BLOODCAPE
Chapter 137: Descent Protocol

Chapter 137: Chapter 137: Descent Protocol

The archive hadn’t changed — but everything inside it had.

The schematics rotated slowly above the central vault platform like a solar system of dead bones, skeletal rings of kinetic maps circling a black data core at the center. The light they cast wasn’t warm. It was surgical. Cold.

In that silence, the plans to breach Scorpio’s final vault looked less like a strategy and more like an autopsy in progress.

Dekra moved through the projections with casual authority, her fingers leaving faint afterimages as she selected three different access paths and stretched them into a triangular pattern.

"Three routes," she said. "One still breathes. One’s rigged to devour you from the inside out. The last one caved in two years ago — not from damage, from abandonment. If you guess wrong, I’m not dragging your nervous system back in a sack."

Iro crouched nearby, unspooling a long case of concussive charges. He wasn’t tense — just focused, the way he always got before entering a place designed to erase people instead of kill them. His voice stayed flat.

"The trap’s on B?"

"Confirmed," Dekra said. "But it’s not a bomb. It’s a recursive echo array — Scorpio’s version of a memory prison. Walk in, and your perception loops. You think you’re leaving, but you never did."

"Zodiac ghost tech," Iro muttered. "Didn’t think that was ever field-ready."

"It wasn’t," she said. "But he didn’t care about readiness. He cared about proof."

In the rear corner of the archive, Aya sat at an auxiliary console alone, low light sliding across her features. She had the biometric readout of the courier Hernan killed displayed again — frozen on a single frame. Not the moment the blade struck, but the one just before. The courier’s eyes — mid-shift, jaw tense, something too human flickering in the fear. Something familiar.

She didn’t speak. She didn’t need to.

Her silence was its own language now.

Hernan stood a few paces away from the main map, strapping on his rig with quiet, unhurried precision. His movements had grown more mechanical since Scorpio’s cache was revealed. As if the closer they got, the more pieces of him stopped pretending.

Every time a vault segment flashed red in the rotating projection, Hernan’s eyes flicked toward it — not like he was reading it. More like... remembering it.

"Route C is viable," Dekra said at last. "It’s the narrowest, deepest, and only path without memory disruption nodes. One catch — it bottlenecks into a decompression tube. You have eight minutes of clean air if the seal breaks. After that? Your lungs will try to crawl out of your throat."

Iro clipped his last charge. "Always so poetic."

Hernan’s voice came low. "I’ll go alone."

"No," Aya said before anyone else could respond.

He turned to her, expression unreadable. "It’s not a team op anymore. It’s Echo-adapted infiltration. That means me. If something goes wrong inside—"

"We don’t follow because we think we’re stronger," she said, still not looking at him. "We follow because if you go down there alone, I don’t know what’s coming back up."

Hernan didn’t reply.

Aya finally rose, turning to face him fully now. Her eyes had stopped holding judgment. But what replaced it was colder.

"Do you remember what the courier looked like?" she asked. "When he died?"

Hernan paused.

"No," he said after too long.

Aya didn’t flinch. Just nodded.

It wasn’t an accusation.

It was confirmation.

Iro rose next. "You may be the one Echo recognizes, but it’s a blind vault. If you’re compromised, you need someone to pull you out. Period."

Hernan didn’t argue. He didn’t agree either.

He simply looked back at the projection as if it had stopped being a map and started being a confession.

Dekra returned to the center, enlarging Route C. Her fingernail drew a glowing line through the lowest tunnel to a void marked only by a glyph: ASH NODE.

"This is the door," she said. "Past here, there’s no system memory. No backups. No signal. Everything past this gate was built to forget itself. You won’t find logs. You won’t find light."

She looked at Hernan. Then Aya. Then Iro.

"After this, there’s no memory," she said. "Only the experiment."

None of them spoke.

Because they all knew — the experiment wasn’t a place.

It was Hernan.

The descent shaft opened like a throat. A vertical, spiraling wound in the earth that bled red light from its ribs.

They moved single-file, boots ringing against polymer-steel stairs that trembled faintly with the breath of deep machinery. The farther they dropped, the more the walls pulsed — slow, like a sleeping heart unsure if it wanted to wake.

Each checkpoint bloomed open as Dekra’s uplink codes forced the ancient Zodiac locks to twitch alive. Scanners blinked green. Barriers hissed away.

They hit the first trap two levels down.

Iro was the one who spotted it — a thin glyph carved into what looked like weld line. His visor flared. "Stop. Memory trap."

Hernan halted instantly. Aya paused beside Iro.

"Is it active?" she asked.

"Dormant," he said. "But it’s hungry. If we’d walked through it, we’d be stuck reliving our worst thirty seconds until our minds collapsed."

"I’d rather take a bomb," Aya said softly.

"Bombs don’t whisper to you," Iro replied. "They don’t learn your name."

He disabled the trap in two precise pulses. It died without ceremony.

They continued.

The tunnel straightened, narrowing, darkening. Ahead of them shimmered a translucent curtain of white light. No frame. No mechanism. Just... presence.

Aya stepped into it first.

The beam trembled. Her breath caught in her throat. It felt like ice and fire at once — like something was peeling back her thoughts to see what she meant, not what she was.

Red.

Yellow.

Long pause.

Then green.

She stumbled forward, breath ragged.

Hernan entered next.

Green. Instantly.

No hesitation.

Aya saw it. So did Iro.

Neither said anything.

But the silence sharpened.

At the final bend, the corridor opened wide. A massive dome stretched before them, smooth obsidian walls ringing a central anomaly — the Vaultmouth.

It didn’t look like a door.

It looked like the absence of everything else.

As they approached, the air shifted. The walls seemed to ripple subtly, like oil being stirred by invisible hands.

Dekra’s voice came behind them. "This is the blackout shell. Once you cross that threshold, nothing tracks you. Not GPS. Not signal. Not sound."

"No exit?" Iro asked.

"No outside," she said.

The Vaultmouth scanned them one by one.

When Hernan stepped up, a single line of white light passed across him.

Then a voice — mechanical, stitched together from broken threads:

"Subject recognized: Echo Zero. Welcome back."

The Vaultmouth uncoiled.

Soundlessly.

Petals of black steel folding outward into dark beyond dark.

Aya watched it open, her jaw tight.

It had not just accepted Hernan.

It had expected him.

He stepped through without hesitation.

Aya followed. Slower.

Iro last.

As the doors began to close behind them, Dekra lingered at the threshold, just a silhouette against the void.

"You were the first echo," she whispered. "You just didn’t know it."

The Vaultmouth sealed shut.

And the dark welcomed them in.