The tunnels were vast—decades of subways, maintenance shafts, sewage lines, evacuation routes, half-built bullet train systems and long-dead electrical corridors. The city above may have burned, but this world remained untouched—forgotten by the planners, dismissed by the new rulers, overlooked by the mobs too consumed with surface illusions.
Solace made it his.
He carried notebooks bound in leather, filled with rough sketches of shafts, intersections, air vents, crawlspaces, structural weak points. Over time, his maps became as valuable as any weapon.
He catalogued chambers that once stored emergency supplies. Locations where resistance cells might build. Even water pockets where clean runoff could be filtered. The underground had its own geography. Its own rules.
He moved at night, sleeping during the deadest hours of morning, when even the ferals were at rest. Often he’d camp in silence under collapsed stairwells, with nothing but a dim lamp and his thoughts.
He listened.
Above, the ground sometimes trembled from parades or riots. The faint echo of marching chants, now hollow. A voice on loudspeakers preaching “unity” as an excuse for obedience. The language had changed, but Solace understood what it meant: Compliance or exile. Silence or ruin. Obey or die.
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