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The lights snapped on. Screams still echoed from the floors above, but the golem had already shouldered its way to the front of the formation.
One massive foot lashed out and smashed the rotten door off its hinges. The impact kicked up a choking cloud of dust and splinters.
Ronin slipped a gas mask over his face without a word.
No one needed orders. The golem stepped through the ruined doorway into the corridor, and the mercenaries fell in behind it, rifles ready.
Tactical flashlights cut through the swirling dust, revealing cracked concrete walls and sagging ceiling tiles. Nothing moved. The golem took point and headed straight for the stairwell.
They had barely gone ten steps when a wet, chittering hiss rose from below, followed by the rapid scrape of claws on concrete. Something down there had heard them coming.
"Combat ready," Muir said, twin pistols already in his hands.
Vanessa's figure blurred and vanished. This time Ronin caught the motion clearly—she sank straight into Maschur's shadow like a swimmer disappearing beneath dark water. Maschur himself dropped back to the rear of the group, shielding her position.
Ronin stayed at Muir's side, En spread wide. Life signatures were pouring up the stairwell, moving fast. The shapes felt wrong—too many limbs, too fluid. They reminded him of the xenomorphs from old movies he had seen before crossing into this world.
Gunfire erupted the instant the first creature burst through the stairwell door.
It looked like a streamlined, predatory hybrid—more velociraptor than alien, but just as vicious. The golem's right arm unfolded into a massive Gatling gun. The barrels spun up with a rising whine, then vomited a solid torrent of lead.
Monsters poured out in a wave. None of them made it more than three steps before the bullet storm ripped them apart, spraying ichor and shattered chitin across the walls.
Three minutes of sustained fire.
When the last echoes faded, the stairwell was gone—chewed open into a ragged hole that looked out over the black abyss between buildings. Cold wind howled in through the breach. Farther out, the silhouettes of other massive structures loomed in the darkness.
The gunner riding the golem's left shoulder jumped down. Another armed Nen user immediately climbed into the vacated spot. The man who had dismounted took up a submachine gun and rejoined the formation on foot.
Ronin noticed the three men who had rotated off the golem forming a tight protective ring around the fourth. That man was already digging into his pack, pulling out strange, glowing rations that still pulsed with faint life energy—clearly an Emitter's work meant to speed recovery.
The new gunner on the golem's back manifested a heavy war hammer. The construct's right hand closed around the weapon while its left reached back and unslung a slab of a shield large enough to cover a small car.
With a grinding of gears and stone, the golem began descending the ruined stairs, crushing monster corpses beneath its feet. Ronin and the others followed close.
The screams from outside had stopped. Through the shattered wall Ronin glimpsed dozens of pale, silken cocoons clinging to the cavern ceiling far above. Some of them were almost certainly explorers who had entered the ruins ahead of them.
He looked away. No one here had time for rescues.
The gas mask kept the worst of the stench at bay. His En picked up nothing new, but the floor was badly fractured—another wrong step and someone could plunge straight through.
A few minutes later the team halted again.
More footsteps. More hissing. This time the golem didn't open up with the Gatling. It worked with the rest of the squad, hammer and shield smashing anything that lunged out of the darkness while the riflemen picked off the rest.
Ronin and Muir joined the fight without hesitation, moving in smooth coordination with the mercenaries.
Wave after wave. When the last monster finally stopped twitching, they had reached the ground floor.
They stepped out into what had once been a street.
Broken pavement stretched in both directions. Rusted, overturned rail cars lay scattered like the bones of some colossal beast. The buildings on either side towered into the darkness, their facades cracked and lightless.
Ronin stared. Ever since they had entered this section of the ruins, questions had been piling up in the back of his mind.
According to every record, the Mahavi Ruins were more than two thousand years old. Had this world already possessed high-rises and magnetic rail systems two millennia ago?
"Surprised?" Muir asked, a dry chuckle in his voice. "First time I saw this place I felt the same way. But the reason these ruins look like this ties into something most people never learn in their entire lives."
Ronin already had a suspicion forming.
"This world is bigger than you think," Muir continued, stopping to face him. "What we live on is just one small island in a vast lake. Beyond it lies a true continent—the place we now call the Dark Continent. That's where humanity originally came from."
He met Ronin's eyes directly. "Not every ruin reveals this much of the past. After V5 formed, they classified sites like Mahavi. Anything that might prove the Dark Continent exists is now considered completely off-limits."
Ronin nodded slowly.
Something still felt off. The Mahavi Ruins hadn't shown any direct link to the Dark Continent—yet Muir was deliberately drawing that connection. If the man didn't have another reason for sharing this, Ronin would eat his own mask.
"if we keep finding advanced technology in these ruins," Ronin said, "why hasn't modern society advanced at the same pace?"
Muir gave him an approving look. "Because every high-tech site we've uncovered is missing the one thing that actually made that technology possible—energy."
The squad had paused on the ground floor to rest and reload. Outside, the streets waited, and no one knew what fresh horrors might be prowling between the buildings.
The break gave Muir time to keep talking.
"Everything from that era ran on power sources that came straight from the Dark Continent," he said, pointing at the overturned rail car. "That train doesn't have batteries. It doesn't burn fuel. It ran on a special stone."
Ronin's mind flashed to the name.
A peculiar ore that generated electricity simply by being submerged in water. Strings of bead-sized stones could output roughly twenty thousand kilowatt-hours per day—enough to power an average household for ten years.
The unmanned stone.
Muir watched him closely, clearly waiting to see how much Ronin already knew… or how much he was willing to admit.