The guards' orders were clear. The crew of the Tartarusios obeyed them in silence as they were led forward, their boots clanking against cold metal and the echoes of their footsteps swallowed by the endless dark ahead. For the first time they saw the true face of the Labyrinth — a hollow world where even sound seemed afraid to travel, where the air was damp and metallic, and where faint, chilling echoes drifted up from somewhere deep inside that might have been voices or might only have been the structure groaning in its ancient sleep.
A shape came toward them out of the mist: a heavyset man in a faded blue uniform that barely fit him, his face pale from years under artificial light, holding a flickering tablet in one hand, with six armored guards standing silently behind him. He squinted at the crew through the gloom and raised his voice.
"Welcome to the Labyrinth," he announced, in a tone that was heavy and cruelly casual. "Probably the last place you'll ever see, so listen carefully. Each of you will be given a uniform and a claw tool. You'll need that tool if you want to survive down there, so hold on to it. In this place there are no limits to where you can or can't go. It's vast. You'll see for yourselves soon enough." The grin faded from his face. "There's only one rule. You don't climb up. If you do, you'll be shot on sight. No warning. No mercy."
He glanced down at his tablet and then back at them with a tired smirk. "One last thing. We don't serve food in there. Once a week we drop a package on the third level. It isn't much, but it's all you'll get. Things tend to get… expensive down there." He took a slow step back, and his voice dropped as though he were repeating a prayer he had said far too many times. "So may God have mercy on your souls."
The words hung in the air like the toll of a funeral bell, and the crew exchanged uneasy glances as the truth sank in. They were not prisoners in any ordinary sense. They were offerings to something deeper.
When they had been given their rough gray uniforms and their crude claw tools, the colossal gates began to close behind them with a deafening roar of iron grinding against stone, sealing them off from everything they had ever known.
Oscar turned to his crew, firm but uneasy. "Head count."
They gathered close with their torches flickering in the stale air, and one by one the names were called — but some of them went unanswered.
"Youri," Oscar said, looking around. "Where's Youri?"
Nolan frowned. "I don't know, Boss. I don't think they even took him off the ship with us."
A second count confirmed it. Ten more were missing too — the kitchen staff, and Tom with two of the other pilots. They must have hidden in the Orbiton cockpits or down on the emergency deck before the Baraken soldiers searched the ship. Whether it was luck or cleverness, they were beyond anyone's reach now.
Oscar clenched his jaw. "We move," he said quietly. "We have enough to worry about."
The road to the first level began just ahead of them, and as they stepped onto it, the last traces of the outside world disappeared. There was no wind and no hum of engines, only the rhythm of their own footsteps and the distant pulse of the earth. The path sloped downward, carved from jagged black stone that glimmered faintly in the torchlight. It was not so much a tunnel as a canyon trapped inside the planet, narrow and steep, its walls bristling with metal spikes that glowed a faint blue. Some of them crackled with static; others dripped a strange liquid that steamed where it hit the ground.
Bjorn brushed a hand along the wall, and the stone vibrated under his palm. He pulled his hand back with wide eyes. "It's alive," he whispered.
They pressed on. The air thickened into a violet haze that swirled with every movement, and the ground trembled beneath them — not from their own steps, but from something massive breathing far below, as though the Labyrinth had lungs of its own. "Stay close," Oscar murmured. "No one wanders off."
The road twisted like a serpent, dipping into darkness and rising again into patches of dull light. The iron spikes along its walls seemed arranged with purpose, forming cryptic patterns that looked almost like writing. At one point the walls closed in around them until the air turned hot and stale. Then the stone suddenly released them and seemed to sigh open again. They came to a bridge of fractured black slabs suspended over a bottomless pit, and from somewhere far below came faint whispers that sounded human.
"The others," Nolan muttered. "The ones who came before us."
They crossed it in silence, and then the world opened up in front of them.
The sight froze them where they stood. A colossal cavern stretched out ahead, so vast that its ceiling was lost in a haze of smoke and shadow. Jagged bridges crossed the chasm like veins between rusted platforms that hung from ancient chains. Rivers of molten ore cut through the stone and cast a pulsing orange glow across the walls like the heartbeat of a dying world. And everywhere, people were working — hundreds of them, then thousands. Some hacked at the rock with their claw tools, their strikes echoing like the ticking of a clock, while others hauled glowing stones in crude carts, their bodies skeletal and scarred, their faces gray with exhaustion and their eyes as sharp as blades. The air burned to breathe. The smell of sweat, oil and dust was suffocating.
"This isn't a prison," Bjorn said quietly. "It's a city."
He was right. The longer they looked, the more it resembled one — a twisted underground civilization with walls built from old ship parts and pipes welded into towers, whole shanties stacked on top of each other beneath faint lights strung on cables that flickered through a fog that smelled of rust and ozone. Amid all of it, people were trading. Figures wrapped in rags huddled around makeshift fires bartering glowing minerals for food, tools and vials of strange liquid. Crystals, shards and metal dust had become the currency of the damned.
Oscar watched an inmate hand over a fistful of red stones in exchange for a rusted blade. "Even down here," he muttered, "they built a system."
"Survival always has a price," Mahin said.
Whispers followed them as they walked. The inmates watched the newcomers in silence, curious but careful, because newcomers were always noticed, and few of them lasted long.
Then a figure came toward them out of the haze — old and bent, wrapped in a torn cloak that dragged along the ground, with a long gray beard and pale blue eyes that were piercing even through the smoke. He stopped in front of Mahin and stared at him for a long moment, trembling.
"You," the old man rasped. "You're the hero, aren't you?"
Mahin froze, unsure how to answer, and the old man let out a wild, rasping laugh that echoed off the metal walls. "So they sent you down to the pits of hell too. To think they'd sink this low — sending their own savior to rot with the rest of us."
Mahin stepped closer. "Old man, why are you down here? What did you do?"
The laughter grew louder and cracked into something close to madness. The old man's eyes glistened in the orange light. "What did I do?" he shouted. "I gave life to my only son!"
His laughter turned hollow, a sound that did not belong to a sane mind, and around them the other prisoners turned away, unwilling to hear any more. Somewhere in the distance, the Labyrinth's bells began to toll, deep, metallic, slow, marking the end of another day beneath the surface.
And so began the Tartarusios crew's first night in the Labyrinth, a place where time, mercy and hope had died a long time