The world outside suddenly fell silent, but within Kael’s consciousness, the storm had not completely subsided. A sharp static hum continued to spiral through his motor nerves, leaving behind throbbing pulses that seemed to signal that the battle between his biological consciousness and the remnants of The Core’s defenses still smoldered.
He lay on his back atop the transparent glass floor of the main archive, staring up at the metal dome ceiling, which now emitted a faint sapphire-blue glow.
The air inside the room felt hollow, saturated with the heavy scent of ozone and the faint smell of scorching from the main console, which had just operated beyond its thermal capacity. Kael tried to move his fingers. His joints felt stiff, as though the electromagnetic wave’s high-energy impact moments ago had suddenly frozen all the blood in his body. With the last reserves of strength gathered in his chest, he forced himself upright, propping himself on one elbow while clutching his head with the other hand as the intense hum continued inside it.
“Did... did the message get sent in full?” Kael whispered into the room’s silence, his voice hoarse and fractured in the vast space.
In answer to his question, the main console’s screen, which had been dark, suddenly radiated a soft golden glow. The holographic data lines that had been thrown into disarray by The Core’s intrusion now knitted themselves back together, forming neat, structured geometric patterns. A small status window appeared in midair, displaying a calmly blinking global transmission percentage: **OMEGA ARCHIVE CLASS 1 TRANSMISSION: 100% COMPLETE. GLOBAL NETWORK DISTRIBUTION SUCCESSFUL.**
Kael let out a long breath, an overwhelming sense of relief washing over him, even though he knew exactly what that one hundred percent meant for his survival. In New-Aethelgard, millions of Upper Sector and Lower Sector citizens who had lived under the strict control of the memory-cleansing algorithms were now witnessing the shadow of true history for the first time. The Central Council’s propaganda of eternal peace had cracked. Outside, panic must have been sweeping through the Council’s leadership; the absolute control system they had built over decades had been breached from within by a low-tier archaeologist from the Lower Sector.
But Kael had no time to celebrate that small victory. The status window on the main console suddenly turned bright yellow, displaying a new urgent warning: **PERIMETER ALERT: FACILITY MAIN REACTOR CONTROL UNSTABLE. AUTOMATIC SELF-DESTRUCT PROTOCOL ACTIVATED BY THE CORE SECURITY PROTOCOL. TIME REMAINING: 15 MINUTES.**
“Damn,” Kael muttered, forcing his trembling legs to stand fully upright.
The Core would not allow this ancient archive facility to remain intact after its secret data had leaked across the world. The self-destruct protocol had been automatically approved to erase all physical traces, ensuring that no artifacts or technology from the past could ever be used by future rebels. Fifteen minutes was far too little time to find a way out of this vast underground facility, especially with Kael’s body still reeling from the violent collision of consciousness.
He limped away from the main console area, retracing the circular corridor that had brought him into the archive room earlier. Emergency lights along the walls now flashed rapidly in vivid red, casting long, racing shadows across the metal walls, which had begun to shake violently. The tremors came from the quantum reactor beneath the glass floor, which was slowly releasing excess heat as the countdown progressed through the system.
*14:12... 14:11...*
Large red digital numbers were displayed on every corridor wall panel, counting down the seconds until the facility’s destruction. Kael broke into a jog, enduring the stabbing pain at the back of his head each time he moved too quickly. He knew he had to find a secondary evacuation route or an emergency lift connected directly to the surface outside Zona Kosong, far from the collapse of the central archive tower.
As he turned the corridor toward the maintenance sector, a deafening mechanical roar suddenly erupted from the ceiling. The cooling pipes overhead burst, spewing thick clouds of white-hot steam that filled the passage in an instant. Kael covered his face with his coat sleeve, coughing violently as the dense vapor reduced visibility to zero.
Amid the billowing heat, small mechanical shadows began descending from the ventilation grilles above. They were no longer human, but a new type of armed autonomous cleanup unit—residual-destruction drones the size of hunting dogs, equipped with sharp plasma-powered claws and red optical sensors that scanned the area aggressively.
“Anomaly detected. Immediate elimination command activated,” a cold, shrill synthetic voice rang out from one of the drone units.
Kael threw himself onto the wet floor as a beam of searing plasma hissed directly over his head, melting the metal wall behind him until it glowed. He crawled quickly behind the wreckage of a large cable distribution box, pulled a small energy pistol from his thigh holster, and aimed it toward the drone’s hissing in the steam cloud.
Without seeing his target directly, he pulled the trigger three times in rapid succession. The emergency shots struck true; one of the residual-destruction drones erupted in a bright burst of blue electricity before crashing to the floor, its components shattered into pieces. But the two remaining drones hissed with increasing fury, crawling swiftly toward Kael’s hiding place from two different directions.
Time continued to run out, and the countdown numbers on the walls had now reached the final ten minutes. Kael had to escape this maze of corridors immediately, or he would be buried alongside millions of pieces of secret historical data in the belly of Zona Kosong.