Chapter 99: The Forgotten Camp

Chapter 99: The Forgotten Camp

The ancient passage stretched far beyond what Sky had expected.

He had thought the doorway was just an entrance to another small hidden room, maybe a vault or a shrine. But this was different. The corridor kept going, straight and even, with no turns or branches. It felt less like a dungeon path and more like something intentionally built to connect two distant places.

Unlike the labyrinth above, there was no mud beneath their feet, no twisted vegetation creeping through cracks, and no remains of savage beasts scattered across the ground. No smell of rot either. The air was dry and cold, but fresh, like it was being filtered somewhere.

Everything was unnaturally clean.

Too clean. That was what bothered him most. In a place that had been sealed for who knows how long, there should have been dust piled ankle-deep, fallen stones, rust. But the floor looked almost swept. The walls held no cobwebs.

The walls were made from the same dark stone as the staircase they had descended, smooth and seamless, covered in strange carvings that Sky couldn’t understand. They weren’t decorative. They were too orderly, too repetitive, like warnings or instructions.

His Soul Clone moved ahead, a faint transparent version of himself phasing through the walls and returning whenever it detected something unusual. It was his best way of scouting without risking a trap.

So far, nothing. The clone would go out thirty meters, look around, and come back with nothing to report.

That somehow made Sky more uncomfortable. A dangerous place with monsters was scary, but at least you knew what to expect. A perfectly empty place that stayed perfectly clean felt wrong.

"How much farther does this go?" he asked, keeping his voice low. The corridor carried sound too well.

Chloe glanced at her visor. The flickering had reduced a lot since they entered this passage.

"Approximately two hundred meters to the next open space," she said. "The path is holding straight. No elevation change."

Sky raised an eyebrow, a little surprised.

"You can measure it now? A minute ago you couldn’t get a clear reading."

"Partially," she said, tapping the side of her visor where a small antenna was adjusting itself. "The interference from the Array is weaker here. Or maybe this place was built to block the interference. Either way, I’m getting range back."

"That’s good news for once," Sky said.

"Don’t celebrate yet," Chloe replied, her tone tightening. She pointed ahead, even though there was nothing but darkness visible. "I’ve detected multiple structures at the end of the path. Artificial. Not just walls. Something was built there."

They continued deeper, their steps synchronized without thinking. Sky kept his Blood Blade loose in his hand, not ignited but ready. Vesper walked with her Holy Scepter Blade resting against her shoulder, her eyes scanning the carvings as if trying to memorize them.

A few minutes later, the passage suddenly opened into an enormous chamber. It wasn’t a natural cave expansion. It was a perfect rectangle, high ceilinged, with supports built into the walls.

Sky stopped at the threshold, holding up a hand for the others to stop too.

Someone had been here.

And not a thousand years ago. This was recent.

A broken wooden table rested against one wall, one of its legs collapsed. Several empty crates were scattered across the floor, some broken open, some still sealed but covered in dust. While a pile of old blankets had been abandoned in one corner, faded and chewed by moths but still clearly blankets, not ancient cloth.

Near the center of the chamber sat the remains of a small campfire. Stones had been placed in a circle, and inside was ash and blackened wood. Someone had tried to make this place livable.

Sky slowly approached it, his eyes scanning for any sign of a trap or a body. He crouched and touched one of the blackened pieces of wood. It was cold, but dry. Not fresh, but not ancient either.

"Someone lived here," he said quietly. "This wasn’t just an expedition that passed through. They camped."

Chloe immediately began scanning the surroundings, her visor sweeping the floor and walls in a wide arc. She moved in a slow circle around the campfire.

"Not just one person," she said after a second. "Look."

She pointed toward the ground near the crates. In the thin layer of dust that had settled since the camp was abandoned, footprints were still visible.

"There are multiple sets of footprints. Different boot sizes."

Sky looked down where she was pointing. He could see them now. Some were clearly human, narrow and small.

Others were much larger. Much larger than any normal human should be, with a deeper tread and claw marks at the front.

Vesper walked toward the remains of the camp, stepping carefully over the scattered supplies. She lifted the edge of one of the blankets with her blade.

"How old is this camp?" she asked. "Weeks? Months?"

Chloe’s visor flickered rapidly as she ran a composition analysis on the ash, the wood, the fabric.

"Several years at minimum," she said. "Three to five years, based on the oxidation on the metal and the decay rate of the blankets. The fire has been cold for at least that long."

Sky frowned. That timeline felt wrong.

"Then why did they leave all this behind?" he asked. "If you live here for a while and then decide to leave, you take your supplies. You don’t leave crates and blankets. Unless..."

He didn’t finish the sentence. Unless they left in a hurry. Or unless they didn’t leave at all.

Nobody answered. The thought hung in the cold air.

He began searching through the abandoned supplies more carefully, pushing aside broken planks and empty cans that had long since rusted. Most of them had deteriorated beyond usefulness, fabric rotting, food long gone to mold and dust.

But beneath a collapsed wooden box, half-buried under ash and dust, he discovered a small metal container. It was about the size of a book, dark grey, with a locking latch that had rusted shut.

Sky pulled it free and shook it. Something rattled inside.

The lid was badly rusted. He had to wedge his blade into the seam and force it. With some effort and a sharp metallic screech, he forced it open.

Inside were several damaged pieces of equipment. A broken compass, its glass cracked and needle stuck pointing the wrong way. An old communication device, the kind the early Array explorers used before Forge Tech took over. Its battery was long dead.

And beneath those, a thin stack of waterproof papers, tied together with a cord. They were yellowed and stained, but intact.

Chloe’s eyes immediately lit up when she saw them. Papers meant records.

"Give me those," she said, already stepping forward.

Sky handed them over without argument. He knew better than to get between Chloe and potential data.

She placed the papers beneath her visor, holding them flat. Several thin scanning beams passed across the damaged pages, reading and reconstructing where the ink had faded.

"Most of the text is corrupted," she muttered, watching lines of garbled text appear in her display. "Water damage, or time. The ink has bled."

"Can you recover anything?" Sky asked. "Anything legible?"

"Give me a moment," she said, adjusting the filters. "The waterproof layer saved some of it. I’m running reconstruction."

Sky looked around while Chloe worked, letting her focus. He walked slowly around the perimeter of the chamber. There was something else here, something that was bothering him at the edge of his vision.

Then something caught his attention near the far wall, behind where the table had been pushed.

He walked toward one of the walls, his boots kicking up dust.

There were scratches carved into the stone. Deep, frantic scratches, made with a knife or maybe even a fingernail. They weren’t part of the ancient carvings. These were new. Messy. Human.

Not random scratches.

Words. Someone had taken the time to carve a message when they had no paper left, or when they wanted it to last.

Sky slowly stepped closer, brushing away dust to see it better. The letters were uneven, desperate.

He slowly read them out loud, his voice barely above a whisper in the huge, empty chamber.

WE WERE HERE IN FOREST FALL