Day 29. Lost City of Tinnos
It took Lara a while, but she has finally arrived at a glacial cave. A bit more familiar and cozy place to her than… Well, a maze of mining carts? The abyss looks quite steep, and there are few platforms to land safely, but on the end of the glacial cave there's a bridge worth examining. She gracefully executes these jumps, and rises up to a big wall of a lost city discovered by Willard and his team. "Tinnos?" she asks to herself, while looking at the outer wall.
She gets into the city through a tunnel built by Willard, and senses it. "It's like walking on Chernobyl," she thinks. "I better hurry." But she now also understands where did polynesians get their architecture from. It's beautiful, and brownish. The difference is that the eyes of the stone faces are decorated with unrefined meteorite stones. The artifacts have surely been refined by this civilization.
After making sense of the hall she's in, Lara makes it to a bridge that has been blown apart. She doesn't know how to cross it, and what's worse is that mutant wasp hive. She takes cover behind the bridge's pillars, but the hive's more populated than she expected. "I'm running out of ammo," she thinks. "Gonna have to craft some more."
She does manage to cross the bridge somehow, and faces some local guardians. They have been so deep into mutation, they hardly resemble a human being anymore. They double Lara in size, and have a tail appendaging from her head. "Gross," she thinks. "I need to hurry before I end like them." Surely, she doesn't want to be at the epicenter of Willard's experiment, but that's where she's heading to. She's been more disgusted by Willard's naivety than by Natla's experiments. "At least, she created her own breeds," Lara thinks.
Ahead, some tetrical traps await Lara, which include fire-spitting stoneheads, neverending mud pools, deadly water and wind tunnels, and some more mutant locals who hadn't died by radiation. All of this opens way to a hall where more of those mutant wasps reside and manyfold levers, to advance further. "Where should I start?" she asks herself. It takes a while for Lara to find out the right sequence, and she opens a door leading further into the meteorite cave, full of welcoming Rapa Nui.
A bit of progress later, she arrives at a cave shaped as a cross, each end holding one of the stones, and a group of four stone men adoring the circular center, from where Willard summons the meteorite rock from the depths. Below the meteorite, there's a haze of light, and Willard lets himself in to Lara's surprise. "I never thought he'd be that stupid!" She thinks.
What comes back isn't human, but still has Willard's face. It could be akin to a giant spider with superpowers, and coming for you in a nightmare. And it's still more disgusting than that… and deadly. Fortunately enough, it's also dumb. So, Lara can take him down for a while, but she has to retrieve each of the artifacts to weaken Willard. After taking the fourth meteorite artifact, the meteorite goes down. Dr. Willard becomes molecularly unstable and blows into atoms which leave a blue haze behind.
She hurries out of Tinnos, lest she becomes herself a big spider. It's dawn at the Antarctic continent. Willard's henchmen continue their job faithfully ignoring their boss' death. And a helicopter lands nearby. "My ticket out of this place!" Lara rejoices.