Day 30.
The Factory Floor.
Sauget, Illinois.
00:05 Hours.
I was braced for the aneurysm.
The timeline paradox was a physical weight inside my skull, a pressurized bubble of memory and trauma threatening to liquefy my frontal lobe. I closed my eyes, gritting my teeth, waiting for the wet pop that would end my second life.
But the pain didn't come.
Instead, the air pressure in the factory floor dropped. My ears popped. The ambient temperature, usually freezing due to the User Chill, spiked to a humid, tropical warmth.
I opened my eyes.
The green light pouring through the skylight wasn't just illumination. It was heavy. It possessed mass. It swirled around us like a bioluminescent fog, thick with cascading binary code and particles of emerald dust.
It didn't feel like grace. It felt like a scan.
"PHASE 1 SURVIVORS DETECTED," the Voice boomed. It vibrated the rivets in the steel beams, shaking dust from the rafters. "INITIATING MAINTENANCE PROTOCOL."
`[SYSTEM MERCY: ENGAGED.]`
`[TARGET: ALL BIOLOGICAL ASSETS.]`
`[OBJECTIVE: RESTORE TO BASELINE FOR PHASE 2.]`
"Jack?" Helen's voice cut through the hum. It sounded wet, broken.
I turned to look at the Lung entrance.
Helen was on her knees. A minute ago, she was a dying woman. The chlorine gas from the Enclave attack had turned her lungs into scar tissue. She was coughing up pink foam, grey-faced from alcohol withdrawal and thirty days of terror. She was drowning on dry land.
Now, the green mist was forcing its way into her mouth and nose.
She gagged, clawing at her throat. "Get it out! It's choking me!"
"Let it in," I said. My voice was calm. Unnaturally calm. "It's fixing you."
Helen convulsed. She arched her back, hacking violently.
Then, she took a breath. A real breath.
Her chest expanded fully. The rattle was gone. The wheeze was gone.
She stared at her hands. The tremors—the ones that had plagued her since Day 1, the shakes she treated with scavenged whiskey—stopped instantly. Her skin flushed pink. The grey pallor of liver stress vanished.
"I can breathe," she whispered, touching her throat. She looked horrified. "My lungs... they're clear. It scraped me clean. It feels like... ice water inside my chest."
"It's maintenance," I said. "We're assets. You don't let your assets rust."
"Look at Travis," Yana said.
The Tank was standing in the center of the room, bathed in the green spotlight.
His left shoulder was a ruin of third-degree burns from the Enclave flamethrower. The skin was charcoal, the muscle cooked grey.
As the mist touched him, the dead flesh began to slough off.
It fell away in wet, heavy sheets, hitting the concrete with a sound like raw steaks being dropped. Slap. Slap.
Underneath, there was no blood. Just pink, fresh muscle knitting together at high speed. Fascia wove itself into cables. Skin grew over the raw meat in seconds, turning the familiar stone-grey of his class.
Travis flexed his arm. He rolled his shoulder. The pain was gone.
But the arm itself—the fused, club-like limb I had created with the serum—remained. The elbow was still a knot of bone. The fingers were still thick, fused claws.
`[TRAVIS: HP 100%.]`
`[STATUS: OPTIMIZED.]`
`[NOTE: MUTATIONS ARE RETAINED AS UPGRADES.]`
"It didn't fix the arm," Travis rumbled, looking at his club.
"The System doesn't see it as an injury," I said. "It sees it as an evolution. It fixed the damage, not the design."
I looked down at my own leg.
The acid burn from the Pus-Bomber was gone. Not scarred. Gone. The skin was smooth, unblemished, the muscle fully regrown. It was as if it had never happened.
I looked at my hands. They were steady as a rock. The blackened, necrotic veins from the User Chill had settled into a calm, dormant blue. The maggots were gone.
But it wasn't just the body. It was the mind.
The Sanity meter in my vision, which had been blinking red at 65%—the danger zone for psychosis—shot up.
`[SANITY RESTORED: 100%.]`
`[TRAUMA BUFFERS: CLEARED.]`
`[EMOTIONAL STATE: NEUTRALIZED.]`
I felt a cold shiver run down my spine. Not from fear, but from the sudden, jarring absence of it.
The guilt about Sal being crushed? Gone.
The horror of the woodchipper? Gone.
The lingering, crushing fear of the Server Wipe? Deleted.
It felt like someone had reached into my brain with a wire brush and scrubbed the hard drive. I remembered the pain—I knew, intellectually, that it had happened—but I couldn't feel it. I couldn't summon the grief.
I tried to picture the Ghost of Timeline 1. The dead version of myself who had pointed to the floor.
I couldn't see him. The hallucination was scrubbed.
I felt clean. I felt hollow. I felt like a weapon that had just been stripped, dipped in solvent, oiled, and reassembled.
"It's resetting us," Boyd said.
He was standing under the shattered skylight, unplugged from the generator. The green code washed over him, reflecting in his silver skin. He looked polished. New.
"It's fixing the hardware," Boyd droned. "Defragmenting the software."
"It's erasing the cost," I said. My voice was flat. "It wants us fresh for the next round. It doesn't want broken toys."
Ronnie ripped the bandage off his face.
He stood there, blinking his one good eye. The infection was gone. The pus, the inflammation, the fever—vanished.
The socket was empty. The skin had sealed over it, smooth and pink, like the skin of a newborn baby. He touched the depression where his eye used to be.
"I don't hurt," Ronnie whispered. He looked at his hands, then at me. "Jack, I don't hurt at all. I should hurt. I lost my eye. I lost Sal."
"The System doesn't care about your eye," I said. "And it doesn't care about Sal. It cares that you can work."
I walked to the center of the room. I looked at the crew.
Twenty-eight people.
Five minutes ago, they were a ragged, starving, traumatized mess. They were on the verge of collapse.
Now?
They looked like athletes. Their muscles were full. Their eyes were clear. Their posture was perfect. Even the starvation deficit was wiped. Our stomachs stopped cramping. The hollows in our cheeks filled out.
We were peak condition.
And that was the scariest thing I had seen in thirty days. Because you don't repair a tool unless you plan to use it for something heavy. You don't sharpen a knife unless you plan to cut.
I looked at Yana.
She was standing near the wall, away from the others. The green mist swirled around her. It touched her arms, healing the shrapnel wound in her thigh.
But when the mist reached her stomach, it recoiled.
The green light seemed to hit an invisible barrier around her midsection. It shimmered, turning a dark, bruised violet for a split second before dissipating.
`[SCANNING...]`
`[ERROR: BIOLOGICAL ANOMALY.]`
`[PROTOCOL: SKIP.]`
Yana gasped, her hand going to her stomach. She looked at me, her eyes wide with terror.
"It knows," she mouthed.
"It skipped you," I said softly, stepping closer so only she could hear. "It can't fix what it doesn't understand."
`[RESTORATION COMPLETE.]`
`[ALL ASSETS PRIMED.]`
The green light began to fade, retracting back up into the sky like a tide going out. The green tint remained in the atmosphere, a permanent filter over the world, staining the clouds, but the active healing mist was gone.
The Voice returned.
"PREPARE FOR PHASE 2. DIFFICULTY INCREASE: 200%."
I clenched my fist. The strength was intoxicating. The Cruelty trait was still there, embedded in my psyche, but it wasn't a burden anymore. It was just a setting I could toggle.
"Everyone up," I ordered. My voice didn't crack. It didn't waver. It commanded. "Check your gear. Load your weapons. If the System healed us, it means we're going to need every hit point."
"What comes next?" Paige asked. She wasn't shaking anymore. She held her pistol with a steady hand. She looked ready to kill.
"The expansion," I said.
I turned to the hole I had drilled in the floor. The one the Ghost had pointed to before he was deleted.
The jackhammer was lying next to it.
"Travis," I said. "Peel the floor back. Let's see what the System was hiding."
Travis walked over. He jammed his massive, mismatched fingers into the crack I had made. He braced his legs. The new muscle in his shoulder rippled.
"Open," Travis grunted.
He pulled.
SCREEECH.
The concrete slab didn't just crack; it tore. Travis hauled a six-foot section of the foundation upright and shoved it aside. It crashed onto the factory floor with a sound like a tomb being unsealed.
We looked down.
Underneath, embedded in the foundation of the factory, was a heavy, circular hatch made of a metal that wasn't steel. It was seamless, matte-black, and pulsed with the same green light as the sky.
On the hatch, etched in glowing letters, was a single word.
NEXUS.
`[HIDDEN NODE DETECTED.]`
`[ACCESS GRANTED: PHASE 2 ARCHITECT.]`
I looked at the crew. They were healed. They were loyal. They were armed. And they were terrifyingly sane.
"Welcome to the next level," I said.
I grabbed the wheel of the hatch and spun it.
FOUNDRY PROTOCOL - DAY 30
SECTOR 1 (JACK MONROE) █████████░ 9/10 Nodes
STATUS: HEALED (SYSTEM MERCY)
Crew Health: 100%
Sanity: 100% (Trauma Wiped)
Discovery: The Nexus Gate
Next Event: The Map Expands / New Unlocks