We reached the shimmering, translucent border that marked the way into Southern Singapore late at night. The ride down had been uneventful, thankfully, but the highway told a different story. We passed remnants of the battle’s survivors as we drove. Some were moving south like us. Others just looked… lost.

  I slowed and stopped a few times to offer help, but it was pointless. By now, my bike and the black-and-green Grave Digger truck were recognizable. We were not a lifeline to strangers anymore. We were an omen. The sight of us seemed to announce the arrival of the four horsemen, and people wanted no part of it. After the third rejection, I stopped trying and kept going, eyes forward.

  We had agreed in chat that once we reached the barrier, we would camp for the night and cross in daylight. In this hellhole of a world, it probably should not have mattered, but there was something reassuring about stepping into the unknown under a bright sky instead of the grim weight of night.

  Farah pointed out, matter-of-factly, that we should have thought of that earlier. We could have turned back before we got this far. None of us said it out loud, but we all knew why we did not. We did not want to return to the school. We did not want to go back to the New Jurong site either.

  And it looked like we were not the only ones.

  Numerous vehicles were already parked a few meters from the shimmering wall, pulled over along the highway like an impromptu checkpoint. From a distance, it could have passed for a border crossing, if not for the way everything sat too still and tense. I spotted sleeping bags and tents spread out on the tarmac and along the shoulder.

  Small fires flickered in pockets of light, and the air carried the faint smell of food. Burnt sausages, mostly, with smoke that clung to the back of my throat.

  We parked a good distance from the main throng of vehicles. Without a word, Siva and Shawn got to work setting up camp, unravelling the huge tent and the cots with the kind of quiet efficiency that came from doing the same thing too many times.

  Farah and Farisyah had their own small two-person tent, one that could fit neatly inside our giant gazebo of a setup. We left them to it while we claimed our cots and tried to rest. Jess was already curled up on her cot, boots still on, asleep like her body had finally decided to shut down.

  There was nothing to do now but wait, and the stillness made my mind itch. I decided to take stock of my stats. I had not really looked properly in days. Recently, my time had been split between planning, fighting, or doing both at once until they blurred together.

  I pulled up my status page in my HUD.

  And almost sat bolt upright.

  Level 26.

  What the fuck…

  In all my years of playing Pathfinder, I had never levelled a character that high. Not even in campaigns that ran for years.

  I opened my chat window and pinged Eva.

  Chris: Hey Eva. What does it even mean that I’m at level 26 now?

  Eva: Hey, Chris. There’s a whole matrix of calculations running in the background. It mostly translates to the quality of loot drops, and the difficulty of whatever comes next. Do you really want me to explain it to you?

  I blinked at the reply.

  That was… weird. Eva had never spoken to me that casually before. At least, not with a Hey.

  I told her it was fine and closed the chat. I needed sleep, and that was not a thread I wanted to pull on. Not tonight.

  Instead, I started combing through my spells, skills, and equipment, letting the familiar lists soothe me. Until something in my inventory caught my eye.

  I retrieved it.

  It felt solid in my hand. The replica lightsaber hilt Amira had given me for our anniversary. A piece of the old world, and the life I was supposed to return to.

  My thumb traced the curves and knobs, the little details meant to imitate something iconic and impossible. For a second, my mind drifted to happier times.

  Then it soured.

  I had instructions to find a blacksmith, to turn this replica into a real weapon. I had asked around. Plenty of classes came close. Metallurgist. Fabricator. Names that sounded right. None of them had been a Blacksmith.

  In the end, it stayed what it had always been. A souvenir. Another promise I could not fulfil.

  I stowed it away before the memory could settle too deep.

  My thoughts wandered anyway, sliding back over the path that had dragged us here. The first moment everything changed, back at Chong Pang Market. Siva hauling me out of the jaws of mutated macaques. Learning about the System in a 7-Eleven, like it was a normal thing to do.

  The crimson zones in the north. Andy’s group. The fights, the running, the constant calculation of distance and danger until the larger crowd fell away and we became what we were now. Four people. A team, not because it was ideal, but because it was survivable.

  My mind drifted to Causeway Point and the final battle in the mall. Movie monsters made flesh. The kind of nightmare you laughed at in a cinema, until it was tearing into you with claws and teeth.

  And then the West.

  The scheming. The alliances that were not alliances. The fights we were forced into, against both the Rebels and the Temple, like the world wanted to make sure we stayed sharp by grinding us down to the bone. I hated it. I still did.

  I turned my head and took in the shapes of my team in the dim light.

  Siva had been forced to grow up too fast. He had numbed himself to things that should have broken him, because someone had to keep us alive. Someone had to be the shield.

  Jess had lost her family, and with them, the last fragile part of her that believed she could get through this without taking a human life. That line was gone now. Crossed and erased.

  Shawn was still… Shawn. If you squinted, you could pretend he was unchanged. But the darkness hanging around his neck, and by extension around all of us, was a ticking bomb.

  And me?

  That was the question I refused to touch.

  I did not want an answer. I did not even want to think about it. Let other people judge what I had become. I would not be able to pull myself out if I started digging into that hole, and right now, I needed to stay functional more than I needed to be honest.

  I did not know when I had drifted off, but I woke to the sound of multiple engines revving and the first hint of daylight creeping across the highway. My mind was still fogged over until Farisyah literally jumped onto my cot and started shaking my shoulders, the brightness in her eyes somehow brighter than the morning sun.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  That did it.

  I sat up fast and lifted her off me, half laughing, half groaning as she nodded impatiently and pointed toward the barrier like a kid on a school trip.

  We took our time packing, stowing what we could into our inventories while we let the others go first. One by one, vehicles rolled forward, touched the shimmering wall, and vanished into the south like they had been swallowed whole.

  Jess was already awake in the truck, sitting with her knees pulled up and her jacket wrapped tight, watching the line move with a quiet intensity.

  “You ready for this?” Shawn asked as he climbed into the driver’s seat.

  I swung onto the Phantom and nodded once before adding, “Do not say it.”

  Shawn pulled an exaggerated sad face as he started the Grave Digger’s engine. I knew exactly what he wanted to shout. Something like Four Horsemen. Riding out. Like a messed up Optimus Prime.

  Still, it got a grin out of me as we rolled forward.

  Then the barrier swallowed us.

  For a heartbeat, the world went white and soundless. My HUD flickered, my stomach dropped, and the air felt like it had been replaced with cold water.

  Then we came out the other side.

  Where the north had been constant night and the west had hidden its cruelty under a thin veneer of normalcy, the south did not pretend to be anything.

  The south was cyberpunk turned up to eleven.

  The barrier between the west and the south sat right at the edge of the Central Business District. I expected the usual skyline. Glass and steel, banks and hotels, the kind of buildings that looked impressive but sterile.

  And they were there.

  Except the entire district had been repurposed into something else entirely. The familiar towers were now wrapped in glowing strips of light that pulsed like veins. Neon signs blinked brightly even in the morning sun, not just stuck on walls but projected into the air like floating billboards. Some were so sharp they looked solid. Others shimmered, half-real, like the city was running on augmented reality that was layered permanently over my eyes.

  Every surface competed for attention. Giant screens hung on skyscrapers, looping ads on repeat. Not just for food or supplies, but for things that made my skin tighten.

  SLEEP PODS. SAFE REST. NO INTERRUPTIONS.

  AMMO RESTOCK. QUALITY GUARANTEED.

  BODY MODS. PAIN OPTIONAL.

  COMPANIONS. DISCRETION INCLUDED.

  The last one made me look away on instinct.

  My HUD pinged constantly. Shop names appeared with little icons beside them. Some had a subtle golden glow. Some were tagged with a faint skull. Every stall had floating price markers in the air, as if the System had helpfully turned the entire CBD into an open-air marketplace UI.

  It was not chaos. It was commerce.

  The roads and sidewalks were no longer roads and sidewalks. They were corridors of makeshift shops crammed so tightly the CBD felt like it had become a living bazaar. Shipping containers had been stacked into two-storey storefronts. Scaffolding bridges connected buildings. Light strips had been embedded into the ground to guide foot traffic, and people actually followed them like they were in a theme park queue.

  Somewhere nearby, music thumped. Not a song I recognized, more like a catchy jingle engineered to stick in your brain. It bounced off glass walls and echoed between the towers. Above it all, I caught the occasional whine of drones. Small ones drifted overhead, projecting adverts and scanning crowds like security cameras with wings.

  We rode at a crawl. The lanes had been choked down to a single narrow strip between stalls and pedestrians. Vendors shouted at us as if we were potential customers. Pedestrians shouted back as if we were the problem, swearing at Shawn and gesturing at my bike like I was personally responsible for urban planning.

  I slowed to a stop, mesmerized and completely bewildered.

  A horn blasted behind me.

  Shawn leaned out the window and pointed ahead toward a sign for a parking garage.

  We edged our way in, and I had to blink twice.

  A gremlin sat at the toll booth reading a newspaper.

  Not lurking. Not threatening. Not trying to bite anyone’s face off.

  Just… working.

  He wore a typical parking attendant uniform, complete with a baseball cap. He even had a little handheld stamp like we were back in the nineties, except it glowed faintly when he tapped it against the booth.

  A sign on the glass read:

  10 gold per hour.

  200 gold per day.

  I sat there for a beat, dumbfounded. Not only at the normalcy of a gremlin manning a toll booth, but also at the absurdity of those prices. Nobody in the north would waste a gremlin on a job like this. Up there, a creature like that would have been tearing someone apart in an alley, not enforcing parking rates like this was Orchard Road on a Saturday.

  “Oi. You coming in or not?” the gremlin snapped, voice high and squeaky, eyes still half on his newspaper.

  Shawn honked again from behind, impatient.

  I paid for the day. Four hundred gold, for both of us. The gremlin tapped his stamp, the gate lifted with a mechanical whirr, and we rolled into a massive parking garage that smelled faintly of exhaust, metal, and something sweet I could not place.

  As we drove through, scanning for an empty space, I saw rows of luxury cars.

  New Mercedes models. Lamborghinis. Bentleys.

  It looked like someone had taken a high-end showroom and stuffed it into a public carpark. The Grave Digger and my Honda suddenly felt like we had wandered into the wrong neighborhood.

  From inside the truck, Jess leaned forward from the back seat and mouthed, slowly and clearly, What the fuck.

  I could not even argue with her.

  There did not seem to be any distinction between bike and car lots, so we parked next to each other in an empty stretch and killed our engines.

  We left the vehicles behind and followed the nearest stairwell, an EXIT sign glowing above the doorway.

  The stairs were clean.

  No, they were pristine.

  White marble steps, polished to the point they caught the light and threw it back at us. No grime. No cracks. No dried blood. Not even dust. We could have eaten off it.

  “Where the… where the fuck are we even?” Siva muttered as we started down.

  Jess smacked his arm and flicked her eyes toward Farisyah.

  Siva caught himself immediately. He gave a sheepish grin and lowered his voice. “Sorry.”

  Farah did not seem offended at vulgarities being spoken in hearing distant of a child. If anything, she looked distant. Like her mind was somewhere else entirely. I clocked it and filed it away for later. Something was going on with her.

  We reached the bottom and pushed through the exit doors.

  And stepped into a city within a city.

  Sound hit first. Like before, music bleeding from unseen speakers. Ad slogans looping in cheerful voices. Vendors shouting over each other like it was a festival that never ended. The noise stacked on itself until it became a living thing, a wall of sound trying to sell you something.

  Light hit next.

  Neon. Holograms. Giant screens crawling with color. The air itself felt crowded, like it had been filled with adverts.

  Jess moved up beside me and hooked her arm around mine. We stood in the doorway for a moment, staring out with our mouths slightly open, like village idiots who had stumbled into a metropolis for the first time.

  “I agree with Siva,” she said quietly, almost to herself. “Where the fuck are we…”

  Shawn walked past us, then stopped a few steps ahead. He turned around, spread his arms wide, and flashed a big, stupid smile.

  “Welcome to The Bay.”

  He turned again and pointed at something in the distance.

  Marina Bay Sands dominated the skyline, exactly where it always had. Three towers, that ship-like structure perched across the top, once the crown jewel of the area. The place tourists photographed and visited in every Youtube travel vlog of my country I’ve watched.

  Except now it had a sign.

  A giant neon sign that pulsed like a heartbeat from the top of the building.

  THE BAY.

  Our HUDs all pinged at the same time.

  [System Update: The South]

  [Objective: Nil]

  [Exit Condition: Complete the Scavenger Hunt]

  [Items List: Loading…]

  As the last line pulsed in my vision, I looked past it and took in the lanes of vendors and shops stretching into the district. I could already imagine what the inside of those glittering buildings looked like. More stalls. More signs. More smiling faces selling necessities like they were souvenirs.

  A scavenger hunt. In this place?

  Fuck me.

  About Marina Bay Sands

  Marina Bay Sands