The scorched corridor stretched before them like a throat sealed in soot and silence.
Lieutenant Voss motioned for the squad to hold position, his exosuit's servos letting out a faint hiss as he raised a clenched fist. The walls around them were warped — blistered metal, carbon-stained stone. Heat had long since faded, but the aftermath clung to the air like old sorrow. Zeta-9 and Omega-4 stood in a chamber that once bore power — the remains of a fusion relay chamber from a time before any of them were born.
"Hotlands?" muttered Sergeant Iyami, voice crackling faintly over the comms. "What's left of it, anyway."
"No mistake," came Omega-4 Captain Reznik's voice. Deep, gravel-thick. "This was an energy nexus — I'm seeing fusion lines, magneto-conduits. Burned out, collapsed, but they ran deep. Goddamn deep."
The rest of the squad moved carefully through the blackened passage, boots crunching over debris — fragmented wiring, chunks of melted alloy, and a fine gray dust that wasn't just ash. Corporal Miles knelt by a shattered vent duct, waving his sensor wand over a tangle of scorched tubing. Numbers flared red across his HUD.
"Radiation spike. Residual. Not enough to cook us, but something big went off here."
Voss exhaled slowly. "Central, this is Zeta-9. We've reached what appears to be a fused chamber under Site Delta — consistent with historical Core structure layouts. Radiation within tolerable levels. Requesting backup scans from orbital."
Silence.
Again.
Comms sputtered, cracked, then died entirely. Static filled the channel. Voss sighed, a harsh rasp in the dry air.
"They're gone again," he muttered. "That's the third blackout in an hour."
"Signal's degrading the deeper we go," Iyami added. "Same pattern as before. The tunnel behind us is clean, but forward — something's blocking it. Scrambling it."
"Something down here is scrambling it," Reznik growled.
The Omega squad's pointman, Corporal Darvick, kicked aside a collapsed support strut, revealing what looked like the edge of a doorway — melted into a jagged crescent. Inside was a small room, its walls blackened beyond recognition. Yet in its center stood something intact.
A child's backpack.
Voss froze. The others took a slow step inward.
It was impossibly out of place. No fire damage. No scorch marks. The bright red fabric looked faded, but preserved — as if time had passed, but the fire had not touched it.
Sergeant Iyami stepped forward, kneeling beside it with a reverent caution. "It's real," she said after a moment. "Old, but not… ancient. Mid-21st century style. No ID tag. Just… this."
She pulled out a folded piece of paper from one of the side pouches.
It was a drawing. Crayon on yellowing paper. Six stick figures — each holding hands. Smiling. One had a blue triangle scribbled above its head, another a red heart. Below them, written in messy letters:
"We're not alone."
Reznik swore under his breath. "This belonged to one of the kids."
"No scorch. No dust. It's like it was placed here," Iyami muttered.
The air behind them shifted — a low vibration reverberating through the floor.
"I've got movement," whispered Darvick. "Seismic or… footsteps?"
The light in the chamber dimmed subtly, like something unseen passed between them and the only functional ceiling light.
And then they heard it — a distant scraping. Wet. Heavy. Deliberate.
Zeta-9 tightened formation, exosuits shifting into combat posture with a whir of hydraulics and a soft whine of primed capacitors. Omega-4 fanned out, forming a perimeter around the ruined chamber. The child's backpack sat untouched in the center like bait.
"Thermals," Reznik ordered.
Their visors flickered. Lines of data scrolled down HUDs, attempting to isolate heat signatures — but the results were… wrong. The chamber registered cold. Deathly cold. Yet something moved just beyond visual range.
"Something's disrupting our sensors again," Iyami said, steadying her rifle. "I'm seeing afterimages, thermal echoes, but no source."
A hiss of static burst across Zeta-9's channel, then resolved into… a voice.
"Help us."
It was faint. Warped, as if carried through waterlogged tape.
Voss turned sharply. "Did anyone else catch that?"
"Affirmative," Reznik growled, his tone darkening. "That wasn't from Central. That wasn't human comms."
Then came the sound of giggling — broken, stuttering, hollow. Like something trying to recreate a laugh it didn't understand.
Darvick, on point, took a step forward—
And the wall beside him exploded inward.
A blur of motion — claws, bones, charred fur. Something fast and wrong slammed him into the ground with enough force to crater the floor. Screams burst across the squad comms. Weapons fired — red laser bolts flashing through the dark like tracer rounds.
The creature shrieked. A high-pitched, inhuman wail that rattled the exosuits' internal speakers. It darted away before the full force of the barrage could pin it down, vanishing into a crack in the scorched ceiling.
Darvick lay still — his vitals red across the squad HUD, but alive.
Voss reached him in two steps. "Status?"
"Armor took most of it," Darvick groaned. "But… look."
He held something up in a shaking gauntlet.
A handprint had been burned into his chestplate — small. Child-sized. But it radiated heat, even through the exosuit. Voss scanned it with his gauntlet — the results came back biological but… mutated. Laced with magical residues. Traces of monster DNA and human.
"Impossible," Iyami said. "That thing—what we saw—it wasn't a kid. It wasn't alive."
Reznik knelt, analyzing the scorched wall. "Not a natural lifeform. Fusion of… god knows what. It used magic. Blood magic. Defensive spells laced with instinct. Like it didn't even know what it was doing."
Voss turned slowly toward the melted doorway — the child's drawing still in his hand.
Six stick figures. One with a heart.
One with a triangle.
He whispered aloud: "They didn't just go missing. They were taken."
Iyami's voice cracked. "Sir… what if they're still down here?"
The light above flickered again — and for a moment, every HUD in the room showed six ghostly silhouettes at the chamber's edge. Children.
Watching.
Then gone.
The chamber's lights went dark.
"Fall back," Voss ordered. "Tight formation. We're not staying here with that thing still loose."
Outside, in a wide corridor where the damage was less severe, they regrouped. Darvick was stable but silent, his gaze distant.
"Armor seals holding," Iyami said. "But we've got multiple low-pressure warnings on three suits. We need resupply if we're going any deeper."
"Agreed," Voss replied. "Initiate ping burst."
Reznik added: "Requesting: replacement energy cells, armor sealant, medical nanites, and heavy sensor drones. We're going to need more eyes."
A soft chime signaled successful burst uplink.
One of their earlier drones — battered, melted, but functional — hovered back to them. It carried data.
A corrupted video log opened on Voss's HUD.
[DATA LOG: RECOVERED FOOTAGE — 2097.08.12]
SUBJECT: "Matthew E." — Age 9.
The footage is shaky, handheld. The view bobs as a small figure runs down a narrow tunnel — breathing ragged, whimpering.
Faint voices echo in the background. Childlike. But wrong. Too many syllables. Gurgled laughter mixed with sobbing.
"They're not my friends anymore," a boy whispers.
He ducks behind a ruined pillar. The stone is scorched. The air shimmers faintly with residual magic. He peeks out — and the camera catches it:
A figure at the far end of the hall.
Tall. Thin. Its body twitching, reshaping itself every few seconds. It mimics the posture of a child — but its proportions are off. Limbs too long. Fingers twitching like antennae.
The boy's voice again, barely audible:
"Toriel said we could go home. She lied."
Static fills the screen.
Then a flicker — another figure appears beside the first. Smaller. Holding something.
A stuffed animal. A duck with one eye burned away.
"Mattie, come back," the smaller one says. But the voice is not a child's. It's layered — like five voices speaking at once.
The boy screams and bolts — the camera shakes, falls — and cuts to black.
Back in the corridor, no one spoke for a long moment.
"That's the first," Voss said finally. "Matthew E., reported missing near Ebott 33 years ago."
Reznik glanced toward the darkened hallway they'd just left. "They were changed down here. Used. Rewritten."
Iyami's voice cracked slightly. "Sir, if they're still alive… are they even themselves anymore?"
Silence answered.
Until a second ping came through.
Supply drop inbound. ETA: 17 minutes.