"Time does not heal what was buried alive." Inscription on a forgotten military vault, Circa 1947

Sixty years later, the world had changed.

Above the sealed bowels of Mount Ontake, Nagano District 9 had bloomed, an architectural marvel rising like glass and chrome from the bones of forgotten war. A modern metropolis, alive with hums and light.

Green technology pulsed through every vein of the city: maglev rails crisscrossed the skyline, solar spires blinked across the arcologies, and carbon scrubbers danced in temple gardens designed to mimic old-world Zen.

Neon signs cast rainbows across ramen stalls, VR cafés, and hover-bike vendors clustered in alleyways no broader than a whisper.

Drones zipped overhead, carrying groceries, prescriptions, or quietly scanning for viral anomalies in breath patterns. To the citizens of Nagano-9, life was clean, efficient, digital, and above all, peaceful.

No one remembered the war below. No one remembered what they buried.

Until the tremor came.

It started subtle. A low growl beneath the pavement, passing like a ripple through the bones of the city. Commuters paused mid-stride. Monorail lines sparked to emergency halt, casting showers of gold onto the streets below. Streetlights flickered erratically. A hush swept across the market arcades.

Three seconds of silence.

Then the ground cracked.

A rupture tore through Sector 6, directly beneath the Shin-Ontake Medical Research Center, now repurposed as a biotech facility for AI-regenerative prosthetics. What lay beneath had been sealed off long before the building’s new purpose. No living records remained. No access codes, no history.

Yet the tremor split open an ancient vent in the substructure, rupturing containment plates that hadn’t been touched since the early 21st century. A scream of pressure hissed from below as dust, ash, and rotting insulation burst upward through sterile chrome floors.

Power surged.

Lights across District 9 snapped off, one by one, in a growing wave of darkness. From Shin-Ontake to the Inner Circle Loop, Tokyo’s auxiliary grid failed in cascading arcs. For exactly 2.17 seconds, over 40 million people were plunged into silence.

Then it spoke.

Deep beneath the surface, below the geothermal plates, past the sealed tombs of decommissioned projects, a pulse fired through forgotten circuitry.

417 Hz.

A signal. Not static. Not noise.

It was a rhythm. Structured. Breathing.

In the dark, rusted corridor of Sub-Level 0-KAI, a pressure lock disengaged. Containment pod #11 hissed, releasing vapor like a sigh. Lights flickered green across spectral readouts untouched in decades. A glass coil buzzed to life, syncing to neural frequencies long thought dead.

The coil pulsed.

Something inside the chamber moved.

A camera, coated in mold, its lens cracked, turned on rusted servos. Its feed, jittery and grainy, captured a shadow as it stepped forward. Humanoid. Unsteady. Humming with residual heat, though no heartbeat registered. Its movements were slow. Like a memory retracing muscle.

The chamber door opened.

What emerged was not human.

Tokyo Metropolitan Civil Emergency Command

Red pulses blinked across the central screen wall. Dozens of feeds, seismic, electromagnetic, thermal, all showing variations never recorded before. Beneath the standard quake signature, something new had appeared.

“Sir,” whispered Analyst Hoshino, eyes fixed on a waveform scrolling like a heartbeat across the lower screen. “There’s... a pulse.”

“What kind?” asked Major Tanaka.

“Biological. Neural. EEG patterns.”

A silence followed. Another analyst chimed in.

“And... it’s broadcasting. On a loop.”

The room fell still. Tanaka stood slowly, eyes narrowing.

“How is that possible? Facility 0-KAI was buried beneath three hundred meters of volcanic debris before satellites were even operational. That site was declared”

“Erased,” Hoshino finished. “Yes, sir. But it’s broadcasting now.”

A screen switched to a feed, schematics of a facility few in the room had even heard of. Older than any AI-assisted record. Lead-shielded. Powerless. Supposedly sealed since 1949.

Not anymore.

Brunel Hyphen Law Scholarship – International Human Rights Law LLM

In collaboration with alumna Eniola Aluko MBE and Hyphen Sports, offers the Brunel Hyphen Law Scholarship. This scholarship supports outstanding students who wish to pursue the International Human Rights Law LLM programme at Brunel Law School.
Scholarship Value
Amount: £4,500 tuition fee waiver
Available Awards: 3 scholarships
Programme: International Human Rights Law LLM (one-year, full-time)
Eligible Entry: September 2024 and January 2025
Who Can Apply?
To be considered, applicants must:
1. Apply for the International Human Rights Law LLM here:
2. Hold an offer of admission for the programme starting in January 2025.
3. Complete the Hyphen Scholarship application form here:
Deadline for January 2025 entry:
📅 Thursday, 19 December 2024 at 12 pm (UK time).
Key Eligibility Notes
Open to UK and international students (including EU).
Scholarships are not available for deferred entry or students enrolled at Brunel Pathway College (BPC) or Brunel Language Centre (BLC).
Applicants must commit to full-time study.
Scholarship Conditions
The award is applied as a tuition fee waiver for the first year of study.
Awardees will still need to pay the standard £5,000 deposit (for international students).
Winners may serve as Brunel Ambassadors, representing the Law School and Hyphen at events.
Scholarships cannot be combined with certain other fee waivers (with limited exceptions such as Graduate Discount).
Application & Selection Process
Applications will be assessed by the Hyphen scholarship allocation panel against set criteria.
Selection includes reviewing the applicant’s written statement.
Final decisions by the panel are binding and cannot be appealed.
Important Links
Full Scholarship Details – Brunel Hyphen Law Scholarship:
Apply for the International Human Rights Law LLM:
Scholarship Application Form:

Sector H, Post 7 Checkpoint

Private Juno Kreel lay slumped against a wall, like a marionette whose strings had been torn in silence.

Twenty-eight. Five tours in the Martian Reclamation Zone. Veteran, exo-scout, high discipline. Not the kind of soldier who dies without warning.

His eyes were open. His helmet still sealed.

But his mouth, frozen in a scream that had never been heard.

When Patrol Team Delta breached the checkpoint, they found the room silent. No alarms. No breach. Just the overwhelming cold and the body.

Kreel’s fingers were blackened, veins blue, lips bloodied as though ruptured from the inside. There was no external trauma. No burn. But his core temperature was subzero. Inside his armor.

Captain Vorn, whose leg had once been blown apart on Titan and who hadn’t blinked at battlefield dismemberment, turned away, sick.

“His eyeballs,” whispered the medic. “Crystallized. Not melted. Frozen. Like frost climbed through him from inside.”

The internal temperature in the checkpoint room was a balmy 22°C. The frost didn’t belong.

They pulled surveillance.

Thermal feed. Low-res, outdated. Yet the footage was clear enough to raise alarms at Central Command.

Kreel was alone for hours, casually logging ambient readings.

Then the signal began.

Five-second pulses of static distortion. The image flickered. A hum bled into the audio, irregular, throbbing, mechanical. The room’s temperature, in the thermal feed, dropped six degrees.

And then... it appeared.

A shape. Faint. Like heat-haze or bent glass. Humanoid only in outline. No face. No bones. But something inside the blur shimmered like armor. Like a skull that didn’t quite fit human proportions.

It stood directly behind Kreel’s left shoulder.

He never turned. But his vitals spiked. Heart rate peaked. Blood pressure surged. The sensor data blurred.

And then, everything died.

Lights. Feed. Pulse.

Three minutes later, the feed resumed. Kreel’s body was in the same position. Cold. Hollow.

They tried to bury the footage. They failed.

A junior tech, Private Farris, leaked a single frame to the darknet. Within hours, the footage had spread across underground streams, encrypted nets, conspiracy boards.

They called it: The Wraith. The Cold Man. The First Flicker.

Slow motion showed a hand, elongated, spectral, reaching toward Kreel’s shoulder.

Inside the blur of that hand, paused mid-frame, was the faintest image of a second face.

Human.

Mouth wide open. Eyes full of eternal fear.

Dr. Elena Ramirez reviewed the pulse.

417Hz.

That same cursed frequency had only ever appeared once before, in a sealed dossier marked Project Threnody. Top secret. Neuro-quantum experiments from the Cold War era. Files shredded. Witnesses missing.

But now the same pulse had returned. Alive. Broadcast like a heartbeat.

She didn’t say it aloud.

But she knew.

Whatever woke beneath Ontake... wasn’t a ghost.

It was the memory of a weapon.

And it had learned how to scream.