My name is Crispin Cross.
I’m a retired B-rank hunter, now head of security at the Enclave. A classified, high-tech facility beneath Red Creek City, owned by the Red Clover Corporation, the largest commercial entity in the southeastern hemisphere. Our mandate was simple: develop the perfect hunters to clear the monster gates plaguing our world.
We wanted a weapon that never tired. That felt no pain, no fear. Something with an insatiable hunger for killing, designed to keep fighting long after any living thing should have stopped.
We succeeded.
And like any successful corporation protecting its investment, we engineered a viral failsafe—ensuring no competitor could ever replicate what we’d built.
Then, the incident happened. The Enclave’s security protocols triggered automatically, sealing the facility and cutting it off entirely from the outside world. I wasn’t on shift that day. Lucky me.
The corporation sent their best extraction team down to find out what went wrong. They didn’t come back. Instead, a couple survivors surfaced. We seized them the moment they broke containment and dragged them straight to our Red Creek facility, hidden in the city’s General Hospital.
Among the two survivors, one showed signs of mutation and was added to Project Goliath while the other was designated Project Aegis. While those survivors were being processed, my team of elite hunters and I went back down and reopened the Enclave.
We learned that the virus engineered to protect our proprietary product had mutated far beyond anything we’d anticipated, killing everyone inside. It didn’t just kill them. The virus reanimated them into the perfect soldiers we had succeeded in creating. Except now, they had no built-in failsafe.
I survived thanks to my team’s sacrifice. After reporting the catastrophic situation back to the Red Clover Corporation, we regrouped at Red Creek General Hospital, awaiting further orders.
The local news confirmed their true intentions before our own tactical comms did. The Red Clover Corporation had officially declared Red Creek City a loss, a necessary sacrifice. They were turning the entire city into a massive, live-field testing ground for Project Goliath before nuking it to erase all evidence and containing the infection. My team had just been assigned to assist Major Bane, a former A-rank hunter, with the operation.
Unfortunately for them, I wasn’t the Crispin Cross they thought they were dealing with. I was Crispin Chase: the Novel Raider.
Accepting our official orders, we returned to the secure facility on the lower levels. One of my subordinates greeted me grimly, snapping a hurried salute, "Sir, while we were securing and transporting the scientists when the infection spread to the general hospital, Project Aegis escaped in the chaos. She’s the asset who showed the highest compatibility with the virus."
"What about her tracking chip?" I asked coldly, seamlessly playing my part as Crispin Cross, the ruthless head of security.
Project Aegis was actually one of the two survivors, Aegis McColon, from the Enclave. She was the protagonist of this novel, destined to slaughter Major Bane along with the engineered biological monster that was Project Goliath and every soldier under his command.
The role of Enclave’s head of security gave me a strong head start with high security clearance, abundant resources, and authority over the facility, but it came with a corporate slave collar, one that promised a disastrous, bloody ending if I didn’t do something about it.
"It seems to have been fried during her escape, sir," the agent answered immediately. "We are currently trying to locate her using the city’s surveillance system."
"Once you do, inform me immediately. Also, Major Bane is arriving soon. Make the necessary arrangements to receive him," I ordered, dismissing him. I needed to buy myself a quiet minute to assess my situation and devise an actual game plan.
The agent snapped another crisp salute and hurried away, leaving me alone in the sterile, fluorescent-lit corridor of the facility.
I finally let out a slow, controlled breath. My tactical armor suddenly felt five times heavier. In Resident Hazard II, Major Bane’s arrival meant the real horror was about to kick off. He wasn’t coming to inspect the facility, he was arriving to kick-start the first live deployments of Project Goliath in the field, unleashing a literal bio-weapon directly into the city crawling with infected.
A cold sweat broke out across the back of my neck as I ran through the plot. Only Project Aegis and a bunch of her friends survived the novel’s end. Once Major Bane unleashed Project Goliath into the city, the company’s remaining private soldiers—us—began to drop like flies going up against Project Aegis and her friends.
Major Bane viewed my men and me as nothing more than expendable data points. All he cared about was testing Project Goliath against Project Aegis before the corporate nuke’d the city by sunrise to contain the virus and erase every shred of evidence.
If I stayed here acting like a loyal corporate drone, I was guaranteed to either be killed by the protagonist or vaporized in the nuclear blast. My priority was to survive this novel. To do that, all I needed to do was get out of the city safely before sunrise.
However, as a corporate slave, I couldn’t just walk out the front door without triggering immediate desertion protocols. I couldn’t just run. I had to make the necessary arrangements before Major Bane took command of the facility away from me.
With the novel plot tucked away in my mind and the absolute authority I held as the head of security, there was a vast amount I could achieve. However, I was severely short on time with my recent orders.
I had about fifteen minutes, twenty if I was lucky. After that, Major Bane would own this facility and everything in it, including me.
I hurried down the hall to start making arrangements before it was too late. With my security clearance, I entered the lab holding Project Goliath and got to work.