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Artyom confesses that 10 years earlier, he and his friend went to the surface at the neighbouring station, Botanical Gardens. Hunter leaves, but asks to speak to Artyom. VDNKh is facing increasing attacks from mysterious creatures known as "The Dark Ones", who inspire terror throughout the station. The three meet and discuss the situation in VDNKh. Artyom spends his time on patrol in the tunnels and working in the mushroom factories.Īrtyom meets a man named Hunter, who is looking for Sukhoi. Sukhoi is now one of the authorities of VDNKh, one of the stations in the Metro, and has raised Artyom as his son. He was saved from a horde of carnivorous rats that killed his mother and the inhabitants of his station as a baby by Sukhoi, a military officer. The protagonist of the novel is a 24-year-old man named Artyom who was born before the nuclear war. Within that station, the events of Metro 2033 unfold.

While most of the stations were controlled by the three main factions, some stations formed an independent alliances, including the station VDNKh ("Exhibition"). Other stations were outright destroyed by animals, mutated by the nuclear fallout. As the war raged, the stations who refused to join either side were either demolished by the factions, merged into the Hanza regime, raided by criminal bandits, or formed their own independent states.

Factions emerged, ranging from the independent peacekeepers the "Rangers of the Order", to the neo-Stalinist "Red Line" faction and the neo-Nazi "Fourth Reich", to the more powerful factions such as "Polis", which contained the greatest military power and the most knowledge of the past, and the "Hanza" regime, which controlled the main ring of metro stations by its sheer economic power.Īs these groups began to evolve, the Red Line and the Fourth Reich quickly entered a state of war, as both sought to destroy the other. Eventually, communities settled within the underground train stations and developed into independent states over time. In 2013, a nuclear war forced a large amount of Moscow's surviving population to relocate to the city's Metro system in search of refuge.
