Dylan woke to darkness. The floor was cold beneath him, stiffening the muscles across his back. For a moment he didn't remember where he was, but when he lifted his head, the ache at the base of his skull reminded him of everything he'd tried not to think about before he'd passed out.
The diner. The alley freezing mid-motion. The light. The System dragging him somewhere he didn't understand and dropping him here because… what? It didn't know what else to do with him? That was the best guess he had, and it didn't make him feel any better.
He thought about the status screen, and the blue panel flickered back into existence as if it had been waiting.
[DYLAN CARTER]
[CLASS: ???]
Still no answer. Still stuck. Still broken.
He exhaled slowly. "Yeah," he muttered. "You and me both."
He let out a slow sigh. The sound carried farther than he expected, bouncing off the metal walls until it faded into the dark. That was when he noticed the silence again—no footsteps, no voices, nothing moving in the corridors beyond his little hideout. Just the faint vibration under the floor, that steady hum he'd heard when he'd first woken here, like distant machinery buried deep below him.
His stomach cramped—sharp enough to make him wince. Hunger. He hadn't eaten since the diner, and that had only been a handful of fries. Before that… he wasn't even sure. Hours? A day? Time felt slippery down here. He focused on the corner of his vision where the small timer hovered, mostly forgettable until he paid attention to it. The moment he did, it expanded into view.
[QUEST: INITIAL SURVIVAL — 24 HOURS]
[REMAINING TIME: 17:23:46]
Great. So it had taken him roughly an hour to walk back to this room and barricade himself inside, which meant he'd only managed a few hours of sleep. He guessed he couldn't complain too much—nothing had tried to take a bite out of him while he was unconscious. Probably.
He pushed himself upright. His joints protested, and the room swayed for a moment before settling. The doorway was little more than a dark cutout in the wall, the weak blue-green light from a patch of fungus in the corridor bleeding around its edges just enough to show that nothing had shifted outside while he slept. He rubbed his hands together to wake them up and muttered, "Right. Need to move. Need to at least find some water. Maybe food." The silence swallowed the sound as soon as it left him.
His thoughts drifted back to the first room he'd woken in—the one with the puddles spread across the metal floor and the steady drip from the pipes overhead. At the time he'd been too overwhelmed to care, but now the memory of those thin, clear pools stuck with him. Water. Or something close to it. It hadn't smelled sour or chemical, and it hadn't burned his skin when he'd touched the floor around it. If there was anything on this level he could test for drinking, it was probably that.
"Well," he muttered, "Time to put the chemistry degree to work, I guess."
It wasn't much of a plan, but it was a direction, and right now that mattered more than comfort.
He tightened his grip on the pipe he'd taken earlier, the rough metal biting into his palm, and stood. There was nothing here worth staying for. If he wanted to make it through the countdown ticking at the edge of his vision, he needed to leave this room and start figuring out what counted as survival on this level.
Dylan stepped into the corridor. The air out here felt colder than he remembered. Maybe it was just hitting him more now. He listened before he moved. Nothing waited in the dark. No scraping, no distant footsteps, no sign that anything living had passed through since he'd first found this place. If anything, the silence felt heavier now—thicker. It sat on his shoulders like a weight he couldn't shake off.
He walked slowly, keeping close to the wall. His shoes stuck for half a second with every step, lifting off damp metal with a soft tack that sounded too loud. He found himself pausing between steps just to listen, making sure nothing answered back.
He wasn't sure why, but he felt more on edge now than he had the first time he walked these halls. Maybe it was the survival countdown ticking down in the corner of his vision. Maybe waking up here—really waking up here—had stripped away the last hope that this was just some messed-up dream. Or maybe it was the steady ache of hunger and exhaustion reminding him he was one bad choice away from dying in a place no one would ever find. Whatever the reason, it made him look at everything differently. It made him notice things he'd missed before.
A few dozen feet down, he found the first sign that someone else had been here once. Scratches marked the wall in long, uneven lines. Not letters, not a message he could read—yet they weren't random either. The strokes grouped together in short clusters, like someone had been trying to carve out a pattern or mark a direction before their strength ran out. Dylan ran his fingers across the grooves. The metal around each line was smoothed down slightly, as if whoever made them had dragged the same tool across the surface again and again.
He kept going, following the marks until they trailed low along the wall and ended near the base of a support beam. That was where he saw it—a fork half-buried under grime. He crouched and picked it up by the handle. The tines were worn almost flat, edges dulled from repeated scraping..
He turned it over once, then set it back down. The fork was proof—someone human enough to grip cheap metal and scratch their story into a wall had been here, long before he showed up.
He straightened slowly. The fork lay where he'd left it, dull metal catching the faint blue glow. For a moment he pictured a hand wrapped around it—shaking, desperate, dragging lines into the wall because there was nothing else left to do.
"Hope you made it out," he whispered, though he didn't believe it.
The walk back to the first room felt longer this time, even though the layout hadn't changed. The corridors repeated themselves—same doors, same shadows, same dead panels—until the familiar junction came into view.
The puddles were still there, gathered in the same shallow depressions across the metal floor. Thin ripples shimmered under the weak blue-green glow of the fungus, and cathing bits of the weak orange-white flicker from the hallway lights. Seeing them again pulled him back to the moment he'd first woken—confused, half-frozen, stumbling through this room without really seeing anything. Now, with hunger clawing at him and the taste of stale air thick in his throat, the sight of standing water felt almost like relief.
He crouched at the edge of the largest one and dipped two fingers into the water. Cold. Cleaner-smelling than anything else here. He tested it on his wrist, counting out breaths the way labs had drilled into him. No burn, no numbness. He tasted a dot against his tongue—sharp metal tang, but nothing worse. He swallowed a small mouthful, waited, then let himself drink another, then another.
The relief was immediate and aching, hitting him low in the chest and making his shoulders sag before he could stop himself.
Dylan leaned over the puddle again, scooping another handful of water. It was cold enough to sting his teeth, but it went down clean, without the chemical bite he half-expected. He swallowed, then sat back on his heels and listened to his own breathing settle. For the first time since waking here, something was simple: drink or die. That part, at least, he understood.
A new sound slipped into the space, threading itself between the steady dripping and the low mechanical hum beneath the floor. It wasn't metal settling or a stray pipe cooling. This was like a large dog dropping its weight onto metal, claws or pads scraping just enough to catch. The kind of sound you only noticed because everything else was so still. Dylan went still with it, listening as the quiet stretched around him, waiting for the step to come again.
He stayed hunched beside the puddle, eyes fixed on the corridor he had come through. The silence that followed was worse than noise—tight, stretched thin, waiting to tear.
Another step followed, a little closer, the sound carrying just enough weight to raise the hair on his arms. The quiet afterward felt sharper, as if the whole corridor were holding its breath with him.
He shifted slowly until his back touched the wall, pipe angled across his body. His heartbeat felt loud enough to hear. His eyes stayed locked on the single slice of corridor visible from where he knelt, the faint blue light catching on the wet floor.
A third step. Still measured. Still steady. Something moving with purpose, not wandering.
That was when it clicked. He wasn't the only thing down here that needed water to stay alive.
For a moment, he almost felt relieved. If something else came here to drink, then he wasn't alone in this place—not completely lost in metal and fungus with nothing but the hum for company. It meant life still clung to this level in some form. But the warmth of that thought cooled fast. Anything tough enough to survive down here would be hungry, territorial, or desperate in ways he couldn't guess. Sharing a water source with it wasn't comforting—it just meant he'd wandered into someone else's routine. And that he probably shouldn't be standing here.
His mouth went dry again, undoing the tiny victory drinking had given him.
Carefully, he pushed himself upright. His knees complained, and the thin film of water on the floor made his footing uncertain, but he didn't take his eyes off the corridor even once. Whoever had used this puddle before him might be back any second.
He had two choices: wait here and hope the thing wasn't brave enough to come all the way in, or leave before it realized he was standing between it and its water.
He already knew which one he preferred.
Keeping close to the wall, Dylan eased toward the opposite passage—the one he hadn't explored yet. The one leading deeper into the unknown. He didn't love the idea, but staying felt worse.
Another step echoed from the corridor he'd just walked through, closer now, and a sputtering flicker from the overhead lights cast a brief silhouette across the far wall—low to the ground, too lean to be human, its back arched in an unnatural curve and something like a long forelimb dragging behind it. The light snapped out again before he could be sure of what he'd seen, but the shape alone was enough to spike fear through his chest.
That settled it.
He turned into the dark corridor before whatever was approaching could round the corner, pipe held tight and breath controlled, every instinct telling him that the puddle he'd been grateful for seconds ago had just turned into bait.
He didn't look back.