Where Is Your Rider (OFFICIAL WATTPAD UPLOAD)

Chapter 1

Cold.

It was so, so cold.

Tubbo shivered violently, fiercely rubbing his hands together to warm them up a bit.

His sonar scanner, which could've gotten him out of here hours ago, was still offline, which meant that the batteries were definitely dead.

"Damn it," he mumbled.

He could've avoided the tunnels, but the pack of insects had had other ideas, leaving him trapped under at least a hundred feet of nuclear winter-frozen earth and mycelium and hopelessly lost in the cavernous tunnels.

He needed a new battery, but he doubted he'd be able to find a spare down here.

Also, Tubbo really wanted to scratch his nose—which was itching and running annoyingly in the biting cold—but if he took off his filtration mask, the toxins in the air would kill him in a matter of minutes.

Sighing, Tubbo kept going.

It was strange, he thought to himself, running his gloved fingers along the rough tunnel wall as he walked down the tunnel. For as long as he could remember, the world had been a stinking radioactive ball of ice, covered in a huge, toxic jungle that had been seeded by the fallout of an ancient war. And yet, the crumbling paper map he'd found once, dated 2057, said that the tunnels he was navigating were right under a city of the Old Ones, now nothing but ruined skeletal steel towers overgrown by the toxic jungle.

He'd been scavenging said ruins for scrap when the insects had caught his scent and forced him to flee into the tunnels.

His situation wasn't exactly ideal.

Out of nowhere, the ticking of the Geiger counter attached to his coat started to get much quicker.

Tubbo froze in his tracks.

"Radiation," he blurted, backpedaling. "Shit. Not this way. Gotta get back out of here."

He knew he wouldn't last long in extended radiation. As Uncle Phil had always said, if there's fast ticks, you'll be dead quick.

Tubbo had zero plans to turn into a Walker today.

He started moving as fast as he could back up the icy slope, biting his lip anxiously.

Fuck, it was cold down here.

He must've taken a wrong turn somewhere, because the ground pitched downhill again, and then Tubbo lost his balance.

With a shriek, his crampons skidded against the ice, and he slid down the tunnel.

"AAAAAAAAAA—" he screamed, his hands scrabbling on the slippery floor—

—He slammed into something.

"Oof!" Tubbo yelped as the impact knocked the wind out of him, and he scrambled to his feet.

He froze.

He'd hit a wall, but not a mycelium wall. He must've made it below the jungle's roots, because his fall had been stopped by a wall of rock.

And embedded in said rock...

"Holy moly," he mumbled, eyes widening in amazement as he stared up at the strange, huge circular metal door, pitted and rusted with age.

That was Old Ones' work.

Tubbo's hopes soared. Old fallout vaults like this were always the perfect places to find supplies and valuable ancient tech, and judging from how the door looked intact, this bunker probably hadn't been disturbed since before the war, before the jungle had first taken root.