The fluorescent lights overhead buzzed inconsistently, flickering with a sickly yellow hue as Ryunosuke followed Aiko and Mayu through the damp, narrow corridor. The concrete beneath their boots was slick with condensation, and somewhere above, the pipes groaned like an old ship under pressure.
They had memorized the path. No speaking. No lights. Just movement.
Aiko held a portable terminal close to her chest, its screen dimmed to the lowest setting. The map displayed a schematic of the Gamma facility's lower wings, lines traced with old engineering code. At the end of the corridor—just past the generator room—was a sealed access shaft used during the bunker's construction phase, now forgotten by most of the current PSIA rotation.
"Almost there," she whispered. "Ninety meters."
Mayu kept sweeping the rear with her sidearm, sharp-eyed, steps careful. She hadn't spoken since they left the dorms, but Ryunosuke could feel her nerves like static electricity in the air.
The tension hadn't faded since the tunnel ambush. If anything, it had crystallized into something heavier—something harder to ignore. Every corner felt like it had eyes. Every overhead camera felt just slightly off-angle, like someone had repositioned it just after they passed.
They turned the final bend and reached the old service bulkhead.
Aiko knelt immediately, flipping open a rust-covered access panel and extracting a toolkit. "This was supposed to be decommissioned in '95. If the relays weren't completely fused, we can open it manually."
Mayu crouched beside her, pistol raised, scanning the hallway.
Ryunosuke stayed back, eyes flicking between shadows.
For a moment, there was only the soft tapping of metal tools and Aiko's quiet breath.
Then—
Click.
Aiko froze.
"That's not me," she muttered.
Ryunosuke's chest tightened. "What—"
BOOM.
The tunnel behind them erupted in flame and shrapnel, the shockwave sending all three crashing to the floor. Ryunosuke landed hard on his side, head ringing, vision spinning with bursts of white. The lights above exploded in sequence, showering them in sparks.
Dust choked the air. The corridor was plunged into chaos.
Mayu recovered first, dragging Ryunosuke behind an outcropping of broken wall. Aiko scrambled up, coughing, clutching her terminal as she kicked away a smoking piece of debris.
Then came the footsteps.
Not running—advancing. Four, maybe five sets. Heavy, tactical. Precision-born.
Shapes emerged from the smoke. Black suits. No insignia. No words. Faces hidden behind masks. Their rifles swept in unison, trained toward the pile of broken concrete.
"Move!" Mayu screamed, returning fire in short bursts.
Aiko dove behind a power junction as bullets tore into the opposite wall. Ryunosuke, dazed, crawled back through the broken doorway into the facility proper.
Mayu laid down suppressing fire, then followed, dragging Aiko by the shoulder.
They retreated into the auxiliary corridor—abandoned, narrow, barely wide enough to move side by side.
"I thought you said this exit was clean!" Mayu shouted.
"It was," Aiko snapped. "They must've prepped it hours ago. We were already compromised before we moved."
They ducked into an old vent access hatch, slamming it shut behind them. Aiko scrambled to weld it from the inside with a sparking multitool.
The thud of boots on metal echoed outside—then silence.
Ryunosuke pressed his back to the wall, sweat dripping from his brow, eyes wide with fear and fury. "We're actually being hunted."
"Not hunted," Aiko said, finishing the weld. "Erased."
The air in the shaft was still and sour.
Ryunosuke looked at the faces of the people beside him. Exhausted. Cornered. Bloody.
They had made it out of the lie. But they weren't out of the fire.
Not even close.
The emergency lights had gone from yellow to blood red.
Ryunosuke's heartbeat pulsed in rhythm with them as he pressed his back against the rusted support strut. The hallway ahead dipped slightly, leading deeper into a maintenance sublevel meant for power routing and water regulation. It wasn't on any of the official maps—not even the one Aiko decrypted.
But the men hunting them seemed to know exactly where it was.
Gunfire still echoed behind them—short bursts followed by silence, like punctuation in a deadly sentence. The bodies they'd passed two corridors ago—facility techs, barely armed—were shot in the back. Executed mid-run.
"They're not trying to contain the breach," Aiko whispered as she crouched beside a ruptured conduit. "They're wiping the entire facility."
Ryunosuke ducked lower. "Why?"
"Because Gamma's failed. The public already knows. Kanda doesn't care about cleanup—he wants everything gone. If I had to guess, it's so they don't have anything other than the leaks when he goes to jail."
Mayu peeked around the corner, then quickly withdrew. "Two of them. Moving slow. Tactical spacing."
"They're clearing the area," Aiko murmured. "Standard slice-and-sweep. Room by room. They'll push us into a bottleneck."
"We're already in one," Mayu hissed.
From above came a faint groan of twisted metal—then a dull thump. Dust sprinkled down from the pipes overhead.
Ryunosuke clenched his fists. "How do we turn this around?"
Mayu didn't respond. Instead, she reached into her jacket and pulled out a flashbang. "We buy time."
Without waiting, she tossed it around the corner.
Snap.
A blast of white light flooded the hall, followed by panicked shouting and gunfire. Mayu rushed in, dropping to a knee mid-sprint and firing twice. A scream cut short. She kicked one body aside and waved the others forward.
They moved fast.
Two corridors down, they ducked into a storage room and sealed the door with an old pipe shoved through the latch. Inside, the air was heavy with mildew and the faint chemical stink of coolant.
Aiko slumped against the wall, pulling up a diagnostic on her terminal. Her voice was shaky. "Secondary explosives went off near the upper labs. They're burying the levels above us. C-section is gone."
"They're keeping us from getting out," Ryunosuke said.
"No," Aiko replied grimly. "They're collapsing it all. Once they're sure we're dead, they'll bury the evidence with us."
A soft moan made them all turn.
A wounded man lay near the far wall—PSIA uniform, badge melted partially from heat. His lower torso was soaked with blood.
Mayu knelt beside him. "Name?"
He coughed. "Agent Mori…"
"Where's your team?"
"Gone. We were monitoring the west corridor… Thought it was just a drill…"
Mayu gritted her teeth. "What's coming?"
He looked up, eyes glassy. "Not just soldiers… something else is down here… it was a tiger wrapped in flames…"
Before anyone could press him further, he exhaled sharply and went still.
The silence was louder than before.
Aiko knelt and pulled the dog tag from his neck. "We should move. Before whatever he saw finds us."
"Where to?" Ryunosuke asked.
She looked up at him with a hollow expression.
"Deeper."
The server room had been gutted years ago, its racks half-rusted, stripped for copper, and left humming like tired lungs. Red standby lights blinked faintly across the rows of old terminal husks, casting jagged shadows against the peeling walls.
Aiko pried open an old node panel, her fingers steady despite the tremor in her breath. Ryunosuke and Mayu dragged the door shut behind them and reinforced it with a snapped server tray and a bent steel bracket.
No words were spoken for a full thirty seconds.
Then Aiko broke the silence. "They've severed uplink from Gamma to Central PSIA. No traffic in or out. Internal logs show a partial override, pushed from an off-site node labeled only 'OMEGA-RED.'"
Mayu narrowed her eyes. "That's not PSIA."
"It's not in any of our known ops code either," Aiko confirmed. "It's not military. It's private."
Ryunosuke sat against the far wall, head tilted back, sweat dripping from his neck. He could barely breathe.
His vision pulsed.
The red lights. The steel. The smell of burning plastic and something… darker. He blinked hard, but it didn't go away. The shadows kept twitching at the corners of his eyes. Shapes trying to form, trying to speak.
His fingers clenched.
"Something's… wrong," he whispered.
Mayu turned, alarmed. "Are you hurt?"
"No. It's not that. It's like—" His voice cracked. "Like I'm not alone in here."
Aiko stopped typing. "What do you mean?"
But before Ryunosuke could answer, the terminal buzzed.
The screen turned to static.
A low-frequency sound, like a heartbeat underwater, filled the room.
Aiko stepped back. "That's not coming from this system…"
It was coming from beneath it.
The floor itself vibrated subtly. Not from footsteps. Not from machinery.
From pressure.
Something was pushing up—through the bunker.
Mayu raised her weapon instinctively, eyes darting toward the door. "We need to move. Now."
Then the lights died.
Every server blinked off.
Only the emergency exit sign cast a dim green glow on their pale faces.
The silence was so loud it pressed on their skulls.
And then—
Screams.
Not close. Not distant.
Somewhere in between. From a place no sound should travel.
They were wet. Distorted. Like lungs filled with oil and glass.
Aiko reached out to Ryunosuke—but he was already standing, staring at the floor.
His eyes had gone violet again.
His skin shimmered with cold sweat. The pupils weren't human anymore—slits in oceans of white.
He didn't speak.
He existed.
The vibration stopped.
Outside the room, something burst—a sudden release of energy. Alarms shrieked and failed. The air sank with heat and pressure as if gravity itself had warped.
When Mayu peeked out the server room door, she gasped.
Four mercenaries lay in the hallway. Their armor had melted at the chest. Their faces frozen in rictus. Black scorch marks spiraled around them—not outward like an explosion, but inward, as if sucked toward Ryunosuke's location.
Aiko pulled Mayu back and shut the door.
They all looked at Ryunosuke.
His eyes slowly faded back to brown. He blinked.
"What happened?" he asked softly.
No one answered.
Even the shadows were quiet now.
They moved without speaking.
No one acknowledged the bodies in the hallway as they passed—what was left of them. The scorch marks still steamed. The smell of burning metal and carbonized flesh clung to the air like an invisible fog, saturating their lungs.
Ryunosuke followed behind Aiko and Mayu, his steps shaky, disconnected. His legs moved, but everything felt off-balance—like his body was just slightly out of sync with the world around him.
They reached the Emergency Control Deck two sublevels up. The room was built like a bunker within a bunker—reinforced steel walls, analog overrides, and an ancient comms rig intended for disaster scenarios. Dust blanketed the consoles. The overhead lights barely worked.
Aiko set her terminal down and immediately began attempting a link override.
"I'm sending a blind transmission to the Shibuya cell. It's not on PSIA's network anymore—decommissioned after the embassy leak in '19. If anyone's still listening, they'll respond."
Mayu stood by the only window—a reinforced slit looking into a ruined section of corridor beyond. Rubble choked the exit. One of the walls was caved in, dripping with black water from a ruptured pipe. A fluorescent tube hung by a single wire, swinging like a pendulum.
"Every exit's either buried or crawling with those mercs," she said quietly. "They didn't miss anything."
Ryunosuke sat down slowly on a crate. His fingers trembled, not from fear—but from the memory of control slipping away.
He looked up at the two of them. "What happened back there…."
Mayu turned, arms crossed. "What was that?"
"I don't know." He stared at his hands. "It felt like I blinked… and something else opened its eyes."
Aiko didn't look away from the screen. "You annihilated four armed men without moving. That's not adrenaline. That's something else entirely."
Ryunosuke's voice dropped. "I didn't mean to. I wasn't even… angry. I was scared."
Mayu didn't answer. She walked past him and picked up one of the fallen mercs' rifles from earlier. Examined it. Clicked it empty. Set it down again.
Aiko sighed. "If we're going to survive this, we need to understand two things. One: we are absolutely cut off. No one is coming. Two: whatever happened to Ryunosuke? It might be the only thing keeping us alive."
She turned and looked directly at him for the first time in hours.
"That makes you a weapon. The question is—whose?"
Before he could respond, the lights cut out again.
Then came the footsteps.
Slow. Measured. Not the wild stomping of battle, nor the rapid shuffle of troops.
Deliberate.
The three of them dropped into cover behind the ruined console as the door across the room unlatched with a hiss and a mechanical click.
A man stepped inside.
He wore no insignia. His armor was charcoal gray, tactical. A pulse rifle slung low, but idle. His face was hidden beneath a smooth black visor.
In his left hand, he dragged a body.
It hit the floor with a dull thud. Blood smeared the concrete behind it.
The figure knelt. Pressed a gloved hand to his earpiece. His voice was quiet but carried.
"Subject is here. Visual confirmed. Facility compromised. Orders?"
A pause. Then a nod.
"Understood. I'll finish it myself."
He stood.
The lights flickered once.
And then went out completely.