The air was too still. That was Liera Vossel's first thought as she crouched atop the jagged ridge, her bow already drawn.
The wind didn't move here—it twisted, coiled, then fell dead like it was afraid to touch this place. Beneath her, the fractured surface of Sector Gamma Prime groaned under shifting plates of sun-baked steel and warped concrete.
Her sharp green eyes locked onto faint shimmer-trails darting between the sky's dim haze and the blackened horizon.
Drones.
She exhaled once. No words. No chant. Just a whisper of breath and the pull of bowstring against her fingers.
Then she loosed.
One drone dropped—then another. Her arrows made no sound, just vanished from her grip and reappeared through mechanical hulls a second later.
"Three down," she muttered into the comm. "More are coming from the ridge. Five seconds."
Inside the ruins, ASC-9 Warden Pike's head snapped up. His glowing visor pulsed orange, identifying multiple incoming hostiles.
With a thunderous step, he moved to shield the lab's breached entrance. His voice came across the channel, cold and calm:
**"Threat proximity rising. Cover required. Recommend immediate extraction."**
Kaelin Vorr was already moving. "We're out," he called. "Everyone to the southern slope. Vossel, fall back."
The Ghostline team spilled out of the ruins in pairs, weapons drawn but tight in formation. Micah led the center group with Harka and Sera close behind. Varn Roath and Syrran Drehl covered the forward wedge, both moving like boulders with a mission. Tern Vale and Nyra Tal brought up the flanks, eyes constantly scanning.
The drones weren't pursuing.
Yet.
Liera fired one last arrow—striking the lead drone in its optical node just before it could pivot toward the team's movement. Then she turned and sprinted along the cliffside trail, vanishing into the shadowed gorge.
Behind her, Pike's heavy frame dropped a compact charge—its blinking light disappearing beneath a collapsing slab of metal.
The Ghostline moved fast and low through a fissure just beyond the lab—Micah's earlier scouting route.
The cracked floor gave way to a tunnel mouth: half-buried, rimmed in burned glyphs and metal veins that ran like old scars across the rock.
"Obsidian Vein entrance is open," Micah confirmed. "Looks stable. ASC-4, take point."
Blitzfire whirred silently forward—hovering just above the ground, its scanning pulse emitting in tight, rhythmic chirps. It slid into the black without hesitation.
Micah stepped in after it.
Heat hit them immediately—like stepping into a furnace masked in silence. The walls shimmered with thermal residue.
Vent shafts hissed soft jets of vapor into the humid air, and strange veins of black crystal snaked across the passage, pulsing occasionally like something alive was slumbering beneath the surface.
"I thought this place would feel more...dead," Nyra muttered.
"It's not dead," Sera replied, eyes narrowed. "It's just quiet."
Micah touched a carved edge along the wall, its glyphs so ancient they barely resembled Ashari script anymore. He traced them with his gloved hand.
"Pre-fall design," he whispered. "Maybe older."
As they progressed, the path narrowed and dipped. Platforms of fused stone jutted out like natural bridges.
Molten light flickered deep below—geothermal veins pulsing like veins beneath skin. The silence wasn't absence; it was the *presence* of something not speaking. Not yet.
"We need to pause," Kaelin ordered. "Check rear, rotate scouts."
ASC-9 scanned behind them, verifying no contact. Liera and Tern took new positions while Micah and Harka slipped forward.
They moved like shadows—silent, alert. Micah's Hollow side stayed quiet, but alert. Watching.
In the distance, the tunnel opened into a wider chamber. Here, the air crackled faintly, and the stone bore scars from both energy weapons and magical disruption.
Drone limbs were fused into the wall, some still twitching from residual voltage. One skeleton—likely Thornkin—was partially embedded in a melted slab, its gear still intact.
"Something happened here," Nyra said grimly.
Tern ran his hand over a section of the wall. "Looks like a skirmish. Tech versus... whatever lives down here."
"Or *lived*," Varn Roath said, eyes narrowed. "This place doesn't just repel. It consumes."
Micah stopped near a collapsed frame—its architecture too advanced for a lab wall, too seamless for recent construction.
"I don't think we're following a tunnel," he said slowly. "I think we're walking inside a conduit."
Sera frowned. "A power route?"
"More than that. A supply line. A system pathway. This might not just *lead* to the Core Nexus. It might be part of it."
That was when Kaelin voiced what had been building between all of them.
"We thought this was a road," he said. "But what if we're standing in front of the door?"
The silence that followed wasn't fear.
It was realization.
Micah turned to face the group, then looked back into the dark, where ASC-4 had paused at a fork in the path. Heat shimmered just ahead—unmapped, unscanned.
He took a breath.
"Blitzfire, stay low. Keep sweeping. We follow the vein. Quiet. Tight."
And the Ghostline pressed forward—into the unknown.
The obsidian tunnel narrowed, then opened into a metal-lined chamber with a faint blue glow. Micah stepped through first, his boots clicking on polished black tile that had no right being this clean after years of abandonment.
The rest of the Ghostline team followed, spreading out into the massive subterranean space with growing unease.
"What is this place?" Nyra murmured, her hand resting near her blade.
Lights buzzed on overhead—dim, cold, surgical. The air shifted. No longer warm and stale like the cave—they were breathing filtered air now. The smell of sterilization. And something else.
Decay.
They passed the first row of tanks.
Kaelin stopped cold. "By the Core…"
Clear biopods lined the walls in perfect rows. Inside each one, a body floated suspended in translucent gel—humans, Thornkin, Myrvane alike. Skin partially grafted with machinery. Steel and bone fused together.
Some had limbs replaced with crude robotics; others had internal organs exposed and augmented with metal tubing.
And their faces.
Some were at peace, eyes closed. But others—others had died mid-scream, caught in some moment of pain or terror, forever frozen.
Micah's steps slowed. His vision blurred. The Hollow inside him stirred, recoiling.
"This wasn't just experimentation," Sera whispered, her voice hollow. "This was slaughter disguised as science."
Micah didn't speak. He stepped forward, fists shaking. His gaze locked on a tank containing a young Thornkin woman—barely more than a teen. Half her face was overlaid with circuitry, her vines wilting in the gel.
He clenched his jaw, let out a wordless growl, and slammed his fist into the nearest wall.
Metal rang like a warning bell. Blood smeared across his knuckles.
"Micah!" Sera grabbed his arm before he could strike again. "This won't help them."
"They were people," he hissed. "Ashari, Myrvane, Thornkin. They trusted someone. And *this* is what they got."
Varn Roath stepped closer to one of the tanks and pressed his hand to the glass. "Their roots were cut before they could grow," he said solemnly. "Their strength stolen, repurposed."
Kaelin turned to the others, voice low but sharp. "There's no way something like this existed without someone knowing. The council? The upper echelon? Did they turn a blind eye, or were they part of it?"
Nyra said nothing, but her jaw tightened. Tern Vale slowly approached a nearby terminal, brushing dust away with his sleeve.
"I can extract some records. No full data, but local logs might still be intact," he said quietly. "Might tell us who authorized this."
Micah stood still, breathing through his fury. Behind him, Harka's visor reflected rows of tanks without a word. The silent soldier had said nothing since they entered. Now, he moved to the back of the room and began marking each tank with small signal beacons, quietly cataloging every lost life.
Minutes later, they gathered what they could. The machines were too dangerous to leave behind, so Tern scrambled their systems, and ASC-9 Warden Pike sealed the door behind them.
Outside the lab, the stone and ash of the mountain gave way to a small open clearing—silent, windless.
It was here that they buried the dead.
Varn and Kaelin built cairns from obsidian and basalt, setting one marker for each fallen.
Sera moved between the graves, singing an old Thornkin healing hymn that the forest once sang to grieving mothers. Her voice cracked but didn't stop.
Micah knelt beside one grave, hands folded, eyes closed. "You were never supposed to be forgotten. You were never supposed to be tools."
Liera stood watch from the perimeter, her bow resting loosely in her hands.
Syrran Drehl said nothing. He simply knelt, head bowed, as if offering respect the only way he knew how.
Tern stepped back last, leaving a carved plaque made from an old Ashari panel he'd salvaged from the lab. On it he had scratched three words in all three alliance languages:
**Never Again.**
As the wind returned, sweeping down from the upper cliffs, the team stood in silence—nine warriors, one machine, and the weight of truth.
They turned as one.
Back to the path. Back to the mission. Back into the darkness.
But behind them, the dead finally rested.
And ahead, the reckoning waited.