The Manaless King Of Sigma

Chapter 7: The Signal Beneath the City

The darkness swallowed everything.

Mateo froze with one hand against the wall, listening to the silence beneath the transit station. The lights had gone out without a sound, but the vibration that followed still lingered in his bones.

Beside him, Lucía switched on her phone’s flashlight.

Nothing happened.

She tapped the screen twice, held down the power button, and tried again. The display remained black.

“Please tell me you expected that,” she whispered.

“I didn’t.”

“Good. I’d hate to discover that you have a habit of walking into underground tunnels that shut down every electronic device nearby.”

A faint smile crossed Mateo’s face, but it disappeared when the symbol on the wall began to glow.

Three silver rings surrounded a dark center. The light pulsed slowly, as if something behind the wall were breathing.

His chest tightened.

He had seen that symbol before. First on the night he died, in the memories of a future that should no longer exist. Then in the strange visions that had followed his return to October 16. Now it had appeared beneath a transit station on the first day of humanity’s new world.

He could no longer dismiss it as coincidence.

“Don’t touch it,” Lucía said.

Mateo withdrew his hand from the wall. “I wasn’t going to.”

“You were leaning toward it.”

“I was looking.”

“You look at dangerous things as if you’re trying to challenge them.”

“Sometimes looking is the only way to understand a threat.”

“And sometimes it’s how people get themselves killed.”

Before he could answer, the volunteer behind them stumbled.

“Did you hear that?” the young man asked.

A low vibration traveled through the corridor. Dust sifted from the ceiling, and the blue markings running along the walls brightened one after another.

Then came a sound from beyond the sealed passage.

Three slow knocks.

Mateo’s blood turned cold.

He knew that rhythm.

In his previous life, explorers had discovered similar knocks inside the ruins beneath Hollow Crown Dungeon. They had called them echoes, assuming the sounds were trapped in the stone. The first expedition had ignored them. The second had followed them deeper.

Only three members of the second expedition had returned.

Mateo had never learned what happened to the others.

He had been too busy trying to survive in a world where his destroyed mana channels made him useless.

But the symbol on the wall had been there, too.

“Everyone, step back,” he said.

Lucía obeyed immediately. The volunteer needed no second warning.

Mateo moved away from the wall and forced himself to breathe steadily. He could not afford to let old memories dictate his actions. This was not Hollow Crown, and he was not the broken man who had entered those ruins years later.

He was here now. He had a chance to make a different choice.

A pale blue window flickered into existence before his eyes.

SYSTEM NOTICE

UNREGISTERED STRUCTURE DETECTED

Location: Municipal Transit Maintenance Level

Classification: Incomplete

Energy Source: Unknown

Access Status: Restricted

ANOMALOUS TRAIT: PARTIAL SYNCHRONIZATION

Foreign pattern detected.

Analysis incomplete.

Warning: Further synchronization may cause neurological and mana-circulation instability.

The window vanished.

A sharp pain pierced Mateo’s temples. For a moment, the corridor tilted, and his right leg nearly buckled.

Lucía caught his arm.

“Mateo?”

“I’m fine.”

“You nearly fell.”

“I said I’m—”

“Don’t finish that sentence.” Her grip tightened. “Your face has gone pale, and you’re sweating. Whatever you’re seeing, stop forcing it.”

He wanted to tell her that he had not deliberately activated anything. The strange ability seemed to respond to the symbol on its own, drawing his attention toward patterns his ordinary eyes could not perceive.

But he did not understand it well enough to explain it.

“I think the system is warning me about this place,” he said.

“Then we should listen.”

Another set of knocks sounded from beyond the passage.

This time, there were four.

The volunteer backed away. “That sounds like something is trying to get out.”

“Or something is trying to communicate,” Lucía replied.

“Would that make you feel better?”

“No. It would make the situation more complicated.”

Mateo looked at the glowing symbol. The dark center seemed deeper than the wall surrounding it, like a hole cut into the world itself.

“We need to find out what’s causing the disturbance,” he said. “That’s the mission objective.”

“The mission says to locate the source. It doesn’t say we have to open whatever that is.”

She had a point.

In his previous life, Mateo had survived for years by learning the difference between a useful risk and a pointless one. The people who charged into every unknown threat rarely lived long enough to become experienced.

But leaving without understanding the signal might allow the disturbance to spread toward the residential district.

He glanced at the volunteer. “Can you return to the entrance and warn the others? Tell them to keep the road clear and stay away from the maintenance level.”

The young man nodded quickly.

“What about you two?”

“We’ll check the corridor ahead. If anything changes, get back to the shelter and tell Marcos.”

Lucía gave Mateo a sharp look. “You’ve decided that already?”

“No. I’m asking whether you see a better option.”

She studied the symbol, then the corridor beyond it.

“We go only as far as the next junction. We don’t touch the structure, we don’t separate, and if your condition worsens, we turn around.”

“Agreed.”

The volunteer hurried away, his footsteps fading into the darkness.

Mateo and Lucía waited until they heard the distant scrape of the outer door before proceeding.

The corridor beyond the symbol sloped downward. Blue markings appeared at regular intervals along the concrete, but they did not resemble any wiring or maintenance diagrams Mateo remembered from his previous life. They were too precise, too deliberate.

Lucía took a small sensor from her equipment bag. It had survived the earlier interference, though its readings fluctuated wildly.

“Energy concentration is increasing,” she murmured. “But it isn’t behaving like ordinary mana.”

“What does ordinary mana look like to your equipment?”

“Consistent enough to measure. This keeps changing its frequency whenever we move.”

Mateo stopped.

“Whenever we move?”

Lucía checked the readings again. “Wait.”

She took two steps forward. The sensor’s numbers climbed.

Then she stepped backward.

The numbers dropped.

She repeated the test.

The result was the same.

“The source is reacting to our position,” she said. “Or to something we’re carrying.”

Mateo felt a familiar pressure behind his sternum.

His anomalous trait had not settled since they entered the tunnel. It pulsed with the same rhythm as the symbol, sometimes falling behind, sometimes racing ahead.

He could not tell whether the phenomenon was responding to him or whether he was simply noticing a pattern that had always been there.

“Let’s test something,” he said.

Lucía folded her arms. “I’m listening.”

“Move farther away from me. Slowly.”

She did, watching the sensor.

The readings remained high until she was several meters away. Then they fell.

When she returned to his side, they rose again.

Neither spoke for a moment.

Finally, Lucía lowered the device.

“That’s not normal.”

“No.”

“Is your condition connected to this place?”

“I don’t know.”

It was the truth, though not the whole truth.

She seemed to recognize the distinction. “You know more than you’re telling me.”

Mateo met her gaze.

“I know enough to be cautious. Not enough to give you a reliable explanation.”

Lucía looked as if she wanted to challenge him, but she turned back to the corridor instead.

“Then don’t pretend you understand it. We’ll record what we can prove.”

That, Mateo thought, was one reason he had trusted her in his previous life. Lucía did not confuse a lack of answers with permission to invent them.

They reached a junction where the passage split into two tunnels. One led toward the transit station’s main maintenance rooms. The other descended toward an older drainage system.

Mateo remembered the second tunnel.

In his previous timeline, it had been blocked by a collapsed section of concrete. Weeks after the First Awakening, creatures had emerged from the drainage network and attacked several residential blocks. The survivors had spent days trying to determine how the monsters had bypassed the road defenses.

If the passage was already open, the danger might be closer than he had expected.

He crouched beside the floor.

Fresh scratches marked the concrete. Something heavy had been dragged through the tunnel recently. A thin trail of dark fluid ran between the marks.

Lucía knelt beside him, careful not to touch it.

“Blood?”

“Maybe. Don’t assume it came from a creature.”

She examined the trail with her sensor. “The energy readings are strongest in the drainage tunnel.”

Mateo looked at the junction. The mission had begun with a few creatures blocking the eastern access road. Now the system was directing him toward an unregistered structure and a tunnel that might connect to the residential district.

The two problems could be connected.

Or someone—or something—wanted them to believe they were.

A blue notification appeared in his vision.

REGIONAL MISSION UPDATE

SECURE THE EASTERN ACCESS ROAD

Secondary disturbance identified.

Location: Unregistered underground passage.

Safe route status: Not established.

Time remaining: 3 hours, 18 minutes.

Additional information unavailable.

“The mission recognizes the passage,” Mateo said.

Lucía glanced at him. “You can see another notification?”

He nodded.

“Can you tell whether it identifies the source?”

“No. It only confirms that the underground passage is part of the disturbance.”

She exhaled slowly. “Then we have two choices. We can report what we found and return with more people, or we can inspect the tunnel from here without going too deep.”

Mateo looked down the drainage passage.

In his first life, he had spent too long regretting the moments when he had failed to act. That regret had nearly become a reflex: move first, endure the consequences later.

But he remembered Gabriel and Sofía at the shelter, trusting him to make decisions that would affect their survival. He remembered the pain of losing his mana channels because he had tried to carry more than he could handle.

He would not repeat every mistake simply because he remembered making it.

“We inspect the entrance, then report back,” he decided. “No going deeper until we know what’s there.”

Lucía nodded. “That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said since we came down here.”

“I’ve said several sensible things.”

“You nearly walked into a mysterious glowing wall.”

“I stopped.”

“After I told you to.”

He almost laughed. The ordinary exchange eased some of the tension, but the feeling in his chest did not fade.

They approached the drainage tunnel together.

A cold draft flowed out of it, carrying the smell of wet stone and something metallic. Their footsteps echoed strangely, as though the tunnel were much longer than its visible length suggested.

Mateo’s vision sharpened.

Thin blue lines appeared across the walls, converging farther down the passage. Unlike the markings near the symbol, these lines were broken and uneven. They reminded him of damaged veins.

At the point where they converged, the darkness seemed to ripple.

Pain struck behind his eyes.

He grabbed the wall.

“Mateo!” Lucía caught his shoulder. “Stop looking at it.”

“I’m trying.”

The lines twisted. For a brief instant, he saw a shape behind the darkness—an arrangement of rings, angles, and branching paths that seemed to extend beyond the tunnel itself.

Then the image fractured.

His right hand went numb.

The sensor in Lucía’s hand emitted a shrill tone before its display filled with warning symbols.

She pulled him away from the passage.

“Enough. We’re leaving.”

This time, Mateo did not argue.

They had barely turned around when the vibration returned.

Three knocks.

Four.

Then a pause.

Mateo felt the sound inside his chest rather than through his ears.

A final knock followed.

It was quieter than the others, but the moment it came, his anomalous trait went still.

The pain vanished.

For one impossible second, he understood a single fragment of the pattern—not its meaning, but its direction.

Something lay beyond the tunnel.

Something connected to the symbol.

And whatever it was, it had just noticed him.

A message flashed across his vision.

ANOMALOUS TRAIT

Partial synchronization interrupted.

Foreign pattern recorded.

New observation: SIGNAL RESPONSE CONFIRMED.

Source identity: Unknown.

Mateo staggered backward.

Lucía seized his arm and pulled him away from the tunnel. “We’re done here.”

He did not resist.

They retraced their steps, moving faster now. When they reached the circular symbol, its light had dimmed to a faint silver outline. The dark center remained, but the sensation of something watching them had disappeared.

At the entrance, they found the volunteer waiting beside the service door. He looked relieved to see them.

“Marcos wants to know what you found,” he said. “He says the creatures near the truck have started moving again.”

Mateo’s attention snapped toward him.

“How many?”

“Three outside the gate. The trapped one is still there, but the others have spread out. One of them went toward the road.”

The eastern access route was still in danger. Whatever they had discovered underground had not solved the immediate threat.

“Did anyone get hurt?”

“Not yet.”

“Then we still have time.”

Lucía gave him a warning look. “We have less time than we had before, and now we know the disturbance is connected to something we don’t understand.”

Mateo looked back into the maintenance corridor.

The symbol was hidden around the bend, but he could still feel the faint rhythm in his chest.

He had come here expecting to find the source of a monster outbreak. Instead, he had found evidence that the system’s new world contained structures it could not properly classify—and something that could recognize his strange ability.

He needed to tell Lucía more. Not everything about his regression, not yet, but enough to help her investigate the connection between the symbol and his condition.

First, they had to secure the road.

“Tell Marcos we’re returning,” Mateo said. “We’ll deal with the creatures before they reach the residential district. Then we’ll come back with a proper team and equipment.”

The volunteer hurried ahead.

Lucía remained beside Mateo for a moment.

“You’re frightened,” she said quietly.

He considered denying it, then decided against it.

“Yes.”

“Good. Fear means you understand that you don’t control this situation.”

“And what does your fear mean?”

“That I intend to survive long enough to find out what we’re dealing with.”

She started toward the exit.

Mateo followed.

Behind them, deep beneath the city, the silver rings on the wall brightened once more.

A faint vibration passed through the maintenance level.

This time, there were no knocks.

Only a sequence of sounds too subtle for human ears—and a response from somewhere far beyond the city.

The signal had found its listener.

And it was no longer waiting for him to return.