I was carefully inspecting my gun, checking every part, when I heard a faint noise in the distance. It was subtle, almost hidden among the ruins, but strange enough to make me stop.
The spooky sound bounced around the deserted roads, and I couldn't tell where it was coming from maybe one of the old, falling-down buildings or from somewhere else.
When I heard that unusual noise after so many years, I felt a mix of confusion, fear, and excitement. I said to myself, "What is that?" My heart was pounding, reflecting the doubt I was feeling.
The sound was unfamiliar and surprising, making my heartbeat faster. After twenty years of quiet and being alone, the thought that there might still be something or someone around scared me but also made me excited.
I looked around, trying to find where the sound was coming from. "Is anyone there?" I asked, my voice a bit shaky. There was no answer, but the sound got louder.
"This can't be happening," I said quietly to myself, thinking about what could be causing it.
My curiosity pushed me to look into it, even though it could be dangerous. The quietness in Æsir was so strong that any little noise seemed like it might be important or dangerous. I set off down the cracked and overgrown streets, each step taking me nearer to the source of that strange beeping. My pistol felt heavier in my grip the louder the sound grew.
"Where is this coming from?" I muttered, eyes scanning the ruins for any sign of movement. The echo seemed to come from the very walls of the derelict buildings.
It really ramped up beeping, almost beckoning, as I turned a corner. My heart was thumping in my chest with that mix of fear and curiosity that comes from ignoring a not-great instinct.
Just this relentless noise shattered the otherwise oppressive city silence, and I couldn't help but wonder what I was walking into.
Finally, I stood in front of a huge, ramshackle building, the name board hardly readable with all the grime and ivy that had settled upon it: IRIS Corporation.
The beeping was near deafening now, pulsing to some weird rhythm. I gazed up at the building; a shiver coursed down my back.
"Why here? After all this time, why now? " I muttered to myself, tightening my grip on my pistol as I took a deep breath and approached closer to the entrance.
The moment I stepped into the IRIS Corporation, all beeping just stopped, and it plunged the place back into an eerie silence. My heart still racing, I froze in my tracks, trying to process the light bulb that had just flickered on in my head.
"What the hell?" I whispered, glancing around the dim, decaying interior.
All of a sudden, the quiet is unnerving, it makes the emptiness feel a lot more oppressive than it already was. I took another cautious step forward as the silence weighed heavily on me. "Why did it stop? What is this place hiding?"
The questions tumbled through my mind as I strained to hear anything, anything at all, but there was nothing, only some unsettling nothingness where that sound had been.
I picked my way across the lobby, the echoes from my footsteps the only sound in this vast, empty space, cracked marble floors covered in dust, shattered glass from the windows strewn across the ground. Vines and moss took over, wrapping around faded columns, crawling up the walls.
My eyes swept the room. The light was dim as it came through grimy windows. The air smelled of rot, and every creak of the old building, each groan, made my nerves tingle. I couldn't rid myself of the sense that something, or somebody, was watching me from the shadows.
I kept rummaging through the dust at a lobby floor when my eye suddenly fell on something amidst the filth. I knelt and brushed aside a layer of grime to reveal a key card in surprisingly good condition for its surroundings.
On one corner it read, "Hanz Taylor", while on the other it had a light IRIS Corporation logo.
I turned it around in my hand, wondering who is Hanz Taylor was and what role he played here. This card could be the key, both literally and figuratively, to whatever secrets this building still held.
"I haven't been inside this building for ages, and then I just saw this keycard." I took another look at Hanz' keycard. "At least he look handsome on his card."
After examining the key card, I slipped it into my pocket and continued to scan the area.
My eyes eventually caught an old elevator at the other end of the lobby, its doors partially open, and only a faint light flickering from within. It was something about this elevator that drew me closer.
I took a step forward, murmuring, "Could this be it?" wondering if the key card might unlock whatever was hidden behind those rusted doors.
I slapped the card against the elevator panel, not really expecting much in return. The doors opened almost instantly with a soft chime, the same beeping I'd heard awhile back.
My heart quickened as I stared into the dimly lit elevator; the noise echoed in my ears like a ghost of a moment ago. "So that's where you were coming from," I muttered, but my curiosity was well and truly piqued as I stepped inside.
No sooner had I stepped into the elevator, but at this point, I still couldn't shake off the feeling that if the beeping sound came from here.
"That noise if coming from this elevator means somebody must have been here before me," I grumbled in a low voice as my mind grappled with so many questions. It was an unbearable thought that I wasn't alone, and this elevator must have been opened by some other person, this sent shivers down my spine.
I turned to the control panel on the right side of the elevator and gazed, incredulous, at the list of 750 floors in total. How could my mind grasp which one of these held the answers?
"Which one could it be?" I mumbled, shaking my head, as thoughts whirled through my mind of what could be on each. All of those floors seemed a bit daunting. I had no clue where to start.
I noticed, next to the control panel, a key card scanner. I pondered whether the key card had some specific function after all, perhaps being programmed for a particular floor.
"Let's see what this thing can do," I muttered and slid the key card into the scanner. The display flickered a moment before lighting up with a floor number. My heart raced with the destination it revealed, wondering what awaited me there.
I slid the key card into the scanner, and the display flickered before showing the floor number, [Floor: 3B]
"3B?"
The elevator lurched to life with a soft hum and began its downward ride. My heart was pounding with expectation as the floors whizzed past, each one closer to whatever was lying on 3B. My hands braced on the edges as it moved; the beeping sound from earlier now replaced by the rhythmic clunk of the elevator in motion.
The elevator finally came to a stop on floor 3B, and the doors cracked open into total darkness.
I took a deep breath as my anxiety tightened, and I readied my weapon and my headlamp. The beam sliced into the darkness, leaving unsettling shadows over the vacant area. I crept cautiously out of the elevator, every sense on high alert as I stepped into the unknown, with my flashlight beam dancing across the pitch-black environment.
I stepped onto the 3B floor, holding my rifle in one hand and a flashlight in the other. The laser cut through the smothering blackness to reveal what looked to be a huge, abandoned laboratory.
Wrecked equipment and papers lay here and there on the floor; machinery stood still and untouched. My heart was racing as I looked around in search of my surroundings.
"Could this be where they carried out the portal experiments?" I thought aloud, trying to piece together the history of the room and what secrets it might hold.
I slid through the disorderly materials on the dust-covered workbench until my eyes were drawn by one page with its strange, disjointed notes. The handwriting was fast, almost frantic, and the words jumped out at me.
"Quantum instability… unauthorized portal activation… potential breach imminent."
Reading on and on through the fragmented sentences to piece together a tale, my pulse quickened.
Those materials pointed out there was something wrong with the studies; the mention of a "unauthorized portal activation" did send shivers down my spine.
What had happened here, and what did it have to do with those weird sounds I had heard?
I kept flipping the pages; my eyes scanned the faded words. A disturbing phrase then leaped at me;
[First experiment: QUANTUM portal activation successful. Entity breach. unknown creature emerged from the portal. Description: monstrous, highly aggressive. Containment failed.]
My breath froze in my throat as I digested the implications. The documents related to a terrible experiment gone awry, in which a monstrous monster was released. The association of the portal with the beeping sound I had heard was now quite uncomfortably clear.
After reading about the first experiment, I delved deeper into the documents to find that one of them was a description of a monstrous entity;
[Red Lycan]
[A wolf-like creature with fur in the deepest shade of red, burning bright with a primordial rage, which had emerged from the portal during the initial experiment; its presence was followed by chaos and terror]
As I digested the details, the reality of this creature living and the kind of danger that was potentially unleashed became quite alarming.
I moved on to the next file, detailing an even more jolting creature;
[Distortion].
[The creature was in a human-shaped figure, encased in something like molten glass with tendrils of inky blackness. Its appearance was mesmerizing and terrifying at once. It outlined more alarming powers: whatever the Distortion touched would instantly become a form similar in nature, glass-like, ink-covered.]
The description left me cold to the full extent of danger these experiments held within them.
As I finished reading about both the Red Lycan and the Distortion, my body was overcome with horror and disbelief.
"What kind of experiments were they running here? ," I mumbled to myself, staring at the documents in trembling hands.
A feeling of dread and unease had passed through my mind while considering the bloodthirsty rage of the Red Lycan and the horrifying ability of the Distortion to assimilate anyone it touched, beyond anything one could imagine.
It was then, with these two monsters, one of them a ruthless predator, the other a cold-blooded, shape-shifting nightmare, that reality set in.
As I finished reading the last of the documents, a faint noise caught my attention, a soft rustling, coming from the other side of the room. I froze, my heart pounding, straining to listen. The sound was so very fine as to be barely perceptible, but in the silence of the abandoned lab, it was unmistakable.
Something was there.
Slowly, I raised the flashlight and gun, taking cautious steps toward the source of the noise, with each nerve on edge for whatever might be waiting in the shadows.
I approached the door, my hand shaking a bit as I reached out to the handle. Slowly, I pushed it open; the hinges spoke in complaint.
"Hello?" I called cautiously, my voice barely above a whisper, as I stepped into the darkness beyond.
I stepped inside, and the air hit me with a smell of rot. My flashlight beam swept across the walls, dark, dried bloodstains smeared across the cracked surface. The sight churned my stomach; the air was thick with the smell of something rotten. Every instinct screamed at me to turn back, but I forced myself to move forward, determined to uncover whatever horror had taken place here.
A few paces in, my flashlight's beam caught in a shadow. My breath hitched as I saw them. Three Red Lycans, their fur the color of blood that glistened in the small light. They were hunched down tearing at something.
Someone on the floor.
My heart turned over when I looked across and saw a torn coat on the pavement, name tag still pinned on it: "Hanz Taylor." I shuddered. The terrible connotation of what I was finding hit my mind with a ton of bricks.
The words "Hanz Taylor" leaving my lips sent the Red Lycans into stillness. By turns, their ears twitched, and the bloodied heads rose slowly in my direction. Their eyes shining bright like embers hot from the fire fastened on mine, and from somewhere inside their chests came a low growl.
The red Lycans charged towards me with their powerful limbs, propelling them towards me with a speed that was near frightening. I opened fire with my gun in wild arcs, but the rounds seemed to do little good as the creatures' wounds healed rapidly before my eyes. Panic set in as the realization hit me that I couldn't stop them, and I wheeled on my heel, pounding my way through toward the exit with my heart pounding.
I took long, quick strides as the snarling grew louder behind me. I ducked and weaved at a good speed through the darkened corridors, trying to get out of the hell of a scene into which I seemed to have stumbled.
I sprinted down the corridor; my breathing was in rags, with a Lot of pain as the Red Lycans' snarls closed in. All I had in my mind was getting to the elevator. Scratchy scraping from their claws hitting the floor, just behind me, and I knew I still had to push harder.
I spun a corner and in the far distance saw the elevator doors, my only hope for escape.
My heart sank as I sprinted toward the elevator, only to find one of the Red Lycans blocking the doors, its eyes glowing menacingly.
The creature was a wall of red fur, reeking of deadly intentions, and it snarled as it flexed in preparation for defending its territory. I skidded to a stop, frantically searching for another means of exit while trying to keep my thoughts steady.
The heavy steps closing in behind me made my blood run cold as I was frantically looking for a way out. I turned to see the other two Red Lycans closing in on me, snarling, their sound reverberating off the walls.
Panic surged as I turned to find myself trapped between the beast blocking the elevator and these advancing predators at my back.
In a flash of desperation, I saw a staircase on my right.
"Emergency staircase," I mumbled, managing to pick out the single word, but at that desperate opiate hour, it was my last bet to run to. With haste to beat, I ran towards that staircase, praying so much that it was opening towards refuge as the Red Lycans were closing in behind me.
I reached the emergency staircase and quickly fumbled through my bag to pull out the rope I always carried with me. With shaking hands, I tied the rope around the door handle to secure it as tightly as possible. The sound of the Red Lycans' snarls grew louder, nudging me to work faster. Then I tightened the rope and nervously turned my head backward before beginning my climb.
The staircase seemed to climb on forever as I rose, each step echoing with my frantic breaths. I hit the gap between the staircases, where I paused to catch my breath, peering down through the dimly lit floor below.
The rope seemed to hold, but I knew that I had only gained moments. The gap above was treacherous but my only hope of escape from the horrors beneath.
I turned left, found the emergency staircase, and quickly fumbled through my bag for the rope I always carried. My hands shook as I tied it to the door handle, but it would have to do. The sound of the Red Lycans snarling was getting closer, so I was spurred on to work faster.
"Come on, come on!" I urged under my breath, tugging tight before turning a nervous glance over my shoulder.
I jumped and just managed to grab the edge of the gap between the staircases, pulling myself up with all my might. Just as I was halfway up, the crumbling edge gave way and I felt myself slipping.
"No, no, no!" I gasped, clutching desperately as the rubble and dust fell away beneath me.
The door at the level below burst open with a huge boom, and I could hear the Red Lycans streaming into the stairs, their growls getting louder. Panic poured through me as my fingers slipped from the disintegrating edge.
"Hold on, hold on!" I yelled back, fighting to hang on.
Every second seemed an eternity while I wrestled with the proposition of keeping my head above the turmoil in the overwhelming pressure of that moment.
As the crumbling edge finally gave way, I felt my grip break and me start to fall. "No! Not like this!"
I shouted, bracing for impact, but just as I started plummeting, a hand shot out and grabbed mine, halting my descent.
The grip was firm and steady, and I looked up to see a figure's determined face.
As the figure hauled me up, its hood finally fell away to reveal a woman with long, streaming white hair and pointed ears; she looked about my age. I gazed in disbelief at this ethereal creature so at odds with the grim surroundings.
"You're… you're not human?" I managed to stutter, still trying to recover from her appearance. Her eyes, quiet and almost placid, watched me as if trying to fathom the confusion in mine.
She locked her eyes with mine, a mixture of confusion and urgency crossing her expression, then grasped my hand very tightly. Without a word, she started to climb and dragged me along with her to the exit.
"Wait! Why are you helping me?" I called back, struggling to keep up. The only thing she replied was a determined look and a firm tug to take us both to safety.