The chord didn't just hit the audience. It assaulted them.
Min-ji slammed her hand against the strings, channeling every ounce of frustration from the last year into a single, distorted noise. It wasn't music. It was the sound of a riot.
SCREEEEEE.
Yoo-jin watched the monitor in the wings. He held his breath.
On the screen, two waveforms battled.
The red line was Min-ji's raw input—jagged, chaotic, ugly.
The blue line was Mason Gold's AI filter—smooth, curved, perfect.
The blue line tried to eat the red one.
Instantaneously, the massive stadium speakers pushed back. The screech of the guitar was caught, scrubbed, and spat out as a clean, synthesized synthesizer chord.
"It's working!" David Kim yelled over the noise, clutching his tablet. " The AI is live-patching them! The audience is hearing a pop song!"
Yoo-jin looked out at the crowd.
Twenty thousand people sat motionless. Their eyes were glazed. They nodded their heads in perfect unison to a beat that Min-ji wasn't even playing.
"No," Yoo-jin hissed. "He's erasing them in real-time."
On stage, Sol realized it too.
She belted a high note—a raw, guttural cry of defiance. But what came out of the speakers was a perfectly pitch-corrected, auto-tuned whistle. It sounded like an angel. It sounded fake.
Sol's eyes widened. She tapped her microphone. She screamed, "Wake up!"
The speakers chirped, "Let's dance!"
The AI was replacing her words. It wasn't just filtering; it was overdubbing deep-fake audio.
Mason Gold, sitting in his glass skybox, sipped champagne. He looked down at Yoo-jin in the wings and raised his glass. I told you, his expression said. Perfection always wins.
Yoo-jin felt a cold sweat break on his back. He had no System. No cheat code. Just four kids in dirty coveralls fighting a god in the machine.
"They can't hear us," Luna shouted at Sol, panic edging her voice. "We're ghosts!"
"Don't stop!" Yoo-jin screamed from the side, though they couldn't hear him. "Make it uglier! Break the buffer!"
Eden looked at Yoo-jin.
The boy was behind the drum kit. His face was pale, sweat dripping down his nose. He could feel the Violet Signal trying to crawl into his brain, urging him to fall into the perfect rhythm.
Thump-thump-clap. The AI wanted a heartbeat.
Eden gritted his teeth. Blood trickled from his nostril.
No.
Eden raised his drumsticks. He didn't hit the snare. He hit the metal rim.
CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK.
It was a machine-gun rhythm. Too fast. Too sharp.
The AI hesitated. The blue line on the monitor jittered. It tried to smooth the clicks into a hi-hat beat, but the tempo was mathematically irrational.
"The buffer is lagging!" David shouted. "Eden is confusing the algorithm!"
"Min-ji!" Yoo-jin roared. "Now! The feedback loop!"
Min-ji saw the signal. She dropped to her knees. She shoved the neck of her guitar directly into the floor monitor speaker.
SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
The feedback loop shrieked like a dying banshee.
The AI panicked. It tried to auto-tune the feedback. It tried to turn the screech into a violin section.
WUB-WUB-SCREEEE-WUB.
The sound system convulsed. The audience blinked, the unison nodding broken for a split second. A few people frowned, rubbing their ears.
"The mask is slipping," Yoo-jin realized. "Sol! The bridge! Hit the High C!"
Sol nodded. She grabbed the mic stand with both greasy hands. She closed her eyes.
She didn't sing for the award. She didn't sing for the fans. She sang to break the glass box she had been living in since she was a trainee.
She drew a breath that expanded her ribs.
And she let it out.
It wasn't a pretty note. It was desperate. It cracked at the edges. It was full of pain and rage and exhaustion.
It was the most human sound the Grammy stage had ever heard.
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
At the same moment, So-young—hiding in a coffee shop three miles away—hit Enter.
The Kill Code, hidden in the bass track, slammed into the destabilized audio system.
The result was catastrophic.
BOOM.
A spark showered down from the overhead lighting rig.
The blue line on the monitor flatlined. The AI crashed.
For one second, the speakers died.
Then, they roared back to life. Unfiltered.
Sol's real voice—raw, cracking, powerful—blasted through the arena. Min-ji's guitar snarled like a chainsaw. Eden's drums sounded like war.
The optimization signal shattered.
"NOW!" Yoo-jin screamed into his headset. "KILL THE SCREENS!"
So-young triggered the visual hack.
The massive, thirty-foot Jumbotron screens behind the stage—currently displaying polished, CGI avatars of Sol & Luna—glitched.
Violet pixelation tore across the images.
Then, black.
Total darkness.
The house lights died. The stage lights died. The entire arena was plunged into a void.
The silence that followed was heavy. The audience, released from the trance, gasped. The collective intake of breath sounded like a vacuum.
"Did we fail?" Director Park whimpered in the dark.
Then, a single light appeared.
It wasn't a spotlight. It was a cell phone flashlight from the front row.
Then another. Then ten. Then a thousand.
The crowd lit the stage themselves. The beams of light cut through the dark, illuminating the four figures in dirty mechanic coveralls.
They looked exhausted. Sol was panting. Min-ji was bleeding from a cut on her finger. Eden was slumped over his drums.
They looked real.
"Is that..." a voice from the crowd shouted. "Is that live?"
Min-ji stepped into the pool of cell phone light. She didn't have a mic anymore. She just cupped her hands around her mouth.
"YEAH!" she screamed at the top of her lungs. "IT'S LIVE!"
The roar that erupted from the Staples Center wasn't polite applause. It was a tsunami.
People jumped out of their seats. The hypnotic fog was gone, replaced by the electric thrill of seeing something go wrong—and seeing it go right. They cheered for the sweat. They cheered for the grease stains.
"They love it," David Kim stared, his mouth open. "They love the mess."
"Humans get bored of perfection," Yoo-jin leaned against the wall, his legs trembling. "We just reminded them what adrenaline feels like."
Up in the skybox, Mason Gold stood up. He threw his champagne glass against the wall.
It shattered.
Yoo-jin saw the movement in the shadows. Security guards—dozens of them—were rushing the stage from the other side. These weren't the confused local staff. These were Mason's private contractors. They had batons.
"We have to go," Yoo-jin grabbed David's shoulder. "Now!"
He ran onto the stage.
"Sol! Luna! Move!"
The idols snapped out of their daze. They saw the approaching guards.
"Drum solo is over," Eden said, kicking his stool away.
They scrambled toward the wings, diving past confused cameramen.
"Stop them!" a voice boomed over the emergency comms. "Lock down the exits!"
"This way!" David shoved a bewildered stagehand aside and kicked open a fire door. "The kitchen route!"
They burst into the service corridor. The roar of the crowd was still shaking the floorboards behind them.
"We didn't finish the song!" Luna yelled as they ran, her coveralls flapping.
"You finished the system," Yoo-jin panted, checking behind them. "That's better."
They sprinted past stainless steel counters and startled chefs. Min-ji knocked over a stack of pans to create an obstacle.
CLANG-CRASH.
"My stock!" David checked his phone as he ran. "Yoo-jin! Look!"
Yoo-jin glanced at the screen.
Zenith Global's stock price was plummeting. A vertical red line. The broadcast failure—and the subsequent "riot"—was trending worldwide. #RealKPop was outpacing #ZenithGrammys.
Investors were panic-selling. The myth of Mason Gold's flawless control had cracked.
"We hurt him," David laughed breathlessly. "We actually drew blood."
"We're not done yet," Yoo-jin saw the loading dock ahead.
The van was there. But so were three black SUVs blocking the exit.
Men in tactical gear stood waiting. They weren't holding taser guns this time. They were holding silence.
Standing in front of them was a woman. She was tall, wearing a sharp white suit that matched Eternity's. She had a tablet in her hand.
"Director Alice," Yoo-jin recognized her. Mason's head of 'Human Resources.' Meaning, his head of erasure.
"Manager Han," Alice smiled pleasantly. "Mr. Gold was impressed by the performance. He'd like to offer you a contract renegotiation."
"We're independent," Yoo-jin stopped, signaling the team to bunch up behind him.
"Nobody is independent," Alice tapped her tablet. "We have the perimeter secured. You can surrender, and we'll wipe the broadcast tapes, claim it was a technical rehearsal, and offer your team a very comfortable retirement in a facility in Nevada."
"And if we refuse?"
"Then you never left the building," Alice said. "Tragic electrical fire. Very common in old venues."
Min-ji raised her guitar case. "I'm going to hit her."
"No," Yoo-jin held up a hand. "She has shooters."
He looked at Alice. He felt that phantom itch again. He wished he could see her Loyalty Stat. He wished he could see a weakness.
But he saw something else.
Behind Alice, the loading dock ramp was open. Beyond that was the street. And on the street, a massive crowd of fans was gathering, drawn by the blackout and the rumors spreading on social media.
They were banging on the chain-link fence, chanting "STAR-FORCE! STAR-FORCE!"
"Alice," Yoo-jin said calmly. "Do you know what happens when a System crashes?"
"We reboot it," Alice replied.
"No," Yoo-jin smiled. It was a dangerous, tired smile. "The users look for a new operating system."
Yoo-jin reached into his pocket. He didn't pull out a weapon. He pulled out his phone.
He held it up. The camera was facing Alice.
"We're live," Yoo-jin said. "Instagram. Two million viewers."
Alice froze. The shooters shifted uncomfortably.
"Say hello to the fans," Yoo-jin grinned. "Tell them about the electrical fire."
Alice's perfect composure cracked. She looked at the shooters, then at the phone. She couldn't kill them on a livestream. It would destroy whatever stock value remained.
"Stand down," Alice hissed.
The men lowered their weapons.
"Get in the van," Yoo-jin ordered his team, never lowering the phone.
They scrambled past the tactical team. David jumped into the driver's seat. The engine roared.
Yoo-jin walked backward toward the van, keeping the camera trained on Alice's furious face.
"Great show," Yoo-jin told her.
He jumped into the sliding door just as David floored it.
The van smashed through the wooden barrier arm and shot out onto the street.
The crowd of fans erupted, surrounding the van. They weren't zombies anymore. They were loud, chaotic, and beautiful. They pounded on the windows, cheering.
David honked, slowly parting the sea of people.
Inside the van, silence fell.
Sol slumped against the wall, sliding down until she hit the floor. She started to laugh. It started as a giggle and turned into a sob.
"We did it," she choked out. "We actually sang."
Eden looked at his hands. They were shaking, but they were his.
"I am still here," Eden whispered. "I am not optimized."
Yoo-jin leaned his head back against the seat. The adrenaline was crashing. His entire body hurt.
He looked at the phone. The stream was still running. Comments were flying by so fast they were a blur.
Yoo-jin ended the stream. He tossed the phone to David.
"Where to?" David asked. "We can't go back to the garage."
"No," Yoo-jin closed his eyes. "We need a new base. Somewhere Zenith can't track."
"Korea?" Sae-ri asked, wiping a smudge of grease from Yoo-jin's cheek.
"No. Dragon is gone, but the Ministry is still watching," Yoo-jin murmured. "We need neutral ground."
He thought of the map. He thought of the one place where chaos was the currency, where systems went to die.
"Drive north," Yoo-jin said. "We're going to Silicon Valley."
"Silicon Valley?" Min-ji frowned. "That's tech central. That's the enemy's backyard."
"Exactly," Yoo-jin opened his eyes. They were dark and sharp. "Mason Gold wants to buy the future? Fine. We're going to build a better one."
He looked at the USB drive in his hand. The Kill Code was gone. But the data on the drive had changed.
During the upload, So-young had downloaded something back.
"Besides," Yoo-jin held up the drive. "We just stole his source code."
The van sped onto the freeway, disappearing into the endless stream of red taillights. The Grammy Awards continued behind them, a hollow ceremony for a broken god.
The real show was on the road.