Xander froze mid-step, weight half-committed, every muscle coiling with the instinct to brace for impact. The moment the sound echoed across the empty barn, everyone stopped as they waited collectively for the penny to drop and something bad to happen. Jo’s sword snapped up to guard, Blake stepped in behind her with his spear at the ready, and Zoey moved left, bow half-raised as her eyes swept up to the rafters. Kane angled toward the rear flank, shielding Ford.

  Xander didn’t move. The sound hadn’t come from overhead or from a wall. It had come from the floor.

  He clenched his teeth, waiting for the trap to trigger.

  But nothing lunged out of the walls. No darts hissed through the rafters, no hidden turret snapped to life. Nothing.

  Then the lights came on.

  Overhead, a row of aged industrial bulbs flared one after the other in staggered pairs, thick glass domes crusted with dust and grime that did little to mute the amber glow. The lights weren't electrical, and they didn’t flicker like enchanted lamps Xander had seen in Starlight and Fort Octave. The lights reminded him of the first mechanical dungeon Zoey, Alex, and he had entered shortly after the Cataclysm, and then again in the dungeon located under the railroad museum. A faint hum followed the lights snapping on. It sounded like machinery coming to life below the building.

  Xander swore under his breath. Not loud enough to echo, just enough for the team to hear. "Shit. Okay, this one is on me."

  Jo didn’t answer. She just rolled her eyes and continued to watch the rest of the warehouse as if she still expected something bad to happen.

  "That hum," she said. "It sounds like there is more going on here than just turning on the lights."

  He stepped back from the pressure plate, rolling his foot off it as gently as he could, just in case it was actually a trap. "In my defense, it didn’t look like a trigger."

  "It was," Zoey said. "And for once it didn’t release poison gas or angry rats. Progress."

  Another click sounded. This one was more of a clunk than a click. It echoed through the floor near the wall, roughly ten feet from where the team stood. The sound of metal dragging against metal somewhere just beneath the concrete followed the clunk. The barn vibrated faintly as something shifted in the floor below.

  "That’s the sound of a locking bar sliding."

  "Grain barns don’t have powered subfloors," Ford said.

  "No," Jo replied. "No, they don’t."

  And then the dust on the floor moved.

  What had looked like a smooth expanse of poured concrete now carried a visible outline. It was a square panel, roughly five feet across. Its edges revealed by the light tremor shaking settled dust out of hiding. The shape of a hidden floor hatch was unmistakable.

  Xander crouched, taking in the outline of the hatch. There was no handle or other mechanism to open it, but along one edge near the corner he saw scuff marks. A narrow line of drag marks caught the light as if something heavy had been moved recently.

  Ford stepped closer but didn’t kneel. "You really think we should open that?"

  "No," Xander said. "But we’re going to."

  "If it’s a dungeon," Ford continued, "we should table it for later if we don't see signs of the scouts. This barn’s already off-script."

  "We leave something unknown like this behind us," Kane said, "and it bites us later. I’d rather look it in the teeth now than get flanked by it tomorrow."

  "I'm not convinced there actually is a dungeon here," Xander said.

  Jo was already circling, studying the seams like a puzzle. She stopped at the far corner and brushed aside another layer of dust. "Mechanical hinge. Internal mount. Opens from this side."

  Zoey rested one hand on her bow but didn’t knock an arrow. "Place is about three seconds away from being a horror movie. And now a floor hatch with its own security system. Yeah, look. I'm not going to be the token female who gets murdered by the bad guy in a shower scene."

  "It is safe to say that this is not a grain barn," Xander said. "It was built to look like one. The real question is who built it, why, and what does it have to do with Prairiehold's missing scouts… if anything."

  He glanced at Jo, and she was already nodding.

  They moved in tandem, each gripping one side of the recessed panel. It was difficult to get a grip on the edges, and the hatch resisted at first. When it gave, it did so with a mechanical groan that echoed into the bones of the building. Cold air spilled out in a slow wave. It didn’t carry the earthy scent of grain. It smelled of old metal and concrete.

  The underside of the hatch was reinforced. Not reinforced like a vault door, but as if it had been built to withstand a large amount of weight sitting on top of it for extended periods of time.

  Xander stood at the edge and looked down.

  The metal staircase that stretched into the darkness certainly wouldn't pass any building codes. It had narrow treads with a steep pitch and no handrails. It almost appeared as if it were a maintenance access point of some sort. The steps ended beyond the range of the lights, vanishing into shadow.

  The others gathered without needing to be called. Jo still had her blade drawn. Kane shifted forward with shield raised slightly, more out of habit than intent. Blake stood just behind him, eyes narrowing at the stairwell. Zoey didn’t even bother with commentary this time. She just waited.

  Ford hesitated the longest.

  "This is going to be one of those days, isn’t it?" he asked.

  "When was the last time it wasn’t?" Xander replied.

  "Fair."

  Jo moved first.

  Xander followed her down into the dark.

  The stairs dropped deeper than he’d expected, metal treads giving way to a broad landing. The others fell in behind him, boots thudding softly as they descended in tight formation. He counted steps without thinking. Fifty-two before the wall broke away.

  The basement spread out ahead in a wide, gloomy chamber, its floor stretching almost the full footprint of the barn above. Steel support beams framed the ceiling at regular intervals, and along every wall stood dozens of heavy racks, lined up in rows. Each one built to hold crates or gear. Each one was empty.

  The space hadn't been abandoned. Instead, it looked as if someone had recently cleared it out.

  Dust coated the racks unevenly, broken by long scuff trails and narrow streaks where storage containers had once rested. Footprints overlapped near the walls, some deeper, some faint, almost all recent. Xander tracked them without moving, eyes narrowing at the density. A dozen people at least. Probably more. This wasn’t scavenging. This was an organized extraction.

  Jo stopped beside him, gaze sweeping the far wall. "This looks like some kind of government storage site."

  He nodded, already seeing it. Identical spacing. Reinforced bracing on the corner racks. The sheer size and, more importantly, uniformity. It looked like something built to be inventoried, checked, rechecked, and locked down. But whatever had been here was gone, and the patterns in the dust said it hadn’t been gone long.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  Blake stared at the empty racks like someone who’d just learned the church basement hid missiles. Blake moved left toward one of the center aisles. "I don't understand. This wasn’t a grain barn," he said. "Did the scouting team find this place and empty it out? They didn't come back to the safe zone, so that would mean they were hoarding it for themselves?"

  "No, if they were going to hoard it, they just wouldn't have reported it back most likely. Leaving it in place would have been the best choice and then just taking what they needed as they needed it." Zoey said. "More likely is they found this place empty, and whoever had scavenged it before them triggered some defenses, and those golems killed the scouts."

  Xander stepped forward, passing the first aisle. The further in he walked, the more signs emerged. Scrapes along the concrete. Rubber smears from wheeled carts. One drag mark stretched fifteen feet, ending in a scuffed half-circle like someone had rotated a container in place. The cleaning job upstairs had been clinical. Down here, someone had worked fast and left in a hurry.

  At the far end of the room, near the back wall, a raised panel stood out among the concrete catching his eye. He changed direction as he moved toward the console.

  He recognized the shape before the details. It had an angled housing similar to what they had seen in the two admin rooms they'd found attached to dungeons. This one had a cracked casing, and the faint outline of a data slot embedded in the front plate.

  The access port was shattered. Where the system key should have slotted in, the panel had been half-pried out. Loose wires spilled from the console’s underside in a tangle of stripped cables and scorched insulation. A small screwdriver lay discarded nearby, its handle still smudged with oil. Two of the panel screws were missing. The other three lay scattered across the floor as if someone had dropped them mid-task.

  A dusty tarp had been pulled to one side. From the outline, it had once covered the console. Not for years. Days, maybe. Someone had been here, had uncovered this thing, and tried to bypass whatever it used to run on.

  Jo stood beside him, arms folded. "That’s admin interface. Similar to the vault systems."

  "Wired differently," Xander said. "But yeah. Same basic design."

  "We haven’t seen anything like this outside the dungeons."

  "Nope."

  Ford knelt beside the wires, frowning. "Damage looks fresh. That charring is less than a week old. Whoever was here didn’t just find it. They tried to use it."

  "Or rip it out," Kane said.

  Zoey drifted in from the left. "So someone knew this was down here. Someone with a plan. What was it Rex said again? The Cult’s been active looking for Simulation technology. Real active."

  Xander didn’t answer. He was still staring at the console. Still thinking about the spider tank in the mine. The fight that hadn’t made sense. The buried simulation gear in the middle of nowhere. Now this.

  Someone had known about the Simulation.

  And they’d known before any of this started.

  Ford stood slowly. "We don’t have hard proof it was the Cult."

  "Could be military," Kane added. "We saw working magitech back at Fort Octave. That place had gear older than this."

  "Maybe," Zoey said. "But nobody from the military came back to this site and scrubbed it clean."

  Blake looked uneasy. "We’re talking about different leagues now. This kind of infrastructure? The scouting team was looking for food. They wouldn't have focused on this stuff."

  "No," Xander said. "No, they wouldn't have."

  Whatever this place had been, it wasn’t forgotten. It had been used. Operated. Cleaned out and sanitized by someone who didn’t want anyone to find what was left behind.

  They moved deeper into the rows, moving slowly, checking every aisle. The silence pressed harder here, like the walls had been built to hold something back, not just protect what was inside.

  Zoey spotted the first body.

  It was behind a collapsed storage rack, limbs twisted beneath it as if they’d fallen or been thrown. The individual's gear was intact. Their packs still strapped tight, boots laced, weapons still sheathed. But the man wasn’t breathing.

  Xander crouched beside the corpse and studied the throat. There were no cuts or bruises visible. But the sides of the neck bore faint discoloration.

  Jo approached without a word, eyes flicking from the man’s face to the surrounding floor. "No defensive wounds."

  Xander stood. "No single strike either."

  "He didn’t die fast," she said.

  A beat of silence followed.

  Farther down, Kane called out. "There’s another."

  The second body sat slumped against the far wall. Unlike the first body, this one's gear was gone. Their pack missing, boots stripped, coat half-unzipped. Someone had killed the man and left him sitting like an afterthought.

  Blake knelt beside him, face tightening. "That’s Jameson the other one was Aaron. Two more scouts from the salvage team. Good guys."

  "They had families," Blaked continued as his jaw tightened.

  Jo stood nearby, arms crossed. "No signs of a fight. Same as the first."

  Ford went pale. "I don't get it. The first guy looks like he may have been tortured, but this person was just killed."

  "We don’t know that," Blake said, but the words lacked weight.

  "No gear on this one," Kane said. "None of this makes any sense."

  Xander didn’t move. He was still watching the footprints. Too many to be just the scouts. "Someone wanted something from them. And when they didn’t get it, they left them here."

  "But why kill them at all?" Blake asked. "They didn’t know anything."

  "Maybe someone thinks Prairiehold does."

  Jo turned toward Blake. "You need to talk to your people. We need access to what’s inside that place."

  Blake met her gaze. "It’s not my call. But I’ll say something to the Deacon. And the Bishop, if I can."

  "They left the bodies," Zoey said suddenly. "But they missed something."

  She stepped back from the rack and held up a scrap of cloth, no bigger than a torn pocket flap. The color was wrong for standard salvage gear. Wrong for Prairiehold.

  It was deep maroon.

  Xander took it from her and ran a thumb along the edge. The weave was tight. High-quality fabric. Not field-made. Not military surplus.

  Back in the mine, some of the cultists had worn this same shade.

  Jo eyed the torn edge. "They cleaned this whole place. Took everything. But missed that."

  Xander looked up, gaze drifting toward the ceiling. "Or they didn’t get the chance."

  Blake glanced at the staircase. "You think the golems scared them off?"

  "It’s possible," Xander said. "They moved fast. Didn’t clean their trail. Left two bodies and a console. Something spooked them."

  Jo said nothing, but he saw the shift in her posture. There was an edge of readiness she only carried when the math stopped adding up.

  Xander turned slowly, eyes scanning the walls one last time. Were they alone down here, he thought to himself?

  Xander didn’t speak the thought aloud, but the weight of it settled between his shoulders like a pack too long carried. Everything about the situation just felt wrong, and the math wasn't adding up. It was almost as if someone else knew the punchline already and was waiting to see if everyone would catch on to the joke.

  Ford shifted beside a line of shelving, then crouched low near one of the anchor points along the concrete. "These aren’t just shelving brackets," he said. "You see the bolt patterns? That’s equipment anchor spacing. Same design as the train museum."

  "This place has the same feel. Almost as if someone had stashed things here before the cataclysm for recovery later. It’s the same type of job we saw at the vault. No sign of what was here, but if it is anything similar to what we found, it will be a game-changer."

  Behind them, Blake stood near the far wall, head tilted. "There’s a plaque back here," he said. "Same logo from the door upstairs." He ran a hand across the tarnished brass and read aloud. "Office of National Systems Maintenance."

  Below it, in smaller text, a secondary line had been engraved into the metal. He squinted. "National Continuity Assets."

  The words meant nothing.

  But the way they said nothing felt deliberate. One of those deliberate government redirects to give just enough deniability that anything clandestine was taking place. Secret doomsday bunkers never came with a sign saying break glass in case of world-ending events.

  Xander looked back toward the console one last time. Burnt wires. Rushed sabotage. Whoever came through hadn’t just tried to erase their tracks. They’d tried to get access to secrets they weren't supposed to have. And failed.

  "Alright," he said. "We’ve seen enough. Let’s move. We still have two more scouts to locate."

  The group turned in near silence. Even Zoey didn’t offer a line. No one liked the feeling that they were walking through something designed to be forgotten.

  They climbed the stairs in order, Kane leading, Xander close behind. The faint mechanical hum from earlier was gone now, replaced by the steady creak of bootfalls on metal. Step after step, the hatch above came closer. Light bled in around the frame.

  Kane stopped two rungs short of the top. He didn’t call back, just held up one hand in a fist and stayed still.

  Xander caught up with him and crouched at his shoulder.

  Footsteps. Moving slowly across the barn floor above.

  Kane leaned just far enough back to speak to the group. "Someone’s waiting."

  Xander nodded once, then signaled the others to hold. He reached the top and slid his fingers under the hatch's lip.

  Then he pushed.

  The door creaked open on the hinges, revealing the barn’s interior just as they’d left it.

  Except they weren’t alone.

  A semicircle of figures stood between the exit and the center of the floor. Eight, maybe ten. Each dressed in robes with signs of armor peeking out from underneath. They weren't wearing cobbled and scavenged sets of clothes. Their expressions were still. Cultists.

  No one reached for a weapon.

  One of them stepped forward as the group emerged from the basement. They had nothing marking them as the leader or spokesperson for the group. They simply moved like someone who knew the lines of this conversation before it started.

  "You shouldn't have come here," the cultist said.

  Xander stepped up beside Kane and matched the tone. "We’ve walked in worse places."

  The cultist tilted his head slightly. "I know you. You carry what was taken from the train vault. Hand it over, and you may leave."

  Jo glanced at Xander.

  He didn’t look back.

  Could be Thalindra.

  Could be the admin key and manual.

  Could be something they hadn’t figured out yet.

  He rolled his shoulders slightly as he set the butt of his spear on the floor.

  "You’re going to have to be a lot more specific."