The ventilation shaft opened into a crumbling alleyway somewhere deep within Kuala Lumpur's industrial sector.
Irfan Shah tumbled out first, helping Aina Farisha pull Reza through behind him.
The night air hit him like a slap — cold, oily, thick with the scent of burnt electronics and decay.
The city was still there.
But it was no longer the city they knew.
⸻
Massive black drones hovered silently above the streets, their sensor eyes sweeping methodically.
Checkpoint gates had sprung up across major intersections, manned by blank-faced PHALANX operatives.
Digital banners flickered across the skyline, projecting soothing propaganda:
"Order. Unity. Ascension Awaits."
Citizens shuffled like shadows between security cordons, heads bowed, eyes empty.
The city wasn't on fire.
It was being smothered.
Quietly.
Completely.
⸻
Aina cursed under her breath, pulling her jacket tighter.
"This isn't surveillance."
"This is occupation."
Irfan's jaw clenched.
He could feel it too — the heavy blanket of fear woven into every alley, every neon flicker.
The silent war had become open tyranny.
And they were standing in the middle of it.
⸻
They slipped into an abandoned train depot at the edge of the sector, concealed by rusted train husks and forgotten machinery.
Reza slumped heavily against a wall, her wounded side freshly bandaged.
Irfan paced the room restlessly, mind whirring.
The portable drive in his jacket felt heavier than ever.
Inside it — the truth about TITAN-9.
The weapon PHALANX planned to unleash.
And now, no one could save them.
Except themselves.
⸻
He knelt by a broken maintenance table, clearing the debris aside.
From the depths of his pack, he pulled salvaged tech:
microdrives, broken drones, power cells stripped from dead terminals.
Aina watched him silently from the shadows.
She recognized the look in his eyes —
the same look he had when he built his first quantum decoder at sixteen.
The look of a mind refusing to surrender.
⸻
"What are you thinking?" she asked.
Irfan didn't look up.
His fingers moved rapidly, sketching designs into the dust on the table.
"I'm thinking… we stop playing their game."
"I'm thinking… we build our own weapons."
He held up a scorched neural transmitter module, eyes gleaming with fierce intensity.
"They use signals to control."
"We'll use signals to fight back."
⸻
Within minutes, he had the prototype components laid out:
•A portable Pulse Disruptor — designed to scramble local neural fields.
•The early frame of a Stealth Hoverboard — lightweight repulsor coils scavenged from drone grav-units.
•Blueprint sketches for a NanoShield Generator — a focused EM field burst capable of deflecting incoming fire.
Primitive.
Unstable.
But possible.
⸻
"This won't hold long against real firepower," Reza muttered, weakly smirking from her corner.
Irfan smiled grimly.
"It doesn't have to hold forever."
"It just needs to hold long enough for us to make them bleed."
Aina stepped forward, placing a hand lightly on his shoulder.
"You really think we can fight them?" she asked, voice low.
Irfan finally looked up, meeting her gaze.
Behind the exhaustion, the fear, the pain —
there was fire.
Unbreakable.
Undeniable.
"We have to."
"If we don't… no one else will."
⸻
Above the shattered depot, the black drones whispered overhead, searching for signs of resistance.
Unaware that below, in the dust and darkness, the first sparks of rebellion had been lit.
Tiny.
Fragile.
But burning all the same.
And fire, once started, was very hard to contain.