02:13 AM.
The city was asleep.
But somewhere beneath layers of encrypted servers and silent satellites, something was collapsing.
In a private financial vault in Singapore, security alarms detonated across the mainframe.
Unauthorized intrusion detected.
Firewall integrity: failing.
Encryption breach in progress.
Engineers froze — then chaos erupted.
"Trace it!"
"It's masked!"
"How many nodes?"
"Thirty-seven… no — forty-two!"
The signal kept splitting. Different countries. Different networks. Different IP shadows.
But every trail pointed to the same name.
Zero.
Across multiple continents, digital locks dissolved like smoke. Accounts shifted. Stocks trembled. Power realigned.
This wasn't theft.
It was domination.
Thousands of miles away, inside a dim hostel room, a single laptop screen illuminated the darkness.
Blue code cascaded like digital rain across the display.
A young man sat motionless.
Black hoodie. Steady breathing. No panic. No urgency.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard.
On the screen:
> Access Granted.
A secure channel blinked open.
UNKNOWN: You shouldn't have touched that server.
He didn't blink.
UNKNOWN: Black Crown is watching.
For the first time, his eyes narrowed.
Black Crown.
A syndicate powerful enough to influence governments. Ruthless enough to erase entire identities.
Another message appeared.
UNKNOWN: We know you exist.
A faint smile curved his lips.
He typed slowly.
ZERO: Knowing I exist doesn't mean you can find me.
He pressed Enter.
In Singapore, the final server collapsed.
Total blackout.
Inside the hostel, silence returned. The laptop screen dimmed.
Outside, the campus remained peaceful.
In five hours, this same young man would walk into class with a backpack slung over his shoulder.
He would sit in the last row.
He would answer when attendance was called.
"Arjun Varma."
Average.
Ordinary.
Forgettable.
And no one in that classroom would realize…
that the most hunted name in the digital underworld
was sitting three seats behind them.
Watching.