He stored every detail neatly in his head, like a craftsman arranging his tools before getting to work. Nothing could be left to chance.
From behind the shipping container, he glanced at his old watch once more, then looked up at the sky as its colors began to change: faded orange giving way to deep violet, Murniarta’s signature fog descending over the warehouse roofs. Night would be here in full soon, and with it, the opportunity he had been waiting for ever since he saw that symbol on Don’s desk yesterday.
For a moment, he considered what would happen next. Wisnu would panic when his Khodam slowly woke from sedation, trying to cover up the mess before Don found out, perhaps blaming another capo for sabotage they had not even committed. A small disturbance that would spread on its own, without Karel having to do anything more. He only needed to light the fuse, then step back and watch from a distance, exactly as he always did.
Every so often, amid all those cold calculations, his father’s face would appear in the Karangbraja workshop, saying the same words that kept echoing in his mind: binding an entity without respecting it isn’t power. It’s just theft wrapped in a spell. Karel wasn’t entirely sure what his father would think of the way he was acting now—turning another entity’s suffering into a tool, even if his reasons were different from those of the mafia dukuns he despised.
He pushed the thought aside. This was no time for doubts like that. Not tonight.
As he worked through the details of his plan—the shift change, the escape route if something went wrong, the way to disguise the thinning dosage so it would look like a natural leak—his thoughts drifted briefly to the symbol on Don’s desk. To the fragment of sigil in his little box. To his father’s voice on the last peaceful night before everything changed.
He wasn’t a hero. He knew that, and had never bothered denying it, not even to himself. Heroes saved people. Karel wanted only one thing: to burn enough houses that the snakes hiding behind them would have nowhere left to hide.
These factions—the Sanjaya Consortium, Trah Jagad Ireng, Kartel Sangker—they thought they were playing chess against one another, watching each other’s territory, eyeing one another for internal traitors. They had no idea the board itself had been rigged from the start by someone they had never considered dangerous enough to suspect.
Karel smiled faintly in the darkness, a smile he never showed anyone in daylight.
He checked the small tool hidden behind his belt one more time: a slender needle coated in yellow iron, fine enough to pierce the seal on a Tirakat Opium container without damaging its outer layer, allowing the contents to drip out slowly over the next several hours instead of spilling all at once. Slow enough not to arouse anyone’s suspicion tonight. Certain enough to lower the sedation level of Wisnu’s Khodam at exactly the moment he needed—tomorrow, the day after, whenever the next opening appeared to complete the second part of his plan.
He glanced at the watch on his wrist. Ten minutes until the next shift change.
Karel drew a long breath, the only sign that behind his trained composure, something still pounded whenever he stepped closer to the point of no return. Then he moved, following the shadows between the stacks of shipping containers toward an old ventilation shaft on the north side of the warehouse—the only gap in the entire Sanjaya Consortium security system that had never been designed to hold someone like him.
Night settled completely over the Sanjaya Consortium grounds. The logistics warehouse lights glowed yellow through the thin fog, and Karel stepped out of the shadows, walking slowly toward the Tirakat Opium storage warehouse, the folder still tucked in his hand, his face as calm as ever, as if he were merely carrying out a routine Cleaner’s assignment. Inside his Waskitha Glasses, the violet crack of the Rift Knot still blinked softly, guiding him toward the beginning of everything.
The game had begun.