Chapter 36 - A Collision of Two Worlds

At ten at night, the air inside The Vault—Midnight Frequency's secret headquarters in the Tirtodipuran area—felt thick with the smell of sweat, mild cigarette smoke, and the constant hum of a live guitar amp. Graffiti covered nearly every inch of the concrete walls, and a single bare bulb swung slightly overhead, casting shifting shadows across the cramped equipment crowded into the room.

Michi sat on her drum stool, spinning a pair of wooden sticks restlessly between her fingers. In front of her, Genta the guitarist and Bimo the bassist stood with their arms crossed, giving her a sharp look they rarely ever showed her. That night's rehearsal had been cut short midway because Michi had made a fatal mistake in the breakdown section of their new song—something that almost never happened.

"Chi," Genta called, plucking his guitar strings absently to break the stiff silence that had settled over the room. A low, grating hum echoed through the cramped room. "What's up with you this past week? Your timing's been off way too often. Where's your head been wandering off to? Don't tell me you've started getting caught up in your classical coursework mood."

Michi blinked, hurrying to straighten up in her seat and put on an innocent face. "No, Gen. I'm just short on sleep. Exhausted from putting together an orchestral transcription," she said, the lie coming out smoother than it had any right to.

"Short on sleep, or short on focus because of that genius composer boyfriend of yours?" Bimo cut in, his tone half-teasing, though there was a flicker of genuine worry in his eyes. The long-haired bassist tossed a small towel onto his amplifier. "You realize you've been late to rehearsal twice this week, and yesterday you asked to leave early right when we were all fired up dissecting the arrangement? If you're not a hundred percent in this band anymore, just say so, Chi. Don't half-ass it."

The sentence struck Michi right in the gut.

Not because she was offended, but because she knew exactly how right Bimo was. The two worlds she was living now had started colliding, wearing each other down. On one side, she loved with everything she had the wild energy and absolute freedom she found behind Midnight Frequency's drum kit. But on the other, the shadow of her future in Vienna, the orchestral project with Rimba, and the guilt of constantly hiding her identity were slowly draining what little energy she had left. Some nights she lay awake trying to remember which lie she'd told to whom, and on which night, and found the effort itself exhausting in a way that had nothing to do with the music at all.

"It's not that we're trying to judge you, Chi," Genta said, his tone softening a little. "You're the life of this band. Without your playing, Midnight Frequency's just a bunch of amateur kids making noise. But if you keep splitting your focus between our night world and your fancy campus world... sooner or later, one of those worlds is going to fall apart, or you're going to fall apart first."

Genta's words hung heavy in the air of the basement room, compounded by the deadline for their mini-album release drawing ever closer. In front of them, Michi suddenly felt like a master fraud, sitting there nodding along while an entire other life—scores, scholarships, a boyfriend who didn't even know her real name in this room—waited silently just outside the door. Genta and Bimo knew absolutely nothing about her world at the conservatory, about the Vienna scholarship, or about Rimba. And yet, it was precisely in this room—among walls plastered with underground band posters, thick with the smell of cigarette smoke—that she found the purest freedom she had never once experienced behind the grandeur of a classical stage.

Michi hung her head low, staring at the surface of the snare drum in front of her, still faintly humming. Her fingers gripped the wooden sticks so tightly her knuckles went white.

"Sorry," Michi squeaked quietly, her voice hoarse against the faint noise of traffic drifting in from outside the studio. "I don't mean to throw off the band's focus at all. This week's just been really packed, honestly..."

Seeing Michi's face suddenly turn pale, out of arguments, Genta let out a long breath. The anger on the guitarist's face softened instantly. He stepped forward a few paces, tapping Michi's shoulder gently with the edge of his own drumstick.

And that night, under the dim yellow lights of the dusty indie studio, Michi realized one of the most frightening truths of all: time kept moving forward, and she couldn't stand forever with a foot on each side of a bridge that was slowly drifting apart, without one of her legs eventually slipping into the gap between them. Before she truly had to choose, she had to fight to hold onto both a little longer—for the sake of her classical music dream, and for the sake of Midnight Frequency's heartbeat, the very thing that had saved her sanity.

Neither Genta nor Bimo pushed the matter any further that night. They packed up early instead, the mood in the room settling into something more subdued than usual, none of them quite ready to say out loud what they were all thinking: that whatever was pulling Michi's attention in two directions wasn't going away on its own, and that the band's next few rehearsals were going to tell them a lot more than this one had. Riding home alone afterward, helmet visor fogging slightly in the cool night air, Michi found herself doing the math she'd been avoiding for weeks—how many more months of pretending she actually had left before the two halves of her life stopped being willing to wait their turn. She thought about Genta's tired eyes, about Bimo's half-joking accusation, and wondered how long two good friends could keep giving her the benefit of the doubt before that patience finally ran out for good.