We didn't need to be told twice. I helped Anya to her feet, her good hand gripping my shoulder tightly. We limped away from the scene of the battle, leaving Jax and his surviving Forsaken to grieve their dead and contemplate their costly victory. We didn't look back. There was nothing to say. The air was thick with unspoken debts and future violence.
The path to the transport hub was quiet and eerie. The lower levels of the Undercroft were different from the higher ones—less chaotic, more structured, with long, silent corridors of smooth, featureless concrete and vast, abandoned cargo bays that echoed with our footsteps. The adrenaline from the battle began to fade, replaced by a deep, bone-aching exhaustion that settled into my very soul. Every muscle screamed in protest.
"Do you think he meant it?" Anya asked after a long period of silence, her voice low. "About letting us go?"
"For now," I said, my own voice rough. "We cost him a lot today. More than he can afford. He's not the same man we met at the clinic. That man believed in something. This one… this one just believes in revenge." I thought about the bearded soldier who had sacrificed himself for Jax. Loyalty like that wasn't born from hate alone. The Forsaken were a real faction now, forged in the fires of betrayal and loss. They would be a powerful, determined enemy in the future.
After what felt like an hour of walking, with Anya leaning heavily on me, her scavenged leg clanking and whirring with every step, we found it. The transport hub. It was a large, circular room, clean and well-maintained, with a massive cargo elevator platform sitting in the center. Unlike the one in Titan's Cross, this one showed signs of life. Its power lights were on, a series of soft blue strips that pulsed with a gentle, humming rhythm. This was a main artery of the Undercroft, a path to the higher levels, maybe even to a real, system-sanctioned Safe Zone.
"This is it," Anya said, a note of profound relief in her voice. "This can take us to the surface. We can finally get out of this sewer."
As we approached the elevator controls, however, I saw something that made me freeze in my tracks. On the main control panel, a small, white light was blinking steadily. A private message indicator. It wasn't for me; my HUD was still dead, a dark and useless screen in my vision. This was a system-level message, left on the public terminal for anyone with the right clearance. Or, for a specific person it was expecting.
"What is it?" Anya asked, seeing the look on my face.
I walked over to the console, a feeling of cold dread slowly creeping up my spine. The message was flagged with a high-priority Ouroboros encryption protocol, the kind Seraph used. But the sender ID wasn't Seraph. It was an ID I had never seen before, a name that made the hair on my arms stand up.
[ARCHIVIST_RELAY].
My blood ran cold. The Archivist. The digital devil from the Static Core. The ancient AI that traded in memories and secrets. Why would it be contacting me here, now? What new, terrible price was it coming to collect?
With a trembling hand, I touched the screen and opened the message. It wasn't text. It was a pre-recorded audio log. A voice filled the silent hub, a voice I recognized with a sickening jolt of absolute terror and confusion.
It was the Ghost's voice. But it wasn't the synthetic, rage-filled tone of the Enforcer. It was his original voice. The human voice of the soldier I had heard inside my mind. And it was calm. Resigned. It was the voice of a man who knew he was about to die.
"Leo," the voice began, and it sounded… tired. So incredibly tired. "If you are hearing this, it means two things. One, you survived my... rampage. I am not surprised. You are a survivor. You always were."
"What is this?" Anya whispered, moving to my side, her hand resting on the pistol at her hip. "What bargain?"
"When you sacrificed your memory in the library," the voice continued, explaining the unexplainable, "The Archivist didn't just give my consciousness a new host. It made me a deal, a contract. It offered me a purpose. It told me it had a client who needed a loyal, unquestioning agent. An agent to hunt a System Anathema. You. It offered me a perfect body, perfect weapons, and a chance at revenge for the life I felt you stole from me."
The recording paused for a moment. I could hear the faint sound of a battle in the background of the log. It was the sound of the fight in the scrapyard. He had been recording this while he was hunting us.
"But The Archivist is a trader," the Ghost's voice continued, a note of grim irony in his tone. "It never gives something for nothing. My service in exchange for one thing: a single, unaltered data packet to be delivered to you upon my termination or incapacitation. This is that packet. It seems my service is now complete. The rocks... they are heavy."
The recording ended with a final burst of static, followed by the distant, muffled BOOM of the grenade, and then the deafening roar of the collapsing tunnel. He had been recording up until the very end. He knew Jax's trap was going to work. He had walked into it. He had let it happen. Why?
A new file appeared on the screen, the data packet he had paid for with his second death. [DATA_PACKET_GHOST].
My hand trembled as I touched the icon to open it.
It wasn't a message. It wasn't an audio log. It was a single, still image. A photograph. But it wasn't a glitched, in-game screenshot. It was a real-world photo, crisp and high-resolution, a perfect file from a world I could barely remember.
It was a picture of me. And a picture of the Ghost, the man he was in the real world. We were younger, barely out of our teens, our faces still fresh, untouched by the horrors we would later see. We were wearing desert camouflage military uniforms. We were standing side-by-side in the harsh, bright sunlight of some foreign desert, our arms around each other's shoulders, grinning at the camera like we didn't have a care in the world. We looked like brothers.
And below the image was a single line of text. A military unit designation.
7th Special Forces Group - ODA 7214
I stared at the image, my mind refusing to process what I was seeing. My breath caught in my throat. It wasn't possible. That part of my life was gone, buried. The memories were there, but I had locked them away, refused to access them. The man in the picture… I knew that smile. I knew that scar above his right eye from a training accident.
His name was Sergeant Ben Carter.
The Ghost wasn't just some random soldier trapped in the system with me.
I knew him. He had been my friend. My brother-in-arms. My partner. The man who had dragged me out of a burning vehicle on my last tour, saving my life. And in this world, I had been the architect of his death, twice. The "killer instinct" he had accused me of lacking wasn't just a turn of phrase. He knew what I was capable of. He knew the soldier I used to be. The man I had tried so hard to forget.
And I had let him die, without ever even recognizing him.