The rooftop chant didn't die with the sunrise — it tunneled down, deeper, burrowing into the cracks of the city where the daylight never quite reached.
When the riot lines finally broke, when Seojin's last command turned to static on her phone, when the precinct gates slammed shut behind Minjun and his rooftop kids — they didn't scatter. They didn't go home.
They carried the anthem like a smoldering coal, passing it hand to hand down into basements, old subway platforms, graffiti-choked back alleys where the neon didn't bother shining.
Minjun's wrists were raw from the zip ties, but Jiwoo cut them free with a box cutter someone slipped him during the chaos. The plastic fell to the damp alley floor behind a fried chicken joint. Miri smeared antibiotic cream on the raw lines around Minjun's wrists, her fingers steady even as her own hands shook.
None of them spoke for a moment. The only sound was the muffled echo of the rooftop anthem still pulsing out of cheap speakers hidden in the alley's trash piles.
Finally, Minjun looked up at the circle of kids who'd formed around them — punks, ex-trainees, buskers, students, coders with laptops strapped to battery packs.
"Where now?" he asked.
A scrawny boy in a torn beanie — maybe sixteen, nose ring gleaming under a flickering bulb — grinned and jerked his thumb at a metal door in the alley's back wall. "You wanted a stage, hyung?" he said. "We've got one."
They stepped through that rusted door into another world — a half-finished basement carved out of an abandoned bathhouse. Concrete floors, exposed pipes dripping water, posters from twenty-year-old rock gigs peeling off the walls.
In the middle of the cracked tiles sat a makeshift stage no bigger than a bedroom rug — a wooden pallet propped up on old milk crates. A single mic stand rose from the center, wrapped in strings of dead fairy lights.
It smelled like mold and warm beer. It looked like ruin. It felt like freedom.
Kids poured in behind Minjun — carrying amps, drums, secondhand mics, old cameras duct-taped to tripods. Someone dragged in a rack of mismatched stage lights, half of them busted, the other half flickering like a dying star.
Jiwoo knelt by the pallet, testing its wobble with his bruised knuckles. He looked up at Minjun, grinning through a split lip. "Rooftop stage is underground now, huh?"
Minjun cracked a grin of his own. "Doesn't matter where it is," he said. "As long as it's ours."
Miri flipped open her battered laptop on an overturned crate. Her fingers danced over the keys, tapping into hidden networks — the same pirate stream she and the coders used to hijack the bank tower wall was still alive. Now, it reached deeper.
"We'll lose the big feeds soon," she warned. "The label's lawyers will start slapping shutdown notices everywhere. But if we bounce the signal through local relays…"
She didn't finish the thought. She didn't have to. Minjun just nodded. "Do it. However you can."
By midnight, the bathhouse basement pulsed with noise — kids tuning guitars with broken strings, hacking together drum kits from old oil drums, setting up webcams from pawn shops. The lights flickered, throwing shadows across the cracked tiles, but nobody cared.
Above ground, the city slept — or pretended to. Screens flickered in bedrooms, in empty convenience stores, in bus stations where janitors paused to watch a stolen signal slip through the cracks.
They weren't watching an idol with perfect hair and a fake smile. They were watching themselves — raw, cracked, off-key, but alive.
Minjun stepped onto the pallet stage just as the first guitar wailed through the room — a ragged, feedback-heavy riff that rolled off the concrete walls like thunder. Jiwoo grabbed an old floor tom and hammered out a beat with sticks that barely matched.
Miri shoved a mic into Minjun's hand — no fancy wireless setup this time, just a frayed cord snaking through a tangle of extension cables to an amp that might blow at any second.
He closed his eyes. Took a breath. Felt the rooftop under his feet — even here, under meters of concrete and rusted pipes.
Then he sang.
The anthem, rawer than ever, spilled into the basement like a promise. Kids pressed against the moldy walls, screaming every word they knew and humming the ones they didn't. Miri's fingers danced on her laptop, pushing the feed live again — a shaky stream stitched together from stolen Wi-Fi and kids' prepaid data plans.
Somewhere uptown, Seojin sat in a darkened boardroom, face lit by a single screen showing the pirate feed. Her eyes were hollow. Her phone buzzed with silent notifications: Takedown failed. Takedown failed. Takedown failed.
Minjun's voice cracked once — the cheap mic squealed in protest — but nobody flinched. A girl in the back slammed her foot on the floor in time with Jiwoo's beat. A kid with a buzz cut swung a light stick like a sword. Someone fired off a handheld fog machine, and the tiny basement filled with drifting mist that caught the busted lights and made the shadows dance.
It wasn't an idol stage. It wasn't supposed to be. It was better.
When the last note crashed into the cracked tiles, the room didn't fall silent. The kids kept the beat alive — fists pounding on walls, feet stomping broken tiles loose. The echo climbed the pipes, rattled the rusted ceiling, found the city above and whispered: We're still here.
Minjun lifted the mic, chest heaving, sweat dripping from his fringe. His eyes caught Miri's — hers wide behind smudged glasses, blinking back tears she didn't have time to wipe.
He lowered the mic to his lips, voice raw but clear enough for every camera still watching.
"This stage is yours," he said, breathless, smiling through bruises. "No labels. No lies. No contracts. Just you. Us. The rooftop, underground, anywhere."
His voice dropped to a whisper, but the basement roared back like thunder:
"WE! ARE! ROOFTOP!"
And somewhere far above them, in the glittering glass towers where the old rules were made, the echoes shivered through boardroom walls — reminding them that the rooftop could never be sold, never be silenced.