Chapter 2: The Secret of Subway Line 4
The concrete stairs leading down to Manhattan’s deepest transit lines were cool, smelling faintly of old grease and damp stone. Leon didn’t take the elevator. In less than two hours, those metal boxes would become vertical coffins when the primary power grid sputtered and died. He took the steps three at a time, his cheap leather work shoes clicking sharply against the gray stone.
His heart was still hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs, but the suffocating panic from his past life was entirely gone. It had been replaced by a cold, calculating focus.
"One hour and fifty minutes," Leon muttered, glancing at his cheap wristwatch. 10:10 AM.
In the original timeline, the first major slaughter of the New York Incursion didn’t happen on the sunlit streets above. It happened deep underground.
The media back then had dubbed it the "Subway Line 4 Massacre." A high-tier elite boss—an Abyssal Larva—had spawned prematurely inside the abandoned maintenance tunnels beneath the city. It hadn’t climbed to the surface until three days after the apocalypse began, but by then, it had already consumed over five hundred terrified civilians who were using the tunnels as a bomb shelter. The creature had gorged on human flesh, evolving into a monstrous, armored centipede that eventually leveled three entire city blocks.
The golden-boy Hunter who finally put it down—a billionaire’s son named Bradley—became an overnight global celebrity just by absorbing the massive mana core left behind in the beast’s skull.
’Not this time, Bradley,’ Leon thought, a grim smile tugging at the corner of his lips. ’That core belongs to me.’
He stepped off the stairs and onto the crowded subway platform. The atmosphere was completely ordinary, almost painfully so. Commuters were leaning against concrete pillars, staring blankly at their smartphones. A group of teenagers laughed loudly near the tracks, and a businessman was pacing back and forth, arguing over a Bluetooth earpiece. None of them had any idea they were walking directly on top of a sleeping nightmare.
Leon didn’t wait for a train. He walked toward the far end of the platform, where the bright tiled walls gave way to the dark, industrial opening of the maintenance zone. Slipped past a heavy iron gate marked AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY, he gave the old latch a hard, practiced kick. A sharp crack echoed over the rumble of a distant train, and the door swung inward.
He stepped through, pulling the heavy metal door shut behind him. The noise of the station instantly muffled, swallowed by the thick, heavy silence of the under-city.
The air here was different. It was freezing, smelling heavily of rust, stagnant water, and something else—something rotten and sweet that made the tiny hairs on the back of Leon’s neck stand straight up.
A sudden ripple passed through the air. A translucent black notification tried to manifest in his field of vision, warning him about entering a high-danger zone, but Leon flicked his wrist, dismissing the screen before the text could even form. He didn’t need a system prompt to tell him he was in a meat grinder. His own survival instincts were already screaming.
He pulled his phone from his pocket, flipping on the flashlight. The narrow beam cut through the thick gloom, illuminating graffiti-covered concrete walls, rusted water pipes, and old wooden railroad ties.
As he walked deeper, his breath began to turn into white mist in the air. Around ten minutes into the tunnel, the concrete beneath his feet suddenly gave way to something horrific. The ground was no longer solid. It was covered in a thick, fleshy purple carpet that throbbed rhythmically against the soles of his shoes. It looked like living tissue, veined with pulsing lines of sickly green light that leaked a foul, translucent slime.
Screeech...
A low, wet sound echoed from the darkness ahead.
Leon instantly killed his phone light, plunging the tunnel into absolute blackness. Fifty yards away, two massive, bulbous yellow eyes snapped open. They weren’t the tiny, cowardly eyes of a goblin. They were the size of dinner plates, dripping with a corrosive, glowing saliva that hissed angrily as it dripped onto the steel train tracks.
The Abyssal Larva. It was currently the size of a minivan, a bloated, heavily armored maggot with hundreds of twitching, razor-sharp legs scraping against the gravel.
Even though it hadn’t reached its final, catastrophic form, the pressure the creature exerted was suffocating. To an ordinary human with zero combat experience, just looking at those glowing eyes would cause their knees to buckle from sheer terror. Leon’s biological instincts were fighting him, begging his legs to turn around and sprint back to the safety of the crowds.
But his mind remained dead calm. He had faced far worse things at the bottom of the Tower. He had died once already; a giant worm wasn’t going to make him flinch.
The monster roared—a high-pitched, grinding sound that vibrated the fillings in Leon’s teeth—and charged. The ground shook violently as its massive, armored bulk tore through the darkness, its hundreds of legs throwing sparks off the iron rails as it closed the distance.
Ten yards. Five yards. Three yards.
Leon didn’t move an inch. He didn’t have a sword, a shield, or magic armor. But as the foul stench of the monster’s open jaws hit his face, he unlocked the dark, heavy energy swirling deep inside his soul.
"[Sovereign’s Domain: Decay]," Leon whispered.
An invisible, suffocating wave of absolute blackness erupted from his boots, expanding into a perfect ten-foot circle around him. The moment the pulsing purple flesh on the ground touched the edge of Leon’s domain, it instantly dried up, turning into gray, lifeless ash.
The Abyssal Larva slammed headfirst into the barrier.
The beast expected to crush a fragile human insect into paste. Instead, the moment its thick, chitinous head crossed into Leon’s domain, the monster let out a piercing, agonized shriek that nearly shattered the concrete walls.
The heavy, bulletproof armor on its face began to rust, peel, and flake away like wet paper. Its glowing yellow eyes withered into dry, black crust in a fraction of a second. The corrosive slime in its throat turned to sand, choking its own breath. The concept of Finality was tearing its biology apart, forcing its cells to age and rot at an impossible speed.
The creature thrashed violently, trying to back away in sheer, primitive terror. It had never encountered anything like this. This wasn’t human magic; it was the fundamental end of existence.
But Leon didn’t let it go. He stepped forward, tracking the beast’s movements inside his dark circle. He raised his bare right hand and drove his fist straight into the rotting, softened flesh of the monster’s ruined skull.
"Down," he muttered.
With one final, wet shudder, the giant beast collapsed heavily onto the tracks, the light in its eyes completely extinguished.
Leon stood in the quiet tunnel, his arm drenched to the elbow in black, foul-smelling monster blood. He didn’t feel disgusted. He only felt an intoxicating, violent surge of raw power flooding his veins as his SSS-rank passive skill began to strip the dead thing of its life’s work.