The tunnels closed in around them. Low ceilings, cracked stone, the reek of stagnant water and rusted metal.
Every step sent echoes rolling into the dark. Behind them, the Reign's thunder still fell, distant but constant — a reminder they had no sky to return to.
The wounded leaned on each other, breathing shallow. The Last Light moved at the front, blade ready, hand brushing the wall to guide them. No light but the pulse of a dying battery at his hip.
His boots splashed through pools of stagnant water, each step breaking a thin skin of grime. Above, the tunnel groaned under the weight of the broken world.
Memory clawed at him, unbidden.
Another tunnel.Another lifetime.Running — a boy then, boots too big, hand clutched in another's.His mother's voice, sharp in the dark:"Run. Never stop running."
The boy tripped.The hand let go.Gunfire replaced the whisper.
The Last Light blinked the memory away, forcing his mind back to the present.
A splash ahead — faint, but real.He raised a fist.
The survivors stopped, pressing into the walls.
Something moved in the water.Low.Fast.
Not human.
The Last Light shifted his stance — lower, blade ready.He knew better than to call out.Noise was death down here.
Instead, he motioned: spread out. Stay low. Watch.
The girl from the Hollow Guard crept closer, clutching the stolen data core like a relic.
Another splash — closer this time.
The tunnels were not empty.
They never had been.
A few more steps — and then total silence.The kind born only where death has already passed through.
The Last Light raised his fist.The survivors froze — waiting for judgment they could not outrun.
Something shifted in the water ahead.Not a splash — something worse.A slow, sucking sound, as if the flood itself had learned how to breathe.
A shape lurched into view, half-swallowed by the darkness.Armor plates hung from it like dead skin, mottled with rot and mold.Its legs — what was left of them — scraped against the tunnel floor in jerking, unnatural spasms.
The Last Light tightened his grip on the blade.
Lights flickered deep within its ruined skull — a sick, broken stutter of red and gold, pulsing like dying embers.One eye bulged grotesquely, leaking a trail of black fluid into the stagnant water.The other two burned colder — dim, steady, watching without a shred of thought left behind them.
It made no sound of warning.It simply charged.
The Last Light moved first.He shoved the survivors backward into the deeper dark and stepped forward to meet it.
Steel flashed.Water erupted.
And in the tunnels where even the dead had learned to crawl, the Last Light stood alone — the only light left against the rot.
The crawler hit him with the force of a landslide.Its momentum drove him backward, boots skidding through the filth.He twisted, letting the blade carve a deep line across its armor as it passed.
Sparks spat into the dark.The crawler shrieked — not a sound of pain, but fury.
It came again, faster than its broken frame should have allowed.
The Last Light ducked low, feeling the gust of rusted limbs slicing the air above him.He drove upward with a brutal strike, ramming the blade into the soft seam beneath the crawler’s core.
The creature spasmed, leaking black rot and sparks, but did not fall.
A piston-driven limb caught the Last Light across the ribs, sending him sprawling into the flooded floor.
The water swallowed him for a breathless moment.Cold.Heavy.
He rolled, came up coughing, blade still in hand.
The crawler staggered, one leg dragging uselessly behind it, but its burning gaze never left him.
The Last Light lunged, feral and fast.
He slammed the crawler into the wall with his full weight, blade sawing through layers of corroded plating.
The machine screeched and bucked.
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It clawed at him with hooked limbs, catching his shoulder, tearing through the worn armor there.Pain flared, but he ignored it.
One final thrust, angled true, and the blade drove into the crawler's heart-core.
The creature convulsed once — a violent, shuddering death — and then sagged, lifeless.
The Last Light wrenched his weapon free and let the carcass slump into the water.
For a moment, there was only the ragged sound of his breathing and the distant rumble of the Reign’s guns above.
He turned back to the survivors, who watched him with a mixture of terror and awe.
He gave no speech. No comfort.
Only a word, cold and final:
"Move."
And they did.
The Last Light led them deeper into the tunnels, the blood still drying under the shredded edges of his armor.
As he moved, something twisted deep beneath his scars — a slow, burning pressure he hadn't felt in years.Not pain. Not exhaustion. A calling.
The Hollow Guard girl stumbled, clutching the data core tighter to her chest, keeping close behind him.For the briefest moment, the brand on her skin glowed — a faint, sickle-shaped halo of light, unseen by the others.
He saw it.And somewhere inside his ruined frame, the same light answered — a silent tremor beneath the wreckage of what they’d tried to erase.
The Reign had built them both for something.And forgotten them both just the same.
He felt it then — a scar deeper than any wound, a name he no longer dared speak.A face half-lost to time, but never to memory.The one he could not save.The one they burned away.
The girl stumbled behind him, clutching the core, fire in her brand and fear in her eyes.It was not her face he saw.It was hers.
And the Last Light remembered what it cost to lose a promise.
The survivors whispered behind them.Fear threaded every word.
"She's wrong." "She's not one of us." "We leave her... before it's too late."
The Hollow Guard girl stumbled, clutching the core tighter to her chest, keeping close behind him.
The Last Light slowed. The ache under his skin — the burning call — pulsed hotter.He remembered — the one they left behind.The one he hadn't protected.
Not again.
He turned to face them.
The survivors skidded to a halt, faces pale, breaths steaming in the cold rot-thick air.
His voice was low. Flat.
"Anyone who leaves her dies behind her."
No one argued.No one moved.
The Hollow Guard girl stared at him — confused, terrified, but alive.
The others shuffled back, their fear folding inward, tangled now between the dark ahead and the man they followed.
The Last Light turned and kept walking, the girl close behind.
The silence that followed was heavier than any gunfire.
The tunnel narrowed into a throat of broken stone and collapsed piping.The walls sweated moisture, the floor slick underfoot.
The Last Light led them without hesitation, his steps sure even in the dark.The others followed, breathing shallow, the air thick enough to drown in.
The girl stumbled again — not from fear this time, but from something deeper.Her body trembled under the weight of the thing buried inside her.The brand at her throat flickered once — barely a spark — but he saw it.
He slowed, letting the others move ahead just enough to give them space.
"You're burning," he said, voice low enough for only her to hear.
She looked up at him, eyes wide, hollow with confusion and something deeper — recognition.
"I don't know why," she whispered.
He did.He'd felt it too — the first time the Reign tried to awaken what they buried inside him.A fire that didn't consume flesh — but memory.A fire that changed what you were.
"Keep walking," he said.
Because the alternative was waking it now.And if she woke it down here, in the flood tunnels under the ruins — they wouldn't need the Reign to finish them.
They pressed deeper into the old flood arteries.The walls tightened around them — no longer tunnels, but veins, pulsing faintly with the memory of life long gone.
Somewhere far behind, the tunnels moaned — a hollow, broken sound like the last breath of something already dead.
The Last Light raised a hand.The survivors stopped immediately, fear drilled into their bones now.
He crouched low, fingers skimming the slick ground.
Tracks.
Not crawler tracks. Not human boots.
Something heavier. Wider.
Recent.
His hand tensed on the blade.
"What is it?" one of the wounded whispered.
He said nothing.
No need.
Whatever made those tracks was ahead of them — and waiting.
The Hollow Guard girl shivered behind him.Not from the cold.From something she could feel, even if she didn't understand it yet.
The Last Light rose slowly, eyes scanning the narrow black ahead.
"Stay tight," he said, voice a rasp of command."No lights. No sound. Move."
They obeyed.
Because the only thing worse than the dark in these tunnels — was whatever had learned to live inside it.
They moved in silence, each step a whisper swallowed by the dark.
The tunnel widened ahead — a sunken chamber lined with broken metal ribs where the ceiling had collapsed long ago.
The Last Light felt it before he saw it — the change in the air. He stopped, blade lifting instinctively.
From the far side of the chamber, a shape unfolded from the shadows.
Massive. Twisted.
Not a crawler. Not even a man.
It wore remnants of Reign armor fused into bloated flesh.Its spine jutted in cruel hooks.Its arms were fused to rusted weapons — long-dead tech, melted into bone.
And in the center of its chest — a cracked Reign insignia, half-buried beneath layers of rotted metal and scar tissue.
An experiment left to rot. Forgotten. Now hungry.
The thing roared — a sound like tearing steel and gurgling blood.
The survivors froze. One of them whimpered.
The creature charged.
The Last Light moved — but he knew he wouldn’t be fast enough this time.
Then — the Hollow Guard girl screamed.
But it wasn't fear.
It was something else. Something bigger. Older.
The air around her shattered. A shockwave of light and sound blasted outward, raw and wild.
The creature stumbled, thrown sideways into the crumbling wall.
The survivors fell to their knees, shielding their faces.
Only the Last Light stood, feeling the fire inside him pulse in answer.
The girl collapsed, unconscious, the stolen power crackling faintly around her like a dying star.
The chamber echoed with silence again — but this time, it was not the silence of death.
It was the silence of something awakening
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