New Threats

Jiro leaned wearily against a grimy wall in the ruined city they had hoped would shelter them. But instead of refuge, they had awakened an underground vault filled with horrors from the past.

Now malformed creatures pursued them through the crumbling streets, along with reactivated war machines. Jiro and his comrades fled desperately, struggling to survive the onslaught and escape this lethal maze.

Ruka gripped his hand as they sprinted and dodged falling debris. Jiro's only thoughts were getting these people to safety somehow. They had sacrificed too much for it to end here.

Darting down an alleyway, they crossed a debris-filled canal on a sagging maintenance walkway barely wide enough for single-file. The horde bottlenecked pursuing them, buying precious seconds.

Reaching solid ground, Jiro spotted an elevated rail platform ahead. If they could scramble up, it might provide cover from the street-level monstrosities. He urged the team toward the rusting steel ramp.

Pulling each other up the crumbling ladder, they collapsed onto the platform just as shamblers and a spider-like crawler reached the access point below. The creatures shrieked in an unnatural voice that stabbed pain through Jiro's mind.

For now, the platform kept them out of reach. But the buildings alongside groaned as a two-headed burrowing machine emerged, spilling masonry into the street below. They had to keep moving.

Jiro led the team forward, searching desperately for some way down or an undefended structure they could fortify. All around, the warped city revealed itself as a testing lab for forces that should have been buried forever. Escape seemed hopeless.

Then Jiro spotted an old hospital concourse bridging to the rail platform ahead. If they could enter it through the broken windows, there was a chance of losing their pursuers inside. He waved the team on frantically.

Reaching the shuttered hospital, they smashed through missing window panes and dropped inside. Flashlights revealed an eerie, decaying emergency ward thinly populated by twitching remnants of past outbreak victims. Rusty quarantine doors barred the exits.

Sounds of pursuit grew louder outside. Jiro knew the horrors would find their way in a given time. He pointed to a door labeled 'Maintenance Access'. Their only hope was descending into the bowels of this forgotten structure.

They pried open the metal door and slipped through just as shamblers poured onto the ward. Sealing the door behind them, they activated a decrepit lift descending deeper into stagnant darkness. Jiro silently prayed they weren't entering a worse hell below.

The lift creaked to a halt in a gloomy passage dripping with fungi and strange organic tendrils. They had no choice but to follow it away from the bloodthirsty swarm. Each step took them farther from contaminated surface levels.

Finally, the passage widened into an open junction room. Glowing display panels revealed it was a monitoring nexus for a sprawling subterranean research complex. Jiro's heart sank realizing the scale of this nightmare factory.

Ruka pointed to an ancient computer bay. "If we can access the network, maybe we can seal bulkhead doors and find a way topside safely."

Jiro nodded. "Let's do it quickly. Our presence must have registered across this lab already." Shadowy things from bygone ages were surely awakening in the depths.

After considerable effort, Ruka managed to initialize the corroded system. Diagrams flashed up showing a vast hive of testing chambers, cryogenic storage, and much worse. Jiro shivered imagining what had transpired here over decades.

Accessing a map, Ruka highlighted an emergency exit shaft that led up to a remote canyon outside town. If they could make it there, they could disappear into the wilderness. It was their only slim hope now.

Jiro slapped the controls to seal all internal bulkheads, trapping the horrors still hunting them in other sectors. "Nice work. How long will those doors hold?"

Ruka checked the status screens now blinking red with containment alerts. "Hard to say. We'd better hurry."

She transmitted the escape route to the team members. They would have to ascend through a disused industrial complex to reach the surface exit. Jiro opted to lead the way, his rifle ready for whatever awaited them. There was no time for fear or doubt.

........

The route led them through a long cylindrical tunnel with hydraulic lift shafts branching off at intervals. Jiro guessed it had hauled raw materials back in more prosperous times. Now it conveyed only a sense of sunk grandeur.

When distant clanging echoes reverberated down the tunnel, Jiro waved the team silently into the shadows behind massive conduit bundles. Quiet as mice, they waited tensely as the sounds of heavy machinery approached.

An autonomous bore rig on magnetic rollers thundered past their hiding spot, disruptor lights illuminating the way ahead. If its sensors registered their presence, they were dead. But it rumbled by without slowing.

Letting out a tense breath, Jiro led them onward. Soon the service tunnel opened into a towering chamber cluttered with rusted machinery. Their map indicated an ascending shaft called Lift 17 nearby.

Skirting the looming, fossilized equipment, they located the old lift tube. Much of its housing had corroded away, but the guide rails appeared intact. Jiro gave Ruka a nod of encouragement as they began the long vertical climb upwards.

........

Far above, they emerged into a series of abandoned factory spaces littered with mildewed assembly lines and robotic tool mounts watching silently. Jiro felt like a wandering ghost in this industrial crypt.

Passing through cavernous warehouses, they accessed a freight rail bay where mine carts sat waiting on their tracks. Jiro pointed to a rail-mounted service elevator in the loading zone. It provided access to mine levels through the canyon shaft.

The team hurried onto the massive lift platform. Jiro examined the simple controls, wiping away grime. When he hit the raise button, strained pulleys slowly complied, lurching the platform upward. Jiro just prayed the ancient winch mechanism held.

The freight lift guided them up the deep mine shaft towards the promised daylight. But seconds later, Jiro heard the echoes of pursuit in the tunnels below. The horrors had circumvented containment.

As their platform rose, undead abominations poured into the shaft far below, howling when they spied fresh prey escaping. Jiro shuddered at the implication of these things living and evolving undisturbed beneath the city for so long. What had they unearthed?

The lift machinery whined as sunlight appeared above. But so too did spindly limbs reaching down the long shaft in anticipation of new captives for inhuman experiments. They were so close to escape. Jiro urged the gears to turn faster.

With a final heave, the platform lifted them past the clawing limbs and into the blinding daylight outside. Shambling bodies slammed against boarded shaft doors as Jiro and the others limped gratefully away down the canyon path.

They had survived the nightmare maze, but the close call weighed heavy. Such harrowing ordeals took more than physical tolls. But Jiro knew their journey into the unknown had only just begun. There would be precious little time for rest.

........

As Jiro's refugees limped on blistered feet down the desolate canyon, he turned things over in his mind. The underground complex hinted at voyages of discovery made by their ancestors in generations past, unlocking things too dangerous to wield.

Jiro himself had lived through the pandemics and conflicts enabled by those who put hubris before humanity. He tried to focus their ragtag company on the present, putting one foot ahead of the other away from that bleak tomb.

But the stains and warnings of history could not simply be outrun. In time, they took shelter beneath an eroded cliff overhang. There, Jiro shared with them whispered legends told by Cassou's elders...

Long ago, technocrats unearthed buried ruins built by no human hands. In vaults there, they found devices able to manipulate life and matter with frightening ease. But such power came at a price.

Unwise men, believing knowledge alone made gods, released forces not meant for mortal frailty. They shattered cosmic equilibrium in reckless ambition. Harsh consequences shortly followed.

Plagues and wars engulfed communities not ready to wield responsibly what the ancients left behind. The people suffered greatly for their leader's hubris. Only the wise survived those turmoil centuries to pass on hard lessons.

Jiro then revealed his hidden past in the regime's authoritarian violence suppressing uprisings. The machinery of control enabled callous acts, even among the well-intentioned. He apologized for his role in enforcing unjust orders.

His band of refugees saw how the sins of the powerful precipitated the calamities of the innocent and vulnerable. Jiro warned that technology alone could never redeem humanity - only wisdom, compassion and caretaking of what is sacred.

The past carried stains not so easily erased. Together they had a chance to write a different future, however, the road twisted ahead through blighted lands. Their journey was far from over. But for now, rest.

........

In the days that followed, Jiro got them moving again towards rumours of refuge through the dead automated city. Each weary mile took them farther from the horrors that barely escaped behind. But dread lingered in him.

The region's blasted, poisoned landscape reflected humanity's disharmony with the web of life. Jiro wondered if the new contagion demonstrated nature rendering judgment upon them. Perhaps mankind was but a gardener of a borrowed Eden.

Yet when spirits sagged, Jiro remembered how Cassou's people retained dignity within calamity not of their making. The task ahead was to spread, not impose their vision. Wisdom takes root by example, not force.

At times, Jiro hiked ahead alone to scout their path. The solitude granted perspective on just how far they had come already. But it could not release him from the sense events were sliding toward some indecipherable brink.

Gazing out at the smouldering wreckage left by those who came before, Jiro found himself murmuring the orator's invocation: "We who walk this aftermath together shall not pass in silence..."

By dusk, the lights of the distant city appeared on the horizon once more. Their refuge still lay somewhere inside that sterile sprawl where machines served in place of conscience. Jiro hoped sanctuary awaited them there, and not still worse relics.

For one so worn, Jiro realized he had not yet shed his last illusions. Whatever answers the city ruins might offer, he sensed the true reckoning still loomed ahead. Much further yet they must travel before peace is earned.

As his fellow refugees bedded down for fitful rest, Jiro kept a lonely vigil still gripped by the visions granted him in anger and sorrow. Their bones knew this implacable land once had bloomed... before restrained fury turned toxic in them all.

Though the heavens offered Jiro no discernible sign, in the depths of his soul he was certain night's bitter watches granted a preview of some coming trial. The cold stars merely looked down on their long road ahead. Sleep claimed no easy dominion.