For the next few days, Neo remained in a sealed medical chamber inside the base. Officially it was called recovery observation; in truth, it was a gilded prison.
Routine medical checks. Bland but filling nutrient meals. And the occasional "casual" visits from Dr. Dane—conversations that seemed meandering but always cut closer to the bone, probing deeper into his supposed knowledge.
Neo played the game with care. He offered just enough fragments of Old Era knowledge to intrigue, while always anchoring it to the story of his dead "teacher." Never too much, never enough to expose his true origin.
Falcon did not appear again, but Neo could feel her unseen eyes. A weight of surveillance, always pressing. Within his restricted movements, he quietly studied the Prism Base itself.
This was no ragtag settlement. Its structure was disciplined, its technology leagues ahead of the wasteland norm. Stable energy supply. Reliable air filtration. That alone marked decades of work. More telling still was their hunger for relics of the Old Era—their engineers and researchers sifted endlessly through scavenged ruins, reassembling fragments of lost science. For what purpose, Neo could not yet see.
On the fourth day, the calm shattered.
A shrill alarm tore through the cavern, bouncing off the stone like knives. Red warning lights spun in frenzy, washing faces in blood-colored panic.
"Level One Combat Alert! All combat personnel to stations! Non-combatants to designated shelters! Repeat—Level One Combat Alert!"
Neo's door slammed open. A soldier, face taut with urgency, barked: "You—move! To the shelter, now!"
Neo's chest tightened, but he kept his composure, following the soldier into the corridor. Chaos surged through the tunnels—shouts, running feet, frightened cries—but beneath it all, order still held. Prism Base was trained for war.
Then the cavern itself shook. A thunderous impact roared from above, raining dust down like gray snow.
"What was that? An earthquake?!" someone screamed.
"No!" A dirt-streaked soldier burst in from the upper tunnels, voice hoarse with dread. "It's a Burrower! A giant aberrant! The outer line is breached—they dug straight through to our ceiling!"
The name was enough to ignite panic like wildfire. Burrowers. The terror of every underground settlement—worm-like titans that tunneled through earth and stone, armed with rotary grinders strong enough to collapse fortresses.
Neo's wrist comm crackled with battle transmissions—snippets from Falcon's squad above:
"…No good! Standard AP rounds can't breach its armor!"
"Structural supports won't hold—another hit and the whole dome comes down!"
"Falcon! We need heavy weapons—we need mechs!"
"Mech bay's blocked by debris! Engineering says ten minutes to clear!"
"Ten minutes?! We won't last three!"
Explosions. Shouts. The sound of men and women fighting on the edge of death.
Neo's pulse hammered. Danger—yes. But opportunity, too.
He grabbed the soldier beside him. "Take me to the nearest tactical node! Now! I know how to deal with Burrowers!"
The soldier froze, incredulous. Who would trust an unvetted "survivor" with the fate of the base?
"No time!" Neo's voice thundered, raw with urgency and conviction. "Tell Falcon this: I know its auditory perception flaws, and I know the joint weaknesses in its shell! Change attack frequencies—shift fire to the third through fifth segments behind its head sensors!"
The soldier hesitated—but the fire in Neo's eyes, the sheer certainty, cut through doubt. Maybe it was his past hints of knowledge. Maybe it was desperation. Either way, the soldier relayed the message.
A terse reply came within seconds. The soldier's face paled. He looked at Neo as if seeing a ghost, then seized his arm. "Come. With me!"
They burst into a tactical command room, walls alive with screens. The battlefield sprawled across them: a colossal dark-brown worm-thing slammed its grinder head into the cavern ceiling, sending down avalanches of rock. Soldiers scattered below, their beams and armor-piercers sparking harmlessly off its carapace.
Falcon's voice cut through the comm, ragged but resolute: "Survivor—this better not waste our last seconds."
Neo lunged to the console, scanning the live data feeds. His old instincts flared alive, the commander within him reawakening.
"Falcon! Stop conventional fire! Its shell is a fortress, but its hearing is hypersensitive. Exploit it. Switch all rifles to pulse-mode. Target the auditory clusters on the third to fifth rings, behind the head! Overload its senses—confuse it!"
A pause. Then Falcon's cold, decisive reply: "All units, obey! Pulse mode! Third to fifth segments—suppressing fire, now!"
The feed shifted. Lines of bright pulses lanced into the specified points.
The Burrower shrieked, a sound that rattled bone and stone alike. Its massive body convulsed, thrashing in erratic spasms. Its attacks grew wild, disoriented, its precision broken.
"It's working!" a voice shouted through the channel, half in disbelief.
"Not done yet!" Neo's eyes burned as he jabbed at the scan display. "Its weakness isn't its back—it's the belly! When it rears to strike, the fourth abdominal segment exposes a pale patch. Old wound—or a vent. That's the kill point! Prep your strongest armor-piercer!"
On the screen, Falcon herself hefted a heavy launcher, despite her stagger and the blood staining her armor. She steadied her aim, calm amid the chaos.
The Burrower reared once more, screaming blind fury, belly pale and vulnerable.
"Now!"
The launcher roared. A blazing lance of fire punched into the pale spot. The shell split, flesh tearing. The explosion bloomed inside it.
The Burrower gave a final, guttural cry, then collapsed in a seismic crash. Twisting. Convulsing. Then still.
The cavern shook with silence. And then—cheers. Wild, disbelieving, alive.
In the command room, eyes turned toward Neo. Soldiers, officers, technicians—all staring as if at something other than human. A young drifter, with nothing but screens and scans, had pinpointed and destroyed a monster that entire databases had failed to map.
On the comm, Falcon's breathing rasped hard, ragged in his ear. Then her voice came, softened, stripped of its icy veneer:
"Survivor… report your location. I need to… thank you. In person."
Neo sagged against the console, drenched in sweat. His heart still thundered. But his gamble had worked.
This time, not just survival. He had earned something more.