Area 12 - The Breach

The bottom of the stairwell was a tomb. The air was stagnant, heavy with the scent of wet stone and the metallic tang of dried blood. Miller reached the heavy blast door first, his gloved hand gripping the recessed handle. He pulled. Nothing. He braced his boot against the frame and heaved. The metal didn't even groan.

"It’s a hard seal, Ma’am," Miller reported, his breath misting in the cold air. "Feels like the locking pins are fused, or it's barred from the other side."

Cresser moved up, his light illuminating the edges of the door. "Maybe they don’t want guests, eh? Or maybe they’re just keeping the 'materials' from wandering off." He spit on the concrete floor, his Black Country accent thick with grim humour "Whatever’s in there, it’s got a right nasty sense of hospitality."

Sheridan knelt, her tactical tablet's blue glow casting sharp shadows across her face as she pulled up the Level 6 schematic. "This is the primary access to the Bio-Genetic Storage and the main server uplink. If we don’t get through this door, we’re stuck in this vertical coffin."

"Captain."

Somers’ voice was a low, urgent whisper. She was leaning close to the door's seam, her tactical light off, using only a handheld thermal scanner. She reached out a gloved hand and touched the steel.

"The welds are still hot," she said, her voice trembling slightly. "This wasn't done hours ago. This was done minutes ago. They knew we were coming down."

The silence that followed was deafening. Every soldier instinctively tightened their grip on their weapons, eyes darting toward the darkness of the stairs above them.

"Clouds, front and centre," Sheridan commanded, her voice cutting through the tension.

Corporal Thomas "Clouds" Blake drifted forward. He was the quietest member of the squad, a man who seemed to move through the world with a ghostly lack of presence—until things needed to be erased from existence. He looked at the heavy door, then at the glowing red seams where the metal had been fused.

"Think you can tickle this open?" Sheridan asked.

Clouds gave her a crooked, almost feral grin. He reached into his demolition kit and pulled out a small, flat binary explosive device. "You betcha, Captain. I'll give it a proper 'unconventional' welcome."

"Stack up! Back up the stairs, three landings!" Sheridan barked.

The squad moved with practiced precision, retreating up the concrete spiral as Clouds worked. He moved with the delicate grace of a watchmaker, tamping the binary charge into the door's weak points. A minute later, he jogged up to join them, his thumb hovering over a wireless detonator.

"Cover your ears," Clouds murmured. "3... 2... 1..."

THOOM.

The detonation didn't just sound; it felt. A massive pressure wave slammed into the squad, shaking the very bedrock of the facility. A choking cloud of pulverized concrete dust and the sickening, burnt-sugar smell of oxidized blood blasted past them. Through the haze, the smell of rotting flesh and fried circuitry flooded the stairwell.

"Move! Inward!" Miller roared.

Miller and Sheridan led the charge back down. The blast door hadn't just been opened; it had been turned into a jagged projectile. The massive slab of steel had been blown off its hinges, taking the concrete frame with it.

On the opposite wall of the storage bay, the door was embedded deep into the masonry. And pinned behind it was a nightmare.

It was a construct, its body a patchwork of grey muscle and industrial staples. Its left arm was a massive, integrated welding rig, the nozzle still glowing a dull, angry orange. It was half-crushed by the door, its legs kicking spasmodically, while a low, electronic screech emitted from a speaker in its neck. Its one remaining organic eye rolled wildly as it tried to pull its mangled frame out from behind the steel.

Frosty stepped forward, his Sig Sauer P226 raised. CRACK. A single 9mm round through the construct's forehead silenced the screech. The welding rig arm twitched one last time and went dark.

"Welcome to Level 6," Frosty muttered, holstering the pistol and swinging his LMG back into his shoulder.

Sheridan stepped over the wreckage, her boots crunching on glass and bone fragments. Ahead of them lay a darkened corridor, the emergency red strobes casting long, rhythmic shadows that looked like grasping fingers.

"Stay sharp," Sheridan whispered, the blue and red highlights in her hair now ghostly under the dust. "We’re in the heart of it now."

The Discovery

The heavy door to BIOGENETIC ANALYSIS hissed open, and the squad was met with a sight that made the slaughter in the corridors above look like a mercy.

The room had been gutted, its scientific instruments tossed aside to make room for a rhythmic, industrialized nightmare. Automated robotic arms, salvaged from the facility's manufacturing wing, moved with a terrifying, jerky precision. They were non-stop—needles the size of rail spikes punched through grey flesh, stitching torsos together with high-tensile wire, while welding torches hissed, fusing titanium plating directly to shattered bone.

"God... they're mass-producing them," Miller whispered, his rifle light shaking as it swept over a row of bodies on conveyor belts.

"Look at the heads," Somers gasped, her voice barely a thread. She pointed her light at a half-finished construct. Dozens of tiny, silver, spider-like robots were scuttling across the exposed cranium, their multi-jointed legs burrowing into the grey matter. They weren't eating; they were wiring—weaving fiber-optic cables into the brain’s motor cortex.

The Reunion

The squad stood frozen, the mechanical whir-click-hiss of the assembly line filling the silence of their shock. Then, from a darkened corner near a server stack, a voice crackled through the room’s intercom—dry, aristocratic, and utterly cold.

"Welcome, Captain. How kind of you to arrive. You have saved me the trouble of bringing your materials here personally."

"Stenn? Or whoever the hell you are! Show yourself!" Sheridan roared, her red and blue hair catching the flicker of a blue welding arc.

A heavy, pneumatic hiss echoed from the shadows. A figure stepped into the light. The squad’s breath caught in a collective, horrified hitch.

It was Hudson.

Or it had been. His tactical vest was still there, but it had been sliced open and bolted back together over a chest cavity reinforced with steel ribs. His face was a mask of pale, bloodless skin, one eye replaced by a red-glowing optical sensor that whirred as it focused. His right arm was gone from the shoulder down, replaced by a gleaming, three-foot-long pneumatic spear.

"Hudson...?" Cresser breathed, his rifle dipping an inch in pure disbelief. "Mate, is that you?"

The Hudson-construct didn't speak. It didn't even blink. With a sound like a steam piston firing, the creature lunged.

The Betrayal of Flesh

"CONTACT! REAR—!" Miller tried to yell, but it was too late.

The Hudson-construct was a blur of mechanical speed. Before Somers could even raise her sidearm, the pneumatic spear arm retracted with a hiss and then fired.

The steel spike punched through Somers’ ballistic plate and out her back in a fraction of a second. The force of the blow lifted the medic off her feet, pinning her against a row of glass specimen jars. The jars shattered, raining formaldehyde and preserved organs over her as she let out a choked, wet gasp.

"SOMERS!" Frosty screamed, his LMG erupting into a deafening roar.

The 7.62mm rounds shredded the Hudson-construct's tactical vest, but the creature simply stood there, absorbing the kinetic energy, the red optical eye glowing brighter as it looked directly at Sheridan.

"Raw... materials..." the construct wheezed, the voice coming from a speaker implanted in its throat. "Integrated."