The weight of In-ah’s arm pressing Rora and Da-eun down against the cold marble floor was the only thing keeping reality pinned together. Above them, the sharp snap of automated suppression fire echoed through the fractured grand hall, cutting through the thick black haze.

"Stay down!" In-ah commanded, her voice dropping into the low, lethal register she used on precinct raids. Her eyes darted toward the blown-out eastern windows, tracking the dark silhouettes moving through the courtyard.

Across the room, pinned behind the structural stone pillar, So-min met Rora’s eyes through the smoke. Chae-won was still holding So-min’s jacket, her white blazer stained with grey ash, her face pale but her expression fierce. In the chaos, the Park family heiress hadn't fled to her parents; she had stayed to shield the girl she thought she was protecting from the past.

But beneath the overturned mahogany table, right next to Da-eun’s scraped knee, lay the metallic briefcase Chae-won had brought to the principal's office. One of its twin latches had popped open from the concussive blast, revealing not the gold-embossed SNU scholarships, but a secondary, hidden partition line beneath the paperwork.

Da-eun’s fingers brushed the cold aluminum. "Rora," she breathed, her voice completely masked by the alarms. "Look."

Slid into the hidden foam lining of the briefcase was a sleek, military-grade black flash drive, labeled with a single, handwritten sequence of numbers: 04-B / ECLIPSE.

Chae-won hadn't just brought them scholarships to buy their safety. She had brought the master decryption key to the very bunker she had begged them to ignore. Whether she knew it was in there, or whether she had stolen it from her family's vault as a last-resort leverage card, didn't matter.

"The Kims are retreating to the inner sanctum!" Do-hyun’s voice echoed from the fog, frantic as he tried to navigate the security detail toward the younger students. "We need to clear the hall!"

"We're not leaving without it," Rora whispered back to Da-eun, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs.

This wasn't school anymore. The unit tests were over, the tracker was the least of their worries, and the city they thought they knew was burning from the edges inward.

Da-eun grabbed the handle of the briefcase, snapping the remaining latch shut with a quiet, definitive click.

The night Seoul remembered had just begun.

PROLOGUE ENDS