During the same hour that Agent-90 waged his silent war against the assassins, another theatre of darkness unfolded beyond the city's luminous arteries—within KaoSec-07 Township, a regulated habitat zone under Corporate-Security Jurisdiction (CSJ).
KaoSec-07 was never meant to inspire.
It was engineered to function, contain, and endure.
Designed by joint councils of megacorporate architects and security engineers, the township embodied the governing axiom of Nin-Ran-Gi's dystopia: order above freedom, surveillance above comfort.
The city was arranged in concentric security rings, radiating outward from the Central Command Spire—a towering monolith of black alloy and reinforced glass. It housed administrative councils, surveillance AI cores, and drone command arrays. The spire never slept. Even in daylight, its windows glimmered faintly, like an unblinking eye fixed upon its own dominion.
Beyond it lay the Residential Blocks—brutalist megastructures stacked vertically, stripped of ornamentation and stripped of names. Each was identified only by alphanumeric designations. Balconies were shallow, utilitarian, often sealed with mesh fencing, less for safety than for restraint.
The Industrial and Utility Zones sprawled low and wide, choked with power substations, data farms, water recyclers, and ration-processing plants. Steam vents hissed endlessly. Coolant pipes laced the skyline like exposed veins, carrying lifeblood through steel arteries.
Transit Corridors sliced through the township—elevated rails above, narrow shadowed roads below. The design discouraged loitering, discouraged gathering, discouraged thought.
The aesthetic was uniform: matte concrete, oxidised steel, EMP-hardened glass. Neon signage appeared only where navigation was compulsory. Everything looked heavy. Everything looked permanent. Everything looked slightly decayed—even when newly built.
At night, KaoSec-07 transformed.
Neon seams ignited along buildings and transit rails, casting sharp chromatic reflections across wet concrete. The sky glowed faintly red-orange from distant industrial zones. The township became alive—not loudly, but dangerously.
Off-shift workers murmured in alleys, trading contraband and rumours. Hackers tapped unsecured data streams from dim apartments. Underground couriers slipped through blind arcs between surveillance cameras. Sinners and outlaws passed through unnoticed, absorbed by the density. Illegal clubs hummed beneath residential blocks—music leaking where daylight forbade emotion.
The township's psychological design was deliberate: Tall buildings induced insignificance. Narrow streets have limited choice. Constant illumination erased privacy. Surveillance bred self-censorship.
People learned to survive by not being seen.
KaoSec-07 was a buffer between high-security districts and lawless outskirts. A recruitment pool for corporate enforcement. A pressure cooker where resentment fermented slowly, invisibly.
It was not a place where dreams were born.
It was a place where endurance replaced hope.
Within one of the Residential Blocks stood Sharma's residence—not merely a home, but a cognitive fortress.
The structure rose as a tiered monolith of obsidian and titanium, its faceted surfaces resembling a crystal grown rather than built. Embedded light-veins pulsed faintly in blue and violet, responding to neural activity within.
Its adaptive metamaterial walls shifted opacity according to Aarav Sharma's mental state—matte and inert when calm, rippling with fractal patterns under cognitive strain, like exposed brainwaves.
Inside, corridors curved and reconfigured via magnetic suspension. Floors subtly tilted and realigned. Orientation was a privilege reserved for the linked.
At its core hovered a circular chamber—the neurolink nexus—where Aarav interfaced directly with SSCBF's strategic lattice. There were no consoles. Data manifested as holographic thought-constructs, shaped by cognition alone.
Psychic shielding fields layered the residence. Unauthorized minds suffered headaches, spatial dissonance, emotional suppression merely by proximity.
That night, the light-veins burned brighter than usual. Holographic sigils drifted near the upper spires—thought-anchors stabilising Aarav's extended consciousness. The air hummed with low-frequency resonance.
Inside, Aarav conducted silent wars of cognition—reducing enemy movements to predictive probability clouds, refining thought-weapons capable of fracturing systems without a single bullet fired.
Outside, security patrols doubled. Civilians retreated indoors early. Even augmented street life quieted, as though the district itself sensed a mind awake that never truly slept.
It did not sense the intruder.
The security grid failed—not violently, but politely. One by one, surveillance nodes fell silent. A presence slipped through blind zones with surgical restraint.
The culprit entered through the rear access, moving with unhurried precision, footsteps placed where sound dissolved into architecture. Upstairs, water could be heard—steady, oblivious.
Aarav was showering.
The intruder descended instead, locating the basement reserves. He found the fuel canister without difficulty. Lifted it. Ascended again.
He noted the cameras as he passed—dead eyes, obedient in their silence.
In the attic, he reached the water filtration unit. Removed the lid. Poured the fuel carefully, methodically. No haste. No tremor.
Then he descended once more.
In a spare room, he found a lighter.
The bathroom door stood closed. Steam escaped beneath it. Inside, water gushed.
The intruder struck the lighter.
The flame caught.
He tossed it through the curtain.
Aarav's scream tore through the residence—brief, shocked, agonised—cut short by heat and chaos as fire consumed air, space, and certainty. The neural fortress became a furnace. Thought collapsed into instinct. Control into terror.
By the time the alarm systems spasmed back to life, it was already over.
The culprit was gone—slipping back into KaoSec-07's suffocating anonymity, leaving behind nothing but smoke, silence, and a mind that would never wake again.
In KaoSec-07, no one screamed for long.
And no one ever truly saw anything.