They fell.
Not a slip, not a stumble—one second Raku was on solid ground, hanging onto Osio's ropes, and the next the whole floor dropped out from under them like the world glitched and forgot to load.
The white room, the scientist, the screaming alarms—gone.
Just wind.
And darkness.
And Osio tied to a chair.
"RAKUUUUUU!" Osio somehow managed to yell, even with tape over his mouth. It came out as variations of "MMRRGH" but the panic translated fine.
Raku's stomach tried to crawl up through his throat. Air tore past his ears, loud enough to drown out his own thoughts.
The broken platform spun away above them, shrinking fast into a jagged, falling shadow. Pieces of concrete and metal tumbled alongside them like it was raining building parts.
"Hold still!" Raku shouted, which was a stupid thing to yell at someone who was currently plummeting in a chair, but his brain had officially resigned.
He tightened his grip on the ropes around Osio's torso. The chair flipped; now Osio was above him, Raku dangling underneath, their bodies joined by knots and bad decisions.
The darkness rushing up to meet them didn't look like any kind of "bottom." It looked like someone had taken the idea of "down" and stretched it until it started to tear.
"How far is this?!" Raku choked.
Osio responded with "MMMPH MPH MPH!!" which Raku generously translated as: Too far, bro.
Bits of the facility whistled past—sections of wall, a piece of railing, what might have been part of a light fixture. One of the guards tumbled by in the distance, arms flailing, swallowed quickly by black.
Raku glanced at his forearm.
The metal ring there was digging into his skin, edges biting with every spin.
As they dropped through the glowing mist, something clicked.
The band loosened, split at one side, and slid free.
Raku watched it tumble away into the dark below.
"Yeah," he muttered. "Abandon ship. I get it."
The wind got colder.
The air grew thicker, heavier, tasting less like building dust and more like old stone and something metallic.
Time stretched.
They weren't just falling through a hole in one lab room. They were falling through… layers. Through everything beneath the facility, everything beneath the city, maybe beneath the continent. Raku's brain tried to do the math and politely crashed.
Osio wiggled, making the chair spin.
"STOP MOVING!" Raku yelled.
Osio froze as best he could, chair still slowly rotating. For a moment, Raku had a dizzy view of everything at once: the receding glimmer of the broken lab above, the walls of the shaft around them, and the darkness below, deep and strange.
The walls weren't smooth.
They were carved with old supports, pipes, bits of collapsed structures—like levels of construction, abandoned and built over and abandoned again. In some places, the rock looked melted. In others, it was chewed away, rough and jagged.
"This was an ocean once," Raku thought wildly. "People built on top of it. Then it vanished, and they just kept building around the absence."
The thought didn't help.
His eyes watered from the rush of air. His fingers, locked around the ropes, started to tingle.
"If we hit the bottom like this, we die," he thought. "Neck break. Spine. Game over. Mom never even knows what happened."
His chest clenched.
He wanted to scream, but the wind ripped the sound from his mouth before it went anywhere.
Something flickered below.
Not light—at least not normal light. More like a smear of color, far down, glowing faintly through the darkness.
It grew.
"Do you see that?" Raku shouted.
Osio made a noise that sounded like, How would I miss it?!
The glow spread out beneath them, a hazy sheet that seemed to stretch sideways more than up—a false horizon, pale and shifting. For a horrible second, Raku thought it was fire.
Then they hit it.
It wasn't solid.
It wasn't air.
They crashed through a layer of thick, luminous mist that clung to their skin like warm, wet cloth. The ring on Raku's arm burned against his skin, lights going white-hot for one blinding instant.
Everything slowed.
The screaming plunge became a heavy, syrupy fall, like gravity had been turned down to "almost responsible." Raku's stomach floated instead of trying to escape. His fingers finally felt like they belonged to him again.
They burst out of the mist.
Below them wasn't rock.
It was green.
They fell toward a forest that had no right to exist this far under the world.
Trees—if they were trees—rose in tangled clusters, their trunks dark and smooth. Their leaves weren't green but glowing: blues, soft purples, neon greens, all lighting up the air like a field of hanging lanterns.
Between the branches, strands of water hung in the air, flowing sideways, not down. Tiny rivers suspended in nothing, curling through the glowing canopy.
"What," Raku said, because his brain had given up forming full questions.
The chair tilted again. The slowed fall turned back into regular falling.
"Oh, come on," he groaned.
They crashed through a layer of glowing branches. Leaves exploded around them in a spray of bioluminescent dust. Something big and rubbery slapped his shoulder on the way down—a giant leaf, soft but not soft enough.
Raku lost his grip.
Osio and the chair bounced off another branch and tumbled away.
Raku pinwheeled through light and leaves and air that smelled like damp earth and something sharp and sweet, like citrus left in a cave for too long.
He hit something.
Not the ground.
Water.
Cold slammed around him, knocking the last of the air from his lungs. For one blind, thrashing moment, he was under—no up, no down, just bubbles and panic.
He fought his way toward where the light was brightest.
His head broke the surface.
He gasped, coughing, blinking glowing droplets out of his eyes.
He was in a pond.
The water glowed faintly from below, lit by stones embedded in the bottom like lazy stars. Bioluminescent plants grew around the edges, their fronds pulsing softly with light each time he disturbed the surface.
He dragged himself to the shore and collapsed on his back, panting.
His entire body hurt. Some parts hurt in new, creative ways he'd never experienced before. His mouth tasted like old minerals and neon.
Above him, the false sky spread out: a high, dark ceiling far overhead, veins of light running through the rock like constellations. The mist layer he'd crashed through earlier formed a hazy "cloud" band higher up, glowing faintly.
Osio hit the ground nearby with a crunch, chair and all, rolling in a messy tangle of limbs and metal.
He lay there for a second.
Then he groaned.
Raku rolled onto his side. "You alive?"
Osio lifted his head.
His hair was full of glowing leaves. One stuck directly to his cheek. The tape over his mouth was half peeled off.
He spat it the rest of the way out.
"I'm gonna be honest," Osio croaked. "Zero out of ten. Worst ride ever. Never letting you pick the field trip again."
Relief hit Raku so hard it was almost painful. He barked out a laugh that sounded too high, too shaky.
"You're welcome," he said.
Osio tried to stand and immediately toppled over because he was still tied to the chair.
He lay on his side, staring at the glowing forest.
"Where… are we?" he asked.
Raku looked around.
Glowing trees. Suspended streams of water. Mist above like fake clouds. No sun, no moon, just ambient light coming from plants, stones, and those strange veins in the ceiling.
"Underground," Raku said.
"No kidding," Osio said. "Thanks, stupido. I mean, what level of hell is this?"
Raku sat up slowly.
Around them, the forest never really went quiet—leaves whispering against each other, water dripping somewhere out of sight, and a low vibration in the ground, like a sleeping engine under everything..
It didn't feel dead like the basin above.
It felt alive.
Wrong, impossible, but alive.
Raku swallowed.
"This was the Hole," he thought. "All the warnings, all the history lessons… and nobody mentioned trees."
Osio twisted around, ropes creaking.
"If this is the afterlife," he said, "I have complaints."
"You always have complaints," Raku said.
"Yeah, well, I died in a chair, man. That's not how I imagined going."
Raku's mouth twitched.
"You didn't die," he said. "Yet."
"Comforting," Osio muttered.
He kicked his feet uselessly. "Help?"
Raku pushed himself to his feet. His knees shook, but they held. He staggered over and started working on the knots around Osio's chest.
His fingers trembled.
Partly from the fall.
Partly from the fact that when he closed his eyes, he could still feel the sensation of the world breaking open beneath him.
"Raku," Osio said quietly.
"Yeah?"
"We're really under it, aren't we?" Osio's voice lost its usual bounce for a second. "Like… under the Hole. Under everything."
Raku glanced up at the ceiling again.
At the glowing veins.
At the hanging rivers.
"At least two floors under reality," he said.
Osio huffed a tiny, nervous laugh. "If my dad sees this on the news, he's gonna kill me for going missing."
"If he sees this on the news," Raku said, "I'm suing the Hole for invasion of privacy."
"There it is," Osio said. "There's my boy."
The last knot came loose.
Osio wiggled free of the ropes and kicked the chair away. It slid a little, then tipped over and lay still, looking very offended.
They stood there, dripping, breathing, staring at a forest that had no right being where it was.
For a brief moment, nothing tried to kill them.
Raku almost relaxed.
A soft, metallic whirring broke the quiet.
He frowned and turned.
From between two glowing trees, something drifted into view.
A drone.
Old, scratched, one side dented. The kind used for inspections and news footage topside. Its camera lens blinked faintly as it hovered, aiming directly at them.
Osio squinted at it.
"Is that… ours?" he asked. "Like, did we unlock the 'documentary mode' ending?"
Raku stared back at the lens.
He couldn't tell if it was live.
He couldn't tell if anyone was watching.
He just knew one thing: the last time he'd seen that model, it had been in safety videos about staying away from the Hole.
The drone hummed, adjusting its height, tracking them.
Osio waved at it weakly.
"If you're recording this," he said, voice hoarse, "I want royalties."
The drone did not respond.
Far above, beyond layers of rock and mist and history, an old network node flickered on.
Connection: searching.