Archive Ruins

The setting sun shone through gaps in the forest, casting blood-red light across the mottled stone walls around the ruins.

Ryan sat beside a broken slab of stone and rested for fifteen minutes. Though his clothes had not been damaged, tiny chips had appeared along the edge of his short blade, and the Eye power bar inside his bracer had entered its low-battery warning state. In his current condition, he could not continue fighting deeper inside.

He lowered his head and counted his equipment: one spare power cell, two packs of compressed rations, one medical injector, two Nen Needles, and a small jammer for emergency signal blocking.

It was enough for now, but it would not last long.

Rather than acting immediately, he pulled up a structural scan of the ruin's buildings from his terminal. Earlier, in the main control room, Eye had briefly entered part of the underground ventilation shafts. One of them contained a block-shaped structure suspected to be the central control "Cold Standby Layer," surrounded by shielding devices that clashed sharply with the layout of the entire old base.

And now, that Cold Standby Layer was what he needed to confirm.

There was only one way in: follow the abandoned pipelines of the old power-transfer nodes and descend into the core area.

As darkness fell, Ryan switched Eye One to infrared imaging and hung it behind his shoulder. He sheathed his blade and silently slipped into the edge of the base.

The entire facility had long since lost power, yet residual heat still lingered on the ground, indicating that some small units had been activated not long ago. As he crossed the rubble-strewn central platform, a passage concealed beneath metal plates came into view—the Cold Standby entrance Eye had detected earlier.

The entrance was narrow, barely wide