His voice is sharp enough to cut the air, but it doesn't reach me fast enough. My body has already made the decision. The floor shifts beneath my next step, and I'm inside before I can stop myself.
And then the ground gives way.
It isn't a drop so much as a slow, surrendering slide—the floor loosening its grip and letting me fall through. I land hard, knees bending on instinct. Pain spikes up my legs but fades quickly. My breath catches, swallowed by the dark. The air rushes past like a whisper that doesn't want to be heard. For a heartbeat, there's nothing—no sound, no light—just the echo of movement and the dull thud of my pulse.
Then I see it.
Next to me, faint and glowing through the black—a door. Before I can even brace myself, I'm already reaching for it.
The door opens with a slow, obedient groan.
Inside—rows and rows of clothes. Not new, not fresh. Old uniforms, cloaks, and coats hung in endless lines. The air tastes of iron and age. For a moment, it feels like I've fallen into someone's forgotten past.
I step closer, brushing my hand along the nearest rack. The fabric is stiff with time, but familiar. Hunter Academy uniforms—mine among them. Brown coats, sharp collars, and the crest stitched in neat gold: a spear that becomes a key. My fingers hesitate there…
"Anna, report."
Bill's voice crackles softly in my ear, warm enough to slice through the unease.
I tap the side of my face. "Bill, I'm here. Fell through a service floor. Found some kind of storage room. Looks like a wardrobe bunker—Hunter uniforms, mostly. Old ones. Some newer gear too."
There's a pause. "Any movement?"
"None. Just dust and ghosts."
"Copy that. Check the room, grab anything useful. We lost your signal for a second—you alright?"
"Bruised pride, maybe." I smile, even though he can't see it. "I'll live."
"Stay sharp. This could be an old supply vault from the early days," Bill says.
I nod to myself and move deeper. There are civilian clothes mixed in—soft shirts, patched jackets, things people once lived in. I kneel by a low bin and find a mask half-buried beneath folded coats. It's smooth and black, with a thin visor that hides the eyes. I pick it up, testing the fit. It seals with a faint hiss, snug against my skin.
Something glints on a nearby shelf—a clock, small and square, pale blue with cracked paint. I pick it up. The second hand doesn't move, but when I turn it over, there's a faint hum.
The clock hums faintly against my palm, fragile as breath. I turn it over again, letting the dim light slide across its scratched surface. Dust clings to the edges, but something catches beneath it—letters, small and uneven, etched by hand along the metal rim.
I brush the grime away with my thumb.
"Niekada nepamiršk." (Eng. Never forget.)
The words sit there, soft but deliberate.
For a moment, the air in the room changes. It feels heavier. I can't tell whether the message was meant for me—or for anyone desperate enough to find this place.
"Bill?" I whisper, even though I know the line's gone quiet. Static answers—thin, distant.
Then nothing. The signal's dead.
I lower the clock and listen. Nothing moves. Not even the slow hum of an old camera lens. The silence feels clean in a way that surveillance never does. I tilt my head back, scanning the ceiling—no lenses, no vents except the one I crawled through.
Whoever built this room meant it to be invisible, even to its creators.
Alone.
The word settles somewhere in my ribs, not as fear but as freedom.
I clip the clock to my belt; it's lighter than it looks. The faint hum deepens, steady now, like it's alive in its own quiet way. I take one last look around. The rows of coats stand unmoving, fabric hushed. Dust motes spin in thin bands of light that leak from cracks in the ceiling. Everything here feels preserved—like the air has been holding its breath, waiting for someone to disturb it.
My boots whisper across the floor. At the far wall, behind a rack of cloaks, I find it—a seam that doesn't belong. A narrow line where the wall and floor don't quite meet. I crouch, run my gloved fingers along it, and feel a small gap, the soft pull of air moving through.
Another door.
This one isn't mechanical. It's disguised—camouflaged under layers of paint and dust. I press along the seam until I find the latch, a small iron handle recessed into the wall. When I pull it, the door hesitates, then opens with a low exhale, as though it's been holding its breath for years.
A corridor stretches beyond—narrow, dark, lined with stone that sweats faintly with condensation. The air smells of wet earth and oil. A faint blue light pulses at the end, too dim to read but enough to draw the eye.
I glance back at the room one last time—the hanging uniforms, the forgotten dust, the quiet clockwork ghosts. Never forget.
The mask waits in my hand. Black, smooth, impassive. My thumb runs over the visor's edge before I lift it to my face. The seal tightens with a soft hiss, closing me inside my own breath. The sound of the world muffles instantly—heart, air, fabric—all wrapped in the quiet rhythm of filtered oxygen.
"Alright," I murmur, mostly to myself. "Let's see what you're hiding."
The corridor greets me with a shiver of cold. My boots find the steps easily, each one echoing in the empty hall. The mask's visor tints the world blue-gray, turning the walls to the color of faded memories. The clock hums once more, faint but certain, like a heartbeat guiding me forward.
And as I push open the next door, the air moves—slow, deliberate, as if the corridor itself is exhaling.
The corridor opens wider the further I go, as if the walls have been holding something in for too long and are finally letting it breathe. The air grows colder, heavier. The hum from the clock matches the faint vibration under my boots—a pulse running through the stone itself.
It feels less like I'm walking into a hallway and more like I'm being led somewhere that remembers me fairytales.
The walls begin to change. Smooth metal replaces rough stone. The floor evens out, covered in dust so thick it muffles every step. There are markings under it—lines, numbers, initials—but I can't make out much through the grime.
At the end of the hall, a door waits half-open, light seeping out from inside. Not bright, not natural—an artificial glow, the kind that flickers when power barely holds on.
I push it open with my shoulder. The hinges groan softly, but the room inside is silent.
A control center—or what used to be one. Rows of consoles line the walls, their glass screens cracked and dulled by time. Papers are scattered across the floor, yellowed and curling. The smell of burnt circuits and old metal sits thick in the air.
I set the clock on the nearest desk. Its faint hum answers the low buzz coming from a terminal still running near the far end of the room. The screen blinks in uneven rhythm, like a dying heartbeat.
When I approach, the light stabilizes.
ARCHIVE ACCESS: PROJECT REFRACTION // HUNTER ACADEMY INTERNAL
I pause. The title alone shouldn't exist. No student records, no mission logs, no official briefings had ever mentioned "Refraction." The word feels wrong. Familiar, but wrong—like a term I've tried to forget.
I swipe the dust from the keyboard and press a key. The display flickers, lines of faded text crawling up the screen.
Shipment 14—Status: Cleared for Transfer.
Total Units: 26.
Origin: Hunter Academy Branch 3.
Destination: Zone 12 // Civ-Industrial Holdings.
My throat tightens. I scroll down.
Shipment 15—Status: In Transit.
Total Units: 32.
Origin: Academy South Sector.
Notes: Training period incomplete—authorized by Command Unit 01.
The words tilt inside my head until the room feels smaller, colder.
I keep reading. Each line cuts deeper, repeating the same pattern: batches of numbers, dates, designations that I know too well—ages, classifications, specializations. Hunter trainees. Taken before graduation, marked as "cleared for reassignment."
And every document ends with the same signature block:
Approved: Academy Oversight Committee / Bill Corrin (TL01)
My breath stumbles. My stomach knots. I step back, needing air that doesn't exist down here. The hum of the clock grows louder, sharper, syncing with my pulse. I reach for it, needing to ground myself, but when my fingers brush the metal, the world seems to tilt again.
The documents burn on the screen. My training tells me to extract copies, record everything, report to teacher—but teacher is the problem, isn't it? The Hunter Academy isn't just training soldiers. It's selling them.
Human trafficking, dressed up in military precision. The "units" weren't lost in missions—they were moved. Handed over. Converted into assets, labor, experiments. Whatever the world outside was willing to pay for.
The silence around me feels wrong now—too intentional, too heavy.
If this is true—if the Hunter Academy has been feeding its own into the system—then everything we fought for was built on bones.
I close the terminal, its hum fading to silence.
The darkness returns. It presses in until it feels alive, breathing with me. My training tells me to stand still, to let the eyes adjust, to listen before I move.
And I do.
I listen.
The air has a pulse down here—slow, methodical, mechanical. Not a machine exactly, but something old. A pattern beneath the silence.
I shift my weight. The floor responds with a soft echo that travels further than it should, vanishing into a space too deep to measure. My instincts sharpen instantly—shoulders tighten, lungs slow, heartbeat drops to a steady rhythm.
Something about this place feels wrong.
Not dangerous yet—aware.
I start walking again, but quietly now. Every step is deliberate. My body knows the drill better than my thoughts do; the Hunter Academy burned that into me long ago.
Observe. Assess. Adapt.
But it's different now. There's no team at my back, no voice in my ear to tell me I'm doing fine. Just me and the shape of the air.
I reach the end of the hall where a faint trail of footprints cuts through the dust.
Not mine. Smaller. Lighter.
They weave, pause, continue—a staggered rhythm that speaks of someone running, someone afraid. The edges are blurred with age, but they're there.
Someone else has been here.
My pulse flickers faster, but not from fear. It's the knowing that comes before thought—the primal sense that this place is watching, waiting to see what I'll do.
I crouch, tracing one of the prints with a gloved finger. The dust feels damp underneath.
Not recent, but not ancient either. Maybe months. Maybe less.
The Hunter Academy always said instincts were dangerous, that logic was cleaner, safer.
But logic builds walls. Instinct finds cracks.
And right now, something in my bones is whispering this wasn't supposed to be found.
The air shifts again—a faint pressure drop.
Someone opened a door.
I don't move. I let the mask filter the breath, my head tilting to catch the sound. It's distant, two corridors over, metal against metal. Slow. Controlled.
Not panic. Not escape. Routine.
Someone's still down here.
The thought settles like a weight in my stomach, but I don't reach for my weapon yet.
I wait.
My training pulls every sense into alignment—the smell of ozone, the way the dust hangs slower than it should, the vibration running through the soles of my boots.
There's a rhythm beneath the hum, a faint repetition. Four beats, pause, two beats, pause. Machinery, maybe. Or footsteps echoing through layered metal.
I follow the instinct to move—slow, silent, my fingers brushing the wall for orientation. The texture shifts halfway down: stone turns to smooth alloy, colder to the touch. Lines of faint light run under the surface, pulsing irregularly, like veins that forgot how to flow.
My body tenses before I consciously understand why.
The air ahead feels wrong—thin and sharp, like standing too close to the edge of something that doesn't want to be seen.
I've felt this before—on missions that went bad, just seconds before an ambush, when the world holds its breath because it knows you're about to see something you shouldn't.
My hand finds the hilt at my thigh.
I draw the blade quietly, the sound a whisper of steel over polymer.
The corridor bends left. I move with it, hugging the wall, careful not to disturb the dust. My steps match the beat of my breathing—four heartbeats forward, pause, listen.
Ahead, faint light leaks from another open door.
It flickers against the wall like fire reflected off water.
I stop at the threshold, breathing steady, pulse silent. Every sense inside me sharpens to a single point.
This isn't discovery anymore.
I ease the door open an inch more and peer through. The light comes from low ground panels, faint blue, steady enough to outline the space. Inside—rows again, but not of consoles.
Cages.
I blink once. My eyes refocus. Metal cages stacked two high, welded into the walls. Empty, most of them. Rusted in places. But the floor tells a different story—scuff marks, stains, the pattern of weight and struggle.
The smell hits next—sterile chemicals layered over sweat and something faintly organic. Not rot. Preservation.
My body goes cold before my thoughts can catch up.
I step inside, every movement controlled. My boots avoid the wet patches on instinct. One of the cages still hums faintly with low power, its lock blinking a weak orange.
Something inside the far corner catches my eye—papers, tied together with old wire, half-soaked from leaking pipes above.
I cross the room, crouch, and lift the bundle carefully. Most of the ink has bled into gray smears, but a few words remain legible:
"Intake Schedule – Human Resources Division."
"Hunter Cadet Evaluation."
"Asset Transfer Approval."
My jaw tightens. I don't need to read the rest.
The instincts in me—the part that has always known when to duck, when to fire, when to trust—start screaming now, but not to run.
Todig deeper.
This wasn't just a room of storage or testing. This was a checkpoint. The place they sorted us.
I glance back at the door. The hallway behind it glows faintly with that same blue pulse, as if the facility itself is breathing again after being silent for too long. The air tastes like electricity and secrets.
Someone left this. Someone wanted it to be found.
But it's not curiosity driving me now—it's something deeper. The instinct that says if I stop now, I'll never be free of this place.
So I move again. Quiet. Focused.
Down the next corridor, toward whatever's still breathing in the dark.
The air thickens as I walk, carrying a new scent—metal, heat, something faintly alive. The pulse beneath the floor quickens, faint vibrations syncing with my steps. Ahead, the light flickers once, twice… then steadies, too steady, too deliberate.
I pause.
That's not a malfunction. That's a signal.
Someone, or something, knows I'm here.
For a heartbeat, the world holds its breath. Then, from the far end of the corridor, a sound answers the silence. Not a machine. Not the hum of power.
A voice. It speaks my name.
"Anna."