Nihil pried open the old subway access hatch and dropped into darkness, the world above vanishing behind him like a memory he'd rather forget. His boots hit rusted iron with a sharp clang, echoing into empty tunnels.
Stale air filled his lungs — dry, metallic, with a faint underlying rot that spoke of long abandonment.
Good.
If anything had been breathing here recently, it would've been worse.
He lit a chemical flare and moved forward.
The old subway line had collapsed in places, forcing him to weave through broken cars, jagged debris, and mutated roots that had torn through concrete like paper. Every step was careful, deliberate. One mistake, and the ground could give way into a nest of hungry memories.
A sign, half-shattered and hanging by a thread, still bore ghostly letters:
"Shelter Complex 09-A. Authorized Entry Only."
Shelter Complex 09-A... The signal from the relay node had come from somewhere below it.
Deeper into the forgotten veins of the earth.
Nihil descended further, the flare casting long shadows across graffiti-stained walls and half-collapsed corridors. Sometimes he caught glimpses of things moving just beyond the light — echoes of former passengers, fragments stuck replaying the last moments of their existence.
He ignored them.
You had to, or you went mad.
Finally, he reached the outer doors of the shelter.
Massive slabs of reinforced metal, scorched and dented from the inside.
Someone had tried to escape once. Had failed.
The access panel blinked erratically, miraculously still drawing power from an emergency capacitor.
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Nihil knelt, bypassed the corroded security lock with a jury-rigged shard of his own code.
The door groaned.
Opened just wide enough for him to slip through.
Inside, silence reigned.
Rows of cryo-pods lined the chamber walls — cracked, shattered, or completely empty. Dust floated thick in the air, carrying the smell of chemical preservatives long turned sour.
It wasn't just a shelter.
It had been a vault.
A place where humanity had tried to preserve itself during the collapse.
Failed.
He moved carefully, scanning for threats.
There, at the center: a control hub.
Miraculously intact.
Nihil approached, hands steady despite the adrenaline hammering through him. He interfaced the system using a scavenged cable grafted into his wrist rig.
Data bled out onto the cracked displays.
— Experiment logs.
— Survival ratios.
— Psychological degradation reports.
— Warnings about systemic corruption spreading through the shelter’s AI.
And beneath it all:
One active file.
Encrypted, buried under layers of fragmented code.
Marked only with a single word:
"SEED."
Nihil hesitated.
There were rules he lived by.
One of them: if something was buried this deep, there was a reason.
But rules were luxuries he could no longer afford.
He broke the encryption.
The system howled in protest, screens flickering violently as decades of decay fought him. Nihil pushed through, sweat beading his forehead, until — finally — the file opened.
A 3D model spun into existence above the console.
It wasn’t a weapon.
It wasn’t a program.
It was... a fragment.
A black, pulsating shard that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it.
Embedded deep within the heart of the shelter, protected by layers of lockdown protocols and security traps.
His mind reeled.
A Seed.
Not just a metaphorical one.
A real artifact — a core fragment of the Tower’s original architecture.
Whoever had run this shelter...
They hadn’t been trying to survive.
They'd been trying to control the Tower.
Nihil pulled back, heart pounding.
This was bigger than survival.
This was destiny.
The flare sputtered, dying.
Darkness closed in around him.
In the suffocating black, he heard it — not with ears, but with something deeper.
A voice that wasn't a voice.
A thought that wasn’t his.
"Come closer..."
His fingers trembled over the console.
One more command.
Unlock containment.
Everything in his body screamed against it.
He did it anyway.
The ground shook as ancient mechanisms ground into motion. Somewhere deeper, steel walls folded back, unsealing the core chamber.
The Seed called to him, a siren-song of annihilation and rebirth.
Nihil stepped forward.
Into the dark.
Into himself.