From Moving Crates to Killing Gods-Chapter 84: Eric and Rue

I opened the notebook carefully.

The handwriting was neat. Someone who had been educated.

My name is Eric, Her name was Rue. If you are reading this, I am dead.

I don’t know how much of this will survive, so I’ll write what matters first.

A full section was lost to water damage. I turned past it carefully and found the next readable passage.

...I have had time to think about why. The races of the two western countries had made a pact with something old. They wanted us gone, all of us, the hibrem. They had been working toward it for years while we shared tables with them and called them colleagues...

I read that line twice.

Hibrem.

A word that reminded me of the cube I had and the voice in my dreams. Now it was here, in a dead man’s handwriting, on a page that had survived for quite a while.

I kept reading.

...this facility was built to serve our nation. This facility produced energy for three cities. Rue designed the water purification systems on the lower level. She was proud of that work. She had every right to be. We were happy here.

Another gap. Two pages fused.

...I was in the barrier room performing maintenance on the ward when it happened. The nuclear coupling below the table had come loose during the last tremor and I was reconnecting it. The work took longer than expected.

When I came back up, there was a monster where she was supposed to be.

I knew what I was looking at. We were inside the bunker with no way in from the outside.

I said her name from inside the barrier, but she did not react.

The thing that had once been Rue stood in the center of the room, its shape shifting slowly like thick oil trying to remember how to hold a human form. Where her eyes should have been there were only hollow black pits.

They did not turn toward my voice.

They did not turn toward me at all.

I said her name again. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

Nothing.

For a moment it simply moved through the room without direction, touching the silver walls, the floor, the broken instruments. Each time it brushed against something solid its surface rippled, as if it were trying to understand the shape of the space around it.

Once it passed close to the barrier, close enough that I could have reached out and touched it.

It did not react.

It did not pause.

Whatever senses that creature used to perceive the world, they could not reach me through the ward.

The woman I loved was standing less than a meter away, and there was nothing left of her in that thing.

I stopped reading for a moment.

Phinyx had drifted close and was reading over my shoulder without making a sound.

I turned the page.

...I have been inside the barrier for eleven days. The ward holds. She cannot reach me. From here I can see her moving through the room, and she moves like something searching, never finding. I think she cannot feel me at all through the barrier.

On the fourth day I made the mistake of stepping outside to check if I could maybe escape the bunker. She attacked without hesitation. No recognition. No pause.

I went back inside and I have not left since.

Several lines were unreadable here, the ink faded to nothing.

...she has the Acolyte rank. Even now that she became a monster.

I cannot open the containment door with her inside, she could escape and harm other people... if there were any left.

Also I’m not willing to end her life, I have tried to form that intention and I cannot. So here I am.

The nuclear coupling is now disconnected below the table. The ward will run on its remaining charge until it does not. That’s enough for me.

I have decided I will die by my ability when I am ready. I would rather die this way than with corruption in my soul.

Whoever finds this... though I don’t expect anyone will, since most of us are gone and this bunker can only be opened from the inside, if you connect the nuclear coupling back, the ward and water system will start working again. It was meant to supply three cities, but by the time you find this, the infrastructure might not work the same.

The hatch is under the table.

I closed the notebook and did not say anything for a moment.

Coco had come close to read the last few pages. His usual lightness was gone. He just looked at the skeleton beside the table with an expression I hadn’t seen on him before.

"He stayed..." Coco said quietly.

Neither of us said anything after that.

I crouched and looked at the base of the runic table. The grooves I had noticed earlier formed a perfect rectangle in the floor, almost invisible.

A hatch.

Below it, according to Eric’s notes, was the nuclear coupling that he had disconnected the day Rue became something he didn’t recognize.

I picked up the second notebook.

This one was different. No personal writing. Just dense, structured text with diagrams filling every margin. A manual. Page after page of coupling diagrams and connection sequences, with runic annotations marking each step.

The diagrams were universal. Numbered components. Arrows. Step by step sequences marked with symbols I could cross reference from the illustrations.

I could follow this... maybe.

I studied the diagrams in silence, turning pages slowly, building the sequence in my head.

The ward above the table was dark and inert, but if the coupling below was reconnected, it would power it again.

I looked and moved to the edge of the hatch, them started pressing my fingers into the groove.

It gave with a low, resonant click.

The hatch swung open, and from the darkness below came a smell of old silver and dry stone, also the faint residual warmth of something that had been running for a very long time before it finally stopped. Like opening an oven that hadn’t been used in years. A very large, very nuclear oven.

And beneath that, barely audible, the distant hum of something that hadn’t stopped entirely.