Chapter Text
The fluorescents droned, a thin insect note threading the concrete chamber. Vent fans worried the air with a steady breath, and over it the cash made its own weather—crisp notes whispering as stacks were counted. Overhead, neon bubblegum pink and arcade blue bled from the ceiling tubes, skinning the room in bruise-light, color pooling in the seams of the floor. Smoke kept its own timetable, the vents too tired to claim it; it braided itself above the money in deliberate curls, as if learning the room by touch. Rubber bands snapped softly. The paper smelled of starch and ink, a clean chemical sweetness that couldn’t quite drown the metal tang of the ducts. Everything was hard: the slab underfoot, block walls beaded with cold, a tabletop scored by box cutters and burn marks. In that wash of color the portraits on the bills went flat, almost gray, but the paper kept its bite—the weight that settled into the palm and said, without drama: count again.
"Ten million dollars, baby," Mingi whispered, lips brushing the top of the final stack as if sealing a lover’s kiss. He lit a cigarette with trembling fingers, took a long drag, and exhaled like he was breathing out the weight of a thousand sins. "This—" he said, spinning in the creaking swivel chair, arms wide like a king on his throne, "—is fucking life."
The wall-mounted TV stuttered through a snowstorm of static before cutting to the breaking news. A suited anchorwoman with too much makeup and too little truth was talking about the Siren Heist: a job so clean it turned the country’s finest into amateurs on live television. Cutaways rolled past—officials blotched and blinking, detectives talking in circles, a mayor too proud to admit he’d been outplayed as he rattled off hollow vows to haul 'The Twin Towers' into court. The chyron said "developing." The room knew it was done.
Mingi scoffed. "Fucking idiot cops."
"Fucking dumbass government, you mean," Yunho muttered as he knelt to seal the last stash of cash into a reinforced titanium safe. The hiss of hydraulic locks sounded like music to their ears. "Can’t even catch their own shadows."
The Twin Towers.
That’s what the media called them. Not because they were brothers by blood, but because they moved like mirrors: same thoughts, same instincts, same deadly precision. Two minds split across two bodies. Mirror images in mayhem. A duo carved from the underbelly of society. Shadow and flame; calculation welded to chaos. Ghosts in the underworld. They clawed up from the city’s bruise and learned its grammar the hard way. In the alleys they went from rumor to parable to law. They weren’t born to crime. Fate orphaned them; hunger hardened them. The rest they chose.
Yunho, the Mastermind. A straight-A student turned ghost. Plucked into money, then thrown out of it on a lie about a missing watch—an irony that now feels quaint. Once polished, once promising; now the quiet crown of the underworld. Calm. Clever. Calculated. His mind cut cleaner than any blade. He didn’t crash systems; he redrafted their rules and made them sign.
Mingi, the Executioner. Born into welts and apologies that never came. A father’s belt taught him to stop crying; hunger taught him to start taking. When taking wasn’t enough, he learned the grammar of endings. Reckless, mule-stubborn, a weather front with fists. If Yunho drew the blueprint, Mingi was the impact crater. He was the last silhouette before the lights went out.
Together they close the circuit. Mercury and granite. A metronome and a hammer. They’ve emptied vaults that swore at birth to stay shut. They’ve made currencies stutter and ministers rehearse lies in the mirror. Ten years and the ledger shows no red. They move like choreography taught to a storm. One draws the map, the other becomes the road. You don’t see them arrive; you notice you’ve already complied. The city carries their signature as a faint ache in its bones, a lesson learned once and remembered always. Not invincible. Worse. Exact. Perfect enough to feel inevitable.
"I still can’t believe we pulled that shit, man." Mingi practically vibrated with excitement, bouncing his heel against the floor. "You’re a fucking genius!"
Yunho smiled, not modestly as in never that. But like a man who already knew. "You know I couldn’t have handled it without you."
"Oh, fuck yeah!"
The room vibrated with the buzz of energy, it was the kind that came after doing the impossible and living to talk about it. The heist had gone off perfectly, just like the others. And tonight, they were kings in a world they’d built from ash.
"This calls for a celebration," Yunho said, brushing dust from his tailored sleeves. "We drink tonight."
"Same place?"
"Same place."
Beneath the glittering lights of the surface world, buried under steel, secrets, and silence, lived a city called Sector One. Built on broken laws and blood debts, it was the sanctuary for the criminal, the damned, and the forgotten. No cops came down here. No cameras lasted long. No laws. No mercy. Snitches didn’t live to see daylight. This was a society of predators, and at the top of the food chain stood the Twin Towers.
When Yunho and Mingi slipped into the core, the ground had a heartbeat. Stalls welded from shipping crates sold calibers by the handful and chemicals by the gram; secrets were weighed with the same scale. Corners worked like checkpoints, gang colors standing in for flags. Neon bruised the damp walls and marked the iron doors—each a choice between danger, pleasure, or both. The crowd didn’t part from fear; it adjusted out of habit. Yunho read exits without looking up. Mingi measured threats by how quickly they remembered to look away. Sector One was awake and watching, and its kings had come home.
They turned into a corridor marked by blue flame symbols, the sign of their favorite bar.
Halazia.
A place of refuge for the ruthless. Hidden behind a rusted vault door that opened like a secret and exhaled a wool-thick haze. The music stayed low enough to plot over, the pours came heavy and honest, and the clientele was curated for danger.
As they stepped inside, the room recalibrated. Heads tipped. Sentences lost their endings. The heavy scent of alcohol, sweat, and smoke settled over everything like a weighted blanket. Not out of fear, though some felt it. Not out of respect, though they earned it. It was pressure, the barometric shift that happens when weather walks in. Famous criminals in a room full of infamous ones, and every eye made the same quiet math: if Yunho was the angle, Mingi was the force. The blue flames on the wall seemed to burn a shade brighter, as if recognizing their own.
"Ah, there’s my favorite chaos duo," said a voice from behind the bar.
Wooyoung, the owner of Halazia, flashed his signature grin. Sleek, dangerous, charismatic. Same age as them, but smarter than most. He knew how to run a bar where murderers drank side-by-side. And he knew when to shut up and pour. If Sector One was hell, Wooyoung was its cheeky devil. "The usual?" he asked, already reaching for the good stuff.
"Yeah, the usual," Mingi replied, tossing a smirk as they dropped onto the barstools like they owned the place.
"You got it, my lords," Wooyoung teased, sliding two glasses of obsidian-dark liquor across the marble counter.
They clicked their glasses. A silent cheers to chaos. The burn down their throats was familiar, comforting. It tasted like loyalty. But of course, envy doesn't hide long in Sector One. From a shadowed corner came the inevitable venom.
"Tch, it’s those cocky punks again."
"They’re so full of themselves. They really think they run this place."
Mingi didn't bother turning but rather he sneered. "Fucking pricks."
"What'd you say, asshole?" came a drunken voice from behind them. A twitchy broad man, probably a gang grunt, stood behind Mingi.
Mingi didn’t flinch. He turned slowly, eyes glinting like broken glass, and stood. Shoulders squared, chin high.
The man laughed. "Yeah, that’s right. Stand up. Let’s see what you got. Or are you just your master’s little bitch?"
He was about to let loose the fire when—
"Mingi," Yunho’s voice cut through like a blade. It was calm yet sharp. Like a safety clicked off.
Mingi froze, jaw tight. He let out a shaky breath and sat back down, his glare never wavering.
The thug grinned wide, triumphant. "Yeah bitch, that’s what I thought. Listen to your—"
CRACK.
A glass shattered.
Not from impact, but from Yunho’s hand. His knuckles tightening so hard around the whiskey glass it exploded in his grip.
Everything tipped.
By the time the room understood the sound, Yunho was no longer on his stool. He was standing over the thug—motion so fast it looked like a skipped frame. His fist kissed the man’s nose once.
Crunch.
Then again. And again. A metronome of ruin.
The thug hit the floor, but Yunho didn’t stop. He followed him down, straddled his chest like a predator on its kill. His fists became pistons, rising and falling, bone meeting bone with mechanical brutality. Each punch landed with sickening sound.
"You don’t speak to him like that," he said calmly yet his tone said otherwise. "You don’t look at him like that."
"Don’t. Ever." Crack.
"Speak to him." Crunch.
"Like that." Snap.
The man screamed. Or tried to. But his jaw was already broken. Teeth spilled from his mouth like loose coins. Blood painted the floor in wide arcs, splashing Yunho’s sleeves, staining his jaw. But his expression never changed.
Blank. Cold. Empty. It was like a porcelain mask hiding hellfire. His eyes were locked on the man’s face, what was left of it. As if he wasn’t even hitting someone anymore. As if he was erasing him.
The bar had gone deathly still. Even the music had stopped. The only sound in the room was Yunho’s fists pounding flesh like a drum of war.
No one dared move. No one dared breathe.
Yunho’s final punch made a sound that wasn’t human. Something cracked deep. A rib? A cheekbone? It didn’t matter.
He stood slowly, calmly. Blood dripped from his knuckles like rain from a blade. He turned to the thug’s crew and they were frozen in fear, white-faced and stunned.
"Take him," Yunho said, voice level, almost gentle. That was the terrifying part. "And if I see any of you again… I’ll put you in the ground beside him."
The minions scrambled, dragging the barely breathing body toward the door, leaving a crimson smear in their wake that told the whole story without a single word.
Mingi let out a whistle, impressed, then laughed wide as he slung an arm over Yunho’s shoulder. "Holy shit, man. You’re a freak."
Yunho didn’t respond. He was already wiping the blood from his hands with a napkin like it was nothing more than spilled wine. Because to him, it was nothing.
If anyone so much as breathed wrong toward Mingi, Yunho wouldn’t raise his voice.
He’d raise hell.
And Mingi would burn the map for Yunho without a second thought. Ten years of death, chaos, and loyalty forged in hellfire. They weren’t just partners. They were each other’s trigger and safety. The charge and the ground. The line you don’t cross and what happens when you do.
The air in Halazia slowly returned to its usual buzz. Voices rose again, cautiously, as if afraid to shatter the silence left behind by Yunho’s fists. Music resumed, soft and haunting. Mops appeared from nowhere; no one asked whose. Conversations resumed in fragments, pronouns doing the heavy lifting. The bar remembered how to be a bar, but the room kept a bruise. Blue flames jittered on steel and in the puddle’s reflection, as if the walls themselves were trying not to look. Wooyoung poured another round, his eyes flicking to the blood still staining the floor.
"You’re both freaks," Wooyoung said, shaking his head as he wiped a blood smear off the bar. "And I say that lovingly."
They laughed. Freaks? Yeah. Maybe. But in Sector One? Freaks rule the world.
"Shit, Yunho," Wooyoung muttered, sliding the drink toward him. "You ever think about therapy?"
Yunho scoffed as he sipped silently, unfazed. Mingi was still grinning, the fire in his chest not yet cooled. "Don’t act like that wasn’t the best entertainment your bar’s had all week."
"No doubt," Wooyoung smirked. Then he leaned in on the bar, elbows planted. "You two know you’re the talk of the whole world again, right?"
"Let ‘em talk," Mingi shrugged, lighting another cigarette.
"Nah, I mean it. Everyone won't shut up about the Siren Heist. Ten million clean. No blood. No trail. No alarms." He gave a low whistle. "Even The 0X1 is watching now."
Yunho’s eyes lifted slightly. Mingi arched a brow. The 0X1 was an older gang, notorious and hard to kill. If they're paying attention… the water is about to get red. "They’re still alive?"
"Barely. But they’re watching now. And more importantly…" Wooyoung’s smirk faded. He tapped the counter once. "The Captain wants to see you both."
The air thickened. Even in a place like Halazia, that name meant something.
He is the leader of the Black Pirates.
It's a ghost syndicate. Built from orphans, strays, and outlaws. Sector One’s quiet kings. Their work was so clean the surface called it rumor and filed it under acts of God.
Yunho and Mingi were the headline, sure, but only a line in a longer text: the Black Pirates. Not a gang. A lineage. Heists that left no bruise you could photograph, only budgets that woke up limping.
At the heart of it all is their leader: The Captain—Hongjoong.
He hadn’t saved them; he selected them. Pulled kids from train yards and back rooms, from storm drains and precinct benches, then tempered them—discipline first, silence second, family as binding law. He taught the etiquette of vanishing and the craft of arrival. Hunger became edge. Grief learned geometry. He turned scrap into instrument, names into signatures, rumor into record. His word is law, and they follow.
They finished their drinks without another word, the burn of alcohol now secondary to the weight of the summons.
Wooyoung led them past the regulars, through a rust-stained hallway, to the reinforced steel door at the back of the bar. Only five keys existed for it. Wooyoung carried one of them.
The hinges groaned open, and the secret room of the Black Pirates swallowed them whole.
The room spoke in whispers. An operations core smothered in shadow, where black glass exhaled data—camera mosaics, wireframe blueprints, ledger anomalies, satellite pings chasing themselves across the dark. Holographic maps hung like slow planets, arterial routes pulsing as they turned.
At the center stood The Captain.
Hongjoong looked misplaced in the constellation of it. He wore an oversized cream cardigan over a soft black tee; thin silver rings laddered his fingers; platinum hair parted clean down the middle, curled just enough to look accidental. His eyes were large and almost doe-like, framed by long lashes. He looked like someone who belonged in an art gallery, not at the helm of a crime empire.
But Mingi and Yunho stood straighter the moment they entered.
Sector One had learned the saying the hard way: "as they say don’t judge by a book by its cover." The softness was only scabbard. Behind it lived a tactician with tolerances you could measure in microns—precise, unsentimental, lethal without raising the temperature. He folded cities the way others fold maps. He didn’t bark orders; he subtracted options until obedience was the only arithmetic left. Networks feared his math. Even the holograms seemed to cant toward his gaze, as if the room itself had learned where authority lived.
He isn’t the Black Pirates’ Captain by accident.
Hongjoong turned slowly and spread his arms widely. "My towers. Sector One's finest."
"Sit," he said softly, gesturing to the leather chairs across from him.
Yunho gave a curt nod. Mingi collapsed into his seat with that same smug grin, but even he kept his tone in check.
"You did good," Hongjoong said. "Clean work. No casualties. No trace. Ten million. That’s another history for you both." He circled them slowly, assessing like a general before war. Then he stopped and looked them in the eyes. "But this was just the start."
A wall screen blinked to life, displaying a moving schematic of what looked like a corporate fortress. Armed patrols on every tier. Rooftop pads waiting for blades. Vaults sunk like anchors below street level.
"This," Hongjoong said, "is our next step. The Siren Heist was so impressive. But, this will be unforgettable." He tipped his fingers toward the projection. "Codename: Utopia."
They leaned in as he sketched the bones: triple-tier security, offshore routing webs, stacked encryption. Air-gapped segments. Dead-man switches. Every line of it spelled don’t bother.
"There’s a new element this time," he added. "You’ll meet additions soon. They’ll run at your shoulder."
"New blood?" Mingi’s brow creased.
"Yes."
"I work better with knives than strangers," he muttered.
"I know," Hongjoong replied without blinking. "But the next target is bigger. Riskier. The payout justifies the bruise. You’ll need depth on the bench. This isn’t another hit. Rather, it’s a declaration."
Mingi didn’t bother to hide the sour set of his mouth. Yunho’s hand settled on his shoulder. "If the Captain says so," he said, eyes on the rotating fortress, "we trust you."
"That," Hongjoong replied, the faintest smile touching one corner, "is why you’re still alive. Go. Rest. I’ll brief you when it's time."
They'd barely turned when the captain’s voice called out behind them. He looked at them both. Not just as a leader, but like a man who had watched them bleed and rise and become. Scars he recognized. Fire he’d helped stoke.
"I’m proud of you," Hongjoong said, simply. "You remind this city who we are. You’re not just the frontliners anymore. You’re the edge we strike with. The fear they feel before they even see us."
A beat of silence passed before Yunho nodded once. Mingi’s smirk curled back into place. It was wolfish, wicked, ready for war.
They exited the backroom without another word. Two ghosts stepping into neon rain, boots whispering over tile, the hallway narrowing like the barrel of a gun. The city sensed them before it saw them—air pulled taut, vents holding their breath, doors remembering how to be afraid.
They weren’t just legend now. Legend is something told after. They were rumor turning rigid, rumor hardening into rule. Their names moved mouth-to-mouth in the underlevels, ferried by people who never looked up and never forgot. Yunho counted exits by habit. Mingi smiled at the cameras because he wanted them to remember his face.
And tonight they wouldn’t whisper. They’d set the city to their frequency.
They would etch their names into the skeleton of this place—rebar, grout, river silt. They’d leave fingerprints in ash, stamp every vault with a motive no file could domesticate. Corridors would keep the heat like a secret. Sirens would have to learn a new note.
They never asked for power. Asking is what you do when you plan to accept no.
They took it.
Because freaks don’t beg for the world.
Freaks rule it.
And the first empire they’d burn? The one that built the cage and called it order.
Steel will crease. Locks will talk. The city will carry their mark, not as a brand but as a scar that knows its makers.
This is their story. Everything after this is consequence.