The sound of his own footsteps was the loudest thing Corvin had heard in years.
There was no moss here to dampen the noise. No fleshy walls to swallow the vibration. Just the sharp, rhythmic clang of metal boots against polished chrome. The silence in this hallway felt surgical—designed to keep even a whisper from escaping.
Corvin stood before the heavy, pressurized door. The symbol etched into the center was a circle with three jagged slashes—the ancient mark for a biological hazard. But beneath it, a name was carved in a language that felt like a splinter in his mind.
PROJECT: ECHO.
He reached out with his remaining hand. His silver fingers trembled, not from fear, but from the resonance of the room behind the door. It was calling to the liquid fire in his veins.
He didn't find a handle. Instead, he pressed his blackened, molten stump against a glass panel beside the frame.
The reaction was violent.
The panel didn't just read him; it drank from him. A sharp, stinging pull dragged a surge of dark energy from his shoulder.
The door didn't slide. It breathed. A heavy hiss of ancient gas escaped the seals, smelling of ozone and chemicals that hadn't seen the light of day in centuries. The massive slab of metal recessed into the ceiling.
Corvin stepped inside.
The room was vast, filled with thousands of glass cylinders reaching from the floor to the high, shadowed ceiling. Each cylinder was filled with a thick, translucent blue fluid.
And inside the fluid... were things that looked like him.
Thousands of silver frames. Some were missing heads. Some had four arms. Others were twisted into shapes that were more beast than man. They weren't alive, but they weren't exactly dead. They were discarded ideas.
Failed echoes of a man who no longer existed.
Corvin walked past the tanks, his reflection ghosting across the glass. He saw himself in every failed prototype—a monster built by men who wanted to play god.
Suddenly, a voice echoed through the chamber. It didn't come from a speaker. It came from the vibration of the floor itself.
"Sequence 07... you were the only one who didn't shatter."
Corvin spun around, his molten arm flaring with a dark, oily light.
At the end of the long row of tanks stood a figure. It wasn't a silver giant. It was small, frail, and wrapped in a tattered white lab coat that had turned yellow with age. Its face was hidden behind a cracked glass mask, and its breath came in ragged, mechanical gasps.
"Who... are you?" Corvin growled, the words scraping his throat like gravel.
The figure tilted its head, a slow, clicking movement. "I am the one who waited. The one who watched you fall through the layers like a stone through water."
The old man stepped into the dim light. In his hand, he held a small, glowing shard of pure white resonance—the same light Corvin had seen in the abyss.
"You've come a long way to die in your birthplace, Corvin."
High above, the forest was gone.
Maren and Kael stood on a barren, white plain of ash. The trees had vanished into the ground, and the sky above was a swirling vortex of violet clouds.
The ground beneath Maren's feet began to hum.
"Kael, the hatch! Look!"
A circular plate of metal shifted in the ash, revealing a ladder leading down into the darkness. It was the same path the hunters had used.
"We go down," Kael said, his voice hard. "Or we turn into ash with the rest of this layer."
Maren didn't hesitate. She grabbed her daughter and began the descent.
Back in the graveyard, the man in the white coat raised the shard.
"The Titan is waking up, Sequence 07. And it wants its stolen heart back."
The cylinders around Corvin began to vibrate. The blue fluid inside turned a dark, angry red.