The team stepped into the chamber, their boots echoing off the cold metallic floor. The dim lighting from their flashlights revealed the vast, cavernous space, just as the drone footage had shown. Towering power generators lined the chamber, massive machines of rusted steel and complex wiring standing in eerie silence.
The two engineers, Cooper and Harlan, split from the group, making their way toward the nearest generator. They carried handheld scanners and diagnostic tools, their eyes scanning the ancient machinery with keen interest.
Meanwhile, the rest of the team spread out cautiously, weapons at the ready. Though nothing had appeared on the drones' feeds, experience told them that danger rarely announced itself in places like these.
Vance and Rion drifted toward the far end of the chamber, where the remains of what seemed to be a large wall-mounted map stood. The faded remnants of ink clung stubbornly to the corroded metal plate, but the years had not been kind. The map had degraded too far, the once-detailed schematics now nothing more than unintelligible streaks of decay.
"Damn," Vance muttered, running a gloved hand over the metal. "This could've saved us a lot of trouble."
Rion sighed, stepping back. "No surprise. I would've been more weirded out if it was still intact."
They moved on, scanning the chamber for anything else of value. A few collapsed storage containers, a rusted-out console, and long-dead security cameras—all relics of a forgotten era. The biologist in their group, Doctor Lianne, kneeled near a dark stain on the floor, taking a small sample with a swab.
Stone turned as Cooper and Harlan approached, their faces a mix of curiosity and frustration.
"Well?" he asked.
Cooper scratched his beard. "These things are dead. No way to restart them. Even if we had replacement parts, the internal mechanisms are too far gone. No fuel left, no working circuits."
"But," Harlan added, "we could rewire some of the power conduits and connect them to the portable generator we brought along. It wouldn't be enough to run the whole place, but with some clever routing, we might be able to get power to certain systems—lights, doors, terminals, that kind of thing."
Stone nodded, considering it. "Alright. We'll revisit the idea if we find something worth turning on. For now, let's move out."
The team gathered near the stairwell. Stone led the way, ascending the stairs with slow, deliberate steps, their flashlights casting long shadows along the metallic walls. The higher they climbed, the more the static interference from their earlier drone feed made sense—an unnatural, heavy presence seemed to settle in the air, as if the facility itself resented their intrusion.
At the top of the stairs, they stopped.
A massive reinforced gate loomed before them, towering over the group like a silent sentinel. Thick steel plating, reinforced support beams, and a faded warning label in an unfamiliar language. This rusted gate looked like it should have been able to withstand anything short of a full-scale military assault. But that wasn't what caught their attention.
It was the claw marks.
Jagged, deep gouges ran along the metal, as if something had raked its massive claws across the surface in a fit of rage. The scratches varied in size and depth—some shallow, others cutting so deep they had nearly torn through the steel. The force behind them had been immense, warping sections of the plating. Whatever had done this possessed unnatural strength.
Dr. Lianne stepped closer, running her gloved fingers over the grooves. A thick layer of grime filled the gaps, and rust had eaten away at the once-pristine plating. She paused, her breath catching as she noticed something glinting faintly in the dim light—a sliver of keratin-like material, wedged deep within one of the gashes.
"These are old," she murmured. "Very old."
She carefully extracted the fragment, holding it up to her flashlight. The material was thick and dense, with a texture resembling hardened bone.
"This doesn't make sense," she said finally.
Stone frowned. "How so?"
She turned back to the gate, her scanner humming softly as she adjusted its settings. "The corrosion patterns here—see how the rust has formed in layers? The oxidation rate suggests the gate began degrading at least a century ago. But these claw marks…" She traced the jagged edges with her gloved finger. "The metal deformation is consistent with an extremely high-pressure cutting force, but the corrosion within the grooves is minimal. That means whatever did this attacked long after the gate had already started to rust."
Athena, the leader and only member of the Shadow Sisters Stone chose to join the group, frowned, stepping closer. "So, something was here recently? Or… is still here?"
Dr. Lianne shook her head. "Not necessarily recently. But definitely long after this place was abandoned. Decades, maybe. Hard to say without more data."
Rion crossed his arms, his flashlight casting long shadows across the gate. "Alright, so we've got a mystery creature with claws strong enough to tear through reinforced steel. But the real question is…" He paused, his voice dropping. "Was it trying to get in… or out?"
The team fell silent, the weight of the question settling over them like a suffocating fog. Their flashlights flickered across the gate, the claw marks now seeming more ominous than ever. The jagged grooves looked almost frantic, as if whatever had made them had been desperate—or enraged.
Vance glanced back toward the stairwell, his grip tightening on his rifle. "Either way, I don't like it. If it was trying to get out, that means it was trapped in here. And if it was trying to get in…" He trailed off, the implication hanging in the air.
Stone stepped forward, his voice calm but firm. "We'll keep moving. Stay sharp. If there's something in here, we'll just have to deal with it."
The team pressed forward, stepping past the gate into the corridors beyond. Their flashlights flickered along the metallic walls, revealing a space that had been long abandoned. Dust clung to every surface, thick enough to suggest that no living thing had walked these halls in decades.
The passageways stretched before them in an eerie silence, the air thick with a stagnant, metallic scent. The only signs of past activity were the deep, claw-like scratches on the floor.
One of the crew members ran a hand over one of the scratches. The grooves were long, stretching for meters. He exchanged a glance with Vance, who simply nodded. No words were needed. Something—many somethings—had moved through here, and not gently.
Stone gestured forward. "Keep moving. Eyes sharp."
They advanced cautiously, their weapons at the ready, but aside from the unsettling marks on the floor, the corridor was empty. No bodies. No equipment. It was as if someone—or something—had deliberately stripped this place clean.
After several tense minutes of navigating the vacant halls, they reached another door—this one slightly ajar, its locking mechanism partially fused as if it had been subjected to extreme heat. Stone exchanged glances with another retainer, then gestured for Cooper to check it.
The engineer stepped forward, placing a hand on the door's edge. He gave it a testing push, and with a groaning screech, the metal yielded, sliding open just enough for them to step through.
Beyond the door was a vast chamber—one that had clearly once been a laboratory.
Their flashlights swept across the space, illuminating rows of cultivation vats stretching from one end of the room to the other. Many were shattered, their reinforced glass ruptured from the inside, while others remained intact, their contents preserved in a murky, greenish fluid.
The room was colder than the rest of the facility, the air thick with a chemical staleness that burned at the nostrils. Faintly luminescent veins of wiring crisscrossed the floor, embedded into the metal plating, though no power seemed to be running through them.
Dr. Lianne was the first to step forward, her scientific curiosity overriding caution. She approached one of the intact vats, her breath fogging slightly against the glass as she peered inside.
Suspended in the fluid was a beast whose body was a fusion of organic and mechanical components. Thick, plated skin covered a muscular frame, while exposed sections revealed an intricate mesh of sinew and what looked like synthetic muscle. Its head was elongated, teeth sharp even in death, and its closed eyes gave the unsettling impression that it might wake at any moment.
"Holy shit…" Vance muttered beside her.
Similar creatures floated in other vats—each different, yet bearing the same grotesque blend of biology and technology. Some had wings, though shriveled from decades of disuse. Others had additional limbs, sharp protrusions along their spines, or reinforced skull structures.
"What exactly are we looking at?" Stone asked.
The biologist tore her eyes away from the grotesque amalgam of flesh and metal inside the vat, her mind already racing through possibilities. She inhaled sharply, adjusting the settings on her scanner before answering.
"This facility… it must have been dedicated to the study of mutated beasts. The earliest documented cases of mutations were reported over a century ago, but back when this place was operational, they would've been relatively new phenomena." She gestured toward the preserved creatures, her flashlight casting eerie reflections against the glass. "The people who worked here must have captured these things and experimented on them, trying to merge their biology with the technology of the time."
Stone folded his arms, absorbing her words. "For what purpose?"
Lianne hesitated. "That part… I'm not sure about." Her voice dropped slightly, the uncertainty creeping in. "Could be anything—military applications, biological weaponry, or even an attempt at controlled evolution. Whatever the reason, the research here must have been extensive." She tapped on the glass of one vat, observing the intricate fusion of organic muscle and synthetic wiring along its spine.
A short distance away, the two engineers, Cooper and Harlan, had been examining one of the shattered vats. Their handheld scanners emitted soft beeps as streams of data scrolled across their screens.
"Boss," Harlan called out, his voice laced with unease. "We've got something."
Stone turned as the two approached, their faces partially illuminated by the glow of their devices.
"There's still residual power running across this base," Cooper explained, adjusting the settings on his scanner. "Weak, but enough to keep the preservation systems running at low efficiency."
Lianne's eyes sharpened. "Meaning?"
"Meaning that after all these years, there's still at least one active generator somewhere in this facility," Harlan clarified. "These things have been dead for a long time, but the system kept them from fully decaying. That kind of energy reserve doesn't just happen by accident."
"If we can locate the power source and reroute it," Cooper added, "we could bring the lab back online—at least partially. Access data logs, see what the researchers were working on before everything went to hell."
Rion exhaled through his nose, casting a glance at the grotesque beings floating in their murky tombs. "Yeah… because waking up a haunted lab full of dead experiments is always a great idea."
Stone ignored the sarcasm and weighed the information. The idea of getting access to the facility's logs was tempting—answers were always valuable, and right now, they had too many questions. But powering up an unknown system could lead to unknown consequences.
He shook his head. "You said something similar earlier, but my answer is still the same." His tone left no room for argument. "We still have other floors to check. We don't know what else is in this place, and I'm not taking any risks without a better understanding of what we're dealing with."
Cooper sighed but nodded. "Understood."
Stone motioned toward the exit. "Let's keep moving."
The next corridor stretched before them, long and eerily vacant. Their flashlights cut through the darkness, revealing walls covered in old, peeling warning labels that most likely once designated restricted access. Every so often, they passed thick steel doors, some slightly ajar, others sealed shut by time and corrosion. The ones that were open revealed empty rooms that looked to have functioned as break rooms or some other similar purpose.
Some time later, they finally made their way into another research lab in the complex.
The interior layout looked almost identical to the last one. The only difference was that the intact cultivation vats didn't contain any wierd mutated beasts.
Instead, they contained the bodies of humans!