The air in the Wastes tasted of rust and ancient lightning. Ren stood before the small, trembling boy who bore the face of a dead man. To the young Gage, Ren was a nightmare a stranger with glowing blue veins and a voice like a winter storm.
"I asked you a question," the young Gage stammered, his knuckles white around the rebar spear. "Are you from the Spire? Did the Master send you to mark us?"
Ren didn't answer immediately. He observed. He saw the malnutrition in their sunken cheeks, the primitive combat stances, and the way the other children looked at Gage as their leader. They were the "unfiltered" stock humanity without the Caelum-7 refinement.
"The Master didn't send me," Ren said, his voice dropping into the low, hypnotic frequency he had used to command Diamond squads. "The Master is a thief. He stole your world, your memories, and your future. I'm here to take them back."
"Big words for a ghost," Elara chimed in from her perch on the rusted girder, a playful but dangerous glint in her eyes. "Careful, Ren. The 'Master' has ears everywhere."
As if on cue, a high-pitched hum vibrated through the air.
High above the ruins, a silver sphere a Harvester Drone descended from the clouds. It pulsed with a rhythmic red light, its rotating sensors scanning the valley.
"Hide!" the young Gage hissed, his eyes wide with terror. "The Eye is here! If it sees us outside the burrows, it'll mark the whole tribe for the early Harvest!"
The children scrambled for the shadows of a collapsed skyscraper, but Ren didn't move. He stood in the tall grass, his eyes fixed on the drone.
"Ren, what are you doing?" Anya asked, her hand hovering over her blade. "We aren't ready for a direct confrontation. We don't have the gear."
"We have the most powerful weapon in this iteration," Ren replied, his fingers dancing over his data slate. "We have the administrative backdoors Silas forgot to wipe."
[SYSTEM MESSAGE]
[LINKING TO HARVESTER DRONE 09-B...]
[ENCRYPTION LEVEL: PROTOCOL 100]
[STATUS: UNAUTHORIZED USER DETECTED]
"Silas updated the security," Ren muttered, his brow furrowing. "He's using a bio-metric lock. It needs a Diamond-rank signature."
"Then we're dead," Anya said, looking up at the drone as its red sensor locked onto Ren.
The drone stopped ten meters above them. A mechanical voice, cold and devoid of life, boomed from its speakers.
"ANOMALY DETECTED. SUBJECT 004 IDENTIFIED. STATUS: EXTINCT DATA. INITIATING IMMEDIATE NEUTRALIZATION."
The underside of the drone opened, revealing a twin-linked plasma turret.
"Run!" Gage screamed, but he froze in place, paralyzed by the sight of the glowing blue energy charging in the weapon's barrel.
Ren didn't run. He didn't blink.
"Anya, the sensor. Left side. Now."
Anya didn't hesitate. She launched herself from the grass, a blur of black armor and grey eyes. She didn't strike the drone; she slammed her armored fist into the ground, creating a cloud of dust and debris that masked her heat signature.
The drone's turret pivoted wildly, searching for the "Active" target.
In that split second of confusion, Ren sprinted toward the young Gage. He didn't grab the boy; he grabbed the rebar spear.
"Gage, give me your hand!" Ren commanded.
"What?! Why?!"
Ren didn't wait. He grabbed the boy's palm and pressed it against the serrated edge of the rebar. A drop of blood pure, unrefined human blood smeared onto the metal.
"The Sovereigns use Caelum-7 for everything," Ren explained, his voice a calm whisper amidst the charging plasma whine. "Their systems are designed to detect us. But they ignore you."
Ren threw the spear.
He didn't aim for the turret. He aimed for the drone's optical sensor. The spear, weighted by Ren's enhanced strength but masked by the 'natural' signature of Gage's blood, bypassed the drone's automated shielding.
Clang!
The rebar pierced the glass lens. The drone let out a screech of static. Its red light turned a frantic, pulsing amber.
[SYSTEM ALERT: OPTICAL CORE DAMAGED]
[SWITCHING TO MANUAL OVERRIDE...]
"Elara!" Ren shouted.
"On it!"
Elara dropped from the girder like a spider, landing on top of the blinded drone. She jammed a small, sparking device a logic bomb she'd cobbled together from her ruined lab coat into the drone's maintenance port.
The drone's engines sputtered. The plasma turret discharged harmlessly into the sky before the entire machine slammed into the dirt, smoking and twitching.
The young Gage stared at the wreckage of the "God-Eye." No one in the Wastes had ever seen a drone fall. To them, it was like watching a star die.
"You... you killed it," Gage whispered, looking at Ren with a mixture of terror and awe.
"I didn't kill it," Ren said, walking toward the downed machine. "I hijacked it."
Ren knelt by the drone and plugged his slate into its core. His eyes reflected the rapid scrolling of gold code.
[ADMINISTRATIVE ACCESS GRANTED]
[DOWNLOADING WASTE-SECTOR MAPS...]
[HIDDEN ARCHIVE DETECTED: BUNKER 0-1]
"The 'Old Friend' was right," Ren said, his gaze fixed on a coordinate three miles to the north. "The armories aren't enough. We need the original source."
He turned to the young Gage and the other children, who were slowly emerging from the ruins.
"Listen to me," Ren said, his voice amplified by the drone's still-functioning speakers. "The Spire is going to send a recovery team. They'll be here in sixty minutes. If you stay here, you'll be 'Integrated'. If you follow me, you'll be soldiers."
Gage looked at his scarred palm, then at the fallen drone. For the first time, the light of defiance the same light Ren remembered from the last iteration flickered in the boy's eyes.
"Where are we going?"
"To find the girl in the iron mask," Ren said.
Bunker 0-1 – The Deep Wastes
The entrance to the bunker was hidden beneath a rusted playground. It required a physical key a concept so ancient it baffled Elara.
"A mechanical lock?" she scoffed. "Silas has warp-drives, and we're looking for a piece of shaped iron?"
"It's the only thing the Reset couldn't rewrite," Ren said, kneeling by the base of a slide. He pulled the pocket watch Silas had "given" him in the last iteration out of his pocket.
It wasn't just a memento. The base of the watch unscrewed to reveal a small, jagged key.
He inserted it into a hidden slot in the metal floor. With a groan of centuries-old gears, the ground began to descend.
The bunker was a tomb of cold air and flickering fluorescent lights. The walls were lined with rows of stasis pods, but they were all empty. All except one.
At the very end of the hall sat a pod that was encased in heavy iron chains. The glass was frosted over, but through the ice, they could see the silhouette of a small figure.
And on the figure's face was a heavy, blackened mask of iron.
"Is that her?" Anya asked, her hand on her sword. "She looks... dead."
Ren walked to the control panel. It was ancient, covered in dust, but it still hummed with a faint, green light.
[PROJECT 000: THE SOURCE]
[STATUS: HIBERNATION COMPLETE]
[WARNING: REMOVAL OF MASK WILL TRIGGER FULL SYSTEM AWAKENING]
"Ren, wait," Elara said, her playful tone gone. Her scientific instincts were screaming. "Look at the energy readings. This isn't Caelum-7. This is something else. Something... raw."
"The message said she's the only one who knows the truth about Iteration 1," Ren said. "Without her, we're just fighting a god with sticks. We need her."
Ren reached for the manual release lever.
"Ren, look at the wall!" Anya shouted.
Ren turned. Behind the stasis pod, etched into the stone wall in a language he shouldn't have been able to read, were hundreds of tally marks.
Each group of marks was labeled with a number.
Iteration 1: Failed.
Iteration 10: Failed.
Iteration 50: Failed.
Iteration 99: Failed.
And at the very bottom, written in fresh, wet ink that hadn't yet dried:
Iteration 101: The Final Sacrifice.
Ren's heart skipped a beat. If the ink was wet, someone had been here. Someone who knew the Reset was coming.
"Who wrote this?" Gage asked, shivering in the cold.
"I did," a voice whispered from the darkness behind them.
Ren spun around. Standing in the entrance of the bunker was a figure in a grey civilian suit. He looked exactly like the man from the Spire the one who had "extracted" Ren's squad.
"You," Ren hissed. "The Old Friend."
"Not exactly," the man said, stepping into the light. He looked older now, his face tired. "I'm the one who failed the first ninety-nine times, Ren. I'm the 'Ren' who survived Iteration 1."
The room went silent. Anya and Elara stared at the man, then at Ren.
"You're... me?" Ren asked, his mind reeling.
"I'm the version of you that joined Silas," the man said. "The version that helped him build the Spire. And for a hundred years, I've been trying to find a way to kill him. Every time I failed, the Archivists reset the world, and I had to start over, hiding pieces of the puzzle for the next version of myself."
The man pointed to the stasis pod.
"The girl in the mask isn't an ally, Ren. She's the reason the Reset happens. She's the Archivists' anchor on Earth. If you wake her up, Silas loses his immortality but the world ends."
Suddenly, the bunker's sensors wailed.
[ALERT: DIAMOND-RANK SIGNATURE DETECTED]
[LOCATION: ENTRANCE OVERHEAD]
The ceiling of the bunker groaned. A massive, blue-glowing drill began to pierce through the stone, directly toward the stasis pod.
"He's here," the older Ren said, pulling a heavy plasma pistol from his coat. "Silas found the bunker. He doesn't want the girl. He wants to destroy her before you can use her to break the cycle."
The drill broke through, and a figure descended through the hole, wreathed in blue fire.
It was Silas. But he wasn't alone.
Standing beside him, her eyes glowing with a violent, corrupted gold, was a girl who looked exactly like Lena.
"Welcome to the end, 004," Silas boomed, his voice shaking the bunker. "Did you really think I'd let you find the Source? Lena, purge the chamber."
The "reborn" Lena raised her hands, and a wave of pure, white-hot energy erupted, aimed directly at the stasis pod and the young Gage.