The impact of the explosion from Riku's workshop still rang violently inside Kael's ears, creating such intense disorientation that he had to feel his way along the wet walls of the maintenance tunnel to keep his balance. Cold, viscous sewage soaked his boots halfway up his calves, the splashing breaking the absolute silence in the depths of *The Undercity*. Here, far beneath the reinforced-concrete foundations of the Lower Sector, New-Aethelgard's artificial sunlight could never reach. The only illumination came from the faint glow of bioluminescent moss clinging between rusted iron pipes and peeling fiber-optic cables.
Kael kept moving forward at full speed, ignoring the pain spreading through his calf muscles and the constant throbbing in the neural implant behind his ear. The lead-shielded storage container in his coat pocket felt warmer by the second, as if the Omega-class data inside were alive and breathing, responding to the rise in Kael's body temperature brought on by adrenaline. Every few seconds, the neural implant sent out a small twitch that triggered brief visual flashes in the corner of Kael's eye—vague shadows of collapsing glass towers and a sea of white data melting like wax.
"Focus, Kael," he whispered to himself, trying to drive the shadows from his mind. Riku had risked his life so Kael could escape the grasp of the Special Forces Memory Hunters. If he were captured now, it would mean more than the end of his own life—it would mean the total extinction of humanity's only hope of learning the truth.
After running through the labyrinth of drainage channels for nearly twenty minutes, Kael finally reached a large intersection marked by a colossal water-distribution pipe more than ten meters in diameter. This place had once been the main pumping station of the Pre-Consolidation Era, before the Central Council rerouted the city's entire hydraulic system into a centralized automated network. In the middle of the vast chamber, an old suspension bridge made of rusted steel cables stretched across a dark chasm whose bottom was nowhere in sight.
Kael stepped carefully onto the suspension bridge. Each time he took a step, the steel cables beneath him creaked sharply, throwing back an eerie echo against the walls of the expansive artificial cavern. On the far side of the bridge, a narrow tunnel led directly toward the city's outermost boundary—a shortcut to the Void Zone marked on the Omega data's coordinate map.
Suddenly, Kael stopped. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. A survival instinct honed through years of fleeing across the Lower Sector warned him that he was not alone in the chamber.
From the darkness at the far end of the bridge, a sharp, cold mechanical voice shattered the silence: *"Identification confirmed. Target Kael, former Lower Sector technician, holder of an illegal Omega-class archive. You are under a permanent detention order issued in the name of the Central Council."*
Blinding red laser sights suddenly lit up from the ceiling, locking directly onto Kael's chest. In the next split second, three shadowy figures in pitch-black tactical armor emerged from behind a massive concrete pillar. Their helmets were fitted with infrared optical lenses blinking in a military-green pattern. They were members of the elite Memory Hunters unit—cold-blooded killers who would not hesitate to forcibly extract their targets' brains on the spot if necessary.
Kael wasted no time trying to negotiate. He dropped flat onto the suspension bridge just as a high-energy plasma beam hissed through the air directly above his head, scorching the ties of his jacket and leaving behind a sharp ozone smell.
*Zzzzt!*
A second plasma beam struck the bridge's wire railing, instantly melting the iron and sending glowing sparks cascading into the dark chasm below. Kael crawled quickly across the violently shaking bridge, drew his small energy pistol from its thigh holster, and fired three blind retaliatory shots toward the enemy's position.
Kael's shots were not meant to kill, but to draw their attention. The small blasts from his emergency pistol triggered a short circuit in one of the power-distribution boxes on the wall, bringing down a blinding curtain of electrical sparks that blocked the hunters' optical line of sight.
Taking advantage of the momentary chaos, Kael sprang to his feet, summoned all the strength left in his lungs, and ran across the rest of the bridge before hurling himself into the mouth of the narrow tunnel on the other side of the chasm.
Two energy rounds followed close behind, striking the stone wall on either side of the tunnel entrance and showering his back with sharp rock fragments that tore through his coat. But Kael had escaped the direct line of fire. He rolled forward across the rough tunnel floor, quickly got back up, and continued running into the deeper darkness.
"Target has entered the Outer Border Sector. Activate sector lockdown protocol," a cold command voice echoed from the hunters' portable speakers left behind on the far side of the bridge, growing weaker and weaker as the distance between them increased.
Kael did not stop. He continued running along the rocky tunnel, which gradually began to slope upward, moving farther away from the center of New-Aethelgard City. The air here felt completely different—colder, drier, and utterly free of the industrial chemical odor that usually dominated the city. This was clean air that had long since vanished from the lungs of Lower Sector residents.
After running nonstop for more than an hour through the increasingly narrow tunnel, a dim grayish light began to appear at the end of the passage. It was not the glow of artificial neon lights or the beams of surveillance drones, but the natural light of dawn reflecting across a stretch of white desert sand that extended as far as the eye could see beyond the city limits.
Kael stepped out of the tunnel mouth and stood atop a high rocky cliff overlooking the silent landscape of the Void Zone. A powerful wind greeted him at once, whipping the torn edge of his coat and cooling the sweat on his face. Before him sprawled the half-buried remains of an ancient civilization—skeletons of skyscrapers from the past that now looked like the enormous bones of prehistoric creatures sleeping for eternity.
In his hand, the lead-shielded storage container vibrated one last time before projecting a small hologram into the open air. The coordinates he had been searching for now blinked brightly in the middle of the ancient city ruins below, pointing to a secret underground facility not recorded in any official history.
Kael drew a deep breath and stared across the silent desert before him. His escape from New-Aethelgard had just ended, but the real war had only begun. He stepped down from the rocky cliff, descending the steep slope toward the sea of sand, carrying with him humanity's greatest secret—a secret ready to shake the world.