The Old Jakarta Archives, 02:15 WIB
The warehouse was no longer a place of papers; it was a room with a lot of white noise. The gas made a hissing sound, like a snake that filled Pistachio's lungs with a smell. His vision got blurry. The world around him started to look gray and fuzzy.
The Executioner moved in a robotic way. He didn't run; he just glided between the iron shelves like something was wrong with reality.
"You think a piece of paper can change things, Pistachio?" the man with the mirror mask said, his voice shaking the floor. "What Saraswati chose ten years ago was important. But the result is still the same: the girl died because the law was too slow to help her. I am the speed the world needs now."
Pistachio fired his gun. Bang. The bullet hit a metal pillar. Sparked. The Executioner didn't even flinch. He raised his hand, and a pitched sound came out of the device on his wrist. It hit Pistachio like a punch to the chest. Made his heart beat strangely.
Pistachio fell to the ground, his gun sliding across the floor. His heart felt like a trapped bird beating fast and irregularly.
"Pis!" Malik shouted, running from behind a shelf.
Malik didn't go for the Executioner. He went for the sorting table. Grabbed his tablet. "I'm uploading the file! The physical scan of the worker's note! If people see that 'The Garden' caused the tragedy, everything will fall apart!"
"Connection failed," a cold robotic voice said from the tablet.
"He's blocking everything!" Malik hissed, ducking as a pulse broke a glass case above his head. "We're in a zone, but he brought his own network!"
Pistachio groaned, crawling on the floor. He could feel the robots in his blood. Dormant for weeks, probably from the city's "clean" water. Starting to react to the Executioner's signal. His own body was turning against him.
"The Zero-Debt Theory," Pistachio gasped, his voice barely audible. "It's not about balance. It's about control. You don't want a world. You want a world that's afraid to exist without your permission."
The Executioner stood over him, the mirror-mask showing Pistachio's scared face.
"Fear is the thing humans respect," the Executioner said. "I am the nightmare that keeps the people under their beds. You, Detective, are a reminder of a past that didn't work. You are a 'detail' that needs to be deleted."
He raised his wrist, and the red light glowed brightly. The frequency increased. Pistachio's heart skipped a beat, two. His lungs stopped working.
This is it, he thought. The final audit.
Then the frequency changed. A loud screech filled the air. The Executioner. His wrist device sparked with blue electricity.
"What...?" the distorted voice crackled.
Malik stood by the archives' electrical panel, holding a heavy copper wire. He had jammed it directly into the building's unprotected transformer.
"You brought a tool to a lightning storm, you son of a bitch!" Malik yelled.
The surge of electricity created a big electromagnetic spike. It didn't kill the Executioner. It damaged the delicate sensors in his mask and wrist. The red light died. The strange heartbeat in Pistachio's chest stopped instantly, replaced by a natural thud.
Pistachio didn't hesitate. He lunged at the Executioner. They crashed into a shelf of tax records, a cloud of dust and paper covering them both. Pistachio reached for the mask, his fingers clawing at the surface.
He ripped it off.
Pistachio froze. He expected a monster, a scientist, or someone he didn't know.
Instead, he saw a face that looked familiar. It was a man he had seen on TV every day for the month. A man who had cried for the victims of crime while secretly building their gallows.
"You..." Pistachio whispered.
"I told you, Detective," the man said, his lip bleeding, a light in his eyes. "The law is a ghost. I am the thing that's real."
Outside, the sound of helicopter blades began to thump in the distance. The police were coming. Whose side would they be on?