I dug even deeper into the archives, down to where the folders no longer had digital tags and the pages crumbled to dust at a single touch. Among stacks of reports, I stumbled upon a strange scrap of paper. It was rough, yellowed, and literally inscribed with brown, dried blood. The words were traced with a trembling hand, as if the author had written them in the final seconds of their life.

  Text of the manuscript:

  "They call her the Queen. Those who came after—the Demons of the Third circle, spawns of steel, gunpowder, and radiation—they know no honor, but they know fear. They bow before Aurora not out of respect, but out of terror of the Void. As long as she is here, as long as her gaze is turned toward this world, the Great Swarm will not attack at full strength. We are alive only because the Demon of Oblivion still wants this world to remember her beloved..."

  I froze, rereading these lines over and over. A metallic taste of blood seemed to settle on my tongue.

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  "So, our entire 'order' is an illusion?" I whispered into the emptiness of the office. "The demons aren't wiping us off the face of the earth just because their Queen is playing 'childhood friend'?"

  I looked at the endless shelving units, packed with similar secrets.

  "All of this needs to be digitized... converted into code... It will take an eternity. Right, Yanu? Do you hear me?"

  In response—silence. Only the steady hum of the servers. Yanu, who usually never missed an opportunity to make a snide remark, was stubbornly ignoring me now. In this organization, the AI was just as capricious as its creators.

  With every page I read, I became more and more terrified. I felt the walls of Sector "Zero" closing in around me, turning from a workplace into a gilded cage.

  I started to laugh quietly—a dry, cracked laugh that echoed off the concrete walls of the archive.

  "I know too much now... Quit this place? Hahaha! They'd erase me from reality before I could even reach the exit if I just handed in a resignation letter."

  I picked up the next folder. I had no choice. I had become the keeper of secrets upon which the survival of humanity depends. And the most terrifying part was that humanity didn't even suspect how incredibly thin the thread separating it from the abyss truly was.