The rain never stopped.
When the great machine roared to life, no one thought it would last more than a few weeks. Scientists predicted that, like every storm, the skies would eventually exhaust themselves. But weeks turned into months, and months into years, until the idea of a clear sky became nothing more than a half-remembered myth whispered by the old to the young.
For six years the downpour consumed everything. Rivers swelled into oceans, mountains shrank beneath tides, and cities drowned one after another. Concrete jungles became skeletons of steel rising above endless gray seas, their windows shattered by the waves, their lights extinguished forever.
Civilization fractured. Some fled inland, building fragile rafts and floating colonies on the waters that swallowed their homes. Others starved, their farms lost beneath the floods. Entire governments collapsed, their armies reduced to scattered warlords fighting over what little land remained above the tide. The world did not end in fire, as so many had imagined—it ended in water, in silence, in slow drowning.
But not everyone shared that fate.
Hidden high in the bones of a mountain, where floodwaters could not reach, lay a structure that had never belonged to the world above. It was not a home, nor a shelter—it was a bunker built for secrets, forged by those who had believed themselves gods.
And inside that bunker lived a boy who was no longer a boy.
Mickey. Ys9. The ninth experiment. The one the scientists had called "perfect."
When he was only seven, he had shattered glass with his bare hands, spilled the blood of the men who claimed ownership over him, and sealed himself away from the chaos that followed. That memory was burned into him—their faces, their screams, the sudden silence afterward. At first it haunted him. At first he thought he was a monster. But as the years passed, the guilt faded, replaced by something harder, something sharper.
He had not chosen to be made. But he had chosen to survive.
The bunker kept him alive, but survival required more than walls. Food came from sealed rations, carefully counted and stretched. What little remained of the lab's hydroponic system became his garden. Rows of pale-green leaves glowed under artificial light, a fragile defiance against the endless rain outside. Water, at least, was plentiful. He built filters from spare parts and let the storm itself sustain him.
But Mickey did not spend his days only eating and waiting.
The bunker was filled with machines—broken drones, rusted weapons, failed prototypes abandoned by their dead creators. To most, it would have been a tomb of useless junk. To Mickey, it was a library. He studied them, dismantled them, rebuilt them. Slowly, his hands grew more skilled, his mind more cunning. He learned the language of gears and wires, the secrets of energy cells and circuits.
Each night, the generators hummed softly, and beneath their rhythm he drew sketches across old notebooks. He tested metals, sharpened tools, forged weapons of his own design. A blade that could cut steel. A rifle tuned to fire underwater. Traps meant not only to defend him, but to confuse, to terrify, to break the spirit of anyone who dared to come too close.
Still, it was not the machines that changed the most.
It was Mickey himself.
The Ys experiment had twisted his body in ways even he struggled to understand. His reflection—seen in the cracked surface of a steel plate—showed someone taller than his years, shoulders strong, eyes burning with an unnatural blue light. His wounds closed almost as soon as they opened. His muscles carried strength no child should possess. When he gripped the bars of the training room, the steel bent beneath his palms like soft clay.
And sometimes… sometimes the rain seemed to answer him.
On nights when his anger boiled, when memories of the scientists clawed at his mind, he would hear the storm grow louder, as though the very sky was listening. He did not yet know if this was his power, or only his imagination. But it was enough to remind him that he was not human—not fully.
He was Ys9. The last of their creations. The only one who survived.
The world outside had become a graveyard, yet Mickey endured. Six years of solitude had carved away the softness of childhood and left behind something else—something colder, something disciplined. His routines kept him sharp: wake before the first hum of the generators, train until sweat mixed with the bunker's stale air, inspect the weapons cache, tend the plants, study the machines. Again and again, day after day, until survival was not just instinct, but a craft.
But beneath the routines, beneath the silence, there was always the same question pressing at the edges of his thoughts:
How long before the world found him?
For now, the bunker was hidden. The mountain shielded him, the rain drowned his presence, and the sea kept away those who did not dare its depths. But Mickey knew better than to trust forever in walls. The world outside was desperate, and desperation always searched for something to take.
And when they came—because one day they would—he would be ready.