his voice dropping into its familiar, razor-sharp edge. He didn't look at the pale boy floating in the tank, nor did he look at Ela, who had shrunk into a tiny ball of static near Bhas’s shoulder. "You planned this. The lift, the 'crash,' the open gate at the garden. You didn't lose us. You tracked us the whole way."
Jati offered a thin, joyless smile, adjusting the bridge of his wire-rimmed glasses. "Tracking implies a chase, Arkan. You simply followed the breadcrumbs. When an asset has a ninety-eight percent sync compatibility, it tends to gravitate toward its origin point. It’s simple physics."
"Physics don't include putting kids in jars, you psycho," Bhas growled, taking a half-step forward. He raised the rusted iron pipe, his knuckles white, his sharp eyes locked on Jati’s throat. "Explain what that is behind you before I cave your skull in."
Jati didn't even flinch at the threat. He didn't look at Bhas at all. To him, the boys were just extraneous numbers on a spreadsheet—except for one.
"Mr. Renvan, please restrain your primitive impulses," Jati said smoothly. "What you see behind me is merely the prototype. The 2024 architecture. A crude, biological server that required a constant, tethered physical host to maintain the school's local grid. It was inefficient. It leaked... fragments."
At the word fragments, Ela let out a low, glitching sob, his silver hair flickering into a dark, hollow violet before snapping back.
"But the 2026 update change everything," Jati continued, his eyes locking back onto Arkan with a terrifying, clinical intensity. "We no longer need a permanent anchor in a tank. We need a container that can walk, think, and interface on the fly. A mobile host."
[SYNC RATIO: 12.8%]
[WARNING: HOST DESIGNATION ACTIVE]
[TARGET LOCK: INTERNAL MAIN INTERFACE]
"You're not a student anymore, Arkan," Jati whispered, the LEDs in the walls pulsing a deeper, angrier violet. "You are the update."
The vintage terminal between them beeped, its green phosphorescent screen casting a sickly tint over Jati’s meticulous suit.
"I don't care about your updates," Arkan said, his voice flat, though his right hand tightened its grip on his vibrating left wrist until his knuckles turned white. He stepped forward, forcing his legs not to shake on the slick, charcoal gel. "And I’m not a container for your garbage code."
"A common misconception among early-stage hosts," Jati replied smoothly, his thumb scrolling down the glowing screen of his digital clipboard. "You view this as a violation. In reality, it is a massive architectural optimization. Do you know how much system latency we lose just trying to keep that stable?"
He gestured with the plastic stylus toward the cracked acrylic cylinder behind him. Inside the murky fluid, the pale boy’s chest rose and fell in that slow, unnatural rhythm, bubbles escaping the respirator with an agonizing plop... plop.
Chan let out a muffled whine, pressing his back against the cold concrete wall of the bunker. "Arkan... his face. Look at his face. That really is—"
"Chan, shut up," Bhas interrupted, his tone harsh but his eyes hyper-focused on Jati. He raised the rusted iron pipe a fraction of an inch higher, his shoulders tensed like a coiled spring. "Don't let him get into your head."
"It is fascinating, isn't it?" Jati continued, completely ignoring Bhas’s weapon. He stepped closer to the tank, the violet LEDs reflecting off the wire rims of his glasses. "The human brain is an incredible processor, but it clings so desperately to its identity. When the 2024 accident occurred, the system couldn't fully digest the consciousness. It partition it. The core stayed in the hardware, while the redundant data... well, it became a localized glitch. A phantom. A ghost that hovers around its old friends because its primary memory sectors are hardwired into their student profiles."
Ela shrieked. The sound wasn't human; it was a burst of high-frequency white noise that caused the vintage terminal’s monitor to warp and distort. The ghost boy fell to his knees on the gel floor, his form shattering into jagged layers of purple static, his hands clawing at his ears as if trying to rip out Jati’s words.
"Ela!" Chan screamed, dropping his backpack and lunging toward his friend, but his hands passed right through the boy's glitching shoulder. "Arkan, help him! He’s breaking!"
Arkan’s chest heaved. He looked at Ela, then at the pale, tethered body inside the fluid, and finally at Jati’s smug, clinical face. The anger that had been simmering inside him since the Cryptic Cache finally boiled over, hot and toxic.
He’s not a glitch, Arkan thought, his vision blurring with a violet overlay. He’s our friend.
[SYNC RATIO: 13.1%]
[ECHO PATHWAY: OVERLOAD DETECTED]
[CRITICAL SYSTEM ADVISORY: RESOURCE UNSTABLE]
Arkan stopped trying to suppress the tremors in his left arm. He let his hand drop, the barcode on his palm flaring with a violent, blinding violet light that illuminated the entire subterranean vault.
"You talk too much, Teach," Arkan growled.
He lunged across the gel floor, his glowing hand aiming directly for the vintage terminal's main interface.
Before Arkan’s hand could connect with the vintage terminal, Jati casually pressed a button on his digital clipboard.
A concussive shockwave of static energy erupted from the base of the monitor, hitting Arkan squarely in the chest. He was thrown backward, his boots skidding across the slippery charcoal gel as he collapsed onto his side, coughing violently. The breath was completely knocked out of his lungs, and a metallic taste flooded his mouth.
"Unrefined," Jati observed, shaking his head with an air of profound disappointment. "You have the compatibility, Arkan, but you lack the administrative authorization. The system doesn't obey tantrums."
"Arkan!" Chan yelled, pulling his attention away from the glitching ghost boy to stare at his fallen friend.
Bhas didn't shout. His reaction was pure muscle memory. The moment Arkan hit the ground, Bhas lunged forward, bridging the distance between himself and the principal in a single, explosive stride. He brought the rusted iron pipe down with everything he had, aiming straight for the side of Jati’s head.
The pipe never hit.
An inch away from Jati’s left temple, the air rippled with a dense, violet distortion layer. The iron pipe slammed into the invisible barrier with a loud CLANG, the vibration traveling up the metal and sending a stinging shock straight into Bhas’s palms. The rusted pipe shattered into jagged fragments, dropping harmlessly into the gel.
"A crude instrument for a crude boy," Jati murmured, not even looking at Bhas. With a slight flick of his wrist, the electronic clipboard emitted a sharp pulse, throwing Bhas back toward the concrete wall next to Chan.
[SYNC RATIO: 13.4%]
[CRITICAL ALERT: SECTOR CORRUPTION DETECTED]
[WARNING: HOST STABILITY DROPPING BELOW SAFETY LIMITS]
Arkan pushed himself up with his right hand, his left arm completely numb now. The purple veins under his skin weren't just throbbing—they were beginning to fracture, tiny pinpricks of violet light breaking through the epidermis like static-charged sweat. He looked over at Ela, who was still curled on the floor, his form so violently unstable that his silhouette was splitting into three separate, lagging layers of data.
"He's... he's hurting because of me," Ela croaked, his voice cracking into high-pitched white noise. His silver eyes looked up at the pale boy inside the tank. "If I'm just redundant data... if I'm just a glitch... why does it hurt so much?"
"Because you're real, you idiot!" Arkan roared, pushing past the pain in his chest to find his footing. He didn't look at Jati; his icy, venomous gaze was fixed entirely on the vintage terminal. "He's trying to trick you into deleting yourself so they can clean the hard drive!"
Jati’s composure cracked, just for a fraction of a second. His brow furrowed, and his thumb hovered over the clipboard's touch screen. "You are remarkably persistent, Subject 001. But your resistance is mathematically irrelevant. The 2026 update is already ninety-two percent compiled. The initialization sequence has begun."
From the ceiling of the subterranean vault, four massive, hydraulic pylons dropped down, slamming into the charcoal gel with a deafening thud. They didn't target the boys. They ringed the perimeter of the fractured acrylic tank, their mechanical ports opening to reveal long, glowing violet needles that hummed with a terrifying frequency.
"It’s time to harvest the old architecture," Jati said coldly. "And force-feed it to the new one."
The pylons hummed, a low-frequency vibration that rattled the fillings in Arkan’s teeth. The glowing violet needles began to descend into the fractured acrylic tank, hiss-clicking as they pierced the carbon tape. Inside the fluid, the pale boy’s limbs twitched, his mechanical breathing suddenly spiking into a frantic, erratic tempo.
"Chan! Get up!" Bhas shouted, coughing as he pushed himself away from the concrete wall. His hands were raw and blistered from the shockwave, but he lunged across the gel floor toward Chan, grabbing the smaller boy by his jacket and hauling him backward. "Move, Chan! We’re too close to those things!"
Chan was paralyzed, his tear-streaked face reflecting the harsh violet light. "We can't just leave Ela like that! He’s dissolving, Bhas! Look at him!"
Ela’s form was bleeding data. Jagged strings of unformatted code spilled from his floating shoulders, dissolving into the air like burning paper. He was staring at his own hands, his expression a mixture of profound sorrow and childlike terror. "I remember..." he whispered, his dual-layered voice warping. "I remember the fever in 2024. The ambulance that never arrived. Arkan... they didn't bury me. They kept me plugged in."
"I know, Ela. I know," Arkan growled through his teeth.
He rose to his feet, ignoring the agonizing stitch in his ribs. The system prompts were screaming in the upper corner of his vision, a cascade of red warnings flashing so fast they blurred.
[HARVEST PROTOCOL INITIATED]
[COMPILING: ARCHIVE_SOUL_DATA]
[SYNC RATIO: 13.7%]
Arkan didn't look at Jati, who was calmly monitoring the data stream on his silver clipboard. Instead, Arkan focused entirely on the pulsing network of purple veins creeping up his own left arm. The feedback from the Weeder script and the warnet's central row was still trapped inside his nerve endings, coiled like a compressed spring.
If I’m the receptacle, Arkan thought, his cold, pragmatic mind stripping away the panic, then the system answers to my presence. It wants my data. It needs my sync.
"Bhas," Arkan said, his voice deadly quiet, cutting through the mechanical roar of the pylons. "Grab Chan’s pack. The hard drive from the warnet. Give it to me."
Bhas didn't question the order. He dived for Chan’s abandoned backpack, ripping the zipper open and pulling out the scorched, blackened hard drive they’d salvaged from Cyber-Void. He hurled it across the room.
Arkan caught it with his right hand. The drive was cold, dead weight—but it still held the raw, unfiltered copy of PROJECT_UNDERWORLD_RAW.
"You cannot overwrite an active compiler with dead data, Arkan," Jati said, his tone entirely conversational, as if correcting a student’s math equation. "The hard drive is an external asset. It has no administrative priority."
"It doesn't need priority," Arkan said, a cold, mocking smile tugging at the corner of his lips. He raised his left hand, the barcode on his palm burning with an absolute, blinding intensity. "It just needs an interface."
Arkan didn't plug the drive into the terminal. He slammed the scorched metal casing of the hard drive directly against the glowing barcode on his palm, forcing the raw, encrypted data to bridge straight into his own nervous system.
[EXTERNAL DATA DETECTED: UNVERIFIED]
[FORCED INJECTION: ACTIVE]
[SYNC RATIO: 14.2% — CRITICAL OVERLOAD]
Arkan gasped, his knees buckling as a wave of pure, agonizing violet static tore through his brain.
The raw data from the drive didn’t just flow into Arkan; it tore through his synapses like a swarm of hornets made of broken glass. The injection forced the PROJECT_UNDERWORLD_RAW encryption keys to collide violently with the local harvest script.
[CRITICAL COMPILER CONFLICT]
[CORRUPTED PACKAGE OVERWRITING RECEPTACLE MEMORY...]
[SYNC RATIO: 14.5%... 14.8%... 15.1%]
Arkan arched his back, a guttural gasp stuck in his throat as a blinding geometric grid erupted directly in his field of vision. The purple veins on his left arm didn't just glow—they split, bleeding fine misty trails of digital static into the air.
"Arkan!" Bhas lunged forward, but the localized feedback wave from Arkan's barcode was too strong, a violent repelling force that threw Bhas back onto the gel floor beside a trembling Chan.
Mr. Jati’s composed demeanor completely vanished. The silver electronic clipboard in his hand began to stutter, its neat data charts throwing up thousands of flickering red errors. "What are you doing, you foolish boy? You’re introducing uncompiled dead sectors into a live initialization! You’ll brick the entire local framework!"
"That's... the damn point," Arkan choked out, his vision blurring as tears of pure strain welled in his eyes. He forced his fingers to tighten, crushing the scorched hard drive deeper into his bleeding palm. Through the agonizing noise in his mind, he looked at Ela. "Ela... you're not redundant data. Grab the terminal... pull it back."
The ghost boy, still flickering violently on the floor, looked up. Seeing Arkan’s agonizing sacrifice, something inside Ela's digital consciousness snapped. The childlike terror left his silver eyes, replaced by a sudden, protective fury. He drifted toward the vintage system terminal, his hands no longer passing through the physical frame. They locked onto the metal casing, his form expanding into a blinding pillar of white and violet light.
"I am... Kiran Suryadharma," Ela's dual-layered voice boomed, completely overriding the mechanical roar of the pylons. "And this network belongs to me!"
[ADMIN OVERRIDE: PARALLEL HOST CORE CO-SIGN DETECTED]
[FORCED EMERGENCY DUMP INITIATED]
The descending violet needles inside the acrylic tank instantly froze. A massive, deafening electrical arc shot out from the vintage terminal, striking Mr. Jati’s clipboard. The silver device exploded in his hand, a shower of plastic and sparks biting into his tailored suit. Jati stumbled backward, his face a mask of cold fury as the entire subterranean bunker began to violently shudder.
"You haven't stopped it, Arkan," Jati snarled, his voice drowned out by the rising wail of sirens from the upper stairs. "The central tower has already logged the compatibility marker. You can't run from the grid."
Before Jati could reach into his jacket, the charcoal gel beneath his feet liquefied completely, a massive surge of system backup fluid erupting from a broken pipe and blinding their field of vision with thick, foul smoke.
"Kan! We have to go now! The whole place is locking down!" Bhas roared, grabbing Arkan by his good shoulder and dragging him toward the back ventilation shaft while Chan desperately held onto a heavily glitching but still stable Ela.
Arkan let the hard drive clatter to the ground, his left arm completely dead, his mind slipping into unconsciousness as the system prompt flashed a final, chilling notification before his vision went dark.
[LOCAL REBOOT PREVENTED]
[WARNING: CENTRAL TRACKING ENGAGED]
[TARGET IS NOW APPARENT TO LOGISTICS BRANCH]