Part 3: Hive Collapse
The Hive had stopped broadcasting.
By 03:26, every internal feed was either static or pulsing red with recursive data.
The lights had dimmed to flickers. Every corridor echoed with mechanical moaning—like the building itself was in pain.
The body count was over sixty.
And still climbing.
Hive Level 2 – Security Subsection Gamma
Corporal Jan Renn and his last four men had barricaded themselves inside a reinforced checkpoint bay—blast door sealed, emergency oxygen cycling. The floor around them was slick with boot tracked blood. The smell was unreal.
They huddled in a half circle, rifles trembling, Eyes staring at the locked door.
None of them had seen Kairo.
But they'd heard it.
The wet tearing. The metal screaming. The gunfire that never ended in return fire.
Then came the silence.
Then the scratching.
Soft at first. Like a rat pawing metal.
Then louder. Dragging. Carving.
Jan lifted his rifle to aim.
And then—
BANG
Something slammed into the blast door.
A body.
A corpse, half skinned, nailed to the door.
The man's own femur had been driven through his jaw like a handle. His eyes had been gouged and replaced with glowing ID chips.
The retinal scanner blinked.
Then beeped.
The door unlocked.
Kairo stepped in.
The guards didn't scream.
They simply froze—as if their brains had short circuited at the sight.
He was streaked with blood—others' and his own. His left shoulder had been torn open by shrapnel and was still regenerating. Blue light pulsed beneath his flesh like a second heartbeat.
He walked forward, slow, deliberate.
Jan raised his weapon and fired.
Three rounds hit Kairo in the face.
The first bounced off bone, the second lodged in his cheek.
The third…
Kairo caught it mid air.
Between his teeth.
He crushed it.
Then he moved.
Jan tried to run.
Kairo tackled him, drove him down, and slammed his head into the wall once—twice—three times until the helmet shattered like an egg, and brain matter leaked down his neck.
The others couldn't believe their eyes, they tried to retreat.
But they were too slow.
Kairo was behind the first before the man even realized.
One hand over his mouth.
The other inside his ribcage.
The man convulsed as Kairo peeled his spine upward like a lever and used it to hurl the body into the third man, crushing both into a corner.
The fourth tried to shoot himself.
Didn't make it.
Kairo hurled a severed forearm into his gun hand, dislocating the wrist.
Then dragged him screaming across the floor and shoved his head into the oxygen vent—until the fan blade started to spin.
The man's body twitched long after the skull was gone.
Kairo stood there, silent, dripping.
His eyes were full of rage but on his face was the most sadistic smile anyone had ever seen.
He was enjoying this.
He'd broken the checkpoint.
But it wasn't enough.
He turned to the wall, stared at the access panel for the panic core.
It blinked.
CLEARANCE REQUIRED: TIER 3 + BIO-CODE
He turned to the floor.
Bent.
And peeled open Jan's torso like a sack.
Inside, beneath the sternum, embedded in the tissue—
A bio-code tag.
Kairo yanked it free.
His hand smoked where it touched—acid defenses. Didn't matter.
He pressed it to the panel.
The door opened.
Hive Core – Stairwell to Panic Vault
Kairo descended through the lower spine of the Hive like a phantom made of heat and vengeance.
The walls trembled.
Blood trailed behind him in splashes and fingerprints.
He walked barefoot down a staircase slick with gore—his own toes blackened from stepping on bone shrapnel.
He passed a corridor where two guards had shot each other by mistake.
Then a maintenance shaft where someone had hung themselves, power cable wound so tight around the throat it had nearly popped the skull off.
He found two more men hiding behind a server panel—sobbing, whispering prayers into bloody palms.
Kairo didn't kill them.
He just stared.
And walked past.
One of them began laughing.
Then bit into his own wrist until blood sprayed the wall like a fountain.
The other followed a moment later—headbutting the corner of the metal wall again and again and again until the skull finally split with a loud crack and his brain slopped out in chunks.
Hive Panic Vault – Outer Seal
The inner vault door was thirty feet tall and six feet thick.
A nameplate had been etched above it once:
"No One Gets In."
Kairo stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
Looked up.
His body was steaming from a dozen wounds. Parts of his chest were still twitching with embedded glass. His arms were flayed from the elbow down, circuitry exposed.
He stepped forward.
And placed his hand on the vault.
The metal hissed.
Began to glow.
Not melt—deform. As if the wall itself was rethinking what it wanted to be.
The door's security AI lit up.
PLEASE STEP BACK. THIS AREA IS SEALED.
ALERTING PANIC ROOM OCCUPANTS.
He said nothing.
The metal groaned under his palm.
Something beneath his skin cracked.
And he whispered:
"This is vengeance."
The vault creaked—
And began to open itself.