The floor beneath West vibrated with a deep, mechanical groan, as if some slumbering giant were beginning to stir.
He steadied himself, breath ragged, pipe held at the ready. His knuckles were scraped raw, his shoulder screamed with every movement, but adrenaline kept him upright. The command unit, though visibly damaged, remained upright—its spiral core now pulsing with a darker hue, like the slow throb of a dying star. It had paused—not from pain, not from defeat, but from something else. Listening.
Then the floor split open.
A circle of reinforced plating retracted inward, gear by gear, with heavy metallic shrieks. Hydraulic arms hissed steam into the chamber as the panels peeled away, layer by layer, revealing a shaft descending into red-lit darkness. The opening radiated heat—unnatural, ancient—and a gust of hot air burst upward, thick with ozone, scorched wiring, and the sour tinge of old chemical coolant.
Somewhere deep below, gears groaned to life. The sound wasn't modern. It was raw—mechanical age tech mixed with living circuits. Like the bones of a dead empire being reawakened.
"It's opening a vertical drop," Aria said, her voice sharp and fast in West's earpiece. "West, whatever it's connected to—it goes far below your mapped zone. This isn't on any Grid schematic. This zone was supposed to be sealed permanently."
The command unit turned toward the shaft. For a moment, its crimson eye slit flared brightly. Then, without warning, it jumped.
West blinked.
No hesitation.
No tether.
The machine simply dove into the void.
"You can't be serious," Aria said.
"It's not waiting," West replied, tightening his grip on the pipe. His voice was hoarse, but steady. "And if that thing gets control of whatever's beneath—"
He didn't finish the sentence.
He stepped to the edge.
The stranger appeared beside him, cloak rippling from the updraft. "You're not equipped for subterranean descent. No exosuit. No signal relay."
"I'm not equipped for any of this," West muttered. He looked down once. Then he jumped.
Wind howled past. The shaft was deeper than he expected—hundreds of meters, at least. Emergency lighting blinked along the shaft walls, throwing the descent into a chaotic red strobe. West twisted his body midair, reaching out. His boots scraped against a maintenance rail—metal screamed beneath him as he rode it, half sliding, half falling.
Then the floor vanished.
He dropped into a new world.
A massive cavern opened up around him—larger than any underground structure West had seen, even in military archives. A lost city beneath the skin of the Earth.
It stretched far beyond visible range, its dimensions swallowed in shadow and distance. A hollow echo bounced between the massive metal ribs supporting the chamber. The walls were lined with coils of cable as thick as fuel lines, sagging between broken catwalks and collapsed scaffolds. Pools of coolant shimmered in the dark like still water, glowing faintly blue.
In the center stood a tower.
Old Pulse design, but mutated. Fused with bio-metal overgrowth, its base wrapped in cords of living circuitry that pulsed like arteries. Strange glyphs glowed faintly across its surface—markings from a language older than West's database could parse.
The command unit stood at its base, one hand pressed against the tower's core interface. Its spiral insignia pulsed in perfect rhythm with the tower's central column.
"It's syncing," Aria warned. "That's a core relay. An old broadcast system—except it's been modified. If it completes the handshake, it could trigger every AI-linked construct down here."
Too late.
The tower's lights flared.
Subsurface mechanisms thundered to life. Across the cavern, dozens—no, hundreds—of containment pods embedded in the walls flickered to life. Inside, dark humanoid figures twitched beneath frost-covered visors. Limbs stirred. Hydraulic clamps unlocked.
West ducked behind a pile of collapsed crates—rusted and half-melted by time. His pulse thundered in his ears, but his mind stayed cold. Assess. Prepare. Survive.
"Aria," he said, voice low. "Estimate."
She hesitated. "If even half of those pods activate—then this isn't just a threat to Echo Sector. It's a sector collapse event."
West peeked over the crates.
The command unit lifted its head.
The awakening figures turned as one.
Red lights blinked in unison.
West adjusted his grip on the pipe.
"Then I guess we're doing this underground."
The final war hadn't begun.
It had just been buried.