The Five Evolution

『"It’s all right, it’s okay. We’ll live to see another day..."』

Amara woke to the sound of hissing oxygen. At first, everything was blurred shapes and harsh white light shining through transparent plastic curtains.

When she tried to make use of her ears, voices overlapped around her.

"Contamination levels dropping."

"Run another scan."

"Necrotic residue detected on stretcher three."

"Keep the quarantine barrier stable!"

Her eyelids felt heavy and every muscle in her body ached like she’d been torn apart and stitched back together incorrectly.

A figure in a yellow hazmat suit leaned over her, visor reflecting pale medical lights. "Oh... easy," the medic said quickly, noticing movement. "Easy. Don’t sit up too fast."

Amara blinked slowly, still disoriented as everything refused to settle into focus.

What is going on? Where am I?

The cavern ceiling came into focus above her. That meant they were still underground. Except now the eastern chamber had been transformed into a temporary emergency response zone.

Portable floodlights illuminated sections of the cavern in harsh white beams, plastic quarantine sheets divided contaminated areas from safe zones, and medical equipment hummed everywhere.

"What...?" Amara managed, still trying to piece together how she’d gotten here. She bent her neck carefully to get a better view of her surroundings without having to actually move her battered body.

Around her, several personnel in full-body hazmat suits moved rapidly between stations while others carried containment cases filled with black residue samples, most likely from the remains of any parasitic fungal monster they could find.

Finally, Amara heard something she recognized, familiar voices bickering from a distance.

"...eight hundred and sixty four," Yelena said flatly from somewhere nearby.

Dante scoffed aloud. "There you go inflating your numbers again."

"You’re just poor loser." Yelena’s voice again.

"Oh, really? I’m a poor loser? Me?" Dante’s voice again.

Amara turned her head weakly towards the direction of the sound.

Near the edge of the medical zone, Dante sat on top of a broken concrete slab while a medic sprayed decontamination foam across his heavily tattooed arm.

Yelena stood beside him with her arms crossed, enduring another medic scan while her handheld device beeped periodically.

"You killed seven hundred and thirteen," Yelena continued calmly. "I killed eight hundred and sixty four. It is not close."

"Okay, but I destroyed the core," Dante argued, gesturing dramatically enough that the medic had to dodge. "That should count for at least like... two hundred extra kills. Minimum."

"It does not."

"It bloody does."

Amara had no context for what they were arguing about specifically, but hearing their familiar voices brought an involuntary smile to her face.

Then someone moved suddenly to her right, and the voice that followed was the one she’d been most desperate to hear.

"Amara?" Ethan called. He was the first to notice she was awake.

She lifted her head to get a better look and it was really him. He was in a partially-open hazmat jacket hung loose around his waist, with the upper half peeled off like he’d gotten tired of wearing it properly.

There were fresh bandages wrapped around both his arms and dried blood crusted near his eyebrow. But the moment he saw her awake, all the tension in his face vanished instantly.

"You’re awake," he breathed, and the way his voice broke on that last word told her how long he’d been waiting, how badly he’d needed to hear her voice.

Hiro nearly tripped over a supply crate trying to get to her first. "Wait—she’s awake?! Move, rich boy!"

Raj was right behind him, weirdly shirtless. Apparently none of the emergency responders had managed to convince him to wear the protective hazmat suit properly.

"Hey!" Raj grinned tiredly. "Look who decided not to die!"

Amara tried sitting up and pain immediately shot through her ribs.

"Easy," Ethan said quickly, his hands steadying her before she could collapse backward onto the stretcher. "You’re still healing. Don’t push it."

Only then did she notice Sophia lying on the medical bed beside hers.

Sophia looked exhausted beyond words. And like Amara, also out of it.

An oxygen mask rested around her neck while dried blood stained beneath her nose.

"Sup." Sophia lifted two fingers weakly in greeting. "Are we still underground?" she asked with a tired smile on her face.

Correction, Sophia was more out of it than her.

Amara let out a shaky breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. Sophia was okay. Her eyes moved further, and on a different stretcher, lay Maya, still unconscious.

Unlike the others, Maya’s entire body was partially enclosed inside some kind of translucent medical field while black-and-gold tubes fed stabilizing fluid into her bloodstream.

The necrosis along her arm had stopped spreading, but only barely. Amara’s chest tightened instantly. "Maya—"

"She’s stable," Ethan said before panic could fully set in. "Still unconscious, but stable."

"For now," one of the medics added grimly while adjusting something on a holographic monitor floating beside Maya’s stretcher. "We need to get her transferred in order to fully treat this. What we have here is just... buying time."

The medic’s visor turned toward Amara after a moment. "Honestly," he admitted, "I don’t even know how any of you survived long enough for extraction in the first place."

Another medic nearby nodded immediately. "The eastern chamber’s contamination levels are still lethal. Half our personnel can’t even enter without layered protection."

"We had to rotate extraction teams every three minutes," another said while sealing a containment case. "Longer exposure started causing hallucinations and internal bleeding."

"Yeah, no kidding." Hiro ran a hand through his hair. "How the hell were you guys able to breathe in there?"

"I could breathe just fine though," Raj muttered.

"The moment we got there..." Ethan said quietly, his expression darkening as memories clearly resurfaced. "We found you and Sophia both unconscious on the ground beside Maya. You were barely breathing."

He gestured to Sophia. "And Sophia here was bleeding from her eyes and nose. We thought—" He didn’t finish the sentence.

"Yelena called medical immediately after they destroyed the core," Hiro added. "But I gotta say, it was a really long dig through several tons of collapsed tunnel rubble to get to you guys."

Immediately, he felt the weight of Raj and Ethan’s stares boring into him. He glanced at both of them with an awkward, nervous chuckle. "Not that you guys weren’t worth it! You totally were."

Raj rubbed the back of his neck. "Anyways, it all worked out and we all made it." He glanced toward the stretcher holding Maya. "And it’s all gonna work out for her too. Maya’s tough. She’ll pull through."

"Apparently it was to risky to move Maya to the surface," Ethan explained. "That’s why they had to set up shop here. Stabilize her first."

A medic suddenly focused directly on Amara, his scanner beeping insistently. "You especially," he said carefully. "Your biometric readings make absolutely no sense whatsoever."

That immediately drew everyone’s attention, and the medic looked down at his scanner again like he still didn’t trust the numbers it was displaying.

"You were exposed to enough corruption to kill most Awakeners several times over." His voice lowered slightly. "But somehow your body purged all foreign contamination entirely."

Silence settled briefly. Then Amara’s fingers curled against the bedsheet as memories of the battle, the near-death experience, the vision of the ancient king, and most vividly, the white flames erupting from her body with no conscious control surfaced in her head.

"I don’t really understand it either," she admitted quietly, unable to meet anyone’s eyes. "It just... happened. The white flames again."

"I’m just glad you’re okay." Ethan gave her a warm smile.

"I’m glad you’re okay too," Amara said.

Sophia groaned from where she lay. "Get a room you two."

As seconds ticked by, the medical zone began to feel almost normal again, as normal as anything could feel three hundred meters underground.

Raj was in the middle of chastising Hiro for doing nothing while he and Ethan carried out the three unconscious girls through a biohazard zone when Hiro suddenly frowned.

"Wait." Hiro looked around slowly, his expression shifting from a frown, to confusion, to alarm. "Where’d Dante and Yelena go?"

Hiro was right, the argument that played out in the background between Dante and Yelena had stopped. She could no longer hear the sarcastic insults, bickering, or annoyed Russian threats and British cursing.

There was just silence. Enough so that it made Ethan straighten immediately, his entire body going tense.

"Now that you mention it..." he muttered.

The medics noticed too, several of them pausing mid-task to look around.

One looked toward the edge of the quarantine zone with an eyebrow raised. "That’s strange," she spoke quietly. "They were literally right here—"

"Oh, they’re fine." The soft and polite voice came from deeper within the cavern and every single person immediately stopped moving.

Then footsteps echoed against stone as two figures emerged slowly from the darkness, the both of them wearing a white long hooded cloak.