Little White climbed down along the anchor bolts driven into the rock face, each one spaced about fifteen meters apart. The uneven stone made the descent easy. She moved fast—then faster—using bolts and jutting rock as landing points, dropping in light, controlled hops.
After twenty-three bolts, she reached what she’d estimated as the bottom.
It wasn’t.
It was just an irregular platform—maybe two hundred square meters. When she crept to the edge and looked down, she saw only more darkness.
“Little White—are you down yet?” Bit asked over the open channel.
“No. Just a platform.” She shared her view.
“Want me to come back and help?”
“Don’t break the plan,” she said. “Any new discoveries on your side?”
“Nope. Rock, rock, and more rock.”
“Merc?”
“Same.”
They each shared their view. From above, Little White watched endless stone walls—like frozen waves, like tendons over bone—sometimes split by vast fissures. Bit and Merc’s flight paths were just as chaotic, twisting and looping like a toddler’s scribble.
“All right,” Little White said. “I’ll keep going. You two watch your speed—don’t smash into the wall.”
She circled the platform and quickly found the next bolt line. Down she went again.
A hundred meters. Another platform. Seventy meters. Two hundred.
After four platforms, she reached a much larger one—over a thousand square meters. A section of rope ladder lay there, charred and hanging in tatters. For a moment she thought she’d reached the bottom—but the platform still had an edge, and below it was the same infinite black.
She looked up.
Above was darkness too. By her rough calculation, she was already more than a kilometer below the cavern-airport.
Standing at the platform’s edge felt like floating alone in a black sea… or at the end of the world. Like she’d stumbled into a place no one had ever reached since time began. A loneliness she’d never known crashed into her, smothering the curiosity that had driven her down.
For the first time, even she felt a flicker of fear.
Comms were still stable, though. She refused to let her voice show weakness.
“Current depth from start point: 1,265 meters,” she said lightly. “Still not at bottom. No anomalies. Continuing.”
Two hundred meters later, the near-vertical wall began to tilt, settling into a slope—about seventy degrees.
Was she finally close?
Then she noticed the bolts were gone.
At first she thought the spacing had widened, but after searching fifty or sixty meters downslope she found nothing. It made sense, she told herself—on this angle, you didn’t need a ladder.
Which meant the trail ended too.
Black stretched in every direction. Where was she supposed to go now?
Whatever. She’d come this far. She would reach the bottom first and worry later.
She kept moving down as the slope gradually flattened. Soon she could walk without using her hands, only watching for sudden cracks in the stone. Five minutes later, the incline eased to ten degrees—almost level.
Her depth from the start point hit a ridiculous number: 1,742 meters.
She went a few hundred meters farther, sent her hovering lights out to probe the distance, and finally—finally—no edge appeared.
Only then did she start to believe she’d truly reached the floor.
“Hah! I’m down!” Little White announced, grinning into the channel. “One thousand seven hundred forty-two meters. Can you believe that?”
“Tell us what’s down there,” Bit demanded.
“Still rock,” she said. “Like someone laid the wall flat. But I can only see a small patch—the rest is just… nothing.”
“We’ve flown almost twenty kilometers,” Merc said. “No discoveries.”
“You think humans could live in a place like this?” Little White murmured, staring into the endless dark. “I’m starting to understand those people in the camp. If you lived down here long enough… you’d go insane.”
“It’s too early to conclude that,” Merc said.
“Yeah,” Bit agreed. “If it’s just a lighting problem, humans solved that centuries ago.”
“Flip it around,” Merc said. “If Lord Julian wanted to turn this place into a human stronghold, what would be his first step?”
“He’d build an artificial sun and hang it in the center,” Little White said immediately.
Bit snickered. “Look at you. Even a certain simple-minded somebody figured it out right away.”
“Bit, who are you calling simple-minded?” Little White snapped. “Keep talking and I’ll punch you.”
“I meant me,” Bit said quickly. “Why are you getting mad?”
“So,” Merc said, cutting in, “my guess is something went wrong. Little White—stay alert.”
“Got it,” she said. “You two fly slower too.”
“Relax,” Bit said. “We’re moving like kites.”
Little White kept walking. She set her two hovering lights twenty meters ahead, synced to drift with her so the path stayed illuminated.
The stone floor rolled on forever. It wasn’t perfectly flat—ridges and boulders and trenches rose out of the dark—but the silence was vicious. Even her own soft footsteps sounded too loud.
After seven or eight kilometers, the landscape still hadn’t changed. Doubt started to gnaw at her. If she kept walking for three days and saw nothing but this… what then?
Would she just keep going like an idiot until time ran out?
A voice cut in over comms.
“I think I found something,” Merc said.
“What?” Little White and Bit asked together.
“Something attached to the wall… like a lamp. And it still works.”
Merc shared his view. Little White saw a palm-sized hemisphere fixed into the rock like a wall sconce. It blinked with a red glow.
“It was dark before,” Merc said. “When I got close, it started flashing.”
He backed away. The flashing slowed. When he withdrew far enough, the light went out completely.
“I get it,” Bit said. “An aircraft obstacle beacon—warning planes not to drift too close to the wall.”
“…Maybe,” Merc said, and didn’t sound convinced.
“What’s wrong?” Bit asked. “That’s normal. In the human era, every tall building had lights like that.”
Merc paused. “What color do you see?”
“Red,” Bit said.
“Red,” Little White echoed. “Why?”
“I feel like there’s information hidden in the spectrum,” Merc said at last. “Maybe I’m just being oversensitive…”
“Wait,” Little White said. “I think I’ve got something too.”
“What?” Merc and Bit said together.
“Shh. Listen.”
She stopped, dropped to a knee, and pressed close to the ground.
A moment later, Bit and Merc heard it too: in the deep silence, a faint, continuous sound—water, somewhere far away.
“A river?” Bit asked.
“A stream,” Merc guessed.
“I’m going to check,” Little White said.
She jogged forward. Less than fifty meters later, the ground dipped again. This time there was no cliff—just a massive trench cut into the stone. The water sound came from the bottom.
“Look what I found,” she said, excitement creeping into her voice. “A stream.”
The water was clear under the hovering lights, clean enough to see the stones beneath. After staring at nothing but rock for hours, the sight of moving water felt unreal.
“A one-meter-wide river,” Bit said.
“Still a major discovery,” Merc said. “Life needs water. Follow it.”
“Exactly what I’m doing.”
Little White chose the downstream direction, where the terrain looked flatter.
Ten minutes later, the stream widened, splitting into multiple channels that ran between the stones.
And then she saw something that made her stop.
Between the rivulets, the ground wasn’t bare rock anymore.
There was “grass.”
Even for someone from the human era, it looked wrong: dark gray blades edged with dull red, thin and short, barely reaching her ankles. Ugly, in a way that felt intentional.
“Have either of you seen grass like this?” she asked.
“No,” came the answer.
“Then it’s probably something unique to the underground,” she said.
She stepped closer, bending to examine it—
—and heard a whisper.
“Hi,” or maybe “Hey.” The voice was low, careful. She couldn’t make out the word, only the shape of it.
“Who’s there?”
Little White snapped her head up, scanning as she stepped into the grass. The silence returned, leaving only the soft rush of water. She swung her hovering lights in a slow sweep.
Nothing.
Just grass so dark it almost merged with the abyss… and scattered rocks… and the flicker of water reflections.
“Did you hear someone call me?” she asked softly.
“Yeah,” Bit said. “I heard it.”
“I recommend you back out of the grass,” Merc said. “Something feels off.”
“…Okay.”
Little White started to retreat.
She’d only taken a few steps when a dry, shuffling sound rose from the side—footsteps, coming closer.
She spun.
In the dark, a pair of eyes ignited—crimson and fixed, staring straight at her.
Years of surviving disasters kicked in. Little White drew both blades and settled into a fighting stance.
The motion seemed to trigger it.
A beastlike roar tore through the black, and a shadow bigger than a bull lunged at her.
She calculated the impact point in an instant. One step right to evade. A spinning slash to finish it.
Then something happened that she couldn’t have predicted.
The “grass” that had felt soft beneath her boots tightened like a snare, wrapping her ankles and locking her in place.
Panic flashed across her face.
“Ah—!”
That cry was the last thing Bit and Merc received from her over the channel.
Then the connection snapped.
No matter how they tried to reconnect, the line stayed dead.