While the pain urged him on, Ark continued to ignore it, and instead drew out the paper map, studying it closely. The section he was in now was closest to the central part of Lowtown, which on his map was marked with a big red X, and labeled: RESTRICTED AREA.

This meant that the authorities had wholly given up on this part of the tunnels, content with cleaning the outer limits while, whatever had made its nest in the central parts, was left to its own devices. As long as it did not attempt to reach the surface, Vanguard had deemed it more cost-effective to leave it alone.

Swallowing, Ark looked back into the dark side-passage, which was just as pitch-black as everything else. Despite no visual difference, he felt a creeping dread leaking out of the tunnel, piercing his body and settling in his spine. Here it grew its influence, reaching the nape of his neck where cold sweat sprang out.

“Fine!” He managed to say through clenched teeth, “I’ll go get myself killed in there, happy?”

Silence. There was no response, merely a flickering of his interface, then… nothing. The pain became a distant memory, a dull thrum of a drum pulsing in beat with his heart’s frantic staccato.

“Shit,” Ark cursed, staring down the passageway; a suggestion of depth marked by his netlink in lines of orange. First, he was summoned to his hateful birthrealm; attacked by an object he had never seen before; and now—whatever this object was—had infected his netlink. No good could come out of following these alien instructions, and yet what choice did he have?

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, Ark thought, chewing on his lip. As long as he remained there, static, nothing happened. However, he understood better than anyone that stagnation was death. Breathing the stale tunnel air, he set his jaw and moved his hands forward, toward the dark passage and into the unknown.

The jarring silence around him was deafening, broken only by the thumping beat of his heart or the disquieting sound of his raspy breath. Even after a hundred meters, he saw no new rifts, minor or otherwise. When he reached a fork, he let the pulsing beat of pain in his arm guide him, as it intensified slightly to indicate the right path.

After another hundred meters of straight path, Ark began to notice the temperature in the tunnels intensify. It had not been cold up till then, exactly, but now he began to feel sweat forming beneath his suit.

This was perhaps what unsettled him the most about his journey into the heart of the tunnels, as he had no knowledge that would explain this. There were no furnaces down here, nor were there supposed to be any left-over propellant in Vanguard’s main thrusters. The station had not required them for over thirty years, and so they had either been decommissioned or redesigned into other useful machinery, probably in Midcity.

The heat only intensified, as he got closer. Sweat began to pool on the inside of the suit, and leak out through any hole it could find, passing over his skin like slithering snakes in their escape. Several times, Ark looked over his shoulder, back at where he had come from—back to what he knew—and was rewarded with a sharp pinch of pain, reminding him that there was no way back. Not unless he wanted to gamble his sanity away through excruciating pain.

After at least a half an hour of drifting through the tunnels another change occurred. Like with the heat, it was subtle at first, but when Ark noticed it, it wholly consumed his attention. It began as a harmonic beat to his pulsing blood, syncing with the sound, but growing ever so slightly stronger with his approach. When Ark finally noticed it, there was no denying what it was. Another heartbeat, one pulsing so strongly that it echoed through the tunnels in a steady and calm beat.

As his attention, and fear, were grasped by this dawning realization, he was suddenly yanked into a violent halt. It took him a moment to even realize what happened, then another to reorient himself in the tunnel, before he could even begin to figure out what had happened. Only then was he able to mentally fathom the depths of the trouble he was in.

He had reached the end of his rope—literally. He looked back at the fibre-reinforced rope that was supposed to give him at least a kilometer of free movement, now extending completely taut behind him. He felt a subtle tug from the other end, a series a signals he understood was a query about his situation. Eyes wide, and barely able to make out anything, Ark stared down at the single piece of security equipment he had, and understood what needed to be done. It was just that doing it was an incredibly, unbelievably stupid thing to do.

Swallowing, he reached down to his waist, where the rope was attached, hesitating. The rope was not just there to pull him back, should he become unresponsive, it was also a marker that showed him the way back. Without it, and without a map of this area, he could become lost down here, doomed to wander the darkness until the batteries in the grav-suit gave out, leaving him to die a certain death, probably from thirst.

Ark had faced death for most of his life, and that in and of itself did not scare him. What scared him was the manner of death. A long and painful death from a base need was at the very bottom on his list on desired deaths, along with drowning, prolonged torture, or being force-fed tomatoes. He abhorred tomatoes.

With a face set in grim determination, Ark released the rope from his waist, where its magnetic end had been secured with three full latches. Once freed, he began a series of instructive tugs, and waited for a reply. As expected, the reply objected. Ark made one final set of instructions, then placed the magnetic end of the rope onto the side of the tunnel, holding it there. He ignored the scraping sound of magnet against metal, as Mino attempted to reply in vain.

Licking his lips, he turned back towards the direction he was forced to go down, and stretched out his arms. Slowly, ever so slowly, he moved again, further into the deep.

No going back now.

As the heat grew to a simmering sting on his face, Ark continued down the tunnel, guided by the pain in his arm through another set of forks. Likewise, the steady heartbeat that resounded through the tunnels grew stronger, making him nauseous. He desperately attempted to forge a map in his mind, already planning out the way back in reverse. Fortunately, he did not have to remember a complicated or extensive pattern, before he reached an end to the very narrow tunnel system.

Unfortunately, the end opened up into a larger space without any discernible source of light. With shaking fingers, he grasped the edge of the tunnel, holding onto it for dear life, as if letting go would result in a sudden drop.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

How am I supposed to find my way back here? He thought, staring into the darkness, where even his netlink was unable to provide guidelines. Slowly, he moved his head through the opening and turned a full rotation, looking for any landmarks he could use as a reference. There was nothing but empty plating and darkness in whatever direction chose.

He tried pinning his location on the netlink’s internal guidance, although he doubted it would be much help. Without access to the map of the tunnels, the netlink would be unable to guide him back across all three dimensions. The best it could do was two dimensions, with distance to Vanguard’s central pillar as the reference point. If this was the only tunnel entrance on the lateral axis it would be enough, but Ark had no way of knowing that for sure.

From the looks of this place, Ark’s best guess was that it had once been a logistical hub, for goods to either be stored, or transferred across lines to their final destination. There might be a hundred tunnel entrances, or more, and all of them labyrinthine.

His pulse rose, falling out of sync with the echoing heartbeat that now hammered against his ears as if they were drums of war. He racked his mind for a solution, any idea that did not involve him letting go of yet another secure way back, only to come up empty. The pain still urged him on, relentless and absolutely unsympathetic to his distress.

You’re getting desperate, he thought, staring down at his left arm, resentment rising in his chest. How much time do you have, I wonder?

There was a slight hint of desperation in the constant pain, and Ark was quick to take note of it. While the influence was in control of his netlink, it had to exert a lot of energy to force his compliance the way it did; and in doing so it opened itself up to attack from the netlink’s hard-wired defenses—the ones that even Ark would be unable to disable, should he want to. Ark was certain that, should he reconnect to Vanguard’s neural network, the influence would be purged in moments, as it would add exponentially more processing power to the fight.

Until he was able to reestablish the link, Ark had to play along, even if it meant giving the influence what it wanted—at first. He was not so kind as to allow anyone to use him as a tool and get the better of him afterward. Ark would have his due, in time.

Fueling his actions with hatred, rather than fear, Ark grasped the edge of the tunnel on opposing sides and pushed off. Rudderless, he drifted, guided only by a dull pulse of pain.

Once he was free from the tunnel’s enclosing space, and the darkness had entirely consumed him, all of his senses became utterly useless. Only the soft touch of the stale air caressing his face as he passed into the unknown told him he was moving.

In this singular state, seconds passed like minutes. Minutes felt like hours, merely drifting in nothingness. After a while, time became entirely meaningless. Only the sound of his breath, his unsteady pulse, the heat that assaulted his skin, and the echoing heartbeat that thrummed through the cavity, assaulting his mind with every thu-thump.

Then he saw it. An eerie outline at first, slowly coming into focus as he approached. A sinister red hue grew stronger, filling his vision. As he breathed, he felt the dust-laden air scratch at his throat. His eyes began to water, as particles rained into them, originating from whatever was hidden here, within a cloud of dust.

The outline became oblong, then its jagged and rough surface came into view—as did the origins of the light. A stone, as tall as a man, floating freely in the massive hollow, surrounded by a thick cloud of dust that obscured its subtle light. Etched into the face of the oblong stone that Ark drifted ever closer to, were lines and shapes, forming distinct words.

With his eyes blurry from dust and tears, Ark had difficulty making out what it said, before he was finally in front of the object and able to blink away the intrusive particles. The heat here was excruciating, scorching his skin, like he was sitting in front of an open fire. He had to halt his momentum, certain that touching the stone in front would leave him with burns.

Wiping away the last dirt from his eyes Ark could make out what was written on the stone. The pulsing pain in his arm had taken on an excited beat, insisting he came closer, urging him forward, but he ignored it. Etched into the surface of the stone, three clear initials stood out in bloodied red, skilfully carved.

E.N.D.

While curious, these in and of themselves did not feel remarkable. What instead grabbed Arks attention—and his imagination—were the hastily scratched letters below. Clearly done after the stone had been manufactured and placed here, someone had used what might very well have been their fingernails to scratch a single, two-word warning below the initials.

—is nigh—

Reading these juxtaposed messages together, Ark felt a creeping sense of existential dread. This stone was wrong, somehow—he could feel it in his very bones. What he felt was worse than the fear of death, worse that fear of pain—and he absolutely could not understand why he felt this way.

The sensation was disturbing, not merely because of its inexplicable nature, but also the haziness it brought to his mental faculties. Thoughts slowing down to a crawl, Ark was reminded of the time that he got drunk with Mino, when one of their jobs had been paid out in cheap booze, rather than the credits they required to buy food. What Ark remembered from the experience was the dulling of his senses, his reactions, and the loss of control, making it feel like an out-of-body experience. Now, in the presence of the obelisk, that same loss of control returned, intensified by the ominous heat and the heartbeat pulsing with a hypnotic rhythm.

Stunned, Ark could only watch as his hand moved forward, as if on its own volition. He registered the anomaly, screaming internally to it to stop, to halt its advance and leave the damn stone be!

It was no use. The control he had been able to assert over his hijacked hand was lost, in the face of the strange obelisk. Helplessly, Ark could only watch as his hand touched the dark surface of the obelisk and pandemonium erupted before him.

Like warped clockwork, the obelisk responded to his touch by rotating around itself—slowly at first, then increasing its speed, casting off dust particulates that masked its true surface. The initials of E.N.D. marked the center of the spiraling object, remaining eligible while the hastily scratched warning quickly flaked off to reveal the blood red surface beneath.

Rather than a single, structural object, the obelisk was instead composed of a multitude of hexagonal lattices formed from translucent crystals; growing, forming, retracting, and restructuring in organized chaos that clearly had some purpose, but was so far beyond Ark’s ability to understand that he could only stare dumbly. The scene was unlike anything Ark had ever seen that he felt it had a distinctive alien nature—the kind that could only be fully understood by a similarly alien intelligence.

Still dulled by whatever influence he was under, Ark was alerted by his netlink that the object in front of him was more than just a pretty piece of jewelry that had gathered dust in this abandoned storeroom.

Tr()j@n pr¤t%col a#tivat&

Corrupted text followed too quickly for Ark to keep up, or make sense of, but he did not need to read it in order to understand the general purpose behind it. Something, or someone, was launching an assault on Vanguard, using him as a pawn.

At the same time, he felt the hazy grip on his mind and body falter, as the influence that had infected him concentrated its efforts on the crystalline structure in front of him, forgetting Ark in the process. It was a fatal mistake, and something that Ark’s former keepers had repeated in the past. Leaving Ark to his own devices was a recipe for disaster—to his enemies.

With a decisive breath, Ark closed his eyes and delved back into his netlink with a clear goal in mind.

I’m coming for you, you bastard.