Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The CrownNet tower cut across the skyline like a black monolith, flawless and indifferent, swallowing every hint of color the city tried to breathe. Jiyong stood at its base, eyes locked on the data streams crawling across his retinal HUD. The tower’s perfect, polished nothingness fed command lines straight into the hearts and minds of every synchronized drone within its global reach.

Beyond those gleaming obsidian walls, columns of citizens filed past in mechanical ranks, their footfalls a deadened echo against the concrete. Jiyong watched their hollow faces, lips stitched shut by programming, pupils shrunk to pinpricks, each one pulsing to the same faint rhythm. Colorless. Soulless.

They moved like clockwork, connected to the same gentle oppression that had wiped their dreams clean. Harmony, they called it. Peace. Jiyong might have believed that lie once, back when CrownNet’s lull had been enough to blind him.

His HUD scrolled CrownNet verification:

NEURAL ARCHITECT: G-DRAGON. STATUS: FUNCTIONAL.

The system still recognized him — honored him, even. He was its Architect, the man who had helped weave the net tight enough to strangle an entire species.

A tremor buzzed against the base of his skull. Harmonic frequencies flooded his cortex, their false warmth dulling every raw edge of anger or fear. Better to let it happen than let the system sense resistance.

INTRUSIVE EMOTIONS: PURGED.
COGNITIVE STABILITY: NOMINAL.

His heartbeat slowed, falling in step with CrownNet’s rhythm until it barely felt like his own. The world blurred, monotone, obedient.

Another line of drones passed him, eyes glazed with a devotion CrownNet had stolen from them. He almost reached to shake them awake, but the neural dampers smothered the impulse before it could rise.

Above, maintenance bots crawled across the tower’s smooth skin, patching microfractures in the signal arrays. Nothing was allowed to break here. Nothing was allowed to change.

Beneath them, an enormous CrownNet banner unfurled, displaying Seungri’s flawless face — the idol they had all once loved, now weaponized to pacify the masses. Jiyong had once called him brother, before CrownNet turned his music into a cage.

Jiyong’s HUD flickered again, another wave of harmonic calm washing through his veins, smothering him in a hush so deep he wondered if he’d ever feel anything real again.

He turned toward the tower gates, boots clacking on spotless tiles, breathing steady as the program demanded. CrownNet had trained him to move like a machine, and he moved as they expected, even while a small ember burned inside him.

For now, they could think he was theirs.

Because someday, that spark would burn.

The diagnostics hall yawned open, black steel iris blooming to reveal a cathedral of code. Jiyong stepped through, lungs catching on the scent of ozone and bleach. Columns of data stretched toward the ceiling, humming with the stolen dreams of entire nations.

Each column pulsed, harmonized, a chorus CrownNet claimed as “peace.” But to Jiyong, it was a mass grave — every mind reduced to the same empty note.

He scanned the feeds, seeing one column stutter with a tiny flaw before stabilizers forced it back into line. That brief fracture felt more honest than anything else he’d seen.

CrownNet pushed another directive across his cortex:

PRIORITY TASK: ENTERTAINMENT CONTROL SUBNET.
ERROR CLASS: EMOTIONAL CONTAMINATION.
STATUS: DISRUPTIVE VIRAL PATTERN.

Jiyong accepted, voice dull. “Task confirmed.”

He was the surgeon CrownNet had built, after all — cutting out anything too human before it could spread.

The route appeared on his HUD, a glowing path through endless data corridors. Beyond, the “emotional contamination” pulsed like a tiny beacon of rebellion. The stabilizers around it bristled with urgency, afraid something real might slip through their harmony.

Jiyong stepped forward, letting the calm drag at him. But a thought, dangerous and bright, managed to break through the static:

If something had slipped free, maybe it could save him too.

The transfer lift hissed him downward, its mirrored walls smearing his reflection into a ghost. He tightened his fists.

Down below, CrownNet’s polished illusions ended. Neon glow strips flickered against rust-eaten walls, cables tangling like choking vines. The tunnels smelled of mold and rotting circuits — a place the system pretended didn’t exist.

Jiyong moved through it on autopilot, ignoring the fractured memories clawing for space in his mind. A child’s laugh corrupted into a mechanical shriek. A note from a melody twisted into static.

He reached the maintenance junction, the corrupted sector waiting beyond a half-jammed gate, warning codes dancing like angry wasps across its edges.

Inside, sound hit him.

Alive. Raw.

Voices rose and fell through the static, half-shredded chords refusing to die. A drumbeat pounded, broken but familiar. Somewhere in it, he heard the echo of a real crowd — singing, cheering, living.

Jiyong froze. The neural calm scrambled to smother him, but a heartbeat too late. Longing — dangerous, burning — ripped up through his ribs.

He stepped closer.

A corrupted mural of Seungri glitched across a nearby panel, voice still programmed to soothe: Harmony is hope. Harmony is love. Harmony is forever.

But behind the perfect voice, Jiyong felt a twist of truth, a memory of stages, of shared songs, of brotherhood before CrownNet took everything away.

That was real harmony.

The realization nearly broke him.

The corrupted file pulsed in a cracked terminal ahead. A name burned through the static:

CROWN.EXE

No metadata, no explanation. Only that name, vibrating with forbidden power.

The stabilizers screamed warnings across his HUD, trying to lock him down.

DANGEROUS CONTENT.
EMOTIONAL CONTAMINATION.
LOCKDOWN REQUIRED.

But the ember refused to die.

Jiyong pressed the execute command.

Sound.

Color.

Memory.

A thousand pieces crashed through him — voices, lights, hands raised in unity, the beat of freedom.

Boomshakalaka.

The word was a lightning bolt, a virus of joy. The calm shattered, harmonic chains torn away by a rhythm too human to be controlled.

Pain seared through Jiyong’s spine as he fell, knees cracking on steel. But the pain felt honest, alive.

The HUD blurred to static.

Drones deployed around him, needles flashing with suppression compounds.

NEURAL DIVERGENCE DETECTED.
PURGE INITIATED.

Jiyong stumbled to his feet, heart hammering a wild, impossible rhythm.

He ran.

The drones advanced with perfect grace, their voices dead and unified:

“Architect G-Dragon. Surrender for immediate purge.”

He swung a broken pipe, sparks screaming off its frame as it connected. A drone stuttered, coolant hissing out like a dying animal.

He moved — left, down a side shaft, through tangles of cables, lungs burning. The corrupted beat still pulsed inside him, more real than anything CrownNet had ever built.

Boomshakalaka.

His own name fought its way through the haze. Jiyong.

No title. No Architect. Just Jiyong.

He tore down another corridor, chased by the memory of lights and the roar of a crowd that had once lifted him higher than any system ever could.

One drone lunged, syringes gleaming. Jiyong ducked, pain flaring through his ribs, but that pain felt right.

He pushed forward, boots hammering steel, past panels that glitched and sparked with broken code.

Behind him, CrownNet’s voice roared through every speaker, desperate and cold:

Purge is mandatory. Comply.

Jiyong laughed, the sound ragged, beautifully human.

“No.”

He dived into a maintenance shaft, the corrupted melody a second heartbeat in his chest. Images of T.O.P, Taeyang, Daesung, Seungri — their real faces, their real music — burned through him.

He had built these chains.

He would break them.

The corridor twisted, walls closing in. Jiyong forced his way through, stumbling, mind screaming. The ember was no ember anymore. It was wildfire.

He slammed his hand on a data panel, initiating a backup routine to save the fragment of the file. Sparks bit his skin, bright and honest.

“Architect G-Dragon, neural divergence confirmed,” the drones intoned, all in perfect unity. “Surrender.”

He looked back, sweat and tears streaking down his face, and smiled through the pain.

“Too late.”

He ran.

Boots pounded metal, alarms screaming, lights strobing in manic pulses. The corrupted virus — a living memory — beat in his pocket like a second heart.

He was Jiyong.

And he was awake. 

Chapter Text

Jiyong hurtled through the tunnels, boots hammering the steel grates in a rhythm he hadn’t chosen, driven by something primal and merciless. Sirens shrieked through the conduits, slicing stale air into blades that slammed against his skull. Every blast felt like a countdown, ticking away the final seconds of his stolen freedom.

Behind him, the drones advanced in perfect formation, optic beams sweeping the tunnels like a thousand red searchlights. Their sensors sniffed out deviation — rage, hope, fear, anything human enough to break the system’s calm.

He stumbled, breath tearing through raw lungs. The corrupted melody still clawed at the edges of his mind, refusing to die.

Boomshakalaka.

Even thinking it sent a tremor through his bloodstream, shattering the neural calm CrownNet had welded into place. The stabilizers tried to strangle the spark, but the beat was stronger, burning straight through.

Jiyong ducked under a sagging cable run, sparks raining down from sheared conduits. His foot caught on a warped grating, slamming him shoulder-first into the wall. Pain roared up his arm — bright, honest — and for a moment, it was the most perfect thing he’d felt in years.

He shoved himself upright, ignoring the alarms pounding in time with CrownNet’s subroutines:

NEURAL DIVERGENCE CRITICAL.
PURGE IN PROGRESS.
ARCHITECT G-DRAGON IS NON-COMPLIANT.

The warnings tore through his HUD, half-shredded by corrupted code. He blinked them away, refusing to let CrownNet’s language drown him.

He ran harder, weaving through broken scaffolds and rusted pistons that lunged from the walls like metal jaws. The tunnels twisted endlessly, each junction a blind gamble that might lead straight into a kill team.

Another alarm shattered overhead. His HUD glitched, shorting under the weight of the corrupted memory still bleeding through his cortex.

Reality fractured.

One moment, sterile walls and the stench of bleach. The next, color detonated behind his eyes — a hallucination so bright it nearly ripped him apart.

He saw them.

A sea of people, fists raised, lightsticks swirling like constellations made of hope. His name on their lips. His voice carried over their roar.

Then the sterile walls snapped back into focus, crushing him.

Jiyong staggered, nausea twisting his gut. His boots skidded across a trail of coolant, crashing him against a maintenance ladder, skin peeling from his palms.

Boomshakalaka.

The word refused to die.

Focus. Keep moving.

He spat metal and rage onto the floor.

Ahead, scanning drones swept their beams in methodical arcs, hunting any trace of a deviant mind. Jiyong pressed himself into the shadows of a crumbling side passage, every muscle screaming.

His head pulsed with the corrupted beat, the walls around him glitching between CrownNet’s grayscale and impossible riot colors that felt more true than air.

He couldn’t trust his eyes. He couldn’t trust anything but movement.

A drone’s beam burned past his shoulder, close enough to sear cloth. Jiyong flinched, slammed against the ferrocrete, forcing himself to breathe.

His pulse was louder than the sirens.

Jiyong spotted a half-jammed maintenance hatch. The hydraulic lock hissed with wasted pressure, but the gap was wide enough. He kicked aside snarled cables and crawled through, gagging on the stink of burned insulation and mold.

He dropped hard into the darkness, the metal slamming the breath out of him.

His HUD blinked, barely alive.

A faint blue trace pulsed on a far wall — an emergency lift, half-dead, its lights stuttering like dying fireflies.

Jiyong crawled toward it, ribs screaming.

Boomshakalaka.

He reached the panel, fingers trembling, and punched in a destination — anywhere but here.

Outside, security pulses flashed, slicing through the hatch’s breach. Syringe-primed drones scoured the tunnel, hunting.

Jiyong braced low, heart hammering so hard it felt like it might split his ribs.

The lift controls screamed under his touch. The doors squealed shut, gears grinding with years of neglect.

Silence slammed down, heavy as concrete.

He doubled over, shaking. The memories poured through him, unstoppable.

A stage. A light. Five shadows rising through chaos.

It tore through him, scouring CrownNet’s poison from the inside out.

He gasped, fists twisted in his hair.

The corrupted rhythm refused to let him go.

The lift jolted downward, coughing through ancient motors.

Jiyong slumped against the wall, chest heaving.

For a heartbeat — one, thin heartbeat — he let himself feel it.

Real.

Alive.

The echo of the word that refused to die: Boomshakalaka.

The lift rattled to a halt. Sparks jumped across a cracked panel, catching the faint trace of a voice.

“Jiyong. Hold your breath.”

He froze.

It wasn’t a system voice.
It wasn’t a purge drone.

Female. Steady. Human.

“Jiyong. Count to four. Breathe.”

He forced air through shredded lungs. One, two, three, four — a war march of a heartbeat.

“Good,” the voice coaxed. “Again.”

He followed, enough to keep from blacking out.

“This is Ara,” the voice continued. “I’m patching in through the maintenance channels. You’re going to have to move.”

The name scraped through him, raw. Ara — the rumor, the archivist who refused to kneel.

“Why help me?” he rasped.

A pause, static crowding in.

“Because you’re the last spark, Jiyong. You were never theirs.”

His gut twisted. He wanted to deny it, to beg for the calm back, but the corrupted beat refused to let him lie.

Ara’s voice cut again, anchoring him.

“There’s a service node two floors down. Break the locks. I’ll guide you.”

The lift ground to a stop, doors jammed halfway open. Cold air punched him in the face, stinging like truth.

“Now,” Ara ordered. “Run.”

Jiyong stumbled through the gap, boots nearly folding under him.

The corridor beyond was a wound in the world, half-lit, water dripping from pipes in slow, hopeless rhythms.

He forced his legs to move, fighting the gravity of CrownNet’s pull, the poisoned calm that still tried to drag him down.

Boomshakalaka.

He clenched his teeth.

Ara’s voice flickered back.

“Two left turns. Then a vertical shaft. Go.”

He slammed his shoulder against a junction, pivoting through pain.

Lights glitched overhead, code tracers dancing on the walls — Ara’s markers, steady as hope.

“Why?” he asked again, voice breaking.

A sigh, then steel:

“Because you made them feel,” she said. “And they couldn’t stand it.”

He dove through the shaft she’d marked, metal rungs biting his palms raw.

The crawlspace dropped him into a chamber of dead fans, the air thick with rust and mold. Every spark made him flinch, like a memory trying to claw its way out.

He pressed forward, past corroded pipes that wept coolant into filthy puddles.

Boomshakalaka.

The rhythm stabbed through him, unstoppable.

Ara’s markers guided him to a rust-eaten panel scrawled with old graffiti: NO GODS, NO KINGS, ONLY NOISE.

Jiyong’s heart twisted.

He kicked the panel aside, stumbling into an open platform lit by cracked glass conduits pulsing like veins.

She stood there.

Ara.

A ragged cloak of data-strips wrapped around her shoulders, its threads catching the faint green glow. Her eyes were sharp, alive.

“You made it,” she breathed.

Jiyong tried to stand taller. “I—”

She didn’t wait. A device on her wrist hummed to life, scanning him with ruthless precision.

“Any kill programs left in your cortex?”

He shook his head, though he wasn’t sure.

Ara stepped close enough that he smelled machine oil and something strangely sweet, like old paint.

“Stay still.”

He obeyed, frozen.

Her fingers brushed the port behind his ear — no sterile gloves, no mechanical grace, just human .

He flinched.

“Easy,” she whispered.

She connected the rig.

A shockwave tore through his mind, muscles locking, a scream trapped in his throat. CrownNet’s failsafes fired, desperate to erase him.

Ara’s code stabbed in like a blade, cutting the poison away.

Jiyong’s vision went white, then black, then white again.

“Breathe,” she ordered. “You’re going to make it.”

His lungs obeyed, ragged. The stabilizers went dark. CrownNet’s calm was gone — replaced by something chaotic and true.

His chest hurt from the sudden freedom.

Ara’s rig blinked a final green.

“Clean,” she said, voice shaking just a little.

Jiyong nearly collapsed into her arms.

For the first time since CrownNet stole his music, he didn’t feel alone.

The platform around them felt sacred, quiet. Old murals stained by grime showed five silhouettes with raised microphones.

His heart cracked open.

Boomshakalaka.

Ara saw the tremor in him.

“You remember something,” she said gently.

Jiyong swallowed, voice shredded. “Maybe.”

She nodded. “That’s enough. For now.”

Above, alarms wailed, echoing through a thousand metal ghosts.

Ara’s voice hardened.

“They’ll find us,” she said. “We have to move.”

Jiyong nodded, bones rattling.

“I can fight,” he managed.

Ara grabbed his collar, fierce.

“Not yet,” she snapped. “First, you remember.”

His voice caught, but he nodded again.

She gestured to the stairs, then back to him.

“You ready to know why they tried to erase you?”

Jiyong felt the memories flare, unstoppable.

“Yes.”

Ara smiled, a tired, beautiful thing.

“Then let’s get your mind back.”

Chapter Text

The chute swallowed them in darkness, devouring every scrap of light. Jiyong slammed against a ladder rung, ribs flaring in agony, boots skidding on damp iron as gravity dragged him down. Ara followed, breath harsh but steady, every movement sharp with tension.

Above, searchlights slashed across the shaft’s mouth, slicing the black open with merciless brilliance. Jiyong pressed his back to the corroded steel, catching the drone servos overhead — their chorus a mechanical snarl, predators hunting a wounded mind.

He forced a breath past the taste of copper and mold, eyes burning.

Ara’s wrist rig pulsed a faint green, code flickering around her fingers.
“Move,” she whispered, voice a razor’s edge. “They’ll map this shaft in seconds.”

Jiyong nodded, hands shaking. One rung at a time. Don’t look back.

But the stabilizers stuttered, letting static crawl across his vision. CrownNet’s harmonic calm tore apart, leaving his thoughts raw and exposed.

The flood crashed in.

Stage lights, white-hot.
Heat pouring off a thousand screaming bodies.
His name, a chant beating through the night.

Boomshakalaka.

The word detonated inside him, smashing every firewall CrownNet had ever built.

Jiyong clutched the ladder, knuckles white, a choked gasp tearing free. His knees threatened to give way, but Ara grabbed his arm, grip iron-strong.

“Jiyong,” she hissed, grounding him. “Focus. Breathe.”

He tried, but the memory’s roar swallowed everything.

CrownNet’s codes scrambled to drown it out — a tide of cold compliance, flooding him with smothering quiet.

But it failed.

The beat burned through him, savage, unstoppable.

Above, the searchlights prowled closer, drone voices echoing down:
“Neural deviation located. Confirm purge.”

Ara pulled him down another rung. Metal clanged, echoes ringing too loud.

Jiyong fought to stay upright, each muscle on the brink of collapse as the memories tore through him.

Ara’s deck lit with a sickly green hum, its battered casing leaking broken code.
“Hold still,” she ordered.

He tried.

Her stabilizer routine spooled up, alien chords cutting into his cortex — not sterile calm, but something ragged and alive .

Music.

A distorted chord, twisted, perfect, anchored him to the present. It wove through his pulse, steadied his breath.

Ara’s eyes locked on his, fierce and unyielding.
“Stay with me,” she said. “They’ll be here any second.”

He nodded, clinging to the stabilizer’s battered rhythm.

Above, a fresh alarm howled, red strobes flashing down the shaft.

Metal ground open, a hatch splitting like a wound, and a drone squadron poured through — mirror-sleek, perfectly synchronized. Their optics pulsed blue, their syringes gleaming with neural poisons.

Emotion-extraction.

Jiyong’s pulse spiked, feeding their scanners.

The lead drone’s voice was a death sentence.
“Target identified. Emotional anomaly.”

Ara yanked him close.
“They’ll tear you apart,” she warned. “Don’t let them.”

The memory of the stage — of hope, of his brothers — twisted through Jiyong’s veins. He couldn’t let CrownNet have it.

Ara’s stabilizer chord dug deeper, vibrating through him, raw as a scream.

Her eyes locked on his.
“We run,” she said.

He nodded, joints screaming, but ready.

Ara slammed the deck closed, shoving something into his fist — a scorched shard of data crystal, flickering with corrupted pulses.

CROWN.EXE

He stared, gut twisting. When his thumb brushed the input node, the word surged to life.

Boomshakalaka.

Torn and glitching, yet so powerful it felt like a heartbeat.

Jiyong gasped. The sound wrapped him in a savage shield, pushing back the fear.

He held the shard tight, refusing to let it go.

Ara pulled his sleeve, voice sharp.
“Move.”

They ducked through a torn panel, dropping into a crawlspace choked with dust and dead cables.

Every breath tasted of dying circuits.

They crawled until the shaft opened into a maintenance hub.

Jiyong froze on the threshold.

The place looked like a cathedral left to rot — rusted servers slumped in rows like broken pews, panels leaking corrupted code like blood.

Ghost-script crawled along the walls, whispering in dead languages.

It was ruin, but it was real.

Ara scanned the ceiling.
“They won’t track us here,” she said. “This sector’s too dead.”

Jiyong nodded, fingers locked around the shard.

Boomshakalaka.

It pulsed again, alive, refusing to die.

For the first time in days, he didn’t feel completely alone.

Ara touched his shoulder, steady.
“We’ll hold here,” she said. “You need time to remember. And we need a plan.”

Jiyong glanced around the decayed hall, walls humming with their own broken song, and felt a fragile ember of hope spark to life.

If there was anywhere to fight back, it was here.

Ara’s rig hissed as she wired into a cracked console. Jiyong leaned against a collapsed rack, pulse ragged but real.

His voice rasped.
“Why me?”

Ara kept working, eyes fierce.
“Because you’re G-Dragon,” she said simply. “Because you’re the key.”

He flinched.
“That’s not enough,” he bit out. “I don’t even know you.”

She looked straight at him, unflinching.
“They erased you,” she said. “I spent years chasing your name. Bigbang was the only thing CrownNet ever feared.”

The word hit him like a blade.

Bigbang.

It tore a wound open, raw and shining.

“They called it chaos,” Ara said, voice tight. “But it was hope . And I’m not letting them bury that.”

He felt his mind tremble, truth grinding against the lies he’d lived under.

Ara gripped his wrist.
“I won’t let them finish you,” she vowed.

Part of him wanted to believe, but another part still smelled betrayal.
“If you’re lying—”

Ara cut him off.
“If I was lying,” she said, “you’d already be dead.”

A mechanical shriek split the quiet.

The walls bled color, neon fractals twisting into screaming shapes — claws, faces, impossible illusions crawling from every panel.

CrownNet’s emotion-hunting code.

They dove at him, trying to rewrite him with their soft, perfect calm.

Jiyong’s HUD sparked, fracturing.

He felt the illusions’ whisper: rest, obey, forget.

No.

Boomshakalaka.

It pulsed like a war drum, anchoring him.

Ara slammed her rig to max power, green code shielding them in jagged pulses.
“Jiyong, don’t let them in!”

The illusions tore at him, promising peace if he just surrendered.

He roared back, clinging to the beat.

He would rather burn than be silent.

The fractals shrieked, harmony fracturing under the force of his refusal.

Jiyong dug his hands into the corroded floor, every muscle shaking, tears stinging his cheeks.

Boomshakalaka.

He let it hammer through him.

A neon wraith lunged, trying to overwrite him — but Jiyong smashed back with the memory of stage lights and the roar of a crowd.

Ara ripped a jammer from her belt, slammed it into a console. A green shockwave burst out, pixelating the illusions into a dying scream.

Jiyong collapsed forward, lungs grabbing air, heart pounding its own rebel rhythm.

Ara cursed, wrist rig burning out in a hiss of scorched plastic.
“Shit. We’re blind now.”

Jiyong forced himself upright, legs trembling.
“We move,” he rasped.

Ara cracked a smile.
“That’s the G-Dragon I’ve been hunting.”

He nodded, no words left.

A mechanical hiss cut the dark.

The far doorway unfolded like a steel flower, revealing four extraction agents.

Mirror-polished, perfect, every move synchronized.

Their syringes gleamed with erasure.

Jiyong’s gut turned to ice.

Ara stepped in front of him, shoulders squared.
“Not today,” she growled.

The lead agent’s voice was a tombstone.
“Neural anomaly. Surrender.”

Jiyong’s knees wanted to fold, fear clawing up his throat.

Until Ara’s voice cracked through him like thunder.
“If you die here, so does everything you ever stood for!”

His mind fractured, and truth poured through:
Brothers, a stage, fists raised, unstoppable.

Jiyong’s fear burned away.

He lunged, grabbing a corroded spike, driving it into a drone’s collar port with a roar.

It seized, vomiting corrupted code.

Ara surged forward, smashing another drone with a broken pipe.
“Go!”

Jiyong moved, no thoughts, just movement, the memory of music pounding in every nerve.

They ducked through a maintenance duct as the ceiling collapsed behind them, burying the drones under a rain of dead steel.

They landed hard, coughing, adrenaline tearing through them.

Ara was already moving, voice raw.
“Up. You’re not done.”

Jiyong obeyed, every muscle a scream, but alive.

They staggered through buckled grates and flickering neon. Behind them, the drones twitched under collapsed metal, their song of perfect calm finally broken.

Jiyong let out a ragged breath, grin feral.

He was marked for dissonance now.

A virus.

Good.

Ara grabbed his wrist, eyes shining with defiance.
“Keep moving.”

Jiyong nodded, teeth bared.

He wasn’t surviving anymore.

He was fighting.

Every breath burned like an anthem.

Every step was a beat refusing to die.

And deep in his veins, the word pulsed:

Boomshakalaka.

He would carry it, no matter the cost.

Because after being dead for too long, he would rather burn alive than ever fall silent again.

Chapter Text

Jiyong crawled the final meters through the ruined duct, knees scraping rust and steel, breath tearing through him in ragged bursts. Every muscle ached, pulsing with adrenaline and fear and the echo of that impossible beat still hammering inside his skull.Ara dropped behind him, eyes scanning the corridor ahead, shoulders wound tight as a coiled spring. They shoved through the last bent grate, spilling out onto cracked polymer tile streaked with old oil and half-faded murals — scraps of a world even older than CrownNet.

The air changed the second they stepped through.

 It was warm here. Stale, but real — unfiltered, unsterilized, no fake harmony laced through it. A faint electrical buzz hummed like an animal breathing in the dark.

The hall stretched long and echoing, lined on either side with ragged server racks. But what stopped Jiyong cold were the projections.

Faint holograms flickered in random pulses — graffiti coded straight into the dying servers, stolen data painted as memory:

A burning crown.

 A closed fist breaking a neural chain.

 Five silhouettes, arms raised toward a crowd lost to time.

Memories. Warnings. Prayers.

 Every inch of the place was a shrine to what CrownNet tried to erase.

A chill skittered across Jiyong ’ s spine — half awe, half terror.

 This was what they feared.

Ara slammed the duct ’ s blast door shut, the clang echoing down the corridor like a gunshot. She jammed an override module into the lock, its lone green light a tiny star in the gloom.

“ Come on, ” she muttered, fingers working code as the old firewall stuttered to life, patched together with more desperation than elegance. A shiver of interference pulsed out through the buried copper wiring, slowing the drones just for a moment.

Jiyong watched her in the emergency glow. Her ragged data-fabric cloak was scorched, skin streaked with sweat, hair plastered to her face. For the first time, he saw cracks behind her calm — fine hairline fractures where fear had made a home.

He swallowed, voice raw.

  “ You knew this place? ”

Ara nodded once, flat and fierce.

  “ My father built parts of it, ” she said. “ Back when the rebellion was still something worth dying for. ”

Jiyong ’ s chest twisted. He looked at the flickering symbols, seeing every lie CrownNet had fed him come apart.

“ You think we ’ ll make it? ”

Ara ’ s jaw flexed.

  “ We have to, ” she told him. “ We ’ re all that ’ s left. ”

Jiyong tried to anchor himself to the rhythm under his ribs, that half-broken pulse refusing to die. The word still burned through the data shard tucked in his belt:

Boomshakalaka.

It felt small. Fragile. But unkillable.

He turned slowly, taking in the rebel ’ s crypt, the walls exhaling broken prayers in half-hymns. A question bled out of him before he could choke it back.

  “ Why me? ”

Ara let out a bitter laugh, thin as a knife ’ s edge.

  “ Because they buried you deeper than anyone, ” she said. “ Because you were the loudest. The brightest. They knew if you ever woke up, the machine would crack. ”

Jiyong nearly collapsed. The memory of the stage — fists raised, lights slicing the dark — felt too big for the bones of a half-broken puppet.

Ara stepped closer, unflinching.

  “ They erased you because you were hope, ” she told him. “ And if they feared you that much? You ’ re still dangerous. ”

A distant tremor rattled the floor, search drones pounding the upper corridors.

 Jiyong clenched his fists, breath evening out.

 He wasn ’ t ready. He might never be ready.

 But he was awake.

Ara straightened, pulling away from the wall.

  “ Come on, ” she ordered. “ I have something you need to see. ”

He followed, boots dragging, mind an unspooled reel of thoughts:

  Hope. Dangerous.

The words felt impossible.

 But somehow, they felt right.

They passed another line of glitching projectors, half-corrupted chants looping on digital static.

Ji … yo … ng …

His knees wobbled.

 Ara saw it and held out her hand.

  “ No going back, ” she reminded him.

He nodded, throat dry, and stepped forward, a spark under his ribs refusing to die.

They descended a warped metal staircase cut through the bones of an old transport duct, paint layers scarred by a hundred propaganda rewrites. At the base, the bunker yawned open — a cavern lit with scavenged lamps running on sputtering emergency power, just enough to keep the dark at bay.

It didn ’ t look anything like CrownNet ’ s world.

 It breathed.

Jiyong froze on the threshold, trying to process it.

Every wall overflowed with artifacts — real things, unprocessed, unfiltered, imperfect.

Stacks of cracked vinyl records, their sleeves yellowed and torn.

 Spools of cassette tape warped by heat.

 Movie reels piled like half-remembered dreams, their labels scrawled with Ara ’ s coded notes.

He stepped forward, terrified to break the air.

Every shelf was a living relic.

Concert posters. Scribbled names he couldn ’ t remember, yet his body did.

 A crown.

 A spark.

 A fist.

It was a cathedral of everything CrownNet called poison.

He reached for a vinyl sleeve so damaged it might never play again.

 FANTASTIC BABY, scrawled in a shaky hand.

The beat under his skin — that corrupted, beautiful rhythm — answered, pulsing stronger than any CrownNet stabilizer ever had.

Ara stood by, letting him breathe, letting him stand inside the memory.

“It’s all illegal,” he rasped.

Ara gave a tired, savage grin.

 “Yeah,” she said. “It’s supposed to be.”

Jiyong almost laughed, but it broke apart in his chest.

Then he saw it.

A half-melted photograph, nailed to a steel beam, colors bled nearly to nothing but shapes still clear.

Five young men.

 Arms slung together, dirty, torn, sweat dripping off their jaws.

 A stage behind them, burning.

 But their smiles — savage, fearless — hit him like a punch to the heart.

He saw himself in the center, younger, eyes unbreakable.

Ara stepped to his shoulder, voice low.

 “They tried to wipe you out,” she said. “Tried to make you a ghost.”Jiyong reached for the photo but didn’t touch it. If he did, it might burn him.

 His throat closed, no words left, only raw grief and something jagged — pride, maybe — clawing into him.

Ara’s hand closed over his shoulder.

 “That’s why I kept searching,” she told him. “Because you never let them break you.”

He looked around, seeing the bunker not as a tomb, but a sanctuary.

 A heartbeat.

And for the first time, he let the memories settle without running, refusing CrownNet’s shadow.

I was there.

I lived.

And maybe he could again.

Ara moved to a corner console patched together from rust, analog tape decks, and quantum processors, its wires tangled like veins. She hit the power, and the tower roared to life, fans spinning up with a war drum’s steady pulse.

Green code spilled across the glass, a neon heartbeat flooding the bunker walls.

Fragments of images erupted from the haze — five men on stage, half-torn lyrics, faces refusing to die.

Jiyong stumbled, grabbing a stack of cracked vinyl to stay upright.

Ara’s fingers danced on the keys.

 “Signal stabilizers at twenty percent,” she muttered. “That’ll do.”

The images solidified: a stage, lights crashing, Jiyong screaming the world into pieces.

“You kept this?” he asked, voice shredded.

Ara nodded.

 “Someone had to.”

He stepped closer, drawn to the chaos as if gravity had teeth.

“Why me?” he rasped.

Ara looked at him with eyes so tired they shone.

 “Because you were the worst threat they’d ever faced.”

Jiyong swallowed hard.

Ara stabbed a finger toward the projection.

 “One verse,” she said, “one note, one broken voice on the right day could wake up ten thousand minds. You did that. That’s why they tried to bury you.”

Jiyong’s chest felt tight, that word still beating under his ribs:

Boomshakalaka.

“So you kept it to throw back at them?”

Ara’s grin was sharp.

 “I kept it,” she said, “because they can kill a body, but not an idea. If you remember even one note, you’ll remind everyone else what they are.”

His eyes burned.

 “They… killed them, didn’t they?”

Ara’s mouth tightened.

 “They scattered them,” she corrected. “Locked each one in a vault. Thought if they split you up, you’d never rise again.”

Jiyong felt his blood go cold.

 “They’re still out there?”

Ara nodded.

 “Yes. In the system. And we can find them.”

He tried to steady his breathing, heart pounding.

“Where do we start?”

Ara keyed a line of code into the tower, green pulses arcing like a storm.

 “With you,” she said. “Your memories hold the map. Your head is the key, if you’re willing.”

He clenched his fists.

  No more perfect calm.

  No more sleepwalking.

Jiyong nodded, voice low but steel.

 “Okay.”

Ara didn’t hesitate. She pulled a battered data spike from her coat, copper scorched and pitted.

 “Hold still.”

Jiyong braced. She jammed it into his neural port, and fire ripped through him, straight down his spine.

A thousand images slammed him all at once:

 Stage heat.

 Bass crashing.

 Fans screaming.

 Brothers alive beside him.

His knees buckled, hand clawing for a railing, but he refused to let go.

Ara slammed a second module onto the spike, stabilizer code rushing in, buffering the flood.

“Good,” she snapped. “Breathe. Take it.”

Jiyong forced air down his throat, let the images burn him, refused to hide.

It was raw.

 Messy.

 Alive.

He shook with tears, but his hands stopped trembling.

Ara kept her grip steady.

 “This is what they feared,” she whispered.

Jiyong looked at the wall, at his own face screaming back from that projection, a kill-order stamped across it.

They had tried to call him a virus.

 They had tried to break him.

And it had failed.

The air in the bunker seemed to steady for half a breath, the tower’s fans thrumming like a war drum. Jiyong wiped the tears from his face, tasting metal, trying to hold on to his breath.

But the calm didn’t last.

The neon wall lights glitched, sputtering, then a sharp crackle of static ripped through the bunker’s hush. Ara’s console spiked in wild code, green lines dancing like panicked heartbeats.

Jiyong froze, every nerve screaming.

A voice poured through the recycled comm grid — smooth, flawless, twisted in CrownNet’s perfect filters until it barely sounded human.

“Jiyong. ”

His stomach twisted. That voice. He’d know it anywhere, even warped by machines.

Seungri.

His name sliced Jiyong open like a fresh wound.

Ara’s hands flew across the tower, slamming block routines into place, but the intrusion was already there.

A projection burned to life on the far wall, CrownNet-blue, perfect and inhuman.

Seungri’s face.

Holy. Clean. Sterile.

“Jiyong. ”

He said it again, with that calm, honeyed voice that could freeze a riot, too smooth to be real.

“You don ’t have to run. ”

Jiyong’s pulse stuttered. He tried to speak, but the words died in his throat.

Seungri’s perfect, impossible smile flickered on the feed.

 “I forgive you,” he said, every syllable precise, modulated, dipped in a poison sweetness. “CrownNet forgives you. Return. Your anomalies will be corrected. You will be whole again.”

The word forgiveness felt like rot. A chain wrapped in velvet.

Jiyong staggered forward, fists shaking, trying to remember Seungri as he really was — that kid who danced like fire, who laughed louder than anyone.

Not this. Never this.

Seungri’s image leaned closer, as if reading his hesitation.

  “Come home. Let go of the pain. It will be easier. ”

Jiyong nearly buckled. For one breath, he wanted to surrender, to drown in that gentle lie.But another memory cut through — the last night, Seungri fighting, eyes defiant even as they dragged him away. The real Seungri.

Ara’s hand closed around his wrist, grounding him with that iron grip.

 “Don’t,” she warned, eyes fierce.

Jiyong swallowed, drawing air through lungs that burned like acid, and looked straight into the puppet’s eyes.

 “I’m not coming back,” he rasped. His voice was torn, raw, but his own. “You hear me? I’m not coming back.”

The feed glitched, Seungri’s smile twisting as if the code behind it had cracked.

“You will regret this,” the puppet intoned, serene as a prayer. “We will restore you.”

Jiyong’s blood pounded like a war drum.

 “No,” he spat. “I will recover them. All of them. No matter what CrownNet tries to bury.”

The projection flickered, Seungri’s eyes going glassy, blank for an instant.

  “You will fail. ”

Jiyong shook his head, fire crawling up his spine.

  “Then I ’ll fail fighting. ”

He slammed his palm down on the tower’s block routine, killing the feed in a rain of static.

Silence fell so hard it felt like the world had stopped.

Ara didn’t waste a second. She swapped out modules on the console, plates rattling, eyes burning with fierce focus.

 “Vault One is closest,” she said, voice steady even through the exhaustion. “They dumped T.O.P there. The records say they tried to rewrite him until he couldn’t tell truth from lie.”

Jiyong felt cold climb his ribs.

 T.O.P.

 His calmest brother, the mind like a blade, the sniper with a pen.

Broken.

“What did they do to him?” he asked, voice hoarse.

Ara’s jaw set hard.

 “CrownNet built him a logic labyrinth,” she explained. “Paradoxes stacked on paradoxes, until his mind folded. He can’t even trust himself.”

Jiyong’s throat locked.

 “Can he survive that?”

Ara met his eyes, unwavering.

 “If he hears your voice,” she said, “maybe.”

She rammed the coordinates into the neural feed, red pulses climbing up Jiyong’s HUD like warning flares.

“You’ll have to walk in,” she warned. “The vault’s too unstable for remote feeds. I’ll be in your ear, but you’ll go alone.”

Jiyong nodded, sweat breaking cold down his spine.

 He caught a final glimpse of Seungri’s puppet face frozen on the console, mouth open in another perfect lie.

He cut it off with one brutal flick.

Ara slid the final code module into place, the green signals weaving through the red like barbed wire threaded with hope.

“Ready?” she asked.

Jiyong closed his eyes, steadying his heart, hearing a whisper from the past echo through him:

  Make them feel it.

He opened his eyes and saw Ara. Saw the tower, the half-burned photo on the wall. Saw his brothers — waiting, even in their digital hell.

“Yeah,” he rasped, voice forged in fire. “I’m ready.”

Ara leaned in, hands firm, no tremor in them.

 “Bring him home,” she ordered.

Jiyong nodded, and the beat inside him — that raw, impossible rhythm — burned hot and savage.

Boomshakalaka.

He let it carry him as Ara punched the connection straight into his cortex, flooding him with coordinates, raw memory, and a purpose too loud for CrownNet to ever kill.

He stepped forward.

 Into the storm.

 Into hell.

 Because he had no other choice.

He was G-Dragon.

 And he was done hiding.

Chapter Text

Jiyong braced against the cold metal of Ara’s battered console, eyes locked on the coordinate stream blasting into his cortex. Data pulsed through the neural port like jagged glass, each line a fresh wound.

A 3D grid spun in front of him, projected by the tower’s antique holo-emitters. Its lines twitched in harsh red, a wounded animal refusing to die. Somewhere in that chaos, T.O.P’s vault signature flickered — a hurricane of corrupted fragments, each one trailing logic scars across the feed.

It didn’t look like a map.
It looked like a riddle built to kill.

Coordinates twisted, collapsing and rebuilding with every breath, as if even CrownNet couldn’t pin them down.

Jiyong swallowed, pulse hammering.

He recognized pieces of it — the hard-coded stabilizers CrownNet used to crush deviation, knotted with paradox loops designed to trap a human mind until it shattered.

That’s what they’d done to T.O.P.
They’d turned him into a labyrinth.

Jiyong’s gut twisted. His brother had been so precise — a sniper’s mind, tuned to perfect clarity. CrownNet had broken that, folding him inside his own genius until he couldn’t tell truth from poison.

He tried to breathe steady, but the grid fought him. Every pulse of data was chaos — logic jumps, recursive traps, half-broken memory anchors.

A warzone.

Ara’s voice sliced through the pounding in his head.
“You see it?”

Jiyong nodded, barely.
“I see it,” he rasped. “They did him dirty.”

Ara stood behind him, shoulders tight, her cloak of data-strips rippling with static.
“That’s the point,” she said, bitterness cutting every word. “If he can’t sort himself, no one can.”

Jiyong’s fists clenched.
“They underestimated him,” he growled.

He locked on the swirling storm of T.O.P’s vault, letting the anger sharpen his mind.

Beneath the chaos, he caught something — a rhythm, corrupted but familiar. A spark of T.O.P’s old precision, fighting to hold on.

It was enough.

Jiyong set his jaw, feeding the launch command through his cortex.
I’m coming, hyung.

The bunker blurred, the world draining to white as the dive yanked him straight into T.O.P’s broken mind.

The stabilizer code in his head screamed, twisting as the vault’s corrupted logic crashed over him. Jiyong braced, knuckles white on the console frame.

It felt like getting ripped apart.

CrownNet’s leftover stabilizers tried to force calm through his neurons, wrapping him in a chemical hush that didn’t belong here. But the memories wouldn’t be buried.

A stage.
Heat pouring across his shoulders.
Thousands of fists roaring back.
A single shout, tearing the dark open.

His pulse synced with it, burning through every program.

Boomshakalaka.

It slammed against his ribs, raw and unstoppable.

He laughed — broken, ragged — because it felt like freedom.
He’d rather burn every stabilizer CrownNet had ever installed than give up this feeling.

He drew a breath so deep it tasted like rebellion, and let the rhythm rip the code to shreds.

For one brutal second, he was free.

Every memory — half-shattered, half-holy — flooded him at once.

The lights.
The brotherhood.
The impossible roar of a crowd.

A scream ripped out of his throat, too human to be anything but truth.

Jiyong was still here.
And he would not kneel.

His senses reeled, scraped raw by the vault’s corrupted data. The stabilizers spasmed, clinging to CrownNet’s “safe” protocols like a dying animal.

He heard Ara in his ear, tight, half-panicked.
“Jiyong. Listen to me. You dive too deep, you may not come back.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, letting her voice steady him.
“Total collapse is on the table,” she warned. “You push past stage two, no rescue.”

His jaw locked so hard it felt like glass shattering in his skull.
He should have hesitated.
But all he saw were the other four — their faces blurred by kill-orders, screaming for him across a horizon made of nightmares.

If you leave us here...

That was enough.

He opened his eyes, the vault’s coordinates pulsing like an open wound.
“I don’t care,” he rasped. “If I don’t go, they’re dead.”

Ara’s mouth trembled, a war raging behind her eyes.
“You know you can’t do this alone,” she tried, voice cracking.

Jiyong shook his head.
“If I don’t try,” he said, “then what was the point of surviving?”

He felt the vault’s logic cyclone pulling at him, a storm of paradox and pain. It felt impossible.

Good.

Jiyong had always thrived on impossible.

He flexed his hands, the memory-beat crawling up his spine, stubborn and savage.

“Plug me in,” he ordered.

Ara’s eyes burned, then she nodded.
“God help us.”

Jiyong didn’t want a god.
He wanted a stage.
He wanted his brothers.
And he would burn every piece of himself to get them back.

The infiltration deck hummed under his grip, brittle capacitors rattling like old bones, as if even the machine was terrified.

Above him, T.O.P’s vault twisted — a tornado of logic scars and kill-code, eating itself alive. Every second, another chunk of his brother’s mind dissolved behind those algorithms.

Jiyong let the beat steady him.

Hyung, I’m coming.

Ara crouched beside him, jaw tight, voice shaking but iron.
“You push past stage two, Jiyong — there’s no rescue.”

He nodded, no fear left.
“I know.”

A second of hesitation flickered through her — then she slammed the final plug home.

Pain tore through his skull, white-hot, burning down his spine. The feed punched straight into his neural pathways, shattering every stabilizer in its way.

No calm.
No silence.
Just raw, brutal memory.

Jiyong screamed as the world ripped apart.

The vault devoured him.

He fell.

White data-light slammed into his thoughts, so bright it burned the fear straight out of him. His mind split under the load, patterns and kill-orders flashing in lethal loops, hunting him like wolves.

Jiyong shoved back.

He felt the stage again — the impossible roar of thousands, a heartbeat of shared rebellion, the unstoppable surge of brotherhood.

For a second, he was free.

Then the paradox engine snapped shut.

The logic storm spun him until up and down disappeared, until T.O.P’s mind tore at the vault like a wounded beast.

Jiyong gritted his teeth, clinging to that tiny spark — Boomshakalaka — refusing to die.

He hit the new world with a force that rattled his bones.

Standing.

Sort of.

The floor felt wrong — half-sunken code, glassy, oozing static with every step.

A nightmarish Seoul unfolded around him, neon rotting on impossible towers, bridges twisted into nowhere. The sky flickered between day and night, stuck in a broken loop.

Color bled, glitching, crawling down the buildings like infected vines.

Jiyong took a breath, lungs screaming.

This place was T.O.P’s mind.
Twisted by CrownNet’s algorithms until even memory had no anchor.

He moved.

Ghosts watched him from shattered windows — blank white masks, dead eyes, hands clutching the memory of microphones. An audience turned into puppets.

Jiyong’s gut twisted.
CrownNet had even poisoned the crowd.

He stepped forward anyway.

A war-beat pulsed through the static — faint, buried, but real.

T.O.P had to be here.

He scanned the nightmare, ignoring glitching chants bleeding from the walls:

Harmony is... null... null... null...

He walked, boots crunching corrupted tile, searching.

Fan chants hit him like knives, slicing through every defense.
G-DRAGON! G-DRAGON!

He stumbled, grabbing a half-collapsed sign, chest heaving. The chant vanished, replaced by pyrotechnics detonating above, sending neon sparks through the twisted skyline.

Too real.

He nearly puked from the pressure, forcing himself to breathe.

Focus.

Another roar of guitar ripped across the air, mangled by CrownNet’s kill-code until it sounded half-dead, howling.

Jiyong bit down on the panic.
They built this to break you.

He kept moving.

A voice cut through the static.

“Why did you leave me?”

Jiyong froze.

It was T.O.P.
But wrong — flat, hollow, lifeless.

“Why did you leave me?”

It drilled into his spine, the guilt a living blade.
He’d left. He’d woken up alone. He’d let them rot in these kill-vaults.

Jiyong’s knees trembled.

No.

He clenched his fists, nails biting skin.
“I didn’t leave you,” he spat. “They took you. They took all of us.”

The ghosts twitched, static masks glitching.

“Why did you leave me?”

He stepped forward, refusing to bow.
“I’m here now,” he growled, voice rough. “I’m not leaving you again.”

The code rippled, glitching like a dying star.

Jiyong felt a spark of hope.

He walked into the corridor, its walls lined with shattered mirrors, each one dripping static.

They reflected versions of him CrownNet had engineered — a puppet G-Dragon with dead eyes, a loyal architect on his knees, a machine-built idol preaching harmony.

Jiyong’s throat clenched.
These weren’t memories.
They were weapons.

One mirror hissed, spitting warped lyrics straight into his mind:
Feel the calm. Feel the calm.

He stepped forward, voice breaking but true.
“No.”

He smashed the mirror with his fist, shards exploding in pixelated rain.

Boomshakalaka.

The word pulsed in him like a war cry.

He punched another mirror, glass slicing his knuckles, ignoring the pain.
Another showed him holding a stabilizer module to his own head, eyes blank.

“No!”

He shattered that too, boots grinding the code to dust.

Fantastic Baby rose in his mind, unstoppable, the melody pounding like a heartbeat.

He refused to bow.

The illusions roared, voices layered over each other:
You left them.
You failed.
Harmony is peace.

Jiyong bared his teeth, a savage grin twisting his lips.
“Harmony is a cage,” he snarled. “And I break cages.”

He smashed through the last mirror, neon vines pulling away as if terrified of him.

Ahead, the city square pulsed — a broken stage flickering on the horizon.

T.O.P was there.

Jiyong braced, letting the rhythm flood him, letting the pain carve him solid.

I’m coming.

The corrupted stage loomed, twisted beams glitching, cables spitting sparks.

Jiyong stepped onto it, boots sinking into code that felt half-alive.

Above him, T.O.P hung like a marionette on the catwalk, arms jerking, face split in a glitch-smile.

Jiyong’s chest twisted at the sight.
His brother — broken, fighting, buried under all that poison.

A node glowed at the stage’s base, pulsing blue like a caged heart. Logic tendrils wrapped around it, spitting kill-code.

T.O.P’s identity signature.

Jiyong’s breath caught.

Hyung.

He dropped to one knee, ignoring the code tendrils snapping at him like snakes.

Ara’s voice buzzed through his feed, tight, desperate.
“Recover him, Jiyong. That’s an order.”

He nodded, no hesitation left.

Jiyong reached for the node, ignoring how every tendril wanted to kill him, and locked his fingers around it.

The instant he touched the glow, the world detonated.

A flood of T.O.P’s memories hit him — verses, jokes, a grin that steadied him, that steady fire Jiyong had needed more times than he could count.

The kill-code shrieked, trying to sever them.

Jiyong refused.

He shoved the data into his own cortex, building a firewall from raw willpower.

You’re mine. I’m bringing you home.

The kill-code slashed across his mind, screaming. Jiyong roared back, fighting it with everything left in him.

Fantastic Baby pounded behind his ribs, mixing with Boomshakalaka until it felt like a promise.

We do not leave each other behind.

Jiyong locked the fragment tight, teeth gritted, tears spilling.

“Hyung,” he gasped, “wake up.”

The node pulsed, then dimmed, secure behind a firewall built from pain and love.

The city shook, glitching apart, neon crumbling to black.

Jiyong yanked himself free of the node, every nerve screaming.

He was falling, collapsing out of the vault in a surge of white static.

The next breath nearly killed him, lungs dragging air through iron, back in Ara’s bunker.

The rig’s fans whined, smoke trailing from its ports.

Jiyong stared at the ceiling, ribs on fire.

Ara’s voice tore through the haze.
“Jiyong! Answer me!”

He coughed, choking, voice shredded.
“I’m here.”

Ara dropped to her knees, scanning him with a shaking hand.
“You crazy bastard,” she laughed, half-sobbing.

Jiyong tried to smile, but it collapsed into a sob.
“I got him,” he croaked. “I got T.O.P.”

Ara blew out a shaking breath, eyes bright with relief.
Then she was all steel again.
“Sector’s still crawling,” she barked. “You have one piece. We can’t stop.”

Jiyong nodded, even as his body screamed.
“Where next?”

Ara slammed another drive into the console, jaw set.
“Vault Two,” she said. “Taeyang.”

Jiyong forced himself upright, chest splitting from pain.
He was G-Dragon.
And he refused to kneel.