Chapter 24: The Harvest Begins

Three days had passed since the eight doors sealed shut.

Inside the bunkers, the party had never really stopped. When people spend two months staring death in the face, a warm room, limitless food, and high-proof alcohol act like an addictive drug. The players had completely settled into their new lives. They slept in until noon. They cooked steaks for breakfast. They traded crude jokes about the miserable bastards freezing to death outside.

They believed they had conquered Phase One.

Four hundred meters beneath the cold North Atlantic, Julius Vance sat at his obsidian desk inside the central command bridge of St. Jude’s Spire.

The room was quiet. A silver pot of black tea rested on a stone warmer beside his keyboard. Standing behind him were Colonel Thomas Mercer and Commander Raymond Croft. Further down the tiered observation deck, Chief Engineer Elena Santos sat at a diagnostic station, monitoring live sub-surface seismic arrays across eight continents.

"How are our guests doing, Raymond?" Julius asked smoothly, lifting his teacup.

Croft tapped his tablet, pulling up the master monitoring feed onto the primary wall screen.

"Site One, Canada: all thirty occupants are currently asleep in the central dormitory wing following a heavy drinking session. Site Three, Swiss Alps: twenty-six targets are congregated in the main mess hall, while four are in the medical bay. Across all eight locations, zero defensive postures. No perimeter patrols. Weapons have been stowed in the personal quarters."

Croft paused, glancing at Julius with a look of profound respect mixed with cold terror.

"They treat the sites like five-star ski resorts, sir."

"Of course they do," Julius replied. "When a man escapes a cage, he doesn’t think the next roof over his head is just a bigger cage. He just thinks he’s lucky."

Julius set his cup down with a soft click.

"Elena. Report on the deep chambers."

Elena Santos turned in her swivel chair, chewing on the end of a grease pencil. Her dark eyes gleamed with cold professional pride.

"During the initial excavation six months ago, we followed your exact architectural addendum, Mr. Vance. Beneath the bedrock foundation of each regional bunker—roughly eighty meters directly below the main living sectors—we bored a secondary hollow cavity. We didn’t fill it with support pillars or emergency stores."

Elena pressed a key on her console, bringing up a cross-section schematic of the Swiss Alps bunker.

Beneath the glowing blue living quarters, deep in the dark crosshatch of the granite floor, sat a massive, unmarked red cylinder.

"Each bunker sits directly on top of forty metric tons of industrial-grade RDX and baritol composite charges," Elena explained in a calm, matter-of-fact tone. "Paired with the small modular nuclear reactor’s core containment vessels, a synchronized detonation won’t just crack the floor. It will vaporize the structural basalt, collapse the entire mountain massif inward, and instantly trigger a localized seismic implosion. The temperature inside the blast pocket will exceed four thousand degrees within three milliseconds."

She tapped another key, showing the arming sequence.

"All eight subterranean demolition arrays are linked via our low-frequency subsurface quantum relay. They cannot be disarmed locally. The manual override leads only to your console."

Julius leaned forward, his elbows resting on the polished stone desk.

"Mercer," Julius said, not turning his head. "If you were inside one of those bunkers, possessing enhanced human strength or elemental shielding, could you survive a forty-ton subterranean implosion?"

Mercer gave a short, harsh bark of laughter.

"Not a chance in hell, sir. It doesn’t matter if your skin turns to diamond or if you can shoot fire from your eyes. You can’t punch a shockwave traveling through solid rock at eight thousand meters per second. The atmospheric pressure alone will turn their organs into jelly before the falling mountain crushes whatever is left into paste."

"Good," Julius said softly. "Then it’s time to collect our return on investment."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his black smartphone.

The screen was open to the [World Chat].

The chat had slowed to a crawl over the last forty-eight hours. Out of the 488 players who had survived the first month of rain, only a handful of desperate messages still flickered from the dying remnants trapped outside:

— [Swift]: Water reached the treeline. My legs are completely numb. If anyone can read this... don’t bother climbing the Alps. The door never opens.

— [LoneWolf]: Three days in the sleet. My brother died an hour ago. To the thirty bastards inside the Canadian bunker... I hope you choke on your fresh bread.

— [WanderingMonk]: The storm is rising again. May whatever gods watch over this realm have mercy on our souls.

And then, right below those dying whispers, sat the smug, arrogant replies from the champions inside the vaults:

— [ThunderG]: Still crying out there? Sucks to be slow. We just cracked open a crate of aged rum. Have fun swimming.

— [Bloodhound]: Save your breath, LoneWolf. Nobody is coming out, and nobody is coming in. When the flood ends, this bunker is our kingdom.

— [Viper]: Julius Vance, if you’re reading this from your lonely island, thanks for the hot shower. We’ll be coming for your neck eventually, but until then, we’re living like royalty.

Julius looked at Viper’s message. He smiled.

He tapped the screen and opened the custom app: [Project Sirens: Master Terminal].

A large, circular red button occupied the center of the display.

Above it, eight green confirmation boxes glowed steadily:

================================================== [PROJECT SIRENS: SUB-BEDROCK DEMOLITION NETWORK] ================================================== SITE 01 (CANADIAN SHIELD) : CHARGES ARMED [30 TARGETS] SITE 02 (PATAGONIA) : CHARGES ARMED [30 TARGETS] SITE 03 (SWISS ALPS) : CHARGES ARMED [30 TARGETS] SITE 04 (SAHARA MASSIF) : CHARGES ARMED [30 TARGETS] SITE 05 (SIBERIA) : CHARGES ARMED [30 TARGETS] SITE 06 (EAST ASIA) : CHARGES ARMED [30 TARGETS] SITE 07 (AUSTRALIA) : CHARGES ARMED [30 TARGETS] SITE 08 (ANTARCTICA) : CHARGES ARMED [30 TARGETS] -------------------------------------------------- TOTAL ENCLOSED TARGETS : 240 CANDIDATES SAFETY PROTOCOLS : OVERRIDDEN COMMAND KEY : VANCE_PRIME_00 ==================================================

Julius rested his thumb over the red icon.

He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t feel a shred of remorse. In this death game, there was only one rule written across the stars: Be the Sole Survivor.

These two hundred and forty people hadn’t hesitated to butcher their comrades on the muddy thresholds outside. They had laughed at the dying while stuffing their faces with his food. They were arrogant, predatory, and foolish enough to believe that a gift in an apocalypse came without strings.

"Goodbye, champions," Julius murmured.

His thumb pressed down firmly on the screen.