The corridor outside the lab was worse than the room Felix had woken up in. Emergency lighting flickered sporadically along the walls, casting everything in shades of sickly yellow and deep shadow.
The floor was cracked and uneven, with chunks of concrete jutting up at odd angles like broken teeth. But what really caught his attention were the veins of crystallized energy that ran along every surface, pulsing with that same eerie purple and green glow he'd seen in the lab.
They looked almost alive, like some kind of luminescent fungus that had spread through the entire facility. In some places, they'd consumed entire sections of wall, replacing metal and concrete with something that looked organic and wrong.
"Stay close to me," Cyber said, her voice low as she moved forward with her rifle raised.
"The corrupted machines are drawn to movement and heat signatures. Your augmentations are giving off both right now."
Felix followed her, trying to keep his footsteps quiet despite his body still protesting every movement. "How long was I out? What the hell happened here?"
"Two hundred and thirty-seven years, give or take a few months." Cyber glanced back at him, her glowing eyes reflecting in the dim light.
"As for what happened, that's going to take more than a few minutes to explain."
Two hundred and thirty-seven years. The number hit him like a physical blow, and he had to stop walking for a moment to process it. Everyone he knew was dead. The world he remembered was gone. He was a relic from a time that no longer existed.
"Keep moving," Cyber urged, reaching back to grab his arm.
Her synthetic fingers were surprisingly warm against his skin. "I know it's a lot to take in, but we can't stay here."
"This facility is compromised, and more corrupted machines will come to investigate the noise we made."
Felix forced his legs to move again, pushing down the rising panic in his chest. "You said something about Mana Syndrome. What is that?"
"A disaster of our own making," Cyber replied, her tone bitter in a way that seemed too human for an AI. "About fifteen years after you went into stasis, the Mana Integration Project went catastrophically wrong."
"The energy we were trying to harness as a power source turned out to be far more volatile and sentient than anyone predicted."
She paused at an intersection, checking both directions before continuing down the left corridor. "It didn't just leak into our technology. It infected it, changed it, made it alive in ways that defied every law of physics we understood."
"Within six months, nearly every piece of advanced technology on the planet had been corrupted. Power grids, weapons systems, transportation networks, even simple electronics. All of it turned against humanity."
Felix's grip tightened on his rifle as her words sank in. "The Mana Integration Project. That was my project. I designed the core systems."
"I know," Cyber said quietly. "That's why they put you in stasis."
"The government hoped that if they could preserve you, maybe someday you could help fix what went wrong. Unfortunately, the world ended before they could wake you up properly."
They reached a heavy blast door that was half open, jammed in place by what looked like crystallized Mana growing through its mechanisms. Cyber squeezed through first, then helped Felix climb over the debris blocking the lower half of the opening.
On the other side was a stairwell that spiraled upward into darkness. The steps were covered in more of that organic crystal growth, making each one treacherous. Felix could hear sounds echoing from above, distant screeches and mechanical whirring that made his skin crawl.
"We're going up," Cyber said, already starting to climb. "The facility has seventeen sublevel floors."
"We were on sublevel twelve. The surface entrance is our best chance of getting out without running into a full nest of corrupted machines."
Felix followed her up the stairs, his enhanced legs making the climb easier than it should have been. "You keep saying corrupted machines like they're alive. Are they actually sentient?"
"Some of them, yes." Cyber's voice echoed in the stairwell. "The Mana doesn't just power them anymore."
"It thinks through them, uses them as extensions of itself. The smaller ones operate on instinct, like animals. But the larger constructs, the ones that used to be military hardware or central AI cores, those have developed something close to intelligence."
"They hunt in packs, set traps, even communicate with each other."
She stopped suddenly, raising her fist in a signal Felix remembered from his old military training. He froze, listening.
At first, he heard nothing but his own breathing. Then he caught it, a soft skittering sound coming from somewhere above them, like metal claws on concrete.
Cyber's eyes dimmed, going into what Felix assumed was some kind of stealth mode. She motioned for him to stay still and pressed herself against the wall. Felix did the same, trying to control his breathing as the sound grew closer.
Something appeared on the landing three floors above them. It moved like a spider, but it was made of what looked like torn pieces of different machines welded together by crystallized Mana.
Six legs supported a body that was all jagged edges and exposed wiring. Its head, if it could be called that, was a cluster of camera lenses that rotated independently, scanning the stairwell below.
Felix held his breath as one of those lenses swiveled in his direction. For a moment, he was certain it had spotted him. But then it turned away, continuing its patrol across the landing before disappearing through a doorway on the other side.
Cyber waited a full minute before moving again. "That was a Scout variant. Relatively harmless on its own, but if it had detected us, it would have called for reinforcements. We need to move faster."
They climbed in silence for several more floors, passing doorways that led to dark corridors filled with who knew what. Felix's legs were burning now, his body not yet fully recovered from centuries of stasis. But he pushed through the pain, driven by a desperate need to see what had become of the world above.
Finally, they reached the top of the stairwell. A massive door blocked their path, this one sealed with an electronic lock that was somehow still functioning despite the Mana corruption everywhere else.
"This is the main security entrance," Cyber explained, approaching a control panel next to the door. "It's been sealed since the initial outbreak. No one's opened it in over two centuries."
She placed her hand on the panel, and Felix watched as blue light spread from her fingers across the surface. The lock clicked, groaned, and then slowly began to disengage. The door itself started to slide open, ancient motors struggling against rust and decay.
Light spilled through the widening gap, real sunlight that Felix hadn't seen in what felt like forever. He moved forward eagerly, ready to breathe fresh air again.
Then the door fully opened, and Felix's hope died in his chest. The world outside was a nightmare.
What had once been the streets of New Avalon was now a twisted hellscape of ruined buildings and corrupted technology. Skyscrapers lay toppled like fallen giants, their frames twisted and merged with massive crystalline growths that reached toward the sky.
The streets below were choked with the wreckage of vehicles that had fused together into grotesque sculptures of metal with glass. And everywhere, absolutely everywhere, were the machines.
They crawled over the ruins like insects, ranging from small things the size of dogs to massive constructs as large as buildings. Some were patrolling, others were fighting each other in savage displays of violence. The air itself seemed wrong, thick with purple mist that swirled between the ruins.
Felix stood frozen in the doorway, staring at the graveyard of civilization. This was Earth. This was home.
"Welcome to the Mana Apocalypse," Cyber said softly beside him.
"This is the world you helped create."