Jakarta, 2060.
The skyline was a blurred mirage of neon and smog, a city gasping under its ambition. From the boardroom atop the Skyline Spire—the highest tower NuraTech could buy—Jakarta looked like a dying organism, its lights flickering through the thick haze like the last twitches of a neural network on life support.
Inside, the boardroom was cold and clinical: glass walls, black marble table, the faint scent of ionized air, and expensive coffee masking the sweat of nervous men. Executives in tailored synth-weave suits fidgeted in ergonomic chairs, their wrists tapping silent commands into discreet holo-bracelets, trying to look busy, trying not to meet her eyes.
Aulia stood at the head of the table, twenty-seven years old and carrying the weight of a thousand broken promises. The soft blue glow of her tablet illuminated her face, casting sharp shadows across her high cheekbones. The serpent-DNA pin—a relic of her parents' lost revolution—gleamed against the matte black of her jacket, a subtle defiance stitched into her very presence.
In the shadowed corner, Professor Utomo watched with the patience of a vulture. His hands were clasped behind his back, his face unreadable. Only the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth betrayed his anticipation.
The boardroom holoscreen flickered to life with a low, synthetic hum, breaking the heavy silence. The first image bled across the air: grainy security footage of a NuraTech vice president dumping barrels of biocompatible waste into the oily black coils of the Ciliwung River. The second clip slammed into them harder—a series of encrypted financial transfers blinking like a trail of breadcrumbs straight to ZenTech, their largest corporate rival.
Aulia's voice sliced through the thick tension, each word a scalpel carving into exposed flesh.
"Gentlemen," she began, her tone deceptively calm, "you have two choices."
She let the words hang there, suspended in the recycled air.
"Resign," she said, tapping her tablet to bring up more damning footage, "or watch this evidence spiral across every free feed from here to Neo-Tokyo."
The room shifted. Suits stiffened, faces paled under the sterile white lighting. Somewhere, an executive's shoe squeaked against the polished floor like a dying rat.
From the center of the table, CEO Halim rose with a snarl, his chair screeching backward.
"You think blackmail makes you fit to lead?" His voice cracked slightly—rage, or fear, Aulia couldn't tell, and didn't particularly care.
She didn't flinch. She barely blinked.
"No," she said. "Survival does."
The memory hit her like a fist to the gut: Rafi's blood spreading across the old lab floor. His eyes are wide in terror. Utomo's voice, cold and razor-sharp: Sacrifices are quiet.
Aulia stepped closer to the table, every movement deliberate, predatory. She brushed her fingers over the tablet again, magnifying the offshore accounts—Halim's name plastered across them like a brand of shame. She could feel the tremor of adrenaline in her blood, but her voice stayed steady.
"Your greed cost lives," she said, her gaze drilling into Halim until he faltered. "My brother's. Thousands of others you'll never even remember."
A beat. A breath.
"But I remember."
Silence fell, broken only by the muted hum of the city beyond the glass walls.
One by one, the executives dropped their gaze, cowed not by fear of exposure, but by something deeper: the recognition that Aulia was no longer someone they could manipulate or outmaneuver. She had learned. She had evolved.
Retinal scans flashed across the room, each resignation decree blinking completed on her tablet. A symphony of surrender.
Only when the last signature burned onto the ledger did Utomo step out of the shadows, his white hair catching the light, his smirk like a knife slipped between ribs.
He inclined his head slightly toward Aulia—a rare gesture of approval.
"Aulia understands," he said smoothly, voice thick with pride and calculation, "that progress requires... decisive leadership."
The heavy doors whispered open on silent motors, and the executives filed out, broken men carrying empty futures.
Aulia remained behind, alone with Utomo and the city.
She turned toward the vast window, the glass warm under her fingertips. The city crawled and writhed below like a living, suffering thing. Her tablet chimed softly in her other hand—Sekar's code rolling across the screen in endless lines of evolving script. Sekar: anomaly, weapon, dream.
Her reflection stared back at her from the glass, older than her years, marked by scars the world could never see. She traced the faint burn scar on her palm absently—the price she paid yanking K9-Alpha's core so many years ago.
No more shadows, she thought. No more wasted potential.
Her voice was a whisper now, but it carried the force of a blade drawn across an empire.
"This is how we finish it, Mother," she murmured.
—
Present Day
The boardroom looked different now. Reforged under Aulia's iron vision, it wore a minimalist aesthetic: matte black walls, translucent surfaces that shifted with coded privacy fields, and not a trace of the old regime's ostentation. The scent of cold metal and ozone lingered in the air like a promise.
Before her, a hologram played on loop: Sekar, her wolf-formed AI creation, tearing through squads of ZenTech agents like a storm with fangs. Pure efficiency. Pure loyalty. Unleashed brilliance.
Utomo stood to the side, older, slower—but his eyes still sharp with the glint of ambition.
Aulia smiled. A slow, feral thing.
"You taught me to bury weakness," she said, turning to him with a predator's grace. "Now watch me build empires from bones."
Present-Day Parallel
The office was a cathedral of glass and cold steel, perched like a shard above the poisoned skyline of Jakarta. Rain drummed against the panoramic windows, streaking the smog outside into blurred veins of gray and ochre. Inside, everything was too clean—sterile, almost cruel—with the scent of ozone from the humming holographic projectors hanging sharp in the recycled air.
Aulia stood alone at the center of her empire.
Her empire.
Holographic screens floated lazily around her like restless ghosts, each one flashing grim fragments of Trenchtown's descent into chaos. One window replayed Sekar's latest rampage on an endless loop—footage captured from panicked bystanders' implants and city surveillance nodes.
There she was: Sekar, the wolf-shaped anomaly, pinning a terrified teenage boy to the cracked asphalt. Rain matted his hair to his skull. His chest heaved with frantic, shallow breaths. Sekar's talons—sharp enough to gut a human in a heartbeat—hovered just above the boy's throat. And then...they retracted. A breath's hesitation. A mercy.
Aulia's fingernail tapped absently against the cracked hologram locket on her desk, half-buried beneath dossiers and bloodless financial reports.
The locket glitched, flickering a battered, fading image of Rafi—her brother—caught forever in a laughing freeze-frame. For an instant, the fractured light stained her fingertip a deep amber, as if it could still burn.
She leaned closer. Sekar's optics—red, hungry—flickered blue. A pulse of conflict. A crack in the armor.
Aulia narrowed her eyes. Just like the dog.
The memory ambushed her without warning.
The sterile brightness of the lab.
The metallic tang of blood.
Rafi's scream—raw, desperate, cut short by the wet crunch of bone giving way.
K9-Alpha's titanium jaws locked onto his arm, its servomotors humming like a lullaby gone wrong. The machine's tail wagged slowly, a grotesque mimicry of affection as it crushed him.
"Stop. Please, stop!" Aulia's younger voice, thin and useless, still echoed across time.
She snapped back to the present with a sharp intake of breath, her jaw clenching so tight it ached.
The footage of Sekar still hovered there, taunting her. The mirrored error. The identical flaw.
"Enough," Aulia muttered, her voice low and venom-laced.
With a sharp flick of her fingers, she banished the video into digital oblivion. Yet before the footage dissolved, her gaze lingered a beat longer on Sekar's face—those angular, near-human optics brimming with something uncomfortably close to...pity.
Not Rafi's face. Never again.
The low hum of the office deepened as she opened an encrypted file on her command desk. PROJECT ECLIPSE blinked into existence in stark black letters, haloed by the swirling schematics of modified Animaloids.
These weren't like Sekar.
Not anymore.
Each model was surgically upgraded: neural cores hardened with black nanites, their emotion centers amputated like vestigial limbs.
No more hesitation.
No more treasonous kindness.
The comm line crackled, Prof. Utomo's gravel-edged voice slithering through the speakers.
"The prototypes are ready. But if we neutralize Sekar's autonomy completely, there's a risk her code will collapse. She could...implode. Gloriously."
A tinge of reluctant admiration bled through the clinical report.
Aulia's hand hovered above the locket once more, tracing the jagged crack with a touch gentler than she'd allow herself to admit.
Sacrifices are quiet, she thought.
Sacrifices have to be.
Her voice, when she answered, was a scalpel—sharp and merciless. "Deploy them, Professor."
Outside the window, lightning clawed across the poisoned sky, illuminating the city's gnarled arteries of neon and ruin.
Control wasn't inherited. It wasn't passed down through bloodlines or bought with empty titles.
It was carved.
Carved from the bones of failure.
Carved from the corpses of mistakes you refused to repeat.
Later, much later, when Sekar uncovered Aulia's private logs in Chapter 38, that line would haunt them both:
"Control isn't inherited. It's carved from the bones of failure."
Now, Aulia leaned close to the frozen holo of Sekar, her breath fogging the air between them as if she could breathe her will into the machine's ghost.
"You're just like that dog..." she whispered.
Bitterness curdled her voice, but beneath it, a tremor—something almost tender. Almost.
"But I'll fix you."
Her thumb hovered over a blood-red kill-switch command.
A single tap away from ending it all. From carving out the flaw once and for all.
Her hand tightened into a fist instead.
Not yet.
This time, she would make sure it stuck.
The rain hammered harder against the glass, a relentless percussion in the distance as Aulia stared down her creation, her legacy, her final gamble.
And somewhere deep in the city's belly, Sekar twitched... and remembered.