The elevator groaned like a dying beast.
Li Wei stared at the flickering screen above the door:
"-B4: Restricted Sub-Core – Genetic Containment Wing."
No one spoke.
Not Rui, whose fists were clenched behind her back.
Not Chen Yu, who—despite his usual smart mouth—stood unnaturally still. His hand was wrapped around the edge of his jacket, trembling.
Not even Dr. Lin, who had chosen to remain behind, claiming her body wouldn't survive another exposure to the lower levels.
"There are things in the dark that remember you, Rui," she had said. "Things that still carry your scent."
Rui hadn't flinched.
The descent took five minutes.
But every second dragged, each vibration in the shaft echoing up their spines.
The lights overhead flickered and then cut out completely.
Chen Yu broke the silence. "So… anyone wanna talk about how bad this is on a scale from one to freaking dead?"
No one answered.
He chuckled nervously. "Cool. Great. Everyone's in their brooding antihero phase. Love that for us."
The doors opened.
The smell hit first.
Rot. Old metal. Something wetter.
Then the darkness. Not pitch black—but moving. Like the air was made of ink that shifted when you breathed.
Their boots echoed through the corridor as they stepped into the ancient hallway. Walls were cracked. Pipes dangled from the ceiling like the veins of a dying beast.
There were murals.
Hand-painted on the walls—drawings made by children.
Some were innocent: suns, stick figures, a house.
But others…
A figure with no face.
A bleeding mountain.
A child surrounded by red hands.
"Those were drawn by my batch," Rui said, softly. "They made us paint every morning before the injections. Said it helped with stability."
Chen Yu leaned closer to a drawing. "This one's just a scribble of teeth and black worms."
"Yeah," Rui muttered. "That one was mine."
They passed through four bulkhead doors—each sealed manually with the code chip. The final door required a blood signature.
Rui stepped forward without hesitation, pressed her hand to the scanner, and bit down on her palm until it bled.
The machine beeped.
"0107 confirmed. Subject active."
Then the metal groaned open.
The room inside wasn't a lab. It wasn't a cell.
It was a cathedral.
Tall ceilings. Stone floor. At the center, a pillar of fleshy mass pulsed like a giant, beating heart. It had bones. Skulls. Children's toys buried within.
All around it—cocoons.
Dozens. Maybe hundreds.
And movement.
Not from the walls—from the cocoons.
Something was waking up.
Li Wei stepped forward. His chest tightened. "This is where it started."
Rui nodded. "No. This is where it never ended."
The first cocoon split open with a wet, tearing sound.
A figure dropped out, naked and pale. Its eyes were huge—black. Skin veined with glowing purple. It stared at Rui with a terrifying familiarity.
"0107," it said, voice distorted like underwater static.
Another one tore free.
Then another.
Soon, half the chamber stirred with life—former children—now twisted, humanoid things barely tethered to sanity.
Chen Yu whispered, "Okay… that's more than I signed up for."
Li Wei stepped forward. The one who had spoken to Rui moved toward him, eyes narrowing.
"You are not of the batch," it hissed. "But you wear its echo."
The lights above burst.
And then they attacked.
Li Wei moved with unnatural precision—dodging, striking, adapting. Every time his hand touched one of the creatures, he felt something new: their memories, their pain, their rage.
Chen Yu—now fully aware of his telekinesis—used it like a wrecking ball. He flung debris, twisted pipes, and sent three cocoons smashing into the central heart-pillar.
"Yeah, baby! Who's the gifted one now?!"
Rui didn't hesitate—she moved like lightning, her movements a blur. She didn't fight with power—she fought with training. Ruthless, surgical, feral.
It wasn't enough.
The creatures were endless. They kept coming.
And then—
The floor beneath the pillar cracked.
A voice filled the chamber—not Echo. Not Dr. Lin.
Something ancient.
Something inside the pillar.
"You returned… my blade. My breath. My ruined seed."
The pulsing mass cracked open like an egg.
And what crawled out… wasn't human.
Not even close.
They ran.
There was no plan. No destination. Only escape.
As they fled back through the corridors, pursued by half-living children of the batch, Li Wei shouted behind him:
"What the hell did you people awaken down here?!"
Rui didn't answer. She didn't even look back.
Because she knew.
She'd seen it in her dreams.
They hadn't just awakened a monster.
They'd awakened the Mother Batch—the original mind the Ascendancy had tried to clone, control, and silence.
But minds don't stay quiet forever.
Not the ones buried in the bones of mountains.
They didn't stop running until their lungs burned.
Even then, they didn't stop—because the screams kept echoing up the shaft behind them. And beneath those screams was something worse:
The voice.
Calling Rui's name.
The lift was gone.
The emergency ladder twisted into the darkness like a spinal cord. Cold, metallic, endless.
"Great," Chen Yu rasped. "Cardio."
Li Wei didn't hesitate—he jumped and began climbing. His fingers bled by the third level.
Rui followed, silent, though her limbs trembled more from memory than exhaustion.
Chen Yu muttered the entire way up.
"Note to self: Next hideout? Let's pick a bakery. Maybe a nice little haunted church. No freaky cocoons, no underground flesh gods—just cinnamon rolls."
At the top—when the last hatch door opened—they found themselves not in safety but chaos.
The entire Hollow Ridge compound was on fire.
Flames licked the broken towers. AI terminals sparked and screamed as power surged out of control. Echo—the fragmented semi-sentient system—looped one final broadcast before dying:
"Protocol breach… Mutation threshold surpassed… Goodbye, Batch 0107…"
Rui stood still.
Chen Yu said softly, "Did… did it just say goodbye to you?"
She nodded. "Echo was one of the kinder ones. It used to sing lullabies when they took our blood."
Outside the Mountain
Snow had begun to fall—but not cleanly.
The flakes were tinged gray.
Tainted.
Li Wei scanned the sky, uneasy. "This isn't from the storm."
"No," Rui replied. "The Mother Batch is leaking."
They traveled until the lights from Hollow Ridge were just a distant flicker. No one looked back.
They set up a temporary camp near the ruins of a burnt-out radio tower. It was exposed. Unsafe. But it didn't matter. There was nothing left in them for fear—not that night.
The fire crackled between them.
Li Wei sharpened his blade silently. Rui stared into the flames.
And Chen Yu?
He poured half a bag of marshmallows onto a stick.
"Are those even still good?" Li Wei asked, dryly.
Chen Yu sniffed one. "They've evolved. Like everything else. Probably sentient now. If I start screaming in my sleep, assume the marshmallows are crawling up my spine."
He popped two into his mouth anyway.
Li Wei allowed himself the faintest smile. "You always joke like this?"
Chen Yu leaned back against a rock. "Nah. I used to be serious. You should've seen me two years ago. Tie and everything. Desk job. I was gonna propose to my girlfriend."
"What happened?"
"She turned during the first wave. Tried to eat my sister."
Silence.
He tossed another marshmallow into the flames.
"Now I just make jokes. Because if I stop, I'll remember her eyes when she wasn't her anymore."
Rui looked at him, genuinely. "You're stronger than you pretend to be."
Chen Yu made finger guns. "I'm emotionally repressed and charming."
That night, Rui dreamed.
She was back underground, but it wasn't the lab.
It was before.
She saw children—dozens of them—lined up like dolls. Needles. Screams. Doctors whispering behind glass.
Then a voice behind her:
"You were the best of them."
She turned.
But instead of a scientist, she saw the Mother Batch—not in flesh, but in the form of a warped child with Rui's eyes.
It smiled.
"You're not running from me. You're coming back."
She woke up with a scream in her throat.
Li Wei was already up, sword in hand.
Chen Yu stirred, half-awake. "Nightmare? Or the marshmallows again?"
Rui just hugged her knees and whispered:
"It's not done. It's inside me. I felt it take something when I touched the scanner."
By morning, the snow had stopped—but the trees looked wrong.
Birds had no feathers. Squirrels with elongated spines watched from the branches. The world was changing faster than it should.
And the trio?
They kept moving.
They didn't know what awaited them next—only that something from Hollow Ridge now followed them.