The sirens wailed across Neo-Kyoto Campus Zone 6, their pitch designed to carry urgency without causing panic. Students in pristine uniforms moved with practiced efficiency toward shelter zones, their faces showing mild annoyance rather than fear. This was, after all, merely another drill—or so they believed.
In the gleaming command center overlooking the district, a cluster of Academia officials stared at holographic displays with considerably less composure.
"How many did we lose contact with?" asked Director Asahi, her voice sharp enough to cut the tension.
The technician swallowed. "All of them, Director. Eleven students. Communications went dark approximately three minutes after they crossed into the quarantine zone."
"Impossible," Asahi whispered. "These are fourth-year candidates. Legacy bloodlines. Military-grade suppression tech. What the hell happened?"
No one answered. No one could.
Beneath the shining glass towers and sterilized streets of Academia zones, sunlight became a distant memory. The Underscape didn't gleam—it festered. Collapsed transit tunnels formed its skeletal structure, branching into utility corridors and forgotten bunkers. Steam hissed from ancient vents, dripping condensation onto rusted metal walkways. The air hung heavy with spores from luminescent fungal growths, casting an eerie blue glow across the darkness.
This was where humanity's rejects survived. The nullborn, the casteless, the forgotten.
And among them, a child who didn't even know his own name.
The boy woke with the artificial dawn—the moment the steam vents increased pressure, signaling another recycled day. He was small for his five years, body thin and wiry, eyes the color of rain puddles—gray with hints of something shifting beneath the surface. His black hair had been hacked unevenly with whatever sharp edge he'd found last.
In the hollow beneath a collapsed service tunnel, he checked the thin wires he'd set the night before. Two traps held twitching vermin, their dirty fur matted with moisture. Not a feast, but enough to trade.
He moved with the unconscious grace of prey, staying low, stepping heel-to-toe to minimize sound. His worn utility vest—salvaged from some worker's corpse—held his meager possessions: a cracked battery, three corroded metal screws, half a protein bar saved for emergencies, and a dull blade no longer than his small finger.
Surface dwellers called this place hell. To him, it was just existence.
The boy followed a familiar path through the tunnels, avoiding the territories marked with gang symbols splashed in bioluminescent paint. He knew which corridors the enforcers patrolled, which junctions flooded with toxic runoff during pressure changes, which areas hosted mutated vermin too large to outrun.
Today's journey took him to a cramped market in what had once been a subway platform. Here, the Underscape's hierarchy revealed itself in crude commerce. Black market quirk-fixers with makeshift labs exchanged chemical cocktails for ration credits. Scavengers bartered tech fragments for medicine. Gang representatives recruited with promises of protection and threatened those who refused.
The boy approached a hunched figure whose table displayed an array of salvaged electronics.
"What ya got, scrapper?" The dealer hardly looked up, hands continuing to dismantle a circuit board.
The boy placed his catches on the table without a word.
"Skinny ones today." The dealer poked one of the rodents. "But the blood's clean, no mutations. Two stale ration bars or one half-charge battery. Take your pick."
The boy pointed to the food.
"Smart choice. Power ain't worth shit if you're dead." The dealer tossed him two wrapped bars, already turning to his next customer.
As the boy retreated, a commotion erupted at the platform's edge. People scattered, ducking behind stalls or fleeing into tunnels. Six figures emerged from the northern access shaft, their uniforms marking them as Academia enforcers—unusual this deep in the Underscape.
The boy pressed himself into a service alcove, becoming one with the shadows. Not out of fear, but simple survival instinct.
"We're looking for witnesses," announced the lead enforcer, voice amplified through a mask filter. "Blood Rank Trial Zone 3-B. Anyone sees anything, Academia pays in fresh rations and clean water. Anyone hides information..." The threat hung unfinished.
Murmurs rippled through the crowd. Blood Rank Trials were Academia's elite student exercises, conducted in abandoned sectors as "real-world tests." They never came this deep. They never failed.
From his hiding spot, the boy observed with unnatural stillness. He didn't fidget. Didn't blink more than necessary. His breathing remained shallow and controlled.
"They're saying half the trial candidates collapsed," whispered a voice near him. "Not dead—just broken. Like their quirks got ripped out."
"Bullshit," replied another. "Nothing down here could take out Academia brats. Their quirks are engineered, military-grade."
"Then why are the suits crawling all over the tunnels? They're scared of something."
The boy committed every word to memory, though he understood little of their meaning. Quirks belonged to the world above—to the genetic elite, the registered castes. Down here, having a quirk meant either hiding it or being taken.
The enforcers concluded their announcement and began moving through the crowd, scanning identification chips embedded in registered forearms. The boy slipped deeper into the shadows, following maintenance pipes until he reached a vertical shaft barely wide enough for his small frame.
He climbed without hesitation, fingers finding invisible holds in the darkness. Ten meters up, he squeezed through a broken ventilation grate into a forgotten maintenance room, his temporary shelter for the day.
As he settled against the wall and unwrapped his first ration bar, a distant crash echoed through the tunnels, followed by screams abruptly silenced. The enforcer sweep was growing violent. Somebody would be made an example of—not for what they knew, but to ensure cooperation from the rest.
The boy chewed slowly, conserving each bite of the stale, nutrient-dense material. His eyes remained fixed on the door, watching, waiting. Never relaxing.
He had survived another day. In the Underscape, that was victory enough.
Hours later, when the enforcer patrols had moved to other sectors, the boy ventured toward the western tunnels, drawn by curiosity he couldn't explain. The normally busy corridors stood eerily empty, the Underscape's denizens hiding until the Academia presence diminished.
He moved carefully along the edge of what Underscape maps designated as Sector W-11, approaching the boundary of the quarantined zone where the Blood Rank Trial had allegedly gone wrong. Warning markers—skull symbols in luminescent paint—covered the walls near the barrier.
Through a crack in the security gate, he glimpsed the aftermath: equipment scattered across the ground, abandoned in apparent haste. A specialized mask, the kind worn by Academia's elite students, lay cracked near the entrance. Its display still flickered with error messages and vital sign flatlines.
The boy stared, unblinking, at the scene. Something had happened here that the Academia couldn't explain—couldn't control. For those who ruled through power and order, there was nothing more terrifying.
As he watched, a strange sensation prickled along his spine—awareness of being observed in return. From deep in the quarantine zone, a figure stood motionless in the shadows. Too distant to identify, too still to be natural. Their eyes—reflecting the emergency lights like mirrors—fixed directly on the boy's hiding spot.
For one breathless moment, predator recognized predator across the divide.
Then the figure vanished, moving faster than the boy's eyes could track.
He retreated from the barrier, heart pounding not with fear, but with something he had no name for. In a world where he had never belonged, he had glimpsed something that didn't belong either.
Something that adapted.
Something that evolved.
Like the whispers said: not killed, but rendered powerless.
As he disappeared back into the maze of tunnels, the boy didn't understand that he had witnessed the first tremor of a quake about to shatter Academia's foundations. He didn't know that his own body carried the same potential that had broken those students—the capacity to adapt, to evolve, to overcome.
He knew only survival, moving silent as a shadow through the world beneath the world.
For now, that was enough.