Hell Is Always the Same

Inside the pitch-black tunnel. A dozen or so Wilante soldiers clad in hazmat suits swept their flashlights across every shadow-draped corner as they advanced with extreme caution. The air here carried a suffocating oppression, as though countless pairs of covetous eyes lurked in the dark—the gaze of the dead hungering for the living. Because the space was so eerily quiet, even the faintest noise sounded jarringly loud. As a result, the men instinctively kept their chatter to a minimum, exchanging only a word or two when strictly necessary. An hour had passed since the thousand-man unit led by Favre discovered this tunnel, and this scout team had spent a full hour probing deep into the ruins. Yet even now, they had not reached the end of the passage. Many were beginning to wonder whether they were just walking in circles. No one could blame them for thinking so. The tunnel felt as bottomless as a black hole. The deeper they ventured, the stronger that prickling unease in their chests grew. It felt as though staying in here too long meant they would never get out again... "Damn it... where did the digging crew even find this wretched hole?" "Ghost knows..." "The ruins of a settlement from over a century ago... What's the point of searching this place anyway? Are they expecting to find living people down here?" "Enough. Shut your mouth!" At a time like this, telling ghost stories served only to scare themselves. Reprimanded by the squad leader, the soldier let out a sheepish laugh and fell silent. The others shut their mouths as well, plunging the bottomless tunnel back into its chilling silence. Finally, the time for their routine check-in arrived. The Wilante soldier at the front of the squad took a deep breath, unhooked the radio from his shoulder, and spoke in a low voice. "This is 'Sled'... All quiet down here. No suspicious targets found as of yet." After a brief burst of static, his superior's voice crackled through the channel. "Continue the search." "...Understood!" Naturally, high command would never allow them to return empty-handed. Until they located something of sufficient value, they had no choice but to keep scouring this bottomless tunnel. The Wilante squad leader signed off, signaled to the teammates behind him, and led the dispirited squad deeper into the darkness. Navigating through a tangle of warped rebar, they clambered over a half-collapsed ventilation duct, and the space ahead abruptly widened. Seeing that the terrain had finally changed, relieved expressions broke out across their faces. Everyone quickened their pace and soon emerged into a small plaza spanning roughly a hundred square meters. Right in the center of the square stood a square stone stele, surrounded by crooked, haphazardly arranged chairs. Most of the chairs were empty, but tattered garments and several completely weathered skeletons lay scattered nearby. Suppressing his discomfort, the Wilante squad leader stepped up to the stele with his flashlight, sweeping the beam over their surroundings. "This is 'Sled'... We found a plaza. Looks like a gathering place for the local survivors." Pausing, he aimed his flashlight at the stele and noticed rows of tiny inscribed characters. He continued into the mic: "There's a stele right in the middle of the plaza with carved text on it. Looks like names of local residents... Wait, there's another line at the very bottom." Squinting at the fine script, he struggled to make out the words. "'Our world has ended; we shall reboot a new cycle'... I don't get it. Is this some kind of weird religion?" The voice from command came back. "Any geographic information about the settlement on the stele? A name or anything?" "None found... Until we confirm an official name, I'll just call this place 'Stele Town.'" A flicker of curiosity crossed the squad leader's face. Flashlight in hand, he stepped around to the back of the stele. Because his eyes were glued to the stone, he paid no attention to what lay beneath his feet—until a sharp crunch transmitted through the sole of his combat boot. Startled, he looked down, only to realize he had just crushed a human skull. And in that very moment, a sight met his eyes that he would never forget for the rest of his life. Across the open ground behind the stele, skeletons lay crammed together like thick, overgrown weeds. The head he had stepped on was merely an insignificant speck among them. Human bones were piled into miniature mountains in this enclosed space... This didn't look like a settlement at all. It looked like the sacrificial ground of some twisted cult. What on earth had happened here?! Even as a seasoned veteran accustomed to mountains of corpses and seas of blood on the battlefield, he felt an involuntary chill of dread rise in his chest at such an uncanny death. "Damn it..." Swallowing hard, he took a step back, his shoulder bumping hard against the stele behind him. By now, the other Wilante soldiers who had ventured down with him also noticed what lay behind the stele. Every single one of them felt their hands and feet go ice-cold. Command on the other end of the channel seemed to sense the abnormal tension, and an urgent voice promptly sounded in his ear. "This is Command. What did you find?" "Dead people..." "Dead people?" "Yeah... There are dead people everywhere. Starting from behind the plaza stele all the way down the streets buried in debris, there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of skeletons... It feels just like..." The Wilante squad leader swallowed hard once more. Casting his gaze over the desolate, ruined wasteland around him, he rasped: "It feels just like hell..." *** While the Wilante soldiers were exploring that underground hell, several kilometers away at the refugee camp established by the Alliance, two vertical-takeoff Orca transports slowly touched down on a patch of open ground nearby. Over ten thousand survivors were stranded in the area. With Haibei City still enveloped by the Heavenly Realm, it was clearly unfit for long-term resettlement; managing supplies and sanitation alone would be a nightmare. Consequently, the Alliance Army Command had issued fresh directives ordering the local garrison to evacuate the survivors to the coastline a hundred kilometers away. There, the Alliance had set up a staging camp and temporary docks capable of loading and unloading supply ships, which had more than enough capacity to shelter ten thousand people. However, because the Alliance's independently developed Overlord transports required runways for takeoff and landing, the task of ferrying refugees fell to the Enterprise aviation fleet. Watching the long queue of survivors waiting before the helipad, the pilot in the cockpit clicked his tongue and remarked to the Alliance soldier handling the handover: "No offense... but did you guys dig these folks out of hell?" Missing limbs were everywhere; finding a whole, uninjured person was practically impossible. Worse still, many bore festering, rotten-looking sores—gnarled, gruesome scars that were painful to look at. "More or less. We did just crawl out of hell ourselves, after all." Killing Dagger curled his lips into a smile, chuckling at the wide-eyed pilot as he made a casual quip. "Mutants like their food fresh. They often chew off half a person, toss the rest back into the dungeon to keep, and save them for later... These survivors ate na fruit, so they barely have to worry about wound infections. The necrotic flesh just grows together with the new tissue, which eventually turns into what you see here." The copilot gagged. It took him a long moment to lift his pale face and protest to Killing Dagger standing beside the cockpit: "...Enough, don't say another word!" The description was making him physically ill. Killing Dagger shrugged, tossed the manifest into the cockpit, and gave the pilot an encouraging pat on the shoulder with a grin. "There are still over seventeen thousand people left to evacuate, plus the Wilante prisoners are being handed over to us as well... Tough job, but we're counting on you guys. Hang in there!" Watching the soldier turn and walk away, the two pilots exchanged a glance and muttered under their breath. "I swear those guys are out of their minds... How can they look at that without feeling even a little sick?" "I totally agree..." Having wrapped up his business there, Killing Dagger patted the cockpit canopy and turned to attend to other matters. While the Enterprise transports bustled with evacuating survivors toward the coast, two Viper transports carrying researchers from the Alliance Scientific Expedition flew in from the shoreline, touching down not far from the Orcas. A group of researchers in white lab coats quickly disembarked and, escorted by heavily armed players, hurried toward the entrance of Shelter 20. Currently, the entire shelter remained under the control of the Alliance's Burning Corps. Brand-new surveillance equipment had been installed along the surrounding streets, and drones maintained twenty-four-hour continuous patrols overhead. Until the examination of the records stored inside the shelter was complete, it would not be opened to other members of the Slime Mold Consortium. Chu Guang was not the only one keeping a close eye on the latest progress. Fang Chang, intensely curious about Shelter 20, was also paying close attention to the expedition's findings. While waiting for the results, Lao Bai returned from a patrol outside and brought him an unexpected piece of news. "I've got good news and bad news. Which one do you want to hear first?" Hearing him draw it out like that, Fang Chang cleared his throat softly. "Just start with the important one." Lao Bai grinned. "Remember those Wilante guys from before? They actually dug something up from the position we abandoned." Fang Chang froze for a second, then looked at Lao Bai in disbelief. "For real?" Lao Bai nodded. "Got word from our bro Battlefield Guy. It shouldn't be wrong." Fang Chang immediately followed up: "And the good news?" Lao Bai beamed. "What you just heard was the good news. As for the bad news... unfortunate for our allies, their luck wasn't great. They didn't dig up anything except corpses." Fang Chang frowned slightly. "...Nothing except corpses?" Lao Bai nodded and went on: "Yeah. The passage they dug into seems to be the entrance to some settlement, but it's been abandoned for over a century. There's nothing inside except the remains of local survivors." Watching Fang Chang sink into thought, Lao Bai paused, then added: "That settlement is weird as hell, though. According to the Wilante guys who went down to investigate, the entire place looked like it was buried in an instant. "A massive pile of survivor corpses was clustered at the entrance plaza, with no signs of struggle anywhere... It was as if those survivors simply accepted their fate. They carved their names on a stone stele, wrote a prophecy of doom at the end, and calmly embraced their demise. "The whole site gives off an eerie vibe from top to bottom. And what's even weirder, Battlefield Guy said the Wilante soldiers who came back up are all mentally rattled. It's like something scared the daylights out of them—they've turned completely paranoid and jumpy... Logically speaking, that makes no sense. They're battle-hardened veterans; they wouldn't get spooked like that just by a few skeletons." Fang Chang nodded in agreement. After a moment's thought, he offered a possibility. "Could it be a psychic interference device, or perhaps the influence of some pathogen?" Lao Bai shook his head. "No idea. Honestly, I was wondering if we could ask the Legion for a few of their 'wounded' to help with our research. But the problem is... we obtained the intel through unofficial channels. If they don't bring it up themselves, we can hardly ask for them." Fang Chang sighed. "True... Still, the clues the Wilante dug up corroborate some of the expedition team's conclusions." Lao Bai's interest was piqued, and he asked in surprise, "The expedition got results already?" Fang Chang nodded and spoke in a steady voice: "According to their assessment, the Administrator logs of Shelter 20 were intentionally wiped, and it happened right after a catastrophic experimental outcome." Lao Bai frowned. "A catastrophic experimental outcome?" Fang Chang nodded and explained: "Shelter 20's primary research focus was outer space development. Based on two technical concepts they drafted for 'returning to space,' they considered two separate proposals during the twenty years following Year 51 of the Wasteland Era. "The first proposal was to use their limited resources to build a trackless space elevator, retracing the path the Human Alliance once walked step by step. The second proposal took an unconventional route: projecting consciousness out to still-operational Human Alliance space assets in outer space, thus executing a rescue from the outside in... a sort of shortcut to leapfrog ahead. "The expedition concluded that Shelter 20 very likely scrapped the first proposal right after conceiving it, during the technical feasibility phase, placing all their chips on the second proposal from the start... That's why we couldn't find any specific experimental plans for the first proposal on the shelter's servers. They never even attempted it." Lao Bai frowned. "Does that mean... the trackless space elevator plan wasn't viable?" "Not necessarily," Fang Chang shook his head. "How can you say something isn't viable when it was never tried? If the tech was fundamentally impossible in theory, it wouldn't have ended up as a formal proposal in this shelter." Lao Bai asked, puzzled, "Then why did they drop it straight away?" Fang Chang recalled what he had just heard from the NPCs and answered: "The expedition believes... the residents of Shelter 20 judged that the material and time costs required for the first proposal far exceeded what they could bear. If they forced the project forward, it would take fifty years, maybe even longer." Lao Bai looked thoughtful. "Fifty years... That doesn't sound entirely unacceptable." "It seems that way to us, but to them back then, that was an eternity... In their shoes, it's not hard to understand. If just getting back into outer space would take that long, who knew how many lifetimes it would take to restore the Human Alliance's peak territory?" Pausing, Fang Chang went on: "The expedition suspects that, taking various factors into account, they chose the second proposal as their focus... staking all their hopes on mind projection technology, which looked cheaper on paper but carried far more uncertainties." Lao Bai couldn't help asking, "So... did they succeed?" Fang Chang let out a quiet sigh. "Didn't I just say? The Administrator logs were deleted after a catastrophic experimental outcome..." After a brief pause, he continued: "We have no way of knowing what they did during those twenty-one years between Year 51 and Year 72 of the Wasteland Era. But if the skeletons the Wilante dug up belonged to them, the result of that experiment is already obvious... The residents of Shelter 20 rushed for quick success, resulting in an ultimate catastrophe that turned the entire experiment into a desperate mass suicide." Listening to this grim deduction, Lao Bai swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing. In the end, he shook his head, managing only a single sentence: "Completely insane..." Fang Chang nodded and fell silent for a few seconds before speaking again. "Indeed. Another bunch of madmen. They belong to a different era than the Torch, but the madness of the two is strikingly similar. "So much so that it's hard not to wonder whether the Torch drew inspiration from Shelter 20's fate to commit so many outrageous atrocities..."