#### **Chapter 40: Descent into the Past**
Renji moved through the ventilation shaft with the silent efficiency of a creature born to the dark. His world was a narrow tube of steel, the only sounds his own breathing and the groaning protests of the dying mountain. The kill switch had neutralized the Chimeras, but he knew The Director would have conventional forces, human soldiers, combing the wreckage. He was a ghost in his own tomb.
He descended for what felt like an eternity, his grapnel line his only connection to a stable world. Finally, his boots hit solid ground. He was in a sub-level maintenance corridor, a part of the bunker even older than the main facility, smelling of damp earth and cold iron. The emergency strobes down here were dead. He activated the low-light optics in his mask, painting the world in shades of ghostly green.
This was the bunker's original foundation, built during the early days of the Cold War. The technology was archaic, the architecture brutally simplistic. As he moved through the silent, forgotten corridors, he found old, faded Cyrillic lettering on the walls. This wasn't just a Swiss listening post. It was a repurposed Soviet black site.
He was moving through the history that had led to his own existence—a secret war of shadows and whispers, of which W.A.O. was just the latest, most corporate iteration.
He found what he was looking for in a small, lead-lined command office: a set of old, paper schematics, rolled into a dusty tube. He carefully unrolled them on a steel desk. They showed the bunker's original layout, including a detail the modern schematics had omitted: an emergency escape tunnel, a narrow shaft drilled through miles of bedrock, designed to emerge in an unassuming shepherd's hut on the far side of the mountain. It had been sealed and forgotten for over fifty years.
Hope, cold and sharp, cut through his exhaustion. He had a path. Now he just had to survive long enough to reach his family and lead them down it.