It started with the earth trembling.
Not the kind of quake that split mountains or swallowed homes—no, this was subtler. A whisper beneath the roots. A pulse under stone. Tanya felt it first while reviewing crude militia drills in the village square. Her foot sank half an inch into frost-laced soil and didn't return. The ground below had shifted… and it wasn't natural.
She stared down.
"Fetch me a shovel," she ordered flatly.
Within the hour, she had six men digging near the woods. Three feet down, they found blackened rock. Six feet, and they struck old metal—twisted, industrial, and coated in some oily sheen that stank of rotting copper.
At ten feet, they found the door.
Bolted, rusted, and buried by time. It bore no runes, no Viking carvings. Instead, it had symbols—angular, geometric, foreign even to Tanya's sharp memory. A strange language etched with surgical precision. More advanced than anything these Norse primitives could forge.
She leaned closer. Her breath steamed across the surface. One of the younger villagers muttered something about a burial vault.
Tanya did not respond. Her hand hovered just above the metal, and for the first time since arriving in this forsaken land… she felt it.
Magic. No—technology pretending to be magic. A presence. Artificial. Cold. Watching.
A click.
A hiss.
The door opened inward.
They stepped into the dark.
---
It wasn't a tomb. It was a lab.
Steel walls. Cracked monitors. Tubes still humming with viscous, glowing fluids. The deeper they went, the warmer it became. A low mechanical heartbeat pulsed from somewhere below—steady, unnatural.
And then… a voice.
Not booming, not divine. It didn't echo from the walls. It oozed, like oil through cloth. Soft. Smiling. Rotten.
"Oho… so the surface apes have remembered their manners."
The villagers screamed. One bolted. Tanya raised her hand and burned the exit shut behind them. Fear had no place here—not yet.
Then he emerged.
The thing that called itself Mayuri Kurotsuchi was less a man than a living contradiction. Skin painted white with ritualistic lines, hair wild and ink-black. He wore robes of yellow and metal, though the cloth shimmered like it might breathe. His eyes were wrong. One blinked like a camera lens; the other dripped some phosphorescent fluid.
He regarded Tanya with fascination.
"Ohh… oh this is deliciously inconvenient. You're not from here, are you?"
Tanya said nothing.
"You smell of something… artificial. Like smelted steel and saltpeter. And…" He inhaled deeply, audibly, as though savoring perfume.
"Despair. Military-grade. Refined."
Tanya stared back. "You're not native either."
His grin widened, impossible and grotesque. "What gave it away? The décor?"
---
The others didn't survive the conversation. One screamed when Mayuri moved too quickly. Another tried to run. Both ended up as "samples," their organs removed with surgical efficiency while their blood was still warm. Tanya didn't blink. She watched.
"You didn't stop me," Mayuri noted, wiping a scalpel on a dishrag that twitched like it was alive.
"I was gathering data," she replied.
"Ahhh… my kind of girl."
He offered tea—boiling in a cup carved from bone—and Tanya accepted, if only to test it. Bitter, sour, and laced with something hallucinogenic. She sipped once. No reaction. He laughed in delight.
"You are something. Not Norse. Not Christian. Not even magically inclined in the native sense. And yet, you burn like a little sun."
"I'm a soldier."
"Oh, I can tell. It's in the way you suppress disgust. How you weigh every word like it's a bullet."
He leaned forward. "Tell me, little sun. Are you here to conquer me?"
Tanya sipped again. "No."
"Then why not leave?"
"Because I think you're useful."
He blinked. "How rude. How accurate."
---
They spent hours speaking—of worlds lost and wars waged. Of technology mistaken for godhood. Tanya told him little, but he inferred plenty. He wasn't a genius. He was worse—curious.
And curiosity with tools was more dangerous than any god.
"I need weapons," Tanya said eventually.
"I build abominations."
"Same difference."
Mayuri grinned. "What's in it for me?"
"Subjects."
"Oho… what kind?"
"Human. Alive. Terrified."
He giggled like a child being offered candy. Then his face turned grave.
"You would feed me your own people?"
Tanya met his gaze. "They're not mine. Not yet."
The silence that followed was intimate. Not warm—surgical. An agreement carved in mutual ambition.
"Then we have a deal," Mayuri whispered.
---
When she left the bunker that night, the village hadn't noticed her absence. The fire still crackled in the hearth. The children still trained with wooden swords. The elders still prayed to gods that never answered.
And below it all, in the dark earth, a new kind of god whispered to itself…
…and laughed.