Warren didn't wait. The Red swallowed him whole.
The moment he stepped beyond the threshold, the storm outside became a memory. Here, in the drowned bowels of the world, only silence and shadows reigned. The fragment in his pocket was heavy, but it wasn't a burden. It was a beginning.
The Red stretched in every direction: a corpse of what the city once was. Old metro tunnels, cracked and leaking, twisted under the weight of years. Sections sagged where ceilings had buckled, dragging electric wires like snapped veins.
Water pooled in wide black patches, silent except for the soft drip of a broken pipe somewhere deep beyond sight.
Every surface sweated with damp. Rust bloomed in wide, angry streaks across metal and concrete alike, an infection without cure.
Old railcars sat where they had died, half-derailed, windows blown out. Their frames were stripped to bone by scavengers long gone or things worse.
Paint peeled from every wall. What murals and advertisements remained were nothing but rotted skins, words melting into meaningless stains.
Support beams jutted from collapsed corridors like the snapped bones of some vast buried creature, some bent so far they seemed ready to snap with a whisper.
Stray fragments of light clung to places they did not belong: broken lanterns, the distant sick flicker of a security node long forgotten.
The air tasted metallic, fouled by chemical smoke that had never truly cleared, trapped by the earth itself.
Rot was a constant presence. Doors hung loose on broken hinges. Keypads blinked dead signals into the dark.
Trash layered the floors in frozen waves: old clothing, shreds of plastic, collapsed storage crates, ash heaps that might once have been something more.
Warren's boots hit the ground without sound, soaked too deeply to splash. Every step was a negotiation with surfaces that could betray him at any second.
Vines and moss crept through cracks in the ceiling where the world above had split open. A few plants still tried to live here, pale and sickly, clinging to dead light.
There was no system broadcast in the Red. No comforting hum of network chatter. Only static gnawed faintly at the edge of hearing, like a machine dreaming of something it had forgotten.
Signs dangled on twisted brackets: "Evacuation Route," "Safe Zone Ahead," lies for a world that had drowned long before the warnings had faded.
Some walls bore impact scars where desperate hands or weapons had struck in vain. Others were stained darker, the kind of marks Warren chose not to think about.
The Red was not abandoned. It had been forsaken. It was left to its own slow, merciless collapse, forgotten by a world that could no longer afford to remember it.
Every breath Warren took here was theft. Every step was a choice to exist where existence was not welcome.
And he moved through it not as a visitor, as an intruder.
The place offended every part of him that cared about function. The Red was a monument to decay. It had been hollowed out so thoroughly that even its ruin seemed exhausted.
Warren felt the weight of it settle onto him . The silence was not peace. It was suffocation, an accusation carved into stone.
The very walls seemed to watch him. Not with eyes, but with a pressure he could not explain, as if remembering every failure that had soaked into the stone.
Every ruined station he passed through told the same story: abandonment, collapse, and then worse. None of it new. None of it repairable.
The darkness here was not simple. It had depth, a density that seemed to devour even thought if he let it.
The air scratched at his throat, thick with the dust of things long dead and things that had never fully lived.
Warren thought about the people who must have once moved through these tunnels: workers, passengers, soldiers. Their traces were gone. Their ghosts were not.
He wondered if they had understood they were dying when the collapse began, or if hope had kept them blind until the end.
Every shattered escalator, every broken track, every collapsed stairwell whispered the same message: no one is coming back.
The Red was not empty because it had been abandoned. It was filled with death at every corner, a place where every breath risked awakening something better left buried, and every shadow carried the weight of something lost.
Even the faint noises that slipped through the ruin the distant drip of water, the groan of shifting metal felt like echoes of a world that did not realize it was gone.
Warren moved faster because the place was trying to pull him into its own collapse, and he refused to be claimed by it.
Mara would've called it a suicide run. She would've hit him upside the head and cursed him quiet, told him there were smarter ways to gather what he needed. Ways that did not end with his blood pooling into cracked tile. Warren could almost hear her voice brushing against his mind, half judgment and half fear, the way she always spoke when she knew he had already made up his mind.
"You can't outrun dead ground, Rabbit," she would have said. "It eats faster than you move. It does not care about how quiet you are, or how fast your feet are. You think you are clever, but cleverness doesn't fill a grave any slower. It just means you fall in thinking you were winning."
Warren could feel the edge of her laughter in the memory, the way she covered fear with sharp words. Not to shame him. To sharpen him.
"The Red will not wait for you to be ready. It will not care that you are young, or fast, or angry. It has swallowed better things than you, Rabbit. If you run, run smart. If you fight, fight cruel. If you think for a moment you can survive it by instinct alone, you're already buried."
But Warren wasn't interested in "smarter." He wasn't built for careful retreats and long games. He wanted faster. He wanted real. And there was nothing faster than the Red.
The Broken stayed in the Red by day, clustering in its hollow veins. Only the ones whose chips were still intact mattered, and with them, the fragments Warren needed. It was simple math: risk measured against opportunity.
He moved past the ruined threshold of the metro station, boots finding grip on cracked tile, metal rebar showing through where concrete had worn away. The entrance behind him sagged with age. Ahead, the Red stretched on: a labyrinth of decay and silence that devoured sound and hope alike.
The walls sweated damp rot, the ceiling arched low enough in places to feel like a throat closing.
Mara's voice came again, unbidden. "Never chase ghosts into holes, Rabbit. Holes close behind you. They do not let go. Every step forward is a risk you better be ready to pay for."
The Red wasn't just dangerous because of the Broken. It was dangerous because it remembered.
It remembered the weight of footsteps that had never come back.
It remembered promises of rescue that rotted alongside the bodies.
And Warren, with every step deeper, felt the weight of those memories pressing against his spine.
The station signs were still legible in places: "North Line: Evacuation Zone," "South Connect." Lies frozen in paint and metal. No evacuation had come.
Mara's voice again, low and warning: "If the signs point to mercy, they are lying, Rabbit. Mercy is just another way of saying the trap is baited."
The tunnels yawned before him. Rusted rails curled like dead serpents. Overturned maintenance carts sprawled across the platform like carcasses.
Flickering emergency lights barely held back the dark, buzzing like angry insects.
The Red was full. Full of abandoned hopes, full of death too stubborn to lie down properly.
Warren moved through it the way he had always moved: silent, deliberate, patient.
The Broken were out there somewhere, slumbering or twitching in forgotten corners. Warren knew better than to expect them to stay that way.
"Quiet until it matters," Mara whispered, her memory curling cold against his ears. "And when it matters, you be the one who ends it. No screaming. No second tries."
He advanced deeper into the maze of the Red, past shattered kiosks and wrecked checkpoints, each step deliberate.
Every piece of ground here was a gamble. Every breath was a theft.
The stench of mildew and old blood clung to the tunnels, heavier the deeper he moved.
Cracks in the ceiling let drips of filthy water trace thin lines down the broken walls. Warren didn't flinch when one splashed across his coat. The Red touched everything.
Old terminals flickered without pattern, their screens warped by age and bleeding static onto the floor.
"Eyes open. Hands ready," Mara's voice repeated, like a litany burned into the marrow of him.
This was not a place to hunt without consequence.
This was not a place built for the living.
And Warren had no illusions about which side of that line he walked.
Warren moved through it like it was familiar. It was. Crushed tile underfoot, sharp as old teeth. Skeletal vending machines gutted and left to rust. Graffiti carved with nails instead of paint. Maps to nowhere. Messages scrawled for no one.
The air tasted of old copper and damp stone. Every breath felt like breathing history gone sour.
He set traps as he moved: wires thin as hair across shattered thresholds, shards planted sharp-end-up where feet might land. He rigged trip hooks under half-collapsed doorframes, hidden under piles of debris.
Mara had taught him how. Her voice stirred in him now, steady and patient.
"A good trap does not beg for attention," she said. "It waits. Silent. Still. A whisper in the floor, not a shout."
He unraveled old insulation cords, fraying them just enough to look like garbage while tying them taut between cracked benches.
Every hallway he crossed became a choice: safe path or silent death.
He placed broken glass under shallow puddles where it would slice unseen. Shoved splintered rebar under the waterlines where a desperate foot might fall.
"You are not just hunting," Mara said in his memory, low and firm. "You are writing your name in the place they die. Make sure it is clear. Make sure they understand too late, Rabbit."
Warren kept moving, a silent architect of pain.
He pushed a half-fallen locker to create a bottleneck, blocking easy retreat paths. If they came after him, they would come single file. Easy to break.
Above a collapsed arch, he pried loose a slab of broken tile, balancing it precariously. A touch to the wrong beam, and the ceiling would fall.
"Traps are not for the ones who see," Mara murmured in his thoughts. "They are for the ones who chase without looking."
He placed jagged metal plates behind a bend, then soaked the floor ahead of them until it gleamed slick and treacherous.
It was slow work, meticulous work. The kind of cruelty that built survivors, not heroes.
Mara would have approved.
"Every second you steal from them is a second longer you get to live," she said. "It is a second they bleed trying to catch you, my silly little Rabbit."
He wove razor-thin strands of copper wire between twisted stair railings, invisible at a glance but deadly to a neck or hand.
He pressed old nails through the soles of discarded boots and left them half-buried at choke points.
"Always remember," Mara whispered, "pain is a language. Speak it clearly."
The Red welcomed his work. It did not flinch. It did not warn.
Warren moved deeper, crafting his killing field one silent snare at a time.
He mapped the traps in his head as he went, marking the danger zones with small, almost invisible signs: a shifted stone, a bent piece of pipe.
Mara's lessons were not just about death. They were about control. About forcing the enemy to fight where you had already won.
"The first cut does not kill," she had told him once, sitting cross-legged on a rooftop as they watched the streets below. "The first cut changes the shape of the fight."
He remembered her hands: scarred, steady, wrapping wire around a beam without even looking.
He remembered her voice: warm and calming, yet full of weight, like every word was a stone meant for building something that could not be knocked down.
"They will rush you," she had said. "They will think they are strong because they move faster. Let them believe it. Let them run right into their own ending, Rabbit."
Warren set one last tripwire, low and invisible, across a side passage where he knew instinct would drive someone trying to flank him.
Then he stood in the center of the trap-laced ruin, breathing slow.
It was not fear that filled him.
It was readiness.
Mara's voice settled in him, no longer a whisper, but a weight pressed into every breath.
"You are the knife. Not the wound, not the blood, but the knife."
And Warren smiled, just a little, as he disappeared into the ruin, waiting for the Red to bring him his prey.
Warren found the first Broken by scent before sight. That metallic reek: half rust, half blood, clung to the air like old wire burning. It shambled into view beyond a tangle of fallen rebar, its movements jerky, spasmodic, the system pulses inside it fractured and stuttering.
He did not move. Not yet.
The Broken twitched past, oblivious, its limbs dragging. Warren watched it with still eyes. Killing it would have been easy. Too easy. And too loud.
The Red taught patience. Mara had taught it before that. He needed loners. Not the ones who shambled in packs, not the ones whose death cries might draw worse things.
So he waited.
The second came limping through a collapsed stairwell, dragging one foot in stuttering hops. Warren pressed himself into an overturned support beam. Breath slow. Movements nonexistent. Let it pass.
Then came a small cluster of the third, fourth, and fifth drifting together like aimless debris. Warren noted them and moved on. A cluster meant noise. Noise meant death. Alone, any one of them might have been a target. Together, they were a problem that screamed back if you solved it wrong.
He found the sixth halfway through a submerged access tunnel. Alone, yes. But not isolated enough. Fresh gouges in the walls. Mud disturbed in foot prints that were too recent. more had just passed nearby. He moved away.
The Red pressed closer with each passing moment. Silent. Suffocating. A weight he could feel settling against his skin, growing heavier the longer he lingered.
Ahead, the seventh and eighth came in view locked in some endless broken dance of proximity and conflict, snapping at each other but never truly attacking. Warren passed them without a glance.
Mara's lessons stirred in his mind.
"Two fools locked in a fight are already as good as dead. Let them fall without your help. The world does not need another hand pushing them into the grave. Every action you take must have purpose. If you strike, you do it clean and without hesitation. If you walk away, dont look back."
He heard her like she was beside him, kneeling by rusted iron, her finger tapping out diagrams on broken stone.
"If they are clustered, you do not engage. If they are loud, you do not approach. If they are wounded and calling, you do not answer. You do not get caught in someone else's mistake."
The next Broken stirred farther off, half seen through a cracked barricade, small, staggered in motion, almost pitiful in its degradation. Warren almost smiled. Alone. Movements degraded to stuttering half steps. Perfect.
But he paused.
The puddles around it rippled, waves that did not match its halting gait. Something bigger was moving just out of sight.
Mara's memory stayed patient in his mind, instructing instead of barking.
"The ones that move wrong around the still ones are your real danger. Stillness is a lie in the ruins. Watch the water. Watch the drift. If the surface stirs without a cause you can see, you are already being hunted."
He retreated, blood slow in his veins, letting instinct guide his path deeper into the tunnel.
When he found it, he knew.
It moved alone, not drawn by noise or pack instinct, but staggering at a slow, a stumbling pace that left wide, vulnerable openings. There were no nearby disturbances, no ripples on the water or echoes threading the ruin. It had no companions. No cover.
The fragment sat visible through the frayed circuits sparking weakly at the base of its spine. A clean core, intact and unspoiled.
Its focus was fractured, neither hunting nor luring, just drifting like an abandoned signal. That was the marker Mara had taught him to watch for. Not desperation. Not aggression. Disconnection.
He could take it fast. Quiet. Clean. No screams, no chain reactions. A surgical harvest. The kind that would not summon worse things.
This one was right.
He moved low, swift, a blur of sodden yellow and quiet boots. His truncheon struck with a brutal, surgical crack against the side of its skull, using the environment for leverage. The Broken reeled sideways but did not collapse. It clawed at the air with spastic jerks, the glint of the chip flashing at the base of its skull.
Warren adjusted, stepping inside its weak arc of movement. He swung again, aiming lower to break its balance entirely. The truncheon connected, but this time a sickening crack that was not bone echoed through the tunnel.
The shaft splintered in his hands.
For one breathless moment, Warren stared at the broken truncheon, the weapon that had been a part of him as much as muscle and bone. The timing could not have been worse. The Broken surged toward him with a shriek of static, its hands scrabbling for purchase on anything it could crush.
Warren sidestepped narrowly, letting its momentum carry it past him. His grip shifted automatically, shortening the ruined weapon into a jagged baton. No more leverage, no more clean reach. Every move from here would cost him blood if he missed.
He struck again, jabbing the broken haft up under the creature's chin. The blow staggered it back into the fractured wall, concrete cracking behind its head.
No time to think. No room for error. Warren pressed in, driving his knee into the Broken's chest, forcing it back against the fractured wall. It fought with mindless jerks, hands clawing at his sides, but he leaned harder, keeping it pinned.
The broken truncheon in his hand was useless for clean work. He needed an opening. He shifted his weight, planting his boot on its thigh to anchor it, and jammed the jagged shaft into the creature's throat with brutal force.
The movement staggered it just enough. Warren dropped the ruined truncheon, his hand scraping the ground for anything solid. His fingers closed around a chunk of broken concrete, slick with rain and grime.
The Broken lunged again. Warren swung the piece of rubble with all the strength he could muster. It slammed into the side of the Broken's skull with a hollow, wet sound that made his knuckles ache.
The creature staggered but did not fall. It clawed at him, wild and blind.
Warren struck again, harder. The second impact crushed something vital. The Broken spasmed, limbs twitching in chaotic spasms, then collapsed into the ruined wall.
Breathing hard, Warren forced himself to move fast. He braced the slumped body against the cracked concrete, feeling its shudders weakening with every passing heartbeat.
He jammed his pocket knife into the weakened flesh at the base of its neck, the blade biting through meat and gristle. Wrenching and tearing, he peeled back ruined tissue, feeling the wet slide of muscle giving way. Blood slicked his fingers as he dug deeper, working by feel more than sight.
With a sharp, final pull, he yanked the fragment free. It came loose with a muted snap, coated in grime but intact.
Warren staggered back, the fragment clenched tight in his fist, heart hammering against his ribs. His truncheon lay broken and abandoned. The Red pressed closer, the weight of it growing by the second, and Warren knew he had to move.
The truncheon cracked under the strain. A long, splintering sound as the shaft split. Warren let it fall from his hand as he grappled the Broken down by brute force, too focused on survival to mourn it. When the fight ended, he snatched the broken shaft back up from the wet ground, gripping it tight despite the jagged break.
This was not just wood and steel. This was his. A piece of himself.
Gone.
The fight had been anything but clean. He had battered the Broken into stillness with jagged blows, driving it down against the wall with nothing but desperation and a shard of what had once been a weapon. Every swing had cost him more time, more breath, more blood rising in his throat from exertion. The truncheon's death had not been a clean snap in a still tunnel. It had been part of the chaos, part of the violence he could not avoid.
The sounds of the fight carried through the Red, each impact and ragged grunt of exertion carried farther than it should in the natural silence. It was not just the crack of the truncheon that rang out. It was the messy violence, the scuffle, the struggle for breath that had no place in the dead silence of this place.
The Red answered.
A static roar rose almost at once, not from one throat but many, a tide of corrupted voices lifting together. It poured through the ruined metro like a living thing, drawn by the noise, the motion, the undeniable proof that something still lived and bled here.
Footsteps followed, faster and heavier than the usual staggered shuffle. Not the slow drag of idle Broken. Something worse. A surge, a gathering force.
Warren tightened his grip on what remained of the shaft. He pocketed the fragment quickly, feeling its weight settle against the other he carried. Two now. Still not enough. But survival now came before gathering more.
He broke into a dead sprint, the broken truncheon gripped tight in his hand. His body protested instantly, muscles seizing from the shock of going from stillness to full flight in an instant. Pain screamed through his legs and tore across his ribs, every step dragging fire through his nerves. He ignored it. He forced his body forward, refusing to let go of the weight in his hand, refusing to slow even as each stride shredded what little strength he had left.
In the corner of his eye, he caught movement too close to ignore. A figure, twitching and half crouched, tucked behind a broken support beam. It did not charge, not yet, but it watched. They were watching now.
A trail of blood streaked behind him, dark and unmistakable against the cracked tile. His own blood. He could feel it now, leaking from the torn skin of his palm where splinters from the broken truncheon had driven deep. Each stride left more of him behind.
Still he gripped the broken truncheon. He could not leave it. He would not leave it. It was not just a weapon. It was the last of what he had carried forward from the time before her, a piece of himself that had survived everything else.
Mara's voice slammed into his mind, not patient now, not teaching. Screaming.
"RUN! MOVE! GET OUT! RUN OR YOU DIE! RUN UNTIL YOU CAN'T FEEL YOUR LEGS, RUN UNTIL THE WORLD BLURS, RUN!"
He did. Every muscle screamed in protest. Every ragged breath threatened collapse. But he ran.
He regretted it now, every ounce of arrogance that had brought him here. Mara had warned him. She had told him the Red was a death trap for those who thought they were ready.
He was not ready. He had never been ready.
She had told him the Red was for the mad and the broken. That no sane scavenger went into it willingly. Only those chasing death, or already caught by it.
He thought he had been smarter than that.
He thought he had been stronger.
Every step reminded him he had been wrong.
The tunnels narrowed, forcing him toward a rusted choke point where old security gates had collapsed into a tangled mess. He veered left without thinking, trusting instinct, heart hammering in his ears.
The static roar grew louder, chasing him, calling to him. The sound scraped along the walls, riding the broken surfaces, finding him with a vicious certainty.
Another flash of movement in his peripheral vision. He did not look. Looking cost time. Looking cost blood.
The broken truncheon dragged him down, splinters biting deeper into his palm with every desperate stride, but he refused to let go.
Ahead, faint and filthy, a shaft of light cut down through a collapsed stairwell. The surface. Maybe. His only chance at living.
He pushed harder, ignoring the fire ripping through his thighs, ignoring the blood slicking his grip.
The tunnels around him twisted, the air thickening with the stink of old mold and wet stone, but he kept the light fixed in his mind. It was survival. It was the line between breathing and being devoured.
They would not follow him all the way. Most of them never leave before night fell, the wide stretches where the day still ruled in broken pieces. It was not true safety, but it was a barrier, something primal that held them back, something they hated without even knowing why.
Another roar, closer now, shook dust loose from the cracked ceiling. He could hear their feet pounding behind him, wild and heavy, faster than any Broken should have been.
His heart hammered so hard he thought his ribs might crack under the pressure.
Mara had warned him. She had sat him down once, long ago, voice steady in a way that left no room for argument. "You step into the Red thinking you know it, you die. You walk in carrying doubt, you die. You treat it like any other ruin, you die faster."
He had thought he knew better.
He had thought he could be the exception.
The stairwell loomed ahead, a broken promise of escape, half blocked by debris and hanging cables. He did not slow. Slowing was dying.
He ducked low, throwing himself through the wreckage without thinking, catching the jagged edge of a broken beam across his side, feeling the burn of torn fabric and skin. He did not stop.
The light widened. The surface was real. If he could just reach it, he might live.
He would not give them the satisfaction of taking him. Not today.
Mara had told him the Red was for those who had already given up. He had not given up. Not yet.
And he would not die here, broken and alone.
He ran.