*
Blackwatch Command Staff Restricted Area.
The heart of an operations room whose lights never went out, not even at midnight.
General Randall stood alone. Only two monitors cast their blue glow across his lined face.
The instant Raymond McMullen's report came to an end──the cursor blinked at the edge of the screen, silently staring back at him.
For a moment. One very brief instant. The monitor light wavered slightly in his eyes.
But soon, he hardened again like steel.
"...Evolution, you said."
He muttered under his breath.
It was not the voice of a general who had decided the lives and deaths of thousands on the battlefield, but closer to the voice of a man feeling the edge of some immense fear for the first time.
Randall lightly moved his fingers, reopening a particular section of the report.
> "Suppression did not weaken him.
It made him more focused."
His brow twitched faintly as he read those words.
It was neither irritation nor disbelief.
Pure─
Unmistakable─
A military strategist's assessment of a crisis.
"An uncontrollable variable... potential for escalation... a potential extinction-level threat..."
He murmured, slowly tapping his fingers against the desk.
Friend-or-foe identification. Risk assessment. Reassessment of a strategic asset's value.
Hundreds of simulations involving the single entity known as M-01 were unfolding like shadows in his mind.
Most of them led to endings unacceptable both militarily and humanly.
At last, he muttered so no one could hear him.
"Yes... this is not a weapon."
Every word rang through the narrow room like metal.
"This is... an ecological point of departure."
The low vibration of generators hummed from beneath the floor, trembling in time with his thoughts.
He slowly rose from his seat.
It was a movement with all the dignity and bearing of a high-ranking general. Yet his footsteps carried a decision obvious to anyone who saw them.
Picking up the security keycard at the edge of his desk, he walked toward the steel door and said,
"DX-1118 M... from now on, raise every control protocol to wartime status."
As the door opened, he gave the monitor one final glance.
"And..."
In that small silence, his voice sank to its heaviest.
"...M-01. If you evolve───
then we will have no choice but to call that evolution 'war.'"
As the steel door shut, General Peter Randall sealed away the report as though it were a declaration of war.
*
Containment Room.
Once a place that was cold yet strangely peaceful──a place they had called home, in an abnormal sense of the word. But after the parasitic suppressor was injected, this room was no longer a nest that held any warmth.
The air was heavy, and silence lay settled like stone. Like the faint signs of a virus dying, sorrow crept between the walls and ceiling.
"I'm back."
Kiria pushed through the door as though coming home from work, in his usual playful tone.
But the viruses that had been severed from him in the earlier battle had fallen silent after leaving behind their screams, and his body now creaked in a way it never had before.
Elizabeth Greene lifted her head at his voice.
"...Are you all right, sweetheart?"
Her tone was like a glass already showing cracks.
It was a fragile voice that seemed as though the slightest touch would shatter it.
Kiria sighed and forced a smile.
"I'm fine, Mom. Just... please don't look like the world has ended."
The boy's light joke sank like a stone dropped into sad water. Greene's expression only grew more rigid. Beneath her skin, biomass began to pulse, quiet but violent.
"...I'm sorry. Mom... couldn't protect you. I'm sorry..."
"Why are you saying that? I was the one who agreed to let them put that parasite in me, in the end."
Kiria's words carried a bitter resignation mixed with bleak humor.
Then Greene lifted him into her arms without a word.
For an instant, uncertainty flickered in the boy's eyes. Greene's embrace was warm like that of a human──
But there was another scent within it, too.
Motherhood.
Virus.
Ruin.
Strangely, all three existed together.
In the end, Kiria caught his breath in her embrace and surrendered himself to the heavy fatigue washing over him.
And just like that, he fell asleep.
*
Greene carefully laid Kiria down on the bed. His face was peaceful, but the viruses beneath his skin trembled faintly. Like the last breath of a suppressed monster, neither alive nor dead.
Greene did not move for a long while at the sleeping child's side.
She did not know how much time passed. Minutes or hours─they were meaningless measures amid emotion.
"In the end..."
Her cracked voice seeped into the room.
Biomass slowly rippled beneath her body in resonance. Her emotions were exploding, but the explosion was as quiet as a scream that could only exist inside someone incapable of crying.
"As long as we're here..."
She looked up at the ceiling.
The ceiling of the containment room. The ceiling she had looked upon with her son for countless days.
A prison where they could stare at the same place forever and never escape.
"Does our family... have no choice but to suffer...?"
Her voice was neither a sigh nor despair, but an old sorrow rising from some deep place.
A hazy blur spread across Elizabeth Greene's eyes. The virus moved as though pulsing along with her grief.
"Kir..."
She spoke her husband's name. Resentment and compassion were tangled together within it.
Resentment──
Because he had chosen to weaken their son's power.
Compassion──
Because she knew he had opposed it more than anyone and suffered more than anyone.
"Kiria..."
When she uttered her son's name,
her voice cracked even deeper.
"They made even you... like this..."
With a trembling hand, she grasped at the empty air. It was the hand of a mother who had wanted to protect, yet in the end had protected nothing.
"What... are we supposed to do...?"
A question cast into an empty space. A question with no one to answer it, no god to answer it.
At that moment—
The Redlight virus within her body writhed like a giant heart.
The rage of a mother.
The despair of love.
The sorrow of a monster.
As though responding to all those emotions.
Red.
As though alive.
As though a mother's emotions were trying to strike back at the world.
The containment room fell silent again──but it was a dangerous silence.
And in her eyes,
a madness that could no longer be called merely human emotion was very slowly beginning to seep in.
*
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