The mountain had been cut in half.
Not carved. Not collapsed. Not shattered by erosion or time.
Cut. The top was just gone — sheared off in a smooth arc of molten glass and fused gravel, like the gods had pressed a palm to the Earth and smothered it flat.
Cain stood at the base of what used to be called Mount Voroshilov, though no map dared name it now. The last breath of sunlight was long gone, lost somewhere behind the slate-grey wall of clouds clawing at the horizon. Snow fell slowly, but it didn't settle — the ground was too warm. It steamed in places, patches of ancient slag still leaking heat into the air, a ghost of the orbital strike that had erased the summit.
No trees, no grass, no birds or wind. Just the sound of his boots grinding into vitrified stone and the whisper of frost hissing off his coat.
The remains of the mountain stretched out before him like a fossilized crater — a bowl of blackened stone and half-melted pylons, steel twisted into shapes no blueprint had ever approved. Ruins clung to the lower cliffs like ribs, reinforced bunkers buried in layers of ice and silence.
Whatever was down there, it had been worth trying to erase from orbit.
Right in the middle of it all was an entryway, created by blast, which caved in multiple levels of the reinforced concrete.
Cain crouched at the rim. The edges were jagged and slick with melt-glass, fractured rebar curled like the fossilized tendons of some machine god's corpse. The hole was wide—wide enough for a dropship, maybe even a Vector—though none had dared. He reached out and touched the frost-laced edge, felt the sharp sting even through his glove. The temperature here was wrong. The air was warm beneath the surface. Faintly humid. Metallic. He knew that scent. Machine oil, rust, old batteries left to swell and rupture.
"MERIT," Cain murmured, pausing near the jagged mouth of the crater, boots grinding against scorched gravel. "Do you feel it?"
The pause was slight.
"Affirmative. Geothermal signatures persist. Destruction was... incomplete."
He didn't look away from the ruin below, the dark funnel where the Earth seemed to fold in on itself, as if something enormous had crashed downward and kept going.
"I wonder..." Cain exhaled, voice quiet behind the mask. "If the whole top's been blown off, do I still need a keycard?"
"Unlikely," MERIT replied, voice dry as wind through old bones.
"But authorization protocols may still be embedded in surviving systems."
"Light it up a little, would you?"
"Acknowledged."
At once, the world shifted. A soft green lattice shimmered across his visor—thin, almost delicate lines painting the wreckage in a fine grid of angles and contours. Invisible systems snapped into definition. Collapsed support beams, corroded cable spines, remnants of automated defenses.
Cain unhooked the rope from the pack and fed it through the belay loop on his harness. The line hissed softly as it unwound. The slope ended here—below him, the crater narrowed into a vertical shaft where the Earth had been cored, not cracked. Like something had punched clean through a dozen levels of reinforced bedrock, vaporized the structural supports, and kept falling.
The opening yawned before him like a throat. Scorched rebar lined the walls in broken rings, some still glowing faintly from old heat, others iced over by the creeping breath of Siberia's air. The gridlines MERIT had drawn before began to break apart, interrupted by interference—geomagnetic static, maybe. Or just old ghosts trying to keep their secrets.
He clipped the rope to the nearest embedded girder—still solid, half-melted into the rock but fused tight. Gave it a hard tug. No give. Good enough.
Then he stepped off the edge.
Gravity took hold. The rope held.
The drop wasn't smooth—he pushed off the wall every few meters, using debris as footholds when possible, boots scraping against cracked alloy, rusted brackets, shattered conduits. Light filtered down only in fragments, and only for the first twenty meters. After that, the world folded in.
It smelled like carbon and static. And deep Earth—that old, mineral breath that only came from places meant to stay sealed forever.
Every ten meters, a new level passed.
He counted them by the ringed shadows of walkways, each one twisted into useless spirals.
—Level Three.
—Level Four.
—Level Five: this one still had markings, black lettering scorched into yellow metal:
Primary Substation – Geothermal Relay Access Only
He passed it without slowing.
On level six, the rope jerked slightly. A gust of heat rose past him—not air. Something denser, rising too steadily to be natural. Cain paused, braced with one hand, leaned slightly into the dark.
"MERIT," he whispered, voice steady. "Getting anything?"
The HUD flickered. Then a low pulse of green shimmered through his visor.
"Negative."
Cain adjusted his descent.
By level eight, all light from the surface was gone. Not dimmed—gone. His mask compensated, lens switching to low-spectrum thermal overlay, but the walls were still too warped, too broken to map in real-time.
Finally, Cain's boots struck metal.
Not collapsed structure, not rubble or soil, a floor, once reinforced, now warped and cratered. Melted seams spidered outward from the point of impact, glassed smooth by heat too precise to be natural. Something had come through here, straight down, and tried to finish what orbital fire started.
And it had almost succeeded.
As he turned around, in overlay created by MERIT, there it was, at the center of the crater, embedded like a rusted nail driven through steel. Long. Cylindrical. Charred black. Cracked, but intact.
Not a bomb... Not exactly.
A magma charge.
Cain stepped closer, careful, eyes narrowed behind the mask. MERIT painted its surface with green outlines, overlaying telemetry too old to be reliable. The casing was thick - tungsten alloy, pitted with impact scars and faint traces of decay heat
"MERIT," Cain said quietly. "Confirm."
The AI responded after only a beat.
"Class-3 orbital breaching charge. Directed magma warhead. Detonation core never activated."
Cain exhaled, slow. He circled it once, almost scaring himself with echo of every step he took.
The charge had been meant to turn this vault—this entire mountain—into a lake of molten slag. Like bunker busters of Earth armoury, this was a message - one that never got delivered.
He stopped beside a bent stabilization fin, its edge buried in what used to be reinforced flooring.
"Any idea why it didn't go off?"
A pause. Then:
"Probable causes: premature arming, faulty altitude sensor, delayed ignition. Records show near one percent failure rate for AEGIS-class ordnance during the war."
"One percent."
"Statistically negligible."
And yet here it is. One percent doesn't sound like luck until it looks you in the face.
Cain stepped closer. The casing was cracked along one side, metal bloomed outward from the force of impact. No plasma had vented. No chain reaction had started. The mountain above had been leveled—but this chamber remained. No mountain should have held against that. Unless it wasn't just rock keeping this place alive.
MERIT pulsed softly.
"This was meant to be the final blow."
"But the mountain held," Cain murmured. "Because this thing couldn't finish what the rest started."
He turned away.
Behind him, the crater walls stretched upward—cut smooth by heat, ringed with the slagged remnants of the facility's upper levels. Pipes melted like vines. Beams collapsed inward like the ribs of something trying to shield itself from impact.
But down here, the floor was solid. Intact.
That meant whatever this place was built to protect... it still could.
"MERIT," Cain said. "Any trace of power?"
A low vibration thudded through the floor — not seismic. Rhythmic. Buried infrastructure still dreaming beneath its concrete skin.
"Faint. Shielded. Below us."
"Then let's find the stairs."
The blast door was half-open, warped at the hinges where pressure had tried to fold it in on itself. Cain slipped through sideways, his coat brushing rusted edge. The corridor behind him narrowed to nothing, swallowed again by dust and flickering light. Here, the air changed — heavier. Oil and ozone and scorched polymers, the long-dead perfume of a war factory left to rot in its own silence.
Lights woke up as he entered. Not all at once. One by one, humming into life in long strips overhead, casting pale gold across the floor. No motion sensors. Just old timers — buried subroutines still obeying the presence of clearance they no longer remembered how to verify.
The corridor opened into a vaulted chamber, floor sunken below entry level — like a wound carved into the mountain's spine. Long rails split the concrete in parallel, coated in dust thick enough to track footprints. Cain stepped between them, boots silent on metal grates, eyes lifting to the rows above.
And froze.
Walkers.
Staggered in cradles bolted to reinforced scaffolding.
Some incomplete, stripped to bare actuators and exposed cable bundles.
Others whole — armored, sealed, and painted in chipped, functional greys.
No flash. No insignia. Just names stenciled in blocky Cyrillic along each chestplate.
ВОИН-1
Voin. Warrior.
"Bellator im Machina," MERIT whispered.
"What?"
"Warrior in the machine".
The Voin stood three and a half meters tall. Bipedal frame, wide shoulders, angular plating scarred from manufacturing stress tests. Armor panel edges laser-cut, with jagged edges. No sleek designs. No flourishes. They were ugly and functional.
Half had no arms installed yet. A few lacked torsos entirely. But the rest—twenty-seven by Cain's count—stood finished, locked upright in their support frames, heads bowed as if they had died standing.
MERIT broke the silence with a low murmur in the mask:
"Voin-1 production line. There was no time for modality and customization. Standardization doctrine for mass field deployment."
Cain walked between the first row. His boots left black imprints on the grey-coated floor.
"They built one model," he said, almost to himself. "And made it enough."
"Correct. Simplified maintenance. Faster training cycles. Redundancy prioritized over versatility."
The design philosophy made sense. In a losing war, brilliance didn't matter. Quantity did.
Not one of them had moved in eight years. Not one of them had fired a shot.
They waited here, not forgotten. Just never summoned.
He'd seen war's leftovers — rusted battalions in drainage fields, decommissioned walkers turned to scrap. But nothing like this. This wasn't decay.
He passed the 10th. The 20th. The 25th.
Then—
Something different.
Not immediately visible. Not louder, not larger. Just... wrong.
The last gantry was heavier, industrial brackets bolted into the wall itself. Reinforced. Extra shielding. Cable density five times higher than the others. And the machine suspended inside?
It loomed different — not by size, but by presence. As if the room had been built around it, and never recovered.
Not a Voin-1.
Its silhouette was sharper. Heavier. Coated in thick rubber-like black material. The head module lacked a visible viewport, cooling fins jutted from the spine like vertebrae. The chestplate bore a different name:
ЧЕРНОБОГ
"MERIT, can you translate this for me?"
"Chernobog." MERIT's voice thinned to a whisper."Prototype. Field-untested. Designated strategic escalation platform. Final production authorized... never."
"What is it?" Cain asked quietly.
A pause.
"Black program variant of Voin-1. Designed not for coordination, but for autonomous decision-making. Internal reactor. Closed-cycle coolant system. Fully integrated with independent behavioral patterning module."
Cain stepped closer.
The paint on the legs hadn't peeled. The reactor shielding was clean. Even the dust seemed to hesitate to settle.
"What's behavioral patterning?"
"Mechanized Emulator of Responsive Individual Thought"
"M.E.R.I.T."