Soul was not afraid of the dark. He had not been scared of it since he was a kid, but there was something about the darkness down here that was unsettling, that had some of the hairs on his skin standing on end. It didn't help that there was an almost deafening silence that greeted them upon arrival, like the calm before the storm. As if the world was holding its collective breath.

Back when they were gearing up on the surface, the logistics team insisted on them having some type of heavy melee weapon each, along with the two guns that they were handed.

Soul had originally thought it strange that they were all fitted with their own gas masks, but now he understands clearly. The air down here was thick. Unsure if it was dust or something else he shouldn't be breathing in, it took the appearance of a dense fog the further down they went in the elevator.

As expected, Kid took point immediately upon arrival. Once they hit the unsettling darkness, the two prisoners fell in line behind the dark haired man without question. Despite having just met, they followed orders and signals Kid was throwing out without complaining. Kid motioned quietly, hand signals they had been taught not too long ago, and they crossed the chamber they had arrived in and approached the first door.

They split up as ordered, Soul took position in front of Maka on the left side of the door, while Blake and Kid went right.

Kid spoke cryptically into their comms after everyone was settled into position. "Remember, this isn't a shoot first, ask later mission." He glared at Blake who was already at the ready with his gun drawn. "We already have limited supplies and we're cut off from up top. We need everything we have on us for when we actually need it."

"Need it for what?" Soul asked, repositioning his sub-machine gun in his hands and furrowing his brow. Not that it could easily be seen behind his gas mask.

"It's… difficult to explain. You'll know when." He sounded a little nervous, and Soul and Blake exchanged concerned glances.

"The fuck is that supposed to mean?" Said Blake in a harsh whisper, comms crackling as he jabbed Kid on the shoulder with his palm. Kid had elbowed Blake back into position.

"On three," Kid growled, ignoring him. He quickly held up three fingers. Then put one finger down. Then another. And then the final finger as he activated the panel to open the door.

Despite the reactor in this sector being offline, there was still some backup power flowing to the doors, because the panel lit up a dull blue and then turned green as the door unlocked and opened with a soft hiss and some mechanical clanking. The sound echoed in the silence, louder than it had any right to be, and Soul thought he saw Kid flinch.

When the door was halfway up, Soul and Blake had crouched slightly and peered around into the next room with their guns drawn, attached lights piercing into the darkness. The two of them carefully stepped out from cover and began to sweep the room with their guns from the doorway. A few seconds later, Kid and Maka followed them with their own weapons at the ready.

Since this was a utility floor, the spaces they encountered were not going to be anything pretty or polished as expected with a laboratory. Sure enough, there was a lot of metal visible. Exposed wires, panels, and pipes were everywhere. Even the rough stones of the earth were mostly left exposed from where they have been carved out for the spaces of the facility, the builders not bothering to cover them up.

They fanned out into what appeared to be a storage room. Rows upon rows of racks and shelves lined the space, most of them filled with crates of various sizes and bundles of what looked like raw materials and machine parts. The dust particles were thick in the air, catching the light from their weapons, swirling where the newcomers moved. No one had been here in a while.

The team moved in silence with the goal of meeting up at the far end to continue to the next section. About a minute or so into their sweep, another voice came crackling through the comms. It was Blake, and the fear in his low voice was unmistakable, sending a shiver through every one of them.

"Blake here…Wha… what the fuck am I looking at?"


"What the fuck," Blake whispered fiercely. "What the hell is that?!" With his boot he prodded the recently deceased- courtesy of a sledgehammer blow to the head by Soul, who had snuck up on the thing as if it were truly asleep- a humanoid creature that lay sprawled on the floor.

Most of its head was now gone in a big splatter of blood and gore that had them thankful they were wearing gas masks. Just by looking at its disgusting remains they could tell it smelled something foul.

Dark veins crisscrossed beneath its pale ivory skin, various dry cracks fissuring across certain areas of its body. Its hands were missing all of its fingers, as if they had been chopped or torn off, leaving only its bloody palms intact. It looked like an abomination, one that could very well have come from the depths of hell itself.

For once, Soul was actually glad that Blake had very little filter when it came to voicing his thoughts. Because his reaction this time was entirely appropriate to the situation.

"And did you see the way its chest was glowing earlier?" Blake shook his head in disbelief. "What the actual fuck is going on here?"

"The glowing chest? That's what you were focusing on?" Soul tore his gaze away from the grisly corpse to stare at the blue haired man. "Jesus, did you see its face? That'll give me nightmares for weeks…" Probably even longer than that.

Thinking about the monster's head made him shudder and he tried to push the image of it out of his mind. The image of the huge, gaping vertical maw covered in dozens of bristling fangs that made up the entirety of its face like something out of the worst nightmares of dark, unearthly horrors of the abyss.

"I was trying not to think about that, thank you very much," grumbled Blake with a pointed glare.

Off to the side, Maka had her sights set on the layout printed on her papers. Her flashlight stuck in the crook of her mouth as she flipped through her debriefing files and whatever information she had brought down with them for any answers.

Souls eyes landed on Kid, narrowing as Blakes suspicions about him were proven correct from his recent behavior. It was time to get some answers.

"Kid," He spoke his name firmly, drawing everyone's attention. "You knew what was down here with us, didn't you?" He said it more as a statement than a question.

All eyes turned to Kid. Maka had even stopped shuffling through the paperwork and was now listening intensely. Or at least, silently hoping he had more answers than her paperwork did.

Kid's face was partially hidden beneath his gas mask, so it was hard to see his expression, but after a moment he took a deep breath and nodded slowly.

"Yes."

There were a few seconds of silence as the admission sunk in.

"And you still agreed to come down here?" Blake blurted out and started cackling, his laughter echoing into the dark chamber. "Ha! And I thought I was the fucking loony one!"

"Quiet down!" Kid hissed, stepping up to the loud-mouthed man and grabbing him by his armored vest to shake him. Blake tried to stifle his laugh as best as he could. "We're all here for different reasons," Kid said roughly, "For me, my father set out on an ambitious project that failed to yield controllable results. What's left down here is the only thing that could potentially stop this from getting worse and I'm the only one here that knows how to access it."

"And you couldn't just, I don't know, do a step-by-step procedure on paper for us to follow?" Asked Blake, still grinning like a maniac at the absurdity of the situation. Perhaps he really was going mad.

"A bio locked project is hard to unlock without its key." Kid gripped tighter on Blakes vest.

Black smiled dangerously. "Best get your hands off me…sir."

They stared at each other for a few seconds before Kid dropped his hand away and stepped back. Neither man spoke, and the silence was deafening until Soul broke them out of it.

"So, getting back to more important matters… care to explain what that thing is?" Soul pointed to the corpse. "Is it…. Human?" It certainly looked similar to a human. A horrifically twisted and unnaturally corrupted human spawned from the underworld.

Kid shrugged. "To be honest, I'm not so sure anymore. It might have been human once, but I didn't think it would have mutated to something to this… degree."

There was another bout of silence.

"So this facility… all these people… they're all…." Soul trailed off as he stared at Kid in horror. If the worst were to happen, and he ended up stuck down here, would he end up like these creatures? "That lithium mine is just a front then? To your sick experiments with this-this thing?" Soul could feel the anger seething through his veins.

"The lithium mines are real. It's how it started anyway." Kid, ignoring the anger the two prisoners were radiating, nonchalantly responded, "Once we came across the substance, it became a side project for funding the research further."

"What the fuck happened here then?" Muttered Blake, looking around as if he might find some clue.

Kid shook his head. "One experiment gone wrong by Stein led to another, and once it couldn't be contained… They had to evacuate."

"Something forbidden by the code of ethics." Maka spoke up for the first time in a while, drawing their attention. "Doctor Stein was a respected scientist. A mentor. Something changed once he began those experiments. He wasn't himself." Soul held her gaze momentarily before she looked away towards the others. There was a hint of guilt lacing her voice as she explained what happened.

"Do you think he's still down here?" Blake asked curiously. Kid took the time to scan their surroundings as they continued to fill in needed information.

"It's possible? He probably won't be himself anymore but he never made it to the evac center."

Blake burst out laughing again, a strained and cynical sound that escaped his lips, and after getting ahold of himself, Soul glared at him and smacked him in the arm to get him to shut up.

Heart suddenly pounding harder in his chest, Soul frowned, "Well, Kid, Maka; you better make damned sure we all make it to our evac this time. Because I am not dying down here."

He eyed the monster's corpse one more time and shuddered.