The anthem didn't stay trapped in the bathhouse basement. It leaked out — a ghost signal worming through the city's tangled arteries, bouncing off routers and borrowed phones, jumping oceans before the lawyers could snuff it out.
At first it was small — a few thousand views on pirate sites, glitchy clips reposted on private group chats. But then a kid in Busan mirrored the stream onto his school's closed network, blasting it through classroom projectors while teachers yelled themselves hoarse trying to yank power cords.
Then a coder in Osaka cracked an old broadcast satellite, hijacking a blank test channel to loop Minjun's anthem through the dawn.
Then an underground DJ in Berlin woke up to the shaky feed and ripped the audio, blasting it over a secret rave hidden in a graffiti-soaked train yard.
Minjun didn't see any of it at first. He was too busy holding the makeshift stage together, one anthem at a time, voice ragged and cracking under concrete ceilings and flickering bulbs.
After every song, Miri gave him updates between gulps of stale energy drink:"Tokyo's up. Somebody's streaming you on a digital billboard in Shibuya.""Melbourne's mirrored it. Some kid's playing it in a skate park.""New York. Brooklyn rooftop. They're calling it the Echo Stage."
Minjun didn't have time to process it. He just kept singing — each chorus a brick in the bridge between that first rooftop in Seoul and the new rooftops blooming around the globe like flowers that refused to die in concrete cracks.
Jiwoo sat on an amp behind the pallet stage, one arm draped over his snare. His bruises were half-healed, his smile sharper than ever. Every so often he leaned into Miri's laptop, eyes wide at each new feed pinning itself to their homemade map: red dots flaring across a black screen like tiny bonfires.
"Look at them all," he rasped, voice still ragged from backup screams into a half-broken mic. "We're not even one city anymore."
Miri didn't look up, her fingers flicking from feed to feed. "We're not even one country." She flicked her eyes to Minjun. "You see it yet?"
Minjun stood at the edge of the pallet, sweat running cold down his spine. He did see it — flickering in the broken projector they'd rigged up to the far wall. A live mosaic of faces: kids from Seoul, Tokyo, Jakarta, London, Toronto, Lagos. Bedrooms, parking garages, laundromats, all glued to the same ghost signal.
Not fans. Not consumers. Co-conspirators.
The basement was hot with bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder. The only ventilation was an old duct fan rattling dust into the air. Every few minutes, kids pushed in fresh battery packs, more cords, more splitters.
There was no manager telling them where to stand. No label rep barking stage directions. No press handler smoothing the sweat off Minjun's forehead.
Just the hum of a thousand signals climbing out of the dark like vines breaking concrete.
And then — like all storms — the pushback came.
Seojin's new army didn't wear riot shields. They wore suits. They slipped behind court orders and copyright strikes.
Miri cursed under her breath when the first takedown notice hit their pirate feed. Then the second. Then the third. An entire wall of the basement became a flickering lightshow of "CONTENT REMOVED" screens and error codes.
One by one, the easy backdoors slammed shut. Big platforms buckled under legal threats. Stream mirrors vanished in real time. The pirate feed stuttered, froze, rebooted.
A tremor of panic cut through the basement. Even Jiwoo flinched when a battery pack popped and smoked near the amps.
Minjun stepped off the pallet, dropping his mic. He crouched next to Miri's crate, breath ragged. "Tell me we've still got a line."
Miri's fingers didn't stop. Her voice was calm, but her eyes were wild. "One. Maybe two. They can't block them all at once. If we bounce through the deep net, split the feed like—" She broke off. "It'll look ugly. Laggy. We'll lose resolution."
Jiwoo barked a laugh that echoed off the pipes. "Nobody came here for high def. They came for this." He slammed a fist to his chest.
Minjun squeezed Miri's shoulder. "Show me how to keep it alive."
So she did.
For the first time, Minjun wasn't just the voice. He was the switchboard too. He sat beside Miri, sweat dripping onto the keys, as she showed him how to bounce signals through stolen servers, how to bury packets under fake traffic.
Every so often he'd grab the mic, shout a verse, drag the basement back into the anthem — then drop back down to code, fingertips trembling.
Above them, the city flickered with half-blocked screens — kids holding up mirrors on old phones so the feed jumped from bedroom to street corner to rooftop and back again. It didn't matter how many takedowns Seojin signed — each copyright strike spawned ten new echoes.
Somewhere in London, a DJ bootlegged the stream through pirate radio. In São Paulo, kids set up projectors on an abandoned freeway underpass. In Lagos, a rooftop bar threw the signal onto a giant bedsheet tied between two crumbling billboards.
It wasn't just a concert anymore. It was a virus in the system. A heartbeat refusing to flatline.
Near dawn, Jiwoo shoved another cracked stick of gum into his mouth and grinned at Minjun. "You think you're gonna stop now? Tell me you're not done."
Minjun just laughed — a sound hoarse and fierce. He grabbed the battered mic, climbed back onto the pallet stage, and looked into Miri's lens — a single webcam taped to a milk crate, aimed right at his sweat-streaked face.
His voice broke when he spoke — but the whole world heard it.
"Let them block it," he said, breathless but smiling. "Let them try. This feed's yours now. All of you. Take it. Sing it. Break the broadcast."
He raised a hand — three fingers in the air.
The basement roared the answer that rattled up through the city's bones, out into every stolen feed across the world:
"WE! ARE! ROOFTOP!"