Thirstfall - Memory of a Returnee-Chapter 71: The Clean Room

I shove the blast door wider and step squarely into a lie.

Past the threshold lies a sterile, pristine white room.

It’s an impossible sight down here.

The ceramic tiles look freshly scrubbed, gleaming under a grid of completely intact laboratory lights. It’s as if time simply gave up and refused to touch this place. There are rows of waiting benches, identical to a hospital triage ward, and an empty reception desk flanking the wall, its monitor dead and devoid of power.

It’s too clean. Too quiet.

The only thing ruining the illusion is the two corpses slumped near the far exit.

The bodies are motionless, soaking in a spreading pool of their own blood. Even from a distance, the deterioration of the flesh is obvious.

It only takes me a second to recognize the tattered clothes. It’s Oliver’s partners—the farmhands who panicked and bolted with Danton.

So they managed to get through here...

I scan every detail. The wrongness gnaws at me before I can name it. I’m not just talking about the lack of dirt or the impeccable, unaging architecture.

Everything in this room screams mistake.

And what no one else can see, I can see perfectly.

My passive [Trace] hums in my vision, peeling back the sterile white lie to reveal the room’s true, wretched nature.

Even though the physical evidence has been swallowed up, the echo fragments remain. To my eyes, this bizarre quarantine room is painted in death. Ghostly silhouettes of past victims overlay the pristine tiles—a chaotic, violent canvas that looks like a carnage painting by a deranged abstract artist.

So the room killed them. The question is how.

Behind me, Oliver breaks formation. He doesn’t look at the bodies—which tells me everything about how he feels about it. His shoulders slumping as he makes a beeline for the triage chairs.

"Finally," he groans, dragging his boots. "A decent place to sit. That walk was—"

"No one takes another step," I order, my voice cracking like a whip. "Unless you want to become history."

Oliver freezes, his boot hovering an inch above a pristine white tile.

"This isn’t a train station waiting room," I tell them, my eyes scanning the invisible tripwires my skill is illuminating. "It’s a quarantine zone. A natural selection filter."

The logic clicks into place.

The Gatekeeper we bypassed outside? That was the firewall. Nothing gets in. But this room? This is an exit filter. Whatever is in this place is meant to stay in this place.

I study the phantom images [Trace] feeds into my eyes. One spectral figure is suspended in the air, hanging by its neck. Another is bisected clean down the middle. A third is riddled with holes.

Judging by the pattern of their fatal injuries, the death zones are clear.

I step forward, keeping my posture rigid. "Do exactly what I do," I say, not looking back. "Do not change a single millimeter of my movements."

I begin to cross the room. It’s a slow, agonizingly precise routine, like performing the steps to a psychotic waltz. Calculating the exact angle of my foot inclination. I step only on the center of specific slate blocks, terrified of putting pressure on the grout lines between the tiles.

Every muscle in my body is coiled tight, demanding complete control.

From the safety of the entrance, Lola’s small voice echoes out.

"Uncle Dryden dances like a nutcracker. All stiff and crooked."

I grit my teeth. Lola always has the perfect punchline to murder my seriousness in the most crucial, life-or-death moments.

I force the distraction away, maintaining my hyper-focus. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

The physical toll of the tension is mounting. A single bead of sweat breaks from my forehead, trickling down the bridge of my nose. I pivot on my heel to bypass a bisected echo-corpse, trying to maintain my balance.

As I spin, the drop of sweat flies off my face.

It arcs through the air and lands on a random tile three feet away.

Splat.

Immediately, a deep, mechanical whirring fills the room. It’s the sound of heavy metal rotating, spooling up, gaining aggressive momentum. For a fraction of a second, my brain scrambles to match the noise to a memory.

Then, the click.

Shit!

I throw myself forward in a blind, suicidal dive toward the exit threshold. The explosive rain of lead erupts at the exact same moment. Three rotary machine guns drop from the ceiling panels, firing instantly without a microsecond of warning. The air turns to deafening thunder.

I hit the ground rolling, my shoulder slamming into the floor as I clear the exit boundary. I scramble up, pressing my back against the far wall, dragging oxygen into my lungs.

Silence slams back into the room.

I pat myself down, checking for bleeding, punctures, missing chunks of flesh. Nothing.

I’m whole...

Back in the room, the three machine guns retract smoothly into the ceiling. The heavy panels slide shut.

But that’s not the terrifying part.

Where the heavy-caliber bullets chewed up the pristine floor, the white tiles are shifting. The ceramic molds like wet clay, knitting back together, repairing the bullet holes as if the room itself is healing.

Bioregeneration. The room feeds on what it kills.

A sharp hiss draws my attention.

Over near the door, both of the dead thug’s bodies begin to emit a foul, acrid smoke.

I watch in grim fascination as the flesh begins to liquefy, entering a state of hyper-accelerated decomposition. The pristine floor beneath him is drinking the blood.

The room is absorbing his organic matter to regenerate the damage.

It’s not a laboratory. It’s a digestive tract. And my squad is still standing inside it.

Danton, I realize.

The bastard is a pressomancer.

He didn’t have a [Trace] skill to navigate this. He realized what the room was, and he sacrificed his own men, feeding them to the room to trigger the digestion cycle so he could slip through the exit in the chaos.

I need to get the others across, but Oliver is too heavy and Lola is too small to make the jump if they slip up.

Thinking of a better plan, I realize I need a bridge.

I look around, searching for a way out.

There! Interesting...

Then I look across the killing floor at the group, locking eyes with the only one agile enough to make it and with the only skill useful right now.

"Rhayne," I call out, my voice flat. "Do you know how to dance?"

She stares at me.

"You’re going to need to. You’re next."