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The victory over the internal entity left a feeling of grim relief. A heavy silence fell over the Nautilus-07, broken only by the steady hum of the submarine moving through the deep.

Then, a new sound began a faint, almost delicate scraping from the outer hull.

Kaizoo looked up, listening intently. The scraping grew louder, multiplying into a frantic, skittering noise that echoed through the metal, like a swarm of giant insects crawling over the entire vessel. Before he could process it, the noise was drowned out by a sudden, violent THUMP!

The entire sub jolted. Then came another. THUMP-THUMP-THUMP! It was a relentless, pounding assault.

Kaizoo rushed to the console and pulled up the external camera feed. He saw them. Dozens of the pale, faceless humanoids were swarming over the submarine, their movements no longer languid but purposeful and coordinated. “They have been dead for a long time,” LUNA’s voice echoed in his memory. Then, a familiar inky blackness emerged, swirling among the attacking humanoids.

"It's you," Kaizoo whispered, then screamed at the screen, "You're not dead! And the sound you made when I tried to kill you... that was to call them, right?"

He saw it now the entity, the black water like before. It looked different, more focused, as if it were controlling the dead. They were methodically attacking the hull's weak points.

"LUNA, report! What are they doing?"

"Analysis: Concentrated physical force applied to hull weak points. Primary target: the previously breached Sector 4-A airlock. Hull integrity will fail in approximately six minutes."

This wasn't a haunting. It was a full-scale assault. The hive mind had finished its profile, and now it was moving to acquire its specimen by force.

There was no time to panic or overthink. Kaizoo engineer instincts took over, but they felt sharper, more desperate. He couldn't fight them all. His only chance was to break the siege and run.

His initial plan was to use the emergency thrusters for a high-power burst, but it was an insane idea. The power draw would be catastrophic, frying the systems. As he ran the calculations, his vision glazed over. Numbers and schematics flashed in his mind's eye faster than he could consciously process. A sudden surge of memories hit him, a painful pressure building in his head and chest.

He felt the phantom weight of a gun in his hand. He was walking slowly toward a woman in a uniform. This time, her face was clear, not blurry like before.

"I'm sorry, Kayla. I have to do this, or we can't proceed to the next level of the test." His own voice was calm, cold. He watched as his memory-self pressed the barrel of the gun to her temple.

"It's okay, Kai. I understand. The progress of the experiment is what's important." Her face was serene, but her eyes betrayed he. Tears streamed down her cheeks. "Remember be calm. This is not your first time. This is what you were trained for. We have to face reality. We are just an experiment."

But his memory-self looked calm, stern, and utterly devoid of emotion. "We will see each other again, Kayla. But it will not be the same as you are now."

BAM.

The gunshot rang out without warning, and the woman collapsed at his feet.

Kaizoo eyes snapped open. Instead of the usual struggle, a profound, automatic calm settled over him. And with it came a solution ,a bizarre bypass, rerouting auxiliary power through the thruster motivators in a way that defied standard engineering. It was a hack that shouldn't work, a patch of brilliant, insane intuition that surfaced from a deep, inaccessible part of his mind.

"LUNA, execute Thruster Override Sequence K-Z-00."

"Sequence not found in database. It is a... prototype command. Authorization required."

"Authorization: K-Dash-Z-Dash-Zero-Zero. Execute!"

The sub shuddered violently. A blinding blue arc of electricity erupted from the thruster ports, cascading over the hull. The faceless walkers caught in the surge didn't just let go they dissolved, their forms bursting into clouds of black, particulate mist. The rest were flung into the abyss. The Nautilus-07 lurched forward like a speared fish, alarms blaring as non-essential systems blew out from the power surge.

He had done it. But the solution was alien, instinctual. K-Z-00. His own name. The words echoed in his mind, meaningless and terrifying. Yet, Kaizo felt unnervingly calm, completely unaffected by the horror of it.

In the frantic moments after the escape, as he worked to stabilize the ship, a hidden panel near the floor of the cockpit jarred loose by the violent maneuver popped open. Inside was a small, military-grade black box, not part of the standard Nautilus schematics. It was unlabeled.

After he had successfully escaped and silence returned, his eyes locked onto the black box. Suddenly, his blood ran cold. The calm he had felt vanished, replaced by a sharp focus. The box looked familiar. What else was hidden on this ship? And in his head?

He took the black box and pried it open. It came apart easily, and he was now certain he had handled one before. Inside was not a data chip, but a single, physical object: a worn, laminated photograph. It showed a group of people—three women and four men in advanced tactical dive suits. They looked like a team. A unit. He scanned the faces. They were strangers. All except two: himself, and the girl he had shot in his memory, Kayla. He and the girl stood among them, looking younger, harder, his expression one of a grim determination he didn't recognize. On the back, a handwritten note in a script he couldn't place: "If all else is lost, remember DeepCore."

He didn't know these people. He didn't remember this photo. But there he was. Proof of a life, a mission, a self that had been completely erased from his mind. Was this from before the amnesia? Or was it part of a fabricated past? The note was a command, a destination. The only one he had left.

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