"Run, Naya! Don't look back!" Zulfa shouted at the top of his lungs.

Without wasting a fraction of a second, Zulfa grabbed Naya by the wrist and yanked her around, forcing her away from the fracturing concrete wall. Behind them, a chorus of sharp hisses and the scraping screech of thrashing claws tore through the silence of the corridor. Dozens of red pinprick lights flared from behind the vent cracks, racing to crawl out with terrifying speed. The air around the corridor plunged to a freezing chill, turning their panicked breaths into plumes of white vapor under the flickering, dying glow of the emergency lights.

Naya coughed violently, choking on the toxic fumes venting from the wall fissures. Her heavy field boots felt like lead, but Zulfa’s iron grip on her wrist provided the momentum that kept her moving at a full sprint.

"Zul! Where are we running?!" Naya screamed over the roar of her own hyperventilating breath. "This corridor dead-ends at the south sector! There's no way out except back to the archives!"

"We are not going back there!" Zulfa yelled back firmly, sweeping his dying flashlight beam toward the left side of the corridor. "Remember that colonial structural map you brought? Up ahead at the bend, there's a maintenance access route leading to the old underground MRT line shut down twenty years ago!"

"The old MRT tunnel?! Are you insane?!" Naya's eyes widened in sheer disbelief. "That line was sealed off because of a string of mysterious accidents and structural collapses! It's completely unstable!"

"I'd rather die crushed under a pile of rubble than served as a light snack for a pack of multi-eyed shadow freaks!" Zulfa snapped fiercely.

They took a hard left around the corridor bend. Looming before them was a heavy, rust-caked iron door secured by a thick chain and an aging padlock, bearing a faded warning sign: RESTRICTED ZONE - RED LINE MRT PROJECT (PERMANENTLY CLOSED 2006).

Without missing a beat, Zulfa released Naya's hand and pulled the heavy iron wrench from his utility belt. Pouring the last of his remaining strength into the effort, he jammed the tapered end of the wrench between the links of the rust-eaten iron chain to act as a lever.

"Naya! Help me brace the bottom of the wrench!" Zulfa ordered, the muscles in his arms and neck straining against the dead weight.

Naya lunged forward instantly, throwing her entire body weight and both hands onto the lever alongside Zulfa. "One... two... three!" Naya screamed.

Clang! Snap!

The ancient iron chain shattered into pieces with a loud metallic ring that pierced the underground stillness. Zulfa slammed his boot hard against the iron door, throwing it wide open to reveal a pitch-black, damp railway tunnel thick with undisturbed dust.

The two of them scrambled inside. Zulfa immediately grabbed the heavy door, pulling it shut and wedging a spare steel bar through the interior brackets to barricade the path against whatever was chasing them as tightly as possible.

Bangk!

Bangk! Bangk!

Violent impacts hammered against the outer face of the iron door. Razor-sharp claws slashed furiously at the metal plating, accompanied by a high-pitched, screeching shriek that made their eardrums throb.

"Quick, this way! Get onto the tracks!" Zulfa urged, grabbing Naya's arm to pull her away from the barrier.

The atmosphere inside the abandoned MRT tunnel was far more oppressive than Naya could have imagined. Zulfa’s dying flashlight beam could only pierce a few meters ahead, casting eerie shadows across reddish-brown rusted steel rails draped in massive, dusty cobwebs.

They raced along the track bed, their lungs burning as they fought for oxygen in the thin, particulate-laden air.

"Zul... look at the wall on the left!" Naya suddenly cried out hysterically, gripping Zulfa’s sleeve and pointing toward the tunnel wall.

Zulfa snapped the remaining beam of his flashlight toward where she pointed. Instantly, his stride locked up, and the blood in his veins ran cold.

Running the entire length of the tunnel wall were thick fiber-optic cables that he had initially mistaken for mundane utility lines—now writhing and twisting like the organic veins of a living beast. The cable fibers pulsed rapidly, glowing with a rhythmic red electronic heartbeat, emitting an eerie, buzzing hiss akin to a nest of angry vipers.

"Good god..." Naya whispered in a voice trembling with terror, pressing both hands over her mouth. "Those cables... those cables are draining something straight from aboveground."

Zulfa narrowed his eyes. At several points along the wall, the fiber-optic strands punctured small, branching conduits leading up toward the surface streets above the city. Inside those transparent vents, digital wave pulses—text messages, internet data streams, and cellular calls belonging to citizens going about their day up top—were being forcibly yanked downward, sucked into the optical veins like prey constricted by a python.

"They aren't just stealing Ley-Line energy from the underground substations," Zulfa said with an icy edge, his jaw clenched tight with rage. "They're using the citizens' own mobile telecommunication networks up there as supplementary fuel to rip the dimensional tear wider."

"This is monstrous, Zul," Naya whispered in panic, staring blankly ahead. "This city... this city is being farmed for living energy."

Suddenly, a massive, deafening rumble roared from the deep darkness of the tunnel ahead.

Crash!

BOOM!

The screech of scraping metal at breakneck speed echoed sharply, barreling toward them with terrifying velocity. This was followed by a blinding flash of bright white headlight glare sweeping around the rail curve up ahead.

"Look out! Train!" Naya shrieked in absolute panic.

Without a second to think, Zulfa threw himself at Naya, tackling them both into a shallow drainage trench beside the rails a split second before an ancient, rusted MRT train car roared past without the clatter of a conventional engine—illuminated only by spitting blue electrical arcs leaping from its roof pantograph to the overhead lines.

The ghost train rocketed past them, filled with the blurred silhouettes of faceless passengers sitting rigidly behind grime-coated windows, before vanishing into the pitch-black southern depths of the tunnel.

Zulfa and Naya picked themselves up slowly from the trench, coughing through the thick cloud of stirred-up dust left in the wake of the phantom transit.

"Are you... are you alright, Naya?" Zulfa asked urgently, checking the girl's arms and legs for injuries.

"I'm... I'm fine, just a little filthy," Naya answered breathlessly, adjusting her crooked glasses. "But... but we can't keep running blindly like this. This tunnel goes on forever, and it feels like we're being herded somewhere."

"You're right," Zulfa said, steadying himself and flicking his dying flashlight back on. "Let's follow the rail line. There has to be an emergency maintenance station at the end—"

Clack! Clack! Clack!

Zulfa's footsteps stopped dead. A heavy, mechanical grinding sound echoed directly in front of them.

Zulfa swept his flashlight high, milking the final drops of battery power to illuminate the end of the tunnel ahead. The dim beam revealed a brutal reality that made their stomachs drop: the tracks terminated abruptly at a solid, three-meter-thick concrete dead-end wall. They were trapped.

"Damn it... it's a dead end!" Zulfa cursed, spinning around to look for an alternate escape route with Naya.

However, before they could take a single step back, a sharp, echoing hiss erupted from the rear.

At the far end of the tracks where they had just entered, dozens of glowing red pinpricks flickered fiercely in the dark. And that wasn't even the worst of it.

From piles of scrap iron, wrecked train chassis, and tangled fiber-optic nests scattered across the tracks, the metallic debris suddenly began to melt and fuse together, morphing into the silhouette of a gigantic shadow beast shaped like a hunting hound, its body embedded with blazing optical-cable veins (a mid-tier Rust-Eaters variant). The creature let out a low, guttural growl, baring jagged teeth fashioned from serrated scrap metal as it locked its multi-eyed gaze on Zulfa and Naya, leaving them with nowhere left to run.