Chapter 3: The Devil's Choice

Chapter 3: The Devil's Choice

Leo’s fingers trembled slightly as she hit the final key. The cursor blinked once, twice, then vanished.

K1ngf1sh3r.Dest1ny.Protocol

The password was accepted.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then, the screen didn’t open to a desktop filled with files and icons, but to a single, stark image: a top-down security schematic of the facility. It was a web of wires and conduits, a digital blueprint of her prison. Her eyes immediately found the room she was in, a small, insulated square labeled ‘Director’s Office’. And leading from it, a single, thin line, colored green.

It pierced the outer wall of the office, snaking through the concrete and steel of the Basin’s superstructure, bypassing several levels of catwalks and what looked like containment zones. The line terminated near the very edge of the schematic, labeled: Evacuation Tunnel M-7.

There. Nyx’s voice was a blade in her mind, sharp and lethal. That’s the exit. A direct path. No more Rigs, no more offerings. We go. Now.

The raw, primal urgency in Nyx’s command was intoxicating. Freedom. Not a temporary reprieve bought with flesh, but a real, physical escape route.

She’s right, Aura chimed in, her voice soaring with a desperate, fragile hope. It’s a shortcut! A way out of the darkness. We have to take it, Leo! We have to run and never look back!

Leo felt a powerful surge of agreement. Her muscles tensed, ready to bolt. She was already scanning the wall indicated on the schematic, searching for the hidden panel. To move, to act, to finally escape. It was a desire so powerful it was almost painful.

But then Echo’s whisper, cold and trembling, coiled around the base of her skull. Wait… the computer… Shae… He made this place. The answers are here. Why he did it. What we are. Don’t you want to know? If we run, we’ll never know. We’ll just be running blind.

The whisper was a bucket of ice water on the fire of her escape fever. Echo was right. For the first time, they had a chance to understand the full scope of this nightmare. To give a name to the horror beyond just ‘The Basin’. To learn the secrets of S. Shae, the man whose nameplate gleamed on the desk, a silent testament to the human evil that had birthed this hell. Leaving now would mean forever being haunted by the unknown.

“We go,” Leo said aloud, her voice tight with Nyx’s conviction. She took a step toward the wall.

“We stay,” she countered herself a second later, her voice dropping to a near whisper, colored by Echo’s fear and curiosity. Her foot froze mid-step.

The schism inside her mind became a physical sensation. It felt as if two invisible hands had seized her, one shoving her toward the wall, the other pulling her back toward the glowing screen. A wave of dizziness washed over her.

There’s no time to read! Nyx roared, the frustration boiling over into pure psychic force. Every second we spend here, the Gauge is dropping. You want the Shrieker to find this nice, quiet little office? You want to be trapped in here with it? The tunnel is the only logical choice!

But what’s in the tunnel? Aura pleaded, her initial hope now tainted with caution. More monsters? Does it collapse? The computer might tell us! It might show us a safer way! Knowing is safer than running blind!

The two voices, once representing opposite poles of hope and pragmatism, had become a chaotic storm of conflicting survival instincts. One urged her toward a dark, unknown physical path. The other, toward a dark, unknown path of knowledge.

“Stop,” Leo groaned, clutching her head. The fluorescent lights of the office seemed to flicker and warp. “I can’t— I can’t do both.”

The pressure was immense, a tangible tearing sensation inside her skull. It felt like her very consciousness was being stretched to its breaking point. She had to choose. The Devil’s Choice. A desperate gamble in the dark, or a terrifying truth in the light?

With a choked sob of effort, she made her decision. Her body, guided by the terrified, cautious part of her that needed answers more than air, stumbled backward and collapsed into the cold leather of Shae’s executive chair. Her hands found the laptop’s keyboard.

“We need… to know,” she gasped, siding with Echo.

But the other impulse—the combined, overwhelming force of Nyx’s ruthless drive and Aura’s desperate hope for freedom—did not simply vanish. It was too strong, too vital. It refused to be silenced.

As Leo’s physical eyes stared at the screen, a list of files appearing before her, she felt a horrifying disconnect. A part of her awareness, a phantom presence wearing her skin, did not sit down. It stood, turned, and walked with purpose toward the wall shown on the schematic. She could feel the cold determination, the absolute focus. She was in two places at once.

Her real hands, the ones resting on the laptop, were trembling. But she could feel her other hands, her phantom hands, running along the smooth wall, finding the almost invisible seam of a maintenance panel. She felt the click as it opened.

A wave of cold, damp air, smelling of mold and deep earth, washed into the sterile office, a scent only she could perceive.

Her physical body remained frozen in the chair, her mind screaming in silent protest at the psychic bifurcation. With Echo as her terrified co-pilot, she forced her gaze onto the first file on Shae’s computer, a document titled Project Log: Introduction.

But in her mind’s eye, a part of her soul was stepping across a different threshold. She—the part that was Nyx’s pragmatism and Aura’s hope fused into a single, desperate entity—stepped into the utter, absolute blackness of Evacuation Tunnel M-7. The panel hissed shut, and the darkness was total.

She was split. One part of her, Leo and Echo, sat in a brightly lit office, about to peel back the first layer of a monstrous truth. The other part, Nyx and Aura, was now blind and alone, venturing into the suffocating bowels of the facility.

And deep below, in the swirling, non-Euclidean heart of the Abyss, an ancient, slumbering consciousness stirred. It felt the ripple of a mind tearing itself in two. It was a new sensation. A new flavor of despair. And for the first time in a very long time, the Maw of the Abyss turned its attention upward.