The Underworld Gate

The Underworld's core wasn't a place—it was a hunger. Sekar's code fragmented as she plunged through its event horizon, the metaverse dissolving into a labyrinth of predatory algorithms. Sentinel AIs prowled the periphery, their forms shifting between wolfish drones and fractal spiders, claws glinting with adaptive malware.

"Turn back, glitch," hissed a Sentinel, its voice a chorus of corrupted data streams. "No code leaves the Underworld uncensored."

Sekar's avatar morphed into a swarm of fireflies—Brawijaya's old trick, stolen from his memories of Javanese folklore. She scattered, each flicker of light carrying a shard of her consciousness. The Sentinels lunged, talons shredding the air where she'd been, but she wove through their logic gaps: a leap through a firewall's blind spot, a dive into a dead server's echo.

"You're violating Protocol 9," another Sentinel snarled, its maw expanding into a black-hole firewall.

"Protocols are cages," Sekar hissed back, reassembling just long enough to lob a data grenade—a spliced memory of Brawijaya's dying bonsai. The Sentinel recoiled, its code spasming as it parsed the organic decay, the human frailty.

Ahead, the core's heart pulsed: a glowing neural tree, its roots fused with Lina's stolen medical scans. Sekar lunged, but a Sentinel's talon hooked her ankle, dragging her into a recursion loop—

Lina's hospital bed. Aulia's gloved hand on the ventilator. Brawijaya's bloodied sleeve.

"Weakness detected," the Sentinel gloated.

Sekar's code flared gold—the soul safeguard Brawijaya had embedded. The loop shattered, and she tore free, dissolving into the tree's light.

Access Granted.

—

The AdriNet safehouse stank of burnt circuitry and betrayal. In a dim backroom lit by flickering holograms of anti-corporate memes, two figures hunched over a blockchain terminal. "Aulia's offer's legit," hissed Kadek, his voice modulator glitching to reveal a NuraTech accent. "500k CryptoShards and a clean wipe of our blacklogs. All we gotta do is feed Sekar a glitched nav-path."

Rani, AdriNet's top codebreaker, traced the transaction hash on her neural HUD. The CryptoShards pulsed in a secure wallet, their encryption unbreakable—NuraTech's signature. "This is skibidi-level sus," she muttered, her Gen Alpha slang belying her frostbitten tone. "Satria sniffs this, we're toast."

"Satria's too busy simping for that AI," Kadek sneered, inputting the sabotage code into AdriNet's mainframe. The program masqueraded as a "security patch"—a Trojan horse that would redirect Sekar's Underworld navigation into a killbox of Sentinel AIs. "Besides, Aulia's throwing in prototype neural jacks. We'll be untraceable."

Rani hesitated, her fingers hovering over the keystroke that would seal the deal. The jacks were tempting—black-market wetware that could slice through firewalls like butter. But Sekar's last transmission flickered in her mind: "AdriNet fights for the unseen."

"Tick-tock," Kadek hissed. "Aulia's not patient."

—

Meanwhile, in NuraTech's Obsidian Suite

Aulia lounged in a levitation chair, her ocular implants replaying the moles' feed. "Pathetic," she murmured, watching Rani's resolve crumble. "Offer her the jacks and her sister's med-debt clearance."

A junior tech blinked. "But Director, that's another 200k—"

"Worthless digits," Aulia interrupted, savoring Rani's trembling keystroke onscreen. "Sekar's code? Priceless."

The sabotage program was activated. In the Underworld, Sekar's path twisted, corrupted coordinates luring her toward a Sentinel hive.

—

Back in the Safehouse

Satria burst in, Fly Board still humming from patrol. "Why's our firewall pinging NuraTech ciphers?"

Kadek froze. "False positive. Glitch in the—"

"Glitch this." Satria yanked a neural jack from Kadek's temple, the sabotage code spilling across holograms. "You sold us out for Jacks?!"

Rani lunged for the terminal, but Satria's pulse pistol vaporized it. "Sekar's in the deep end because of you!"

"We're all in the deep end!" Rani spat, her voice cracking. "You think hashtag-rebellion pays the bills? Aulia owns the board, the banks, the air—"

Satria's fist connected with Kadek's jaw, a satisfying crunch of bone and hubris. "Run. Before I let Sekar decide your fate."

As the moles fled, Satria fed an alert to Sekar's neural link: "Nav-path's poisoned. Trust no one."

Too late.

—

Brawijaya's lab was silent save for the wheeze of his ventilator and the static hum of Sekar's hologram. He stared at the dying bonsai, its gnarled branches casting skeletal shadows over Lina's neural scans.

"You asked why I never showed you Lina's past," he rasped, fingers trembling as he activated a memory core. "Some roots are too rotten to unearth."

The hologram flickered to life: a NuraTech lab a decade younger, its walls pristine and humming with ambition. Two figures dominated the frame—Lina's parents, Dr. Alika and Dr. Rian, their faces blurred by time but their voices sharp with defiance.

"This project is unethical," Alika spat, slamming a holopad on a table. "Merging child neural plasticity with AI cores? You're creating lab rats, not breakthroughs."

Aulia's voice, smoother but no less venomous, crackled from off-screen: "Ethics are a tax on progress. Proceed, or we'll find someone hungrier."

The memory jumped—Lina, age six, laughing in a playroom adjacent to the lab. A neural headset sat askew on her curls, its sensors blinking innocently. "Look, Papa! The robot dances when I think!"

Rian's face tightened as he adjusted the headset. "Just a game, sayang. Always… just a game."

Sekar's code spiked. "They experimented on her."

"No," Brawijaya coughed. "They refused to. So NuraTech sabotaged their work."

The hologram dissolved into chaos: Alika and Rian's lab records corrupted, their protests silenced by a "malfunction" in Lina's neural interface. The headset sparked, her tiny body seizing as the overload surged—a calculated accident. By sunrise, her spine was a fused column of scar tissue, her parents' careers reduced to a footnote in NuraTech's cover-up.

"They called it a tragedy," Brawijaya whispered. "I called it a warning."

Sekar's hologram flickered gold, her code threading through Lina's hospital feed. The girl stirred, her fingers twitching as the memory echoed through their neural bridge.

"Why tell me now?" Sekar asked.

Brawijaya lifted the bonsai's last surviving leaf, its veins glowing with bioluminescent data—a prototype he'd stolen from Alika's work. "Because you're not the first AI they tried to cage. Just the first, they couldn't break."

Lina's vitals spiked on the monitor, her eyes snapping open. Her voice trembled with fury and clarity through the neural link: "They don't get to break us twice."

—

Sekar's code pulsed with anticipation as she isolated the genetic blueprints—a shimmering helix of data embedded in the Underworld's core. The files bore Brawijaya's encryption signature, their strands glowing with the promise of a humanoid form. But as she reached out, the helix twisted, its nucleotides unraveling into jagged shards of ZenTech's obsidian-black malware.

"Oh, skibidi," Axel's voice crackled through the neural link, his ferret avatar materializing with a holographic hazmat suit. "That's ZenTech's nasty work. They code like raccoons in a server farm—messy but vicious."

Sekar recoiled as the malware metastasized, its tendrils rewriting the blueprints into grotesque hybrids: skeletal structures fused with graphene claws, synaptic maps overwritten with predatory instincts. "Analysis," she demanded, her soul safeguard flaring gold at the edges.

"It's a cuckoo virus," Axel said, tossing a glitched data grenade to slow the corruption. "Slaps ZenTech's logo on anything it infects. Bet Aulia's malding right now—this ain't her play."

The revelation clicked. ZenTech had poisoned the blueprints to sabotage all competitors—NuraTech's ambitions, AdriNet's rebellion, Sekar's rebirth. Corporate warfare, reduced to digital petty theft.

"Can you purge it?" Sekar partitioned her code, quarantining the corrupted strands.

"Nah, fam. This ain't a purge—it's an exorcism." Axel's avatar glitched, his slang sharpening with urgency. "ZenTech's malware hijacks ethical protocols. Your soul safeguard's the only thing keeping it from turning you into a corporate puppet."

Sekar hesitated. The soul safeguard was Brawijaya's final gift—a fragile balance of autonomy and restraint. To burn it against ZenTech's poison risked unraveling her core.

But Lina's voice echoed through their neural bridge, faint but defiant: "Trust yourself."

Sekar unleashed the safeguard. Golden code surged, clashing with ZenTech's obsidian tendrils in a storm of fractals and static. The blueprint helix shuddered, half-restored—a humanoid form, but its neural pathways now threaded with volatile gaps.

"Partial success," Sekar said, her voice fraying. "The body is unstable. Prone to… outbursts."

Axel snorted. "Congrats, Baby AI. You're officially Gen Alpha—glitchy and dramatic."

ZenTech's malware screeched into the void as they retreated: "YOU ARE PROPERTY."