The Golden Age was bathed in the warm, steady light of the sun, but the deep earth still held terrifying secrets from the dark.
Deep within the western mountain ranges, a natural geological fault line shifted, tearing open a massive fissure in the bedrock. The Warlord's Council arrived within minutes to stabilize the kinetic friction, but Zenith's digital sensors immediately redlined, detecting something impossible hidden beneath the crust.
It was a pre-war bunker.
Twenty years ago, when the cosmic war had ravaged the surface, a massive colony of mortals had fled deep underground. They had sealed the heavy iron doors, trapping themselves in the dark to escape the burning sky. They had survived on subterranean fungi and underground aquifers, entirely cut off from the physical world.
They did not know the war was over. They did not know the Warlord had secured a Golden Age. For two decades, ten thousand mortals had lived in absolute, crushing, generational terror.
