Chapter 3 - Conscripted Into the Basement Studio

That night, the air inside the aging indie venue in the Tirtodipuran area felt stifling, packed shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of young audience members waiting eagerly for one last dose of brutality from Midnight Frequency. Someone had chalked a countdown on the wall by the entrance, marking off the days until this exact show, and by now it read zero. Backstage in the dim half-light, tangled among a mess of cables and the rising smell of sweat, Michi drew a long breath behind her black hoodie and the neon mask that covered half her face. This was her farewell stage—her last night to shed the full exhaustion of her classical world, unload the weight of her academic burden, and cast off the mask of perfection before flying far away to Vienna.

Out front, Genta had already begun plucking his guitar strings into the opening notes, followed by the thud of Bimo's bass shaking the concrete floor hard enough to travel up through the soles of everyone's feet. Michi closed her eyes for a moment, gripped her pair of drumsticks tightly, then slammed down the first beat with full force. Instantly, the room exploded into euphoria. The music hammered wild, the spotlights flared erratically, tearing through the darkness, and Michi, as always, dissolved completely into the boundless rhythm that had, for so long, been the only place she could truly breathe easy.

But in the back corner of the crowded, dimly lit audience, a man in a dark jacket stood frozen, isolated from the collective joy surrounding him.

Rimba should have been at the conservatory library that night, finishing off their final stack of orchestral score revisions. But the suspicion that had been ruling over his head for the past several days—compounded by a small flyer for Midnight Frequency's farewell concert that he'd accidentally found tucked between Michi's score books at a café table—had led his footsteps to this room thick with cigarette smoke. His original intention had only been to prove his suspicion wrong, to confirm for certain that this indie band, which he'd lately taken to praising in front of Michi so often, had nothing at all to do with his girlfriend.

He stood in the middle of the crowd, watching the drummer raining down blow after blow on the snare with a speed and precision he knew by heart, cold, the way you know a piece of music you've heard a hundred times without ever seeing who was playing it.

That beat.

Rimba's brow furrowed, his breath suddenly catching in his throat. The longer he watched the drummer's hand movements, the stranger the sense of familiarity crawling through his chest became. That syncopation pattern... the way the wrist twisted the stick with an odd accent on certain bars... even the posture the moment the cymbal was struck... all of it reflected back the exact shadow of someone who sat beside him every single day, pressing classical piano keys with all the grace of a Sagan noble's daughter.

Scattered puzzle pieces from months of small, dismissed suspicions suddenly locked into place inside Rimba's head, one after another, refusing to be unseen now that he'd finally noticed them. The calluses on Michi's fingers. His girlfriend's clichéd excuses whenever she had to disappear at night. Her fierce, unwavering defense every single time he'd praised this band.

Rimba's breath stopped. His heart felt like it had just been struck by a sledgehammer.

On stage, the song reached its most savage climax. The spotlight suddenly swung sharp, catching the drummer's face right as she tilted her head back to catch her breath in the middle of the final onslaught of hits. The neon mask covering her face slipped slightly to one side from sweat and the merciless, wild movement of her body.

Rimba's sharp eyes locked directly onto the face revealed behind that shifted mask.

Arunika.

The world around Rimba collapsed instantly into a deafening silence. The roar of the rock music, the screams of the audience, the shapeless rumble of the room all seemed to vanish, sucked into a void. The man stood rigid where he was, his eyes wide with disbelief, staring at the woman he had loved, protected, and thought of as an untouchable, rigid pianist—now standing there ferociously behind a drum kit, leading a sea of people through a haze of underground stage smoke.

The final drum hit thundered out, shattering the night, met by the deafening, hysterical cheers of the crowd. But Michi, who had just lowered her drumsticks, breathing hard, sweat soaking her temples, froze instantly in place. Her movements stopped stiff the moment her gaze locked with a pair of dark eyes staring straight, sharp, and unyielding from the very front row of the audience.

Rimba's eyes no longer radiated admiration. That look now carried a devastating storm of disappointment, a shock crushing enough to flatten his chest completely, and the deep, unbearable wound of betrayal.

The mask had truly, finally split in two. And the sweet lie Michi had guarded so desperately, at such cost, for so many months, now burned away entirely, without a trace, that very night, right in front of the man she loved most in the entire world.

For a long, unbearable moment neither of them moved. The crowd kept surging and cheering around them, oblivious, calling for an encore that was never going to come the way they expected, while Michi stood frozen on that small stage with her sticks still in hand, and Rimba stood equally frozen at the edge of it, the two of them locked in a silence that neither the music nor the noise of the room could touch. Somewhere in the space between them, months of careful lies, of near misses and desperate excuses, collapsed all at once into a single, unbearable fact: he knew now, and there was no version of tonight that ended with her explaining it away. The neon mask hung loose in her hand, forgotten, its purpose already used up.