The Fire and the Fallout

The explosion tears through the Jakarta port like a dragon’s roar, shredding steel containers into shrapnel. A mushroom cloud of fire and smoke billows upward, staining the moonlit sky an apocalyptic orange. Debental rain—twisted scraps of metal, splintered wood, and ash—pummels the docks. Somewhere in the inferno, the remnants of Feng Bao’s prized shipment—quantum servers smuggled from Shanghai, now reduced to molten slag—glow like dying stars.

Feng Bao lands hard on his back, the impact driving the breath from his lungs. His ears ring, his vision swimming with sparks and shadows. The acrid stench of burning circuitry clogs his throat. For a heartbeat, he’s a boy again, cowering in the ashes of his family’s noodle shop after the Triads torched it for protection money. Weakness, his father had hissed, blood trickling from his split lip. Never show it.

He claws himself upright, ignoring the searing pain in his ribs. His tailored suit is singed, the dragon tattoo on his neck peeking through soot-stained skin. Around him, men writhe—a junior enforcer crawls through broken glass, his face a mask of blood. Another stumbles blindly, uniform smoldering. Feng Bao’s jaw tightens. Disgrace. These were his best men, handpicked to guard the shipment. Now they’re beggars, pathetic and exposed.

“L-Lao Da,” a voice rasps. It’s Wei, his youngest enforcer, barely nineteen. The boy clutches a charred photograph—a woman and a toddler—half-disintegrated in his shaking hand. “They… they knew the route. Knew the codes.”

Feng Bao kicks the photo into the flames. Sentimentality is a bullet to the skull. “Who?”

Wei hesitates, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Surveillance drones… they wore the symbol. A black tear.”

Black Sorrow. Feng Bao’s pulse hammers. He’d dismissed the insurgents as roaches scuttling in the slums, all bark and no bite. But this? This is a blade to the throat. The servers weren’t just contraband—they were his bid to monopolize Jakarta’s data-trafficking lanes. A gamble to outpace the Triads in Macau. Now, ashes.

A guttural scream splits the air. Near the water’s edge, a dockworker—a sinewy old man in a shredded vest—drags himself from beneath a collapsed crane. His legs are pulp. Feng Bao recognizes him: Yusuf, a lifer who’d smuggled everything from rifles to rice under Nine Dragons’ payroll. Their eyes meet. Yusuf’s lips move, a silent plea.

Feng Bao draws his pistol.

“Wait—!” Wei starts, but the gunshot cracks like a whip. Yusuf crumples, his blood pooling with the rainwater.

“Cleanup,” Feng Bao snaps, smoke curling from the barrel. His men stir, dogs awaiting orders. “Burn the bodies. Bribe the authorities. And find me the leak.”

Wei pales. “The leak?”

“They knew the codes,” Feng Bao growls. Someone talked. Someone always talks. He grips Wei’s collar, the boy’s fear sour and sweaty. “Bring me their tongue. Alive.”

As Wei scurries off, Feng Bao strides toward the harbor’s edge. The flames cast his shadow across the water—a monstrous thing, jagged and hungry. In the reflection, he sees his father’s sneer, the Triad thugs laughing as they lit the match. Weakness.

His burner phone buzzes. A message from an unknown number: “The tear falls where the dragon sleeps.”

Black Sorrow’s mantra. A taunt.

Feng Bao crushes the phone under his heel. Let them mock. Let them burn. They think chaos is their weapon? He’ll show them hell. He’ll salt the earth of their slums, paint the alleys with their wretched families’ blood. They’ll learn the cost of crossing a dragon.

Across the bay, the first responders’ sirens wail. Let them come. Let the whole city see.

Nine Dragons always pays its debts.

—

Jakarta’s slums burned like a funeral pyre. Feng Bao’s orders had traveled swiftly through the ranks—leave no stone unturned. Now, armored trucks plowed through the labyrinth of corrugated metal shacks, their mounted flamethrowers painting the night in hues of hellfire. The air reeked of gasoline and charred flesh. Children wailed, their cries swallowed by the crackle of collapsing rooftops. A noodle vendor’s cart—its once-vibrant umbrellas now skeletal ribs of wire—toppled into the street, spilling broth that hissed against the flames.

Bintang crouched on a rooftop, his knuckles white as bone. The heat from the inferno below lashed his face, but he didn’t flinch. This is your doing, whispered the voice in his head. You lit the match.

Three days earlier, he’d stood in a basement choked with cigarette smoke and Black Sorrow’s ragged recruits. “Hit the port,” he’d urged, slamming a fist on a map of Jakarta. “Cut the Nine Dragons’ throat where they’re soft.” He’d imagined crippling their tech shipments, not… this. Not mothers clutching babies as they fled burning stairwells. Not the old fortune-teller, Madam Lien, who’d fed him rice during monsoons, now crawling through ash with her braid aflame.

An explosion rocked the street below. Bintang’s gaze snapped to a collapsing tenement—its bamboo scaffolding groaned like a dying beast. Through the smoke, he spotted a figure darting into an alley: Mira, a Black Sorrow scout, her arm bleeding as she dragged a toddler from the wreckage.

Move. Help them. But his legs refused. Guilt anchored him to the roof.

“You look like a ghost, brother.”

The voice came from behind. Amir, Black Sorrow’s explosives expert, limped forward, his left sleeve singed to the elbow. Blood streaked his jawline, stark against his ashen skin. “They hit the safehouse. Took out half our ammo cache.”

Bintang’s throat tightened. “Casualties?”

Amir spat. “Old Han. The twins from Bandung. All gone.” He gripped Bintang’s shoulder, fingers digging like talons. “You promised this would weaken them. Not… this.”

This. The word hung between them, heavy with the unspoken dead.

A scream pierced the din. Two stories down, a Nine Dragons enforcer—face masked by a scaled respirator—kicked in a shack door. An elderly man stumbled out, hands raised. Pak Eko, Bintang realized, the tailor who’d mended his shirts for free. The enforcer raised a pistol.

Bintang moved before he could think. He vaulted the rooftop’s edge, landing hard on a laundry line that snapped under his weight. He hit the ground rolling, pain shooting up his shin, and lunged. The enforcer turned, but too late—Bintang drove a knife into his throat. Warm blood sprayed his wrists.

Pak Eko stared, trembling. “B-Bintang? You’re one of them?”

Them. Not a freedom fighter. A killer.

Before he could answer, a hand yanked him backward. Mira, her eyes wild. “Idiot! They’ll swarm your location!” She shoved the toddler into Pak Eko’s arms. “Run. Now.”

As they vanished into the smoke, Amir descended from the roof, a stolen rifle in hand. “Nine Dragons are setting checkpoints. We’re pinned.”

Bintang scanned the carnage. His people—his people—scurried like rats. This is what war looks like, he realized. Not the clean strike he’d envisioned, but a cancer, consuming everything.

Amir cocked the rifle. “What now, leader?”

The word leader dripped with venom. Bintang closed his eyes, seeing again the port explosion—Feng Bao’s fury made flesh. This was the dragon’s answer: not a duel, but annihilation.

“We retreat,” Bintang said.

Amir scoffed. “Retreat? After this?”

“To fight tomorrow.” He grabbed Amir’s arm, voice low. “Gather whoever’s left. The sewers, the old mosque tunnels—anywhere they won’t torch. We rebuild. Smarter.”

Amir hesitated, then nodded. As he melted into the shadows, Bintang turned back to the flames.

The war has truly begun.

But wars weren’t won with bombs. They were won with teeth.