Shelter 100, Level B40.

The squad led by Darkest finally forced their way through the mountain of debris and excretions, reaching the dust-free warehouse where the black boxes were stored.

Seeing the mission coordinates now so close on the map, everyone let out a brief sigh of relief.

That 200 meter stretch had felt longer than a kilometer, especially with those bugs leaping out of the shadows now and then, hammering their sanity value lower by the minute.

“I’m opening it.” Pressed against the wall beside the warehouse door, Darkest signaled to the teammate on the other side, then slammed a fist into the mechanical button to manually open the sliding hatch.

With a hiss of venting air, a dry current blasted outward, blowing the dust from the door’s seams.

Gun barrels thrust inside, flashlight beams sweeping every dark corner of the room. Confirming no threats, Darkest found himself surprised.

He expected heavy defenses and had braced for a brutal fight. The reality was the exact opposite.

Bell, clinging to the spider robot behind them, ridiculed him instantly. “Positive-pressure seal is standard in clean rooms. The moment you felt air blow out, you should’ve known, no filth could have gotten in here.”

It scuttled inside, extending a leg to flip a switch on the wall. White light flooded the room.

Awkwardly, Darkest switched off his tac-light and lowered his rifle.

Weird...

Where had that unease gnawing at him come from?

But the feeling was quickly replaced by excitement.

Near the freight lift, row upon row of square black boxes stood in the vast warehouse.

Seeing them, the players behind him instantly lit up, voices bursting with delight.

“Holy shit! One, two, three... 29?!”

“Awesome!”

Though black boxes couldn’t be owned privately, each recovery benefited the entire server.

Every new device they unlocked became available for silver coin purchase, and existing items got cheaper or easier to buy.

And beyond the collective gain, each player also received generous silver coin and contribution point rewards.

Now the only question was... how many were still functional.

At its peak, Shelter 100 had housed over 80,000 people, consuming resources like a full-sized settlement.

Clean environments and trained operators prolonged lifespans of black boxes, but nothing lasted forever.

Darkest prayed these treasures of the old world hadn’t been completely ruined by the residents.

Otherwise, there’d be nothing left to ruin!

Leaving five teammates at the door, he entered with four others, using the VM translator to confirm the boxes’ functions.

Not that translation was even necessary.

Black boxes had been designed for illiterates. Even gorillas could follow the pictograms stamped on them.

After a thorough check, of 29 boxes, 22 still worked.

And the failures were trivial items. Light panels, vent filters, everything was cheap and replaceable. The real big-ticket boxes had survived.

The biggest finds? No doubt the boxes that produced Type 5 Light Cavalry and Type 6 Heavy Cavalry exoskeletons!

Police gear that looked sharp, performed well, and, though unsuited for heavy battle, were good enough with a steel plate welded to the chest!

Because of these strengths, both sets had always been rare, only trickling out with version updates.

So far, only the Enlightenment Society had fielded them en masse.

Darkest remembered how, back in the Great Desert, when the New Alliance captured 200 Type 5 Light Cavalry exoskeletons, the administrator had been overjoyed.

Bringing these two black boxes back would skyrocket their favorability!

No one could say his future was as dark as his name any longer!

But the real gems weren’t the boxes that produced exoskeletons.

Closest to the freight lift stood two monsters. One produced a 50 ton thrust plasma engine, the other an aviation-grade metallic hydrogen battery holding 10 tons of fuel!

Grasping their functions at last, Darkest muttered with glee. “Good lord! Brother Mosquito’s little ass is gonna have its mind blown!”

The New Alliance had salvaged technology from the wreck of an Orca, but still hadn’t digested it.

Even with engineers from Bounder Town onboard, the gap in technology was daunting.

With Boulder Town’s conditions, their plasma engines topped out at 5 tons thrust. At best, they were at the level of a helicopter.

To lift a 100 ton Orca? They would need 20 connected in series!

But now, with these two boxes and the example of an Orca, the New Alliance could cobble together a true large plasma aircraft!

No exaggeration, since Shelter 79, Shelter 100 was the richest single grave the New Alliance had ever robbed from the old world!

“These two haven’t even been used. Who needs such power inside a shelter? Not enough surplus materials anyway. My master once imagined future folk would unearth them and collect them as antiques. But it seems... You weren’t joking. You really don’t have 100 colonies, you haven’t even left the atmosphere.”

Bell mocked, watching Darkest’s wide-eyed awe.

But Darkest only chuckled, firing back. “And you? You never even left the house.”

Bell giggled metallically. “That’s not so certain.”

Its strange smile made Darkest wary. “What do you mean?”

Unbothered, Bell continued, “You said you saw Crunchies outside, right? What you call Ghostface Bugs. That means they did succeed after all. Ha! No wonder my master admired them so.”

Bell’s mood seemed almost cheerful, if an AI had moods.

Darkest blinked. “Succeeded... what do you mean?”

“Exactly that,” Bell laughed. “Though they never opened the shelter’s main gate but they still escaped this prison. A pity my master’s dead. Or else, he would be laughing too.”

They never opened the gate.

But escaped?

Darkest stared in confusion at the AI’s grinding chuckle.

Did the shelter have another exit?

“Is that even possible?”

“Why ask that?” Bell cackled. “They lived here for 50 years! Most were born here! They knew every bulb, every screw. Any literate one could recite the rules by heart. Finding a loophole was easier than breathing.”

Darkest fell silent.

He had thought shelter defenses were absolute, but defense and sabotage were always relative. Nothing was unbreakable.

Even walls hardened against nukes could be pierced with a chisel in a million years. And they had something sharper than chisels. They had knowledge.

The realization chilled him. His throat bobbed, his hand holding his rifle trembled slightly..

“You mean... The bugs, ”

“If a window’s too small, cut off your arm. If that’s not enough, send just your head. Ventilation system? That’s a clever trick.” Bell clicked its tongue. Its voice, moments ago light, now carried a faint loneliness.

Or regret.

Hearing its monologue, Darkest finally understood why it had dodged his earlier question about where the residents had gone.

It was to escape the cage.

They armed the Ghostface Bugs, become Crunchies themselves, and gnawed a fissure in the vent system just wide enough to slip through.

They had broken out years ago.

The bugs outside were proof.

Whether they were still human, or how much soul they carried, was another matter.

Certainly, none of the ones he’d seen looked like nuclear engineers or biologists.

He thought of the honeycomb tower of molted shells in the atrium. The words caught in his throat.

“So... in the past conflict, the residents won?”

“Won?” Bell blinked, puzzled. “Do you think anyone won?”

Darkest took a deep breath, reframed the question. “Then... What about the supervisors? Where did they go?”

Bell muttered, “Ah, them. Aside from my master, the supervisors who survived returned to Tree’s embrace. I never saw them again. Maybe they still haunt some circuit board, maybe, like the bugs, they left. Who knows? I’m just a museum guide.”

Darkest stared blankly. “Tree’s embrace?”

Bell’s tone turned sardonic. “Yes. They believed they came from the Great Tree, so they should be buried at its roots... It’s hard for you to grasp, I know. In short, they uploaded their minds to the shelter servers, abandoned their bodies, and fused forever with this place.”

“But my master never believed they would succeed. He thought it was more like leaving behind a memory, then committing collective suicide. He chose to die as a man instead.”

Then Bell launched into the full story of a century ago.

Scarcity and unequal rationing had long strained relations between Treemen and worker ants. Even as both standards fell, the Treemen, being part of Tree’s sensor modules, slipped a little slower.

The spark was the climate recovery on the 50th year.

Five years after the Post-War Reconstruction Committee dissolved, climate hints appeared. Shelter 100’s residents, fired with hope, dreamed of rebuilding. They revived Prosperity Era ideas, preparing for return, forming workers’ and engineers’ councils, ready to bury Shelter 100 forever.

But with years left before the gate opened, the ants’ moves panicked the Treemen.

They had lived only to prune branches, defend order, plug the ant-holes.

Even if collapse was Tree’s set destiny to turn the shelter to a forge pit, the Treemen wouldn’t let their mission collapse too.

They begged the ants to preserve it, for their years of toil.