Translated into English
❤️ Support the project on Patreon — symbolic or full-tier available. EPUB versions available or custom formats by request.
The monitor flickered—then flared to life, slashing through the darkness of the underwater station with a sickly green light.
A piercing signal cut through the silence. Barely audible. Sharp enough to sting.
Incoming transmission.
On the cracked display, garbled lines began to crawl across the screen:
...Signal received...
Integrity: CRITICAL
Noise level: EXCEEDED
Then—
A voice.
Human.
Distorted. Strained. Clinging to the fraying edge of a connection dredged from the depths of the sea.
“This is Ren ‘Compass’ Wayland…”
His voice trembled, as if torn from a place steeped in fear.
“If anyone can hear this…”
Digital static surged like a wave, swallowing the sound. The system struggled to filter the interference—but the noise was overwhelming.
When the voice returned, it was worse. Cracked. Hollow.
“MycoBrain… it’s not what we thought…”
More static.
“This place… we were all wrong. Atlantis… Atlantis is just a veil. A deception…”
The last words were dragged through the distortion, choking on the noise.
And then—
Nothing.
A long, high-pitched whine of a broken signal.
…Signal lost…
Message archived.
Access level: RESTRICTED
The screen went black.
The room collapsed back into heavy, viscous silence—
As if nothing had ever happened.
The system had received the message.
But it didn’t send it onward.
Without direct authorization.
Directive: ACTIVE
Command authority: SKYLAR MONTGOMERY
The desert was alive with heat.
Waves of it shimmered across the dunes, turning sand into liquid gold stretching to the horizon. The sun hung overhead like a judge without mercy, casting everything beneath it into stark, unforgiving contrast. Wind curled and hissed between the hills, lifting dust into the air—like the earth itself was resisting the intrusion.
Ren “Compass” Wayland crouched beside the entrance to a partially buried tomb. His gloved hand hovered over a massive stone slab, its surface cracked and faded with age. He studied the carvings etched into it—spirals, angular runes, and symbols no scholar had cataloged.
He didn’t blink.
Ren stood tall and tightly wired. The heat clung to him, but he wore it without complaint, like a second layer of discipline.
“What do you think, Sphinx?” he asked quietly, his voice low enough not to disturb the moment.
Beside him, the older man tilted his head, eyes narrowed behind thick glasses. Professor Elias “Sphinx” Haddad was dressed in a faded checkered jacket and a sun-bleached hat that hadn’t been in style since the Cold War. His fingers, thin and brittle-looking, traced the ancient markings reverently.
“They speak of gates...” he murmured, almost to himself. “Not ordinary ones. Gates to the gods. A passage to something beyond the human world.”
His voice trembled slightly—not from weakness, but from awe.
Compass stood, gazing out over the dunes. The wind tugged at his scarf, filled the air with the whisper of sand brushing stone.
“Another metaphor,” he said. “Or something more?”
Sphinx shook his head slowly, still running his fingers over the glyphs.
“It reads like a warning. As if someone wanted to make sure this would stay buried. That these gates should never be opened.”
Ren’s brow tightened. He had seen such warnings before—on temples, ruins, caves deep in the jungle. Always the same ancient fear. But this one felt different.
There was a weight to it.
Something... off.
He pressed his palm to the slab, closing his eyes. The stone was hot, dry. And yet... beneath the surface, something buzzed. Not physically, but intuitively.
Behind him, the rest of the team stood silently, watching.
He turned to glance at them.
Five souls, each hand-picked. Each here by choice. Each trusted.
And now, they waited.
There was always hesitation in moments like these. Always a choice. But Ren’s curiosity had long ago made peace with risk.
He remembered his mother—how she’d died following her own truths. And how that guilt had never left him.
But this?
This was bigger.
And it was worth it.
“Echo,” he said. “Scanner. I need to know if there’s a cavity behind this.”
“On it,” came the soft reply.
A young man with a wiry frame moved forward, pulling out a handheld device. His fingers danced across the interface like a pianist coaxing out a delicate symphony.
“Knew we’d get to this,” muttered another voice. Female, bright, confident.
Rivet—mechanic, technician, troublemaker—stepped forward, strapping herself into the exosuit. Metal joints hissed to life as the servos aligned with her limbs.
“If this thing’s too heavy, I’ll give it a nudge,” she added with a grin.
The scanner hummed. Echo studied the screen.
“We’ve got something. Hollow space behind the slab. Fairly large.”
Ren nodded once.
“We open it.”
Rivet cracked her knuckles—both human and mechanical—and took her position.
She leaned forward, planting her powered palms against the ancient stone.
A second passed.
Nothing.
Then came the sound—a low, groaning scrape, ancient hinges moaning as if protesting. Dust exploded into the air. The slab began to move.
Everyone shielded their faces as sand poured from the breach. The air filled with the scent of time and the faint tang of metal.
When the cloud settled, a black rectangle stood before them.
An entrance.
A passage.
A mouth into the unknown.
For the first time in thousands of years, sunlight touched the threshold of the tomb.
“Stay sharp,” said Compass. “Eyes open. No one rushes.”
He stepped forward, flashlight in hand, and disappeared into the dark.
The others followed in silence.
Inside, the air dropped ten degrees instantly.
Cool, dry, still.
It wrapped around them like silk soaked in shadow.
Their lights pierced the gloom, catching fragments of painted walls, sculpted reliefs, and carved recesses. The detail was stunning. Colors preserved. Surfaces smooth. No vines. No rot.
Untouched.
Preserved.
Waiting.
“Unbelievable...” whispered Sphinx.
He moved to one of the walls, brushing his light along a wide engraving.
A star chart.
“Looks like a map of the night sky,” he said. “But the constellations are... off.”
“Not off,” Compass replied. “Different. This is what the sky must’ve looked like... thousands of years ago.”
Behind them, Doc crouched near the ground, his light trained on the corners of the room.
“No signs of life,” he said. “No droppings, no insects. Not even dust on the floor. It’s sterile. Like nothing ever lived here.”
Compass nodded slowly.
Another anomaly.
Another item for the growing list of impossibilities.
“This place isn’t just a tomb,” he said. “It’s something else. Maybe a vault.”
They moved deeper, every step deliberate, every breath held.
Then—
A click.
Soft. Barely audible.
Under Ren’s foot.
He froze.
“Stop,” he ordered.
Everyone halted.
One second.
Two.
No darts.
No collapsing ceilings.
Instead, a low grinding sound echoed from the wall.
A slab slid aside, revealing a hidden compartment.
“We’re getting lucky today,” muttered Doc, cautiously peering inside.
Something inside reflected his light.
He reached in, fingers careful, and pulled it free.
It fit in his hand like it had been waiting there.
A cube.
Perfectly smooth. Metallic. Cold. About the size of an apple. No seams. No buttons. Only faint lines—like veins—etched into its surface.
He handed it to Compass.
Ren held it with both hands.
And felt the weight of history settle on his chest.
“What the hell is this?” Rivet asked, peering over his shoulder. “It doesn’t look like a lockbox... How does it open?”
He turned it slowly, letting the flashlight play over its surface.
Then—something changed.
The metal shimmered faintly.
And symbols began to appear.
Not carved.
Emerging.
As though they had always been there, but were only now choosing to show themselves.
Soft pulses of light traced along the etched lines.
Alive.
“You’re seeing this too, right?” Compass whispered.
Sphinx stepped forward so fast he nearly dropped his flashlight.
His breath hitched.
He recognized the script.
“It can’t be...” he murmured. “These are two different languages. On the same object.”
The others crowded close.
Sphinx ran a shaking finger across the surface.
One side: cuneiform.
Another: Egyptian hieroglyphs.
“Which languages?” Ren asked.
“Sumerian-Akkadian... and classical Egyptian. The two oldest civilizations known to humanity. They coexisted, roughly. But they never communicated. Never shared written language. Seeing them together... It’s impossible.”
Compass bent closer, studying the center of the cube.
There, between the lines and glyphs, one symbol stood out.
A brain. Encased in delicate threads. Like mycelium.
The hair on his arms stood up.
He looked to Rivet. To Echo. To Doc.
They all felt it.
This was no ordinary find.
This was something more.
Something meant to be hidden.
Something that had waited to be found.
The room held its breath.
The cube pulsed gently in Compass’s hands, its surface alive with glimmers of light. The lines along its edges weren’t just engravings anymore—they were channels, conduits of ancient energy responding to touch, to presence.
Sphinx was already speaking, though it sounded more like prayer than analysis.
“The cuneiform reads ‘Abzu.’”
His voice was raspy with disbelief.
“That’s the Akkadian term for ‘the deep’—not just depth, but primordial depth. The abyss.”
He turned the cube slowly, his flashlight dancing across the opposite face.
“And here... the Egyptian script says ‘Ta-Netjer.’”
He paused, stunned.
“Land of the Gods.”
The room fell silent.
Even Rivet had nothing clever to say.
Even Echo, who usually watched everything through a lens, had lowered the camera.
“Two civilizations,” Compass murmured. “Speaking across time. Across language. Saying the same thing.”
He looked again at the central symbol—the brain, laced with filaments like fungal threads.
It stared back at him.
Not with eyes, but with intent.
“It’s a message,” he said. “Left behind. Hidden. Waiting.”
Sphinx nodded slowly.
“A warning, maybe. Or an invitation.”
Doc stepped forward, shining his light across the walls again.
“There’s more here. Star charts. Frescoes. But it’s too clean. Too quiet.”
He bent down and rubbed a finger along the stone.
“There’s no dust. No decay. No bat droppings. No fungal growth. This isn’t a tomb.”
He looked up, face pale.
“It’s a sealed chamber. Preserved. Like a... vault. Or a capsule.”
Compass exhaled, the weight of it all pressing on his chest.
This was no ordinary archaeological site. This was a message in a bottle—hurled across millennia.
And now they had opened it.
He wrapped the cube carefully in a cloth from his satchel and slipped it into a reinforced compartment inside his pack.
“We say nothing,” he said. “Not yet. Not until we understand what this is.”
The others nodded. No questions.
They understood.
This wasn’t just another find.
This was a threshold.
“Let’s go,” Compass said quietly.
They turned back toward the passage, moving silently through the chamber. Their footsteps echoed like whispers from the past.
As they stepped into the outer tunnel, Rivet paused and looked back.
“Feels like we’re leaving something unfinished,” she murmured.
“We are,” Compass replied. “And that’s exactly why we’re coming back.”
The light from outside was harsh when they emerged. The sun still burned overhead, merciless and absolute. But something had shifted.
The team climbed back up the dune slope in silence.
At the edge of the entrance, Compass turned.
The stone slab stood open—still half-shifted from its original position, like the lid of a sarcophagus cracked for the first time in eternity.
“Rivet,” he said. “Seal it.”
She nodded, stepped forward, and placed her gloved hands on the ancient surface. With the exosuit’s strength behind her, the stone groaned and slid back into place.
The sound it made was heavy. Final.
The tomb disappeared once more beneath sand and sky.
The world above would forget again.
And the world below would wait.
They made their way back toward camp. Wind picked up behind them, erasing their footprints one by one.
Sphinx limped slightly.
Doc said nothing.
Echo walked with his eyes scanning the horizon.
Rivet walked beside Compass, eyes forward, silent for once.
As they crested the final dune, Compass glanced back.
The desert was already swallowing the past.
But his thoughts weren’t in the sand.
They were inside the pack on his shoulder.
Inside the cube.
Inside the message.
“Something wrong?” Rivet asked softly, brushing dust from her cheek.
Her tone was casual, but her eyes were sharp.
He shook his head, smiling faintly.
“Nothing we can’t handle.”
She nodded and walked ahead.
He lingered for one more breath, then followed.
Behind them, the wind howled through the dunes, covering all traces.
And ahead of them, unseen, the truth waited.
Buried.
Patient.
Alive.
The great hall at Oxford University had the atmosphere of an impending verdict.
Overhead, crystal chandeliers cast golden light on polished oak panels, but the room was already humming with the anxious energy of a crowd expecting something grand—something controversial. Ren “Compass” Wayland stood backstage, hidden behind a velvet curtain, staring down at the artifact in its case. His reflection shimmered off the polished glass surface of the cube.
He exhaled slowly.
This is it.
Months of excavation, translation, sleepless nights spent with ancient symbols, dreams of recognition—and fears of being wrong. All of it had led to this moment. A single presentation, ten minutes long, in front of some of the most esteemed archaeologists, historians, and skeptics on the planet.
Beyond the curtain, the low murmur of voices buzzed like a swarm. The room was packed—standing room only. Media outlets, scholars, government observers, and even a few venture capitalists had crowded in to hear what some had already dubbed the discovery of the century.
Ren glanced sideways.
Seated near the front row, his team waited with visible tension. Sphinx sat ramrod straight, cane resting across his lap, his face unreadable but his eyes burning with anticipation. Rivet tapped nervously at her ear-mounted comms unit, chewing the inside of her cheek. Echo adjusted his camera rig, focused on the stage like a sniper. And Doc sat still, hands folded, staring into nothing with clinical calm.
He didn’t need to say anything to them.
They all knew what was at stake.
“Professor Wayland,” a voice whispered. An assistant motioned to the stage.
Ren stepped forward.
As he emerged, applause rippled politely—just enough to acknowledge his credentials, but not yet his message. He walked toward the podium, his stride controlled, measured, as though he didn’t feel like an imposter in front of giants.
The massive projection screen behind him flared to life.
A crisp, high-resolution image of the artifact filled the space—silver-gray, weathered, impossible. The cube glowed under the lights, its edges sharp and alien, the engravings faintly visible to the naked eye.
Ren placed both hands on the lectern.
“Good afternoon,” he began, his voice steady despite the weight in his chest. “My name is Ren Wayland. Some of you know me as Compass. I’ve spent the last fifteen years of my life studying ancient anomalies—artifacts, ruins, mythologies that don’t quite fit into our historical puzzle.”
He clicked a button.
The image zoomed in. A close-up of the cube’s surface. Patterns—etched lines, like veins or circuitry—snaked across the metal, converging toward a single symbol.
“This,” Ren said quietly, “is not just another relic. It is a message. And it did not come from any single culture that we know.”
A new slide appeared—two ancient scripts, side by side.
“On one face, we discovered Sumerian-Akkadian cuneiform. On another: Egyptian hieroglyphs. These languages existed roughly in the same epoch... but never in the same place. Never on the same object. Never meant to be read together.”
The room hushed. The audience leaned forward.
Ren gestured to a composite image that overlaid the cube’s engravings onto a stylized brain.
“At the center,” he said, “this symbol—seen in various forms across the artifact—resembles a human brain entwined with something organic. Filament-like. Mycelial.”
A few people exchanged glances. Others whispered.
“We believe this represents a conceptual model. A network of thought. A consciousness. Not bound to one individual—but shared. And ancient.”
He paused.
“There is more. References in the scripts to 'Abzu'—Sumerian for 'the deep'—and 'Ta-Netjer,' or 'Land of the Gods,' from Egyptian myth. These cultures speak of gateways, of forbidden knowledge, of beings that walked before men. And this artifact may be the first physical proof that such myths were rooted in something real.”
The air in the room thickened.
It was working.
Ren could feel the shift—curiosity taking hold. Doubt giving way to wonder.
Then came the question.
“Are you saying this is from Atlantis?”
From the back of the room, a young voice rang out—eager, unfiltered.
The name dropped like a stone in a still pond.
Ren’s stomach twisted. He saw Sphinx wince.
“I’m not making that claim,” Ren said, keeping his tone even. “I’m saying we’ve found something that suggests contact—or continuity—between ancient civilizations. Something predating what we’ve previously accepted.”
But the damage was done.
The word Atlantis now floated over the room like a ghost—and it summoned its own hunter.
From the fifth row, a tall, gaunt man in a dark suit rose to his feet.
Ren knew him instantly.
Professor Michael Rivers.
The man whose career was built on tearing down frauds, hoaxes, wishful thinkers. He had destroyed reputations in a single op-ed. Some called him a necessary evil. Others called him a bastard with tenure.
The room fell silent as he made his way to the aisle, then slowly approached the stage.
“Mr. Wayland,” Rivers called out, his voice dry as sandpaper. “May I?”
Ren hesitated. The cube sat on a velvet-draped pedestal beside him. Rivers didn’t ask again.
With effort, Ren unclasped the protective case and lifted the artifact. He held it a moment longer than he should have—then handed it over.
Rivers turned it in his hand with mock reverence.
“The craftsmanship is excellent,” he said, almost sincerely. “A lovely fabrication. Nice patina.”
He raised it above his head like a chalice.
“But let’s be honest: this is a modern hoax.”
Laughter—nervous at first, then emboldened—echoed from the crowd.
Ren stood frozen.
Rivers smiled like a predator.
“You want to believe it’s ancient? That’s charming. But let’s consider reality. Modern laser etching, friends. Look at these edges—machine-perfect. The ‘mycelium brain’? A fun piece of graphic design. Symbolism pulled from contemporary neurology and pop science.”
More laughter. Some claps.
Sphinx sat stonily, jaw clenched. Rivet looked ready to jump from her seat. Doc closed his eyes.
Rivers continued, now pacing.
“And of course, the inevitable references to ‘the deep’ and ‘the land of the gods.’ You might as well put up a slide of Atlantis and play whale sounds.”
He let the cube drop into his palm with a soft thud.
“We’ve seen this before. The Voynich Manuscript. The Dropa stones. Now, the Wayland cube. The public eats it up—but we, the scientists, have a responsibility not to indulge in fantasy.”
Ren tried to speak, but his throat was dry.
“I never said it was—” he managed.
“Atlantis? Of course not,” Rivers interrupted. “You left that part for your eager audience to assume. Clever. But sloppy.”
More cameras clicked.
Ren turned back to the podium. His hands shook.
He looked to his team.
Rivet met his eyes, silently urging him to say something—anything.
But he couldn’t.
He felt hollow.
Burned out.
And just like that, the energy in the room shifted—from anticipation to derision.
He backed away from the podium.
Then, without a word, Ren Wayland walked off stage.
The heavy oak door closed behind him with a finality that echoed through his chest.
Outside, the courtyard was empty. Night had fallen unnoticed, and the old stones of Oxford glistened with the moisture of a recent drizzle. Ren descended the steps without thinking, his body on autopilot. The cold air bit at his face, but it didn’t bring clarity—only the numb realization that he had just watched his life's work unravel in front of hundreds.
His mother’s voice echoed in his memory—soft, reassuring, reading him tales of ancient cities and lost knowledge. “Be careful what you dig up,” she used to say. “Some truths stay buried for a reason.”
He reached a bench by the edge of the lawn and sat heavily.
For a long moment, he simply stared at the damp grass, his fists clenched so tightly that his knuckles turned white. The cube—his artifact—was still on that stage, probably passed from hand to hand, mocked, dismissed.
It had felt different when they found it. Sacred. Dangerous.
And now?
Now it was a joke with hashtags.
He closed his eyes.
Then—footsteps.
He didn’t look up.
“Compass Wayland?”
A calm, female voice.
He turned slowly.
The woman stood a few paces away, partly illuminated by the golden light from an upper window. She was tall, mid-thirties, dressed in a sleek gray suit that blended perfectly into the Oxford shadows. Her eyes—dark, sharp, intelligent—locked onto his with no hesitation.
“I’m not here for an interview,” she added. “Or to laugh.”
Ren didn’t respond.
“I believe you,” she said.
His brow furrowed.
“Why?”
Instead of answering, she stepped closer and pulled out a phone. She tapped the screen and handed it to him.
Ren took it without thinking.
An image filled the display.
A sphere—slightly larger than the cube—lay on a velvet cloth. It shared the same impossible metal, the same etched lines. And in the center, unmistakable: the symbol of the brain wrapped in fungal filaments.
His breath caught.
“It’s real,” he whispered.
“We found it years ago,” she said. “In a chamber beneath a mountain range in South America. Different language pairing. But the same architecture. Same alloy. Same—message.”
Ren looked up.
“And who’s ‘we’?”
The woman smiled faintly.
“Skylar Montgomery. You can call me Sky. I run a private research initiative.”
He blinked.
“Initiative?”
“Let’s just say we collect truths that governments don’t want and academia can’t handle.”
She paused, then added:
“And we believe there are more pieces out there. You just brought us one step closer to understanding it.”
Ren stood slowly, heart pounding.
“Why come to me?”
“Because you didn’t back down on that stage.” She nodded toward the hall. “You told the truth—even when they laughed.”
He looked away.
“I didn’t feel brave.”
“But you were,” she said simply.
Silence stretched between them, broken only by the soft rattle of wind through the courtyard.
Then Ren spoke.
“If you’ve had this for years, why not show it to the world?”
Sky’s gaze hardened slightly.
“Because the world isn’t ready. Not yet. And not like this.” She motioned toward the building. “You saw what happened when you showed just one piece. Imagine what they’d do with two.”
She stepped closer.
“We don’t need to fight to prove we’re right. We need to understand what this is first.”
Ren studied her face.
There was no arrogance in her tone. No condescension. Only quiet confidence.
And something else—urgency.
“You think there’s more out there,” he said.
“I know there is,” she replied. “We’ve tracked three others to various parts of the world. Each time, we’re too late—or they’re too well hidden. But now, with yours... we might have a pattern.”
She hesitated.
“But I can’t do it alone.”
Ren stared down at the photo still glowing on the screen. The sphere seemed to pulse with a presence of its own.
It wasn’t over.
Not by a long shot.
“You want to work together,” he said slowly.
“I want to finish what we both started,” Sky corrected.
He chuckled bitterly.
“You realize the academic world just buried me.”
She nodded.
“Then it’s time to stop digging for their approval.”
For the first time since leaving the stage, he smiled.
Just slightly.
A spark.
“Alright,” he said. “I’m listening.”
Sky turned.
“Follow me.”
They walked side by side through the darkened grounds, past archways and cloisters that had stood since before America was even an idea. Her pace was unhurried, her direction certain.
They reached a sleek black car parked just beyond the gates. Sky opened the door and motioned him in.
Inside, soft lights lit a minimal, high-tech interior. The hum of the engine was nearly silent.
On a central screen, glowing in blue, was a map.
At the center: a point in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
“Coordinates from the artifact,” Sky said. “Your cube’s inscriptions match those on the sphere. Together, they form a directional system. A kind of... ancient compass.”
Ren leaned forward.
“No way.”
“Yes way,” she said. “And it’s pointing somewhere that’s never been mapped, because it’s not on the surface. It’s under.”
“Under what?”
She looked at him.
“Everything.”
He laughed once—a breath of disbelief and exhilaration tangled together.
“You’re not joking?”
“As a heart attack.”
Ren sat back, eyes on the map, thoughts racing.
His mind felt like it had been cracked open. The shame, the humiliation of the evening—it was still there. But now it had company. Something far more powerful.
Purpose.
“I need my team,” he said.
“You’ll have them,” she replied.
He turned to her.
“And you’re not just some rich collector with a toy submarine?”
Sky’s expression twitched—just enough to reveal the trace of a smirk.
“I’m not interested in collecting. I’m interested in changing the world.”
Ren let the words hang.
Because deep down, he knew: the world was already changing.
They were just the first to see it.
The road twisted like a ribbon of silence through the woods north of London.
The black sedan slid along the gravel path, its engine barely more than a whisper. The surrounding forest stood still, ancient trees crowding in close, branches knitted overhead like a canopy of secrets. Shadows flickered in the headlights, but nothing moved. Not a single soul in sight.
Inside the car, Ren “Compass” Wayland sat in the passenger seat, eyes narrowed as he studied the way ahead.
No signs. No gates. No security cameras. Nothing.
Just the forest swallowing the road whole.
“You own all this?” he asked.
“The land? Yes,” said Sky Montgomery from behind the wheel. “The truth? No one really owns anything this old.”
Her tone was casual. Unapologetic.
As if centuries and secrets were just tools at her disposal.
Ren didn’t respond. He was still thinking about the conference. About the laughter. About the cube burning in his bag like it was alive.
Atlantis was just a curtain...
Sky had said she believed him. Showed him proof. A second artifact. A twin.
But why now? And why him?
They passed under an archway, ivy-covered and forgotten by time, then rolled up to what looked like a manor built for kings.
Stone walls loomed high, cracked and weathered. Ivy clung to every crevice like time itself was trying to reclaim it. But there was no rot. No decay.
Only silence.
The car coasted to a stop. Sky stepped out first.
“Come on,” she said, already walking.
Ren followed.
The air here felt different—thicker somehow, like it held its breath.
Inside, the manor was dim and cool. Marble floors. Wooden beams. Heavy portraits with hollow eyes. But Sky wasn’t leading him deeper into the house.
She led him downward.
Down a flight of stone stairs.
Past the wine cellar.
Through a reinforced steel door with a biometric scanner.
It opened with a hiss.
And the world changed.
Below the old bones of the mansion lay something utterly alien—
A laboratory that didn’t belong in this century.
A cathedral of science.
Soft white light pulsed along the walls.
Workstations glowed with readings.
Sleek terminals blinked with real-time data.
Air purifiers hummed in the corners, keeping the air dry, clean, sterile.
Ren stopped at the threshold.
“This isn’t a lab,” he said. “It’s a command center.”
Sky gave a half-shrug.
“Same thing, these days.”
Ren turned slowly, taking it all in.
This wasn't just wealth.
This was preparation.
“So,” he asked carefully. “What is it you actually do here?”
Sky glanced at him, then walked toward a long table in the center of the room.
A spotlight illuminated something resting on a velvet-lined platform.
“We solve riddles,” she said. “The kind buried under time, myth, and fear.”
She stepped aside.
And there it was.
The sphere.
Ren took a breath.
The same material as the cube.
Same cold shine.
Same delicate lines etched across its surface.
And at the center—
That same haunting symbol.
A human brain, cradled in a web of fungal threads.
Mycelium.
His fingers twitched.
He wanted to touch it. Needed to.
But stopped himself just short.
“Where did you find it?” he asked, voice low, eyes locked on the artifact.
“Another expedition,” said Sky. “Another part of the world. Another set of questions.”
She paused.
“But the answers… they all lead here.”
Ren slowly reached into his pack and pulled out the cube.
His hands trembled—not from fear, but from something deeper.
Recognition.
He placed it gently beside the sphere.
Two shapes.
Two halves.
Speaking the same language across centuries.
And then—
The cube vibrated.
Only slightly.
But enough to feel it in his bones.
The sphere responded.
It lifted.
Without wires. Without motion.
Just… floated.
Suspended above the cube like it had been waiting.
Ren took a step back.
“That’s not possible,” he whispered.
The sphere began to rotate.
A fine needle extended from its core—thin, sharp, glowing faintly.
It moved.
Wavered.
Then fixed.
Pointing.
As if waking from a slumber, it had remembered its purpose.
“It’s a compass,” Sky said, breathless. “A spatial navigator. Not just directions on a map—but orientation in three dimensions.”
She turned to him.
“They were never meant to be alone. They activate each other.”
He stared at the glowing line, transfixed.
Through stone. Through continents.
It pointed somewhere far beyond what maps could show.
“Do you know where it leads?” he asked.
“Not yet. But I have my suspicions.”
He looked at her.
And something clicked.
The nickname.
“Compass.”
It wasn’t just irony anymore. It was prophecy.
He reached out and touched the sphere.
It spun easily under his fingers.
But the needle didn’t move.
Locked on.
Unyielding.
“We need to follow it,” he said quietly.
Sky nodded.
“I’ve already assembled a team. Vessels. Equipment. We were waiting for this moment.”
She looked at the floating sphere.
“Now that the two are reunited… we have our path.”
Ren exhaled.
The memory of laughter in Oxford was still there.
But now it felt small. Distant.
There was something calling them forward.
Something ancient.
Something real.
And maybe…
Something alive.
The sphere hovered in perfect stillness.
Its needle still pointed—unwavering, insistent—through walls and distance, through the crust of the Earth itself.
Ren stood before it, hands at his sides, breathing slow.
Everything he thought he knew about the artifact had shifted. Again.
“So this is it,” he said. “The direction. A destination.”
Sky nodded, arms folded as she watched the readout on the screen behind them.
“Coordinates are triangulating,” she confirmed. “Give it a minute.”
“Where?” he asked.
“Somewhere in the mid-Atlantic.”
She turned to him, her expression unreadable.
“Roughly where Plato placed Atlantis.”
Ren almost laughed—but it came out as breath.
“Of course it is.”
“Not so funny, now,” she said quietly.
He looked back at the glowing sphere.
It still didn’t seem real.
That something this ancient—this alien—could know where to point.
“You said your team found the sphere. Was it... like this?”
“Dormant,” she said. “Until now. We tried everything. Radiation, magnetic fields, sonics. Nothing. But when I saw the photo of your cube... I had a theory. Turns out I was right.”
She stepped closer to him.
“They were made to be together. Two halves of a lock. Now we just need to find the door.”
Ren felt a chill creep through him.
It wasn’t fear. Not quite.
It was the weight of knowing that every story told to children—every myth and whispered secret—might have been pointing to this.
“Atlantis was never the goal,” he murmured.
“No,” said Sky. “It was the curtain. The theater set. But behind it…”
She gestured toward the glowing line.
“There’s something else.”
A low tone chimed from the nearest console.
Coordinates locked.
The readout glowed blue:
LAT: 31.7°N — LONG: 25.2°W
Depth: 4000 meters
Status: Unknown
Ren stared at the numbers. The Atlantic.
Remote. Deep.
No island there. No landmass.
“There’s nothing on the surface,” he said.
“Exactly,” Sky replied. “Whatever it’s pointing to—it’s underneath.”
Ren exhaled.
“This is insane.”
“It’s history,” she said.
Silence fell between them.
In the quiet, he could almost hear the ocean in his ears. The crushing pressure. The weight of time.
And still… the compass pointed.
Sky moved to the side console and opened a drawer. Inside were several sealed cases.
She opened one.
Inside lay a set of satellite maps. Another case held a collection of small vials—samples, sealed and coded. Another still held a chip—bio-encrypted.
Prepared. Everything about her screamed preparedness.
“You’ve been planning this,” Ren said, narrowing his eyes.
“I’ve been waiting for this,” she corrected.
He hesitated.
“Why me?”
“Because you’re the only one who didn’t walk away. You brought your cube into the fire, even when they laughed.”
She tilted her head.
“And because you’ve seen something. I can see it in your eyes. You’ve already crossed the threshold.”
He didn’t answer.
His mind raced—not with fear, but with memory.
The tomb. The cold stone. The glyphs. The voice of his mother reading to him from old texts, warning him to tread lightly around buried truths.
“You really believe we’ll find something down there?”
“I know we will.”
She opened a digital folder on the main console—images flicked across the screen: strange structures on the seabed, anomalies, magnetic readings, lost signals. Some had timestamps decades apart.
“These are all from the same region. Something’s down there. Something the world has chosen to ignore.”
“Or cover up,” Ren added.
She gave him a look—half a smile, half a challenge.
“Does it matter?”
“It does if it fights back.”
That silenced them both.
Finally, Sky turned from the screen.
“I want you with me, Compass.”
Her voice softened. She rarely used names.
“I want you to help navigate this. To be part of something real.”
He looked at her—and something flickered.
Respect? Trust?
Or something else.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
She didn’t flinch.
“Enough to keep you alive.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Comforting.”
She smiled faintly, then turned to the hovering sphere.
“Look at it. Really look.”
He did.
And saw not a device. Not a weapon. Not even a mystery.
He saw a summons.
Something ancient had reached across eons, sent out signals in pieces. And now those pieces were together again.
It was calling them home.
Or into the mouth of something older than home.
“Alright,” he said quietly. “I’m in.”
Sky didn’t respond right away.
Just nodded, once.
“We leave in 48 hours. My team’s assembling now. You’ll have time to prepare. To bring your people.”
He hesitated.
“My team…”
“The professor. The medic. The mechanic. The observer. I know who they are.”
He gave her a long look.
“Been watching me long?”
“Long enough to know you’ll need them.”
She turned to leave, pausing at the top of the steps.
“One more thing.”
He looked up.
“Once we go down there… there’s no turning back.”
And she was gone.
The echo of her boots faded up the stairwell.
Ren stood in silence, bathed in the blue glow of the sphere.
Its needle still pointed, unmoving. Unchanging.
Straight toward the unknown.
He thought of Rivet’s laughter.
Of Sphinx’s warnings.
Of Echo’s quiet eyes.
Of Doc’s steady hands.
I’ll need them all.
The weight settled.
Not of the past.
Of what comes next.
He picked up the cube, held it close, then turned off the lab light.
Darkness fell.
But the compass still glowed.
The jet sliced through the late afternoon sky, high above the steel-blue Atlantic.
Sunlight shimmered across the ocean below like molten glass.
Inside the cabin, silence pressed down like the deep.
Two teams sat in two rows, facing one another, the space between them filled with invisible questions.
In the center of the cabin, a reinforced case rested on a carbon-fiber table.
Inside: the Cube. The Sphere. Still.
But Ren could feel them.
Sometimes the case vibrated—barely. As if the artifacts were waiting.
He couldn’t stop glancing toward them.
We’ve crossed the line. No turning back now.
At the far end of the cabin, Sky sat with her tablet, monitoring maps, checking encrypted feeds.
Ren sat opposite her, eyes steady.
Finally, he stood up, offering a calm smile.
“We’ll be living and working side by side from here on. I think it’s time we got to know each other. Trust will be our best equipment.”
Sky nodded and stood as well.
“Then I’ll start.”
She looked around the cabin, her voice calm but resonant.
“Sky Montgomery. You already know the name. I’m financing this mission because I believe discoveries of this magnitude should serve people, not politics. Not war.”
Her tone was clear, composed—but something flickered behind her eyes. Something unspoken.
To her right stood a man who looked like he belonged to shadows.
Tall, lean, wrapped in tactical black.
Face unreadable.
Eyes like a hawk.
He nodded once.
“Codename: Shade. Intelligence. Recon. Memory recall. Contingency planning.”
His voice was clipped, emotionless.
“My role is keeping all of you alive.”
He didn’t smile.
Didn’t sit.
He just returned to his post, arms crossed, watching the doors and windows like they might turn against them.
Ren swallowed.
That one never sleeps.
Next came a mountain.
Muscular. Stoic. A quiet kind of strength radiating from him.
“Thunder,” he said with a voice like distant artillery. “Ex-military contractor. Personal security.”
He glanced at Sky.
“She saved my life. I protect hers. And yours.”
Simple words.
Spoken like an oath.
The kind that didn’t break.
Ren noticed Sky give him a faint nod. Not gratitude. Something deeper.
Loyalty forged in fire.
Then the mood shifted.
A wiry young man with messy hair and a beaming grin gave an exaggerated wave.
“Yo! I’m Pixel. Hacker, AI tinkerer, codebreaker, occasional urban explorer—meaning I jump off stuff and don’t die.”
A laugh rippled through the cabin.
Pixel’s energy was impossible to ignore.
“If it’s encrypted, I’ll crack it. Ancient languages, satellite signals, alien tech—bring it on.”
He glanced at Sphinx and winked.
“No offense, Professor. We’ll see who deciphers the apocalypse first.”
Sphinx raised an eyebrow, amused.
“I welcome the competition, young man. May the best algorithm—or archaeologist—win.”
More laughter. Even Shade’s jaw relaxed a fraction.
Pixel spun toward the back of the cabin and mock-bowed.
“Also, I know parkour. So if anyone tries to run… I’ll catch you. Without an exosuit.”
He shot a playful look at Rivet, who smirked.
The last to stand was a woman who seemed carved from ice.
Short platinum-blonde hair.
Pressed uniform.
Movements sharp and surgical.
“Codename: Mamba,” she said crisply. “Geneticist. Military physician. I’m here to collect biological samples, analyze evolutionary anomalies, and assess threats to human physiology.”
Her eyes scanned the room.
“This mission may require… unconventional decisions. I’m prepared to make them.”
The temperature in the cabin dropped a degree.
No jokes followed her speech.
Ren felt his gut tighten. There was conviction in her tone.
But no compassion.
He exchanged a glance with Doc, who had been watching her closely.
They were both doctors. But worlds apart.
Mamba returned to her seat like someone completing a field report.
Clean. Precise. No wasted emotion.
Sky turned back to the others, her gaze resting briefly on Ren.
“Now you know my team. You’ll find them competent. Loyal. And occasionally dramatic.”
Pixel saluted with two fingers.
“Mission vibes are officially on point.”
Ren smiled faintly, then stepped forward.
Time to introduce his side of the expedition.
Ren took a breath, then stepped forward.
“Ren Wayland. Most people call me Compass.”
He let the name sit for a moment. It no longer felt like a joke. It felt… earned.
“Field strategist. Researcher of ancient cultures. A little reckless. A little obsessed. But I know how to find what’s lost.”
He turned, gesturing to his crew—his people.
“And these are the ones who’ve had my back through sandstorms, cave-ins, and one almost-murderous vending machine.”
A dry laugh moved through the cabin.
Sphinx stepped forward first.
Trim suit, circular glasses, age dancing in the corners of his eyes—but those eyes were sharp as ever.
“I’m called Sphinx. Professor of ancient languages, comparative mythology, forgotten scripts. I like puzzles… especially the ones buried under five millennia of dust.”
He gave Pixel a small nod.
“And I do look forward to watching you try.”
Pixel grinned wide.
“Race you to the first glyph!”
Next up was a man in sleek gear, lined with sensors and micro-circuits—quiet, lean, analytical.
“Echo,” he said simply. “Communications. Signal engineering. Anything that transmits, decrypts, or listens—I’m on it.”
He flicked his fingers toward Pixel’s portable server pack.
“Just don’t fry my frequency bands, genius.”
“Only if you ask nicely,” Pixel replied.
Then came a clanking step.
A girl in a powered exosuit clapped one metal palm against her chest and saluted.
“Rivet. Engineer, mechanic, pilot. If it breaks—I fix it. If it doesn’t break—I might break it to make it better.”
That earned a full laugh from Thunder, who hadn’t moved until now.
Rivet gave him a wink.
“Don’t worry, big guy. I like well-built things.”
Thunder gave her a respectful nod, arms crossed.
The mood lightened.
It was working.
Finally, a slim man with careful hands and tired eyes stepped forward.
Doc.
He adjusted the strap of his medical case and gave a small wave.
“Doc. Field medic, biologist. If you bleed, I patch you up. If something bleeds on you, I’ll figure out whether it’s toxic before you pass out.”
He glanced toward Mamba.
“Looks like I won’t be the only one cataloging life down there.”
For a moment, Mamba’s expression flickered—respect, maybe.
The two exchanged a silent nod.
Something unspoken passed between them.
They spoke different languages. But maybe… they were still scientists.
When all had spoken, a stillness settled over the room.
Sky stepped back to the center of the cabin.
The sun was setting beyond the windows, painting the sea in molten gold.
She looked at them—ten souls aboard a vessel bound for something beyond maps.
“You all know why we’re here.”
Her voice carried easily, not loud—but steady.
“Because something is calling from the deep. Not a myth. Not a legend. Something real.”
She glanced at the case with the Cube and the Sphere.
“We’ve spent lifetimes in separate rooms, on opposite paths. Soldiers. Hackers. Historians. Medics.”
She smiled softly.
“But now… we are one crew. One team.”
Her eyes met Ren’s.
“And I believe we’re the only ones who can do this.”
The cabin was quiet.
Then—motion.
Pixel leaned toward Echo, whispering something about submarine mesh protocols.
Rivet was elbow-deep in her toolkit again, talking shop with Thunder, who seemed oddly entertained.
Sphinx and Mamba stood at opposite ends of the cabin, watching. Calculating.
Shade had moved to the cockpit, silent and invisible again.
He looked at his people.
And Sky’s people.
His voice was quiet. But it carried.
“We bring each other home. All of us. That’s the deal.”
Rivet glanced back and grinned.
“Wasn’t planning on dying, boss.”
“Good,” Ren said. “Keep it that way.”
Outside the windows, the ocean stretched on—dark and endless.
Somewhere beneath it, something waited.
The Sphere’s needle didn’t tremble.
Outside the windows, the Atlantic glowed gold, touched by the dying sun.
Clouds shimmered like molten brass, and far below, the ocean mirrored their fire.
Inside the cabin, no one spoke.
Even Pixel’s usual hum of commentary had gone silent.
Each of them sat with their own thoughts, watching the water or their own reflection in the glass.
Waiting.
Ren stood by the window, one hand resting lightly on the curved pane.
The cold seeped into his skin.
Beneath them —
miles of water.
And deeper still —
secrets.
He whispered the word without thinking:
“Atlantis…”
His breath fogged the glass.
“For millennia, we’ve taken it literally. A city swallowed by the sea. A myth of pride and punishment. Atlantis… the doomed paradise.”
From behind him, Sky stirred.
She stood, set her tablet aside, and came to stand beside him.
For a moment, she didn’t speak.
Just watched with him, her expression unreadable.
Then she murmured, her voice low and almost conspiratorial:
“But what if it wasn’t a metaphor?”
Ren blinked.
“You mean… Atlantis?”
“No. Atlas.”
Her gaze didn’t leave the horizon.
“What if Atlas wasn’t a man or a god… but something geological?”
Ren turned slightly, intrigued.
“Go on.”
Sky’s voice dropped to a whisper.
“Atlas was said to hold up the sky. But in structural geology… what holds up the Earth?”
Ren’s brow furrowed. Something was clicking into place.
“Basalt,” he said, almost involuntarily. “Oceanic crust. The Earth’s outer skin rests on a dense basaltic foundation.”
Sky nodded slowly.
“Exactly. Atlas wasn’t a titan. He was… the rock beneath our feet.”
Ren’s eyes widened. The thought settled in his chest like a heavy truth.
“And Atlantis? It’s not a sunken city. Not something that fell. It’s something that was hidden.”
Sky’s voice was quiet, reverent.
“A void beneath the crust. A hollow sealed away by time and pressure. A vault buried beneath the ocean’s weight.”
They locked eyes.
No need to finish the thought.
It was there between them.
A world beneath the world.
Ren spun toward the map console.
His fingers flew over the touchscreen, zooming into bathymetric data.
“Right there—look!”
His fingertip stopped on a faint scar in the seafloor.
“Mid-Atlantic Ridge. There’s a discontinuity—anomalous trench, right at the coordinate range the Sphere indicated.”
Sky leaned over his shoulder.
“That’s… not a rift. It’s not even tectonic.”
She tapped the data. The depth readouts pulsed.
“There’s a tunnel. A chamber. A hollow space.”
Ren stepped back, breathing hard.
“Atlantis isn’t ruins. It’s infrastructure. Something ancient… that was never meant to be found.”
The light from the screen painted their faces in icy blue.
Outside, the sun had nearly vanished.
The ocean shimmered like ink.
And beneath it—
answers.
Or something else entirely.
Ren’s thoughts drifted.
He heard his mother’s voice, echoing from long ago:
“Be careful what you chase, Ren. Some truths don’t want to be uncovered.”
She had warned him.
About obsession.
About digging too deep.
And yet—he couldn’t stop. Not now.
The fire inside him burned too bright.
He clenched a fist.
No more fear. No more hesitation.
He turned to Sky.
She saw it in his eyes —
resolve. The kind that didn’t break easily.
“We’ll find it,” he said. His voice was quiet, but solid as stone. “Even if we have to drill through the planet’s spine.”
Sky gave a crooked smile.
“That’s the spirit, Compass.”
They stood side by side in silence, watching the sea darken below them.
And far beneath the twilight waters,
the Earth waited to be opened.
The cabin lights dimmed.
Outside, the Atlantic had become a mirror of ink.
Beneath its surface — something ancient breathed.
Ren stood over the map table, fingers gliding across digital overlays.
Bathymetric lines twisted like veins, tracing the skin of a sleeping giant.
“Right there,” he muttered. “It doesn’t match the tectonic grids. This isn’t a fault line… it’s deliberate.”
Sky stepped beside him.
Together, they stared at the anomaly — an elongated trench, unnaturally even.
“Coordinates align with the Sphere’s last orientation,” she said, tapping the display.
“Whatever this is… it was buried on purpose.”
The chamber.
A vault beneath the crust.
Not a myth.
A mechanism.
Ren whispered:
“A door.”
He leaned closer to the screen, heart pounding.
“We’ve been searching for ruins. But what if we’re the first to open it?”
Behind them, the others remained silent.
Some dozed. Some watched.
But they all felt it — the pull of something vast and real, just beyond reach.
Sky broke the silence, her voice low:
“Do you think they knew we’d come?”
“Who?”
“The ones who built it. Left the Cube. The Sphere.”
Ren considered.
“Maybe they hoped someone would. Maybe they left us a warning.”
He stared out the window again.
The sea had lost its glow.
Now it looked like stone — black, absolute.
“When I was a kid,” he said, “my mother used to tell me bedtime stories.”
His voice was soft, but clear.
“Not the nice ones. The old ones. Stories about forbidden knowledge. Doors that should stay closed. The kind of myths that end in silence.”
Sky turned to him, curious.
“And did she believe them?”
Ren nodded.
“She believed some truths are dangerous. That if you dig too deep, the Earth remembers.”
A pause. His jaw tightened.
“She died on a dig. Fault line collapse in Anatolia. She was trying to uncover a forgotten language.”
He didn’t say more. He didn’t need to.
Sky laid a hand on the console.
“I didn’t know.”
Ren shook his head.
“She wouldn’t have stopped, even if she’d known. She was like me.”
He looked up — eyes no longer hesitant.
“And I won’t stop either.”
The screen hummed. Coordinates locked.
Estimated depth: eight miles.
Seismic stability: uncertain.
Below them — pressure, darkness… and a riddle waiting to be broken.
Sky’s voice was steady.
“Then we go. All the way.”
Ren smiled faintly.
“We’re already falling.”
For a long moment, the cabin held its breath.
Then: a flicker from the Sphere inside its case.
A pulse.
Soft.
Blue.
Echo glanced up. Pixel froze mid-keystroke.
The Sphere turned.
The needle pointed.
Down.
The sea was unnaturally calm — a mirror of molten glass under a bruised, descending sun.
Not a wave. Not a ripple. Not a whisper of wind.
But above it, tension thrummed across the deck of the research vessel like a taut wire ready to snap.
Ren “Compass” Wayland stood with Sky Montgomery near the forward rail, both locked in silence as the submersible Atlas was lowered toward the surface.
Steel cables groaned. The crane arm creaked. The reinforced capsule, shaped like a teardrop and bristling with lights and instruments, sank into the ocean with a heavy hiss of steam and spray.
Behind them, the rest of the expedition watched.
Geologists. Biologists. Engineers. Hackers. Soldiers.
Two teams, once rivals — now fused by mystery, desperation, and something older than myth.
“Submerging. Depth: ten meters,”
Echo’s voice crackled over the comms from the control console inside.
Sky’s fingers clenched the railing as she leaned forward.
Her hair caught the wind like a streamer torn from a flag.
Ren remained still. Focused. Listening.
“This is it,” Sky whispered. “The moment the story becomes real.”
Ren nodded slightly, but his jaw was tight. His thoughts churned beneath a still surface.
There was a hum in his chest — not fear exactly, but instinct.
An old, quiet voice warning him: It’s down there. Something is waiting.
The cube still hung from his side, secure in a protective sling. It hadn’t flickered or pulsed since they launched — but it had pointed them here. Not approximately. Precisely.
And that, somehow, was the most unnerving thing of all.
“Five hundred meters,” Echo called again. “Visibility low. External lights engaged. Holding descent velocity.”
The sun dipped below the waterline.
Darkness swallowed the sky.
The only illumination came from soft control screens and strips of red safety lighting.
“Approaching target depth,” Echo said. “Coordinates locked.”
The ship fell into silence again.
No murmurs. No footsteps.
Only the gentle slap of water against the hull.
Sky leaned closer, speaking so softly Ren barely caught it.
“You ever think we were meant to find this?”
“You mean fate?”
“No,” she said. “Design.”
He thought about that — the idea that some intelligence had wanted this discovery to happen.
It made him colder than the wind ever could.
“If this is a door,” he said finally, “we have no idea what’s on the other side.”
She gave a small smile.
“We open it anyway.”
Ren glanced back at the others.
Pixel sat cross-legged, typing something furiously into a tablet. Thunder stood like a stone statue beside Rivet, who was muttering over a drone’s sensor array.
Even Mamba was quiet, observing everything, arms folded, lips pursed like a judge at a tribunal.
They weren’t doubters.
They were believers.
And believers went deeper than anyone else.
“Eight hundred meters,” Echo’s voice came. “Bottom in sight. Deploying sonar scan.”
Ren stepped up beside the monitor.
A blurry image formed on the screen:
A flat seabed. Silty. Featureless.
A beat.
Then:
“We’re at the coordinates.”
“But…”
“…there’s nothing here.”
No ancient ruins. No alien geometry.
No mysterious opening.
Just… silence.
Across the deck, shoulders dropped. Pixel froze. Rivet swore under her breath.
Sky gripped the rail so tightly her knuckles went white.
“That can’t be right. Double-check it. There has to be something.”
Echo's voice returned, quieter:
“Confirmed. Location matches perfectly. No structures. No anomalies.”
A long silence followed.
Ren’s hand drifted to the cube again.
Still warm. Still steady. Still pointing down.
Unmoving. Undeterred.
He closed his hand over it.
And waited.
“Wait,”
Echo’s voice returned — tight, uncertain.
“There’s something... off.”
Everyone turned toward the console.
Rivet leaned over the screen next to Echo, frowning.
“The sonar is picking up inconsistencies,” she muttered. “Density’s not matching expected readings. Look at this layer.”
Ren stepped closer.
The image wasn’t static anymore.
Below the smooth seabed, a shadow had emerged — faint, elliptical, deeper than the soft sediment should allow.
“What is that?” Sky asked.
“Hard rock… then a drop in density. Like a hollow chamber beneath the crust,” Rivet said.
“Buried?” Ren asked.
“Looks like it,” Echo confirmed. “If there’s something here, it’s been entombed under tons of silt. Deliberately.”
For a long moment, no one spoke.
A seabed that smooth didn’t happen by chance.
It was… erased.
Sky’s expression changed — not surprise, but vindication.
“It’s still here,” she whispered. “Just… deeper.”
Ren’s eyes narrowed as the sonar recalibrated.
What had seemed empty… was hiding something.
“Atlas, hold position,” he ordered.
“We need a scan sweep with full resolution.”
“Understood.”
The submersible’s scanners switched modes. The ocean’s murk bloomed into shifting gradients.
They were seeing not with light, but vibration.
Slowly, something revealed itself —
A massive curvature, like a rib cage buried in the earth.
“There,” Sky said. “You see it?”
“Yes,” Ren murmured. “That’s not natural.”
“Not a structure either,” Rivet added. “It’s too uniform to be geological, but not built like stone walls.”
“Like a shell,” Echo offered.
“A hatch,” Pixel suggested from the background, now standing behind them.
“A sealed entrance. Maybe pressure-triggered.”
The idea hit Ren like cold water.
“It was never meant to be found easily,” he said.
“Which means,” Sky added, “it was meant to be hidden.”
Thunder rumbled in the far sky — distant, faint, but present.
Ren looked out across the sea.
The surface was calm, but the darkness beneath churned with mystery.
He turned back toward the team.
“We’ll need to drill,” he said. “Slow. Controlled. If we push too fast, we risk destabilizing the layer above it.”
“I can set up a precision frame,” Rivet said, already calculating. “Minimal disruption.”
“We’ll anchor here,” Ren continued. “This is it.”
No one protested.
No one hesitated.
They’d come too far.
Sky looked at him — not as a financier, not as a leader. But as something deeper.
An equal. A partner in discovery.
“Do you feel it?” she asked.
Ren nodded.
“It’s not just pressure. It’s… presence.”
And it was.
A quiet weight in the air.
A tension like before a storm — invisible, electric.
The cube pulsed again at Ren’s side.
He unclipped it, held it in his hand.
It trembled.
Below them, the sea was no longer silent.
The silence had shape.
And it was listening.
The ocean was eerily calm—
as if the water itself held its breath.
Above the still surface, the research vessel bristled with motion.
Modules swung on hydraulic cranes, lights flashed, and orders came sharp and clipped across the comms.
Below, on the ocean floor, a new world was being built.
“Drone three, rotate axis four. We’re off by two degrees,”
Rivet’s voice crackled in the comm. She sat at the central console, eyes dancing between live feeds, fingers gliding across the controls like a concert pianist.
Mechanical arms moved in perfect harmony.
Welding beams flared underwater.
Cables snaked into place like obedient serpents.
“Nice touch, Rivet,”
Pixel murmured from a nearby station, grinning.
“You’re giving the bots a soul.”
“They’ve got better coordination than some of us,”
she shot back.
“Though maybe not as many bad habits.”
Overhead, Thunder’s voice cut in—steady, low, confident.
“Load bearing platform aligned. Beginning descent.”
From his station, Thunder directed the heavy-lift submersible, guiding massive structural components into place with unflinching precision.
To Ren, watching from the observation deck, it felt like watching an orchestra tuning for a performance—
except their stage was eight hundred meters underwater, and failure meant more than sour notes.
This was no ordinary mission.
This was a foothold carved into myth.
Piece by piece, the structure took shape.
First the frame. Then the reinforced shell.
Then the inner compartments—labs, living modules, control nodes.
And finally, the heart of it all: the drill array, aimed like a spear toward the unknown.
“We’re almost ready,”
Sky said quietly beside him, hands behind her back.
“All this—years of research, millions in funding, chasing shadows—comes down to one hole in the ground.”
Ren didn’t answer right away.
He was watching the last support ring lower into place.
“Sometimes,”
he murmured,
“you only find truth by breaking through silence.”
But silence wasn’t done with them yet.
Suddenly:
“Module C4’s drifting!”
Rivet’s voice cracked with urgency.
“Undercurrent—shifting east!”
On screen, the module twisted, tipping—
gripping arms sliding off alignment. A direct collision with the stabilizer was seconds away.
“Hold on,”
Thunder replied calmly.
“Redirecting anchor pod.”
The massive submersible hissed to life—
arms bracing the drifting unit from the opposite side.
For a moment, it was a ballet of brute force and finesse.
Water churned. Metal groaned.
“Lock it,”
Rivet snapped.
“Now!”
“Stabilized,”
Thunder confirmed.
Everyone let out the breath they didn’t realize they were holding.
“I swear,”
Rivet muttered, still at her controls,
“one more surprise like that, and I’m filing for hazard pay.”
“I’d have livestreamed it with a countdown,”
Pixel added, his tone light, defusing tension like only he could.
“Welcome to Depths: The Reality Show. Coming to a stream near you.”
A low chuckle swept through the cabin.
Ren smiled quietly.
Even in chaos—
they moved as one.
It made him proud.
They weren’t soldiers.
Weren’t explorers, even.
They were builders—
of something no human had ever dared to touch.
Below them, floodlights blinked on.
The structure glowed in the dark.
A dome of steel and purpose, seated on the seabed like an alien embassy.
And deep within, at its center,
the drill sat waiting—
its titanium tip gleaming like the point of a prophecy.
“Systems green,”
Echo’s voice reported from comms.
“Power steady. Initiating sequence.”
Moments later, the drill came to life.
A deep hum vibrated through the walls.
Outside, the seabed churned as the bit tore into the Earth—
grinding silt, sand, and history alike.
On the monitors, sediment blossomed in slow spirals.
Every meter was a story, every layer a whisper from the forgotten.
Sphinx leaned in toward the data stream, murmuring to himself.
Next to him, Doc watched the drill’s progression with a look that mixed curiosity and concern.
“We’re cutting into time itself,”
Sphinx said, eyes wide.
“And whatever lived in it,”
Doc added quietly.
Beneath the base, the Earth opened.
And above it, silence gave way—
to breathless momentum.
The drill screamed.
Even through meters of alloy, pressure barriers, and silence, the sound made its way into the bones.
“Depth: twenty meters… thirty… fifty,”
Echo called out from the control terminal.
“Steady load. No resistance yet.”
Inside the observation hub, every eye was on the screen.
Even Pixel had stopped joking.
The room pulsed with the rhythm of machines.
A low hum.
A vibration through the floor.
A countdown to discovery.
Then—
a jolt.
The entire structure shuddered, not dangerously—
but enough to draw sharp glances.
“Spike in resistance,”
Echo confirmed.
“Material density rising.”
“What’s the reading?”
Sky asked.
“Basalt,”
came the voice of the geological analyst on comms.
“Tightly packed. Could be ancient lava flow.”
“Or shielding,”
murmured Sphinx from his seat, almost to himself.
“Perhaps they meant for it to remain buried.”
“Or someone did,”
Doc added grimly.
“Screw that,”
Rivet’s voice broke in, crisp and ready.
“Switching out the head. Give me ten.”
She was already halfway down the corridor toward the maintenance hatch.
By the time the backup drill tip—titanium-reinforced and laser-etched—was prepped, the temperature warning had begun to flash.
“Overheating?”
Ren asked.
“Cooling rig’s pushing max capacity,”
Pixel reported, fingers flying across his panel.
“I’ll reroute the thermal regulator—give me thirty seconds.”
“Make it twenty,”
Rivet called from below.
Alarms danced briefly in red—
and then faded as Pixel cracked the system.
“We’re good,”
he said, grinning.
“Cool as sea cucumbers.”
Rivet’s voice cut in dry:
“Remind me to disconnect your metaphors next maintenance shift.”
“That’s what makes me lovable,”
Pixel quipped.
Even Echo chuckled—
a rare sound from a man usually made of wires and silence.
But not everyone was amused.
Inside the main chamber, pacing like a predator, was Mamba.
She moved in tight, measured steps, hands behind her back, eyes locked on the central drill display.
“At this rate,”
she muttered,
“we’ll be done by next century.”
Ren, standing nearby, glanced toward Sky.
She was still, arms crossed, face neutral—
but her fingers tapped against her side with quiet irritation.
Mamba turned sharply.
“We have the equipment. The coordinates. The calculations. Why this crawling pace?”
“Because we don’t want to die digging into the unknown,”
Sky replied without turning her head.
“This mission isn’t just about reaching something—
it’s about surviving what we find.”
“You sound like a politician,”
Mamba snapped.
“We’re not here to hesitate. We’re here to evolve.”
“And evolution doesn’t come from reckless burrowing,”
Ren said calmly, stepping forward.
The room went quiet.
Even Thunder, who had been quietly checking pressure gauges, turned to listen.
“Every meter we drill, we’re rewriting history,”
Ren continued.
“We go too fast, we might miss the warning signs.”
Mamba didn’t respond.
But her jaw clenched.
Hard.
She turned away—
and stared back at the rotating drill, eyes burning.
The tension didn’t break.
But it settled.
Coiled, like a waiting current.
Hours passed.
And the drill kept going.
Downward. Relentless.
“Sixty meters,”
Echo reported.
“Still descending.”
“Temperature stable,”
Pixel added.
“Density consistent,”
came the voice from the sub-sensor team.
In the quiet between updates, Sphinx leaned toward Doc.
“You feel it?”
“What?”
“The silence,”
the old professor whispered.
“It’s... different.”
Doc didn’t reply.
He simply looked at the readout—
and nodded.
Below them, in the dark layers of Earth untouched by time,
something was shifting.
Not stone.
Not machine.
Not yet.
But something.
Ren watched the drill, felt the pulse of it in his chest.
He didn’t blink.
“We’re close,”
he whispered.
Sky, standing beside him, heard the words.
And she didn’t question them.
The moment came on the fourth day.
A harsh metallic screech echoed from the drilling shaft—then, suddenly, the bit dropped forward, slicing into open space. The torque gauge plummeted.
“We have contact!”
Echo’s voice crackled through the comms, sharp with excitement.
“The drill just broke through—pressure dropped. We’ve hit a cavity!”
For a second, silence reigned.
Then it erupted.
Cheers. Shouts. Laughter.
Claps on shoulders. Hugs. Fists to the air.
They’d done it.
The first barrier was down.
“Everyone quiet!”
Ren’s voice cut through the celebration like a scalpel.
“Echo, report. Now.”
Echo was already pouring over the numbers.
“Depth: approximately three kilometers. Pressure stable… wait…”
He paused.
“We’re receiving air samples from the shaft. Oxygen and nitrogen—almost a perfect match to Earth’s surface atmosphere.”
A hush fell again.
Doc stepped forward, squinting at the monitor.
“A sealed ecosystem, three kilometers underground… and it’s still functioning?”
He rubbed his beard, visibly unsettled.
“If that air is breathable… this changes everything.”
“Wait a second…”
Pixel leaned over the adjacent panel.
“Temperature drop. And… bioaerosol traces in the incoming airflow.”
“What kind of bioaerosols?”
Doc’s voice sharpened.
“Spores. Maybe pollen. Some kind of airborne organics.”
Pixel’s fingers danced over the controls.
“High concentration.”
Mamba was already moving before he finished.
She stalked across the lab, eyes lit with a hunter’s gleam.
“Chemical composition?” she demanded.
“Any signs of microbial activity? We need samples. Now.”
“Hold on,”
Doc raised a hand, his expression calm but firm.
“We don’t know what kind of risks we’re dealing with. Pathogens, toxins…”
“Which is exactly why we need those samples in containment,”
Mamba shot back coldly.
“Open the intake valve. I’ll handle the collection myself.”
She was already suiting up—snapping on a respirator, sealing gloves, moving with practiced precision.
Ska yturned to Ren, her expression unreadable.
He gave a short nod.
There was no turning back now. They had to understand what was down there—before stepping inside.
Within minutes, several sealed canisters had been filled with air siphoned directly from the breach.
Mamba clutched them like precious relics.
“First specimens from Atlantis,”
she murmured, eyes glittering.
Doc held one of the vials to the light.
Even unaided, the contents sparkled—dust-like particles catching in the beam like stardust.
“Well then,”
Ren finally said, breaking the silence.
“Time to see it for ourselves.”
His voice was level—almost too calm. But everyone heard what lay beneath: they’d waited for this moment four long days.
Sky stepped to the comms.
“Base to surface ship. Entry confirmed.
Main research team is beginning descent.”
She turned to the team.
“Gear up.
From this point forward, the expedition enters its next phase.”
They suited up quickly.
Lightweight exosuits. Oxygen tanks. Sealed helmets.
Tools. Lights. Instruments. A little fear.
The drill rig had already been converted into a makeshift elevator—a steel cage bolted to the primary shaft cable, enough for ten at a time.
Ren stepped into the lift first, steady hands moving across the controls.
The motor whirred.
The platform shuddered—then began its slow descent into the freshly cut tunnel.
What took minutes felt like hours.
Tense silence blanketed the group.
The only sound: the growl of the winch and their own breathing inside helmets.
Headlamps wavered against the shaft walls.
Their shadows twisted in steel and stone.
Ren glanced around at his team.
Sky gripped the side rail tight. Her face was hidden, but her knuckles were white.
Sphinx stood unmoving, but his breathing came fast—too fast.
Doc whispered something softly.
A prayer?
Mamba tapped the container at her hip, eyes restless.
Pixel’s fingers fidgeted with his gear. He muttered under his breath:
“Welcome to the abyss…”
Echo adjusted his cam feed, double-checking the uplink.
Thunder was stone-still. Anchored. Ready.
And Shade—silent as ever—stood juSkyst out of the light. Watching. Measuring the dark.
The lift jolted to a halt.
Harsh lights spilled forward, catching the round end of the shaft.
Drilled stone glistened with moisture—walls slick and smooth like molten glass.
Ahead yawned a tunnel.
Perfectly round.
Black as pitch.
“We’re here,”
Ren said softly, stepping out first.
He raised one hand—caution.
And crossed into the dark.
Headlamps flickered against obsidian walls.
Too smooth for erosion.
Too perfect to be natural.
“This wasn’t carved,”
Sky murmured behind him.
“It was… built.”
The others followed, flashlights cutting into the dark like blades.
Their footfalls echoed down the corridor—amplified by silence.
The air was cold. Still.
No mold.
No rot.
No life.
Just dust underfoot, soft and ancient.
The tunnel widened.
Walls bowed out.
And then—suddenly—emptiness.
The team stumbled into a cavern so vast their lights vanished into black.
“Activate auxiliary lights,”
Sky ordered sharply.
A dozen floodlights blazed at once.
And what they saw stole their breath.
The floodlights pierced the dark—
—and revealed the impossible.
A cavern opened before them, vast enough to swallow a skyscraper whole.
The walls shimmered with a glassy sheen, as if lined with obsidian or volcanic glass.
Stalactites hung from the ceiling like the teeth of a slumbering beast, yet none looked natural.
Too symmetrical. Too deliberate.
It wasn’t a cave.
It was a chamber.
A chamber someone had designed.
“My god…”
Sphinx’s voice trembled through the comms.
“This… this is not geology. This is architecture.”
They moved as one—carefully, reverently.
The floor beneath their boots was smooth, faintly concave, as if gently guiding them inward.
In the center of the space, a faint glow pulsed.
“Light source ahead,”
Echo said.
“Non-electrical. Unknown origin.”
Ren approached first, sweeping his light across the floor.
Faint lines emerged—like circuitry.
Etched patterns ran across the stone in delicate paths, converging at the center.
At the heart of the room sat a pillar.
And atop it…
A throne?
No—not a seat.
A cradle.
Made from the same obsidian-like stone.
Resting in it: a shape half-concealed under dust and time.
“It’s… a sarcophagus,”
Sky said, breathless.
Ren nodded slowly.
It wasn’t Egyptian.
Nor Mayan.
Nor anything known.
He stepped closer, brushing the dust aside.
More symbols.
Familiar—and not.
Sumerian script, next to hieroglyphs.
And beneath that, something else—curving, fungal lines.
The symbol again.
The brain entwined with threads of mycelium.
“It’s them,”
Pixel whispered.
“Same as on the cube. And the sphere.”
“And on the Gate,”
Sky added.
“This must be a central nexus,”
Ren murmured.
“Not just a room. A… shrine? A command center?”
Sphinx knelt at the base of the pillar, tracing the carvings with his gloved fingers.
“These languages shouldn’t coexist,”
he muttered, voice thick with awe.
“But they do. Here. Rewritten. Unified.”
“As if someone wanted to make sure everyone—anyone—could read this,”
said Sky, standing beside him.
“No matter when they came.”
“Or… something else did,”
Ren said.
“Something ancient. And still waiting.”
A low tremor passed through the floor.
Barely perceptible.
Like the world exhaling.
“Did anyone else feel that?”
Doc asked.
“Seismic activity?”
Mamba’s voice rose sharply.
“No registered movement,”
Echo replied.
“It didn’t come from above. It came from… below.”
They stood still for a long moment, listening.
Nothing but silence.
And then—
“I’m getting new readings,”
Pixel called out.
“Something’s waking up. Energy traces. It’s like… the whole place is a capacitor, and we just flipped the switch.”
The light at the center pulsed again—brighter this time.
And now, it had a rhythm.
A heartbeat.
Ren looked at Sky.
“We’ve opened something.”
“We’re past the point of no return,”
she replied.
“Then we go forward,”
he said.
She nodded once.
“Team, form up. Full scan protocol. No one strays. We treat this place like it’s alive—because it might be.”
The words hung heavy in the air.
And as they moved deeper into the chamber, guided by light and instinct, the walls seemed to listen.
To watch.
The second layer had been breached.
But what lay beneath…
was only beginning to stir.
They stood on the edge of an enormous subterranean cavern.
Its height and width were impossible to measure—
the darkness swallowed everything.
But dozens of massive crystals, clustered along the ceiling like frozen constellations,
fractured the light into a thousand glimmers, scattering it like shattered stars.
Above their heads, the crystal canopy shimmered like a hidden sky.
But even that was not what left them speechless.
Beneath their feet—
in the shimmering half-light of the cavern—
spread an ancient city.
Carved into the stone itself, a wide stairway descended from their platform,
leading into the heart of the ruins.
What they saw defied reason.
And yet—
it was magnificent.
Towers. Colonnades. Pyramids. Ziggurats. Temples.
Architectural styles from every known era—Egyptian, Sumerian, Hellenic—
and others that had no known origin,
merged seamlessly into a breathtaking mosaic,
a civilization built beyond the bounds of time.
At the center of the city, darkness ruled.
Only a faint crystal glow revealed blurred outlines.
No torches, no lights, no movement.
But the city didn’t feel abandoned.
It felt… asleep.
Waiting.
No one spoke.
Until Pixel broke the silence with a nervous laugh.
He pulled off his helmet, wide-eyed.
"We… we actually found it…"
Sky’s voice trembled as she removed her own helmet,
her breath catching.
"Atlantis," she whispered.
"We’re standing in Atlantis."
Sphinx stepped forward, his voice rough and thick with emotion.
"Welcome to history, my friends…"
"I never thought I’d live to see it."
Tears glistened on his weathered cheeks.
Compass directed his beam down the first street.
The shadows of statues and shattered columns seemed to twitch in the moving light,
as if the city were dreaming, and about to stir.
"We descend," he ordered, his tone quiet but firm.
They followed without hesitation.
Each step down the staircase felt like entering sacred ground.
No one spoke.
The silence grew weightier as they went deeper.
It felt as though the city itself was listening.
Scattered on the smooth stone path were relics:
golden bracelets, silver cups, broken pottery.
Intact, untouched.
As if the people had vanished mid-sentence.
Sphinx bent down and picked up a thin gold plate etched with symbols.
"Greek letters… and Sumerian cuneiform," he muttered.
"Together, on the same artifact… like the echoes of every civilization, layered here."
Echo swept his beam across a pile of coins beneath a worn statue.
"All the treasures of the world," he whispered.
"Just lying here, like forgotten dust."
Rivet reached out and touched a cracked bas-relief, her voice low and unsettled.
"Why would they leave all this behind? Gold like this… that’s billions worth of wealth."
Thunder’s voice was steady behind her.
"Maybe gold had no meaning to them. Or maybe… they planned to return."
"But they didn’t,"
said Mamba, cold and clinical.
"Something stopped them."
They reached a broad square.
On all sides stood statues—
of gods, of heroes, some recognizable,
others as if torn from a dream, or a forgotten myth.
Sphinx froze before a large marble slab.
He lifted his flashlight. The carvings shimmered.
"Here—look," he called out.
"These are scenes from the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur."
Etched in stone was the figure of a warrior, sword raised,
towering over a fallen beast.
But the details were… strange.
The face of Theseus looked too modern,
his armor sharp and angular—almost synthetic.
And lining the walls of the labyrinth weren’t the usual meanders,
but complex symbols—
schematics.
Blueprints.
"And this one!"
Doc’s voice was rough with disbelief.
"Hercules, slaying the Hydra… but look—its heads—
they’re mechanical."
Sphinx moved from wall to wall, his flashlight shaking in his grip.
"Olympian gods… These frescoes…"
"What if mythology wasn’t fiction at all?" he whispered.
"What if it was memory?"
"The memory of Atlantis…"
The wonder began to crack—
giving way to something else.
Something colder.
Something waiting.
They stood in the middle of the plaza.
Above them, crystal light shimmered against statues of gods—
Zeus with thunder in his eyes,
Anubis guarding forgotten doors,
a woman with spiraling headdress holding something that looked almost… digital.
Each figure loomed, silent and immense,
watching them.
Pixel muttered under his breath.
“This place feels like a museum built by time travelers…”
Sphinx didn’t laugh.
He was too consumed.
He moved along the walls like a man in a trance,
reading aloud from another slab:
“They wrote about the ‘Great Silence,’” he whispered, fingers tracing the lines.
“‘When the deep voice rises, the gates must never be opened…’”
His breath caught.
“That’s Akkadian. But it’s next to… hieroglyphs. That shouldn’t be possible.”
Compass scanned the plaza slowly.
Statues. Frescoes. Symbols no one alive could interpret.
Yet they were here—
clearly built, not imagined.
Sky kept close, her gaze searching the architecture.
“It’s like someone built this… as a convergence point,” she said quietly.
“Not just one civilization—many. As if they all knew of this place.”
“Or were brought here,” Compass murmured.
“To witness something. Or protect it.”
Doc paused beside a shattered obelisk.
Carved into its surface were concentric circles,
like a brain,
but with threads branching off—
like fungal veins.
He turned to Sphinx.
“Do you see it?” he asked.
“It’s not just mythology anymore.”
“It never was,” Sphinx said.
“We’ve just forgotten how to read it.”
Behind them, Mambe’s voice broke through, sharp and precise.
“This place isn’t a sanctuary,” she said.
“It’s a containment zone.”
Everyone turned.
She stepped into the plaza, her boots echoing.
Her eyes scanned the stillness with clinical detachment.
“No people. No decay. No corpses.”
“Something stopped life here. And whatever it was… it still works.”
Thunder nodded slowly, standing beside her.
“They didn’t abandon it. They were erased.”
Sphinx shook his head, unwilling.
“Or they became part of it,” he said quietly.
“There’s no dust. No weathering. The city is… preserved.”
“Preserved doesn’t mean safe,” Mambe said.
“It means it was sealed.”
Pixel’s smile faded.
He turned his camera off.
For the first time since they’d entered the city,
no one spoke.
They stood beneath crystal light,
beneath the silent statues and unknowable carvings,
and something in the stillness shifted.
Compass felt it.
It wasn’t just awe now.
It was presence.
The city was watching.
Sky broke the silence first, her voice steady.
“We continue. There’s more to uncover.”
Compass nodded, but didn’t move right away.
He looked up—
at the dark towers,
the fused cultures,
the impossible precision.
Atlantis had returned.
And it had been waiting for them.
"Hold up," Rivet said sharply, raising a hand.
The team halted at once. Her flashlight beam pierced a shadowed alcove to their right. What had at first looked like debris began to take shape—dark mounds, oddly uniform.
As they stepped closer, a collective silence fell over the group.
Shoes.
Piles upon piles of shoes.
Hundreds. Thousands. Neatly arranged as if placed with care. There were tiny sandals, worn boots, delicate slippers. Footwear of every kind, size, and material—layered in solemn rows.
Beside them: folded clothing. Robes, tunics, cloaks, children’s dresses. Laid gently in stacks, untouched by time but softened by dust. As though their owners had calmly disrobed, leaving behind everything they carried.
Doc crouched slowly, his gloved hand trembling as he picked up a small sandal. Part of the leather cracked at his touch, and a faint sprinkle of dust slipped to the floor.
"...This is like…" he began, then fell silent.
He didn’t need to finish.
Everyone understood.
They had all seen those black-and-white images.
Piles of possessions left behind in the darkest chapters of human history.
“People don’t leave like this,” Compass murmured.
A chill spread across his chest.
“Unless,” he continued, his voice dry, “they were taken…”
“Or sacrificed,” Sky whispered beside him, her tone cold and hollow, like the hush before a storm.
No one replied.
Only the flickering beam of Rivet’s flashlight moved, casting pale light over the fabric and shoes as the team pressed on.
The corridor grew darker, narrower. Their footsteps echoed louder than before, ringing through the chamber like distant bells.
No bones.
No remains.
No burial grounds or ashes.
Just the silence of absence.
And the eerie persistence of what had been left behind.
“Where did they go?” Echo asked under his breath, scanning the shadows as if expecting translucent figures to step out from the walls.
No answer.
Only the whisper of dust beneath their boots.
Eventually, the corridor widened again—into a vast antechamber of obsidian stone.
At its end stood a pair of massive gates, at least twenty meters tall.
Monolithic. Black. Ancient.
They loomed like guardians of an unknown world.
And they were covered in markings.
Symbols carved deep into the stone—some immediately recognizable: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform.
But others... alien. Angular, flowing in patterns that made no sense to the human eye.
Sphinx stepped forward, reverently brushing his palm across the stone.
“Hieroglyphics… cuneiform… and something else. Something… I can’t place.”
He leaned closer.
“Different languages… woven together. Like civilizations combining their last words.”
“Or warnings,” Compass said quietly, narrowing his eyes.
“Or epitaphs,” added Mamba, her voice as sharp as broken glass.
“For those who would one day find the dead.”
Sphinx’s fingers stopped at a band of larger script—one line cut deeper than the rest, framed by spirals and fractured sigils.
He exhaled and read aloud, his voice unsteady, as if the words carried weight beyond the stone:
“One hundred and twenty years until death by water.”
The chamber fell silent.
The words echoed—once, twice—and vanished into the dark above them.
The echo of Sphinx’s voice faded slowly, swallowed by the vaulted silence of the chamber. No one moved.
“One hundred and twenty years…” Echo finally whispered. “Until what?”
His voice cracked as he asked, but no one answered. Not right away.
Sky’s face had gone pale, her lips pressed into a tight line. Compass stepped forward, eyes fixed on the towering gates, trying to make sense of the impossible.
“Is it a countdown?” he murmured. “A warning left for future generations?”
Sphinx didn’t speak. He was still staring at the words he’d just read, as if their meaning was only now beginning to settle into his bones.
Doc let out a shaky breath. He hadn’t moved since picking up the child’s sandal. His gaze swept slowly across the chamber.
“No remains,” he said, more to himself than to anyone. “No blood. No bones. Just… this.”
Rivet crossed her arms, standing stiffly beside the clothing piles.
“They were preparing for something,” she said quietly. “Like they knew it was coming. And they still didn’t make it.”
“Or maybe they did,” said Mamba, stepping closer to the gate. “Maybe they went somewhere else. Left this behind. Shed it, like skin.”
Her tone was flat, but there was something behind it. A hunger, maybe. A challenge.
Sky didn’t respond. Instead, she looked to Compass.
“Well?” she asked. “What do we do?”
Compass hesitated.
“We open it,” he said.
No one protested.
Together, they approached the dark gate. As they neared, they noticed details they hadn’t before—grooves along the stone floor, like rails. Faint impressions in the dust, as if something enormous had moved here long ago.
Sphinx examined the edges of the gate with a gloved hand.
“There’s no handle,” he said. “But these lines—maybe they align with some kind of mechanism…”
“Stand back,” Rivet called out, already activating her scanner.
Within seconds, a flicker of green lit the display on her wrist.
“Magnetic lock. Ancient, but still reactive.”
She looked to Compass and nodded once.
“Ready when you are.”
Compass drew a slow breath.
“Do it.”
Rivet tapped the control.
At first—nothing.
Then… a low rumble.
A deep vibration spread beneath their feet, dust falling in tiny streams from the ceiling.
And slowly, the gates began to part.
A seam opened, black against black, until the two halves groaned back just far enough for a person to pass through sideways.
A wind pushed out of the darkness—dry, stale, but laced with something… electric.
Like the memory of ozone after lightning.
Like breath held too long.
Compass stepped into the narrow gap, flashlight raised.
A hallway stretched beyond—narrow, smooth, impossibly clean.
“This wasn’t carved. This was engineered.” Sphinx murmured.
No one argued.
One by one, they followed.
Behind them, the gates didn’t close—but neither did they stay wide. The moment the last figure passed through, the doors froze in place… as if watching.
Inside, the air felt denser.
They walked in silence, footsteps muffled by the perfect floor. The walls were made of a dark, seamless material—neither stone nor metal, but something in between.
Etched into them were faint lines—geometries that resembled constellations… or circuits.
Doc’s voice broke the silence.
“What if this place was meant to stay sealed?”
“Then the key never should’ve survived.” Mamba’s reply came sharp and immediate.
Compass glanced back at her, but didn’t argue.
They pressed forward.
Eventually, the hallway widened—and they emerged into another vast chamber.
The air here was colder.
In the center stood a monument: a towering spire of the same dark alloy, inscribed with symbols from top to base. Around its base were statues—half-human, half-machine.
And in their silence, the city spoke again.
Not with words…
But with presence.
Compass felt it in his chest.
Like a second heartbeat, not his own.
“This wasn’t just a city. It was a warning.” Sky’s voice was quiet but firm.
No one dared disagree.
Not anymore.
A heavy silence hung beneath the vaulted stone of the ancient city.
Professor Sphinx’s voice still echoed faintly, trembling with the weight of what he had just read:
"120 years until the water comes."
The inscription carved into the massive gate had landed like a verdict from another world.
Skylar “Sky” Montgomery was the first to speak, her voice barely audible and thick with awe.
“They knew… They knew the flood was coming. But… it was just a legend. Wasn’t it?”
Ren “Compass” Wayland stepped forward slowly, his voice controlled but charged with tension.
“If this is real… we’ve found something that shatters everything we thought we knew. Atlantis isn’t a myth anymore. It’s a warning.”
He reached out, brushing his palm against the cold surface of the gate.
“The question is—are we ready to see what they were hiding?”
Sphinx leaned closer, tracing ancient lines with a reverent fingertip.
“It says here… ‘To open the Depths of Deceit, use the mind.’”
“A riddle?” he murmured. “Or something literal?”
“Maybe it means… shove harder,” Rivet grunted, her metal-reinforced hands already testing the stone for leverage.
She hadn’t even pushed when a low mechanical groan filled the air.
Everyone froze.
At Ren’s waist, the cube pulsed.
Without thinking, he unlatched it—
and the moment his fingers brushed its surface, a soft click echoed from within.
The cube shifted, twisting open layer by layer until a hidden mechanism emerged: a second level of engraved symbols, glowing faintly like old embers coming back to life.
Sphinx inhaled sharply.
“DINGIR… Mesopotamian cuneiform for ‘god’…”
He pointed again, voice trembling.
“The Egyptian symbol for ‘gods.’ And here—ANKH. Not just life. Eternal life.”
No one spoke. Even the ambient hum of their suits seemed to fade.
Sphinx’s hand hovered just over the cube, as if afraid to touch it further.
“They weren’t just writing about immortality. They were pursuing it.”
“You’re saying… they were trying to become gods?” Sky whispered, her face pale beneath the visor.
He nodded slowly, then pointed to a line burned into the metal like a signature:
“DINGIR.NA.BA.KI — ‘Ascension to the gods.’”
Ren let out a dry, uneasy laugh.
“Great. Not just an artifact… it’s a declaration. A promise from people who thought they could surpass what it means to be human.”
He looked around at the others.
“If that’s true… someone, thousands of years ago, found the key to immortality.”
The air grew heavy—thick with something ancient. As if the knowledge itself had weight.
Then, a low rumble. Something shifted far below.
The light inside the cube dimmed.
Sky broke the silence.
“We can’t let this out. Not yet. Not without knowing what we’re dealing with. This is too dangerous.”
Mamba stepped forward slowly. The light reflected in her eyes like fire.
“From the moment we’re born, we begin dying,” she said quietly, voice sharp with conviction.
“If there’s even a sliver of a chance to break that truth—it's worth any risk.”
Ren turned to her, his voice suddenly cold.
“If this leaks out, it won’t unite humanity. It will ignite a global war. You know that.”
“Maybe,” Mamba said, almost gently. “But is the risk greater than death itself? No one asks if death is ‘safe.’ They just accept it.”
“And sometimes they become it,” Doc muttered under his breath.
Everyone fell silent.
Sky stepped forward next, her voice steady, resolute.
“What if we were meant to find this? Two parts of the same artifact, unearthed on opposite sides of the world… brought together here, now. This isn’t a coincidence.”
She glanced around the group.
“This feels like destiny. A call we’ve answered.”
Her words struck like a bell in the void.
Nobody moved.
In the back of Ren’s mind, an alternative unfolded—one he hadn’t dared consider:
They could turn back. Collapse the shaft.
Delete the recordings. Pretend they had never been here.
Let Atlantis sink again into the quiet hush of myth.
But…
Curiosity is louder than caution.
One last moment of silence.
Then Mamba spoke, voice like steel:
“We don’t have a choice. The answers are behind those doors.”
Ren nodded.
“Then we open them.”
The gate resisted at first—an ancient weight holding firm, unmoved by time or ambition.
Rivet stepped up, cracking her knuckles through the servos of her exosuit.
“Let me try the gentle approach,” she muttered, grinning as she braced herself.
The servomotors on her suit groaned, metal grinding against stone. For a heartbeat, nothing happened—then a sharp crack rang out. The massive hinge shifted.
“It’s moving!” she shouted. “Come on—help me out!”
Sky and Thunder rushed to one side. Ren and Shadow took the other. Together, with strained muscles and pounding hearts, they pushed.
The gate groaned open with a sound like the Earth itself exhaling.
Stone scraped against stone. Dust fell in sheets.
And then—
A breath.
A gasp of air colder than the deepest trench. It rolled out from the darkness like a whisper from the abyss.
Everyone flinched. Even Rivet stepped back, blinking.
The tunnel beyond was steep, descending into blackness that swallowed the beams of their lights.
“There’s something alive down there,” Pixel murmured. “Not literally—just… ancient. Watching.”
Doc adjusted his gloves. The silence wrapped around them like a second skin.
“I’ve felt this before,” he said, almost in a trance. “In plague vaults… places where death settled and never left.”
“This isn’t death,” Mamba replied. “It’s memory. Waiting to be reborn.”
Ren stared into the tunnel, eyes narrowed.
His hand clenched instinctively around the cube.
“We don’t know what’s down there,” Sky said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“No,” Ren agreed. “But it’s why we came.”
He turned to the team—his team.
Some looked scared. Others resolute.
But none were ready to turn back.
“Pack light,” he said. “Check your systems. We go in careful, slow, and together.”
“And if it’s a trap?” Rivet asked, already adjusting a shoulder plate.
“Then we spring it on our own terms,” Ren replied.
They moved forward as one.
Lights flickered to life on helmets and suits. The entrance loomed wider now, the air inside damp and electric, charged with anticipation and something unnamable—
something old.
And still, the cube pulsed faintly at Ren’s side.
A heartbeat from the past, calling them forward.
They stepped into the tunnel.
And the dark… welcomed them.
Doc was the first to regain composure. He crouched beside the wall and checked his portable scanner. A soft green pulse blinked back.
“Oxygen levels are adequate… humidity’s high… spores detected,” he muttered.
“Still within safe range. For now.”
Sky and Ren were already moving forward, their helmet lights cutting through the gloom ahead. The walls around them shimmered—slick, dark, and unnaturally smooth.
Then, the light landed on something massive.
They stepped into a chamber dominated by a towering monolith.
It loomed—jet black, blade-like, and impossibly seamless—rising from the earth like a sword plunged into the planet’s heart.
“An obelisk… or a blade,” Echo whispered.
“Doc?” Ren asked quietly.
Doc knelt, brushing dust from the base.
“This isn’t stone,” he said slowly. “Composite material… minerals fused with metal. But not anything I’ve seen. It’s synthetic. Manufactured. A device.”
Sphinx circled the monolith, hand trailing along the smooth surface.
“No inscriptions,” he said, frowning.
“The gate had them. This is… silent.”
“Maybe it’s just decoration,” Rivet offered, but there was no confidence in her tone.
Pixel had already pulled out a scanner, studying its readings.
“Doubt it. I’m picking up voids inside. Not solid. It’s… hollow. Could be a chamber. Or a weapon.”
“Be careful,” Sky warned. “Could be a trap.”
“Composite alloys, energy signature, internal cavities…” Pixel murmured.
“Could be a reactor. A missile. Or something stranger.”
Mamba, who hadn’t taken her eyes off it since they entered, spoke in a low voice:
“If it’s a weapon, we need to understand it. It could be an asset… or a threat.”
And then, for the first time, Tien spoke from the shadows.
“Maybe it already fired,” he said.
“Maybe it was designed to protect something. Or someone… from what lies deeper.”
Ren stared down the gaping throat of the tunnel beyond the monolith.
It swallowed the light, ancient and unknowable.
“We need to know how far this tunnel goes.”
Rivet pulled a compact laser rangefinder from her gear and set it carefully on a short tripod at the edge of the tunnel.
“Let’s see how deep this thing really goes,” she muttered.
“If it's ten kilometers, we’ll know in a second.”
The team stepped back as a thin red beam shot forward—
and vanished into darkness.
The screen flickered. Blinking dashes.
“No return?” Pixel frowned. “That can’t be right…”
Seconds ticked by. The only sounds were the hum of equipment and the faint whine of the scanner.
Then—a shrill beep.
The display lit up.
15,000 meters.
And then—numbers began to drop.
14,950… 14,900… 14,850…
“Wait—echo from fifteen kilometers?!” Rivet shouted, rushing to the screen.
“Look! It’s moving. Dropping fast. 14,700… 14,650…”
“Something’s coming up,” Sky whispered, as if afraid to break the spell.
“Fast.”
“Could be signal distortion?” Doc offered, voice uncertain.
“No,” Ren snapped, grabbing the scanner.
“It’s real. It’s moving. Something enormous is headed this way. Right now.”
The words hit like a punch of ice.
Weapons came up. Safeties clicked off.
Flashlights jerked and danced across the stone, chasing invisible motion.
The air thickened.
And then—a sound.
Faint. Deep. Like massive gears grinding far beneath them.
Then came the roar.
Low. Hollow. Inhuman.
The tunnel vibrated.
And the darkness… moved.
“Fall back!” Thunder shouted, instinctively stepping in front of Sky.
The team scrambled into new positions, using the monolith as a barrier.
Weapons trained on the black corridor.
Then the lights found it.
Something emerged.
Shapeless. Monstrous. Oozing with slick, wet sheen.
It writhed, flowing like liquid shadow—massive and formless, dragging itself along walls and floor in complete silence.
“Oh no…” Echo whispered, hand trembling on his radio.
“What the hell is that thing?!”
No one answered.
The creature came closer, and now they could see—metal gleamed within the pulsating mass.
Fungal growths clung to its form, sprouting like tumors.
It was part machine, part organism—fused into something wrong.
“Fire!” Sky screamed.
Ren shot first.
Tien and Thunder followed.
Bullets sank into the creature’s flesh with wet smacks.
It didn’t even flinch.
“It’s not working!” Tien shouted, reloading.
“It’s absorbing the hits!”
“Fall back! Move!” Ren barked, retreating step by step.
But before they could escape—
The monolith lit up.
A seam split open along its peak.
A blade of white-blue plasma erupted from the rift with a shriek that pierced the skull.
“Down!” Rivet screamed, shielding her head.
The sword launched forward.
A comet of energy—ripping into the creature.
SHRRRRIIIIIIIIIIK—!
A slicing wail echoed through the tunnel.
The blade tore into the mass, vaporizing fungal flesh and metal limbs.
Sparks exploded. Burning sludge splattered across the walls.
The creature didn’t scream. It had no mouth.
It convulsed. Then crawled forward again.
Unstoppable.
But the blade followed.
Striking again. Again.
Each blow peeling away layers of nightmare.
The tunnel became a battlefield of shadows and flashes.
Blue light tore through the dark, carving silhouettes on stone.
Then came the stench—ozone and scorched flesh.
It churned the stomach.
“This can’t be real…” Pixel muttered, peeking from cover. His face was pale in the cold light.
No one had time to think.
Three minutes.
That’s all it took.
The thing…
was gone.
Ash.
Scrap.
Nothing more.
The plasma blade hovered—
paused in silence—
…then returned to the monolith.
It slid home with a hum.
Silence reclaimed the space.
The obsidian spire stood still again.
As if it had never moved.
But the scorched floor told the truth.
The war was real.
Flashlights trembled in shaking hands.
Thunder was the first to speak.
“Everyone alive? Status?”
Nods. Gasps. Weak thumbs-up.
Rivet collapsed by the wall, exosuit hissing as she powered it down.
Echo tore off his headset, panting—his ears still rang from the sonic chaos.
No one spoke.
Not yet.
They had no words.
Sky scanned the group, counting faces. Everyone was present. No serious injuries—just scrapes, bruises, and shock. Somehow, they had all survived.
“That… was way too close,” she exhaled, struggling to keep her voice steady.
She was usually calm in danger, but now even Sky looked shaken.
“If that thing had reached us…” she shook her head.
“That ancient mechanism saved us. A sentinel—deadly and precise.”
“And it activated like clockwork,” Ren added, retrieving his flashlight from the floor.
The beam swept over the black monolith, now silent again.
“This complex… it’s still alive. Still defending something.”
“Which means there’s something ahead worth defending,” Doc said grimly, nudging a steaming shard of metal with his boot.
“Or something worth locking away. Not from us—
from getting out.”
“The gate wasn’t just shut,” he continued.
“It was sealed. Forever.”
“Then whatever it protects must be priceless,” Mamba said, voice hushed, touched with awe.
“If it warrants defenses this powerful… what’s waiting ahead could be unimaginable.”
Tien gave a short, dry laugh.
“Or it’s just that dangerous,” he said.
“Dangerous enough to need a private army of guardians to keep it buried.”
His words hung heavy in the stillness.
Everyone knew both could be true.
Doc stared at the ashen remains of the creature, his voice barely audible.
“If that’s what immortality looks like…
maybe death isn’t such a bad option.”
Ren stood, his jaw set with purpose.
“We’ve seen enough to know one thing—
we can’t go forward unprepared.
We need a plan. We return to base, regroup, check our gear—”
He stopped.
The ground trembled beneath them.
A deep rumble echoed through the tunnel.
The walls shook.
“Earthquake?!” Echo yelled, bracing himself.
The vibration intensified.
Dust fell in waves from the ceiling.
From behind—the direction of the gate—came a thundering crack.
Thunder grabbed Sky and yanked her toward the monolith, shielding her with his body.
Tien lunged and pulled Sphinx away just in time as a slab of stone crashed to the floor where the professor had stood seconds before.
Ren spun toward the tunnel entrance, his heart seizing.
His light caught the far wall—just in time to see clouds of dust billow from the passage back to the gate.
Then came the sound.
The one everyone dreads.
Collapse.
A deafening roar tore through the dark.
The floor kicked upward.
The walls lurched.
And then… silence.
They sprinted to the exit—
and stopped dead.
Before them rose a jagged wall of stone.
A mountain of shattered rock and ancient debris.
The way back… was gone.
Sky stared at the collapsed passage, mouth open, chest heaving.
“You’ve got to be kidding me…” she whispered.
No one responded.
They were trapped.
Buried alive in the deep veins of the Earth.
Behind them: a plasma-scorched tomb.
Ahead: only darkness.
And whatever secrets the dead city still kept.
“The exit’s collapsed...” Sphinx whispered.
His voice trembled, and for the first time, the old professor looked truly afraid.
“Are we... trapped?”
“Stay calm,” said Sky, trying to keep her voice steady even as her heart pounded.
“It could be a localized collapse. Echo, see if you can reach the base.”
Echo was already hunched over his transmitter, fingers dancing across the controls, one ear pressed to his headset.
Only static.
No signal.
No response.
He looked up and shook his head grimly.
“Too much rock above us. We’re cut off. I’ll leave a relay beacon behind, but we’d need a much stronger source to punch through to the surface.”
Rivet turned toward the dark throat of the tunnel — the only path left.
“Then we have no choice,” she said quietly.
“We either move forward and find another exit… or find a way to send a signal from inside.”
“If Compass’s artifact is still reacting to something deeper down,” she added, “there might be something capable of broadcasting up.”
Compass nodded silently. The decision no longer needed to be spoken.
There was no way back.
Only forward.
“If we leave the monolith behind,” Compass warned, “we lose its protection. And light might attract more of those creatures. Any ideas?”
“I’ve got a few scout drones with IR cameras,” said Pixel, already rummaging through his gear.
“I’ll send one ahead.”
“Also,” Rivet chimed in coolly, “I brought infrared goggles for everyone. Originally to study sealed chambers in Atlantis… now they’ll help us stay invisible while seeing in the dark.”
“Perfect,” said Compass. “Hand them out.”
While Rivet distributed the goggles, Pixel strapped on his control headset and launched a small hovering drone.
It buzzed quietly as it slipped into the black.
Everyone stood still, ears straining, breath held.
Pixel mumbled to himself, eyes flickering with streaming data.
Finally, he powered the drone down and removed his headset.
All eyes turned to him.
“Well?” asked Mamba, her voice tight with impatience.
“Two pieces of news,” Pixel began.
“Good and bad?” Mamba asked with a scowl.
“No. Bad and very bad.”
The team tensed.
“Very bad: the tunnel ahead has deep fissures. And I saw… more of those things. Same type as the one the monolith destroyed. At least two.”
A heavy silence fell.
“And the ‘just’ bad?” Compass asked.
“There’s a rail system on the ceiling — huge support tracks that run forward.”
“How is that bad?” Echo asked.
“Because we’ve got nothing to ride on them with.”
They looked up. Sure enough, thick twin rails ran above them, nearly blending into the stone ceiling.
“It’s a transport system,” Rivet said, narrowing her eyes.
“Cargo, probably. And if there were shipments, there’s got to be a platform.”
She didn’t wait for confirmation — just started walking.
Behind the monolith, tucked into an alcove, the team found a platform with several suspended carts.
The carts clung to the rails by strange magnetic clamps — made from a silvery alloy that looked disturbingly like Compass’s artifact.
Even stranger: they hovered without touching the rails.
“Magnetic suspension…” Rivet whispered in awe.
“But… inverted? Normally it’s underneath.”
“Heavy cargo might’ve run below,” Compass mused, examining the ground.
“And this system moved smaller loads simultaneously.”
“Problem is, it’s dead,” said Pixel. “No power. They’re just hanging there.”
“No problem,” Rivet grinned, already pulling tools from her bag.
“I’ve got a couple spare drive units from my exosuit. I’ll rig them with rubber rollers. Not fast, but steady.”
Everyone nodded.
It was the best plan they had.
While Rivet worked, the others loaded supplies into the lead cart.
Soon, everything was ready.
Ahead — darkness.
Unknown.
But now, they had a way forward.
The cart gave a gentle lurch as Rivet activated the motors.
Soft whirring.
Rubber rollers gripped the overhead tracks, and the platform glided forward — smooth, nearly silent.
No one dared to switch on a light.
Compass sat at the front, infrared goggles snug to his face, eyes locked into the abyss ahead.
The cart crept forward, deeper into the tunnel’s throat — where shadows swallowed sound, and the air itself felt thick with warning.
Below them… gaped the fissures.
Wounds in the earth.
Deep. Endless.
Through the lenses, Compass saw them — wide cracks flanking the narrow rail path.
And worse: motion.
“Movement,” he whispered, barely audible.
Figures.
Dark.
Shifting.
Unmistakably alive.
Lurking at the edges of the rift.
Watching.
Sleeping… for now.
One wrong sound. One flash of light — and they might rise.
No one spoke.
The motor buzzed.
Heartbeat by heartbeat, the cart slid forward.
Sometimes the shadows seemed to lean closer.
A flicker here, a ripple there.
“They’re not moving… yet,” Pixel muttered from the back.
“Don’t provoke them,” Sky murmured.
“They’re listening.”
“They’re hungry,” said Echo, almost to himself.
The minutes stretched like hours.
Each meter gained felt like stolen time.
Then — Compass raised a hand.
“Slow down,” he said quietly.
Rivet eased the throttle. The cart hummed gently, rolling to a crawl.
The cart glided forward, its soft mechanical hum the only sound breaking the thick silence. Compass kept his eyes trained ahead, adjusting the infrared goggles as faint contours emerged through the darkness. The tunnel no longer felt like a corridor — it felt like a throat, narrowing and swallowing them whole.
Below them, the fissures widened. Ragged cracks branched like black veins in the earth. And in the depths… something moved. Sluggish, heavy shadows stirred, their outlines too twisted to be anything natural. The creatures weren’t asleep — they were waiting.
“Don’t shine anything,” Compass warned under his breath.
“These things react to light. That's why it's so dark down here.”
“Got it,” Rivet said, her voice low.
“Motors are running cool. No sparks, no flares.”
Every sound seemed louder now. Even the whirring of the drive system felt like thunder rolling across a haunted graveyard.
They passed beneath what looked like a skeletal arch — a twisted structure barely hanging onto the ceiling. As they drifted under it, Compass recognized the shattered remains of what must’ve once been a lighting fixture. Long tubes lay bent and broken. The wall behind it was scorched. Something had torn through this place.
“Lighting system,” Rivet murmured.
“They must’ve had artificial light here once. And something destroyed it.”
“It fits,” Pixel added. “Those creatures— they hate light. This was probably the first thing they attacked.”
More broken structures came into view as they moved deeper. At intervals, small platforms clung to the side walls — ruined, crumpled like tin under immense force. Technical stations maybe, or old relay hubs. Some still had half-melted panels or broken antennae.
“Those were communications points,” Echo muttered, recognizing the design.
“Judging by the damage… whatever lives here went after them too. Anything that glowed or made noise.”
The cart continued forward, never stopping.
“No point examining them,” Compass said.
“They’re long dead. And we’re not staying still long enough to attract anything.”
The air grew colder.
And heavier.
A faint vibration ran along the rails — not from the cart, but something further in the distance. A distant pressure. The kind you feel in your chest more than your ears. Like the heartbeat of something slumbering deep beneath the stone.
Sphinx sat hunched in silence, clutching a small notebook. He hadn’t said a word since the collapse. Now and then, he would glance toward the walls, as if trying to read inscriptions that didn’t exist.
Sky sat near the rear of the cart, her hand wrapped tightly around a support rail. She didn’t tremble — but her grip had gone white.
“I don’t like this,” she finally said.
“It’s too quiet. Like the place is… holding its breath.”
No one disagreed.
They passed a large intersection — or what remained of it. The ceiling above had collapsed at some point, filling a nearby branch of the tunnel with rubble. More ruined tech littered the path. A half-buried terminal blinked once — then died completely.
“Still receiving power from somewhere,” Rivet muttered.
“Residual charge in some capacitor, maybe.”
“And then gone,” Pixel added.
“That’s how fast things vanish down here.”
The cart jolted slightly as it crossed a damaged section of rail. Rivet slowed it to a crawl, guiding it across a makeshift support strut of her own construction. Compass scanned ahead. The cracks in the floor below were deeper now — some wide enough to swallow the entire cart.
And worse — down in one of the rifts, something moved again.
It didn’t crawl this time. It slithered.
A black limb, boneless, long and wet, reached upward before coiling back into the shadows.
“They’re watching,” Echo whispered.
“We need to be past this section fast,” Compass said.
Rivet gave the motors a little more power, but not enough to make noise.
Every meter forward felt like walking a tightrope stretched over a pit full of teeth.
Then — finally — the tunnel shifted.
The walls ahead widened. The rails turned slightly, angling toward a larger chamber.
They were close to something new.
Something different.
But even before they reached it, the temperature dropped again.
So sharp, it felt like walking into ice water.
“Whatever’s up there,” Sky said quietly,
“It’s not just cold. It’s ancient.”
Compass raised a hand again. The cart slowed to a near stop.
The shadows in front of them were denser. Thicker.
The tunnel ahead was completely blocked.
Massive boulders, twisted metal, and jagged stone piled like a broken ribcage, left to die in the dark.
“That’s it,” Pixel muttered grimly. “Like something—or someone—intentionally buried the way forward.”
The team silently dismounted the cart.
Thunder stepped forward first, running a gloved hand along the nearest slab.
“Collapsed across the full width. These stones aren’t moving. It’s packed tight.”
“And we didn’t bring a drill,” Echo added nervously, fidgeting with his radio antenna.
Rivet straightened abruptly, determination flashing in her voice.
“I’ve got the exosuit. Pixel has microcharges. We’ll break through. Just carefully—if we loosen the wrong thing, it’ll all come down.”
“Carefully?” Mamba snorted, nodding toward the black patches pulsing between the stones. “This place is barely holding together. The fungal growth’s eating it alive. Time’s not on our side.”
“All the more reason to move,” Compass cut in sharply. “Rivet, peel back the top layers with the exo. Pixel, place charges—surgical, not brute force. Everyone else, clear the edges. Let’s go.”
The engineer and the hacker got to work.
Rivet, amplified by her powered suit, moved with mechanical precision, lifting slabs and placing them aside like puzzle pieces.
Thunder and Shade dug into the edges by hand, dislodging debris and widening the space.
No one spoke. Every sound echoed louder than it should have.
Pixel slid up beside a massive stone, kneeling to plant two small charges. He stretched the wires back and glanced at Compass and Sky.
“Ready? They’re low-yield, but still—get down.”
Compass nodded.
Everyone crouched low, hands over ears.
The explosion was more felt than heard—like something cracking inside your chest.
Stone split with a groan. Dust surged upward in a suffocating wave.
Before it settled, Rivet surged forward, exosuit humming as she pulled away fractured rock.
The passage began to open.
Stone grated. Metal rang out.
Sweat stung their eyes. Arms ached.
The air felt heavier now—thicker.
Like the tunnel was watching.
“Break,” Doc rasped, wiping fog from his glasses. “People are burning out.”
Sky raised a hand in agreement.
The team dropped where they stood—some onto stone, others straight to the floor.
Without realizing it, they naturally split again—old teams re-forming out of habit.
Compass didn’t sit.
He moved forward to the newly cleared gap.
A narrow opening gaped in the rubble.
Beyond it, only blackness—but a chill breeze brushed his face.
There was something past the blockage.
An open space. A chamber.
They were close.
Rivet was already reaching for the exo controls when the air shifted.
A sound sliced through the silence.
Thin. Sharp. Distant. But building fast.
A grinding squeal—metal dragging on stone.
Then the floor trembled.
“Back!” Thunder shouted, tensing instantly.
They tried to move.
Too late.
The entire pile folded in on itself.
No blast. Just gravity.
The floor gave out.
Stones crashed down—forward and below.
Compass lunged—
—and heard someone scream.
Rivet.
He reached for her.
Tried to grab hold—
But instead, he fell.
Stone. Dust. Screaming steel.
The world spun out from under him.
“Reeennn!”
Sky’s voice tore across the dark.
Ren “Compass” Wayland woke with a sharp inhale, unsure how long he’d been unconscious—minutes, hours… a day? His entire body throbbed as if crushed and stitched back together by careless hands. A bitter, metallic taste filled his mouth. Warmth slid down his temple—blood or water, he couldn't tell.
Instinctively, he reached up and removed his infrared goggles. The lenses clicked softly as they folded, and he tucked them into his side pouch. Only then did he realize—it wasn’t completely dark.
A faint glow shimmered across the cavern. Shapes emerged: towering mushrooms with pale greenish caps, luminous and ghostlike. They pulsed with a strange bioluminescence that crawled up their stalks like nervous electricity, illuminating ruined stone arches above and crumbled debris below. Their thick stems were coated in fibrous fuzz, and the air clung to him—damp, viscous, and suffused with fog.
He heard it then: a waterfall, or something close. Not crashing, but a constant hiss of falling droplets, like breath against old stone.
Ren braced against the ground and forced himself up. Pain lanced through his ribs. He winced, steadying himself against one of the fungal pillars. Nothing felt broken, but every muscle protested. He drew in a breath—and choked.
The air wasn’t just damp. It was alive. Spores, thick as dust, floated through the mist in lazy spirals. It smelled of rot and birth, of something ancient molting in silence.
A voice broke through the haze.
“Ren? You with us?”
It was muffled—strained with worry.
“Barely,” he rasped.
Shapes approached through the haze, figures forming like memories being pulled into focus. The first to reach him was Doc, dropping to his knees beside him, face pale but alert.
Behind him, Echo stumbled forward, a deep cut across his forehead, one side of his headset shattered and dangling by a wire. Sphinx limped slowly, gripping his elbow with a grimace, but his eyes tracked everything—quietly analyzing. The last to rise from the rubble was Rivet, crawling from beneath a broken support beam. Her exosuit sparked weakly, the servos whining, but the framework held.
“We all made it?” Ren asked, squinting at their faces, trying to count.
“Looks like it,” Doc exhaled. “Bruises. Some cuts. No internal bleeding I can see. We’re lucky.”
Rivet turned in place, scanning the cavern.
“Wait... where’s Sky’s team?” she asked, her voice tight.
Everyone froze. The realization came with a cold weight.
There was no sign of the others.
No Sky. No Thunder. No Mamba. No Shade. No Pixel.
No voices. No signals.
Just the glow of fungal light. The creeping fog. And silence.
Ren reached for his wristpad, fingers shaking slightly. Static. No beacons, no pings, no movement.
“They must’ve been thrown somewhere else,” Sphinx muttered, his voice rasping.
“Or deeper,” Echo said quietly, eyes distant.
Rivet stepped closer, inspecting her gear. Her hands paused on the mask clamped over her face.
A hairline fracture ran down its center.
She turned to Doc.
“Masks are compromised,” she said. “I’m breathing raw air.”
Echo checked his own. Cracked.
Sphinx’s was leaking along the seal.
Doc peeled his off with visible dread.
“We all are,” he confirmed, voice low. “And I don’t know what’s in this air. Spores like these... they could be hallucinogenic. Or worse.”
A pause.
Ren clenched his jaw. The fog seemed to press in tighter, curling like fingers around his boots.
“Can we seal the suits?” he asked.
Rivet shook her head.
“Too many fractures. The fall tore through half the systems. I can try to stabilize mine, but full filtration? Not happening.”
Doc added, grimly:
“Let’s hope this ecosystem isn’t hostile to mammalian lungs.”
Ren stared into the mist. Somewhere in the distance, a glow pulsed gently, almost rhythmically. Not electronic. Organic. Like breath.
“The trolley’s gone,” he said after a moment. “Buried or unreachable.”
“And even if it weren’t,” Sphinx added, “we’re sealed in.”
Echo looked around. The cavern walls were fractured, but no light came from above. The tunnel they’d come through had vanished behind rubble.
“So we go forward,” said Ren.
It wasn’t a question. There was no alternative.
Rivet nodded, pulling a flickering diagnostic panel from her forearm. Sparks jumped, but the readout stabilized. She tapped a few commands and rerouted auxiliary power to her servos.
“I can get limited function back,” she said. “Won’t last long, but enough to move.”
Doc began checking the others for signs of infection—pupil dilation, tremors, respiratory irregularities. Nothing immediate. But the spores could be slow.
Echo adjusted what was left of his headset, tapping into the short-range relay.
“No signals on any band. No heat signatures. No movement. It’s just... dead air.”
“Not dead,” Sphinx murmured, watching the mushrooms pulse. “Dormant.”
Ren stepped toward the narrow gap between two stone pillars, where the fog thickened into a flowing curtain.
“We find the others,” he said, his voice hoarse but steady. “Or we find a way out. Either way...”
He glanced back, locking eyes with each of them in turn.
“We move.”
There was no dramatic speech. No time for one. Just the sound of boots shifting against fungal dust and the soft ping of machinery recalibrating.
They passed beneath the arching fungal canopy, each step stirring the spores like snow in slow motion. The deeper they went, the brighter the glow became—not from any sun or lamp, but from the strange, breathing light of the mushrooms themselves. Pale blue veins pulsed beneath the caps. Some flexed slightly, reacting to motion.
A few leaned—just barely—as if watching.
The team didn’t speak. Even Echo, usually the first to mutter or curse, stayed silent. The silence felt loaded, like sound might trigger something that hadn’t yet noticed them.
At the rear, Rivet paused beside a spongy cluster growing out of the wall. She touched it gently with a metal probe. It recoiled.
“These things are responsive,” she whispered. “Not just passive growth. They're... aware.”
Ren didn’t slow.
“Then let’s not give them a reason to care.”
The tunnel narrowed, then widened again. Organic light rippled across stone, mixing with shadows. The architecture shifted—ancient and alien—fused with rootlike structures and fungal blooms.
Somewhere deeper in the dark, something shifted. A soft splash. Or a footfall.
Everyone froze.
The mushrooms dimmed slightly. As if holding their breath.
Ren turned.
“Move. Now.”
And they did—into the glow, into the breath of the earth itself, into a place where nothing human had ever walked.
No way back.
Only forward.
“Base? Sky? Come in—anyone!”
Echo’s voice rasped into the void, desperation cutting through the static as he fumbled with the radio strapped to his belt.
Silence.
“Nothing,” he muttered. “We’re on our own.”
Sphinx slowly turned, his gaze drifting across the towering fungal pillars around them.
“This place… it’s not just deep underground. It’s something else. A tomb. A womb.”
The others remained quiet. No one knew how far they had fallen—or if there was even a way back.
The shock of the collapse still clung to them like dust. The air was heavy, damp, tinged with the tang of rot and something... breathing.
Ren stepped forward. The fungal forest stretched in all directions—great stalks reaching upward like petrified trees in a forgotten cathedral. Broken stone jutted from the earth like shattered teeth. The light was dim, filtered through the phosphorescent glow of the mushroom caps overhead.
“We need to scout ahead,” Rivet said, crouched near a panel of her exosuit. She worked with quick, practiced hands, isolating burnt wires, rerouting circuits.
Her face was smudged with grime, her brow scraped raw. But her eyes were steady. Determined.
“There has to be another exit—or whatever drew the artifact here in the first place. Sitting still isn’t an option.”
Ren nodded.
“Stick close. Watch your step. This ground’s barely holding together—and whatever’s down here, it’s not just rock and spores.”
He didn’t finish.
Movement—just past a patch of moss.
A flicker. Quick. Uneven.
Ren’s hand shot up.
Silence.
They froze.
Something was approaching.
Not fast. Not loud.
But wrong.
Like the darkness itself was moving toward them.
“There,” Echo whispered.
Ren turned his wrist-mounted lamp toward the shifting shapes.
What emerged from the shadows was not human.
Figures stepped into view from beneath the fungi.
Humanoid—only barely.
Their heads were engulfed in massive, bulbous mushroom caps. Filaments and gray mold strands hung from beneath like organic hair. Their torsos were draped in scraps of synthetic fabric—torn uniforms, maybe, or artificial skin. No one could tell.
Their limbs were too long, joints too sharp. Fingers ended in curled claws that scraped the soft earth.
In each of their right hands—
a gleaming metallic syringe.
Doc narrowed his eyes.
“Syringes,” he breathed. “Huge. Filled with… something.”
“They’re walking fungus,” he added with a hollow tone. “Not metaphor. Literal.”
“What in God’s name—” Sphinx whispered.
He took a step back, instinctively pressing behind Ren.
The things advanced slowly. They didn’t speak. Didn’t make a sound.
As if the air itself carried them forward.
Then, without warning, one broke formation.
It rushed sideways—straight at Echo.
Before anyone could react, a skeletal hand latched onto his wrist.
The syringe stabbed deep into his forearm.
“Aaaahh!” Echo screamed.
“Down!” Ren shouted.
Rivet lunged for him, grabbing his vest to pull him free.
But the creature held firm, pushing the plunger with a horrible, deliberate motion.
Ren didn’t hesitate.
He snatched a broken steel pipe from the rubble at his feet—
and swung.
The blow struck the creature’s side with a wet crack.
It staggered. Released Echo.
Rivet dragged him backward, shielding him with her body.
The creature that had struck retreated, shuddering, its purpose apparently fulfilled.
But more were coming.
Two. Three. Lurching from the mist. Syringes raised.
“Engage!” Ren barked.
He charged.
Rivet followed—her exosuit roaring as it surged to full power.
Her first strike drove into a monster’s chest with bone-shattering force.
The thing crumpled and vanished into a dark ravine.
Another reached for Ren. He ducked the syringe—
and drove the pipe upward, smashing through its forearm.
The syringe clattered to the ground, still trembling.
The creature reeled back.
Ren didn’t give it a second chance.
He slammed it down, pinned it under his boot,
and crushed its head beneath the pipe.
The fungal cap burst—releasing a gush of black fluid and a dry, rattling cry.
More moved in—
but Ren was ready.
He struck again.
And again.
Syringes flew from their hands like broken bones.
The creatures, now disarmed, hesitated.
Their movements slowed—uncertain.
Then they turned.
One by one, they vanished into the spore-lit gloom.
The forest of fungi fell into silence again.
Only their breathing—harsh, uneven—remained.
Echo slumped against Rivet’s arm, clutching his forearm where the syringe had gone in. His face was pale, lips trembling. A grayish fluid oozed from the puncture, thick and laced with flecks of green.
Doc was already moving.
“Lay him down—gently. Let me see it.”
Rivet eased him onto a flat stone. Doc’s hands moved with clinical speed, pulling gloves from his medkit, shining a light over the wound.
“No ordinary injection,” he muttered. “The needle was wide—dispersal type. Look at the tissue swelling. It’s trying to spread something.”
“Infection?” Ren asked, his voice low.
“Maybe. Maybe worse. This... doesn’t behave like bacteria. It’s too fast. Almost... deliberate.”
Echo twitched, then groaned.
“I’m fine...” he murmured. “I’m okay.”
“No, you’re not,” Doc snapped. “You’re lucky it went into muscle and not a vein. If whatever was in there got into your bloodstream—”
“Can you stop it?” Rivet cut in, voice sharp.
Doc hesitated, then injected a broad-spectrum antifungal and a high-dose anti-inflammatory.
“I’m buying him time,” he said. “But we need answers. And soon.”
Sphinx stood a few meters away, arms wrapped tightly around himself. He hadn’t spoken since the creatures left.
“They weren’t just... animals,” he finally said.
“They had a pattern. Tools. Targets. That wasn’t random.”
Ren stared into the dark, where the fungal humanoids had disappeared.
The void seemed to watch them back.
“They left,” he said. “Why?”
“Testing us,” Doc offered. “Or just warning. The syringe wasn’t meant to kill.”
“To change,” Sphinx whispered. “Infect, adapt... convert.”
“Let’s not wait to find out,” Rivet muttered. She crouched next to Echo, adjusting the exosuit’s shoulder plate to shield him better.
“If they come back with more—he’s not ready to move.”
Ren turned to the others.
“We regroup. We find a secure spot. We set a perimeter. No lights unless absolutely necessary.”
He paused.
“And we don’t split up again. Ever.”
The team nodded.
Even Echo, woozy and weak, clenched his jaw and gave a shallow nod.
The glow of the fungal caps around them pulsed faintly—like breath.
The creatures had melted back into that light. Into the shadows between spores and stone.
But their presence lingered.
In the silence.
In the dripping black slime on Ren’s pipe.
In the syringe now lying on the ground, still half-filled with something alive.
Doc bagged it and other syringes in a sealed container and clipped it to his vest.
“I’ll study it later,” he muttered. “If we get a later.”
The air grew still. Cold.
Somewhere far off, deep in the cavern system—
a wet sound echoed.
A shuffle.
A scrape.
And then, nothing.
“They... left?”
Sphinx’s voice trembled, barely audible. His eyes were still fixed on the darkness where the fungal creatures had disappeared.
“Seems like it,” Doc said. But the certainty was gone from his voice. The adrenaline had faded, leaving only dread.
Ren didn’t move to follow the attackers. His gaze stayed on the black. But the real threat wasn’t out there.
“Echo!” he called, spinning toward the fallen comms operator.
Echo was slumped against a stone, breathing ragged and shallow. A snapped syringe still jutted from his arm.
Doc was already kneeling beside him.
“Let me see. Hold still.”
Echo groaned faintly.
Doc pulled out the needle—and froze.
A dark blue web was spreading under Echo’s skin, crawling through his veins like ink through cracked glass. The blood was turning black.
“His blood... it’s changing,” Doc muttered.
Echo’s skin had gone pale. Sweat slicked his forehead.
“We don’t have an antidote! We don’t have anything!” Rivet cried, her voice edged with panic as she scanned the cave for a miracle that wasn’t there.
Doc’s jaw tightened. He said nothing—just reached into his medkit and yanked out gauze and a belt.
“We need to slow the spread.”
He tied a tight band just above the injection site—like treating a snakebite.
But none of them knew if it would work.
Echo trembled, his breath quickening. His lips were beginning to gray.
“What the hell did they inject into him?” Sphinx whispered, twisting his glasses in his hands.
“Venom? Spores? A virus?”
Ren scanned the floor. A few syringes lay scattered among the debris—massive, filled with glowing blue fluid. Dropped by the fungal creatures.
He carefully picked one up by the barrel.
“We need to analyze these. Take them with us,” Doc said quickly.
He gathered the syringes, placing them gently into a sealed container he kept strapped to his pack.
Rivet knelt beside Echo, one arm around his shoulders like a living shield.
Doc checked his pulse. His expression darkened.
“Spiking. It’s too fast…”
No one said what they all knew:
They were running out of time.
Ren clenched his fists until his knuckles cracked.
After everything they’d survived—was this how it ended?
Some fungal poison in the dark?
No. Not like this.
Then—movement.
Rustling.
“Get down,” Ren whispered.
Everyone scrambled behind what cover they could find. Sphinx and Doc dragged Echo to the nearest stone outcrop.
A terrible thought cut through the fear:
The monsters were coming back.
Figures appeared between the fungal trunks.
Ren squinted.
He recognized the shapes.
Sky’s team.
For one heartbeat, hope flared in his chest.
“There they are!” Sky shouted, her voice tense and sharp.
“Careful—no filters... and what the hell’s wrong with his arm?”
Ren stepped forward, ready to explain, to plead, to speak.
But the next words hit harder than any bullet.
“They’re infected. Fire!”
The shots came instantly.
Bullets sliced through the air above Ren’s team.
They tore into the fungal grove, ripping off mushroom caps and splitting thick stalks apart. With every burst of gunfire came an explosion of spores. The mist thickened, and fluorescent dust hung in the air like toxic snow.
“Cease fire!” Ren shouted.
“We’re not infected!”
No reply—only the thunder of weapons.
Rivet crouched down, shielding Echo with her body. He barely moved, breath shallow. The bandage around his arm was soaked through. His veins had darkened to a sickly greenish-black, pulsing with unnatural color.
“Sky!” Ren yelled, peeking out from cover for a second.
“This is a mistake! We’re not your enemy!”
A shot answered.
It missed—but barely.
Ren dropped back behind the stone, gasping for breath.
“You tried,” Rivet muttered, not looking back.
“They’ve already made their decision.”
“No,” Ren said quietly. “They’re just afraid.”
His voice was hoarse, but steady. There was no anger in his eyes.
“In their place, we might’ve done the same…”
“They can’t hear us,” he breathed. “In their minds, we’re already dead.”
On the far side of the grove, Thunder and Shade moved forward—step by methodical step, machine-like, leaving no gaps, no chances.
“They’re moving in a curve,” Doc observed.
“If we don’t leave now, they’ll surround us.”
“If we do, they’ll cut us down,” Sphinx whispered, panic in his voice.
A bullet shrieked off the rock above them, stone chips showering down.
“We need a distraction,” Rivet snapped, scanning the area.
But the ceiling was too high—fifteen, maybe twenty meters. Completely out of reach. Bringing it down wasn’t an option.
Then Ren saw it.
A massive mushroom. Thicker than a tree trunk. Too big to be stable.
“That one,” he pointed. “Drop it. It'll pull their attention.”
“Understood,” Rivet replied, already on the move.
She activated the wrist-mounted cutter, ducked low, and sprinted under the crossfire. Reaching the base, she drove the heated blade into the stalk. Steam hissed. Fibers melted and cracked under the pressure. She moved fast, carving deep lines across the core.
“Come on…” she growled through gritted teeth. “Fall.”
One final cut—and the enormous cap began to tilt.
With a heavy, meaty snap, the stalk gave out. The mushroom collapsed toward the attackers, spraying clouds of spores and chunks of flesh into the air. The crash thundered through the cavern.
“Now!” Ren shouted.
They bolted.
Doc and Sphinx carried Echo between them. Rivet dropped into a kneeling position and activated defensive mode—reinforced armor plates slid from her exosuit, locking across her back in a curved formation like a living shield.
Bullets slammed into the plating with dull, metallic thuds.
It held.
“Move!” Rivet called out. “I’ve got you covered!”
The team sprinted beneath the protection of the shield. Ren led the way, clearing debris and clearing a path forward.
Another burst of gunfire cracked through the air.
A shard clipped Ren’s shoulder—burning through the suit, scorching the skin beneath.
Under Rivet’s armored shield, with ricochets screaming past them, Ren’s team plunged deeper into the fungal forest. That armor had saved them before—back during their archaeological dives—protecting them from spiked traps and poisoned darts.
Now it was shielding them from bullets.
Colossal mushroom caps flashed past in a wild dance of shadows.
Somewhere behind them, shouting echoed—Sky’s team still on their trail.
Ren led the way, weaving between fungal pillars and stalactites, carving a path forward.
Behind him, Doc and Sphinx dragged Echo, struggling to stay upright.
Rivet brought up the rear—her armor groaning under the strain, but unyielding.
Then came the sound of rushing water—growing louder.
Drops thickened the darkness, and it felt like they were sprinting through a storm of ink.
They ran nearly blind—
hearts pounding,
blood roaring in their temples—
And then: emptiness.
The ground vanished beneath their feet.
Rivet, just steps behind Ren, only had time to see him disappear—
There one second,
Gone the next.
“Watch ou—” Doc started to shout—
Too late.
One by one, all five of them went over the edge.
They tumbled downward—
slamming into ledges,
skidding across moss-slick rock,
grabbing at nothing.
The world spun in a dizzying whirlpool—
And then came the water.
Freezing. Black. Deafening.
Ren was pulled under, into the current of an icy underground river.
He spun, disoriented, every direction the wrong one.
Dark shapes flickered in the murk—
limbs, torsos—his team, just as helpless.
He surfaced for a breath, gasping.
Somewhere nearby, Rivet cried out.
She was afloat—her exosuit buoyed by its compressed-air anti-sink system.
Once, she’d nearly drowned in a flooded tomb trap.
After that, she made sure the feature was always installed.
But the underground river didn’t care.
There was no telling—
where the shore was,
where the passage lay,
where safety might be.
The current dragged them faster and faster.
Ren reached out, trying to grab hold of anything—
a rock, a ridge—
His fingers only raked across slime-covered stone.
Blood mixed with the spray.
His lungs burned.
His strength was fading.
Then came one last surge—
A final wave, crushing.
And he went under.
So this is it, flickered through Ren’s mind.
Not bullets… but a black river no one will ever find.
He sank beneath the surface—
into a silence as cold and indifferent as death.
The icy underground current hurled the five exhausted explorers into the darkness, battering them like driftwood in a storm. For several torturous minutes, they fought for every breath—swallowing water, choking, desperate to stay afloat.
And then, finally, the torrent began to ease.
They were thrown onto a rocky bank beneath a vast cavern ceiling.
Ren washed up first. Coughing and spitting out water, he scrambled forward blindly, fingertips scraping over rough stone.
“Is everyone... alive?” he rasped into the dark.
Heavy gasps answered him.
Rivet’s voice came first, trembling:
“Seems so. For now... I’m still breathing.”
“I’m... here,” Sphinx managed, struggling to his feet. “Echo? Doc?”
“We’re all here,” came Doc’s muffled reply. He was propping Echo upright, helping him sit.
Echo groaned, clutching his shoulder—washed of nearly all strength by the raging current, but still conscious.
Gradually, the whole team gathered on solid ground.
Soaked to the bone, bruised and covered in grime—but alive.
Around them, an eerie silence reigned:
only the steady drip of water on stone,
and the faint sound of the river behind them—the same river that had saved them from bullets.
No more gunfire. No voices.
Sky’s team, it seemed, was far behind.
Ren let out a heavy breath.
The betrayal still burned in his chest,
but right now, survival was all that mattered.
“We have to move,” he whispered, peering into the cavern’s thick darkness.
Everything here felt different.
There were hardly any glowing mushrooms—just a few sparse caps giving off a pale, phantom glow.
Barely enough light to see the outlines of what looked like sloping hills in the distance.
And behind that… nothing.
Just darkness so dense it felt alive, as though it were watching.
They pressed on carefully, inching forward in a tight cluster. No one wanted to lag behind.
Each step echoed under the high stone vault—
as if the cave were listening to them.
Doc glanced around nervously, clutching his medical pack like a lifeline.
The crushing silence gnawed at their nerves. He muttered under his breath:
“I don’t like this... Anything could be hiding in here.
And if it’s like those creatures before—remember?”
He swallowed, haunted by memories.
Ren simply nodded.
Doc wasn’t wrong.
They froze, listening for the faintest sound.
The gloom seemed to hold its breath.
Rivet’s heart pounded in her ears.
Echo breathed in slow, pained gasps, hardly daring to move.
Seconds dragged by.
Nothing.
Only water droplets, plinking into emptiness.
Silence so total it roared in their heads.
Doc exhaled—and without realizing it, his finger brushed the button on his flashlight.
A sudden flare of light.
“No lights!” Ren hissed, jerking his arm to stop him.
Too late.
A narrow beam of white light pierced the darkness, revealing chaotic mounds of bizarre debris up ahead. For the briefest moment, it caught a metallic glint—polished, reflective.
Then everything changed.
A soft, sinister rustle rippled across the cavern floor.
The shadows began to move.
“What is that...” Sphinx whispered.
Shapes stirred—indefinable and formless.
A mass of living darkness rolled closer, as it once had in that tunnel.
Doc stood, flashlight in hand, frozen in place.
Something cold, both solid and shifting, skimmed across his arm.
He had no time to cry out.
From the gloom, dozens of black appendages reached for him.
Tentacles. Limbs.
Something alive—hungry.
“Aaaah!”
Doc’s scream tore from his chest.
He lurched backward, but the bright beam in his trembling grip turned him into a single, perfect target.
The shadows surged toward him from every direction.
At last, Ren and the others could see them clearly: twisted scrap-metal frames—half-crushed robotic arms and joints—fused with slick, pulsing organic matter, as if shot through with fungal webs and mycelium.
A creeping tangle of techno-organic debris groaned with rust and reeked of decay.
All of it lunged at one thing:
the light.
Doc.
Ren sprang forward, but half of Doc’s body was already vanishing into the heaving mass.
It wasn’t devouring him, exactly—
It was absorbing him, like quicksand.
Rivet and Sphinx started to rush in, but Rivet shrieked:
“Stop! It’s everywhere... it’s moving!”
She yanked Sphinx backward, saving them both from stepping too close to the writhing bulk.
Echo let out a cry, paralyzed by horror:
“Doc!”
Ren clutched at one of the metal “arms” pulling Doc, yanking with all his strength.
For a moment, he actually stalled its progress—
but the next lurch tore Doc’s body from his grip.
The flashlight in Doc’s hand thrashed wildly, illuminating his face in fractured glimpses: eyes wide in silent terror, mouth frozen in a final shout—
then gone.
The dark mass closed around him like a maw.
The beam flickered out.
A crunch.
Then blackness.
His scream cut off in an instant.
The last thing they heard was the slow scraping of metal, swallowed by the depths.
And then—
silence.
“Doc...”
Rivet’s voice was barely audible. Her ears rang with her own hammering pulse. Nobody moved.
A chill, paralyzing horror took hold of them all.
Their friend—and only medic—had vanished, dragged into the living darkness.
They stood in stunned disbelief.
Echo’s teeth clenched; a white-knuckled rage simmered in his eyes.
“I hate this... vile abomination,” he spat.
Trying to chase after Doc would be suicide.
Sphinx drew in ragged breaths, struggling to comprehend: seconds ago, Doc had been here... and now he wasn’t.
Rivet pressed a trembling hand to her mouth, fighting tears.
Ren’s fists clenched so tightly his knuckles screamed.
But he forced himself to think.
Panic now would only get them killed.
He breathed in, voice raw:
“No one moves. No lights.”
The team stood motionless in the darkness, hardly daring to breathe.
Everything had become clear: that “gray mass” reacted to light. If they made no sound—if they didn’t move or shine a beam—maybe they’d survive.
One moment…
then another…
silence.
Their heartbeats thundered louder than any shuffle or whisper.
Ren strained to hear something—anything—hoping desperately for Doc’s voice, or even some final awful sound to confirm his fate.
But the cavern was utterly still.
Grief welled up inside him, burning like acid in his veins.
Could they truly have lost Doc?
He clenched his teeth so hard his jaw ached, forcing himself not to break down.
Not yet.
Minutes passed, agonizingly long in the hush.
Finally, Sphinx spoke in a trembling whisper:
“We... we left him back there…”
“He might be alive,” Ren whispered back, though he could barely believe his own words.
“If they’re not attacking… maybe Doc’s still hanging on.”
That faint hope flickered like a lone spark, but they clung to it with all they had.
They went rigid, listening for the slightest sound.
And then, from somewhere up ahead—a faint moan.
Rivet nudged Ren.
“You heard that?!”
He nodded—although in the darkness, no one saw—and mouthed:
“Doc… that’s him!”
Another soft groan, weak and tormented, but undeniably human.
Doc was alive.
Without speaking, they almost rushed forward as one—then froze.
Charging blindly would be suicide. One wrong move could trigger another attack.
Ren raised a hand, signaling the others to stay put.
He and Rivet moved toward the noise, inching ahead in absolute silence.
Step by cautious step, their eyes adjusting to the gloom. A faint emerald glow from distant mushrooms offered enough to make out shapes. Up ahead lay piles of metal, organic matter, and fungal webs—an impenetrable chaos that seemed impossible for any person to survive.
But the moan sounded again—this time, slightly to the right.
They spotted a narrow gap between heaps of debris. Stooping low, they squeezed through, winding deeper into that grim maze of twisted scraps.
At last, Ren made out a human figure lying at the base of a mangled junk mound.
Doc.
He lay sprawled on a bed of bent metal, barely visible in the murk.
Rivet reached him first. Carefully, holding her breath, she began disentangling the metallic “arms”—a tangle of fused metal and fungal strands—that clung to his body.
Ren joined without a word, helping to free him in near silence. Together, they lifted a heavy fragment pinning Doc’s leg. Doc moaned at the movement, but it was a living, undeniable sound.
“Easy… we’re here,” Ren whispered, sliding an arm beneath Doc’s shoulders.
“We’ll get you out…”
After a tense minute of prying, they managed to pull him free from that trap.
Sphinx and Echo crept closer, helping them drag Doc onto a small clearing lit only by a single, dimly glowing mushroom—now their only light source.
“Doc, can you hear me?” Rivet murmured, leaning over him.
He was pale; a thin trickle of blood ran from his temple, and his eyes gleamed with shock—but he was breathing.
Unable to hold back, Rivet let out a muffled sob and clung to him, tears of relief slipping free.
Sphinx exhaled, voice raw:
“Thank the gods… we almost lost you…”
Echo’s voice shook:
“Doc, man… we thought—”
Doc grimaced in pain, but raised a trembling hand to pat Echo’s shoulder.
“I’m… I’m alright… I think…” he rasped.
“Can’t believe… I made it…”
Still half-dazed, he groped behind him for his medical pack. Only when his fingers closed around it did he relax a fraction.
His attempt at a smile turned into a pained grimace. Even so, the others let out hushed laughter—the only release they had from the suffocating tension. They were together again.
Echo, moved by the moment, instinctively reached for his flashlight to check Doc’s injuries—but Ren caught his wrist and shook his head.
Even now, one stray beam could provoke disaster. They’d have to examine Doc in near-total darkness.
Thankfully, his wounds seemed non-fatal: bruises, a gash on his brow, and obvious shock. Once the light had gone out, the dark mass apparently lost interest and tossed him aside, no longer seeing him as a target.
“What was that thing, anyway?” Sphinx whispered, glancing uneasily at the looming piles of rotting metal and fungal matter all around.
Their eyes, finally adjusted to the half-light, took in the vast expanse of fractured machines around them—a landscape of metallic wreckage entombed in fungal growth. Indistinct shapes rose and fell like the contours of a forgotten battlefield, all of it veiled by the dim, emerald glow of distant mushrooms.
“Looks like a graveyard,”
Sphinx whispered, voice rough.
“Some sort of… tomb for machines.”
Rivet—walked a few paces behind him. Her exosuit servos clicked softly with each step. She crouched beside a corroded robotic torso, shining faint in the gloom. A nest of pale fungal tendrils wound through its joints like invasive vines. With a careful tug, she pried loose a severed mechanical arm. Lifting it toward a nearby clump of bio-luminescent fungi, she examined the twisted metal.
“This isn’t just scrap,”
she said under her breath.
“It’s definitely a robot’s arm… maybe a biped, or some kind of automated worker. The fungus has grown right into the core.”
Ren came closer, kneeling by her side. Even in the weak glow, the skeletal shape was unmistakable: a robotic limb, now half-dissolved by time and microbial threads. He remembered half-rumors of ancient labs and subterranean foundries, lost beneath centuries of collapse and decay.
“They're not alive, then,”
he said quietly.
“Just… broken machines, overgrown with fungus. But they look like… the undead.”
“Myco-zombies,”
Echo muttered with a crooked grin, staring at the eerie trophy.
Doc, still breathing heavily, gave a slight nod.
“Exactly… The spores must’ve corrupted their systems,”
he rasped.
“They don’t really see or hear anymore.”
“But they still respond to light—especially sharp, focused beams.”
“Not because they recognize us… just because they’re drawn to it. Mindless. Directionless. Like moths to a flame.”
Ren felt a rush of relief at the explanation. Having a name—Myco-Zombies—somehow made them less monstrous. Just broken robots, drifting aimlessly through the gloom, lashing out at anything that gleamed too brightly.
“So that’s why they attacked whenever we used a flashlight,”
he said.
“They’re not malicious. They’re just… following the glow.”
He turned to see Rivet wiping off more of the fungal webbing from another piece of ancient tech. Her exosuit hissed as she shifted her stance. With gentle precision, she cut away a slimy clot of root-like fibers, revealing a battered robot’s housing beneath. Inside, an intricate coil glinted.
“Hey,”
she breathed, brushing aside the last of the mold.
“This almost looks like a Tesla coil array. See the layered windings?”
All five of them peered closer. Sphinx’s eyebrows shot upward, the tension in his shoulders briefly forgotten.
“A Tesla coil? In a robot?”
Despite the swirling gloom, Ren caught the hint of relief in everyone’s faces. Fear of the unknown had weighed on them like a suffocating blanket. Now, faced with these mechanical cadavers, they sensed at least a glimpse of reason behind the nightmare.
Though the explanation offered some comfort, it also raised new questions.
Sphinx gestured around at the heaped metal corpses, the silent mausoleum of technology.
“What happened down here? It looks like a final resting place for an entire legion of machines… or more. Was there a war? A meltdown? Did someone just… dump them?”
Ren took in the mountainous piles of broken shapes. Some resembled humanoid androids, others were built on treads or spidery legs. Twisted chassis, shattered plating, wires spooled out like intestines in a horror scene.
Rivet exhaled, brushing the back of her hand across her damp lashes. She’d nearly lost Doc to that horrifying swarm. Now, standing here, she could see just how massive the threat was. Groping in the darkness beyond the faint mushroom glow, the scrap heaps stretched into the distance, forming ridges and canyons of rusting steel.
“An entire army,”
she murmured, voice trembling.
“All buried down here, forgotten. Or cast aside like garbage.”
Sphinx sucked in a breath, trying to steady himself.
“But… if they used Tesla-like induction coils, that means somewhere in this complex, a generator or station might still be functioning. Even after all these centuries.”
Rivet’s face lit up with the spark of possibility.
“Exactly. If that station’s still operating—maybe we can tap into it. Amplify Echo’s transmission or find a direct line out. We could call for help. Or at least find out if anyone else is still listening.”
A hush fell over the group. Hope, so close to slipping away, now flickered anew. They might have a way to contact the surface, or anyone searching for them. Ren let out a slow, measured breath, scanning the decaying labyrinth.
“All right,”
he said.
“If that station still runs, it’s our best shot. We can’t stay down here, living in the dark and dodging broken robots. Let’s see if we can trace the coils back to their source.”
“Give me a moment to gather myself…”
Echo said, touching his sore arm.
“But yes… if we find the main console, I might be able to patch into it. If the base infrastructure is intact, there should be a way to route a strong signal.”
Doc raked a hand through his damp hair.
“I still can’t believe these things were built to last centuries,”
he said, voice echoing softly.
“It must have been some advanced civilization… or an experimental lab that nobody else knew about.”
Ren nodded slowly, mind drifting to the rumors of an underground city.
“Either the facility got shut down intentionally, or there was an accident that left the machines to rot.”
The acrid smell of decay and oxidation filled the air, sending an involuntary shiver through Rivet. If it was an accident, it must have been colossal. If it was intentional… the truth might be darker still.
Before any of them could speak further, an abrupt noise shattered the hush: shouts, echoing from above. A distant clang of shifting metal followed, as if footsteps thundered across a higher ledge.
“They’re here! Hurry, get down!”
a voice yelled, harsh with urgency.
Ren’s heart dropped. That voice…
Sky’s team.
Ren flinched and instantly motioned for everyone to duck.
Up on the higher mounds of scrap metal, heavy boots thudded and orders rang out. He knew that voice.
Sky.
Her team had found them—again.
Sky’s team didn’t turn on their lights.
Somehow, they still saw them.
No beams cut through the gloom. No flashes gave away their position. But footsteps advanced—deliberate, fast—closing in with unnerving certainty.
“How…?”
Ren’s voice was a whisper, barely audible.
“They’re tracking us—in the dark.”
The realization sent a chill down their spines.
Somehow, Sky and her people moved through this dead zone as if they weren’t blind. As if the darkness wasn’t a threat—it was their weapon.
Unlike us, they didn’t need the light.
And that made them far more dangerous.
“Down!” Ren hissed.
They dropped into the shadows between twisted heaps of metal.
Heavy breathing. No lights. But above them, figures moved—silhouettes in armor, descending with surgical precision.
No flashlights.
But somehow, they saw.
“Try to hide, and it only gets worse!”
Mamba’s voice—sharp, close. Too close.
Ren clenched his jaw. No room to run.
And then—
“Movement! Left!”
Instead of gunfire, there was a soft pop.
Something arced through the air—and hit the rock with a sickening splat.
“Grenade?!”
Ren’s instincts flared.
But no explosion followed.
Only a crackling hiss—then light.
A pulsing yellow beacon ignited in jerky bursts, flickering across the junk-strewn floor.
“Get it off! Turn it off!”
Rivet cried out.
Too late.
From every direction came the rising screech of twisted metal.
One by one, the mangled bodies of ancient machines began to stir—
the dead legion of robots drawn to the beacon’s dazzling pulse.
With a deafening clatter and metallic wail, the swarm came alive,
scrambling over one another, merging into a single avalanche of writhing wreckage.
All of it surged toward one point:
the blinking beacon lying near Ren’s team.
“Back!” Ren barked.
He lunged forward, snatched the pulsing orb, and hurled it as far as he could—out toward the riverbed.
The glowing sphere spun through the air, still flashing.
Just in time.
The wave of machines barreled past them, close enough to crush them under its weight.
A roaring sea of metal veered away, chasing the arc of light.
But they weren’t safe yet—Sky’s squad hadn’t vanished.
“Run!” Ren snapped, rising to his feet.
“We’ve got to move while the machines are still in motion!”
The group bolted.
Using the chaos as cover, they sprinted deeper into the maze.
Behind them came Mamba’s voice:
“Stop!”
But no one slowed.
Ren led the way, weaving between rusted wreckage.
Darkness closed in again, broken only by distant muzzle flashes,
briefly illuminating the fleeing silhouettes.
Bullets whined and ricocheted off steel.
Then suddenly—space.
Ren stumbled into a wide clearing.
He took two steps—and the floor dropped away.
Slick metal panels gave way—
and the entire team plunged into a yawning void.
No time to scream.
Just the metallic clang of triggered panels,
a few startled cries—
and the crash of bodies below.
The fall wasn't far—
broken robots and thick mats of fungal growth cushioned their impact.
They hit hard, landing at the bottom of the pit, swallowed by near-total darkness.
Only the team’s ragged breathing broke the silence.
Far above, the grind of machines echoed faintly—
the vast swarm of dead robots still stirred on the surface, drawn by even the faintest flicker of light.
Now and then, muffled voices from their pursuers rang out...
then slowly faded, swallowed by distance.
“No lights,”
Ren rasped, pushing himself up on one elbow.
“There could be more down here…”
No one argued.
The memory of what light had summoned last time was still too raw.
One mistake had nearly cost them a life.
Even now, Doc flinched at the memory, breath shaking.
For a long minute, no one moved.
They lay still in the suffocating dark, afraid to breathe too loud.
The only sound was the faint tremor in the metal around them—
a reminder that something massive still lurked in the depths.
Dust and powdered iron scratched at their throats.
“How... how do we get out of here?”
Sphinx whispered.
“No idea,”
Doc answered between breaths.
“Looks like... some kind of service bay.”
Ren groped in the dark, searching for his pack.
“First, we figure out where we are. Lights stay off.”
Then—
“Wait—our IR goggles!”
Rivet’s voice was sharp with hope.
“We brought them for the tunnels, remember?”
Ren’s eyes widened.
Of course.
Seasoned explorers, completely forgetting their own gear.
But after everything they’d endured, thinking had taken a backseat to surviving.
Rivet and Echo were already digging through their kits.
Seconds later—success.
Echo powered up the first set, and a soft lattice of infrared beams shimmered out across the chamber.
Shapes emerged from the dark.
They were lying in an old machinery pit, surrounded by decommissioned robots and fractured components.
At the far end of the chamber, massive industrial grinders sat frozen in place.
Mangled android limbs and twisted chassis littered a dead conveyor belt.
Tracks of fine scrap and oxidized metal streaked the floor—
a ghost trail of where things once moved.
Now it was still. Cold. Silent.
They followed the shattered path cautiously, boots crunching across grit and debris,
moving toward what looked like an old smelter or incinerator.
The curved metal arcs that once channeled molten alloys still gleamed faintly under infrared—
a fossilized heartbeat from a machine long dormant.
As they stepped off the conveyor, the full scale of the place hit them.
And for a moment—despite themselves—someone nearly gasped.
“Whoa…”
Rivet breathed.
“There’s... so much. Structures everywhere.”
The vast chamber opened before them like a buried cathedral—
walls of rusted panels, silent conveyor belts, frozen robotic arms.
Above, skeletal gantries vanished into the dark like ribs of a long-dead beast.
And against the far walls, towers of machines—many still upright, locked mid-movement as if waiting for a command that never came.
“A processing facility,”
Rivet murmured in awe.
“That explains the mountains up top. They brought them here for dismantling…
and just stopped.”
“So the junkyard above—that's what never made it through the system,”
Ren said quietly.
“Or maybe the whole place just... shut down.”
Sphinx narrowed his eyes, scanning deeper into the shadows.
“There... that corridor. It leads further in. Might be a way out.”
“Or another tunnel full of metal nightmares,”
Echo muttered.
They moved slowly, hugging the wall, careful not to disturb anything.
Every step echoed in hollow metal clinks.
The graveyard came into sharper focus through infrared:
assembly lines, silent cranes, inert limbs...
and the unmoving silhouettes of machines that looked just a little too poised.
“They look... alive,”
Sphinx whispered.
At the far end of the room, they found a sealed hatch—
a metal panel slanted into the corner of a wall.
Rivet stepped up, exosuit joints creaking softly as she braced herself.
Her muscles trembled with fatigue, but she hesitated to engage full servo force.
Noise might still draw things—whatever those things were.
She worked the panel slowly, gently.
The metal groaned in protest, but shifted enough for a draft of cold, stale air to snake through.
“What now, Compass?”
Echo asked, leaning toward the gap.
“We move,”
Ren said, voice firm and low.
“Regroup. Find a way out of this place.”
Breathing shallow, steps measured, the team pressed forward—
into the dark heart of the forgotten machine world.
And with them moved a quiet pact:
They would not lose each other again.
Before long, they spotted a small side room ahead—its heavy door slightly ajar.
Through their infrared goggles, they scanned the shadows beyond. No movement. No heat signatures.
“Looks clear,”
Ren whispered, cautiously peering inside.
The walls were lined with ancient control panels, rusted consoles, and cables that jutted like exposed nerves from the floor.
It looked like an old utility station—modest in size, mostly intact, and for once, untouched by carnage.
The others followed, tense at first… until they confirmed the space was truly empty.
Only then did their shoulders ease.
“Finally... a place to breathe,”
Ren exhaled.
“I think we can risk a little light.”
Without hesitation, Rivet pulled out a compact camping lantern.
Click.
A soft glow filled the room, casting a warm haze across pitted walls, dusty terminals, and long-dead machinery.
For the first time in what felt like hours, they could see each other without the ghostly tint of infrared.
It felt… human again.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t draw any light-hunters,”
Sphinx muttered.
“Wouldn’t try this in the hallway,”
Ren replied with a shrug.
“But here—we’ve got a door, a narrow entrance. Hard to imagine those hulking bots squeezing through unnoticed.”
Echo inspected the hinges and frame. It was solid. If something came, they could barricade it.
But now, under the soft light, Doc noticed something unsettling:
Three of them—Ren, Rivet, and Sphinx—had faint, branching markings on their skin.
Rivet had a pale patch on her wrist.
Ren, a subtle discoloration along his neck.
Sphinx—small blotches near his forearm.
Doc quietly checked his own leg, where his suit had torn during the fall.
Beneath the fabric, dark specks had bloomed across the skin like scattered ink.
“Well...”
Doc muttered, pulling back the fabric.
“Looks like we picked up a fungal infection—back when our filters tore. Then came the spores… the river… the scrapyard.”
“Makes sense,”
Ren said grimly.
“What about Echo?”
All eyes turned. Echo checked his arms, his neck, his jawline—
Nothing. No markings. No discoloration. No visible infection.
They exchanged glances. Realization crept in like fog.
“That first encounter,”
Sphinx murmured,
“when those things injected him—”
“They weren’t attacking,”
Doc finished.
“They were treating him. That wasn’t poison—it was antifungal.”
“So those weren’t zombies,”
Rivet said, incredulous.
“They were medbots?”
“Looks that way,”
Doc nodded.
“Redundant systems. Medical failsafes. Backup power. Makes sense they held up better than the rest.”
Silence settled in. A fragile understanding.
Ren sat beside a rusted console, dragging a hand through his hair.
“So... we mistook doctors for monsters.
Now we’ve got spores under our skin—and Echo doesn’t.”
Doc blinked, remembering.
“The syringes,”
he said, reaching into his pack.
“I grabbed a few off them—just in case.”
He laid them on a metal panel. The others leaned in.
Two full ampoules. And one cracked, half full.
“If this is what saved Echo...”
Sphinx said softly,
“It might work. But it’s not enough for all of us.”
“So who decides?”
Doc asked quietly.
“How do we choose who gets cured?”
No one answered. The weight of it hung over them all.
Then Rivet spoke.
“Echo’s safe. That leaves four of us. Let’s figure out exactly what we’ve got.”
Ren nodded.
“Four people. Two and a half doses.”
He looked around.
“Me, Rivet, Sphinx, Doc.”
“I think mine’s the lightest,”
Sphinx said, rolling up his sleeve.
“I’ll take the half-dose. Give the full ones to those with wider spreads.”
“Same here,”
Doc added.
“Mine’s slow-moving. Ren and Rivet should go first.”
While they divvied up the serum, Echo drifted toward a faded red cabinet.
He eased it open.
“Emergency medkit,”
he muttered.
“Still sealed…”
Inside—bandages. Gauze. Basic antiseptics.
No antifungal.
“Just first-aid,”
he sighed.
“But if medbots are still out there… then maybe there’s a medbay.”
Hope. Faint, but real.
They agreed: Ren and Rivet would take the full doses.
Sphinx would take the fractured one.
Doc—insisting he could wait—would use whatever remained.
If they found another medbot, a clinic, anything—the serum would be priority one.
Hands shaking slightly, Doc administered the shots.
He chose the least damaged spots, pressing the plunger slow and steady.
Ren clenched his jaw as the fluid spread.
“Better this than turning into a mushroom…”
They rested in silence. Somewhere in that stillness, Sphinx turned.
Something on the far wall caught the infrared: a half-buried schematic. A map.
Arrows. Faded glyphs.
Labels in a script older than anyone could name.
It pointed toward two areas: Main Production Sector and Experimental Wing.
And strangest of all—
They could read it.
No translation. No hesitation.
They just… knew.
None of them stopped to question it. Not yet.
They were too tired, too numb.
But with a flicker of serum in their blood, and new questions in their bones,
they gathered their gear.
The fungal medbots weren’t enemies.
They were the last doctors of a forgotten city.
But the world hadn’t gotten safer.
The factory still waited.
Steel and silence.
And something in the dark that remembered why it had been built.
Maybe there was a way out.
Maybe a cure.
Or maybe… the truth was worse than any of them had imagined.
Atlantis hadn’t vanished.
It had been buried.
Eaten.
Swallowed by something they only now began to name.
The MycoBrain.
The ascent from the robot-processing facility grew steeper with every step. Fungal moss clung to the old concrete, and the air thinned with the altitude. Their boots scraped against decayed metal dust and scorched residue—signs of past movement, long since stopped.
No one spoke.
There was only the shuffle of footfalls and the hollow hush of expectation.
Then the slope evened out—and the structure emerged.
It rose with uncanny symmetry from the overgrowth: a monolith of smooth concrete and steel, its facade sliced by vertical slats of reinforced glass. It didn’t look like a warehouse, nor an ordinary command post.
It was too geometric. Too deliberate.
At its base: sealed gates.
Massive. Cold. Silent.
Ren approached first, running a hand along the central seam.
The locking mechanism wasn’t mechanical.
Magnetic, maybe. Autonomous once. But it had been dead for centuries.
“No way through here,” he muttered.
They circled the structure. The walls curved with the terrain, broken only by panels of darkened glass. Then Echo pointed silently:
“There.”
One panel had shattered long ago. The fracture ran like a spider’s web across its surface. Several shards had fallen away, forming a ragged aperture just wide enough for a human body.
Rivet reached it first. Her exosuit hissed as she climbed through.
Inside: stillness.
The scent of dry rust and spent resin. The floor, dusted with sediment and collapsed fungus threads.
The room they entered was vast, cathedral-like in scale—but not religious. This place was built for something colder.
It was a space for thought. For calculation.
It was the hall of planners.
The silence inside had weight. Each step echoed—too clean, too sharp.
Nothing lived here, but something… remained.
At the center of the chamber stood a raised platform.
Upon it, a wide circular table, half-buried under decades of dust.
Above it, a mirrored dome reflected dim light in warped angles, throwing their movements back at them like ghostly echoes.
Embedded in the surface of the table: a sculpted map.
Not holographic. Not digital.
Solid. Hand-crafted. Monumental.
Miniature structures surrounded a central axis.
Geometric markers. Formations. No writing. No labels. No legend.
Two main figures faced each other.
Between them: a massive symbol—part sword, part axis.
Behind them: a strange ornamental tree, forged in spiraling lines, like a relic or crest.
Around them, cubic tokens marked directions. Flow. Pressure.
But nothing was labeled.
This wasn’t a plan—it was a ritual. A model of intent, frozen in time.
Sphinx stood quietly, eyes scanning the pieces.
He didn’t touch them.
No one did.
They could feel it in their bones: this place wasn’t meant for operators.
It was meant for architects of war.
The walls stretched into an angular vault. Each surface carefully angled, acoustically honed. Every breath carried.
Every motion mattered.
And near the far wall—a passage.
An arched threshold half-sealed by a thick steel slab, as if someone had once left in haste and never returned.
Beyond it, a corridor. Narrow. Cold.
Descending.
Ren stepped toward it without needing to speak.
“It leads to the Arena,” he thought.
Not a guess. A knowing.
Whatever was decided here… was tested there.
They lingered only a moment more.
The mirrored dome watched them leave.
And then they passed beneath it—
past the silent circle of pieces,
into the mouth of something far older than command.
Where decisions had become design.
And design had become destiny.
The corridor opened—
And before them stretched a colossal arena, so vast and silent it felt as though it were holding its breath.
In the very center stood two titans.
Two humanoid machines, each at least fifteen meters tall, shoulder to shoulder as if locked in a final moment of defense.
Between them, suspended on a great arched mechanical brace, hung a massive double-edged sword.
Beneath it—an isolated tree, its trunk and branches shimmering like threads of woven gold.
And on one fragile branch, a single golden fruit glowed faintly.
“They’re… guarding it,” whispered Rivet.
“The sword, the tree… we’ve seen this before.”
“In the planning chamber,” Echo confirmed, squinting at the scene.
“It’s the same layout. Only now—it’s real.”
“As if we stepped into the simulation itself,” added Sphinx.
The arena was a graveyard.
Tens of thousands of drones lay strewn across the field—charred, mangled, dismembered into meaningless piles.
Machines with claws, wheels, wings, spider limbs… all destroyed in perfect formations.
Each row of wreckage bore traces of strategy, the layout too deliberate for chance.
And every strategy had failed.
“This wasn’t just a battle,” said Doc as he stepped forward.
“It was a test.”
They walked through the wreckage, stepping over melted skeletons and scorched armor plating.
The air reeked of ash and memory.
“Hundreds of simulations,” Rivet muttered.
“But none made it to the center. Not even close.”
This was more than a combat trial. It was a history of thought.
Each fallen drone a hypothesis disproven.
Each fracture in the stone floor—an echo of a failed attempt at perfection.
They approached the center.
The golden tree stood only three meters tall, its thin branches glinting with metallic light.
And hanging from one—was the fruit.
Still. Unclaimed.
A symbol, preserved in amber.
“Why does that fruit look familiar?” Echo murmured.
“Like something we were supposed to remember,” Ren replied.
“But forgot. Like a dream that slips away the moment you wake.”
They lifted their eyes to the titans.
“What are they guarding?” Rivet wondered aloud.
“What does the fruit symbolize?”
“Immortality,” Sphinx offered.
“Or knowledge. Or power. Or maybe… just memory.”
“Or the key to something… greater,” said Ren.
“The right to choose.”
They studied the sword.
It didn’t move, but it felt like it could. As if a single thought would be enough to unleash it.
Just one strike.
Enough to destroy anyone who came close.
“We weren’t invited here,” Ren said quietly.
“But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the lesson is that you can’t win a game that was never meant to be won.”
“Because the winner was never written into the model,” Doc added.
They stood at the heart of the oldest battle.
The giants—undefeated.
The fruit—unplucked.
“If no one ever won here,” Echo said,
“then they never won where the real war was fought either.”
Ren looked at the fruit one last time.
“If no one ever took it…
Maybe no one was supposed to.”
They turned away.
Not out of fear.
Out of respect.
The arena no longer demanded challengers. It had fulfilled its purpose.
The only victory left was the realization that there was no victory to be had.
Behind them stood the two giants—guarding not the tree, nor the sword, nor the fruit.
They were guarding a question.
One no one had ever answered.
The maintenance tunnel that had led them out of the Arena was unexpectedly narrow, winding between tall walls before opening up into a cramped grid of squat, utilitarian buildings. They looked like stacked containers pressed close together, creating a maze of alleyways filled with faded signs, dust-covered doors, and rusting vents.
“Looks like a service sector,” Doc muttered, glancing around. “Those crates are workshops. And there—fold-out beds. People lived here.”
The structures resembled mobile units used by field crews. Everything was barebones: tool racks, cots, exposed shower stalls, uniforms folded in metal drawers. It was clear no one lived here for comfort—it was a place to work, not rest.
“Home sweet home…” Rivet murmured with a flicker of excitement, spinning slowly in place. Her eyes lit up at the sight of the workbenches and dusty machines of unknown purpose. “This stuff... I could bring half of it back to life. If I could just figure out how it all worked…”
“Hate to ruin the moment,” Ren said dryly, “but dragging hundreds of pounds of mystery tech with us isn’t a great idea—especially if Sky’s team is somewhere nearby. We need to stay light.”
Rivet sighed, crestfallen.
“I’d spend a week here... or at least a day.”
“Later,” Ren promised. “If we make it back.”
They pressed on, leaving behind the narrow corridors of labor. After several blocks, the drab surroundings gave way to a striking opulence. Narrow passages opened into wide, ceremonial streets bordered by grandiose architecture—marble facades, gilded columns, ornate frontispieces coiled in sculpture. Dry fountains lined the road, once sparkling beneath domed skylights, now nothing more than dust-choked basins.
“Like palaces,” Echo muttered, looking around. “But no one ever lived here.”
“They weren’t meant to,” Sphinx replied. “These were waiting halls. Make someone feel like they’ve stepped into something divine, and they’ll walk willingly into whatever comes next.”
Inside the buildings—emptiness. Elegant benches, mosaic floors, marble pillars. But not a single bed, kitchen, or personal item. It was meant for brief pause, not permanence. Ceremony, not comfort.
“It was about spectacle,” said Doc. “Make them feel awe, and they’ll stop asking questions. Keep walking… right on schedule.”
The street opened onto a vast circular plaza. At its center stood a massive colonnade, grand and imposing. Coiled around it in a spiraling descent was a magnetic rail—its smooth, metallic tracks leading downward to an arrival platform.
“This is where we were supposed to arrive,” Rivet sighed. “If that tunnel hadn’t collapsed… Imagine what it must’ve looked like, with lights, voices, motion… instead of silence and ruin.”
“Arrival point,” Sphinx nodded. “This is where they came in. From the surface—top side of Atlantis.”
“And where they were stripped of everything,” Doc muttered. “Under the pretense of ‘purification’… but really, it was a medical screening. Checking for disease, for imperfections.”
Ren stepped up to the edge of the platform. His gaze followed the tracks as they curled into the shadows below.
The team circled the platform and found themselves at the entrance of an alley—wide, straight, and eerily symmetrical.
It felt like a pilgrim’s path. On either side stood tall golden statues, some tarnished, some blackened with time. Their shapes were graceful, mythic—Apollos, Athenas, Hermes-like figures. Their faces calm, enlightened, as if watching each step with divine approval.
Far ahead, carved partly into the rock wall itself, loomed a colossal structure. Part temple, part mountain. Its outer face had been extended—adorned in gold detailing and pale stone that shimmered faintly in the fungal biolight that clung to the cave ceiling above.
“The Temple of Immortality,” Ren said quietly.
No one responded.
They walked in silence. The Temple’s presence pressed against their chests like a weight. It didn’t feel like salvation. It felt like the mouth of something ancient, waiting.
“Let’s move,” Ren said simply. “There’s nothing left for us in this dead city. But maybe—just maybe—we’ll find the answer ahead.”
The climb was unnatural.
Each step stretched higher than the last, carved for legs that didn’t belong to human anatomy. These were not stairs meant for mortals, but for something larger—older. Every ascent felt like a transgression, a challenge whispered through the stone.
“Who builds steps like these…” Rivet muttered, bracing against the cold stone.
“People three meters tall, apparently,” Doc grunted behind her.
The temple loomed above, its façade carved into the very rock of the cave itself. Gold veins shimmered faintly under the bioluminescent glow of the nearby fungi, tracing divine symbols across smooth white stone. The arched entrance stood wide and silent—black as the abyss, swallowing light.
They crossed the threshold into silence.
Inside, the air cooled. The floors shimmered with tiled mosaics. The walls were etched with arcane symbols that pulsed like distant echoes of a forgotten heartbeat. But all eyes rose immediately to the ceiling.
The fresco above them was colossal.
And it was not what they expected.
There was no traditional depiction of evolution—no apes, no animals. Instead, a vertical sequence climbed from bottom to top. Six ascending tiers, each with a symbol and its name inscribed in a language that felt simultaneously ancient and oddly familiar.
Flame
“The Primordial Flame”
Angels
“Servants of the Flame”
Humans
“The Entry Node”
Superhumans
“The Transcendent”
Overmind
“The Collective Apex” — an interlinked ring of heads, joined at the temples.
Golden Sun
“The Limit of All Paths”
Sphinx stepped forward, his gaze drawn upward again. His face lit with something more than understanding—reverence.
“This isn’t just theology,” he said. “It’s a map. A roadmap of evolution. This temple… it’s not a place of worship. It’s a lab for ascension.”
“The superhuman stage,” he pointed up. “And beyond that… the Overmind. A collective intelligence. A shared consciousness.”
“MycoBrain,” he whispered. “That’s not a flaw—it’s the next leap. A collective mind with enough power to invent the final step: singularity. Total liberty. Immortality.”
“In this place, people didn’t just believe. They agreed to evolve.”
“We can’t forget this,” Ren said, looking at each of them intently.
“The price of this so-called ‘immortality’… might be higher than life itself.”
They moved on, through the grand chamber and down a gently sloping passage that led to the temple’s innermost sanctum.
There, bathed in golden gloom, stood the chamber of transition.
The walls were smooth and polished, glowing faintly with embedded veins of light. Directly ahead: a massive gate—arched, black as onyx, adorned with fine lines and embossed sigils. Across from it: a golden structure shaped like a throne… or a chariot.
“Looks like they sat there willingly,” Ren said, stepping closer. “The gate opened… and they were carried inside.”
“Then the chariot came back. Empty.”
He stared at the gate in silence.
“But where did they go…?” Rivet murmured behind him.
No one answered.
The silence was deeper here. Reverent. Heavy with intent.
The golden sun above—the final symbol in the fresco—seemed to stare back through stone. Watching. Waiting. Demanding nothing, promising everything.
And beyond that gate…
Something waited.
They stood upon a broad platform, facing the massive metal gates known only by their name in myth: The Gates of Immortality. Silence pressed in on them like stone — as if even the walls understood the gravity of what they guarded.
“The panels are... too massive,” Ren murmured, running his palm across the cold surface. “You can’t break through. Not with hands, not with explosives.”
“No locks. No levers,” Echo added, squinting at the wall. “Just solid armor.”
“It’s all controlled internally,” Rivet concluded. “Or... through a power system.”
“Then we need to find the source,” said Sphinx.
That’s when they saw it — a thick power conduit, half-buried in the wall, vanishing into a side tunnel. The cable was ancient, yet untouched by time or mycelial corrosion, crafted from some alloy that defied decay. It looked less manufactured than drawn straight from the bones of the earth.
“This way,” Ren said simply.
The tunnel led to a magnetic rail line. An old maglev cart sat idle on its track, dusty but intact.
“Internal system,” Echo noted, inspecting the structure. “If this line’s sealed, the bots never made it down here. Could still be operational.”
Rivet gave the cab a quick inspection. After a moment of silence, a faint pulse of green lit the control panel.
“Power’s still humming,” she said. “Let’s move.”
The cart eased forward, slipping into motion as though guided by a memory etched into the rails themselves.
They passed through long corridors where faint fungal light seeped through sealed observation panes in the walls. Behind them stretched vast subterranean fields — towers of bioluminescent fungi five, seven meters tall. This was no auxiliary garden. This was the heart.
Thousands of pale-green mushrooms pulsed softly in the gloom. The glow wasn’t bright — but it filled the chamber with a presence, like breath. A living lung.
The cart came to a halt at the next station. They stepped out into stillness.
The windows above were thick, reinforced. And beyond them — endless fungal fields.
“Is this... just a farm?” Rivet whispered.
“Where’s the MycoBrain?” Echo asked, confused. “Shouldn’t it be... here? At the center?”
“I thought it would be a god-mind,” Sphinx said slowly. “A superorganism. Billions of human neurons, fused into mycelium. A hive intelligence... the collective immortality.”
“But there’s nothing here but spores,” Ren said. “Light. Silence.”
“Maybe the brain is behind the Gates,” Rivet offered. “Maybe this place... was for the bodies.”
“Or maybe,” Doc murmured, “the brain was never a fungus. Which means... what is it?”
The ride continued. More stations. More fields. More spores, more green. And then, the central hub.
A plaque on the wall, still legible after who-knew-how-many years:
Maintenance Protocol for Electric Fungus Mycophyllum electrica
Purpose:
Self-sustaining autonomous system.
The fungus produces air, light, and energy.
Cleanliness and Safety:
— Spores proliferate in dust and humidity.
— Every tenth cycle: clean all surfaces and machinery; apply bitter dust.
— Personnel must undergo antifungal blood treatment every three cycles.
“It does everything,” Sphinx whispered. “Air. Light. Power. And no sun required.”
“That’s it,” Ren said softly, tapping the plaque. “That’s what caused the collapse.”
“There was no one left to maintain it,” Rivet said quietly. “Maybe they evacuated. Or maybe they didn’t make it out at all.”
“And the spores took over,” Echo added. “Even the robots.”
Deeper inside the station, they found the control panel — dusty, but intact. The switches were all flipped downward. Most were barely legible.
Rivet pried open one of the maintenance covers.
“The city’s lighting system — shut down here,” she said. “That explains why it’s dark up top. It wasn’t just broken bots. And here— the maglev control... offline too.”
“And the processing plant,” Ren muttered. “No wonder the bots were never sanitized. They just wandered. Became vectors.”
“Even the Arena,” Rivet added. “The whole sector — cut off from this hub. We walked through it by chance.”
“And the Gates,” Doc finished. “They’re powered from here too.”
The last terminal had a comms module. Echo powered it up. A signal light blinked dimly. Static flooded the speakers. Echo adjusted a cable, fingers flying.
“This might boost the relay I left above,” he said. “If the system’s still chained together... maybe the signal will carry.”
Ren pressed the mic.
“This is Ren ‘Compass’ Wayland…”
His voice trembled — not from fear, but from the weight of everything behind them.
“If anyone can hear this…”
Static.
“The MycoBrain… it’s not what we thought…”
More static. Then, one last burst:
“This place… we were all wrong. Atlantis — it’s just a veil. A lie…”
The signal cut. The transmission lamp blinked out.
Silence. Nothing more.
Echo tried to cycle power again — nothing.
“Then there’s only one thing left,” Ren whispered. “We open the Gates.”
He laid his hand on the breaker bearing the gate’s symbol. Pulled it upward.
The old system groaned to life.
Somewhere, deep in the Halls of Immortality — something answered.
The Gates were ready.
The ride back felt endless. The maglev cart crawled like a slug, and more than once, someone felt the urge to leap out and run the rest of the way.
What alchemists, sages, and scientists had sought for millennia now lay just a few dozen kilometers ahead. But those were the longest kilometers they'd ever faced.
No one spoke. Even their breathing seemed hushed. The rhythm of their hearts echoed like footsteps in the corridor.
Sphinx looked pale, trembling with anticipation. He kept wiping sweat from his forehead, as if afraid he’d die of anxiety before even reaching the Gates of Immortality.
Doc checked his pulse and quietly handed him a sedative.
They were retracing a familiar route, but now everything looked different. Even the air felt heavier—thick with anticipation.
"Almost there," Rivet murmured. "The maglev is leveling out toward the temple platform."
Ren gave a small nod. He sat in the front, his eyes locked on the tunnel ahead, body taut.
"I don't know what we’ll find on the other side," he said quietly. "But my instincts… they’re screaming like never before."
"We've come too far to turn back," Sphinx said. "How many times were we a breath away from death? If we walk away now… was it all for nothing?"
"No," Doc said softly. "But maybe we should ask ourselves why the greatest treasure ever imagined was left behind. Unclaimed."
Rivet fidgeted with the strap on her glove. Her face was calm, but her eyes shimmered. Not with tears—but with pressure. Inside her, the engineer and the human wrestled. Curiosity and fear. Intellect and instinct.
"They promised us immortality so many times," she said. "Through myths. Through science. Through machines. And now… it’s here. Something real. Something we can touch."
"Or something that’ll touch us first," Echo muttered dryly.
The maglev turned, slowing as it approached the final station—at the threshold of the Temple of Immortality.
The Gates were glowing.
Once inert metal now pulsed with a gentle, golden light, as if the heart of the entire complex beat behind it. Intricate carvings shimmered like sunbeams cast from within. The doors were not open—but neither were they sealed. They were… waiting.
Beside them stood the chariot.
They had seen it before—but now it was different. No longer just a gilded platform with arches and rails. It was calling. A soft energy field shimmered along its frame. Power flowed from it to the Gates.
One link in the circuit remained open.
A passenger.
"It’s clear," Ren said quietly. "All we have to do is sit."
"And the gates will open," Rivet added.
"No codes. No rituals. Just contact," Sphinx said, shaking his head. "Brilliant. Or terrifyingly simple."
They stood at the edge of everything. The platform felt too wide. Time stretched unbearably thin. The air was perfectly still. Only the light moved—gentle, constant. Waiting.
Ren stepped forward toward the chariot. He laid his hand on the rail. The metal was warm.
He closed his eyes. One step. One breath. One passage—and everything that came before would be left behind.
But then—
There were footsteps.
Measured. Soft. Not hostile—but resonating like a thought spoken aloud.
They all turned at once.
From the darkness of the tunnel emerged a figure. Behind her—four more. They walked slowly, deliberately. Their weapons were lowered.
Sky stood just meters away—exhausted, worn—but steady. Her eyes didn’t shine with challenge. They watched with care. With tension. But not with threat.
Behind her stood Thunder. Mamba. Shade. Pixel. The two teams were together again.
And then Sky spoke.
The words stopped time.
"Don’t."
To be continued in TOLD BY HOSPES SI. Book 2: Root of Evil