Chương 77: First Glimpse of Erebus

The entrance to the old quarter's catacombs was a collapsed stairwell behind a boarded-up chapel that hadn't held a service in longer than anyone living could say. Syra's directions had been precise — a location, a rough depth, a warning that the crown stopped maintaining the lower levels two centuries ago because three maintenance crews in a row reported instability and nobody wanted to pay for a fourth. Domrek looked at the boards over the entrance, then at Kaito.

'I'm coming down,' he said.

'The passage narrows past the second level,' Kaito said.

'Syra's notes say full-grown men stopped fitting through some of the older sections a hundred years ago. I'll have the Sight. You won't be able to see what I'm reading anyway.' Domrek didn't like it. Kaito could tell by the specific way he didn't say anything for a second, which was Domrek's version of disliking something enough to consider arguing and deciding against it.

'Stay at the top of the stairwell,' Domrek said finally.

'If I don't hear from you in an hour, I'm coming down anyway, narrow passage or not.'

'An hour,' Kaito agreed.

'Kaito,' Domrek said, before he started prying boards loose.

'Whatever's down there. If it's a fight, you come back up. You don't try to win it alone just because you can't see a way to bring me along.'

'I know.'

'Say it back to me.'

'If it's a fight, I come back up,' Kaito said. Domrek nodded once, satisfied, and stepped back to let him work. He pried the boards loose, one at a time, and went down.

The first level was unremarkable. Old stone burial niches, most of them empty, a few collapsed under their own weight. [Architect's Sight] read the structure as standard pre-System construction, nothing flagged, nothing unusual. He moved through it quickly, the way you moved through a room that had nothing for you in it. Dust on every surface, undisturbed in places for what looked like decades.

A few coins someone had left in a niche generations ago, the kind of small offering people made for the dead and then forgot about. Nothing here had been touched by anything living in a very long time. The second level was where the floor gave out. He felt it before it happened — a faint shift under his right foot, the specific kind of give that meant stone that had been load-bearing for two centuries had finally decided it wasn't going to keep being load-bearing for him specifically.

He threw his weight backward and grabbed for the wall niche beside him. His fingers caught the edge of an old burial alcove and held. The section of floor he'd been standing on dropped away and kept falling, longer than it should have, and the sound of it landing came up faint and distant a few seconds later. He hung there for a second, boots scrabbling against stone, heart going hard.

'That would have been a long way down,' Sable said. Her voice was even, but he'd learned to hear the things underneath even.

'Thank you for the timing on that observation,' he said, hauling himself back onto solid ground.

'You're welcome.' He sat with his back against the wall for a moment, breathing, and decided that was enough excitement for one level. He tested every step after that with the toe of his boot before committing his weight, and it slowed him down, and he didn't care. The passage narrowed the way Syra's notes said it would. He had to turn sideways through one stretch, stone close enough on both sides that he could feel it against his shoulders. Domrek wouldn't have fit.

He filed that as one more reason this had been the right call, even with a floor that apparently disagreed.

'Sable,' he said quietly, once the passage opened up again.

'Anything.'

'There's a structural anomaly thirty meters ahead,' she said.

'I've been tracking it since you crossed onto this level. It's getting stronger as you approach. I don't have a clean read on what it is — it's not standard System architecture and it's not Precursor infrastructure in the configuration I'm used to seeing.' A pause.

'Older than this level. Older than the catacombs around it.' This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it'Helpful.'

'I'm being honest instead of confident,' she said.

'You said you preferred that.' He kept moving. The third level was quieter than the second, in a way that started to bother him the longer it went on. No settling stone, no distant drip of water, no rats, no insects, nothing that should have lived in an old catacomb and apparently didn't live in this one. Whatever was thirty meters ahead had emptied the space around it of everything that could have made noise. The passage opened into a chamber.

It wasn't large — maybe ten meters across, low ceiling, the kind of space that had probably been a burial vault once, before whatever was down here took it over. The walls were covered in something black and crystalline, growing in formations that didn't follow any pattern he recognized from rock or mineral or anything natural. It caught no light. The torch in his hand should have reflected off it and didn't. He stood very still.

'Sable.'

'I see it,' she said. Her voice had gone quiet in a way he'd only heard a handful of times.

'Kaito. Open the Sight all the way. I need you to look at this properly.' He did. [Architect's Sight] expanded, and the black crystalline growth resolved into something else entirely. Not rock. Not mineral. Text — dense, layered, scrolling slowly across every surface the growth touched, in a format he recognized immediately because he'd written in it for six years of his life. Code.

Corrupted, fragmented, large sections of it replaced with the visual equivalent of static — but underneath the corruption, structure he knew. Character data architecture. Behavior trees. Dialogue branch logic. The specific naming conventions he'd used for NPC files at Olympus Games, conventions nobody else on his team had ever fully understood because he'd built them for his own use and never documented them properly. He read a fragment that hadn't corrupted.

ENTITY_CLASS: Antagonist_PrimaryDESIGNATION: ErebusBACKSTORY_FLAG: Tragic_Origin_v3PLAYER_RECOGNITION_TARGET: True He knew this file. He'd built it years before the studio folded, late at night, the way he'd built most of the things he was proudest of. He didn't have the energy right now to chase the memory further than that. This was that file. Here. In a catacomb under a city that was ten thousand years older than he was. Grown into the walls like something living.

'This is Erebus,' he said. His voice came out quieter than he meant it to.

'I know,' Sable said.

'How is this here.' He kept his eyes on the walls.

'This was a folder on a machine that doesn't exist anymore, in a country that might not exist anymore, on a planet I died on.' He looked at the slow scroll of his own old work, twisted and broken and somehow alive.

'How did my villain's character file end up growing out of a wall in Eirath.'

'I don't know,' Sable said.

'I want to. I don't.' The growth pulsed. He felt it before he saw it — a shift in the density of the room, the corrupted text on the walls rippling like something underneath had moved for the first time in a very long while. He took a step back without deciding to. Then he felt the second thing. Not words. Not at first. Something that arrived the way a feeling arrived rather than the way language arrived — pressure behind his eyes, a weight settling into his chest that had no business being there, that wasn't his.

Grief. Old grief, vast and patient, the kind that had stopped expecting anyone to notice it a long time ago and was startled, now, to find someone standing close enough to feel it. He put a hand against the wall to steady himself and pulled it back fast when the stone under his palm felt warm.

'Kaito,' Sable said, and her voice had changed entirely, careful and urgent at once.

'I don't like this. We should leave. Right now, before—' The text on the walls stopped scrolling. Every fragment of corrupted code in the chamber went still at the same moment, the way a room went still when someone walked in and the conversation died. The grief pressing behind his eyes sharpened into something with edges, something paying attention now instead of just sitting there in the dark the way it had been sitting there for who knew how long.

And then, low and clear and unmistakable — a voice he knew, because he'd written the lines it was built to speak, because he'd done a rough placeholder version of it himself in a sound booth at the studio late one night, doing his best impression of what he wanted it to sound like before they could afford a real actor — A voice said: 'Creator.' Kaito stood in the dark with his torch in one hand and his Sight wide open and didn't say anything at all. The word sat in the chamber, unanswered.

He could hear his own pulse now, loud enough that it felt like it belonged to the room rather than to him. The grief behind his eyes hadn't let go. If anything it had gotten more focused, the way attention focused when something had been waiting a long time for exactly this moment and didn't want to lose it now that it had finally arrived. He thought about answering.

The word formed somewhere in the back of his throat and he didn't let it out, because he had no idea what answering would mean, what it would commit him to, what it would wake up further in walls that were already more awake than any wall had a right to be.

'Kaito.' Sable's voice, low and urgent, cutting through everything else.

'Don't. Whatever you're thinking about saying — don't. Not yet. Not down here, not without knowing what you'd be answering.' The black crystalline growth shifted again, slow, almost patient, like it could afford to wait exactly as long as it needed to. He took one step back. Then another. His torch hand was shaking and he hadn't told it to. The voice didn't say anything else. It didn't need to.

It had said the one word that mattered, and it was letting that word sit there in the dark, watching him with whatever it used instead of eyes, waiting to see what he'd do next.