The towering shelter gate cracked open like a judge’s folded fan, revealing a narrow slit.

Ice chips blew out with the draft, glinting with a chill sharper than blades.

Before the colossal door, a man in a heavy exoskeleton stood dumbstruck, staring for a long while before squeezing out half a sentence.

“Holy shit...”

The ground across thousands of square meters was paved with ice sculptures, people curled on the floor, frozen in the postures of their final moments.

Some pressed their foreheads to the ground in prayer, some clung together in embrace, mothers and fathers clutching children, families holding hands...

That was Shelter 100’s hundredth floor underground, the very last. Its ceiling was the central atrium’s floor, its floor the shelter’s absolute bottom.

Perhaps because it was a storage zone, it was also the tallest single floor in the entire shelter.

Ten Punch Man had thought he might find some treasure there, or at least valuable scrap. Instead, the first door opened straight into a pile of corpses.

Just a single one warehouse held a thousand, maybe two thousand bodies. And there were more warehouses here.

Those were likely the same...

His boots crunched on the ground.

Unconsciousy, he stepped through the gap into the subzero morgue, flashlight sweeping the surroundings.

More than shock, he felt baffled, muttering under his breath. “... What the hell happened here?”

A teammate in exoskeleton followed him in, crouched by a prone frozen figure, and snapped a photo of its face.

After a moment, he gave his conclusion. “Most here probably died of hypoxia... they weren’t frozen to death, more like frozen afterward.”

Some bore obvious gunshot wounds, missing limbs, clearly dragged over after they had died.

“... What’s the difference?” Ten Punch Man asked.

Clapping the frost off his hands, the player sighed. “None, really...”

Truth be told, it was his first time seeing so many corpses outside a battlefield.

The visual shock was utterly different. On the battlefield, there was never time to wonder how someone died.

“... The signal isn’t coming from here. There’s no way anyone alive is here.” Casting one last glance at the rows of frozen dead, Ten Punch Man dimmed his flashlight and turned to his teammate. “Let’s get out.”

No one wanted to linger. His companion nodded, backing out with him and pressing the close button, for the sake of the old popsicles.

They then checked a few more warehouses. As he suspected, the rooms were the same. They were all crammed with frozen bodies. Level B100 bore no sign of firefights. Who herded those people in and froze them remained a mystery.

As the two finished the last ice room, teammates returning from the other side waved to them.

“This level is a warehouse district. The north side had food cold storage, and the south side looks like it stores engineering and consumer goods. However, everything has been picked clean except one workshop they repurposed. We found generators, batteries, and some unrecognizable stuff.”

Ten Punch Man perked up. “Let’s see.”

Following that player, they soon entered the southern sector.

This area was far larger, with a more complex layout. Towering metal frames stood like walls. They needed ladders to reach the tops.

From the first steps, Ten Punch Man smelled a faint stench of oil and knew that the warehouse was different.

If the others were morgues, the warehouse was a junk-filled recycling yard. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

Several Turtle-class engineering exoskeletons sat like crabs stripped of shells, innards gutted, heads drooping by scaffolds.

Nearby lay coils, cobbled-together contraptions, and strange machines even the players couldn’t fathom.

The survivors there had pushed their intellect and skills to the limit, purifying bug mucus into electrolytes in man-sized jars, making disposable batteries to power their devices.

They scavenged other machines, turned the warehouse into a micro-workshop independent of shelter power, tinkered with integrated circuits and delicate oddities.

The contraptions looked impressive, but Ten Punch Man couldn’t make sense of what they had been for. “What were they making?”

A teammate hesitated. “Maybe... like the game, Oxygen Not Included, they were trying to loop resources inside the shelter?”

“Impossible...”

“Not completely. At least they didn’t touch the bodies in the other warehouses, maybe. Anyway, it means supplies weren’t all gone, they still had choices.”

It was a novel thought.

They had restored power and restarted the cold stores. They clearly cracked the energy bottleneck.

They froze the dead and the bugs outside hadn’t gone extinct. That meant that they finished some goal before running out of nutrients.

The question was... Where did they all go?

Surely not just back to the cold warehouse to freeze themselves?

Eyeing the dissection table piled with carapaces, Ten Punch Man scratched his helmet, feeling a headache coming

He knew nothing of archaeology, yet felt like he was doing it.

But with Prosperity Era technology so far beyond reality, no real-world analogy could explain the survivors’ motives.

He picked up a bowl-shaped carapace from a table and saw tiny letters carved inside. Using his VM’s translation, blue text flickered on his visor.

“... In memory of 77,274 residents, including 645 supervisors,” he whispered out loud.

An agility type teammate peered over curiously. “What’s that? A last message?”

Rest in Peace asked. He had only entered the Storm Corps in the Beta 0.4 version.

“Looks like it.” Ten Punch Man replaced the carapace, checked the admin logs they recovered, and glanced at graffiti-like murals on the walls.

“Rough guess, a conflict broke out here. Residents fought supervisors. Supervisors drove them down here and cut their power? But then residents cut off supplies to them as well, making it a stalemate...”

Really, they didn’t need to do much guessing.

All the way down they had seen battle scars, especially B51 with the walls riddled with bullet holes.

To seize the administrator’s office, thousands died just in one corridor. They were identifiable by their blue coats.

Yet compared to the warehouses next door, even that carnage was nothing.

“Anyway, did you find that anomalous life signal?” asked a strength type player. “This place gives me the creeps. Let’s finish and get out.”

His tag was Unconscious Man, a veteran from the Beta 0.1 version. He had no relation to Rest in Peace despite the matching ID style. However, they were often mistaken for having couple names.

Who knew where Spring Water Commander dug up such weirdos.

“Not yet.” Ten Punch Man shook his head, snapping mural photos.

Rest in Peace muttered, “No better coordinates? Just ‘on this level’? It’s way too vague.”

Someone else shook his head. “B100’s cameras and sensors were dismantled. Really, everything below B51 was. The signal was caught at B51. We only have a faint sense of it.”

Studying the mural, Ten Punch Man spotted another line, seemingly from the same hand as the carapace. Tracing the rusted strokes, he read softly, “... The Treemen did not spring from some nameless Tree. Like a tree, they came from us. The arrogance of others was our arrogance too. Order was meant as a fortress, but we forged its bricks into fratricidal swords. We forgot where we go, forgot whence we came, forgot why we built this fortress, and became its puppets.”

“We shall all die.”

“I will spend my last days finishing our tombstone, the Gravekeeper of Shelter 100.”

He left no name, only a string of numbers.

Ten Punch Man suddenly thought about cycles. Converting them, he dated it to the 60th year of the Wasteland Era.

“So... The survivors all died?” Staring at the century-old mural, he frowned, glancing at the heap of machines.

Were the loot just buried with them for fun?

His gut said otherwise.

Then a teammate shouted from nearby. “There’s a cryo-pod here!”

Hearing that, Ten Punch Man rushed over.

At the end of pipe-tangled racks stood a machine spanning dozens of square meters.

At its center sat a cryo-pod. To the right, a shattered glass cylinder, shards strewn on the ground and it looked to be broken from inside.

His VM’s life radar confirmed. The fuzzy life signal came from within!

Their faces lit with joy.

There’s someone alive!

“I’ll open it!” Ten Punch Man stepped up, jacked in a VM cable, and hit the power.

The expedition’s hack program kicked in, granting control quickly.

Clearly, Yin Fang had real popsicle-breaking tricks.

Without hesitation, he opened it. But as a rotten stench hissed out, he knew something was wrong.

A dozen bug-faced creatures burst out of the slit, chittering as they lunged.

“Fuck!”

Rest in Peace flinched, reflexively firing, shredding a bug at his feet and shattering the silence.

“Cease fire! Don’t wreck the equipment!” Slapping one bug to the floor, Ten Punch Man stomped it into pulp.

Once they’d killed the lot, he peered into the pod.

Inside lay a broken skeleton.

It had its hand clasped on its chest, holding a shattered glass vial, fragments of shells and eggs still within.