The first elevator was dead.
Lucent pressed the call button again, his fingers leaving smudges on the dust-coated panel. No response. No hum of machinery, no flicker of light behind the darkened display. Just cold, silent metal. He ran his palm along the seam where the doors met, feeling for any vibration, any hint of life. Nothing.
Karen exhaled, her breath stirring the fine layer of grit that had settled over everything in this facility. "Of course it's fucking broken," she muttered, as she pressed on the button too many times knowing that nothing will happen anyway
Kai hovered at her shoulder, his fingers tapping an anxious rhythm against his Conduit. The neurostimulant still buzzed in his veins, making his skin feel too tight, he spoke of his thoughts too loud. "Next one?" he asked, already turning toward the other elevators.
The second elevator's doors stood half-open. Inside, the car hung at a drunken angle, its floor tilted toward the black maw of the shaft below. A support beam had sheared through the ceiling, punching down through the center of the space like a spear. Rusted cables dangled like severed tendons, swaying slightly in some unfelt current of air.
Karen leaned in, peering down into the darkness. "Yeah, no. Next."
The third elevator was sealed behind a security gate, its biometric scanner pried open long ago, wires spilling out like gutted intestines. The keypad had been melted into a single fused mass of plastic and circuitry. Someone had really not wanted this one used.
Karen kicked the panel, her boot connecting with a hollow clang that echoed down the empty hallway. "Fucking Myriad and their goddamn locks," she snarled, shaking out her leg. The impact sent fresh waves of pain to her legs, but she'd be damned before she let it show.
The fourth elevator looked no different at first glance—just another steel door in a line of failures. But when Lucent pressed the call button, the panel flickered to life with a soft chime. The doors slid open with a hiss that was too smooth, too quiet, revealing an interior that was... wrong.
The lights inside were bright, sterile, casting sharp shadows across spotless walls. The floor gleamed, free of the grime and bloodstains that marked the rest of the facility. The air that wafted out was cool, filtered, carrying a faint metallic tang that set Lucent's teeth on edge.
Karen hesitated at the threshold, her good hand hovering near her pistol. "That's not right," she murmured.
Kai's fingers twitched toward his Conduit, the screen flickering in response to his racing pulse. "It's like it's been... waiting," he said, his voice too loud in the sudden stillness.
Lucent stepped in first.
The moment all three of them crossed the threshold, the doors snapped shut behind them—fast, too fast, like the jaws of a trap closing. None of them had touched the controls.
A jolt rocked the car as it began to move down.
Kai grabbed the railing, his knuckles whitening as the floor numbers on the panel lit up in sequence:
B1... B2... B3...
"We didn't press anything," Karen said, her voice tight. Her back pressed against the wall, her body angled to keep both the doors and Lucent in her sight.
Lucent's knife was in his hand before the elevator passed Sub-Level 4. The blade caught the fluorescent light, the edge gleaming like a promise.
The descent didn't stop.
B5... B6...
Then—
B7.
A deep, resonant thud shook the car as it settled into place. The doors didn't open immediately. The air inside grew heavier, thicker, humming with the vibration of active machinery—something far older, far more awake than the dying systems above. The walls seemed to breathe, the metal expanding and contracting almost imperceptibly with each pulse of power through hidden conduits.
When the doors finally parted, the corridor beyond was nothing like the decaying labs upstairs.
The walls were lined with glowing Aether circuitry, veins of blue-white light pulsing beneath polished metal panels. The light wasn't steady—it flickered and surged in time with some unseen heartbeat, casting shifting patterns across the seamless floor.
Every few steps, heavy security doors stood shut, their surfaces etched with warnings in a language Kai didn't recognize. No handles. No keypads. Just smooth, unyielding metal that reflected their distorted silhouettes back at them.
The air smelled different here—not the stale decay of the upper levels, but something sharper, cleaner, like ozone and sterilized steel. It made Kai's nose itch, his eyes water.
"This isn't just a lab," he whispered, his voice swallowed by the vastness of the space.
Lucent stepped out first, his boots silent on the immaculate floor. The moment his weight left the elevator, the doors snapped shut behind them—locking them in with a finality that echoed in the sudden silence.
Karen turned, slamming her palm against the metal. "Oh, you goddamn—"
No response. The elevator wasn't coming back.
Ahead, the corridor stretched into darkness, the Aether lights flickering like distant stars. The doors lining the hall remained closed, indifferent to their presence. The only sound was the faint, almost subliminal hum of power running through the walls, a sound that vibrated in their teeth, their bones.
Then—
A sound.
Not scraping. Not screaming.
A single, mechanical click.
Somewhere deep in Sub-Level 7, something had just powered on.
The lights in the corridor dimmed for a heartbeat, then flared brighter, the Aether veins pulsing in a rapid sequence—like a signal, like a warning.
Karen's pistol was in her hand before she realized she'd drawn it. "We move," she said, her voice low and rough. "Now."
But the choice wasn't theirs to make.
Because at the far end of the corridor, where the darkness was deepest, a door hissed open.
And from within, something began to laugh.
The corridor stretched before them, endless and suffocating, its walls humming with the pulse of Aether veins. Every step echoed too loudly, their boots clicking against the polished floor like the ticking of a clock counting down to something inevitable.
They tested the doors as they passed—each one sealed, unyielding, their surfaces cold to the touch. No handles, no seams, just smooth metal that refused to acknowledge them. Kai dragged his fingers along one, feeling for any weakness, any hidden mechanism. Nothing.
"They're not just locked," he murmured, his voice thin in the sterile air. "They're waiting."
Lucent didn't answer. His knife hadn't left his grip since the elevator, his knuckles pale with tension. His eyes never stopped moving—tracking the flicker of the lights, the slight shifts in the hum of the machinery, the way the air itself seemed to thicken the farther they went.
Then, at the end of the corridor, the space widened.
The walls pulled back, revealing a vaulted chamber ahead, its ceiling lost in shadow. And there, looming like the jaws of some great beast, stood a pair of massive steel doors—thicker than any they'd seen, etched with glyphs that shimmered faintly in the low light.
A hiss cut through the silence.
The doors parted, sliding open with a slow, deliberate motion.
No mechanism whined. No gears groaned. They simply opened, as if the facility itself had been holding its breath—and now exhaled.
Beyond lay darkness.
Karen's finger twitched against the trigger of her pistol. "Well," she muttered, "that's not fucking ominous at all."
Kai swallowed hard, his Conduit buzzing in his grip. "We don't have a choice, do we?"
Lucent's jaw tightened. "No."
They stepped forward.
The moment they crossed the threshold, the doors behind them slammed shut with a finality that vibrated through the floor. The sound was deafening—a tomb sealing.
Darkness swallowed them.
Then—
Lights flared to life, harsh and sudden, blinding them for a heartbeat before their vision adjusted.
The chamber was vast, circular, its walls lined with towering machines that hummed with quiet power. At the center stood a raised platform, surrounded by a ring of monitors, each screen flickering with distorted images—faces, schematics, fragments of text too scrambled to read.
And there, in the middle of it all, a figure waited.
Not a Hollowed. Not a corpse.
A man.
Or something that had once been one.
His form flickered, distorted—projected into the space like a ghost, his edges bleeding static. His face was gaunt, his eyes too bright, his mouth stretched into a smile that didn't reach the hollows of his cheeks.
"Welcome," he said, his voice layered with something else—something mechanical, something wrong. "My unwilling participants."
Karen's pistol snapped up. "Who the hell are you?"
The figure tilted his head, the motion too smooth, too precise. "A remnant," he said. "A keeper. A voice in the dark." His image glitched, shuddering like a broken transmission. "And you… you are exactly what I've been waiting for."
Lucent's grip on his knife shifted. "What do you want?"
The figure's smile widened.
"Data." His voice was flat, clinical, as if stating the most obvious truth in the world.
The monitors flared to life behind him—and for the first time, the images resolved.
Security footage.
Of them.
Their journey through the facility, their fights, their near-deaths—every moment, watched, recorded, studied.
Kai's breath caught. "We were never alone."
The figure's laugh was a crackle of static.
"No," he said. "You never were."
And then the real trap sprang shut.
The air in the chamber grew thick with the scent of ozone and something metallic, like old blood left to dry on surgical steel. The flickering figure's grin stretched unnaturally wide, his projected face distorting at the edges as static danced across his translucent form. His hollow eyes gleamed with a cold amusement that made Karen's trigger finger itch.
"Let me give you a little bit of warm welcome," the specter said, his voice layered with mechanical distortion that echoed off the curved walls. The sarcasm in his tone was as sharp as the scalpels lining the surgical trays along the chamber's perimeter.
A deep, resonant hum vibrated through the floor plates as massive hydraulic systems groaned to life. The circular hatch at the chamber's center split apart with surgical precision, its segmented metal teeth sliding sideways to reveal a yawning black pit beneath. The grinding of ancient machinery filled the air as a platform rose from the darkness, its surface gleaming wet under the sterile white lights.
Ten figures stood frozen in perfect formation.
Hollowed.
But these were different from the shambling horrors they'd encountered before. These specimens looked almost... preserved. Their grayish skin stretched taut over perfectly intact musculature, their closed eyelids smooth and unbroken. They might have been sleeping if not for the faint blue glow pulsing beneath their skin, tracing the paths of corrupted Aether veins.
Lucent's knuckles whitened around his knife hilt, the leather grip creaking in protest. The scars along his forearm ached in remembered pain as he took in the sight before them.
"I don't like where this is going," he muttered, his voice low and rough like gravel underfoot.
Kai's Conduit screen flickered erratically in his trembling hands, the device picking up some strange interference from the chamber's humming machinery. His throat worked as he swallowed hard, the neurostimulant in his system making his pulse hammer against his eardrums.
"Am I to assume there will be fighting involved?" he asked, his attempt at levity falling flat as his voice cracked on the last word.
Karen shifted her weight, her boots scraping against the polished floor as she tested her stance. The pain from her ruined socket had settled into a deep, throbbing ache that radiated down her spine with every movement. She glanced at her companions, then down at her useless arm, before deadpanning: "Can you carry me, guys?"
Lucent's jaw clenched so tight his teeth ached. Every instinct screamed to turn on Karen, to snarl at her for leading them into this nightmare and for being the reason they were standing here facing down ten perfect killing machines. The words burned in his throat like acid - but there was no time. No breath to waste on blame when death was bearing down on them in silent, synchronized steps.
Karen must have felt the weight of his unspoken accusation anyway. She didn't look at him, just adjusted her grip on her pistol with a quiet, ragged breath. "Yeah," she muttered, as if answering his thoughts. "I know."
Kai's hands shook so badly his Conduit nearly slipped from his fingers. "Please," he whispered, not to his companions, but to the flickering specter watching them with detached amusement. "You don't have to do this."
The projection tilted its head, its smile never faltering. Static danced across its form as it considered Kai's plea. For one terrible, hopeful moment, the Hollowed hesitated - their synchronized advance stuttering like a glitching recording.
"You're right," it said, voice dripping with mocking sincerity.
For one fragile moment, Kai's grip on his conduit loosened.
Then the figure laughed—a glitching, stuttering sound that crackled through the intercom like a broken transmission. "Did you truly believe I would say that?" Its head tilted, the motion too smooth, too inhuman. "Oh, how precious. Still hoping for mercy after everything you've seen?"
Karen's pistol barked, the muzzle flash illuminating her gritted teeth and the sweat beading on her forehead. The round took the lead Hollowed square between the eyes, snapping its head back - but it didn't fall. Just staggered a step, then righted itself, the wound in its forehead already knitting closed with threads of blue Aether.
Karen's voice ringing to Lucent's ears. "Any brilliant ideas?" she gasped, firing again.
Lucent was too focused on figuring out how to survive this danger . "Die fighting," he growled.
The projection's laughter crackled through hidden speakers, the sound warping and distorting as it bounced off the curved walls. "Oh, no need for that," it purred, the words dripping with false reassurance.
As if on some unseen cue, ten pairs of eyelids snapped open in perfect synchronization. Milky white eyes, webbed with glowing blue veins, fixed on the trio with unnatural focus. The Hollowed didn't twitch or snarl - they simply turned their heads in unison, their movements smooth and mechanical.
The first one stepped forward with perfect balance, its bare feet making no sound against the metal platform. Then the second. Then the rest followed in eerie lockstep, their movements synchronized like parts of some terrible machine. No stumbling. No moaning. Just silent, purposeful advance.
Lucent didn't hesitate. "Back to back. Now." His voice cut through the rising panic like a blade through smoke. He shifted into a defensive stance, his knife held low and ready, his other hand already moving toward the Q-Serin vial in his pocket.
Karen raised her pistol with her good hand, the barrel steady despite the sweat slicking her palm.
The weapon's familiar weight was the only comfort in this nightmare scenario. "Well," she muttered through clenched teeth. "Shit."
Kai's Conduit finally stabilized, the screen resolving into a series of defensive glyphs as his fingers danced across its surface. The blue light reflected in his wide eyes as he watched the advancing horde. "I'm starting to really hate this place," he breathed, his voice barely above a whisper.
The Hollowed reached the edge of the platform and stepped down in perfect unison, their bare feet hitting the floor with ten simultaneous thuds that vibrated through the chamber.
Their arms hung loose at their sides, fingers twitching with restrained energy, their heads tilted at identical angles as they studied their prey.
The projection's grin never wavered as it watched from its safe distance, its hands clasped behind its back like a professor observing an interesting experiment. "Let's begin," it said softly.
And then the first Hollowed lunged.