The fall didn't kill them. It just broke everything else.
Kaelen woke to the taste of copper and stagnant water. He was lying on his back, half-submerged in a shallow pool of slime that smelled of rot and old electricity.
Darkness pressed against his eyes. It wasn't the clean, edited darkness of the surface night. It was a heavy, suffocating gloom, thick with dust and the weight of a million tons of rock overhead.
"Renna?" he croaked.
His voice didn't echo. It was swallowed instantly by the damp air.
"Here," a voice whispered from the dark. It was tight with pain.
Kaelen forced himself to sit up. His body screamed in protest. His ribs, already cracked, felt like they were grinding together. He fumbled for the tactical light on his belt—one of the few pieces of gear that had survived the trek.
He clicked it on.
A beam of harsh white light cut through the gloom.
They weren't in a cave. They were in a station.
It was a relic of the Pre-Silence era. Tiled walls, cracked and stained with yellow fungus, curved upward into a vaulted ceiling. Rusted turnstiles stood like skeletal sentries at the edge of the light. A faded sign hung from a single wire, the letters [METRO - SECTOR 7] barely visible through the grime.
Renna was slumped against a ticket booth, clutching her leg. The splint Kaelen had made was bent, and her face was a mask of pale sweat.
"We fell through a ventilation shaft," she wheezed, pointing up. High above, a jagged hole in the ceiling revealed only blackness. "The railgun broke my fall. And probably two more ribs."
Kaelen crawled over to her. He checked her pulse. Fast, thready, but steady.
"We're alive," he said.
"Debatable," Renna muttered. She looked around the silent station. "Where are we, Kaelen?"
Kaelen stood up, swaying. He swept the flashlight beam across the platform. He saw old vending machines with shattered glass. He saw piles of refuse that might have been clothes—or bodies—decades ago.
"The Hollows," Kaelen said grimly. "The subterranean layer. The Admin doesn't come down here."
He tried to summon the System.
Usually, it was as easy as breathing. A thought, and the blue interface would overlay his vision.
Nothing happened.
He pushed harder, focusing his will.
[ CONNECTING... ]
[ SIGNAL WEAK ]
[ UNABLE TO SYNC WITH SERVER ]
The text was faint, flickering like a dying bulb. It hovered for a second, then dissolved into static.
Kaelen let out a breath he didn't know he was holding.
"The Silence is blind here," he said. "The signal can't punch through this much rock and interference. Valerius can't edit the road down here because he can't see it."
"So we're safe?" Renna asked, forcing herself to stand using the ticket booth as a crutch.
Kaelen shone the light down the dark tunnel that led deeper into the earth.
"No," he said. "We're just off the map. And in a system like this, the things that get thrown off the map aren't deleted. They're just... corrupted."
He picked up the Mark-IV Railgun. The housing was dented, covered in slime, but the mechanism looked intact. It was a heavy, brutal weight in his hands.
"We move," Kaelen said. "If we stay here, the infection in your leg kills you. We need to find a way back up, or a way deeper to the Anchor's roots."
They began to walk.
The Hollows were a graveyard of technology.
As they moved deeper into the transit tunnels, the architecture changed. The metro station gave way to massive, industrial corridors lined with server racks. Roots from the surface had punched through the ceiling, wrapping around the metal servers like strangler figs.
And then, there were the glitches.
Kaelen saw a metal door that was flickering—Solid. Gone. Solid. Gone. He saw a puddle of water that was flowing up the wall, defying gravity.
"It's the Recycle Bin," Renna whispered, staring at the impossible water. "Everything the System couldn't process... it just dumped it down here."
"Keep moving," Kaelen warned. "Don't touch anything."
They rounded a corner into a wide maintenance bay.
And they stopped.
Standing in the center of the room, illuminated by the erratic sparks of a severed power cable, was a figure.
It looked human. Or it had been, once.
It was wearing the tattered remains of a maintenance uniform. It stood facing the wall, its head twitching in a rhythmic, jerky spasm.
Kaelen signaled Renna to hold. He clicked off his flashlight, plunging them into the dim, strobe-lit darkness of the sparking cable.
[ AUTHORITY CHECK ]
[ MANA: 0 ]
[ SYSTEM: OFFLINE ]
Kaelen cursed silently. He couldn't scan it. He couldn't edit it. He had to rely on his eyes.
The figure turned.
Renna gasped.
The man's face wasn't there.
It wasn't missing. It was smeared.
The features—eyes, nose, mouth—were stretched vertically down his chest like wet paint dragged by a thumb. The geometry of his skull was all wrong, expanding and contracting like a breathing lung.
"Er... ror..."
The sound didn't come from a throat. It came from the air around him, a grinding digital screech.
[ TARGET: HOLLOWED ]
[ STATUS: CORRUPTED DATA ]
The man lunged.
He didn't run. He glitched forward. One moment he was twenty feet away; the next, he was ten.
"Contact!" Renna shouted. She raised her rifle, but in the tight corridor, the long barrel was clumsy.
The Hollowed screamed—a sound of pure static—and swiped at them. His arm elongated unnaturally, the bones stretching like rubber to bridge the distance.
Kaelen didn't think. He stepped in front of Renna and swung the railgun like a baseball bat.
CRUNCH.
The heavy metal stock slammed into the Hollowed's chest.
It felt like hitting a bag of wet cement. There was no satisfying snap of bone. The creature absorbed the impact, its body deforming around the weapon.
It grabbed the gun.
Kaelen felt a shock of cold nausea travel up his arms. The corruption wasn't just physical; it was viral.
"Let go!" Kaelen roared. He kicked the creature in the knee.
The knee bent backward with a wet pop, but the Hollowed didn't react. It didn't feel pain. It only felt the directive to consume code.
It opened its smeared mouth. A black void of pixels swirled inside.
BLAM.
Renna fired her sidearm.
The heavy revolver round took the Hollowed in the shoulder. It didn't kill it, but the kinetic force knocked it back, breaking its grip on the railgun.
"Headshot!" Kaelen yelled. "Sever the processing!"
Renna fired again.
The bullet hit the center of the smeared face.
The Hollowed's head didn't explode. It shattered like glass. Fragments of polygon and gore sprayed the air. The body stood for a second, twitching violently, before collapsing into a pile of gray dust.
Kaelen slumped against the wall, breathing hard. He wiped the digital gore from his coat.
"What... was that?" Renna asked, her hand trembling as she reloaded.
"A deletion that failed," Kaelen said. He looked at the pile of dust. "The System tried to erase him, but something stopped it halfway. Now he's just... a loop."
He looked down the corridor. Shadows were moving.
Not one. Dozens.
The gunshot had echoed.
"We made noise," Kaelen said, gripping the railgun. "And down here, the things that listen are hungry."
"We can't fight a horde," Renna said, checking her ammo. "I have twelve rounds left. You have a club."
"We don't fight," Kaelen said. "We find a choke point."
They ran.
They scrambled through the maze of tunnels, turning left, then right, guided only by the instinct to go down. The deeper they went, the heavier the air became.
Behind them, the shrieks of the Hollowed multiplied. A chorus of static and pain.
They burst through a set of double doors into a massive, circular chamber.
Kaelen slammed the doors shut. He jammed the barrel of the railgun through the handles, barring it.
THUD.
THUD.
The Hollowed slammed against the other side. The metal groaned.
"It won't hold," Renna said, backing away.
Kaelen turned to look at the room they were in.
It was silent.
The floor was clean. No dust. No slime.
In the center of the room stood a single, massive pillar of black stone, pulsing with a faint, rhythmic blue light. It looked ancient. Older than the Rust-Spire. Older than the Silence.
Kaelen walked toward it. The air here felt... stable. The flickering in his vision stopped.
"This isn't a glitch," Kaelen whispered.
He placed his hand on the black stone.
A hum vibrated through his arm. It wasn't the cold, aggressive static of Valerius. It was warm. And as he held his hand there, he felt the pulse of the stone synchronize perfectly with his own heartbeat. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
[ SYSTEM DETECTED: UNREGISTERED NODE ]
[ ACCESS: OPEN ]
"It's a server," Kaelen realized. "A local server. Offline. Disconnected from the main grid."
He looked at the doors, which were buckling under the assault of the Hollowed.
"They can't come in here," Kaelen said, a slow smile spreading across his face. "Valerius has no power here."
CRASH.
The doors gave way. The railgun clattered to the floor.
A horde of Hollowed poured into the entrance.
But they stopped at the threshold of the clean floor. They shrieked, clawing at the air, but they couldn't cross the line. An invisible barrier of logic kept the corrupted data out of the stable node.
They were safe.
Renna slid down the side of the black pillar, exhaustion finally claiming her. "Safe zone?"
"Better," Kaelen said. He looked at the pulsing blue light.
"Jurisdiction."
He sat down, leaning his back against the stone. For the first time in days, the pressure in his skull vanished.
He closed his eyes.
And then, he heard it.
Through the stone pillar against his ear. A vibration.
Thump. Thump.
Footsteps.
But they weren't the erratic, shuffling steps of the Hollowed. And they weren't the glitching teleportation of the Silence.
They were steady. Heavy. Purposeful.
Someone was walking. Deep below them.
And they were getting closer.
"Renna," Kaelen whispered, his eyes snapping open.
"I hear it," she said, clutching her knife. "Is it another monster?"
Kaelen listened to the rhythm. It sounded like a heartbeat returning to a dead body.
"No," Kaelen said. "Monsters hunt. This thing... is searching."