The Hidden Face of Black Sorrow

Jakarta’s midnight air clung thick with humidity and the acrid bite of smog, the neon glow of Glodok’s markets painting the streets in lurid hues. Bintang moved like a shadow between food carts and sleepless vendors, his tailored suit swapped for a faded bomber jacket and jeans. To the drunk tourists and night-shift workers, he was just another face in the crowd—a preman with a day job, maybe, or a mid-level fixer. None guessed that the man buying bakso from a street cart was the architect of Black Sorrow, a ghost network carved into the city’s underbelly.

He slipped into a teahouse wedged between a pawn shop and a brothel, its sign creaking in Jawi script: Warung Kopi Kematian. The Coffee of Death. Inside, the air reeked of clove cigarettes and betrayal. Felix leaned against the counter, a half-disassembled pistol in his hands, his sleeves rolled up to reveal tattoos of coiled serpents—one for every Dragon he’d killed. Nicholas hunched over a tablet, its screen reflecting off his wire-rimmed glasses as encrypted files scrolled. A ceiling fan wobbled overhead, its blades scattering the light into fractured spirals.

“Took you long enough,” Felix grunted, slotting a magazine into his gun. “Had to stop for state, yeah?”

Bintang ignored him, locking the door and peeling back a moth-eaten rug to reveal a hatch. The cellar below hummed with server racks and weapon crates, Black Sorrow’s nerve center. Maps of Jakarta and IKN plastered the walls, threaded with red yarn and photo clusters—politicians, enforcers, tycoons. All bound to the Nine Dragons. All targets.

Nicholas followed, tossing the tablet onto a rusted desk. “Oenrust’s waste dumping? It’s a front. They’re tunneling.”

Bintang paused. “Tunneling what?”

“Subsea cables. High-capacity lines from the bioreactor to IKN.” Nicholas pulled up schematics: a labyrinth beneath the Java Sea, labeled Phoenix Convergence. “Mei Ling’s biotech firms are routing data here—financial markets, defense grids, the whole fucking backbone of the new capital.”

Felix snorted. “So the Dragons aren’t just poisoning the water. They’re plugging Jakarta into a life support system they control.”

Bintang’s jaw tightened. His father’s words echoed:

“They don’t conquer cities. They become them.” Subianto’s desperation.

Lia’s diplomacy, David’s doomed conversation—all threads in a noose the Nine Dragons had woven long before any of them noticed.

Nicholas tapped the screen. “The offshore accounts? Shell companies in Vanuatu, Cyprus, fucking Liechtenstein. Money’s flowing to politicians, cops, even eco-NGOs. They’re not hiding it anymore.”

“Because they don’t need to,” Bintang said quietly. “They’re legitimizing.”

Felix slammed his pistol onto the desk. “Then we hit them where it hurts. Sink their ships. Burn their servers.”

“And play into their narrative?” Bintang’s voice sharpened. “Wei Long’s begging for a martyr. Blow up a facility, and the public cheers his ‘security reforms.’”

Nicholas leaned back, grim. “So we fight money with money. Hack their cash flow. Cripple the Convergence.”

“With what?” Bintang gestured to the cellar’s cobwebbed corners. “We’re not syndicates. We’re scraps.”

A beat of silence. Felix exchanged a glance with Nicholas, then reached into his jacket. He slid a photo across the table: Subianto’s son, Bintang’s half-brother, handcuffed in a Nine Dragons warehouse. “They took him yesterday. Leverage for Subianto’s compliance.”

Bintang stared at the image. The boy’s eyes—his mother’s eyes—wide with fury, not fear. Family was a word Black Sorrow had banished. A liability. A weakness.

“You knew,” Felix said, not a question.

“I suspected.”

“And you didn’t warn him?”

Bintang’s fingers brushed the photo. Sacrifice your queen. “We’re not here to save one life. We’re here to break the cycle.”

Nicholas stood, snapping the tablet shut. “Then we need the Crown. David’s relic—it’s the only leverage Subianto might risk a war for.”

Bintang’s gaze drifted to a map of IKN, the new capital’s skeleton rising from rainforest ashes. The Nine Dragons’ Convergence would strangle it before it breathed. But to stop them, he’d have to become what he despised: a kingmaker.

“Get Thalia,” he ordered. “Tell her to leak the tunnel coordinates to David’s team. Let the Dragons and do-gooders claw each other’s eyes out.”

Felix grinned, all teeth. “And us?”

Bintang pocketed the photo. “We rob a tomb.”

Flashback: The Past with the Nine Dragons and Subianto

The metallic tang of blood coats Bintang’s tongue, sharp and suffocating. The warehouse, a cavern of shadows, swallows the dim light filtering through grime-streaked windows. Chains dangle like skeletal fingers from the ceiling, and the floor, stained with oil and older, darker fluids, glistens underfoot. At thirteen, Bintang is a ghost of a boy, all sharp angles and trembling resolve. His ribs scream with every breath, a mosaic of bruises blooming beneath his threadbare shirt. He’d been caught stealing food, a crime Wei Long deemed worthy of a “lesson.”

Wei Long, the Iron Fist, stands motionless, his silhouette carved from the same darkness that birthed the Nine Dragons. His face is a mask, but his eyes—cold as river stones—betray a perverse pride. This is how the syndicate molds its heirs: not with comfort, but with cruelty. “You think the world pities weakness?” Wei Long’s voice is deceptively gentle, a serpent’s whisper. “You are Subianto’s blood. Start acting like it.”

Bintang’s gaze flicks to his father, who leans against a rusted cargo container, smoking a clove cigarette. Subianto’s silence is a blade. He’d brought Bintang here, handed him over to Wei Long without a word. Now, he watches as though observing a sparring match, not his son’s unraveling. Years later, Bintang will recognize this moment for what it was: a baptism. The Nine Dragons don’t raise children—they forge weapons.

“Again,” Wei Long commands.

Bintang staggers to his feet, knees buckling. His fists rise on instinct, knuckles split and raw. The first blow cracks his jaw; the second drives the air from his lungs. He doesn’t cry out. Tears are a luxury the syndicate strips from you early. Instead, he focuses on Subianto’s impassive face, memorizing the curl of smoke from his lips, the way his eyes narrow—approving?—when Bintang lunges, wild and desperate.

Wei Long catches his wrist, twisting until bone grinds. “Survival isn’t about winning,” he hisses. “It’s about making your enemy bleed more.”

The lesson ends when Bintang collapses, vision blurring. Subianto finally moves, crouching beside him. “You’ll thank me one day,” he murmurs, brushing dirt from Bintang’s hair. His touch is tender, incongruous against the violence. It’s this contradiction that haunts Bintang: love sharpened into a weapon, loyalty measured in scars.

By dawn, Bintang learns to swallow pain like scripture.

Returning to the Present: Walking the Edge

The teahouse is a study in tranquility—bamboo wind chimes, the murmur of flowing water—but Bintang tastes the warehouse’s ghosts in his tea. Across the table, Felix, his lieutenant, spins a lotus petal between his fingers. “Mei Ling’s got a battalion guarding her docks,” he says. “You sure about this?”

Bintang’s thumb traces the rim of his cup, a Ming dynasty relic. Subianto once drank from it, negotiating alliances with the same ease as issuing death warrants. The parallels itch beneath his skin. His father had balanced on the knife’s edge between the Nine Dragons and his ambitions, until the blade cut both ways. Bintang chose differently. He built his empire on secrets, not slaughter.

“I want her schedules. Her mistresses. Her fears,” Bintang says. The porcelain warms his palm, fragile as the peace he’s clinging to.

Felix smirks. “Going to burn her world down?”

“No.” Bintang sets the cup down, its clink deliberate. “I’ll let her burn it herself.”

Hesitation is weakness. The mantra pulses in his veins, learned at Wei Long’s feet. Yet now, he hesitates—not out of fear, but calculation. Mei Ling isn’t some street thug; she’s a hydra. Cut off one head, two rise. But expose her lies to the Triad elders? Let them devour their own? That’s a kill shot.

He rises, the silk of his suit whispering. Outside, rain slicks the neon-soaked streets. “You’re playing a dangerous game,” Felix warns.

Bintang smiles, thin as a razor. “The Nine Dragons taught me to survive a war. I’m ending this with a whisper.”

In his pocket, he fingers Subianto’s old lighter—a relic of a man who believed fire was the only answer. Bintang intends to prove him wrong.