The facility didn’t try to hide what it was.
Smooth stone walls framed the compound, lined with polished metal sigils—active wards etched in pristine goldleaf. A pair of banners fluttered over the front gate, bearing the heraldry of House Rovar and the seal of the Adventurer’s Guild. Even the cobbled pathway leading to the front office was swept clean, lined with glowing lanterns enchanted for warmth and visibility.
Cain watched from a rise across the ridge. Even underground, the compound glowed with bureaucratic confidence. Well-lit courtyards, uniformed guards, paved roads to every door. The main office was a two-story structure with reinforced shutters and tasteful wood paneling—designed less like a military base, and more like a government service building.
But the real structure lay deeper.
Behind the main building stretched a massive containment yard, neatly sectioned into magical pens. The monsters weren’t caged with steel or chains. They were controlled with runes, enchanted muzzles, and collar-bound narcotics. The stronger ones were isolated, but most were weak and sedated—bred for quantity. A few even bore signs indicating how many were required to earn a single skill point.
Everything was labeled.
Everything was permitted.
Cain’s gaze lingered on a posted sign by the walkway.
Please notify the front desk after obtaining your skill point.
According to the information from Lila, the rear checkpoint was understaffed, even for a night shift. There were two guards instead of the usual six.
Night shifts tended to make people sloppy, but it wasn’t like very many people were stupid enough to attack a government site.
He exhaled slowly, then activated Stealth.
It wasn’t enough to vanish, but it was enough to blur. It would delay any enemy response by at least a heartbeat.
Then he moved.
Like a blast from a cannon, his boots skimmed the earth. The silence muffled his approach just enough that the first sentry at the north checkpoint didn’t register the blur crossing the distance. He blinked as a wind shear passed, then Cain’s palm struck the side of his head like a cannonball.
The body hit the wall with a wet thud.
=You have defeated (1) Human=
The second guard started to turn, reaching for something on his belt.
Cain snapped sideways, activating Breakstep. The kinetic pulse knocked the man’s feet out from under him before Cain’s knee collided with his jaw.
=You have defeated (1) Human=
=Level up! Stealth+1 is now Rank 3/100=
He landed softly.
Behind him, Lexi touched down lightly from the ridge. Her chains hung loose in her grip like dead snakes, her eyes flat and unreadable.
They advanced past the checkpoint.
The rear facility wall was warded, but not monitored. Most facilities tended to do a bad job of protecting against threats on the inside.
Cain coiled his fist and punched a sigil-carved stone. The wall rippled and cracked with a low whump, a puff of dust shooting from the seams like a cough.
Inside the compound, the air changed. It reeked of ammonia and sedatives, and the aura of the place felt dank and oppressive.
Runes glowed dimly from the containment troughs, casting pale green light on the monsters inside. A half-dozen reptilian hybrids with stunted limbs and iron-bound jaws. Their eyes were glassy, their limbs slack, like puppets left too long in the rain.
Each pen bore a polished plaque, etched in two languages for convenience:
Chimera Class-B (Gen6) – 50 for 1 Skill Point
It was clean, clinical, and efficient. A slaughterhouse.
Cain’s eyes swept over the pens. Some were open-air, others were glassed off with viewing slits and instruction diagrams beside them.
Lexi said nothing, but the chains in her hands twitched like a muscle spasm. She wasn’t looking at the monsters.
A tall man in a Healer’s Guild tabard emerged from a side door, clipboard in hand, yawning as he strolled past a pen full of sickly bugbears. Behind him, two others in cloaks dragged a fresh corpse from a viewing chamber and tossed it down a chute.
Cain crossed the distance in a flash, shadows clinging to his steps. The clipboard hadn’t even hit the ground before the healer’s body crumpled beside it, his neck twisted clean.
=You have defeated (1) Human=
The two cloaked figures turned too late.
Cain launched forward, shattering the stone underfoot. His fists slammed into them with the weight of a falling hammer, one to the chest, one to the temple. The first folded. The second staggered back with a strangled cry.
=You have defeated (1) Human=
Lexi’s chains snapped through the air. They wrapped around the man’s throat like vipers, jerking him off his feet.
Cain threw another punch, driving his knuckles into the dying man’s chest. The blood on his hand shimmered faintly red as he finally managed to trigger Execute again.
=Execute +2=
-Passive Skill-
->Mana: N/A
->Rank: 2/100
->Description: Execute a wounded enemy and gain a burst of energy and speed.
->Threshold: 20%
One ending feeds the next.
=You have defeated (1) Human=
The world surged.
Something broke loose behind his ribs. Heat surged into his lungs, lightning down his limbs. His breath hitched. His body coiled like a loaded spring.
His next step cracked the tile beneath him as he put too much force into it.
And then he moved.
He shot forward, a shadow dragged by thunder, finding the next squad of handlers. His elbow crashed into a jaw. His knee shattered a thighbone. Another handler managed to raise a warded baton in time to catch Cain’s boot with his teeth.
=You have defeated (1) Human=
=You have defeated (1) Human=
=You have defeated (1) Human=
=Level up! Execute+2 is now Rank 3/100=
He didn’t stop moving, aiming for non-lethal strikes to initiate and following up with an instant execution. Every kill pushed him faster, stronger. A red echo trailed behind him, a phantom of impact, until even the air flinched when he arrived.
Cain reached the center of the yard. The containment pens gave way to a low-lying operations building nestled beneath a canopy of interwoven warding glyphs. The air shimmered above it from residual mana.
This wasn’t the heart of the facility, but he thought it might be part of the spine. Logistics and field controls were integral to any operation.
A pair of reinforced doors blocked the entrance. A glowing sigil above the handle flared at his presence, presumably scanning for some sort of access badge that he didn’t have.
He had something much faster, though.
He drove his heel into the seam between the doors.
The buckled inward with a shriek of bending steel. The hallway behind was utilitarian: dull stone, mana-conducting conduits inset along the ceiling in clean lines, and posted evacuation instructions.
He moved quickly.
The control room sat behind thick warded glass, almost like an oversight. But the room itself pulsed with quiet authority: softly glowing panels, a gently rotating scrying orb, filing pedestals with floating clipboards. The air was noticeably colder here.
Cain could see three figures inside—one seated by some sort of orb, another flipping through clipboard pages, and a third sipping tea beside a faintly humming console.
He smashed through the glass.
By the time any of them realized he was there, they were already dead.
He dropped the first one with a throat jab and shattered the second’s ribs with a blow to the side. The third blinked at him stupidly before Cain drove his face into the console.
=You have defeated (1) Human=
=You have defeated (1) Human=
=You have defeated (1) Human=
=Level up! Stealth+1 is now Rank 4/100=
He paused. Something on the console drew his eye.
A big red button.
“I thought these only existed in movies,” he muttered.
Lexi stepped up beside him.
The button pulsed faintly beneath a rune-sealed casing, labeled in clean, block letters:
Plan B.
No instructions. No warnings.
“I’m kind of tempted to push it…”
Lexi gave him a look. “Even though we don’t know what it does?”
“It’s a big red button,” he replied. “I assume it’s some sort of kill switch.”
“…Sure,” she replied, unconvinced. “For what?”
The silence stretched.
Behind them, the scrying orb passively flickered between scenes, showing live images of different pens.
Cain reached for a dusty clipboard tucked beside the console.
“Skill Point Ledger”
It listed dozens of monster types with checkmarks beside kill counts.
Next to each: a name, a guild, a monetary value.
He flipped the page.
More names. More quotas. A handwritten scrawl near the bottom caught his eye:
Commander reserved a 50-mark pen.
He slowly set the clipboard back down.
Lexi’s voice came soft, almost a whisper.
“…This could have been me.”
Cain stared straight ahead.
“Not anymore,” he replied. “Not for you, and not much longer for these creatures either.”
“You’re going to free them all?”
He shrugged. “That sounds like a logistical nightmare. Let’s take this one step at a time.”
The scrying orb flickered again—first the northeast pen, then the front gate, then a hallway he didn’t recognize. The transitions were slow, almost sleepy. No sign of movement. No sign of alarm.
Lexi leaned over the desk, brows furrowed.
“Do you think this thing remembers images it’s seen?”
“Like a recording function?” Cain considered for a moment. “Not sure. I’m not too familiar with what you can do with magic yet.”
He turned his attention to a rack of labeled vials on a nearby shelf—sedatives, stimulants, stabilizers. Some bore the mark of the Healer’s Guild, others just crude tags with handwritten notes. Cain held one up to the light, then set it down without comment.
Lexi drifted toward the glass wall they’d entered through. She stood in silence, chains loose at her sides.
“…Something wrong?” Cain asked.
She shook her head, but didn’t turn around. “No. Just thinking.”
Her eyes flicked to him. Then down.
“…You’ve done a lot for me even though you barely know me. But I can’t figure out why. I don’t matter.”
Cain sighed internally.
“I mean,” she continued, her voice low. “I’m not that useful in a fight. I can’t keep up with you. I just… follow you around and occasionally try to do something.”
He opened his mouth, but she kept going, the words fragile.
“I thought maybe if I followed you here, I’d figure it out. What I’m supposed to be. But I don’t feel any different. I’m still scared. Still angry. I want to be more like you, but…” She trailed off, frowning. “It’s kind of obvious that you don’t want anyone to be like you.”
Cain watched her quietly.
She looked away. “I don’t even know if you want me to be here.”
A long silence rested between them.
Then, softly, Cain said, “You’re right. We haven’t known each other long. But let’s be honest—if I didn’t want you here, do you think you’d still be here?”
Her head snapped up.
“I’m a destroyer, Lexi. I break things. I broke your slave contract. I’m breaking this facility. I’m going to break this city and the mercenaries who ruined your life.”
She stared at him, almost entranced.
He glanced back toward the orb.
“…I don’t need you to be like me. I need you to be what you want.”
He paused, his jaw quivering slightly.
“And I need you to survive the aftermath of my war.”
The words hung there for a moment, suspended in the cold, sterile air. Lexi didn’t respond right away. Her eyes shimmered with something unspoken—not tears, not quite—but the ache of a dam straining under pressure.
She nodded once. A small, uncertain motion. But it was something.
Cain turned his gaze back to the scrying orb. The scene had changed again—this time settling on a dim, glass-walled pen tucked near what looked like the lower containment hallway. On the back wall, it was labeled Sector E in big bold stencil. Inside, two young figures lay curled together on the floor. Dark-furred cat ears peeked out from their hairlines.
Catkin.
Lexi saw them.
Her breath caught.
Cain didn’t need to say anything. He took a moment to study a map near the door and then stepped toward the exit.
Lexi followed.
They followed the path from the control room, guided by the flickering memory of the scrying orb’s image and the path he memorized.
Lexi walked beside him in silence, her chains dragging lightly behind her.
As they turned the corner, the hallway narrowed. The air here was colder, less processed.
After a couple of minutes, the pen’s viewing window came into sight.
Lexi stopped.
On the other side of the glass sat two beastkin girls. Catkin, like her. One was barely into her teens, the other not much older. Their wrists were bound with collars instead of chains like she wore. Their hair was unbrushed, and their eyes were wide with fatigue.
They didn’t move or speak.
They looked through the glass dumbly, like they had lost the ability to process information.
Lexi stepped forward until her hand touched the pane.
No sound came from her lips. Her fingers curled slightly, claws gently scratching the glass as if unsure whether to knock or scream.
Then, softly, she said, “They’re from the south. The fur pattern on their ears… they’re from a tribe we used to trade with. They weren’t fighters.”
She pressed her forehead to the glass. “What are they doing here?”
But, of course, there was no one to answer.
Cain placed a hand on her shoulder.
“This is just one more reason to destroy this place.”
She placed one hand over his.
A second passed.
Then another.
And then the hallway behind them blinked with movement.
Cain’s eyes narrowed.
“Down!” he barked, shoving her to the ground.
A burst of wind rushed past them as a pair of bolts exploded against the wall. Lexi dropped instinctively, her chains coiling behind her like a defensive shroud. Cain spun, already reaching for the wall as more footsteps rang out.
Three adventurers rounded the bend, followed by two more white-robed figures trailing behind.
A red bolt of magic screamed through the corridor, shattering the ceiling tile above Cain’s head. Shards rained down like glass hail. He lunged forward, closing the gap with terrifying speed, but one of the adventurers was already chanting.
“Bind.”
Rings of golden light snapped around his limbs, slowing his charge but not managing to stop him. Another bolt clipped his shoulder, staggering him for half a step, but unable to penetrate his indestructible clothes.
He slammed his elbow into the first man’s throat. Another raised a shield just in time to catch Cain’s knee—but the impact cracked the shield in half and sent its bearer hurtling back into the mages behind him.
One of the white-robed figures dropped to a knee, touching two fingers to the tile. “Sanctifiation.”
A burst of holy light erupted under Cain’s feet, sizzling into his flesh. His vision dimmed around the edges.
Lexi cried out from behind him, struggling to rise through the glare. Her chains twitched uselessly.
Cain forced a step forward, then another. Every nerve screamed in protest.
Another bolt of magic slammed into his chest, knocking him back.
A massive man bearing the mark of a mercenary on his cloak surged from a side hallway, wielding a hammer that crackled with lightning. Cain barely ducked under the first swing—but the second caught his side and sent him skidding across the tile. Sparks danced across his ribs.
Before he could recover, a voice rang out—clear, sharp, commanding.
“Hold.”
Everything stopped.
From the far end of the corridor, a wall of armored figures stepped into view. Knights in black and silver, bearing the seal of the duke’s personal guard. Between their ranks strode a tall woman in gilded plate, helm under one arm.
Cain recognized her from the plaza.
Commander Aldric.
Her eyes swept the hall with surgical precision, taking in the bodies, the broken glass, the pens beyond.
Her gaze settled on Cain.
“Are you the one the dungeon breaker warned us about?”
He rose slowly, breathing hard. The burns on his side stung.
Aldric didn’t draw her weapon.
She didn’t need to.
Behind her, more joined the line—a woman in crimson robes wreathed in elemental flame. An adventurer brandishing twin enchanted blades. A silent figure crouched in the air like a makeshift perch, arrow knocked and pointed at Cain’s heart. A faint flicker in the shadows revealed the presence of a Thieves’ Guild agent, masked and coiled, flipping a dagger between gloved fingers.
“That’s right,” he finally replied. “I’m Cain.”
She studied him, intrigued.
“Do you understand the consequences of your actions here?”
Cain grinned. “Probably not—I’m not that arrogant. But I understand enough that I’m willing to take the risk.”
She sighed. “You’ve slaughtered citizens of the Kingdom and attacked a state facility. If it were limited to murder, you might have gotten out with a light sentence, but this facility is important.”
Cain rolled his eyes. “I get all that. And I do care. Really. I wasn’t completely sure how important this facility was to you, but this…” He gestured to the array of people surrounding them. “A response like this tells me that I’m doing some real damage.”
“You’re not stupid,” she said. “You knew we’d come. We watched you before taking action. The moment you reached the control room, it’s like you lost all sense of urgency. What is your objective?”
A faint rustle from behind him drew his attention. He turned just in time to see Lexi yanked upward by her chains.
The chains scraped and then snapped taut.
Her body hit the wall with a crack. Blood splattered across the stone as her feet dangled.
A knight stood over her, having managed to slip past without Cain noticing.
Aldric turned to her, then back to Cain. “I recognize her. A slave belonging to the ducal house…”
For just a heartbeat, Cain didn’t move. A thread of emotion slipped behind his eyes—then vanished.
His voice came low and flat. “She’s not my concern.”
Lexi’s head jerked up, even through the pain. Her lips parted, just slightly.
Cain didn’t look at her.
“She was following me,” he continued. “Nothing more. You can kill her, threaten her, drag her back to whatever noble sponsored this nightmare—I won’t stop you.”
The knight holding her faltered. Aldric raised a hand.
“…You’re bluffing,” she said, eyes narrowing.
Cain shrugged. “Try me.”
The knight threw Lexi to the ground and stomped on her hand.
She screamed in pain, trying to recoil, but her broken fingers were pinned beneath his boot.
His fingers twitched—barely. He managed to suppress it.
“I’ve seen what you do to monsters,” he continued. “And frankly? I don’t really care. I’m not some moralising fool. The reality is that she exists in a world that hates her, and she had to come to terms with that fact before it was too late. Looks like it’s too late.”
He shrugged. “Oh well.”
Lexi stared at Cain like she didn’t recognize the man before her. Her shoulders curled inward.
Aldric studied him carefully, then gave a quiet signal. The knight holding Lexi stepped back, keeping a grip on her chains. She slumped against the stone, dazed and silent, cradling her broken fingers against her chest.
“You think you have nothing to lose,” Aldric observed.
Cain smiled. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
She took a step forward. “You’re surrounded by A-rank adventurers and elites from all of the guilds of Cairel. Knights are blocking every exit. You’re outmatched in every category that matters.”
“Probably,” he agreed.
“If you’re planning to commit suicide, I don’t recommend it. The temple placed a barrier over this facility—your respawn point will automatically be reassigned to Cairel. There is no way out.”
His eyes flicked past her—back down the corridor.
Her voice sharpened. “Will you come quietly?”
He slowly shook his head.
“No.”
Project Knightfall 