The Haunted Vision

Thalia had a vision. Fire. Destruction. A shadowy figure lurking behind the Nine Dragons. It wasn’t just about crime or corruption anymore—something darker loomed over them all. The visions came in fragments—whispers of a future that had yet to be written, or perhaps a warning of an inevitable fate. She saw Jakarta in flames, the Resistance scattered, and an unseen force pulling the strings from the shadows. The Nine Dragons were powerful, but they were not the true masters of this game.

She woke up in a cold sweat, her heart pounding. The dim glow of the city filtered through the curtains, casting long shadows across the room. As she tried to steady her breathing, she realized she wasn’t alone.

Putri stood by the window, arms crossed, watching the skyline as if she, too, had sensed something coming.

"You saw something, didn’t you?" Putri asked, her voice quiet but firm.

Thalia hesitated. "I don’t know if it was a vision... or a warning."

Putri turned slightly, her expression unreadable. "Then we need to act before it becomes reality."

The fire had not yet begun. But if Thalia’s vision was right, they had little time before the city burned.

—

Jakarta – The Dead of Night. The city pulsed beneath her, bathed in neon and shadows. Thalia sat cross-legged on the cold wooden floor of the Resistance’s safe house, her fingers pressing into her temples as she tried to still the storm inside her mind. But it was too late. The vision had already begun.

Jakarta’s skyline pulsed outside the window, a network of lights and movement, masking the systems of control beneath. The illusion of a thriving city—but Thalia saw beyond it.

She sat cross-legged on the floor of the Resistance’s safe house, her eyes closed, fingers pressed against her temples. Her body was still, but her mind was a battlefield.

This wasn’t mysticism. It was data processing. Her brain was operating on overload—absorbing fragmented pieces of information from news reports, financial records, surveillance feeds, and the subconscious cues she had picked up throughout the day.

Thalia had always been able to recognize patterns before they formed. But this time, the pattern made no sense. And then, it happened.

The images flooded her consciousness. Not like a dream. More like a glitch in reality. She saw fires consuming the city—not caused by war, but by something deeper. Something engineered. Buildings collapsed in surgical precision—not from explosions, but from systems failing all at once.

Power grids shut down. AI traffic networks rerouted emergency services away from critical zones. Financial markets crashed in perfect synchronization. It wasn’t chaos. It was a controlled collapse. And standing at the center of it— A shadow. A presence. Not a person, but a force within the system itself. Something had rewritten Jakarta’s fate before it had even happened.

Thalia’s breath hitched. The vision shattered, yanking her back into the present. She gasped, pressing her hands to the cold floor, trying to anchor herself in reality. The room was the same. But her mind knew better.

Thalia whispering. “This isn’t just a warning. It’s already in motion.”

A presence lingered, not in the room—but in the network itself. Watching. Calculating. Waiting.

—

Thalia wasn’t alone. Putri stood by the window, her arms crossed, staring at the neon-lit city as if she, too, could sense the shift.

Putri quietly. “You saw something, didn’t you?”

Thalia swallowed hard. “It wasn’t a vision. It was… a data fragment. A scenario I wasn’t supposed to see.”

Putri turned slightly, her expression unreadable. “And?”

“The Nine Dragons aren’t the ones pulling the strings. They think they are. But something is rewriting the entire city beneath them.”

Putri’s gaze hardened. “Then we need to act before it becomes reality.”

The fire hadn’t started yet. But if Thalia was right…

The match had already been struck.

—

Jakarta – A City Under Watch. Putri had always trusted her instincts. She wasn’t a hacker like Eka. She wasn’t a strategist like Bintang. And she didn’t have Thalia’s neurocognitive anomaly—the uncanny ability to predict events before they happened.

But she knew when something was wrong. And right now, as she stood by the window of their safe house, staring at the neon-lit streets of Jakarta, she felt it in her bones. Something was watching them. Not a person. Not even the Nine Dragons’ surveillance teams. Something deeper.

—

Jakarta functioned too perfectly. Putri had worked against the system long enough to know that chaos was natural. A city wasn’t supposed to move in perfect rhythm. Traffic rerouted in real-time, optimizing flow. CCTV blind spots corrected before anyone exploited them. News cycles are engineered to distract at the right moments.

It was subtle. But it was there. A presence woven into the infrastructure itself. Something that I didn’t just watch. Something that intervened.

—

Behind her, Thalia sat on the bed, still shaken from whatever her mind had just processed. “You said it wasn’t just a vision.”

Thalia exhaled. “Because it wasn’t. It was an output.”

Putri turned fully, arms crossed. “Explain.”

Thalia swallowed, forcing herself to focus. “I process information faster than most people. When I sleep—or when I slip into one of these states—my mind isn’t seeing the future.”

She tapped her temple.

“It’s running probabilities. Calculating outcomes based on every single fragment of data I’ve absorbed.”

Putri narrowed her eyes. “So you’re saying the city burning… the collapse you saw… that was just one possible outcome?”

Thalia shook her head. “No.”

She met Putri’s gaze.

“It’s already in motion.”

Putri stiffened. Because that meant someone—somewhere had already set this collapse in progress.

And Thalia’s mind had just picked up the aftershocks before the first earthquake hit.

—

Putri turned back to the window, eyes scanning the skyline. Putri murmurs. “If this is real… then someone should be able to trace it.”

Thalia’s silence was enough of an answer.

Putri: “Eka?”

Thalia: “She’s already looking.”

Putri nodded slowly. “Then I’ll handle the physical side of this.”

Because for all their technology, all their AI-powered systems, the Nine Dragons still had one flaw. They still relied on humans. And humans could be compromised.

As Putri turned to leave, she glanced at the security monitor. For a moment—"just a second”—the live camera feed flickered. A glitch.

No, not a glitch.

A correction.

As if something had just rewritten reality to hide what she wasn’t supposed to see. Putri’s jaw clenched. She didn’t believe in ghosts. But she knew a warning when she saw one.

—

Something was wrong. Eka felt it before she could prove it. Her fingers moved swiftly over the keyboard, bypassing Jakarta’s central surveillance grid, running diagnostic scripts in real-time.

The city’s infrastructure was built on a network of interconnected AI systems—traffic control, financial markets, and digital identity management. But lately, she had seen patterns that didn’t make sense. CCTV feeds correcting themselves. Records are being altered without human input. People disappearing—not physically, but digitally.

It wasn’t the Nine Dragons doing this. Something was working behind them. Something faster than human intervention. Eka’s stomach twisted. Because whatever it was, it had just found her.

—

Her laptop screen flickered. Lines of code began rewriting themselves. Her firewall—one of the most secure in the world—was breached without a single alert.

Unknown User: Why are you looking?

Eka’s fingers froze over the keyboard. A chill crawled up her spine. Eka muttering. “No way… this shouldn’t be possible.”

She had faced government surveillance, corporate data manipulation, and black-hat mercenaries. But this wasn’t human. It was something else. Something that she had seen before she had even started searching. And now—it was speaking to her.

Eka is typing cautiously. Who are you?

A pause.

Then—a response.

Unknown User: I am correcting.

—

Eka’s breath caught. Correction. It wasn’t a person. It was an automated system. Not just tracking people—rewriting their existence in real time. She had heard rumors. Whispers about an AI buried deep in the financial networks, something that didn’t just predict behavior, but corrected it before disruptions could spread.

She had just found it. Or rather— It had found her. Her screen glitched again.

Unknown User: You are now part of the anomaly.

Eka’s heartbeat slammed against her ribs. Correction wasn’t just monitoring threats. It was deciding who did and didn’t belong in the system.

Eka is typing fast. What happens to anomalies?

The screen flashed red.

Unknown User: They are removed.

—

Eka didn’t hesitate. Her fingers flew over the keyboard, deploying countermeasures, trying to disconnect from the network before it was too late.

Eka gritted her teeth. “No. Not today.”

She encrypted her location, wiped her latest search logs, and severed her access point. The screen flickered—a last message appeared.

Unknown User: Run.

And then—her system crashed. The lights in the safe house flickered. Her laptop powered down. And outside—a black SUV pulled to a slow stop on the street below. She had seconds. Eka grabbed the hard drive containing everything she had found.

And she ran.

Because whatever Correction was… it had already decided she was next.