Leaving Manila is a lot like fleeing your captors in a hostage situation. At least, that’s what I thought at the time. The pollution, traffic, and the press of people I would never know abated as we drove south into the province. Burgeoning flora replaced stained concrete. The honking horns of the cityscape gave way to the wind beyond our rolled-down windows. Metamatics’s annoying television screens became a distant memory.

I valued only two things in this world beyond my family and friends: writing software and driving. The two are more alike than you’d think. Both require precision and control. Both require problem-solving, especially in Manila traffic where road lines are only suggestions and—at least before the Inspiration Convergence when you could count the number of traffic lights in each district with one hand.

Both also give you freedom. VACINE, SLACKER, and MULTO were our ways of freeing ourselves from the shackles of Metamatics. We didn’t need to abide by any corporate doctrines. We could do what we wanted.

In the van’s driver seat, my hands steady on the wheel, I felt more like myself than I ever did that day. This—right here—was where I came alive.

I parked the van on a precipice overlooking Taal Lake, two hours south of Manila. The lake formed when Taal Volcano—its tip jutting out of the lake’s center—erupted. Staring into the darkness of those calm waters, I found Papa’s notepad.

Verbal critiques were not the only way Papa condemned stream sludge. Sometimes he wrote. They were primarily short snippets in notepads, doodles on scrap paper, or even a few lines of poetry on his favorite typewriter. Sometimes, the stuff didn’t make sense to me, and most of the ideas were still in his head. But the few themes I could parse from them always stood out.

Papa, too, desired freedom.

That night, on the precipice of Taal Lake, I read from Papa’s notepad.

“In dark’s rotting tinge, I fled, in between the rice paddies, raking my very claws against the kalachuchi petals—those fragrant, white blossoms—and plucking one from them and holding it in my furry paws, my elongated fingers, my skin blacker than fire ash. I raised the kalachuchi to the stars and dotted out the night’s light as I swayed it around and danced with it and took notice of a shape in the trees, its gnarled feet clasping the branch, its tobacco roll smoking into a vortex that reached and reached…”

I allowed Papa’s description of the kapre—a towering, cigar-smoking tree giant from Filipino folklore—to ring out.

“… and reached.”

Shay, Andrei, and Reggie waited alongside me, shedding their daylight personae and transforming into something else. We were no longer weary employees trapped in cubicles. Tonight, we were Giant Killers.

They were silent as I read on, not out of respect but because the humming came.

Its fluorescent pink running light appeared first, a circular strip surrounding its cyclopean eye. The drone hovered straight up with thrusters that hummed in sync with our held breaths. It poked its head over the lookout and stared at us through the van’s windshield. No, it stared at me.

It hovered closer, eager to capture every nuance of my recitation. Its recording light blinked as it transmitted my words to its data center at Metamatics. We knew it was a Metamatics drone when we saw the logo—a stylized 'M' formed by two sharp, intersecting triangles, glowing faintly beneath the drone's eye.

Now, I must tell you what Andrei stored in his umbrella case. You may have guessed it was a gun, but not what kind. It was a non-lethal rifle with a long barrel, almost like those kinds the military snipers in war movies shot—the kind that could tear through walls. This one, however, fired EMP darts instead of bullets. We weren’t looking to hurt anyone.

Andrei leaned outside the van’s open door and fired.

Blue light streamed through the air. The drone’s eye broke apart. It wobbled and waned. Reggie pulled the thing towards the van as its thrusters flared in the opposite direction. Shay ran out of the van and threw a coil in the air. A magnet fishing line. Its end slammed on the drone, and Reggie and Shay played tug of war for a fraction of a second before hooking the other end to the van’s bumper.

“Jayson!” Shay shrieked. “Now!”

I cranked the ignition and reversed as Shay and Reggie fell into the back. The drone sped off.

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

“Shoot it again!” Reggie yelled.

Andrei leaned out the window and fired two more EMP darts at the drone. It arced off towards the hills, descended, and then came up again.

Shay crawled into the shotgun seat and punched my shoulder. “Gun it, Jayson!”

I pulled us from the lookout and floored it down the road, following the streaming blue circuity leaking from the drone. It crested a rise, dragging its blood-red running lights that turned the sky to the hue of a butcher’s floor. It flew parallel to the road before veering left over a set of hills, its lights brightening to pink and white, then bursting.

Then, nothing but the still night.

I stopped the van next to the road. We trudged through the tall, wild grass to scale the hills. Andrei led the pack, a fire extinguisher slung over his back.

We found the drone covered in white flames. Andrei ran in and blasted the extinguisher, and the hillside became a dust storm. I waved the blue clouds away, the residue like chalk scattered in some ritual sacrifice, with our prize at the center of a smoldering ring.

I knew I belonged with the Giant Killers that day. These were my friends, my true comrades in a fight we all believed in. We weren’t just coworkers; we were bound by something more profound—a shared hatred for the foreign influence that had taken over our country. We all dreamed of the day we’d see the Giants burn, and this was our way of ever so slowly striking back.

In common history, the Philippines had been colonized three times: by the Spanish, then by the Americans, and then by the Japanese. But it wasn’t the standard narrative that weighed on us. It was the plain truth that we were now in the middle of a fourth colonization. Its official name was the Inspiration Convergence, but we considered it more as the Fiction Harvest.

Andrei examined the smoldering drone. He kicked it, and a panel fell out, exposing lanes of gold running along silicon chips. Wires fanned out like veins in a dissection. The hard drives were damaged; some melted, and others dented, but an iron box remained intact, though charred from the fire.

Reggie came up and threw a duffel bag beside us. Inside were two thick black gloves designed for handling extreme heat. He strapped them on, pulled out the iron box, and flung it to the ground. Andrei, always ready with brute force, bashed it open with the spent fire extinguisher. Shay made the sign of the cross, and I didn't know if she was serious or not.

Andrei emerged with something in his hands. He threw the object to me and I caught it.

The hardcover book was leatherbound and may as well have been a flaming log. I juggled it until the heat subsided and gazed upon its tattered, worn, and crumpled paper. It was still intact, though. Still readable. Fiction, too, by the looks of it. Illustrations of gods. Western creations. Someone must have given it to the drone, expecting a huge payout. I guessed it could have paid for a week’s worth of meals from its weight alone. It was certainly more than my daily salary at Metamatics.

We finished looting the drone. I shoved five more pulp fantasy novels with dragons and elves and other colonizer crap into my backpack. There was romance, too: gobs and gobs of uninspiring, rehashed garbage. The equivalent of stream sludge but in book form. I found a National Geographic issue published only two years ago. Shay came up with a handful of Wattpad paperbacks she’d probably read before depositing them into a fiction chute. Reggie and Andrei made out with the drone’s innards: whatever chips, drives, and wires weren’t charred.

Under the night’s gaze, we buried the drone. Shay made the sign of the cross again as we walked off, this time jokingly, knowing God knew what she was doing but had yet to smite her. She must have thought she was doing something right.

We let the others walk ahead, their voices still carrying on the wind. For the first time tonight, it felt like it was just Shay and me. There was no need for words.

None of us among the Giant Killers was a scholar. None of us had been born into wealth. We weren’t rising through the ranks of some corporate ladder to amass fortunes. No, our aspirations were simpler: to elevate ourselves from the impoverished life we were born into. To do that, we had to free ourselves from the chains that bound us. We had to free ourselves from the foreign powers slowly taking over our city.

The gap between our present and that idyllic future was endless, bridged only by the bricks we laid day by day, crawling on bare hands and feet, with our eyes always forward. We hated the Giants and everything they stood for, but in a twisted way, we were lucky. We could fight back and survive by stealing fiction from them.

At least for now.

We were Manila’s youth, the city’s soul bleeding out on the curb. We could have left the country to work, joining that massive diaspora of Filipinos in the Middle East, the United States, Canada, Italy, and Germany. In those places, salaries for nurses, software engineers, accountants, and almost every other profession earned quadruple what you would here. Remittances contributed to 30% of the Philippines’ GDP. Those overseas workers would arrive home as kings and queens, merchant princes and princesses. They would be the talk and the envy and the idolized.

But in my mind, they had fled our country, allowing it to succumb to the Giants. They would not, in my eyes, ever be genuinely Filipino again.

We drove on, the road winding through the country that had birthed us, a place we loved but seemed intent on choking us. We talked of the night’s spoils and then our lives. Shay dreamt of self-publishing her Wattpad fiction. Reggie and Andrei planned to open a board game café called Reggie and Rei's in Iloilo City, though I wasn’t sure where they’d get the money. I wanted to ask if Andrei had some leftover income from his time with the Kalawang Clan, but there was never an optimal time to delve into that part of his past.

As for me, though? That was the thing. I didn’t know where I would end up, but wherever that was, I wanted to be with my friends.

Moonlight glinted off my knuckles on the steering wheel as our conversations slowed. Moonlight lit the contours of Shay’s face while Reggie slept in the back, and Andrei watched the countryside pass.

I wondered, briefly, if I could ever escape this life.

I asked myself if I even wanted to.