There's only one tunnel from the cavern systems up to the surface, heavily guarded and rigged to bury anything that tries to ascend under several thousand tonnes of rocks and rubble but everyone's still afraid of what wanders in the darkness and silence of the old undercities.
Back before they were broken by the watchers (countless eyes and even more hands on a singular stem-like body), we used to have a system of cameras and thermal monitors left from when the last people were able to live there. Then more and more creatures ascended from even greater depths and drove everyone up to the surface.
One by one they blinded our subterranean eyes, moving slowly but methodically til we were forced to rig the tunnel and threaten them with darkness or death. They wait just out of eyesight and since our eyes have begun adjusting back to sunlight we see even less and they move even closer.
On a good day the light forces them right to the very back of the tunnel, just at the dropping point, and we have enough room to maintain the detonators without risking our lives as much. On a bad day we're all prepared to evacuate and trigger the collapse while the creatures dare us to try.
They've left us with one singular camera, one live feed showing the steadily moving sides of a mass that might have been people once. Possibly even the people who chose to descend in the face of certain death rather than join the rest of us on the surface.
Whatever they've become is far cry from what they were when we last saw them.
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