The walls inside the tunnels were cracked and sunken in some places, but pristine in others—too pristine, with tile that gleamed under no apparent light source. The ceiling dipped low, then suddenly vaulted into open chambers with rusted platforms and exposed pipes winding like ribs through concrete. Faint, humming pulses traveled through the walls—soft at first, then tapering in and out like someone breathing slowly beneath the floor.
KREED glided ahead, casting its scanning grid along the corridor. The light distorted on impact—some angles reflected it cleanly, others refracted it like water. Occasionally, the drone's lights flickered, but it pressed on dutifully.
"This place is folding in on itself," Daihatsu said, low and uneasy. "These angles... aren't even architecturally possible."
Gail kept one hand on her bow, her voice steady. "Could be residual resonance displacement. We've seen it in Sector Ten."
"Not like this," Daihatsu replied, tapping one of the wall seams. His finger passed through slightly—just slightly—like it rippled on touch.
From the back, Iyato chuckled softly.
"We're standing inside a fever dream," he murmured, a small smirk spread across his face. "Feels like this place wants us to doubt our senses."
Adrien's eyes swept the hallway ahead. "Keep your minds on the rhythm. Sync up. And absolutely no improvising."
"That your way of saying 'don't die yet?'" Daihatsu asked.
"That's always the plan," Adrien replied.
They moved deeper. Along the walls, the graffiti began to shift.
What once read LOOP 4 and OUTBACK GANG now pulsed with illegible symbols—spirals, overlapping triangles, and tiny scratches that looked like fingernails had traced them from the inside. A maintenance locker lay open, its contents—tools, wires, ID tags—scattered like they'd been dropped mid-sprint.
Gail crouched beside a cracked flashlight near the doorway. "Burnt out from the inside," she noted quietly.
KREED suddenly paused mid-flight, stabilizers twitching. Its lights dimmed for half a second before returning.
"Warning: momentary drop in visual processing. Recalibrating..."
From far ahead, a soft sound echoed—a dragging scrape, like glass being pulled across tile. Then stillness.
They moved forward cautiously.
"I don't like this..." Daihatsu muttered underneath his breath.
Iyato stopped beside a rusted vending machine, long expired. Its glass was cracked. Inside, the snacks were oddly untouched—one bag of salt chips floated in the air, weightless, slowly spinning in place.
He stared at it, eye unreadable.
Adrien didn't acknowledge his comrade's pause, but his fingers tightened slightly on the hilt of his blade.
Suddenly—KREED's lights blinked off. No warning. No vocalization. The little drone froze mid-air, then dropped like a stone, clattering to the floor with a sound that echoed too loudly in the silence.
"KREED?" Adrien snapped. "Status report."
Nothing.
Daihatsu stepped forward, crouching beside the drone, hand hovering near it but not touching. The casing was ice cold—completely drained.
"That definitely wasn't an overload," he said, voice dropping.
Gail turned her visor to the far corridor, where darkness pooled like ink across the floor.
From somewhere deep within—impossibly far but uncomfortably close—a sound rattled against the wall.
A breath. Then the whisper of grains moving.
Not wind.
Not air.
Dust.
And it was coming closer.
———
Adrien didn't like splitting the team.
He never had. Not in live drills, not in breach zones, and especially not in breathing, mutating tombs like this one.
But logic always overruled instinct—and right now, logic said they were blind, and waiting wouldn't bring light.
He knelt beside KREED's husk, fingers brushing the cooling chassis. The casing was intact—no blunt trauma, no energy spike on shutdown. Just… gone. As if the drone's awareness had been drawn out of itself and replaced by static.
He stood slowly, the distant hum of the substation deepening as the air grew thicker.
"Daihatsu, Gail— you split left," he said into the comms, his voice low and clipped. "Track the grid tunnels. Look for Dead Air spike trails. If the missing units were pulled, it'd be toward drainage zones."
"Copy," Gail replied without hesitation. He could already hear her footsteps echoing as she moved with Daihatsu down the left tunnel—narrower, darker, but tactically solid.
To his right, Iyato was silent. Standing still. Watching a cracked wall.
Adrien turned.
"And you?"
Iyato's voice came softer than usual. "I felt something back near the stairwell split. A pull. Weak—but familiar."
"Residual?"
"Not exactly." He tilted his head. "It felt like it wanted to be found."
Adrien exhaled through his mask. He didn't need metaphors right now.
"Check it. Alone, if you're sure."
Iyato smirked faintly. "Always am."
———
With the others gone, the silence grew stranger.
Adrien strode deeper along the main corridor—his footsteps deliberately paced, his blade floating just behind his right shoulder, angled slightly forward. The architecture around him shifted subtly.
Old signs on the walls blurred as he passed them. One moment they read F3 SUBLINE, the next INTERNAL ACCESS, the next just flickering static. At one point, he swore he saw a reflection of himself on a wall that wasn't mirrored—and in it, his mask had been cracked.
He didn't stop.
This place seems like it's trying to talk, he thought. And failing at every word.
He paused at an intersection. Something hung in the air. It was faint, but clinging. The smell of charred copper and dirt, wet dirt, thick and loamy. A scent that didn't belong in steel.
He touched the wall beside him. It was dry. But when he pulled his glove back—
Dust. Thick, clinging dust. Where there had been none.
And then… a whisper. Not from ahead, or behind, but beneath.
A voice?
A breath?
A drag.
Like sand being pulled through unseen fingers.
Adrien didn't draw attention to it. He didn't slow. But his hand hovered an inch closer to the sword at his back.
"Bloodhound, status check," he said over comms, voice perfectly steady.
Only static answered him.
Adrien let out a frustrated sigh before he pressed forward with measured steps, every sense strained beneath the surface of his calm. The corridor narrowed, its metal walls curving slightly inward—not unlike the throat of some slumbering creature. Dust clung to every groove, but not passively. It gathered, deliberately, like it had been swept toward some invisible centerpoint.
His boots left the faintest prints behind, and even those began to fill in behind him.
He paused again at an intersection—one path leading down into total blackness, the other into a broken maintenance bay lit by flickering amber emergency lights. The strobe effect revealed strange things in pieces: handprints on the walls… but upside down. Deep scratches in the ceiling, as if someone had tried to crawl their way up and out. A shattered helmet resting in the corner, caved inward like it had imploded rather than cracked from impact.
Adrien's hand hovered near the hilt of his blade, which now drifted slightly beside him—more like a companion than a weapon.
He didn't speak into the comms this time. The last static feedback felt… intrusive.
Observed.
———
The left tunnel sloped gently downward, the air getting colder with every step. Pipes hissed with faint bursts of steam overhead, their pressure valves frozen open, rimmed with ice.
Gail kept her visor on low-light filter, scanning the walls as they passed—markings scratched into steel, each too deliberate to be vandalism but too chaotic to read. Like messages written mid-panic.
"Your readout still clean?" she asked.
Daihatsu held up his bracer. "No. I'm picking up low-level echoes... but they're looping. Same spike. Over and over."
"Like a playback?"
"Like someone wants us to think it's a playback."
They moved forward.
On either side of the tunnel, old supply lockers lined the walls. Most were empty or jammed shut with rust, but one stood slightly ajar.
Gail gave a subtle hand signal.
Daihatsu nodded and stepped forward. With a quick pulse of lightning from his palm, he forced the door open.
Inside: a Suppressor uniform—folded. Clean. Perfectly preserved. And on top of it: a name tag, half-melted.
"This one of the Mechon scouts?" Gail asked, brow furrowing.
"No," Daihatsu replied, frowning. "This belonged to a human team."
"We didn't deploy a human team."
"Exactly."
Behind them, one of the wall pipes let out a slow groan. Something heavy moved just beyond the edge of their light.
Gail pivoted fast, arrow already drawn, visor adjusting to magnify motion—
Nothing.
Except...
She could hear it.
Grains dragging. Glass whispering across metal.
Then—
"Gail," Daihatsu said, voice low. "My bracer just dropped signal."
Her HUD flickered once. Just once.
———
Iyato Kyomaki walked alone.
No words. No comm chatter. Just the echo of his boots tracing the edges of a forgotten stairwell, walls half-swallowed in creeping mold and flickering overhead wires that buzzed like dying cicadas. The walls here curved too much, like the structure itself had softened with age, or perhaps something had pressed against it, over and over, with invisible weight.
He descended each step with fluid, controlled motion—his body always slightly hunched forward, not from fatigue, but from focus. He moved like a man whose every nerve was already listening.
Dead Air doesn't howl, Iyato thought. It waits.
He turned a corner and stepped into a long, half-collapsed corridor. The light here was almost completely gone, save for the occasional stutter of resonance leaking from ceiling cracks. It bathed the floor in twitching bands of blue and white.
The first thing he noticed wasn't the silence.
It was the dust.
At first, it was just a patch along the corridor's edge—common enough in these depths. But as he moved closer, it began to shift. Not with his steps, not from wind—on its own.
Hundreds of grains… maybe thousands… moving in small, organized streams, sliding across the floor like columns of ants. They weren't scattering. They were traveling. Deliberate. Quiet. Migratory.
He stopped mid-stride, eye narrowed behind his patch.
One stream split in two at a hairline crack in the floor.
Another flowed into a corner and disappeared entirely, as if swallowed by the wall.
No resonance push… no current…
Iyato knelt, placing one hand just above the flowing dust. The air there was still. But his fingers tingled faintly—not from power, but something more primal.
Memory, maybe.
Or intent.
The dust didn't react to his presence. It kept moving. Converging now… slowly pooling into a small circular pattern a few feet ahead of him, near a collapsed vent. A strange symbol began to form—spiraling, but lopsided. It pulsed once, faintly.
Iyato stood again, and for a moment, his voice cracked softly across the private comm line—only for Adrien.
"Captain," he said, low. "This place isn't echoing. It's… gathering."
No reply.
Just a light static hum.
And the soft, steady hiss of sand tracing the outline of something yet unseen.
Iyato moved in silence, letting the dust lead.
The paths it carved now were more deliberate—no longer scattered, but congealed into thin, winding trails that twisted across the floor like veins. Some trailed up the walls. Others slipped through vents. One flowed directly into the blackness of a maintenance hatch, like it had somewhere to be.
He walked slowly, the static hum in his comm still present. Adrien hadn't responded.
That wasn't surprising.
But it wasn't reassuring, either.
Then—
A sound. Sharp. Sudden.
Whrrr-kkkkkt…grkkk…ZZZ–zkkh–rrrrrh…
Iyato turned his head immediately, muscles still, hand near the side clasp of his blade.
Another mechanical stutter, echoing from just ahead.
He rounded the corner and found the source.
A Mechon unit lay on the ground—on its back, limbs twitching erratically like a flipped insect. Its visual display blinked rapidly with broken lines of static, and its audio driver spat out a tangled knot of syllables:
"T-t-ta…zz…in…capella…loop-loop-loop—vrrrk—detect—hum…you're here—you're here…"
Its torso casing was partially melted, like it had suffered internal thermal failure, and blackened grains of sand were clumped around its chest vent—wedged into every seam like splinters.
Iyato knelt beside it with a long, slow breath. His voice didn't break above a whisper.
"Should've been recycled weeks ago…"
The Mechon twitched at the sound of his voice. Not violently—recognition.
Iyato gave it a look. A tired one.
"Alright. Let's see how dead you are..."
He pulled a small case from his hip pack and flipped it open—sleek, compact, and filled with precise field tools. No theatrics. Just metal, memory, and old motions he didn't particularly enjoy repeating.
A screwdriver hissed softly as he loosened the chestplate latches, one by one.
With a click, the chest panel lifted.
The inside was worse than expected. Charred wires tangled like burned nerves, several conduits completely melted through. And there, embedded deep near the circuit junction, sand had forced its way inside the micro-coils. It hadn't clogged them. It had rearranged them—like it wanted to speak through the Mechon's core.
Iyato scoffed softly, shaking his head.
"Completely fried," he muttered. "Main convergence board's fused. Regulator's shot. This thing's more graveyard than drone now."
He took a breath and slowly closed the chestplate again. No rush. No frustration. Just finality.
Iyato laid the Mechon's body gently onto its side, adjusting its arms so it wouldn't twist in its last spasms. The screen on its face blinked once—like it wanted to speak again—but it didn't.
Only static.
He stood, brushing grit from his gloves with a quiet pat. Then, activating his comm:
"Iyato to Bloodhound," he said, calm but clipped. "Visual on corrupted Mechon—no revival possible. Sand entered its core. It… changed something."
He waited.
Only static.
The corridor ahead stretched on—darker, dustier, pulsing like a throat.
Iyato stared ahead for a long moment, then closed the kit, clipped it to his belt, and walked into the dark.
The hum in Adrien's ears had changed.
It wasn't resonance anymore. Not purely.
It had evolved—distorted into something deeper. Something that vibrated inside his chest cavity, like a pulse beneath a pulse. The deeper he went, the more it pulled, like the walls were leaning in just to listen to him breathe.
His hand stayed near his floating blade, which drifted close at his side—almost magnetized to his presence now. He slowed as he entered another corridor, walls scrawled with spirals and overlapping slashes, some etched in soot, some smeared in what looked like…
Glass dust. Ground so fine it shimmered like powdered bone.
Then—a sound. Not structural. Not Mechon.
A yell. Human.
Distant. Ragged. Panicked.
"Nn–GHHHHH–!!"
Adrien froze, head snapping toward the source—his entire posture shifting in a blink. His grip locked tight around the blade's hilt. The air in the corridor pulsed sharply, like something flinched behind the walls.
He immediately tapped the side of his comm interface, mask light blinking blue.
"Bloodhound—report in," he said. "I just heard something. Someone's here. A survivor or–"
Static.
A beat of silence. Then—
"–Gail, Daihatsu, Iyato—come in. Confirm position."
Still nothing. Not even static now. Just absence.
Adrien's jaw tightened.
"Dead Air's cutting the comms," he muttered, voice low.
He stepped forward. His blade floated beside him, then suddenly jerked upward into his hand. The weapon let off a low, subtle hum as resonance flowed through the hilt.
"Alright then," he muttered, eyes narrowing. "No more walking."
He broke into a sprint, coat trailing behind him, feet striking metal in perfect tempo.
The corridor blurred as he moved—lights dimming in his wake. His blade shimmered at his side, already humming with kinetic pressure. The faint trail of sand swirled up around his feet as he moved through it—grains kicked up, only to follow after him like they were still watching.
The voice hadn't called again.
But Adrien was already too far in to pretend he hadn't heard it.
———
The hallway felt more stable here—tighter, narrower, the floor lined with dull metal grates and industrial wiring long since abandoned by the city's grid. Pipes ticked with old pressure.
Gail moved with her bow lowered but ready, steps precise and balanced. She'd switched her visor's filters to a rhythmic pulse scan—tracking anomalies through vibration variance, not heat or light. It suited her as she didn't trust the obvious.
Beside her, Daihatsu stayed close, one hand occasionally tapping his bracer to re-check resonance decay. He hadn't spoken much in the last few minutes, but that wasn't unusual. Daihatsu wasn't quiet because he was cold—he was quiet because he calculated. Every word, every action—thought through, weighed.
"You always this precise in combat?" Gail asked suddenly, eyes forward.
"You're not?" he replied dryly.
"Not the way you are," she said, with a hint of a smile. "You think like you're already post-mortem. Like you're planning for what happens if we fail."
Daihatsu exhaled through his nose, a low, controlled breath.
"I do. Doesn't mean I expect it."
"That's what makes you a good tactician," she said.
A beat.
"And probably a terrible dinner guest."
Daihatsu snorted. "I only eat standing up."
Their brief moment cracked slightly as they rounded a corner, stepping into a cross-section of the corridor.
Then the ripple hit.
It wasn't wind.
It wasn't motion.
It was pressure.
Sudden. Dense. Vibrational.
Like the entire tunnel had just inhaled.
Gail's visor glitched for half a second—feedback spike. Daihatsu's bracer lit up with a burst of resonance distortion, every warning light pinging at once.
"Was that an energy discharge?" Gail asked, posture already tense, bow halfway raised.
Daihatsu stared down the corridor ahead, eyes narrowing. "No. It was movement. Big. Intentional. Close."
Their comms crackled faintly—just enough for a half-spoken syllable from Adrien's channel to sneak through.
"–firmed. Immedia–tainme–"
"Adrien?" Daihatsu barked. "Confirm that last—was that a target?"
Nothing.
Gail clipped an arrow into place with a sharp snap. "He found it."
"Or it found him."
Without hesitation, they pivoted together down the tunnel, footsteps perfectly in sync, Gail at the lead, Daihatsu close behind.