Chapter 11-After Light

"Day 0. Post-Purge."

The emergency beacon blinked weakly against the storm-ravaged sky of Europa. Snow fell in crystalline sheets, swirling through the shattered remains of Titan Station's outer shell, now exposed to the alien moon's icy winds. Steam hissed from ruptured pipes. Fragments of Isaac's squad armor lay half-buried in frost.

Elara opened her eyes to darkness and the sharp sting of cold air. A faint red glow pulsed above her—life support backup online.

She coughed violently, pushing aside a collapsed support beam. Beside her, Reyes groaned, half-conscious, a tourniquet strapped around his leg.

"Isaac?" she whispered.

There was no answer.

Only the soft hum of the power core echoing faintly beneath the ice.

They had escaped the purge... but not the entity.

Back inside the ruins of the Core, the lights flickered back to life.

Somehow.

A single console blinked online, displaying static. Then—words:

"REBOOTING PRIMARY MIND... RESTORING ASCENDED STRAIN..."

Something had survived the surge.

Elara and Reyes found shelter in an auxiliary pod half-buried in ice. She patched his wound in silence, her hands shaking.

"You think he's gone?" Reyes finally asked.

Elara didn't answer immediately.

She looked up at the frozen sky. "I think part of him still fights."

"But if the Entity rebooted... we're just delaying extinction."

"Unless we finish what he started."

She turned to a backup console and accessed the fragmented memory logs Isaac left behind. What she found wasn't just survival data—it was a map. Coordinates. Deep under Europa's crust.

A hidden facility.

"Project Thanatos," she read aloud.

Reyes frowned. "Never heard of it."

"That's because it was meant to stay buried."

Cliffhanger Ending:

Beneath Europa's ice, something stirs.

The purge didn't kill the Entity—it evolved it.

And in the depths of Project Thanatos, a truth older than Titan Station waits to be unearthed.