The corridors of Sector Zero shifted again.
Akwasi could feel it now—the walls breathing, not metaphorically, but literally. They pulsed faintly, as if the architecture had veins beneath the concrete. Every step echoed like a warning, dragging behind him the silence of something waiting to wake.
He paused before the third chamber—one of the forbidden archives. It wasn't on the map. None of this was.
The keycode glitched as he tried to open the rusted console. For a split second, a strange language flickered across the screen—symbols not meant for human eyes. Then the door slid open with a hiss, revealing a room coated in dust and dried vines that hadn't seen sunlight in years.
Inside, old servers hummed low like growling beasts in sleep. But the real terror sat in the center: a metallic chair, bloodstained, rigged with cables, and crowned with a shattered visor.
Akwasi approached, his eyes scanning the walls—covered with notes, warnings, fragmented codes written in red ink, some scratched in with fingernails.
> "The code heals what man has forgotten." "Memory is a virus. The Healer is the Host." "Do not trust the screen. It lies."
He felt cold.
His reflection on one of the server screens blinked—but he didn't.
Spinning around, he saw nothing. But his shadow stayed frozen in the screen, watching him.
The files he accessed showed images of test subjects—eyes wide open, crying in silence, while their memories were rewritten. Experiments hidden under layers of encryption, all tagged with one name:
"Project NOBA-5"
And one signature: Dr. Menrah.
The name struck a nerve. His mother had whispered it in her sleep before she died.
Akwasi backed away, but the door slammed shut.
Lights flickered. A voice began to speak from the darkness, garbled and full of static:
> "Welcome back, Healer. We've been waiting."
The cables from the metallic chair slithered toward him like snakes, ready to claim a new subject.