The administrator's office felt wrong the moment she stepped inside.
Not dangerous, absent.
The door slid shut behind her, sealing away the breathing walls of the Metros. The red moss did not creep here. No roots split the concrete. No insects skittered across the floor, no distant chirps echoed from unseen rafters. The air was stale, cold, untouched by divinity or decay alike.
This place had been cut out of the world.
Tables lined the room in rigid rows, their surface cluttered with machines that had long since died. Consoles lay dark and hollow, cables slack like severed veins. Power cores sat open, emptied, starved. The silence here was heavier than anywhere she'd been before, thick enough that even her footsteps felt intrusive.
She moved slowly, rifle held close, eyes scanning every corner. Whatever this place once governed, it no longer answered to anyone.
A wall-length map stretched across the far side of the room.
It stopped her in her tracks.
The display was immaculate.
Every major train line was outlined in crisp detail, branching and intersecting like a circulatory system laid bare. Stations were marked, labeled, layered atop one another in careful hierarchies. Even the Deepstrata routes that were buried far below civilian access were present, drawn with the same clarity as the rest.
No cracks. No fading. No moss daring to touch its surface.
It was as if the map had been protected.
She stepped closer, tracing a gloved finger along one of the lines. Terminal 1. Transfer hubs. Maintenance spines. And then, lower still, a convergence point, deep enough that the map grew sparse around it, as if reluctant to acknowledge what lay there.
She felt it again. That pressure in her chest. Not fear. Anticipation.
She turned away.
At the far end of the office, partially hidden behind a collapsed panel, was an elevator shaft.
The doors yawned open, their edges bent outward as if pried apart long ago. Inside, there was nothing. Just darkness descending into black. No elevator car. No cables neatly coiled at the top.
She peered over the edge.
A single cable ran down the center of the shaft, disappearing into the void below.
She sighed quietly, "Of course."
Calling the elevator was pointless. Whatever powered this place had been gone for decades, maybe longer. If she wanted to go deeper, there was only one way.
She slung her rifle across her back and grabbed the cable with both hands.
Before committing, she gave it a sharp tug.
It held.
She nodded to herself, wrapped her legs around it, and began to descend.
The light from above faded quickly. The glow from the administrator's office became a distant square, shrinking until it was little more than a pale memory. Her arms burned as she lowered herself, muscles protesting with each careful movement.
The shaft felt... longer that it should have been.
Minutes stretched. The air grew colder, denser. Sound died entirely, swallowed by the depth. She couldn't see the bottom, only darkness, waiting.
Then—
Her boots struck metal.
She exhaled sharply, steadying herself as she stood on the roof of the elevator car. Dust coated its surface, thick enough to mark the outline of her steps.
She crouched and found the emergency hatch.
With a grunt, she slid it open and dropped inside.
The interior was pitch black. The faint outline of the floor was barely visible, her own breathing suddenly loud in the enclosed space. She reached out, fingers brushing against cold walls, cables, control panels long since dead.
The elevator doors were sealed shut.
She wasn't surprised.
She pulled her terminal from her pack, its screen flickering to life in the darkness. Connecting a cable to the elevator's control interface, she ran a stripped-down power routing program. Nothing elegant, nothing safe.
Just enough.
The elevator doors shuddered.
Then, with a groan that echoed through the shaft, they slid open.
The smell hit her immediately, rancid metal, ozone, something old and wet beneath it all.
She stepped out.
The room beyond was vast.
Rows of dead monitors lined the walls, their screens cracked or dark, control panels coated in layers of dust and corrosion. Thick cables snaked across the floor, disappearing into pits and conduits carved deep into the structure. This wasn't an office.
It was a control chamber.
And at the far end of the room—
Something watched her.
A massive silhouette rose from the darkness, metallic and unmoving. Its form was wrong, too large, too deliberate. Plates of armor overlapped across a hunched frame, cables and structures jutting out like exposed bones. It stood there, silent, its shape barely illuminated by the dying light from the elevator behind her.
It did not move.
It did not breathe.
But it was not dead.
The Fox's hand tightened around her rifle.
The door behind her slid shut.
And the darkness settled in.