The tunnels were alive that night. Not with water, not with rats, but with whispers of rebellion. The resistance had chosen the sewers for their first strike, the arteries beneath the city where porcelain thrones drained their secrets. The plan was simple in words, impossible in practice: sabotage the flow, choke the pipes, turn the very infrastructure against the oppressors above.

I dropped into the tunnels with a flashlight wrapped in red cellophane, its beam faint, conspiratorial. The stink hit me like a wall, but it was a soldier’s perfume now. Around me, the others moved—faces blurred by shadows, hands clutching improvised tools: plungers sharpened into spears, buckets rigged with chemical sludge, rolls of toilet paper soaked and weighted like grenades. We weren’t just rebels anymore. We were saboteurs.

The first act of war was surgical. At junction valves we stuffed rags, grease, and whatever refuse we had. Every blockage was a bomb without fire, waiting to rupture under pressure. The tunnels trembled with each strike of metal against porcelain, each flush from the streets above feeding into the chaos we seeded. We knew the enemy would feel it not immediately, but inevitably—their toilets backing up, their offices flooding, their clean surfaces tainted with our revolt.

But sabotage is never clean. Halfway through the night, the pressure shifted. A roar thundered from deeper in the system, a surge none of us had planned for. Someone whispered Putin’s name like a prayer, swearing he had loosed an entire district into revolt simultaneously. The pipes shuddered, and a brown tide rose toward us.

We ran, but we didn’t flee. Each of us tossed our sabotage kits behind as we scrambled, leaving the tunnels clogged, cracked, and groaning like a wounded beast. Above ground, by morning, the city would awaken not to silence, but to the unmistakable sound of toilets betraying their masters.

This was the first true sabotage of the Poop War. Unforgettable.