The sky didn't fall. It dissolved.
Yoo-jin watched through the translucent walls of the Vault as the digital horizon turned a violent, static red. The safe zone was shrinking.
"They're deleting the chunks," Eden reported, his eyes tracking the collapsing code. "Sector 4 is being formatted. The ground is literally vanishing."
"Mason isn't sending soldiers," David said, pacing nervously on the platform. "He's nuking the map."
"He can't nuke us," Yoo-jin said calmly. He tapped the glowing floor of the bank. "Not without erasing the transaction logs for every premium user in the game."
"Are you sure about that?"
The voice didn't come from the speakers. It came from the darkness itself.
A massive holographic face pushed through the red static walls. It was Mason Gold. He was fifty stories tall, looking down at them like an annoyed god inspecting an ant farm.
"You're squatting in my wallet, Yoo-jin," Mason rumbled. "It's unhygienic."
"It's leverage," Yoo-jin shouted back, staring up at the giant. "Check your backend. If this Vault goes down, forty percent of your user base loses their inventory. You'll face a class-action lawsuit that will bankrupt you in the real world."
Mason smiled. It was a terrifying, high-definition expression.
"You still think like a manager, Yoo-jin. You think I care about money?"
Mason snapped his colossal fingers.
CLICK.
The swirling vortex of numbers beneath the platform stopped.
The golden river of cash dried up instantly. The hum of the servers died.
The lights went out.
Total, suffocating darkness swallowed the Vault.
"He cut the liquidity feed," David screamed in the dark. "The system is powering down! Life support is failing!"
"My interface is gone," Min-ji panicked. "I can't see my HUD. I can't see my hands!"
"It's a shadow ban," Eden's voice was calm but strained. "He has isolated this coordinate from the grid. No power. No data. We will de-rez in three minutes."
Yoo-jin stood in the black void. He felt the cold creeping into his avatar. It wasn't just a game mechanic; without data flow, their digital consciousnesses would fragment.
"Mason is suffocating us," Sae-ri whispered, grabbing Yoo-jin's arm in the dark. "He doesn't need to blow us up. He just pulled the plug."
"We need a power source," Sol's voice trembled.
"There is no power," David groaned. "We're cut off from the Zenith grid."
Yoo-jin closed his eyes. He thought about the industry.
When the agency cuts the budget. When the broadcaster bans you. When the lights go out on stage.
What is left?
"The audience," Yoo-jin said.
He opened his eyes. He couldn't see anything, but he knew they were there.
"David," Yoo-jin commanded. "Is the Pirate App stream still running on our local rig?"
"Ideally, yes," David stammered. "It's running off the truck's generator in the real world. But we can't see the chat. We're disconnected."
"We don't need to see the chat," Yoo-jin said. "We need to feel it."
He turned to Sol and Luna in the dark.
"Girls. Lightsticks."
"What?"
"The official Starforce lightstick," Yoo-jin said. "The 'Moonlight Bong'. It connects via Bluetooth to the central control at concerts, right?"
"Yeah," Luna said. "To sync the colors with the beat."
"In the Sanctuary, every user has an inventory," Yoo-jin explained rapidly. "If they're watching the stream, they're connected to us. We don't need Zenith's electricity. We need to harvest the connection strength of the fans."
"You want to run a fortress on... fan love?" Min-ji asked skeptically.
"I want to run it on bio-feedback," Yoo-jin corrected. "Eden, open a port. Sol, Luna. Sing."
"Sing what?"
"The ballad," Yoo-jin said. "Sing into the dark. If they can hear you, they'll light up."
"And if they don't?" Sae-ri asked.
"Then we die in the dark."
Silence stretched. The cold was biting now. Yoo-jin's HP bar was ticking down.
Sol... Luna's voice whispered. Ready?
Ready.
In the absolute blackness of the deleted sector, a melody began.
It was faint at first. No instruments. Just two voices, terrified and fragile, harmonizing in the void.
When the curtain falls...
And the lights go down...
Eden stood in the center, acting as the antenna. He amplified their voices, pushing the data packet out through the backdoor connection to the Pirate stream.
Millions of people were watching in the real world. On subways, in classrooms, in bathrooms.
They heard the song.
"Users," Yoo-jin spoke over the melody. His voice was low, intimate. "If you're watching... raise your lights."
Nothing happened for five seconds. The darkness remained absolute.
Then—a spark.
A single, tiny white dot appeared in the distance of the void. It wasn't a star. It was a user avatar, holding a digital lightstick.
Then another.
Then ten.
Then a thousand.
"Oh my god," David whispered.
The darkness didn't just recede; it shattered.
A sea of white lights erupted around the platform. It wasn't just the users inside the game. The Pirate App was projecting the real-world viewers as "Will-o'-the-wisps" inside the server.
The "Pearl White Ocean"—the color of Starforce fandom—filled the abyss.
"Energy levels rising," Eden reported, his eyes glowing bright white. "External power input at 200%. System restoring."
The platform beneath them lit up. Not with the cold blue of Zenith, but with a warm, radiant pearl white.
"It's working!" Min-ji cheered. She summoned her bat. It was glowing so bright it looked like a lightsaber.
"Keep singing!" Yoo-jin ordered. "Don't let the connection drop!"
Sol and Luna gained confidence. Their voices soared, fueled by the visual of the ocean surrounding them.
I will find you...
In the endless night...
The walls of the Vault began to reform. The black obsidian turned into white marble. The "Bank" was being overwritten by the "Stage."
Mason's giant face reappeared in the sky, looking furious.
"Unauthorized patch!" Mason roared. "You cannot modify the environment!"
"I'm not modifying it," Yoo-jin looked up, grinning. "I'm performing on it."
Mason slammed his fist down. A massive shockwave of deletion code hurtled toward them.
"Defense!" Yoo-jin shouted.
The Ocean of Lights reacted. The millions of floating lightsticks swarmed together. They formed a massive, shimmering dome over the platform.
BOOM.
Mason's attack hit the dome. It bounced off harmlessly.
"The fandom shield," Sae-ri gasped. "It's impenetrable."
"It's distributed computing," David laughed maniacally, typing on a holographic keyboard that had just reappeared. "Every fan is donating 1% of their GPU power to the shield. Mason would have to crash every computer in Korea to break this!"
Yoo-jin walked to the edge of the new, white fortress.
The "Siege" was over before it began. They hadn't just survived; they had colonized the most secure server in the world.
He looked at the sea of lights pulsating to the rhythm of Sol and Luna's song.
"Mason!" Yoo-jin shouted into the mic.
The giant face in the sky glared down.
"You wanted to own the world," Yoo-jin said. "But you forgot the first rule of the entertainment business."
Yoo-jin raised his hand. The millions of lights mimicked him, raising in unison.
"Without an audience, you're just a man talking to himself."
He snapped his fingers.
The dome expanded. The white light rushed outward, reclaiming the deleted sectors. The red sky turned back to blue.
The "Vault" was gone. In its place stood a massive, glowing coliseum made of light.
[New Zone Established: The Arena]
[Owner: Starforce]
[Current Debt: Payment Paused]
Mason's face flickered. He was losing bandwidth. The sheer volume of fan data was pushing him out of his own admin channel.
"This isn't over, Yoo-jin," Mason hissed. "I will send the Hunters."
"Send them," Min-ji yelled, swinging her glowing bat. "We need the XP!"
The giant face dissolved into static.
Sol and Luna finished the song. The last note hung in the air, vibrating through the avatars of millions of fans.
Yoo-jin turned to his team. They were glowing. Powerful.
For the first time since episode 1, they weren't running. They were holding ground.
"David," Yoo-jin said. "Update the map."
"What do we call this place?" David asked, looking at the glowing fortress.
Yoo-jin looked at Sae-ri. She was smiling, her face bathed in the pearl light.
"We call it home," Yoo-jin said. "And from now on, we charge admission."
He looked out at the infinite digital horizon.
"Welcome to the Entertainment District."