Chen Feng checked his gear one last time. The scavenged 22nd-century rifle felt crude in his hands—a museum piece compared to his Republic-issue pulse laser. He slipped the hard drive containing the Crucible data into a waterproof pouch strapped to his chest, then clipped two bottles of distilled water to his belt. His headlamp remained dark, only the red low-light mode casting a faint crimson glow that wouldn't betray his position.

  He approached the surveillance room's eastern wall. Beneath layers of dust and corrosion, an old paper blueprint was pinned to the wall—a relic from when paper was still used. It showed the entire First Megacorp Enclave in meticulous detail, yellowed with age and curling at the edges. Chen traced three red-marked routes with a gloved finger.

  "Factory Wing → Service Duct 4B → Old Commuter Tunnel → Freight Lift Cluster C-20."

  The route was logical. Direct. A path workers would have taken centuries ago before the nuclear exchanges sealed the world's fate. Before the megacorps turned humanity into commodities.

  He squeezed into Service Duct 4B. The narrow passage—barely 1.1 meters in diameter—smelled of rust and 250 years of condensed acidic moisture. Water dripped with metronomic precision from the ceiling, each drop echoing like a countdown. The floor was slick with a century of accumulated grime, making every step a calculated risk.

  Every few meters, rusted steel plates groaned under his weight. At the third plate, Chen had to plant his shoulder against the corroded metal to prevent it from collapsing beneath him. He pushed with his legs, muscles straining against the relentless decay, until the plate settled with a reluctant groan.

  "So this was megacorp infrastructure quality?" Chen muttered to the darkness. "Back in my day netizens would've flamed this onto the trending page. One viral video of this thing collapsing and the company stock would've crashed by 30%."

  The duct narrowed further, forcing him to turn sideways. His shoulders scraped against protruding rebar where the original ferrocrete had corroded away entirely, leaving only the skeletal steel framework beneath. The air grew thick and stale, tasting of metal and forgotten time. He moved with deliberate slowness, aware that one wrong step in this decaying tomb could send him plummeting into darkness. Each breath fogged in the cold air, the crimson glow of his low-light mode painting the passage in shades of blood.

  Thirty-seven meters in, the passage opened slightly as Chen reached the emergency maintenance hatch at the duct's end. He shoved against the rusted manual release. Metal shrieked in protest before the hatch swung open with a final, defeated groan.

  Beyond lay the Old Commuter Tunnel.

  Chen's light swept across the space, revealing a time capsule of a dead civilization. Overlapping footprints covered the floor like sedimentary rock layers—some fresh, most faded by centuries of dust. Coffee stains marked what had once been break areas. Ancient banknotes, brittle and yellowed, crunched underfoot. Several X-ray scanners stood in skeletal rows, their displays dark. And skeletons—human skeletons in tattered corporate uniforms—lay where they'd fallen two centuries ago during the nuclear exchange that ended the First Megacorp era.

  Chen studied the tunnel's architecture. Reinforced concrete walls, emergency lighting housings, standardized doorways. This had been a daily shortcut for thousands of workers moving between the Factory Wing and residential districts outside the Enclave. It would have had emergency lockdown mechanisms—protocol required for megacorp infrastructure, when defensive and offensive armed warfare become part of their marketing strategies.

  He was right.

  The roll-up door at the tunnel's far end was jammed halfway down, sealed by decades of corrosion. Chen wedged a crowbar into the gap and levered with all his strength. Metal screamed. Rust rained down like toxic snow. With a final, shuddering lurch, the door rose six more inches—just enough to crawl beneath.

  And then the world opened up.

  A 108-meter-long steel bridge stretched across a subterranean chasm. Chen's flashlight beam vanished into absolute darkness below, swallowed by the void. The bridge itself was a skeleton of its former self—a rusted metal framework with a massive 10-meter-gap in the center where the walking surface had collapsed. Only two main support beams remained, extending like balance bars across the abyss.

  A cold wind rose from the depths, carrying a sound like someone sobbing in the darkness.

  Chen crouched at the entrance, shining his light downward. Nothing. No bottom. No walls. Just endless black.

  "If you blow this bridge during a siege," he whispered to the wind, "the whole Enclave becomes a literal island... capitalists really know their craft."

  He stripped off his pack and rifle, securing them to a rope tied around his waist. With a practiced motion, he tossed them across the gap. They landed with soft thuds on the far side.

  Then he dropped onto the two exposed beams.

  His gloves found purchase on the corroded metal. He hung suspended over the abyss, arms fully extended, legs dangling in nothingness. The wind tugged at his clothing, whispering promises of the long fall below.

  He began to move. Hand over hand. The metal was brittle beneath his grip, flakes of rust breaking away with every movement. At the 57-meter mark, the left beam dipped beneath his weight with a metallic crack that echoed through the cavern.

  Rust snowed down around him.

  Chen froze. Stopped breathing. Five seconds of absolute stillness as he waited to see if the beam would hold. Sweat mixed with the acidic moisture running down his face, stinging his eyes.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The last ten meters were pure desperation. His fingers clawed into corroded weld seams, scraping skin raw against the rough metal. His arms burned with the strain. His shoulders screamed in protest.

  When his boots finally touched solid ground on the far side, Chen collapsed face-first onto the ferrocrete. He lay there, gasping, his heart hammering against his ribs. The rope still tethered him to his pack and rifle. With trembling hands, he pulled them near.

  For the first time since waking from cryostasis four centuries ago, Chen Feng allowed himself to acknowledge the truth:

  "I really am alone."

  He pushed himself up, ignoring the tremors in his muscles, and continued down the passage. The freight lift cluster would be ahead. His escape route continued.

  Twenty-three minutes later, Chen stood before the C-20 Freight Lift Cluster—four massive cargo elevators built to transport industrial equipment between levels. Three were dark, their control panels shattered. But the fourth had a faint green indicator light still flickering like a dying heartbeat.

  Chen moved to the control panel, fingers hovering over the call button. He was about to press it when a soft whirring sound filled the corridor.

  The elevator was already coming up.

  Chen didn't hesitate. He scrambled up the elevator shaft's wall, using protruding rebar and corroded maintenance rungs to scale the vertical surface. In seconds, he was pressed flat against the overhead maintenance beam, hidden among grease-coated utility tubes.

  The elevator doors slid open with a pneumatic hiss.

  Two Hellwraith scouts stepped out. Their modified corporate armor clanked with each step. One carried a heavy duffel bag while complaining into his comm unit.

  "Man, I just wanna come down here and grab antiques to sell... Erebus won't notice. This place is a fucking goldmine."

  The other scout had heavy metal blaring from his headphones—so loud Chen could make out the lyrics from five meters above.

  "Fuck off, Ravi. Just keep watch while I—"

  Chen dropped.

  His monomolecular combat knife slid under the first scout's jaw and up into his brainstem in one fluid motion. The man never made a sound. Chen caught his body before it could collapse.

  The second scout—headphones still blaring—hadn't noticed. Chen's silenced pistol coughed twice. Two rounds to the back of the skull. The man's head snapped forward as brain matter splattered the wall like abstract art.

  Four seconds. No gunshots. Only the relentless drumbeat of heavy metal.

  Chen stripped their comms units and keycards, taking the second scout's 7.62mm-caliber, brutish-designed submachinegun with Hellwraiths’ pale 8-eyes skull emblem on it. In the duffel bag, he found something unexpected—corporate-made detonation cord, still functional after centuries. He coiled it around his waist like a serpent.

  He dragged both bodies to the edge of the shaft and pushed them into the abyss. They fell silently—no screams, no impact sounds. Just the void swallowing them whole.

  But just as he finished his grim work, Chen's communicator suddenly emitted a soft .

  He glanced down—a brief signal prompt. He opened it. Nothing. Probably a false alarm from background radiation. He turned it off without thinking.

  Chen examined the dust patterns on the elevator buttons. Most were pristine. But three showed slight wear—B1, B3, and Ground Level. B3 and Ground Level had recent, heavier impressions. B1 was older but cleaner.

  He selected B1.

  Chen climbed into the elevator's upper maintenance bay, curling amid oily machinery and decades of accumulated grime.

  "Elevator-door ambushes are classic," he muttered to himself. "Hitman 47, John Wick movies, and those poor bastards in early Russia–Ukraine War clips... I'm not dying to a rookie mistake."

  In the early days of the 2022 invasion, a Russian squad had used an elevator in a civilian office building. Ukrainian workers cut the power, and the entire squad was captured by local firefighters. A cautionary tale himself—as a self-titled military analyst studied.

  Forty-three seconds of agonizing ascent. Chen's muscles cramped from holding position. His breath fogged in the cold air.

  The doors slid open.

  Nothing. Only acid rain hitting an abandoned loading bay beyond.

  Chen dropped down from the maintenance bay, landing silently on the elevator floor. He swept his weapon across the empty space, heart still pounding from the anticipation.

  "Shit," he said aloud, the word echoing in the empty hall. He actually laughed—a dry, humorless sound. "All that tension for nothing. Should've just walked out—these two idiots didn't even call backup."

  Kilometers away, outside. Erebus sat cross-legged atop his 16-wheel Behemoth command vehicle. Acid rain sizzled where it touched his bare skin, but he remained motionless, eyes rolled white in his tattooed face.

  Beneath his skin, the black ink writhed like living serpents, glowing dark red with an inner light. In his vision, a blood-red hourglass flipped over. A chunk of the sand was suddenly missing—gone, scattered to the four winds.

  One of his back tattoos contorted, reshaping itself into a single, unblinking eye.

  Erebus opened his eyes to the rain. His voice cut through the comms channel.

  "The prey escaped. Divert a third of the outer mobile units. Seal every old tunnel exit."

  The Legate snapped a salute and ran off, barking orders into his comm unit.

  "Get two of our mobile warbands. The prey's out of the cage. I lead, and you will follow!" The black-armored Legate turned to the camps of his immediate warband. The members of his personal kill-team—a team of black-armored brutes—follow with restrained savagery.

  Warlords responded with zeal, each expanding the order in their own image.

  "Call the others as well! We must capture them!"

  Not known by Erebus or the Legate, officers of the Hellwraiths’ command chain over-exercised their commanders’ commands to ensure maximum mission efficiency. A cascading overcommitment of forces began—60% of rapid units redeploying toward the suspected escape routes, leaving only second-line reserves to guard the dome perimeter. What followed was not disobedience, but over-obedience—a cascading over-commitment of forces, each commander expanding the order in the name of the Hellwraiths, of their master Erebus, of to ensure his will is carried out absolutely, until the perimeter was stripped bare.

  Erebus frowned. Something felt off in the pattern of energy. But the pain in his tattoos returned, sharp and insistent, pulling him back into meditation. He was a descendant of the First Megacorp's remnant cults, his rituals meant to strengthen his bond with the ancient "god-artifact" buried beneath Earth’s crust. The pain was part of the price.

  Chen pushed open the last rusted airtight door. Acid rain immediately lashed his face like needle spray.

  He stepped outside.

  For the first time in what felt like lifetimes, Chen saw the sky without a dome, bulkhead, or concrete above him. yellow-black toxic clouds churned against a horizon lit hell-orange by a burning city to the west. No stars. No moon. Just the eternal bruise of a poisoned sky.

  He inhaled deeply.

  Rot. Ozone. Blood.

  The smell of freedom.

  Ten meters behind him, barely visible in the downpour, a new set of footprints appeared in the mud—smaller than his, slightly dragging with each step.

  Flora's voice emerged from the darkness, calm as if discussing the weather:

  "Obergefreiter Chen Feng, you have deserted your post. You will return with me now."

  Chen didn't turn.

  His thumb found the safety lever on the Hellwraith SMG.

  Acid rain hissed on the barrel.