The air was thick — a soupy mixture of mildew, rust, and rot. Every step Sergeant Elias Ward took echoed against the wet tile, bouncing down the tunnel like a ghost whispering secrets in Morse code. He didn’t turn on his helmet light. He wanted the dark. He needed it.
He had once marched through here with a full squad, boots synchronized, rifles at the ready. “Sweep and suppress,” they called it. That was two years ago, when the underground was still contested. Now it was just abandoned — like so much of the city above.
His black UDER armor bore the scars of battles he no longer cared to remember. His helmet, held under one arm, felt heavier than it used to. Maybe it was the weight of the propaganda embedded in its HUD. Maybe it was guilt. Maybe there was no difference anymore.
He paused beside the shattered remains of a turnstile, its metal arms twisted like broken fingers. Nearby, a cracked advertising panel still flickered, trying to sell something — “Progress Is Peace” — the voice distorted, robotic, almost mocking.
Elias exhaled and leaned against a tiled column. Moisture oozed from the grout like the place itself was bleeding. He let the silence settle, broken only by the occasional drip of stagnant water and the distant screech of rats.
He looked down the tunnel. A derailed train sat rotting in the gloom, its windows shattered, graffiti blanketing its corpse in declarations of forgotten hope. "WE REMEMBER CLEAN STREETS" someone had scrawled across a wall behind it. The words felt like a prayer — or a curse.
He remembered his own street growing up — fresh-cut lawns, mailboxes still standing, the smell of his father’s bleach bucket after washing down the front walk. That memory hit him harder than any blast ever had.
Ward reached into a pouch and pulled out a half-burnt photo: his sister and nephew, smiling in front of a fountain that no longer sprayed. They had disappeared six months ago — either taken in a rebel raid or lost to the squalor that now passed for life above ground.
Officially, they were casualties of civil disobedience.
Unofficially... he didn’t know anymore.
His radio crackled to life.
"Echo-4, report. Any rebel activity in the lower metro sector?"
He didn’t answer.
Instead, he slid the radio off his shoulder and let it hang.
He wasn’t ready to go back to the surface. Not yet.
Something inside him was shifting — tectonic, quiet, undeniable.
He kept walking, deeper into the dark, into the forgotten arteries of a dead civilization.
Not to chase enemies.
But maybe to find himself.
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