Cain was strolling through the outskirts of Coeur d’Alene, eating some tuna. A little bland, but he wasn’t one to complain. Most of the houses near the edge of the forest were practically melted, courtesy of the many shaggy buffalo that attempted to get to the center of the town last night. The crack in the ground Cain brought forth last night also apparently extended for miles, allowing a lot of the officers on the East side of town to take a breather, using the hole in the ground as a defensible structure. They were already putting up their own forms of barricades behind the crack, in preparation for the next night.

He actually woke up well before noon, but still felt well-rested. A little bit of extra testing with his Elements clued him in that Vertex was responsible for how he was able to operate well on such little sleep. Tom wanted to get the Mullan patrol group, and a few of the more competent officers to take a hike into the woods in the afternoon, hoping to scout out the area and figure out if all the animals were coming from somewhere.

The message system that Ryan had set up the night before used some strange method of long distance light signalling, allowing for morse code to be sent back and forth over many miles. He didn’t really understand how it worked, which was tied to a realization Cain had made when talking with Ryan once he woke up.

Apparently the officer found it the height of simplicity to accurately send the light signals at the exact place a recorder was waiting to take down the messages. There was a former city council member in Hayden who could do the same thing, and communication was booming between the two. Tom barely let the officer get a couple hours of sleep in the morning.

On the other hand, Ryan admitted to Cain that he couldn’t do nearly as much as Cain had with solid, claiming that it just didn’t “click,” with him. And Cain completely understood. Using light didn’t come nearly as naturally as solid did, or was as fun using as force or resistance were.

Another discovery he had made was that every written use of his Cardinals was recorded in the Numeral. He had two additional Prodigal entries, each on their own pages.

Prodigal - Secondary Ordinal - Second Cardinal (Solid) - Spiked Barricade

Prodigal - Secondary Ordinal - Second Cardinal (Solid) - Crack

Those two in addition to his Spike Prodigal all had the symbols he used to form them on the pages, as well as an outline of their effects. Cain felt as if he could improve on the Prodigals, change the way they were used. But on the same note he also knew these Prodigals were permanent additions to his Numeral. There was no getting rid of them, and there were only so many pages he had in total. 42 to be exact. 39 left.

“Did you find what you’re looking for?” Officer O’Reilly asked Cain. The man accompanied Cain to the edge of town, but split off at some point. He apparently just got back.

“No, not yet. Just a few more minutes,” Cain replied.

The hoofprint Cain found back in Mullan was still bothering him. There was something that had snuck into the town and left without anyone noticing, and it wasn’t a buffalo. All of those were approximately the same size, maybe varying in their size by a foot or so. Cain didn’t know exactly. He wasn’t quite keen on measuring the rotting corpses of animals to find out precisely how large they were. He had been looking for about half an hour, but he still hadn’t found anything on the lawns of any houses or in the dirt of the forested hills.

He was about to give up and return to the Town Center when he spotted something. It was partially trampled by the horde of animals that attacked, but it was unmistakable in the dirt. A tattered t-shirt, medium size. It was plain grey, with nothing on the strips of cloth left indicating who it belonged to. But it got out here somehow. He picked it up and took it to the officer.

“A t-shirt?” O’Reilly asked. “Maybe it’s been in the woods for a week, not a day. Or maybe someone, or something took it out here. Good job Cain.”

“No tracks though,” Cain said, sighing.

The two of them headed back to the Town Center where they let Tom and Sergeant Richards, the acting police chief, know about the t-shirt and suggested that’s where they begin the search.

Cain excused himself and went over to the clothing section of the shopping mall, where a sort of playground had been erected. Jennifer, or Officer Harper, was supervising all the children there. There were only five of them, but these were five children that couldn’t find their parents, or no longer had them. Communication with Hayden allowed a child to go home earlier in the morning, but the others weren’t in such lucky positions.

“Hey again Jennifer,” Cain greeted.

“Thanks for coming by again Cain, I think Alex really appreciates it,” Jennifer said, smiling.

“Well I did promise him, although I can’t stay for long again.”

Cain found Alex by the jeans, where he was cutting out shapes from the denim with a pair of scissors. Hand crafted by Cain too. A solid of 30 allowed for some pretty nifty things.

“Hard at work Alex?” Cain asked, sitting down next to the kid.

“Yeah. I’m trying to get enough pants for everyone. Superheroes need pants while fighting crime,” Alex said, matter of factly.

“Oh I bet they’ll have the strongest pants in the world, especially if you’re the one making them.”

There weren’t any toy stores in the mall, and Cain hadn’t had the time to go and find any in the town. So instead, when he went to visit Alex earlier in the day, he asked Cain to make him a pair of scissors. And he went to work making denim outfits for a bunch of his favorite comic characters.

“And this one fights evil with a shield, isn’t that so cool? And she doesn’t have any superpowers, but does fancy jumps and punches bad guys in the face!”

“What about this one? He doesn’t even have a shirt?”

“Well he grows really big when he gets angry, and always rips his shirt.”

Cain and Alex went like this for a good portion of an hour, and he even helped with outfitting some of the heroes himself. Nobody had come to visit these kids, or even offered to take them off of the hands of the police. Distant relatives had no idea that the parents of these children were dead or missing, and couldn’t even drive to pick them up. So for now, Cain resolved to spend some time with Alex each day until someone from the Independent Men came to pick him up. But all normal things must come to an end, and Officer O’Reilly brought Cain back to the temporary police precinct. Former bar, whatever. Idaho State Liquor Store wasn’t the most flattering name for a business, but at least it was direct and to the point.

The Turners, Lisa, and Eric along with the officers they paired with last night were all in the store, surrounding a table with a map on it. Cain went and stood next to the table as well, but O’Reilly went to say something to Tom, then joined Cain. Ryan was missing, but he was probably corresponding with Hayden.

“Perfect, everyone is here. Now according to our own evidence, as well as reports from Hayden, the attacks were spread out all across the East and North parts of town. Athol here,” Tom pointed a finger at a small town North of Hayden, “was completely overrun last night. Refugees are still coming from the town, and the entire town might not even be evacuated by nightfall. A lot of people have to be dug out from the rubble, and not many want to help with that.”

“I could go and see what I can do, I’m good with solid,” Cain offered.

“I’d prefer you didn’t Cain. There are already officers and volunteer organizations working as hard as they can over there, and it isn’t a pressing matter right now.” Cain disagreed with Tom, a town being overrun was something that had to be addressed immediately. But Cain realized he couldn’t be in multiple places at once, and continued to listen to Tom.

“Also, the Independent Men still haven’t sent anyone to speak with us, so either they have managed their own attack well, or very terribly but don’t want to ask for assistance. Their East part of the town was clearly attacked last night, but we saw no activity over there when Officer O’Reilly went to check.”

So that’s what he was doing while Cain was looking for the hoofprint. The amount of simultaneous tasks Tom assigned to various people was astounding to Cain, and he didn’t know how the man kept it all straight.

“This here,” Tom said pointing to Mullan, “is the town where we came from. Every other town on the I-90 was destroyed, with the more recently deceased bodies closer to Coeur d’Alene. This makes me think that wherever the animals are coming from, it should be somewhere in this region,” Tom said, pointing to an area on the map somewhere in the middle between Mullan and Coeur d’Alene.

“Here is the search grid Sergeant Richards and I have developed,” Tom said, placing a transparent piece of plastic over the map. The area in between Coeur d’Alene and the general area of where Tom thought the animals were coming from was divided into many squares. “You’ll all be assigned a partner like last time and sent to check out as much of the grid as you can before late afternoon. I’d like everyone to be back here by dusk. If you don’t get here by then, you’re on your own. We won’t be able to send out search parties until the morning.”

Tom concluded his explanation, and everyone was paired up again. This time, Cain was with Officer O’Reilly, who introduced himself as Jackson. Cain remembered Tom calling him that yesterday as well, and felt ashamed he had forgotten. The two of them immediately set out for their assigned part of the grid, a large portion just North of the I-90.

“It might be rude to pry, but why do you care so much about Alex?” Jackson asked Cain.

“No, not rude at all,” Cain said, but didn’t speak up for a couple minutes.

“I didn’t have the best childhood, and I grew up in a very religious household,” Cain started, head downcast as forgotten memories flooded back to the forefront of his mind. “While we were at home, my father was treated like some sort of holy figure. Me and my brother had to listen to anything he said, and if we didn’t we would get punished for it.”

“Punished?”

“Yeah. Beating was the easiest. Taking the belt was far better than some of the ‘methods of tempering,’ our father advocated. I was a far better listener than my brother though. I don’t want to go into details, but he sometimes would go for days without seeing another person.” Cain clenched his hands just remembering.

“I’m sorry to hear all that, I didn’t mean to make you remember it. As an officer, I get calls for domestic problems almost daily, but most of the time I can’t do anything about it. The father goes right back to his home after a night in jail, or the mother isn’t even arrested since there would be nobody to take care of the children for a day. I’m not saying I understand, but I also feel frustrated for how Alex seems to be treated,” Jackson empathized.

“When I saw those bruises, I wanted to beat the shit out of whoever did that to him. But if I couldn’t do that, then the next best thing was to keep him company, to at least be a friend, you know? Anyways, sorry to go off like that,” Cain apologized.

“You don’t have to be sorry, we all have dark parts of our pasts. I was actually on the wrong side of the San Andreas Disaster when that happened,” Jackson admitted, and Cain was internally surprised. The man went through something like that as a kid?

“It was nothing special though, we were nowhere near the fault lines. Barely even felt the earthquakes while they were happening. We got rescued within a week, and went to stay with some relatives up North,” Jackson explained.

“We all have dark parts of our pasts indeed,” Cain said, and the two men spent the next few hours in companionable silence. They must have extensively covered half of the way to their target by the time the sun was too low to continue. Of course, they didn’t know what they were looking for, but Cain was also specifically looking for anything out of place on the mountain. Mostly it was just some littered trash or a few melted trees. Unfortunately there was no trail of liquified trees to follow, they were in random spots all over the grid, but it was proof of the shaggy buffalo’s passing through the forest.

It meant that the waves were getting ready to attack the town even before nightfall, but that they took their time getting to the edge of the town. Cain and Jackson didn’t want to be caught out here while the animals massed, and so they made sure to rush back to the safety of the defenses of the town. Cain considered using his Crack Prodigal to open a hole in the middle of the mountain, but he had no idea if it would cause a rockslide or something onto the town. It wasn’t as if the houses near the forest were going to be populated anytime soon, but the possibility of destroying hundreds of homes didn’t sit well with Cain. They were already borderline inhabitable, but the owners might want to take mementos out of them at some point.

The defenses of the town were nearly done by the time they got back, with a lot of civilians even having volunteered to help out with the defense. The police organized a very quick testing of abilities of whoever wanted to help, and they discovered a fairly optimized way of taking care of the wave. Civilians and officers would simply do their best to shoot projectiles at the oncoming animals, with some of the more qualified individuals like Cain or Jackson taking care of any large targets that wouldn’t be killed by a rock or two.

The police even tracked down whoever made the tornado last night. It was an elderly woman, as old as Ray from Post Falls, and she managed to use a Prodigal to summon the tornado, which explained how powerful the use of the Cardinal was. Unfortunately, she was a little loopy, and couldn’t be relied on to do it again if the metal birds came back again tonight.

“Hey Cain!” Daniel waved from across the chasm. He threw Cain something and he caught it. It was a protein bar. “Paige sends her regards, and wanted to give you a snack to eat.”

“Haha, thanks Daniel!” Cain shouted back. He wasn’t surprised that the man had shown up for the defense of the town. He was one of the people that paid the most attention to him when he made his speech yesterday, and was motivated enough to contribute to the town, even if it meant risking his life.

Cain wasn’t feeling hungry though, and pocketed the bar. He didn’t know if it was a side effect of the Ruin or his increasing Elements that he wasn’t feeling as hungry, thirsty, or tired as of late. The lack of a growling stomach was a pretty good justification for his body slowly changing without his notice though. Some people, such as those who even hated the idea of tattoos on themselves, might be horrified at Cain’s acceptance of the strange phenomena going on with his body, but Cain personally didn’t mind much. He was getting used to using Cardinals in daily life, he was already adjusting to nightly waves of rabid monsters trying to invade the bastions of humankind. And after the first couple nights of confusion and horror, Cain was feeling pretty cemented in this new reality.

Of course, that didn’t mean he was losing his empathy or desire to help people, but it also didn’t mean he was just moving from one problem to another. Tom was making plans, he was organizing large-scale efforts for Coeur d’Alene and the other towns part of the larger Spokane area to come back from the Ruin. Hell, communication was already back on the table, which was a big step in the right direction.

The night started off in a pretty standard fashion. Hundreds of the same kind of wildlife ran towards their deaths as police officers and civilians alike peppered them with projectiles, flames, or even icicles. Those melted pretty quickly, and left no trace of their existence within a minute. Better than all the needles strewn across the town which marked Cain’s passage last night.

By the time the buffalos came into view, Cain was pretty bored. Nothing had come close to breaching the defenses of the town, and he was relieved to finally be able to contribute. With his vastly increased solid, he was able to conjure Prodigal Spikes from a fair distance away, ending the monster’s lives before they had a chance to begin spewing acid fog in large quantities.

The metal birds were taken care of by a large group of civilians who had specifically been requested to focus on the animals. Visible currents of wind carried the birds towards the defenders, where they took care of them with their own personalized means. Cain swore he saw a wooden duck braining wolves at some point, but only once. Must have been his imagination.

Near the end of the night was when the defenses were truly tested. A wall of bone, flesh, and skin oozed through the street that Cain was stationed on. It moved like a slug, blobs of mass pulsing forward in a synchronized manner, as if following the ticking of a clock. Protuberances of bone and hair and eyes and teeth, so many teeth, writhed on the surface of the abomination as it moved closer and closer to the defenders.

Its size prevented any animals from squeezing past it so the defenders had a breath of air to try and figure out how to deal with the thing. The conglomeration of flesh shifted closer and closer to a wolf dragging itself forward on only two legs, and it sent out fleshy tentacles to wrap around it and dragged it into its mass. The wolf thrashed and yelped as it was slowly and excruciatingly absorbed, only becoming silent once its jaw was gone from view. A few of the people near him vomited.

Cain tried to throw a few needles at it, which had grown to the length of his entire body, but they were just absorbed. He tried a Prodigal Spike, but the thing just flowed over it, barely impeded. He was prepared to try to slow it down with a Crack, but the Turners intervened before then.

They began carving out their own Prodigal close enough for Cain to glance at, and he smiled, realizing what their plan was. Ed might not have liked the pair, but Cain was extremely glad to have met them.

“Everyone! Back up! Get away from the street!” Cain began to yell, and the officers joined him in moving everyone back. The Turners finished their Prodigal by the time the creature reached the crack, and it was in the nick of time. As it began to pool itself in the hole, dozens of overlapping screams could be heard coming from the street. Within seconds, the entire thing had gone up in flames, and was burning merrily in the street. The smell of burning hair and flesh reached the people nearby, and everyone chose to back up even further. A couple even sent wind to try and blow the smell away.

It took an entire minute of grating screaming before the thing finally died. And yet there was so much mass that it didn’t stop burning for a while. The night was practically over, and he trusted whoever was left to take care of any latecomers to the party. He didn’t go over his plan with Tom, but hoped the man wouldn’t mind.

He took off at a run through the city, his practice with force paying off. He even put more Origin in it, and moved even faster. He was definitely breaking some kind of world record at this point, but that was just a stray thought. He reached the forest's edge in minutes, almost at the same rate as a car would get there, and he didn’t stop. Right after an attack was probably the greatest chance he had at finding a clue as to what was going on. The waves were too organized, following a pattern every single time.

And as if his thoughts were heard, Cain burst into a clearing, moonlight illuminating the sole occupant. A person, no, a monster was walking deeper into the forest. It had fur and hooves for a lower body, but the chest and arms were completely human. The thing, the minotaur must have been over four meters tall, and would tower over Cain if the two stood next to each other.

“Hey, stop!” Cain called out, not sure what to say to a figure straight out of mythology. He had read some fantasy literature as a kid, much to his parents’ distaste. It turned around and instead of the face of a human, the face of a bull, complete with nose-ring, stared back at him. Its completely black eyes saw Cain, and the minotaur gave a very human-like snarl, curling his lips upward. He conjured a double sided battle-axe with no effort, and charged at Cain, swinging overhead with the weapon.

Cain jumped backward and shot a few needles at the minotaur, hoping to gain some distance. His opponent wasn’t even fazed by Cain’s attack, letting the needles bounce off his tough skin as he readjusted his weapon’s angle of attack. It was now coming from the side, and Cain couldn’t just dodge. He had no time for testing, but trusted in his abilities. Cain stepped onto the air, and used force to handle his weight. The Cardinal held, but barely. He walked in the air over the minotaur’s head and it bellowed as it saw him escape, fury slowly building in its eyes.

It grasped the axe with both hands and flung it at Cain, carving a giant gash in his torso as he failed to dodge in time. The pain was blinding, and he lost his focus, dropping to the ground. The minotaur walked over and was making a rhythmic noise. Was it...laughing? A hoof pressed down on Cain’s back, and he felt it slowly dig in, centimeter by centimeter. The minotaur was enjoying this.

Unfortunately, a Prodigal Spike penetrated the minotaur’s chest and ended the sadistic creature’s pleasure. Cain began to heal himself with life, putting some extra Origin into the Cardinal to speed up the process. It barely helped, but it was enough after a minute to allow him to stand up. The gash in his chest had already stopped bleeding, and was visibly closing.

The spike had hit the minotaur from behind, not giving the creature a chance to defend itself. And with good reason. The tip was barely poking through, giving credit to the toughness of its body. Cain idly wondered if animals and recently appearing monsters had the same Elements that humans did, but the minotaur coughing blood brought him back to the present. It raised a hand, reaching towards Cain, as if trying to grab him. Cain jumped out of the way, but nothing happened, and the minotaur’s hand dropped to its side. It was dead.

Cain checked its body, but the minotaur had nothing on its person at all. The battle-axe it had also used in the fight was slowly dissolving into nothing, the same way animal corpses did. An interesting note to know that if someone died, their Cardinals would go with them. At least the conjured kind. Perhaps only the conjured monster kind?

Cain couldn’t lug the corpse of the minotaur back to Coeur d’Alene, and it was already starting to flake out of existence, so Cain left it there. But he checked its hoof and it was pretty much the same size as the print in Mullan. He left the Spike in the clearing as well, hopefully for the search parties to be able to find and know where to narrow the search grid down to. The location of the t-shirt and minotaur confirmed it for Cain, the waves were coming from somewhere more South than North. It was solid information he could bring back to Tom.

And it conjuring an axe also told Cain that monsters could use Cardinals too. It looked different from when he conjured something, but maybe he just didn’t pay enough attention. If a large group of minotaurs or something else tried attacking the town, Cain didn’t know if it would survive. He had barely survived one attack from the thing, and an entire Prodigal nearly failed to kill it. If Cain’s encounter was a close call, with his hundreds of Origin spent so far, then a random civilian’s would end in death.

He returned to the town, intended to let Tom know what he had found out as soon as possible, but was waylaid by Bart of all people. The other man raised an eyebrow at Cain’s appearance, and Cain willed cloth to connect the ripped parts of his shirt together. The color was off, and it was a patch job, but it worked.

“Something happened at the Town Center. Nothing really major, but we all saw how you were, and well, you are probably going to be angry. Tom wanted to tell you himself, but he’s busy, you know how he is,” Bart began, and Cain nodded, but also wished Bart would get to the point.

“Well, short of the matter, is that Alex is gone, but-” Bart said, but Cain was already taking off through the streets. Gone? What did gone mean? Was he dead? Did he run away? Did the Independent Men steal him in the middle of the night? Bart might have answered all of those questions, but Cain had already made the decision to run ahead without him, and was too emotional to turn back now.

He reached the Town Center and entered the clothing section, City Thrift. He found Jennifer and waved her down, and she walked up to him, looking sorry, but otherwise safe.

“So you heard Cain?” She asked.

“I heard Alex is gone. What happened?” He asked, and decided to apologize to Bart after this. He really shouldn’t have run off so fast.

“Well, a few people claiming to be Alex’s family let the police by the checkpoint know that they were looking for Alex. We couldn’t in good conscience turn them away, so we had to let them know Alex was here, and they came to take him away. But- hey, wait! Cain!” Jennifer yelled at the leaving Cain.

He whirled around and practically snarled, “What!”

“Alex gave this to me before he left, said he wanted you to have it,” She said, and handed Cain a stitched denim costume. He didn’t remember giving Alex any thread, but he must have asked Jennifer. It vaguely looked like a man in a jacket, but what gave it away was the ‘Cain’ stitched on the front. The kid must have spent hours making this. He put it in his pocket delicately, not wanting to ruin the stitching.

“Running to try and take him back won’t solve anything, Cain. We are stretched enough as it is trying to get food to the people of the town, and we can’t start doing normal police work like taking care of disturbances. You kidnapping Alex isn’t exactly very lawful either,” Jennifer said, trying to calm Cain down. And damn it, everything she was saying made sense.

“Yeah. Yeah, ok. I got it.”

Cain extracted himself from the consoling and reasonable Jennifer, making his way over to the Liquor Store. Tom and Ryan were there, the former always present, and the latter currently sending a message as Tom recited a message he had written down on a notecard. Something about plumbing. He finished and Ryan laid his head down as Tom turned to Cain.

He let Tom know what happened with the minotaur, from finding it, to its use of a Cardinal, to killing it. Tom made a note on the map of the approximate location Cain thought he killed it. Even Ryan was interested with the story, and scrunched his eyebrows together as if piecing together some piece from a puzzle.

“Uh, Cain, Mr. Hardings, I just thought of something,” Ryan said.

“I’ve told you to just call me Tom, Ryan. But yes, what is it?”

“Well, I just remembered something from a book I read as a kid. It was years and years ago, so I don’t remember much, but it was a book about Greek monsters. The minotaur was in it, but we all know what a minotaur is. The thing I just remembered is that I recognize the metal birds we’ve been fighting. Somphalian, Styphalian birds, something like that, I can’t remember the exact name,” Ryan said, and that got the cogs turning in Tom’s mind.

“Could you try remembering everything you can from that book Ryan? Maybe even the name? Write it all down for me,” Tom eventually said, and Ryan nodded, grabbing some paper that was on the table.

“This helps a lot Cain, I appreciate it. Do your best to not get into so many do-or-die situations though, would ya?” Tom asked, and Cain laughed at that.

“I’ll do my best Tom. By the way, do you know where Joe is? I haven’t seen him around in a while.”

“He didn’t tell you? He went over to Spokane yesterday, wanting to see his grandkids as soon as possible. I’m sure you’ll see him again soon.”

“Yeah, probably,” Cain said, and he left Tom and Ryan to their discussion over the mythology book. He didn’t go to the Costco however, choosing to take a walk down to the I-90. He followed the interstate East until he reached the first signs of destruction to the Independent Men’s territory. It was much further West than it was before, if where Jackson had gone to check was any indication.

Cain thought this was as good a place as any, and sat down, back against a fence of someone’s house. He hoped they wouldn't mind. He got himself comfortable and prepared for a long watch across the street, hoping that he would catch some movement. Hoping perhaps someone would come talk to him. He didn’t know what his end goal was while openly stake-outing their part of town, but he’d know it when he saw it.