The riot line was a wall of black plastic shields and faceless helmets, but the rooftop kids didn't flinch. They'd never planned for violence — they'd planned for volume.
In the cold morning light, the storm that had started on a single rooftop now rolled like thunder down every street that led to the precinct. More kids poured in — dancers who once trained under Starline but never debuted, dropouts who'd sold their guitars to pay rent, hackers who'd slipped past firewalls for the first time just to keep the stream alive.
They didn't carry signs. They carried old amps strapped to backpacks, cardboard drums, mics duct-taped to battery packs. This was no ordinary protest. This was a broadcast that refused to die.
Inside the precinct gates, Minjun stood still as the riot line closed around him. Seojin barked into her phone, voice clipped with rage, calling for more men, more blockades, more lawyers. The chain of command buckled as her polished PR calm slipped, replaced by the bare edge of fear: the one thing she'd always hidden behind boardroom smiles.
Jiwoo leaned into Minjun, shoulder to shoulder, bruises blooming purple along his cheekbone. "They think this is just kids with phones," he rasped, half laughing. "They don't know it's an army."
Miri wiped dried blood from her lip with the back of her hand. "They're going to block the feeds. You know that, right?" She flicked her eyes at Minjun. "They'll pull the plug. Cut the wires. Kill the stream."
Minjun's answer was soft — but every word hit like a drum. "Then we make them listen anyway."
Down the street, the rooftop kids had already moved.
The old punk crew from Hongdae, the buskers who'd dragged the piano onto the roof, the student coders Miri had once taught to slip past Starline's digital leash — they all fell into rhythm like pieces of the same song.
One kid dragged a battered generator onto a curb. Another pulled extension cords from a backpack patched with old tour stickers. A third perched on a streetlight with a projector strapped to his chest, aiming at the blank wall of a nearby bank tower.
Somewhere behind them, a lone violinist — maybe seventeen, hair dyed pink and shaved on one side — started playing Minjun's rooftop anthem. Soft at first, swallowed by the hum of the barricade's roar. Then louder. Clearer. Bolder.
One by one, the voices joined.
Inside the precinct, a junior guard glanced at his phone under his helmet, eyes flicking to the feed before the riot commander slapped it out of his hand. It didn't matter. The feed was alive in the riot line's earpieces, too — humming in their pockets, buzzing in their chests like a heartbeat.
When the rooftop kids hit the switch, the bank's blank wall exploded into light.
Minjun's face — battered, eyes ringed with exhaustion but burning with something cleaner than fear — filled twenty stories of cold glass and steel. No corporate logo, no studio watermark. Just Minjun, and the rooftop anthem, and the kids who refused to let the broadcast die.
It wasn't a PR stunt. It wasn't a press release. It was raw and cracked and real.
Seojin saw it over her shoulder, reflected in the black gloss of a riot shield. Her voice cracked on her phone. "Shut it down!" she barked to the comms team. "Every screen! Every feed!"
But the rooftop kids didn't run cables through the usual wires. They piggybacked on stolen Wi-Fi, on city CCTV signals, on unlocked subway routers. The broadcast didn't care about official networks anymore — it jumped like lightning from rooftop to rooftop.
Minjun stepped forward. A guard moved to block him, but Jiwoo shouldered the man aside with all the weight his bruised frame could carry. Miri hooked her arms into Minjun's, steadying him as he climbed onto the back bumper of the police van.
He stood higher than Seojin now — higher than the riot shields, higher than the plastic wall meant to cage him in.
His wrists were still bound, but his voice wasn't.
He didn't have a mic — he didn't need one. The amps strapped to backpacks and window sills and café rooftops did the work.
He didn't yell. He didn't beg. He didn't read a statement.
He sang.
A single note at first — rough, raw, cracking through the cold dawn air. Then another. A simple melody — the rooftop anthem, stripped bare of fancy arrangement, back to its bones.
It hit the kids at the barricade first — their phones trembled in their hands as they lifted them higher, streaming his voice out to a thousand feeds.
Then the riot shields quivered as the guards flinched. Some lowered their visors to hide the way their eyes betrayed them — young, exhausted, half wanting to hum along.
Seojin turned away. She couldn't stop him now. She knew it.
The song rose — a ragged, half-broken hymn that refused to die. The kids behind the barricades caught it, mouths moving even if they didn't know every word. They didn't need to. They knew the feeling.
They knew what it meant to be told shut up, sit down, sign here, smile like we say.
They knew what it meant to climb a rooftop just to breathe.
They knew what it meant to find someone singing into the dark, reminding them they weren't alone.
A cheer broke through the barricades — not a chant this time, but an answer. Kids banging buckets and drums, violinists threading new notes through the gaps, a half-broken electric guitar screaming along with the sunrise.
It was messy, imperfect, glorious.
And unstoppable.
The rooftop broadcast was no longer just a stream. It was a storm crawling through fiber optic lines, hijacking screens in subway cars, flickering across cracked phone displays on city buses. It spilled into classrooms and kitchens, filling headphones meant to drown out the world.
It didn't ask permission. It didn't apologize. It just was — raw and alive and louder than any PR spin could smother.
Minjun's voice cracked on the last note, but he didn't care. He didn't need perfect pitch. He needed to remind them — them all — that the rooftop wasn't a building anymore. It was them. It was every kid humming along, fists drumming against their ribs, eyes wide open for the first time in forever.
Jiwoo threw his head back and laughed through the pain in his ribs. Miri pressed her forehead to Minjun's shoulder, eyes squeezed shut, humming along like the world depended on it — because maybe, tonight, it did.
When the last chord faded, the riot line didn't move. The rooftop kids didn't move.
For a heartbeat, the whole city held its breath.
Then someone in the back screamed the new chorus: "WE! ARE! ROOFTOP!"
And this time, nobody tried to stop them.