The wind that howled through the Hollow Ridge facility no longer sounded like mere wind. It whispered in a voice made of ash and memory — the kind that clung to your bones. Dust hung thick in the air like the breath of the dead, and every step deeper into the mountain bunker felt like crossing a threshold between man and monster.
The trio stood at the cracked entry hall of the lab, Echo's voice crackling faintly from a corroded speaker above the heavy door.
"Welcome… Subject 0107. Welcome home."
Li Wei's expression didn't change. Rui, however, stiffened. Her small hand hovered near the blade strapped to her thigh. Chen Yu chuckled, low and unbothered, chewing on the last remnants of a mutated rodent he'd cooked with his flame-kissed fingertips. "Creepy old AI calls you 'home' like we're visiting grandma's grave," he muttered.
The lights flickered as the rusted door groaned open, revealing a corridor of blinking red bulbs, bloodstained tiles, and forgotten dreams. Rui walked in first.
They entered the facility slowly, flashlights sweeping across long-forgotten terminals and shattered specimen tanks. Some of the tanks still hissed faintly, despite decades of abandonment. One tank held a fetus, long dead, curled like a question mark. Another still leaked a strange, pulsing fluid — too dark to be blood, too viscous to be water.
Li Wei moved with the quiet certainty of a man who had nothing to lose. Each room they passed unveiled more horrors: bodies slumped against walls with bullet holes through their temples; claw marks gouged deep into steel doors; messages scrawled in blood and feces on the walls.
"They lied to us."
"We were never meant to survive."
"0107 is the end and the beginning."
Rui stared at the last one for too long.
"Are we really going to pretend this place is just another scavenging spot?" Chen Yu muttered, his grin gone for once. "Because this screams—screams—ghosts."
They reached the control room. The shattered glass overlooked a massive underground chamber: a test arena, most likely, from the looks of it. Something had fought here. Something big.
Chen Yu leaned against the window and whispered, "This place… It's where they broke people until they became weapons."
"Not people," Rui said softly. "Children."
She didn't explain further. She didn't need to.
Li Wei approached the central terminal, fingers dancing across the cracked keyboard. Echo's voice returned — soft, almost tender this time.
"Would you like to see her file?"
Rui flinched. "No."
But it was too late. The monitors came to life, displaying a feed of past experiments — blurry footage of a much younger Rui strapped to a gurney, screaming as men in lab coats injected her with glowing green fluid. Another clip showed her curled in a corner of a cage, covered in blood, whispering to herself in a lullaby tone.
"They called her 0107. She was the last successful prototype of the Ghost Batch," Echo said. "They tried to make her forget. But the body always remembers."
Rui turned away, her small shoulders shaking. She didn't cry. She never cried. But the silence that followed was heavier than tears.
Suddenly, the lights flickered again — not just from power surges. Something was moving below.
A monitor switched to live feed. Shadows scurried across the arena floor. Not zombies. Not animals. Something… new. The mutation had found its way into the old lab. A blend of teeth, chitin, and humanoid structure. As if the virus had been learning, adapting, combining traits over years of silent evolution.
"They're breeding new monsters down there," Chen Yu said, voice thin.
"No," Li Wei corrected. "They were breeding them here. The virus took over the lab. Now it's making its own."
An alarm blared — a shrill sound that hadn't been heard in years. The emergency power core was failing. The creatures sensed movement. They looked up at the camera. At them.
"Containment breach."
"Run."
"RUN."
They turned and bolted. Chen Yu laughed madly as he blasted fireballs behind them, sealing doors. Rui moved like smoke and knives, slashing down one mutated test subject that burst through a side tunnel. Li Wei stayed at the rear, covering their backs — the calmest of all, even as black blood sprayed his coat.
As they neared the exit, the bunker shook. The AI screamed through every speaker, now corrupted and desperate:
"You cannot leave. You belong to the program. You are property."
They burst into the cold, open air just as the facility began to collapse in on itself. Stone crushed steel, and with it, the last whispers of Echo were silenced.
Days later, the trio sat under a collapsed radio tower, cooking a bird-like mutant over a trash-can fire. Chen Yu had drawn a cartoonish face on its beak with ash and was pretending it could talk.
"I was a scientist once," he said in a squeaky voice. "Then the rain came, and now I'm delicious!"
Li Wei didn't smile, but the tension in his jaw eased. Rui snorted and tossed a piece of dried fruit at him.
They didn't talk about the Hollow Ridge lab again. Not openly. But each of them carried a new shadow after it. A realization.
The monsters weren't born from the virus. The virus simply gave them form.
The real monsters were the people who made it.
And they were still out there.
The wind didn't die down after they escaped Hollow Ridge — it followed them, haunted them. Whispers carried in the pine trees. Shapes slithered in the edges of torchlight. The mountain had spat them back out, but the poison lingered inside.
They made camp by a dry riverbed three kilometers from the ruins. No fire tonight — not after what they saw. The silence between them was not comfort, but survival. The last thing any of them wanted was to draw attention. Not from beasts. Not from people. Especially not from people.
Chen Yu paced like a wolf too caged to sit still. "Tell me the truth," he finally muttered. "We shouldn't have gone in there, right?"
No one answered. He laughed quietly to himself. "Right. Stupid question. But hey, we found something new, didn't we? Monster babies. Fleshy zoo of government sins."
He leaned toward Rui, voice mocking. "You were the queen of that nightmare. How does it feel knowing your kingdom still lives beneath the rocks?"
Rui didn't react immediately. She sat with her back against a rock, staring at the night sky. Then, coldly: "Don't talk like you understand."
Chen Yu raised his hands. "Easy, ghost girl."
Li Wei finally spoke. "He's not wrong. It's not over."
Rui turned toward him, the firelight catching the sharpness in her eyes. "No. It's just waking up."
A pause.
And then the ground trembled.
Not enough to panic. Just enough to remind them: the world wasn't done changing. The virus wasn't finished with its canvas.
By morning, they'd walked ten kilometers east. A small abandoned checkpoint sat crumbling under twisted trees. Inside the guard post, they found maps, an old laptop with solar charging (non-functional), and a decomposing journal from a border patrol officer.
Rui read aloud.
"They brought them in trucks. Not soldiers. Scientists. Armed with children in straightjackets. I asked one what they were doing in Hollow Ridge. He said: 'Fixing the future.' I quit two days later."
Chen Yu shook his head. "They really believed they were doing something holy."
Li Wei remained still, reading the map. "These labs weren't isolated. There's a chain of them. Hollow Ridge was just the lid."
"What's beneath it?" Rui asked.
"Roots," Li Wei said.
They spent two days in the checkpoint, scavenging supplies and arguing quietly about next steps. The plan was to move east. Further from civilization. Or what was left of it.
But the mutation was spreading faster now.
They noticed it first in birds — oversized beaks and extra eyes. Then wolves with twisted limbs and hideous faces that mimicked human laughter. By the third night, they were attacked by something that used to be a child. No teeth. Just bone ridges that cracked through its skin like coral.
Li Wei killed it with no hesitation.
Rui stood over the body for a long time. "It's not just evolution," she said. "It's spite. The virus remembers what hurt it. And it's designing vengeance."
Chen Yu sat by the fire, eyes darting. "So what does that make us?"
Li Wei responded, quiet and sharp. "Ghosts."
They began to notice changes in themselves.
Chen Yu's fire didn't burn out quickly anymore. It grew hotter, louder, alive. Sometimes it responded before he moved.
Li Wei's reflexes turned unnaturally fast. Once, he dodged a bullet before he even heard the shot.
Even Rui seemed to feel the shift. Not in powers, but in memory. Like her dreams were crawling out into the day, rewriting her thoughts with every step.
"I don't want powers," she whispered once. "I just wanted peace."
Chen Yu smirked, tossing a spark in the dark. "Wrong world, princess."
But when she turned her cold stare on him, his grin faltered.
Because behind her eyes wasn't fear.
It was something much worse.
Awakening.
By the time they left the checkpoint, the horizon had changed color. The skies remained gray, but there was a sickly red hue deep within the clouds, as if the rain might bleed again.
Li Wei stood still for a moment, watching the horizon.
Chen Yu walked up beside him, cracking his knuckles. "You think The Ascendancy is still watching us?"
"They never stopped," Li Wei said. "They're just waiting for us to forget we're prey."
"And when we stop running?"
Li Wei's voice dropped low.
"Then they'll send the others. The ones they kept."
Chen Yu grinned darkly. "Finally. A worthy fight."
He raised his hand. Fire danced across his fingers.
The virus wasn't just mutating the world.
It was mutating the war.