The command center was a carcass of its former glory.
Darkened monitors lined the walls like sightless eyes, their screens spiderwebbed with fractures that caught the flicker of dying emergency lights. Severed cables snaked across the floor, some still sparking at the frayed ends like venomous serpents frozen mid-strike. Acrid smoke clung to the air—burnt insulation, old wiring, and sweat. The stench of collapse.
Luo Jian slumped in his chair like a dethroned monarch, the leather creaking beneath his weight as he leaned forward. His fingers traced the jagged edge of a shattered monitor, each movement slow and deliberate. His eyes—bloodshot, sunken, wild—met their fractured reflection in the screen. Ten versions of himself stared back, each splinter a different truth: the cold-eyed tactician who once controlled Jakarta’s surveillance grid; the tyrant who silenced uprisings with the tap of a key; the ghost of a man whispering secrets to machines no longer listening.