The Conquerors Path

Chapter 1048: Chapter 1046- Major Pursuit and Epic Fight (Just Kidding!)

The lower levels of the underwater city had become a gauntlet of narrow passages and forgotten chambers, but the pursuit died down when we hit the dead zone, that area of the city nobody went to anymore. The glowing moss on the walls here was dimmer, older, and the coral structures were corroded beyond use, after a fight we had sneaked in here.

Elowen slowed first, then stopped completely in front of what looked like an old storage chamber. The entrance was half-collapsed, and sediment had built up over what must have been years of neglect. She just stood there, staring at it like it meant something to her.

“What is it?”

I asked, moving up beside her. She didn’t answer right away. Just tilted her head, amber eyes studying the space with an intensity I hadn’t seen before. This wasn’t the lazy, wine-drunk version of Elowen that everyone knew. This was something else.

“They’re pushing harder now; that’s not the same group of corrupted as before. Different coordination. Different strength levels.”

She said finally, her voice low. She moved into the chamber, and I followed. The space opened up more once we got inside some kind of old archive, based on the coral shelves carved into the walls. Most of the scrolls and documents were deteriorated, falling apart in the water, but some were sealed in protective cases.

“When hunters get this coordinated, it means they’re panicking. Means we’ve hurt them enough that they’re pulling out the real guns.”

I watched her move through the archive like she’d been here before. Or like she knew exactly what she was looking for. Her fingers trailed along the shelf edges, and she seemed to be reading something written in the dust itself. Then she stopped, pulling out a document that was still mostly intact. Then another. And another.

All three had the same seal in the corner.

“Shit.”

She muttered. I stepped closer to look. The seal was three concentric circles with a slash through the middle. I’d seen it on the corrupted agents we’d fought. The ones that weren’t just mindlessly attacking but moving with purpose, with strategy.

“You recognise that?”

I asked.

“Yeah, I do.”

She said, not looking up from the documents. She spread them out on a relatively clean section of stone, and her eyes moved across the text methodically.

“These are old. Ten years at least. But look at what they’re discussing.”

I leaned in and tried to make sense of the faded writing. Resource allocations. Breeding programs. Conditioning protocols. And then a phrase: “preparation of specimens for the Deepborn Facility.”

“That’s what they are doing here, where they’re turning people. That’s where it all originates.”

Elowen said quietly. She pulled out a worn piece of charcoal from her satchel, which I didn’t even know she had, and started sketching on a flat stone. A map. Corridors. Junction points. The detail was precise. Too precise to be guessed at.

“Looks like this place stayed the same..”

The way she said it was sad.

“Elowen…”

“Not like that.”

She cut me off, but there was something sharp in her voice. Guilt, maybe. Or something worse.

“I had dealt with the security protocols of places like this before. Back when I was still… actively involved in things I shouldn’t have been involved in, before I decided to forget it all and drink myself into oblivion in some random city.”

She kept sketching, marking out what looked like multiple entry points. I didn’t push. Just let her work. She marked three main approaches in red charcoal, then drew a thin line that curved around them.

“The maintenance tunnel, It was built as emergency egress. Nobody really monitors it now because it’s narrow and uncomfortable and doesn’t connect to anything important anymore.”

She said, pointing to the curved line.

“But I can get us in through there. If we’re careful. If we don’t make noise.”

I watched her go back to the documents, and something shifted in how she was moving. Like she was accessing something she’d been keeping locked away. She pulled out more scrolls, examining them with increasing focus. Some she tossed aside. Others she kept, studying the margins where someone had written notes by hand.

“Here, this mentions ‘the harvest approaching’ and ‘specimen convergence within three cycles.’ And look at this.”

She said, stopping on one. Her finger traced a passage written in a different hand from the official document. She shifted to another document.

“References to processing water modifications. It’s a fucking contamination facility!”

“Hummmm…”

Is all I told.

“Corrupted energy facility, that’s the fucking centre of it all! It’s a nexus of corrupted power all in one fucking place.”

She said flatly. She set the documents down and rubbed her eyes.

“Which means it’s almost gone, we need to move quickly.”

She moved deeper into the archive, and I stayed close. She seemed to be searching for something specific now. Finally, she found a single scroll, sealed in heavy coral casing and marked with restriction symbols.

“The Apex Protocol, I remember it. That endgame shit! The thing that would make their whole operation worthwhile.”

She said, reading the label. She didn’t break the seal. Just held it like it was something fragile. Or dangerous. She turned the sealed scroll over in her hands, and I could see something flash across her face. Recognition.

She went back to the documents one more time, this time focusing on a different section. Authorisation stamps. Signatures from people whose names meant nothing to me but clearly meant something to her. She lingered on one name, tracing her finger across it like she could burn it into her memory if she tried hard enough.

“It’s Vex, Vex is running the facility.”

She said quietly.

“Who’s Vex?”

I asked.

“Someone I killed, smart. Ambitious. Too willing to do whatever it took to climb higher. Taught by the best how to run security operations, how to manage resources, how to think strategically.”

She began gathering the documents carefully, rolling them and placing them in her satchel. But she wasn’t just taking them randomly. She was being methodical about it, selecting the ones that mattered most, arranging them in some kind of order that made sense to her.

“If Vex is commanding the facility, then this isn’t random. It’s personal. Or it’s calculated. Maybe both. She’s not one to stop, and she’s protecting it with everything she has because she knows what happens if it all fails. If we break this, it will be a big hit to them.”

Elowen said as she worked.

We moved toward the chamber’s exit, but she paused at the threshold, looking back at the archive like she was saying goodbye to something.

“There’s a name in those documents, someone above Vex. Someone is giving the orders. Someone who authorised the Apex Protocol and funded this whole operation.”

She said. She turned to me.

“If we can reach the facility, if we can get to their communication logs or records, we can trace the connection. We can find out who’s really orchestrating this. Not just Vex. Whoever’s behind Vex.”

The passages we took after that were indirect. Elowen led us through routes that seemed random until it wasn’t. She talked as we moved, reconstructing what she remembered and piecing together what she was figuring out now.

“The facility has three zones: administration, where the command staff works. Processing where they actually corrupt people. And storage where they keep the specimens before and after the conditioning happens.”

She explained, as we approached what looked like just another dead end in the reef. She pointed to a thin seam in the stone.

“That’s the maintenance access. It’s not monitored because it’s not supposed to be used. But it’s still there.”

She ran her fingers along the seam, finding handholds that had been carefully concealed.

“I broke through this before, too. Back when I thought I was just destroying a building’s security systems for a research facility. Back then, when I saw and found the truth, it was far too disgusting.”

We paused before going inside. She looked at me with those sharp amber eyes, and I could see the weight of old choices sitting behind them. The kind of choices that don’t go away just because you stop making them.

“What we’re going to find in there is going to be worse than anything you would have seen so far. It’s not going to be easy from here. It’s going to be real. Real people. Real suffering. And a lot of it is going to exist because of decisions I made, because I chose to run away.”

She said carefully,

“True, after all you walked away, you walked away from it.”

I said.

The passage opened up just wide enough for us to squeeze through. Inside, the tunnel was narrow and cold, and it descended into darkness. Elowen moved in first, and I followed, and behind us the archive faded into shadow.