"THE STATION BENEATH"
The metal door groaned open.
And just like that, they were inside.
It wasn't a tunnel. Not immediately. It opened into a maintenance chamber—rough concrete walls, broken floodlights hanging like vines, and cables veined across the ceiling like dead arteries. A rank smell greeted them: mold, old oil, something else they couldn't name.
"Why's it so warm?" Hina asked, wiping sweat from her brow. "This deep down, it should be cold."
"Maybe old generators," Ren offered. "Maybe… I dunno. Ghosts."
"Can you stop saying 'ghosts' every five minutes?"
Yuto's light caught something on the floor. He knelt down. "Hey—track marks." He traced parallel grooves leading across the chamber and down a collapsed stairway.
"Train tracks?" Hina asked.
Ren followed the path with the camera. "It's real. This wasn't made up. We're in it."
Minato stayed still.
He was staring at a corner of the room where a strip of wall was missing. A thin, black gap—barely the width of a hand—ran from floor to ceiling. Like something had pressed against the walls and forced them to crack outward from within.
"Guys," he said quietly. "Don't shine light into that."
Hina turned. "Why?"
"Just don't."
---
They climbed through the stairway rubble, into a lower passage where the air felt wrong. Not stale. Just… wrong. Like breathing in the aftermath of a scream you didn't hear.
And then they found the station.
The platform stretched endlessly in both directions, disappearing into shadow. The rail tracks were dry and sunken. Pillars jutted out every few meters, many of them warped or cracked, like they'd been exposed to pressure they were never built to withstand.
"Is this... marble?" Yuto knelt beside the track wall, brushing dust aside. "Why would a subway station be made with marble?"
"It's old," Ren said. "Pre-war, maybe. Could be an elite line. Rich-people tunnel."
"Or a cover-up," Hina said. "Why seal a place this big? Why pretend it never existed?"
They all fell silent again.
Then the sound returned.
A distant tapping.
Slow. Unsteady.
Tap.
Pause.
Tap-tap.
Drag.
Everyone froze.
Ren focused the camera toward the sound, adjusting exposure manually. "Is that footsteps?"
"It's not walking right," Hina whispered.
Minato moved first, stepping off the platform onto the rails, sweeping his flashlight across the walls.
"No reflections," he muttered.
"What?"
"There's light, but no reflections."
Yuto swung his beam toward a broken mirror fixed to one of the pillars. His own face stared back, smeared and cracked—except the eyes were blacked out entirely.
The tapping stopped.
Then something metallic clanged from the far end of the station.
They all ducked instinctively.
Ren whispered, "Still live. Chat's going crazy."
> pr0jectsoul: tf was that
gaslightadmin: DID YALL HEAR THE METAL
facenight: STOP MOVING STOP MOVING STOP MOVING
A second clang. Closer.
"Back up," Minato said. "Don't turn your backs, but back up."
"Was it the wind?" Yuto offered weakly.
"No wind this far down," Hina said.
Then—laughter.
Childlike. Echoing. But something was off in the pitch, like an audio file spliced wrong.
The flashlight beams swerved.
A figure was standing at the far end of the station.
Distant. Still. Just... watching.
Thin. Too tall.
Ren zoomed with the camera. "Is that—?"
Then the figure moved.
Not walked. Moved.
Like frames were being skipped. One second at the far end of the tunnel. Next, standing twenty feet closer.
Hina screamed. "We have to go—"
"No sudden moves," Minato snapped. "We're being observed."
Another jump—ten feet away now.
Its body was segmented, too many joints. Elbows bending both ways. Limbs twisting with fluid grace and impossible stiffness all at once.
Then the lights went out.
---
Dark.
No stream.
No flashlight.
No breathing—until someone gasped.
"Who's there?!" Ren shouted.
Nothing answered.
Then—
A sharp, glitched static scream tore through their ears. The sound wasn't from around them. It was inside them. In their bones. In their molars. Like a radio trapped under skin.
Ren's camera sparked as it rebooted.
Flickering frames.
A blurry image.
And then a face—right in front of him.
No eyes.
Just sockets.
Teeth—but no mouth.
Too many teeth.
He swung the camera wildly. Everyone was running, screaming, scattering through the darkness.
"Run!" Minato's voice. Clear. Commanding.
---
They barreled through one of the side tunnels—Minato in the lead, Ren clinging to his shoulder, the camera swinging wildly but still capturing streaks of hell.
Behind them, something shrieked. Not like a human.
More like a modem trying to scream.
A low-frequency distortion rolled through the walls and made the lights flicker—like the thing wasn't chasing them through the tunnel, it was inside the architecture.
"Where's Yuto?!" Hina shouted, breathless.
"I—I thought he was with you!"
Then—
A scream. Yuto's voice.
Cut off.
Dead silence.
And the light returned.
---
They stopped, panting, at the edge of a collapsed hallway.
The tiles around them were scorched. A smear of black blood ran across the wall like someone had been dragged.
But no sign of Yuto.
Just a single shoe.
Still smoking.
Ren was on the floor, filming without thinking, unable to keep his hands from shaking.
"I…" he whispered, "I think we just lost him."
Minato turned to them, pale and wide-eyed for the first time.
"That thing didn't just chase us," he said. "It read us. It learned us. It moved like glitching memory. Like corrupted playback."
Ren looked at him. "What are you saying?"
Minato turned toward the tunnel behind them.
"It's not just haunted.
It remembers us."