Hawke stopped three meters away.
The still-functioning emergency light in the corridor cast a green glow on the collar of his trench coat, making the fibers of his gray wool sweater ripple faintly in the light.
Allen's right hand hung at his side. The scan data from the management panel was still hanging in the corner of his field of vision—zero. There wasn't a single ripple of extraordinary energy on his entire body. Heart rate 72 beats per minute, respiratory rate 14 breaths per minute, body temperature 36.4 degrees Celsius. Perfect, textbook-perfect physiological indicators of a healthy middle-aged man.
Unnaturally clean.
"You've chosen an interesting place." Hawke glanced around the corridor. Paint chips, moldy ceiling, broken emergency light. "The community center. Something down there?"
Allen didn't answer.
Hawk nodded, processing the answer in his silence. He leaned against the opposite wall, the two separated by the three-meter-wide corridor.
"Which of the three sentences in the text message do you want to hear first?"
"In order." Hawke's hand came out of his trench coat pocket. Empty. No recording equipment, no USB drive, nothing at all.
"The Manhattan earthquake three years ago. The official report called it an 'unforeseen natural disaster'—I drafted that report." Allen's back rubbed against the brick edge of the door frame. The rough grain of the brick edge dug into his spine through the fabric of his hoodie.
"So it was you—"
"Let me finish." Two words. Not heavy, but all other sounds in the hallway fell silent. Even the hum of the emergency light filaments seemed to fade into the distance in that instant.
"When I wrote that report, I didn't know the alarms had been turned off. I found out afterward. The night I found out, I launched an internal investigation. The investigation lasted a year. Nothing was found." Hawke's head was pressed against the wall. Green light shone on his cheekbone from the side, the shadow dividing the left half of his face in two.
"The man responsible for shutting down the alarms died on the day of the outbreak. His office was directly above the expansion zone of the S-class underground city's fissure. All the evidence—hard drives, paper documents, communications—was wiped out along with the man by the aftershocks."
"A coincidence?"
"Three years ago I thought it was too much of a coincidence." Hawke's back lifted off the wall. He took a half-step forward. Three meters became two and a half meters.
"A year ago I confirmed it. It wasn't a coincidence. Someone killed him ten minutes before the outbreak. To shut him up, and then let the outbreak cover everything up." Allen's left fingernails dug into the flesh of his palm. The pain traveled from his palm to his forearm.
"Who?"
"I don't know who." The green light in the corridor flickered. The filament's lifespan was counting down.
"But I know why." Hawke's next sentence was hushed. The acoustics of the corridor swallowed half of the low-frequency resonances, and Allen had to concentrate to catch every syllable.
"The core of that S-class underground city in Manhattan—forty-eight hours before the outbreak—began to show signs of self-awareness." His breath caught in his throat. The Ash Sewers. That wall. The moment his palm touched it, the blue light on the control panel was swallowed by a darker red. The Abyss Watcher's eyes lit up in the darkness. Its first words—
"Awake." Allen didn't say the word aloud. But Hawke's second half of the sentence put the puzzle in the right place for him.
"Someone—possibly a faction within GWA—didn't want the dungeon core to have self-awareness. They used the eruption to 'reset' the core."
"Twenty-three thousand people." Allen's voice vibrated.
"The price of the reset." Four seconds of silence filled the corridor.
In those four seconds, Allen's mind flipped through three years of calendars. A4 paper. Three pages. The checkmark in the last column of the third page. The investigation report that hadn't arrived for 1095 days. A four-hour queue at the temporary entrance on the east side of the GWA building. New York in October. His fingers were too cold; he dropped the pen twice.
Not a natural disaster.
It was cleanup.
Someone decided that the weight of 23,000 lives was less important than a "awakening" core—and then buried that decision in a filing cabinet through administrative procedures.
"You're telling me this," Allen began, "not out of conscience." Hawke didn't deny it. The collar of his trench coat creased deeply at his collarbone.
"The same signs have reappeared globally." In the corner of Allen's management panel, the line representing the global anomaly fluctuation index trembled slightly at the lower edge of the red threshold.
"The cores of multiple natural dungeons have begun to exhibit self-awareness. That faction within GWA—" Hawke paused for a fraction of a second, as if weighing the weight of a word, "I call them the 'Purifiers.' They're preparing for a second large-scale reset."
"Not just one."
"Not just one. Globally synchronized. All dungeons exhibiting signs of consciousness detonated simultaneously. My current intelligence—twenty-seven. Six continents." The numbers fell into the air of the corridor, softer than the sound of peeling paint.
"And the timeframe?"
"Within three months. Maybe less." Allen's head slammed against the brick wall. It wasn't force—it was that his body tilted back slightly by a centimeter in the instant of information overload, his head hitting the wall. A chill seeped into his skull from his occipital bone.
Twenty-seven. Six continents. The Manhattan massacre killed twenty-three thousand people. Twenty-seven simultaneous explosions—Allen didn't bother calculating that number. The number was too large, so large that even if calculated, it would only result in a string of cold zeros.
These numbers couldn't be verified. The message "Alarms are off" wasn't available through any public channels, nor was it on the USB drive Robert gave him. Hawke possessed a level of access Allen couldn't reach. Regardless of whether what he said tonight was the whole truth or a censored version—refusing to talk was tantamount to cutting off his own leads.
"What do you want me to do?"
"You're the Underground Architect." Hawke's statement was devoid of any emphasis. "You can create dungeons, you can resonate with the core of a dungeon. You are the only one who can possibly stop this reset."
"How?"
"Create enough dungeons. Before the Cleansers trigger the eruption, cover the natural dungeons that are about to erupt with your network of dungeons. Your dungeons can establish a stable resonance with the natural dungeons—you did it. When your hand touched the walls of the Ash Sewers, you established a limited resonance. If the resonance is strong enough, you can suppress the eruption signal." Allen's fingers released the pinch marks on his palm. Four crescent-shaped nail marks remained on his skin, still white for now, turning red in three seconds.
"One hundred." Hawke's center of gravity shifted forward two millimeters. A tiny displacement, but Shadow Sense detected the change in pressure between his soles and the tiles at a distance of two and a half meters.
"At least one hundred. Covering twenty-seven key nodes globally. Each node requires three to four dungeons to form a stable resonance field."
"Who told you this number?"
"An awakened dungeon core." The emergency lights in the corridor flickered again. This time the flicker lasted longer. The darkness lasted for 0.8 seconds before the green light returned.
Hawk didn't press for details about which core it was. This restraint itself was a signal—he understood. He processed it.
Allen's back lifted from the doorframe.
"Give me two things. I'll help you."
Hawk neither nodded nor shook his head. He waited.
"First—the complete investigation files on the Manhattan outbreak. The S-level clearance portion. All of them."
"This requires me to use clearances only Omega-3s possess." Hawke's tone was flat. "If the Cleaners know I accessed that file—"
"That's your risk." The sharp edge of the USB drive in his pocket diggered against his outer thigh through the thin fabric of his jeans. The half-piece of the puzzle Robert had given him had been waiting for three days. The remaining half was locked behind Hawke's access door.
"My parents have been dead for three years. I've waited three years."
There was no echo in the corridor. The walls were too close, the ceiling too low; sound waves would be killed upon impact.
"Second?"
"A protective umbrella. My identity cannot be revealed. Issue a 'Strategic Classified Asset' designation in your name as the head of GWA's New York branch. All my information—identity, location, capability details—is permanently sealed from the GWA database. No one, including Robert Chen, can access it without your direct authorization."
"You want me to remove you from the chessboard?"
"No. I want you to turn me into an invisible piece on the chessboard." Allen's left hand came out of his pocket. The chill of the icy walls of the bomb shelter lingered on his fingers.
"I can do more in the shadows than in the light." Hawk stared at him. The green light of the corridor sliced across their faces from the side, shading their features into a single color. At this angle, the facial contours of the fifty-three-year-old GWA director and the twenty-two-year-old underground architect were cast in equally long shadows by the same light.
"Accepted." Hawk extended his right hand.
Allen looked at the hand. No calluses on the skin. Neatly trimmed nails. A shallow dent from years of holding a pen ran along the side of his middle finger—the hand of an administrator.
The shadow senses still couldn't read anything.
Allen grasped it.
Dry. Warm. Completely contradictory to the blankness of the scanned data.
The handshake lasted a quarter of a second. He released it.
Hawker's hand returned to his trench coat pocket. He turned. The sound of leather shoes crunching on broken tiles receded down the corridor. He paused at the corner.
"The three-month window is shrinking. The sooner the better."
The footsteps disappeared. The spring hinges of the back door gave a low sigh and closed.
Allen stood in the corridor. The green light of the emergency light shone on his face, the scratch on his left lens cutting the light in two.
—P2 level. Pillar number 17.
When Allen sat down, his back pressed against the concrete wall, the icy touch seeping from his spine into his ribs. Unlike the icy walls of the air-raid shelter—the coolness here was dry and rough.
His hands were still trembling. Not fear. Information overload.
Three months. Twenty-seven. One hundred dungeons. Global coverage.
Three weeks ago, he built his first three-room, Class F dungeon in the warehouse basement. His heart pounded at 140 when the red eyes of the skeleton guards lit up in the darkness.
Now he needs to expand the dungeon network from three to one hundred within ninety days, covering six continents, and suppressing twenty-seven natural dungeon cores about to be artificially detonated.
A series of system notifications popped up on the management panel.
[GWA Database Update—User Architect_00 has been marked as a "Strategic-Level Classified Asset."]
[Information Sealing Level: Omega-3.]
[Related Records Processing…Class S Investigation File #NYC-0513-INV—Automatically Archived as "Completed · Conclusion: No Threat."]
[Externally Searchable Information…Cleared.] Allen Grey has become a blank slate in the GWA system.
But the purgers don't use the GWA system. Hawke said—factions. Internal factions have their own channels, their own intelligence chains. Classified asset designations might block the search bar at the front, but they can't block eavesdropping from the sides.
Allen closed the notification bar.
At the bottom of the management panel.
That line of black text reappeared.
It last appeared when the dungeon was upgraded to C-rank. Blurry characters, as if floating from the depths of the screen. That time, there was only one sentence. This time—
"The Architect. You're fighting them. Interesting." Allen's finger hovered above the panel. He didn't touch it.
"But have you considered—what if the 'test' results in humanity failing?" The characters floated up line by line. At a moderate pace, as if waiting for him to finish reading each line.
"The Cleansers want to use an eruption to destroy the awakened core. I want to use an eruption to test your civilization."
"Our goals are different. But our methods—are exactly the same." The coolness of the concrete wall reached below his shoulder blades. Sweat on his back seeped into a blurry, dark stain on the dry wall.
"Are you ready? To stop a global outbreak—which also means stopping my test."
"I will—oppose you." Allen stared at the last four words.
The Will of the Abyss.
Not the Cleansers. Not a human conspiracy within GWA. It's the dungeon itself. It's that thing watching over the entire Earth from the other side of the rift.
Two enemies. The same catastrophe. One wants to kill the awakened core, the other wants to use the outbreak to test whether humanity deserves to live.
"I don't care about your test." The concrete pillars in the underground parking garage formed a gray square in the darkness. Allen's vocal cords vibrated slightly, just loud enough for his own ears to hear.
"I care about those who will die." The black text flickered once.
It disappeared.
The management panel returned to its normal blue-gray tone. But where the black text had disappeared—at the very bottom left corner of the screen—an icon had appeared.
Dark red.
An eye. A vertical feline pupil. The iris veins pulsated between red and black.
Below it, a line of small text.
[AbyssGaze – Passive Effect, Cannot be Turned Off. The will of the abyss is constantly observing your every move.] Allen's thumb traced the edge of the eye icon. He tried to drag it. Couldn't move it. He tried to minimize it. Couldn't collapse it. He tried to long-press it. No menu popped up.
It was pinned to the corner of the management panel, its dark red pupil contracting and expanding.
From this moment on.
No matter what he was building, who he was talking to, or where he was sleeping—that eye was on.
Allen shrunk the management panel to the edge of his field of vision. The dark red glow clung to his left peripheral vision, overlapping with the scratch on his left lens.
A line. An eye.
He glanced down at his BP balance.
3,700.
Three dungeons. Ninety days. Ninety-seven more to go.
His phone vibrated in his pocket. Robert.
"You're still alive?"
Allen's thumb slid across the screen.
"Alive. He's gone."
"What did he give you?" Allen typed two words and then deleted them. He typed again.
"A global countdown." Send.
Robert didn't reply.
In the corner of the management panel, a dark red eye stared unblinkingly at every pixel on the screen.
Allen rested his phone on his lap. The ceiling in the underground parking garage was low, and condensation on the drainpipes accumulated to a critical weight before dripping. One drop hit the ground three meters to his right, the sound amplified into a dull thud in the empty space.
He closed his eyes.
A dark red glow shone through his eyelids.
He couldn't turn them off.