Chapter 20: Beneath the City's Skin
Rain hammered the cracked pavement as Kaito ducked into a shadowed underpass. His breath fogged the air, mixing with the stench of wet concrete and rust. Above him, the city carried on—cars honking, lights flashing, people glued to their lives, unaware that something ancient stirred just meters beneath their feet.
He clutched a crumpled blueprint Haruto had managed to smuggle from the old city records. The lines were faded, but one part was clear: a tunnel sealed off after the District 9 subway collapse.
But the blueprint showed something else—a chamber. Unmarked. Unnamed. Hidden in the city's skin.
He slid between two broken maintenance grates, the metal whining like it hadn't been moved in decades.
And then he descended.
Each step into the darkness was like stepping back in time. Pipes groaned overhead. The air thickened with dust and mold. Water dripped from unseen cracks, echoing like falling pins in a cathedral of stone.
His flashlight flickered.
He kept walking.
The tunnel was supposed to be collapsed—but it wasn't. In fact, it looked… cleared. Like someone—or something—had dug through recently.
"You broke the first chain."
The words still gnawed at him. What did it mean?
He rounded a corner—and froze.
There, in the middle of the path, lay bones. Human. Picked clean.
A badge still clung to the torn jacket nearby. The nameplate read:
Dr. Reiji Nakamura. Sector 7 Lab.
Kaito crouched beside it. His fingers trembled as he noticed deep gashes in the jacket's metal buttons—cut by claws, not tools. Something had eaten through Reiji.
But that wasn't the worst part.
Carved into the wall above the corpse was a symbol—an eye, surrounded by spirals. It pulsed faintly with violet light. Not drawn. Burned into the stone.
Suddenly, the air shifted.
He was being watched.
Kaito turned, flashlight sweeping the tunnel.
Nothing.
Yet the feeling remained.
He pushed forward, deeper into the black, guided by the symbol's twin etched on the blueprint. He knew where he was going, even if his body screamed to turn back.
Another hundred meters down, the ground opened.
The tunnel ended at a spiral staircase descending into a chasm—a man-made sinkhole laced with cables and rebar, as though the city had tried to build around it, not over it.
Kaito descended.
The deeper he went, the more he heard it.
A thrum.
Like a heartbeat.
Like something alive.
When he reached the bottom, the world felt wrong. Gravity wavered. The light didn't behave correctly. Shadows curved away from him. The chamber stretched wide—walls covered in egg-like sacs, throbbing with faint light.
He'd found it.
The lost vault.
And at its center stood a pillar—stone and bone fused together, crowned with a halo of living tissue, like a brain pulsing with memory.
Carved into its surface were names.
Hundreds of them.
Scientists. Soldiers. Test subjects.
His mother's name was there too.
Kaito stumbled forward, his fingers grazing the cold stone.
"Why…?"
"Because they fed us first with minds," came a voice from behind him.
He spun.
A figure stepped from the shadows—a woman in a lab coat, face pale as ash, eyes completely black. Her voice was calm. Familiar.
"Aiko?" he gasped.
She smiled. But it wasn't her smile. Something lived inside her now.
"They thought they were controlling us," she said. "But the chain was never for us. It was always for them."
Kaito raised his guard. "What are you talking about?"
She stepped closer. "You've seen the signs. The awakening. You broke the seal in the upper vault. That creature wasn't the danger. It was the lock."
Kaito's mind reeled. "So you… wanted me to kill it?"
"You did exactly what was needed. You freed the signal."
Behind her, the pillar glowed. The sacs around it began to pulse faster. One ruptured with a squelch, spilling fluid and writhing limbs.
"You're insane," he whispered.
"No," she said. "I'm reborn."
And then her skin cracked.
She shrieked as her form split, revealing wings like shredded paper, eyes running down her arms, her flesh rearranging into something else. Something hungry.
Kaito ran.
The tunnel shook behind him as her screeches filled the air. The ceiling buckled. Light bent around her form as if reality rejected it.
He leapt over Reiji's corpse, dodged the bones, and climbed up the spiral staircase two steps at a time.
At the top, he slammed the grate shut and bolted it.
Then he ran into the night, rain soaking his hair, city lights blinking as if unaware they stood over hell.