Level 0 Backrooms Novels & Stories

After Amy and I finalized our partnership, she flew to Northia to handle the opening of our herbal remedy lab. I, on the other hand, met with an experienced advisor from within the pack. Since Ryan and I were never officially marked as mates, a simple mate dissolution agreement was enough. When I saw the line "voluntarily forfeits all rights to territory and property inheritance", I didn't hesitate. I pressed my thumbprint firmly beneath it. Right as the stamp hit the page, Clare sent me a video.

Graffiti and posters littered the walls, and the distant sound of music echoed further down the hall. "Follow me, and I'll take you to the lounge. From there, you can decide which sin you want to experience first." His deep silken voice did things to me that I was too ashamed to admit. He moved past us, his footsteps silent against the cement floor. Kylie and I followed in silence, taking in every detail we could. Neon blue lights glowed against the floor. Slowly the floor began to dip; a large exit sign sat overhead a set of stairs that took us further underground.

Warning: Substation 'Level Zero' identified as primary destination. Level Zero. The name itself was a historical artifact. It was a three-story corrugated iron shell rotting on timber pillars over the black, oil-slicked currents of the Puget Sound—an abandoned, pre-war shipping terminal that we had leased for three hundred dollars a month when our bank accounts were empty and our ambitions were limitless. It was the physical birthplace of my empire. It was the place where we had spent winter nights huddled next to the warm exhaust fans of our makeshift server racks, our fingers too frozen to type efficiently, sharing a single wool blanket while we dreamed of building a digital fortress that

“The one I entered was a D-rank—the lowest level in the game. The survival rate was fifty percent. So, people still died, but it wasn’t as horrifying. Normally, newcomers start from the lowest rank too. Maybe something went wrong with the system, and it accidentally sent players who should’ve been in D-rank into the highest-level, S-rank.” “Then… what’s the survival rate for S-rank?” He paused for a moment before answering, “One percent, but in this game? It’s zero.” Despair swallowed me whole. Just as the atmosphere turned hopeless, the guy with glasses suddenly pointed behind me. His mouth opened and closed repeatedly, but no sound came out. A chill ran down my spine. “What is it?” “B-Behi

I say. “Agreed, but it can’t come from us. We can’t have alphas looking our way, songbird,” he warns me. Shit, he is right. “I sense something alive in the back room, but otherwise it’s empty,” he adds. We go to the back together, and Caleb opens the flimsy door. It’s a long room, and the back wall is filled with cages. The cages are all broken and dirty, and it stinks. The doors are all open except for a few at the bottom. I try not to look at the piles of bones and red dust in the open cages as I head to the closed ones.

CRITICAL ALERT: REVERSE CODE SOURCE DETECTED. ADMINISTRATOR AUTHENTICITY VALIDATING... SIGNATURE PROFILE: FOUNDER CLASS / UNLISTED HYBRID. "Mamma... the secondary nodes... are trying to reject the handshake," the child’s multi-layered voice vibrated directly within my skull, her infant jaw set in a hard, rigid line that looked terrifyingly like the original Zora Vane. Her tiny veins pulse-flashed with blinding purple heat, her internal processing core drawing so much energy from our pack bond that the hair on my arms stood on end. "They are... they are routing the backup security voltage to the threshold gates. They are going to purge the air from this deck."

I struggled hard, trying to pull my hands free, but the restraints wouldn't budge no matter how hard I twisted. That was when the realization finally hit me. My mother ran an adult shop. And this had to be that new specialty bed she had recently ordered. It had built-in mechanisms. Once triggered, the restraints would lock automatically, and only someone outside could disable it. Earlier, I had been so exhausted that I grabbed the first bed I saw in the back room and passed out. I hadn't even noticed it was the brand-new display model. I must've hit one of the triggers in my sleep. Now the damn thing had my arms and legs locked in place.

We jumped. ### The Graveyard of Prototypes We didn't land in a room. We landed in a **Library of Ghosts**. The Sub-Level was a vast, echoing cavern filled with millions of glass pods. Inside each pod was a "Version" of the Earth. Some were primitive, some were futuristic, and some were nightmare landscapes of flesh and chrome.

of Project Zero was revealed. ​The sub-level was a sprawling, subterranean cathedral of data and biology. Massive, cylindrical tanks filled with a luminous, amber fluid lined the walls, each one housing a suspended network of neural filaments that looked like glowing deep-sea coral. This wasn't just a server room; it was a nursery for synthetic consciousness the next stage of the Vance legacy.

The door itself was on the floor of the corridor, bent, the steel having failed in a way that suggested a force applied from the outside in with significant intent. Xander stepped over it. Basement Zero was a large room. The vault walls were the lead composite Sarah had described — thick, grey, absorbing. The ceiling was low and the lighting was emergency-level, amber, the kind that came on when primary systems had been disrupted. The Origin Drive occupied the center of the space.