narrow, unstable, and half-collapsed by debris, but it was the first route any of them had seen that might still lead upward.

Vaziri, barely able to stand, gave them the final override sequence for the hatch motors.

Whether he did it from remorse or survival no longer mattered.

Arman and the others moved fast.

They hauled two wounded men onto an equipment sled and pushed through the service duct while the mountain groaned around them.

Heat baked the metal walls.

At one point they had to crawl under a bent pipe with sparks dripping from it.

Reza sobbed through his respirator but kept moving.

Leila read the map by a failing hand lamp.

Behind them, Vaziri stumbled once, twice, then fell.

Arman turned back, but the colonel shook his head.

Go, he said.

At least let the truth reach the surface.

They left him there beside the wall he had helped turn into a prison.

The emergency hatch was jammed by pressure and warped steel, but the override sequence worked long enough to unlock the final restraint.

Together they forced it open a fraction, then wider.

Cold outside air poured down like a miracle.

When Arman climbed out, dawn was breaking over a landscape he barely recognized.

The mountainside was torn open in black scars.

Concrete mouths that had once been tunnel entrances were buried or split apart.

Vent shafts were twisted metal stumps.

Smoke rose from fractures in the rock where heat still boiled up from the ammunition burning below.

Rescue teams, stunned and undersupplied, were already digging at blocked access points with heavy equipment and bare hands.

Days later, satellite imagery and thermal readings would show the scale of the destruction at Khorramabad and the Tabriz-area complex.

Official casualty counts would be delayed, disputed, and diluted.

The number of dead, trapped, and missing across the broader underground network would remain politically radioactive.

But the physical damage was undeniable, and so was the collapse of the myth.

The missile cities had not simply been struck.

They had been exposed.

Arman handed over the recorder, the signed order, and the ledgers recovered from Chamber Seven.

Once the materials reached investigators and then leaked beyond the chain of command, the story changed forever.

Public rage no longer focused only on the strike itself.

Families of the missing demanded to know why their sons, brothers, and husbands had been ordered to stay in lower galleries after the blackout.

Why internal seals had been closed.

Why empty canisters had been counted as strength while real men were counted as expendable.

Political Supervisor Farrokh was never found.

Some said he died in a collapsed escape branch.

Others insisted he had escaped before the final entrances were buried.

Naderi’s body was later recovered near the private transit shaft.

Colonel Vaziri was found where Arman had left him, dead from blood loss and smoke inhalation, one hand still stretched toward the wall.

None of that brought back the men who had trusted the mountain.

In the weeks that followed, Arman could not stop thinking about the order that had changed everything.

Not the bombing order from above, but the underground order that had told thousands to remain where they were while the exits disappeared.

The strike had shattered concrete, steel, rock, and fuel.

The hidden command