Corrupted Bonds
Chapter 105: Hollow Below

Chapter 105: Chapter 105: Hollow Below

The breach didn’t end where they thought it would.

Instead of leading them back to the upper strata of Havenfield, the exit tunnel collapsed behind them in a controlled pulse of light and sound. A tether seal—intelligent and intentional.

Rowan whirled, hand outstretched, but the resonance wall was already knitting shut. No return. Not yet.

Lucian stood beside him, eyes narrowing. "We were funneled. This wasn’t the root. It was a gate."

Dust settled in the tunnel around them. Veil light pulsed dimly above, casting long shadows. The team regrouped, expressions bruised and wary. Everyone was bleeding, inside or out.

Kira knelt at the edge of the path, studying a break in the architecture. "The corridor extends downward. Subterranean grid. Old-world. Not mapped. This part of Havenfield wasn’t on any Veil log."

"Of course not," Ren muttered. "No one logs a wound this deep."

Vespera tilted her head. Her aura flickered oddly. "There’s something waiting below. A presence. No recursion signature, but something... persistent."

Rowan looked ahead into the dark throat of the corridor, then back at his team. "We go deeper. We find out what this gate was hiding."

Sloane grunted. "Can’t get worse than the face-eating tether horror."

"You’re tempting it," Zora said flatly.

They moved again, slow and quiet.

The corridor bled into broken walkways and hollow maintenance tunnels. Everything smelled of wet stone, rust, and something wrong—like turned soil and decayed memory. The architecture was layered with old-world tech fused with Veil-grown coral, forming impossible geometry: staircases twisted sideways, doorways that pulsed like breathing skin.

Mira raised her suppressor, the rig sparking slightly but still functional. "My interface is picking up dead zones—gaps in time."

"Temporal instability?" Haru asked.

"Worse. It’s like... things existed here that were erased halfway through happening."

"Not erased," Rowan said softly. "Interrupted."

Lucian ran a hand along the wall. His fingers came back smeared in something that shimmered like blood and dust. "This place remembers pain."

The ground trembled faintly.

And far below, something laughed.

The sound coiled up through the stone and metal like a sentient vibration, bouncing off the warped geometry. It wasn’t a normal laugh—it stuttered, reversed, slowed, then sped up again, like an audio file dragged through broken code.

Lucian’s shoulders tightened. "That’s not laughter. That’s a call."

Rowan reached out with his tether senses. The laughter snagged on emotional threads—despair, rage, hope devoured too quickly. He pulled back, shaking his head.

"It’s mimicking us. Echoing memories that don’t belong to it."

"Can we mute it?" Kira asked. "Because it’s crawling into my teeth."

Ren scanned the sound. "There’s a pattern buried in the distortion. Some kind of looping frequency map—like a song made from regrets."

"A trap?" Quinn asked.

"An invitation," Vespera answered, her voice soft. "It wants us to keep going. It’s threading breadcrumbs out of pain."

Mira flicked a toggle on her HUD, mapping the direction of the resonance. "We’re not just heading toward it. We’re walking into its narrative."

Lucian tightened his grip on his blade. "Then let’s rewrite the ending."

Zora tightened the strap on her field harness. "So, to recap: we’re sealed underground, surrounded by erasing architecture, and someone’s ghost is laughing at us from the basement. Stellar."

"Not a ghost," Ren said, eyes narrowed. "It’s not spectral. It’s structured. That laugh was threaded. Artificial."

"So a haunted AI," Jasper muttered. "Neat. All we need now is a cursed toaster."

"I could weaponize a toaster," Haru offered dryly.

"Don’t tempt me," Mira said under her breath. "I’ve seen your cooking."

Despite the tension, a few of them smiled.

Rowan gestured to the corridor ahead. "Let’s sweep in threes. Ari, Quinn, take rear recon. Mira, Haru, flank and scan for nested fields. Kira, Vespera—watch the emotional current. This place breathes in trauma. We don’t need another Echo."

Lucian touched Rowan’s arm briefly. "You’re running hot. Stay with me."

"I’m here," Rowan said. But he didn’t smile.

They continued down a warped stairwell that rotated ninety degrees over the course of the descent, until the floor became the wall and orientation meant nothing.

Zora swore quietly. "Pretty sure gravity’s making fun of me."

"Gravity doesn’t need to," Vespera said. "Your sense of direction does that just fine."

Sloane muttered, "I liked it better when it was just monsters."

The laughter came again.

Closer this time.

Control Room: Containment Below

The next chamber opened without warning.

A curved bulkhead hissed and peeled back like a breathing wound, revealing a circular control room that descended three levels down. The walls were covered in shattered monitors, cracked consoles, and fibers of Veil-coral that pulsed intermittently, as if keeping a heartbeat no one wanted to sync with.

"This isn’t just old-world," Mira said, eyes wide. "This is Veil-integrated tech. Not post-Rift. Preemptive."

"Someone was planning for the Veil before the Veil even hit," Kira muttered. "That’s impossible."

Ren stepped forward, brushing ash from a shattered console. When he touched it, the screen flickered, stabilizing into static.

Then it spoke.

Not words—tones. Resonant notes, echoing Guide-tether pulses and Esper discharges—layered into a rhythmic algorithm. It coalesced into a partial projection: grainy video of an experiment in progress.

People in lab gear moved around a restrained figure. The restraints shimmered with tetherlocks. The subject was screaming—but muted by the data distortion. Then the scene glitched.

The camera panned across names on a board—one of them lit with unmistakable clarity.

[Rowan Mercer.]

"That’s not possible," Ari said. "That timestamp is forty years ago."

Rowan stared, frozen. "That’s not me. But... it’s my name. My tether pattern."

Lucian stepped in beside him. The overlay shifted. He saw it before anyone else did: the psychic flare around the figure in the projection. It burned with violet heat—wild and violent. Too familiar.

Lucian’s jaw tightened. "That’s my rage signature. Before I ever had one."

The projection crackled—and the image on screen turned. Briefly, horribly—it looked directly at them.

The chamber dimmed.

All around them, the coral twitched.

"This place isn’t decaying," Vespera whispered. "It’s watching. Listening."

Jasper drew his sidearm. "How much you wanna bet it doesn’t like eavesdroppers?"

Suddenly, static surged from the consoles. The chamber flared with shrieking resonance, and three figures blinked into visibility—mirror constructs, malformed Espers and Guides shaped from broken tether signatures.

"Defensive!" Rowan shouted. "They’re not projections—they’re bleeding constructs!"

Lucian met the first with a snarl, blade drawn in a flash. The construct screamed, moving in jags and blurs.

The battle began again.

The first construct lashed out in a blur of claws and coiled tetherlight. Lucian sidestepped, blade carving a brutal arc upward—severing an arm that bled static and shrieked in reverse. The construct reformed mid-motion, jagged and stuttering, its edges glitching through space.

Rowan launched a pulse of resonance that tore across the floor in a wave of golden light. It collided with the second figure, momentarily pinning it to the wall as its face split open into screaming fractals.

"Target their anchors!" Mira shouted, already adjusting her suppressor rig. She fired two bursts—one clean shot to the spine of the third construct, the other a scatterblast that disabled the floor under its feet.

Haru shielded her with a psychokinetic field, intercepting a flicker-blade hurled from the second.

Ren’s chrono-lash snapped forward, catching a construct mid-teleport. It screamed and stuttered, forced into stasis for two full seconds—just long enough for Quinn and Ari to double-team it with surgical strikes to its core node. It imploded in a burst of violet-black mist.

"They’re learning as they move!" Kira warned. Her scanner pinged off corrupted tethers that were adapting to the team’s signatures. One locked onto Zora.

"Heads up!" Zora roared as a construct tackled him into a column. His sigil flared, barely holding. Jasper dove in, slamming a gust of compressed air into the thing’s back. The resulting explosion shredded the air and flung both of them back.

Lucian was brutal—raw movement and barely restrained violence. His blade sheared through one construct’s head, but the corpse burst into coiling memory tendrils that tried to burrow into his chest.

Rowan saw it and reached instinctively, locking Lucian in a tether-pulse. The surge burned through the tendrils, leaving only ash.

"You’re not taking him," Rowan said.

The last remaining construct twisted into something almost human—then shattered itself in an echo scream that knocked half the team to their knees.

Then silence.

Blood dripped. Lights flickered.

"Everyone up," Rowan rasped.

One by one, they stood—battered, shaken, but alive.

Lucian wiped blood from his mouth and looked at Rowan. "This wasn’t a defense mechanism. It was a welcome mat."

Ren stared at the ruined projection. "Whatever this place was built for... it wants us to see what’s next."

Rowan glanced toward the far wall—where a door, newly formed and humming with resonance, waited in the dark.

His legs trembled beneath him. Blood matted his sleeve from a gash just below his shoulder, and the edges of his tether halo flickered with strain. Every movement felt heavy, like dragging himself through the aftermath of someone else’s nightmare.

Lucian’s arm shook as his blade started to disintegrate, the weapon crusted with fading residue. Cuts lined his ribs beneath torn fabric, one of them deep enough to stain his entire side red. He glanced at Rowan, eyes burning but wide—almost vulnerable.

Ren leaned against a cracked console, one eye swelling shut and a trail of dried blood tracing down from his ear. His hands trembled, not from fear, but from the unstable energy still laced in his bones. "If this is just the beginning," he muttered, "we’re not built for the end."

"Then we rebuild," Haru said quietly, helping Mira up from where she’d collapsed. Her suppressor hung useless at her side, sparking in protest. She clutched it anyway, jaw clenched.

Kira crouched low beside Zora, who was coughing blood but waved her off. "It’s in the walls," Kira whispered. "I can feel it watching us. Judging us."

"Good," Zora growled, spitting red onto the floor. "Let it see we bite back."

Ari and Quinn moved in to check on Vespera, who sat slumped against a wall, her aura dim but intact. "We can’t take another fight like that without reinforcement," Quinn said.

"We won’t get any," Rowan replied. "Not down here."

Everyone looked to the door.

The hum behind it deepened. Not louder—deeper, like a heartbeat forming teeth.

"We go forward," Lucian said hoarsely. "Because whatever’s waiting... already knows we’re coming."

And the door began to open.

Search the lightnovelworld.cc website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.