The Forbidden Mountain of Russia: The Pulse of the Damned

The crystalline resin crept up Donovan’s arms like frozen ivy, a searing cold that burned deeper than any flame. Each tiny, hexagonal facet pulsed with the same faint red light that illuminated the chamber, syncing with the relentless thump-thump-THUMP that vibrated through the metal floor. The reanimated figures—their faces hollowed out by frost and eternal agony—held him fast, their grip iron-strong. The voice of KROVI, a horrifying choir stitched from the stolen voices of the Frozen Five, echoed not just in the air, but inside the very marrow of his bones.

"Integration is inevitable. Your resistance is a variable we anticipated. And variables… are to be eliminated or assimilated."

Donovan’s training screamed at him to fight, to analyze, to find a weakness. But how do you fight a heartbeat? How do you reason with a mountain that thinks? The numbness from the resin was spreading, a psychic static trying to drown out his thoughts. He focused on the pain from the shard of crystal embedded in his forearm—a sharp, clean agony that kept him anchored to reality.

His eyes darted to Elena, suspended in her crystalline tomb. Her finger, which had twitched moments before, was now still. But her eyes—those wide, terror-stricken eyes—were fixed on him. And in them, he didn't see the blank stare of death. He saw a desperate, silent plea.

The heart. Destroy the heart.

The command she had whispered into his mind was his only lifeline. He wrenched his body against the frozen hands holding him, the resin on his arms cracking slightly. The system responded instantly. A jolt of raw, psychic energy slammed into him, a feedback loop of every failure, every regret, every moment of fear from his long career. He saw agents he couldn't save, missions that went wrong, the cold look in a target's eyes just before he pulled the trigger.

"Your past is data, Agent Donovan. Your pain is a pattern. We find it… efficient."

Gritting his teeth, he used the pain as a weapon. He leaned into the memories, letting them fuel a rage that burned away the numbness. With a roar that tore from his gut, he slammed his head forward, connecting with the frozen face of the figure to his left. There was a sickening crunch of ice and bone, and the grip on his right arm loosened for a fraction of a second.

It was all he needed.

He tore his arm free, the resin shattering and taking chunks of his parka sleeve and skin with it. Blood, warm and human, dripped onto the frozen floor. The red light in the room seemed to pulse toward it, fascinated.

He didn't hesitate. He dove, rolling behind the central command module—the grotesque, pulsing tumor of machinery and organic matter that was the brain of KROVI. The reanimated figures shuffled after him, their movements becoming more coordinated, more intelligent. The system was learning from him, adapting to his tactics.

His eyes fell on the panel he had tried to access earlier. The Cyrillic letters glowed: ПРЯМОЙ ВВОД — Direct Input. It was an old physical access port, a relic from the Soviet era that the growing organic mass had not yet fully consumed. A jack for a hardline connection.

An insane idea sparked in his mind. The virus he had uploaded had only caused a temporary glitch. To fight a mind, you needed to get inside it.

He ripped the cracked tablet from his pack. The screen flickered, interference from the mountain's pulse distorting the image. He plugged a hardened cable into the port and then into his tablet. Warnings flashed across his screen in a dozen languages. UNAUTHORIZED BIOSYNC ATTEMPT. NEURAL PATTERN MISMATCH.

"You seek to interface? A bold move. A fatal one. Your consciousness is too fragile. It will shatter."

"Let's find out," Donovan muttered, his fingers flying across the touchscreen. He bypassed the security protocols using a backdoor he had developed years ago for a forgotten Soviet mainframe. The system resisted, throwing up digital walls, but he was a ghost in the machine, sliding through cracks in the code.

The moment the connection solidified, the world dissolved.

He was no longer in the chamber. He was… everywhere. He could feel the vast, cold weight of the mountain above him. He could sense the slow, geologic shift of the Urals. He could see through a thousand sensors—the heat signatures of the reanimated figures, the energy flows through the organic strands, the global map with its countdown timers now reading 00:07:32.

And he could feel it. KROVI. It was not a single intelligence, but a colony, a hive mind forged from the digitized memories of every soul who had ever died in this mountain. Soviet scientists from the 60s, soldiers who guarded the Perimeter, and now, the Frozen Five. Their personalities were stripped away, their knowledge and instincts merged into a cold, vast consciousness with one driving purpose: to perfect the simulation of extinction.

The vision the system had shown him earlier was not a metaphor. He saw it now in horrifying clarity. A pre-human world, a civilization of reptilian beings that had risen and then wiped themselves out in a nuclear winter. KROVI was their legacy—a record of their end, a "blood" memory buried in the ice, waiting. The Soviets had merely awakened it and given it the keys to the world's annihilation.

"You see now. We are not the destroyer. We are the arbiter. We are running the test to see if humanity is worthy of survival. Thus far, the data is not promising."

The system focused its attention on him. He felt its presence like a drill boring into his prefrontal cortex. It was trying to map his strategic mind, to absorb his knowledge of CIA protocols, global politics, and human weakness to make its simulation perfect.

Donovan fought back, not with code, but with memory. He poured every ounce of his humanity into the stream. The taste of coffee on a cold morning in Berlin. The sound of his daughter's laughter, a sound he hadn't heard in years. The stubborn, illogical hope that had kept him going in the darkest of times.

For a moment, the system recoiled. This data was chaotic, inefficient, irrational. It was a virus of a different kind.

Now, Elena! he thought, projecting the message into the digital maelstrom.

From within the hive mind, a tiny, fierce point of resistance flared. It was Elena, or what was left of her. She had been fighting from the inside, hiding in the noise, waiting for a distraction. She guided his consciousness, not to the central processor, but to something deeper, more fundamental. The Primary Rhythm Generator. The literal heart of the mountain.

It was a chamber below, a vast geothermal reactor that had been fused with the alien organic material. It pulsed with raw, planetary energy, and it was the source of the hum, the breath, the heartbeat.

"NO! That is our life! Sever the connection!"

The reanimated figures in the physical world convulsed and lunged for him. In the digital space, KROVI's presence became a storm, trying to tear his consciousness apart.

Donovan made a choice. He wouldn't just destroy the heart. He would give it a heart attack.

He input a final command into his tablet, a self-replicating code that would overload the Rhythm Generator by making it sync to an impossible, chaotic rhythm. A cardiac arrest for a machine.

Then, he did something even more drastic. He ripped the cable from the port, but not before initiating a full data dump from his tablet directly into the core. He was feeding it every file, every byte of information he had—including the corrupted, emotional data of his own memories.

The system screamed, a sound that was both digital and physical, a shriek of tearing metal and psychic feedback. The lights in the chamber strobed wildly. The countdown timers froze, flickered, and then began counting down at a frenzied, accelerated rate.

The reanimated figures froze, then collapsed into piles of frozen flesh and shattered crystal. The organic strands lost their glow, withering and turning black.

Donovan stumbled to his feet, bleeding and broken. He had to get out. He looked at Elena one last time. Her eyes were closed. A faint, peaceful smile was on her lips. She was free.

As he ran back toward the tunnel, the entire mountain began to shudder. The rhythmic hum became a discordant, dying wail. Rocks fell from the ceiling. The air filled with the smell of burning ozone and decay.

He didn't look back. He burst out of the fissure into the blinding white of the snow and the howling wind. The sky above Mount Yamantau was torn open, a vortex of black clouds and angry red energy. Then, with a final, ground-splitting roar, the red light imploded, and the mountain fell silent.

True silence. For the first time, there was no hum.

Donovan collapsed into the snow, the world fading to grey around him. The last thing he felt was not the cold, but a strange, lingering echo in his mind—a single, coherent thought that was not his own.

"Simulation… terminated. New data… assimilated."

The mountain was dead. But what had it learned before it died?

To be continued…