The Black Sorrow Team Uncovers Secrets

The moon hung low over Jakarta’s industrial coast, its silver light drowned by the haze of smog and the flicker of distant cargo ships. Felix adjusted his black mask, the fabric scratching against the scar that ran from his temple to his jaw—a souvenir from his days as a Nine Dragons enforcer. Beside him, Nicholas crouched in the shadows, his breath steady but his knuckles white around the hacking device. The air reeked of salt, rust, and something sharper—chemicals leaking from barrels stacked like tombstones along the dock.

“This place stinks of them,” Nicholas muttered, his voice barely audible over the groan of cranes. “Same as before.”

Felix didn’t reply. Before. The word clawed at him. Before defecting. Before the guilt. Before Bintang’s offer of redemption—or was it just another form of damnation? He shook off the thought. The warehouse loomed ahead, its corrugated walls scarred with graffiti. Hitori Industries. Clarissa had died for that name, her body dumped in a Singapore canal with a bullet in her skull. Whatever secrets lay inside, they were worth killing for.

Nicholas activated the device, its screen casting a sickly green glow on his face. “Cameras looped. We’ve got ten minutes before their systems reboot.”

“Enough time,” Felix said, though he didn’t believe it. Nothing was ever enough with the Nine Dragons.

They slipped through a side door, the rusted hinges screaming into the silence. Felix froze, heart hammering. No alarms. No footsteps. Just the hum of servers lining the warehouse floor, their blinking lights like a constellation of eyes. Rows of filing cabinets stood sentinel beside crates stamped with the Nine Dragons’ emblem—a coiled serpent devouring its tail.

Nicholas moved first, gloved fingers prizing open a drawer. “Shipping manifests. Offshore accounts. The usual laundry.” His tone dripped with disdain. “But look.” He held up a folder stamped with a crimson lotus—Shen Ai’s symbol.

Felix’s throat tightened. Shen Ai, the Black Lotus, whose alliances shifted like smoke. Inside the folder were blueprints: schematics for a neural implant labeled CPM-Prototype.

“Mind control?” Nicholas hissed. “This goes beyond money. Bintang was right—they’re building an army.”

A sudden clang echoed from the catwalk above. Felix drew his pistol, instincts honed from years of enforcement. Nicholas ducked behind a server rack, clutching the folder.

“Rat,” Felix whispered, though the lie tasted bitter.

They pressed deeper, past stacks of servers humming with encrypted data. Felix’s flashlight grazed a wall-mounted monitor, its screen fractured but still displaying a live feed: security footage of a figure in a black trench coat, face obscured, moving through a lab. Hitori. The Dragon Enforcer. His presence here was a ghost story, a myth—until now.

“We need to go,” Nicholas urged, stuffing documents into a duffel. “This is bigger than Hitori. Cakra-Birawa, Phi-Trust—they’re all linked. If the Nine Dragons are their pawns…”

Felix’s comms device buzzed—a coded alert from Bintang. Extract now. Compromised.

But as they turned, the warehouse doors slammed shut. The servers’ hum escalated to a deafening whine. Red lights flashed.

“Tripwire,” Nicholas snarled. “They knew we were coming.”

Felix lunged for a ventilation grate, prying it open. “Go! I’ll hold them off.”

“Heroics don’t suit you,” Nicholas snapped, but he slid into the duct, the folder clutched to his chest.

Footsteps thundered outside—too many to count. Felix crouched behind a crate, gripping his pistol. He thought of Clarissa’s body, of Kiran’s erased notes, of the cycle Bintang warned about. Redemption, it seemed, would have to wait.

As the doors burst open, Felix fired into the dark.

—

The Hidden Laboratory... The door hissed open, revealing a cavernous chamber bathed in sterile blue light. Felix’s boots echoed on polished steel floors as he stepped inside, his breath fogging in the frigid air. Rows of cryogenic storage units lined the walls, their glass fronts frosted over. Behind them, silhouettes floated—vials of iridescent liquid, organs suspended in amber gel, and creatures Felix couldn’t name: twisted hybrids of scales and sinew, their forms frozen mid-twitch. The chemical stench burned his throat, sharper here, alive.

Nicholas whistled low, his hacking device forgotten in his hand. “This isn’t laundering. This is a goddamn ark.”

Felix approached a crate stamped with a string of alphanumeric codes: X-9R/CPM. Subject: Human-Neural Integration. His stomach turned. Nearby, servers pulsed with rhythmic lights, cables snaking into the floor like roots. One screen flickered—a DNA helix spiraling beside a progress bar labeled Cycle Iteration 47.3.

“They’re not just moving money,” Nicholas said, plugging his drive into a server port. “They’re moving life.”

Felix traced a hand over a storage unit. The glass warmed beneath his touch, revealing a human brain threaded with silver filaments. CPM-Prototype, read the label. The same neural tech from Shen Ai’s blueprints. “Bintang said they wanted control. This… this is how.”

Nicholas’s screen flooded with data, green text scrolling too fast to read. “The encryption’s military-grade, but there’s a pattern. Look.” He pointed to a recurring header: Project Cyclicality — Phase III. “Every file references ‘The Cycle.’ Environmental data, population stats, war records—it’s all being fed into an algorithm. Predictive modeling on a mass scale.”

“For what?” Felix snapped.

“To replicate it. To perfect it.” Nicholas’s voice tightened. “They’re simulating timelines. Wars, plagues, extinctions—running them like experiments. The Nine Dragons aren’t just profiting from chaos. They’re engineering it.”

A low chime echoed through the lab. Felix spun, pistol raised, as a hologram flickered to life above a central console—a rotating globe, its continents streaked with red pulses. Cycle 48: Estimated Collapse in 7.2 Years.

“They’re not just predicting the future,” Nicholas whispered. “They’re selling it to the highest bidder.”

Felix’s comms buzzed—a distorted voice, barely recognizable as Bintang. “Get out. Now.”

But Nicholas was already yanking the drive free. “Wait—there’s a subfolder. ‘Subject Zero.’ It’s—”

The lights died... For a heartbeat, the lab plunged into blackness. Then emergency strips flared crimson, painting the specimens in bloody hues. A metallic screech tore through the silence as the storage units began to vibrate.

“They know we’re here,” Felix growled, backing toward the exit.

Nicholas didn’t move, his gaze locked on the hologram. The globe had split open, revealing a skeletal core. Text scrawled beneath it: CBM Directive: Reset Parameters for Cycle 49.

“Cakra-Birawa,” Felix breathed. “This is their work. The Dragons are just the middlemen.”

A hiss erupted from the far wall. One of the cryogenic units slid open, fog spilling across the floor. Inside, a figure stirred—pale, hairless, its skin mottled with biomechanical grafts. No, not a figure. Figures. Dozens of units began to unlock in unison.

Nicholas finally broke into a run. “Go! Go!”

They sprinted past twitching specimens, the floor trembling as something heavy slammed against metal. Felix glanced back, catching a glimpse of clawed hands, eyes glowing like coals. Subject Zero.

The exit door loomed ahead, but a shutter began to descend, triggered by unseen sensors. Nicholas dove, rolling beneath it, but Felix skidded to a halt—the drive. It lay glittering on the floor, knocked from Nicholas’s grip.

“Leave it!” Nicholas shouted.

Felix lunged, fingers closing around the drive as the shutter grazed his back. He tumbled free, the lab’s alarms wailing behind them.

In the tunnel outside, Nicholas leaned against the wall, chest heaving. “What the hell was that?!”

Felix stared at the drive. “Proof. Proof that the Cycle isn’t just a theory. It’s a weapon.” He thought of Sebastian, of time folding in on itself. “And we’re all part of the experiment.”