Special thanks to Finicolcomic68 for the power stone—really appreciate the support 🙏
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The basin was maybe four meters across. Standing water — ankle-deep at the center, less at the edges — black under the emergency strip along the far wall. The current that had carried him through the overflow channel was gone. Everything was still.
Leon planted both hands against the concrete lip and pushed himself upright.
His right arm buckled partway through.
He caught himself on the left, got his feet under him, stood. His chest pulled tight on the right side with the first full breath and he cut it short. He stood for a moment and let the shallow breath finish on its own.
The floor sloped slightly toward the center drain. He took a step and felt the slope wrong — expected level, got a slight tilt — and his boot slid a centimeter before catching. The concrete was filmed with something — algae or oil, dark and even. No grip. He shifted his weight forward, slower. The boot held.
Four steps to the ladder on the east wall. The third step found a seam where water pooled and his foot went sideways before he caught it, right arm coming up automatically and then not — not there, not fully — and the wall stopped him instead, shoulder first. He stood there a moment with his forehead almost against the concrete, breathing through it.
The ribs again. Not sharp. Just present. Every inhale measuring against them.
He turned to the ladder.
Eight rungs to the access grate. He put his left hand on the first rung and pulled. The right came up and gripped and the angle through the shoulder sent something immediate and precise down into his chest and he stopped climbing. Let go with the right. Tried again, left doing the work, right just resting against the rung for balance.
Slower. But it moved.
He got four rungs up before he had to stop, ribs compressing under the reach of the left arm, the shallow breathing coming apart just enough that he had to wait. He pressed his forehead against the rung. Cold metal. Wet. He breathed through it in fractions.
Below him the water caught the emergency light in long, still lines.
He climbed the rest of it without stopping. At the top he got the grate open on the second push — the first sent the pain through his shoulder and his grip failed. The second was slower and uglier and it worked.
He pulled himself through. Lay flat for two seconds, left arm extended, right at his side, chest moving in short incomplete cycles.
Then he got up. Not smoothly. Not clean. One knee, then the other hand, then the left leg driving while the right steadied — but he got up.
The corridor ahead was dark past the first bend. His shoulder was a constant low complaint and his breathing was still wrong and the floor under him was wet.
He moved anyway. One hand brushing the wall. Testing each step a half-second longer than he would have an hour ago.
He heard them before he saw them.
Not the slow drag he'd expected. Something wetter. Heavier. The current disturbed from somewhere around the bend, pushing back against his shins in uneven pulses.
Leon raised the Matilda and moved to the right wall.
The first one came around the corner already moving — knee-deep water and it didn't care, legs driving through it in short violent bursts, arms out, head low. He fired twice. Center mass. The rounds hit and it staggered sideways into the wall and kept coming, slower, one shoulder wrong now but legs still working. He fired again, high, and the round caught the side of its skull and it dropped. The water took it, the body pulling at his shins as the current redistributed around it.
Two more behind it.
Just forward. The one on the left was closer and he tracked to it and fired — right arm coming up wrong, the shoulder hitching on the draw — the round sparked off the concrete wall and it didn't react at all. He dropped his elbow, came left-primary, and fired again. This one hit the throat and the thing stopped moving forward but didn't go down, just stood there making a sound like pressure escaping somewhere it shouldn't. He put a fourth round into it and it went sideways.
The third was already on him.
He tried to step back and his boot caught the submerged body of the first one — the ankle turned, the wall caught him, right shoulder first. The impact sent something immediate and total through his chest and he lost the breath he'd been managing and for one second the gun was down and the thing was close enough that he could smell it over the water.
Something hit him.
High. Rear. The shoulder he was already against the wall on. He didn't process it as a shot — just impact, just pressure, the body logging it somewhere below urgency because the thing was still coming and the gun was still down.
He got the Matilda up left-handed and pushed the barrel into its chin and fired.
The recoil wrenched through his wrist and the round went up through the skull and the thing dropped. He held the wall with his right arm, chest not cooperating.
Breathing in fractions.
The corridor was still. He looked at the three bodies in the water, then down the bend. Nothing else came. He dropped the magazine. It hit the water. He got the spare from his belt — right hand failing, left doing it alone — and the click of the mag seating came two seconds late.
Three of them. Eleven rounds.
His right shoulder felt wrong in a way that was different from before. Not the joint. Deeper. He pressed his left hand to it briefly — the jacket was wet, everything was wet — and couldn't tell anything from that. He filed it. Stepped over the closest body, boot finding the floor unevenly on the other side, and kept moving.
The door was already open. One hinge gone, the other bent, the wood warped at the base. Leon pushed through with his left shoulder and stopped inside.
Two officers down. Both still. The smell reached him before the full sweep finished — copper and standing damp and something older underneath. He cleared the corners in three steps.
Maintenance shelving on two walls, a workbench along the third. Most of the hooks empty.
He moved to the shelving. Found a first aid kit. Two partial magazines beside it, loose rounds scattered near them. Eleven in the first. Six in the second. Eight loose rounds swept into his palm and pocketed.
Not enough.
He sat on the workbench and opened the kit. Gauze. Antiseptic wipes. Two rolled bandages. No spray.
He reached back to shrug the jacket off the right shoulder.
His hand came away dark.
Not the water. This was different — thicker, sitting on the surface of the fabric rather than soaking through it. He held his hand under the emergency strip and looked at it. He sat with that for a moment.
He peeled the jacket off, left hand only. The fabric over the shoulder was stiff in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. A tear in the rear panel, high, near the seam — small, clean-edged. Not a claw. Not a scrape.
He reached back one-handed and found the entry point by touch. High on the shoulder, rear angle. His fingers came back dark.
No exit.
The room was quiet. The water at the base of the door moved in slow, directionless pulls. He could hear his own breathing — the short ceiling the ribs imposed on each inhale, and underneath it now something else, a heaviness in the right side of his chest that hadn't been there before or that he hadn't been paying attention to before.
He bit the antiseptic packet open and pressed it to the entry point one-handed. The pressure required was more than he'd expected and his vision went white at the edges. He kept it there.
He wrapped it. Too loose in places, too tight where his one hand couldn't manage the tension — but it would hold the pad and slow what needed slowing. He used his teeth for the last piece and pulled it tight.
He put the jacket back on. It took longer than it should have.
He loaded the two partial magazines and pocketed the spare. Twenty-five rounds.
He stood. His weight shifted and the workbench was briefly useful before he straightened on his own. The bullet was still in there. Filed it.
Leon picked up the Matilda and checked the chamber. Turned toward the door.
The tunnel bent left and opened into a junction — a wider section where two channels met, the water deeper, knee-level, moving with a faint directional current. Four meters across. A maintenance walkway ran along the far wall, a narrow concrete shelf barely wide enough for single-file, the railing long corroded away.
He went through the water.
The current pushed at his right side and his right leg didn't compensate the way it should have. He moved diagonally, favoring left, and made the walkway in six steps and stood on it until his breathing settled.
Something mechanical groaned from further in — distant, deep, metal working against metal in a space much larger than this one. The echo of it ran through the concrete under his boots before it faded.
The second tunnel beyond the junction was narrower, the ceiling lower, the strip lighting absent entirely past the first ten meters. Dripping here was constant and close — not a single source, multiple, irregular. He worked by the Matilda's position and the wall and the feel of the shelf under his boots, his right arm kept still, the Matilda left-primary.
The walkway ended.
The tunnel floor dropped back to the channel bed, water knee-deep again. He stepped down and kept moving. The current ran with him — faint, directional, consistent.
It changed.
A lateral component appeared that hadn't been there, a slow pressure against his left boot running counter to the main flow. He stopped. The emergency strip fifteen meters back threw just enough light that the surface was visible — dark, still-looking, nothing on it.
The pressure came again. Faint. Deliberate.
He looked down the tunnel ahead. Dark. The next strip thirty meters out and dim.
It moved again. Not current. Not drainage. A displacement from below the surface, slow and wide.
He didn't move.
He watched the surface. Nothing broke it.
He shifted his weight right, slowly. The displacement pattern didn't change — still forward-left, still wide, still below. He waited. It held its position, neither following nor retreating. Ten seconds.
Nothing.
He stood with the Matilda up and worked through what going back meant. The junction had only two exits. Going back meant the main channel, waist-deep in sections, the current he'd already fought once with less than he had now.
The displacement moved again. Still left. Still slow.
He exhaled through his nose and let the breath go short and even the way his ribs required.
Then he moved.
Not rushing. Left side leading, the right boot placed a half-second after the left found the floor. He angled right, keeping as much of the channel width between himself and that position as the walls allowed. He took the right third and held that line.
The water pushed faintly at his shins, the current running with him. He watched the left side of the channel without turning toward it. Nothing broke the surface. Nothing crossed his path.
Ten meters in, the darkness was complete. He moved by the floor's resistance against his boots and the right wall and the direction of the current.
Fifteen meters.
Something brushed his right boot. Low. Passing.
He didn't stop. Didn't look down. Kept the line.
Twenty.
The displacement didn't follow.
The emergency strip ahead resolved slowly out of the dark — yellow, corroded, buzzing at a frequency just below hearing. It reached the water in a thin smear of pale light and showed him an empty channel. Concrete walls. A low ceiling. Nothing else.
He reached the light and stopped under it. Looked back down the tunnel.
Dark. Still. The surface flat and unbroken all the way to the junction's edge.
He turned forward and went.