The pod hissed in the dark chamber, a long, wet exhale that sounded far too close to his ear.
Raka's eyes snapped open, but the world remained pitch-black.
W-where am I?
Everything was fuzzy. A brittle crack followed—the sound of old ice shearing under its own weight—then his heartbeat thundered inside his skull.
He tried to lift an arm. Nothing moved.
Taking a shaky breath, he tried again. A single finger twitched, scraping a cold, curved pane that boxed him in like a coffin.
Something tugged at the base of his neck—a stiff cable or IV line. He raised a shaky hand and yanked. "Guh!" Warm liquid trickled down his shoulder.
The pod's interior strips flickered—sickly amber that strobed twice before settling into a dying glow.
Milky condensation smeared the visor, each exhale feathering across a layer of dust on the inside of the glass.
Dust? How long…?
His limbs felt waterlogged. Every command ran through molasses. He pressed the heel of his palm against the visor—the glass squealed but didn't budge. Beside his head, a status panel jittered, then froze on three lines:
____________________________________________________________________________
STASIS LENGTH: 18 ▯▯▯ days
WAKE PROTOCOL: COMPLETE
POWER: 0 %
____________________________________________________________________________
The numbers refused to make sense. A faded heart icon pulsed weakly, syncing to his panicked rhythm.
Calm down. Think. Why was his pod this degraded? Where was everyone? He was still trapped, muscles too sluggish to rip off the visor or force the hatch open.
The pod's frame vibrated as he got ready for another escape attempt. He heard an electronic click sound overhead as old hydraulics heaved. The visor rose three centimeters, jammed, then lurched again before groaning fully open.
A breath of air drifted in—hot, dry, reeking of burnt dust and a smell that made him want to throw up, like something decomposing.
Raka eased a leg over the edge. It wobbled, noodles for bones. "Okay… okay…" One deep breath, one push.
He slid forward—
—and fell.
"Ouch!"
The drop was barely a meter, yet every bone rattled. Knees buckled; he pitched face-first into debris. Landing on the once-padded chamber floor is now dry and cracked.
COUGH! COUGH! Dust stormed his lungs; when the fit passed, he tried to stand. Right calf spasmed, left foot skidded, and he collapsed again.
"Oh, come on!" He rolled onto his back and stared upward. There was no ceiling.
Panels sagged; a jagged fissure carved through the concrete overhead, disappearing into black. Thin roots dangled, waving lazily in the stale air.
The realization hit harder than the fall: the cryogenics bay he remembered—white tiles, humming filters, sterile light—had rotted into a mausoleum.
Faint red ribbons of emergency LEDs traced the floor, pulsing like a dying heartbeat every few seconds.
Raka dragged himself upright, using the pod's frame for balance. Each breath tasted of copper and ozone. He wobbled toward the viewing room just across.
Inside were only broken control panels illuminated by whatever light source there was left..
"Okay… maybe there's a way to send a ping—F-FUCKING HELL!"
A skeleton lounged in the corner, propped against a wall; ribs collapsed inward, fabric long gone to powder. A rust-eaten ID tag hung from its collar: L. Ferreira, Junior Technician.
The bones were clean. Not a scrap of flesh. Raka's blood ran cold. This could only mean that this person must have been dead for a long time. Far longer than a year.
But that couldn't be the case, right? He was only in the pod for a year; that was the plan. How did things become like this?
"What happened here…"
He shoved at a control console. Dials refused; screens stayed dark. Frustration boiled over—he slammed both fists down.
The monitors blinked awake.
"Yes!"
The spike of joy lasted two seconds. There was no mouse, and the keyboard's LEDs stayed dark. Clicking the arrow keys also produced nothing.
"Of course…"
He exhaled through his nose and turned away. A low drip echoed deeper in the bay. He limped to an overturned supply trolley; crates lay burst open. Crunch. He looked down—fragments of a datapad fused with mold, its logo—a twin-sun eagle—almost unrecognizable.
His breathing started to become erratic. His mind was finally processing that the facility was in total ruin. He quickly limped toward where the exit door should be—just a jagged opening now.
"Freya?! Recca?! Anyone?!" His voice ricocheted through the corridor.
But nobody came.
Not again. Please… not again.
He saw a rectangle of pale light at the corridor's far end. It was the elevator, somehow still functioning.
That was his way out of B50. He needed answers, and clean air because with the ventilation not working, breathing was starting to become difficult. He set his jaw and shuffled forward, every step screaming.
Behind him, the stasis pod, its hydraulics finally bled dry, toppled. It hit the deck with a dull boom, spraying a century of dust into a slow, mournful cloud.
Raka did not look back.
/ - /
Raka reached the freight elevator. The call panel was dead—a single cracked button dangled on a copper filament.
"All right, here goes nothing."
Putting his fingers in the gaps between the elevator doors, he pried the doors apart with both hands; warped steel groaned but yielded.
Stale air exhaled from the shaft, laced with old brake grease and the faint mossy smell of groundwater. The car sat barely three meters below floor level, its doors frozen halfway.
"Looks like I need to jump down," he muttered, "Fucking great..."
He dropped onto the car roof. Impact jarred his ankles, but the cab hardly twitched—good sign. He wouldn't need to worry about this thing suddenly falling.
Although he was at the lowest level, he thought the shaft falling a little wouldn't be too bad.
Jumping inside the shaft, it was a little darker than the rest of the facility, but still manageable. The elevator lights were somehow still on, albeit flickering. He pressed the buttons and, as expected, nothing happened.
He took a deep breath to calm himself. Things were NOT going his way at all.
No power. Let's see if there's another way.
He swung down through the roof hatch and climbed to the top of the shaft. Looking up, he saw that the side walls had deep grooves, and he could climb them to ascend to the bottom of B49.
Maybe he could find something there to help him out.
But just as he was about to grab the grooves, the shaft suddenly shifted. He froze, making sure not to make any sudden movements.
…
…
…
"Ok, looks like I'm in the clear-"
The car lurched and dropped.
"Shit!"
Gravity ripped his stomach into his throat. Wind screamed up the shaft as he plunged.
'Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck!' His mind raced as he tried to find a way out of the situation when the shaft suddenly stopped, slamming his body down at the shaft's roof. "Ugh-"
Slowly getting up, he looked down at the side of the shaft and realized that he had fallen to the bottom of the elevator.
The car is now hung and broken on the bottom of the facility. He was at a loss; he needed to find a way to get up 50 floors quickly, before he ran out of what little oxygen there was down there.
Think. He could go back to the previous plan and climb up using the grooves, but he had no idea how far each floor was from the others.
He could end up climbing for hours before reaching the next floor.
He craned his head upward, squinting into the darkness. He was so far down that he couldn't even see the top.
If he didn't find a way to get up, then he would die down there.
Unless—
He suddenly remembered Recca's words, a few days before he was put into that pod.
___
"When you wake, the Sunpiercer's residue will have rewritten every cell," Professor Recca had said, leaning over the bed with that half-metal grin. "Your muscles, bones, even neural pathways—denser, faster, stronger. In layman's terms? Think Olympic sprinter with a rocket strapped on."
___
At the time, it sounded like he was just hyping him up. Now it might be the only plan.
Raka braced himself and inhaled deeply. He closed his eyes and focused on the mana inside his body.
He felt it all flow through his body. Slowly, his body started to heat up, and he began to glow dimly yellow. On instinct, he crouched and placed both palms against the car roof.
A yellow shimmer rippled over his forearms as the Sunpiercer's mana coursed through his body. The elevator roof buckled; rivets shrieked.
Too much force. He eased back, centering the rush behind his legs instead.
Just need to get to the next floor, easy. Either that or he would fail and die down here.
He flexed and kicked off.
SWOOSH
"WHOA!"
He did NOT expect to suddenly blitz up a shit ton of feet up.
49B, 45B, 42B. Those letters passed him as he flew higher and higher.
"Yes! Haha- AUGH!"
Then he clipped the side of the wall, changing his trajectory and sending him slamming down, ricocheting off the walls until he landed back on the elevator roof.
"Grah—!". The car groaned under the sudden force.
Slowly regaining his footing, he looked back up. Ok, I can do this. Yeah. That first burst proved Recca wasn't exaggerating; he just needed to make a plan.
Raka shuffled to the roof's rear edge, wiped blood from his eyebrow, and eyed the floors above him.
He could probably manage a couple of simultaneous wall jumps to get higher, and rest on another floor to start again.
Yeah- this could work.
He inhaled, visualized the current coursing through muscle fiber, not exploding all at once but flowing smoothly.
"Second time's the charm."
He sprang.
The shaft blurred into a smear of rusted steel as air whipped past his face. He extended both arms and legs and pushed himself from wall to wall, his jumps carrying enough force to shake the ground.
Every ten meters, a pulsing emergency lamp lit the dust—red… red… red—counting off the distance like a metronome.
Twice he paused, resting on the closed elevator doors' edges, and drawing on that crackling sun-yellow energy to keep his arms moving.
Almost there!
By the time he was somewhere around the single digits—B05, maybe, his arms felt like molten lead, and his right knee trembled dangerously, but the mana in his veins answered each time he begged for another surge.
Finally, he reached the door on the ground floor and sighed in relief. It was also shut tight, but that was to be expected.
He wedged fingers into the seam and heaved. Concrete dust rained down, and the hatch flipped open into brilliant sunlight.
Wait, why would there be sunlight in- what the FUCK..
He hauled himself onto the cracked concrete lip. Above, between shattered ceiling joists, sunlight poured through a ragged hole big enough to drive a truck through.
Jungle air rushed in—cool, damp, impossibly fresh.
"W-what…?"
Once lined with glass and steel, the facility's entrance hall was buried beneath a canopy of thick vines.
Sunlight filtered through gaps in the overgrowth, illuminating columns snapped like brittle twigs and floor tiles upheaved by roots thicker than tree trunks.
Slowly, he walked out of the hallway to the exit. As he stepped through, the facility he once knew was long gone. There was no courtyard, no labs, and heck, not even the upper levels of the building existed anymore.
What remained was just rubble covered in dirt and grass. Birds shrieked where offices once glimmered. Wind rustled through a forest that shouldn't exist.
What the hell happened when I was asleep?!