Chapter 19: CONTROL CRISIS
*
GenTek’s fifty-first-floor containment chamber was slowly collapsing, as if the torn memories of humanity had been spread out in physical form.
Red biomass had spread across the walls like blood-colored blossoms, while on the floor, the remains of severed lifeforms and the final convulsions of Blackwatch soldiers clung like shadows that had not yet dried.
Alex Mercer walked slowly through that landscape of despair. Sensations neither living nor dead brushed past his ankles.
And—at the center of that utter chaos, there was a woman.
Elizabeth Greene.
She was kneeling amid the wreckage of the laboratory equipment.
Dark crimson stains left by drying blood lightly covered her entire body, and she was as still as the lingering image of a monk who had offered herself as a sacrifice to mourn someone’s death.
In her, Alex saw neither rage nor madness first, but an unfathomably distant silence.
What lay behind her was—the body of a man who no longer breathed.
Minazuki Kir.
At the very center of a ruined world, she held her family as though she were a child who had pulled him out of the darkness.
"...Elizabeth Greene?"
Alex’s voice was quieter than the wreckage in the containment chamber, yet the instant his words reached her, her head slowly turned like a machine joint.
The light had long since left her eyes.
"...The time of waiting is over now."
Her voice did not sound like a human being’s. It was like the heartbeat of a broken mother, refracted through a virus.
It quavered and echoed in two layers, then three.
And—
"Ghk—!?"
Before he even had time to wait for an answer, Greene’s hand cut through the air and swept Alex into the wall.
His bones gave a wet crack, and the biomass-covered wall boomed like a dented piston.
Alex drew ragged breaths. She approached slowly—truly, agonizingly slowly.
If there were a species called a broken mother, neither infected nor monster nor anything else, it was the being standing before him now.
"...Why?"
Alex asked between confused breaths. But Greene answered only by reaching a hand toward him.
"...Look."
She opened her memories. By force.
Greene’s wounded past crashed into Alex’s vision like a storm.
Hope, Idaho.
Hidden experiments.
Pariah.
Minazuki Kir.
Minazuki Kiria.
And—GenTek’s cruel sentence.
Overwhelmed by the pain of memories pouring into him, Alex collapsed, clutching his head.
Greene silently reached toward the wall.
Boom—
The cracked wall tore apart like a sheet of damp paper.
Beyond the opening, Manhattan’s nightscape spread out in a flash. She looked at that view for a moment, as though it were her entire life.
"...Goodbye."
That single word was not a farewell to this containment chamber, but a funeral dirge for everything she had left behind.
Then she threw herself into that darkness. As if falling, as if vanishing.
By the time Alex reached out, she had already disappeared beneath the lights like a trace.
Then—the biomass in the containment chamber stirred violently.
A small seed of catastrophe left behind by the Mother.
Something was being born in the darkness.
Twisted joints. Skin splitting apart like scales. Throats gathering the howls of monsters.
Hunters.
They were the children of violence Greene had left behind.
With heaving breaths, the Hunters unleashed cries more bestial than beasts at Alex.
And—
The chase toward downtown began.
*
The path to the containment chamber still seemed to hum with lingering vibrations, as though someone had shaken the world here only moments ago.
The metal floor trembled faintly, and the air was thick with a hot, metallic smell. Before the olfactory organs in my head could react, my senses as a virus responded first.
Ominousness.
Death.
And—
A trace of Mother.
"...No way."
Refusing to acknowledge the possibility, I forcibly drew in a thin breath.
The fifty-first floor.
The place where I was born, experimented on, and kept captive. And... where Father had always stood, protecting the two of us.
When I stood before the door,
the entire thing was twisted outward.
As if a gigantic hand had ripped its way out from inside.
"..."
My heart twitched as though it did not belong to me.
I slowly pushed the door open.
And then—
The colors of the world collapsed in an instant.
*
The containment chamber was a mess.
The equipment had been ripped apart, the walls were deeply dented by impacts bursting from within, and the floor was stained with translucent biomass and blood.
And—in the middle of the room.
My eyes saw a form I never wanted to see.
A black lab coat.
A torn white shirt.
An access card scattered across the floor.
And...
A motionless body.
It was Father.
"...Father?"
My voice was so quiet that I could not even be sure I had made the sound.
I approached slowly, forcing down the trembling in my knees.
His body was riddled with holes from special ballistic rounds.
They were wounds left not by blades, claws, or biomass—but by human weapons.
"Father... you’re joking... right...?"
My fingertips touched his shoulder.
Cold. Far too cold. Impossibly cold.
My viral senses told me simply that he was gone.
He was dead.
At someone’s hands—no, at the hands of GenTek and Blackwatch.
Brutally.
Absolutely.
Unable even to breathe, I stared down at Father’s face.
He had stiffened with one arm extended forward, as though he had been trying to stop something until his final moment.
As though he had been protecting someone.
"...Father."
No tears fell.
The structure of my heart was no longer human enough to cry.
But—
I could distinctly hear something collapsing deep inside my body.
Father did not answer. He could not answer. He had already spent too long... fighting alone before he died.
I crumpled down beside the corpse. My fingertips brushed his collar.
His clothes were still cold, yet even the last trace of warmth was gone.
I slowly shifted my gaze.
One side of the wall. The shattered containment glass. Red biomass churned there, still vomiting out its traces like a scream.
That pattern.
That pulse.
That sensation.
A vibration that could be explained by only one emotion.
Rage.
Despair.
And—
Escape.
"...Mother."
Mother had broken through the wall and escaped from here.
And Father had been killed here by Blackwatch.
My arms hanging limply at my sides, I slowly began to laugh.
An absurd laugh, at an absurd time.
"...Right. The treasure hunt is really over now."
Father.
Mother.
The reason neither of them had waited for me.
It was clear now.
Neither of them could remain until I arrived.
"It’s really... funny, isn’t it, Father?"
I gave a wrecked machine a light kick with the tip of my shoe. A clump of biomass dropped off with a plop.
"Why did you do it? Why alone—why didn’t you say anything—why..."
The strength left my legs.
I dropped to my knees on the floor.
"...Why did you abandon me?"
The fact that those words had come out of my mouth was horrifying.
Even though I knew I had not been abandoned. Even though I knew this was not my fault.
Emotion cruelly outran reason.
The red stains on the floor felt like a torrential downpour falling over my head.
And then—
I clearly heard something inside me break.
*
The moment I braced my hand against the floor, those emotions flooded toward the center of my body. Bloody tears slowly flowed from my eyes.
Grief.
Rage.
Loss.
Fear.
Loneliness.
And...
The terror that I would lose them again.
At that moment, the storm quietly erupted in the middle of my lungs. I heard something in my chest shatter into pieces.
"...No."
I muttered in a voice no one could hear.
"No... not now... not yet..."
But my emotions had long since slipped beyond my control.
Biomass spread along my spine.
A hot, sharp sensation writhing beneath my skin tore through my entire body.
Crack.
Crack-crack.
Grrrr...
My breathing lost its human rhythm.
The containment chamber floor trembled. Fragments from the walls shook as if caught in a windstorm.
And—
From my mouth,
a cry that was not mine leaked out.
"...Ugh... aah... AAH■■■■■■■—!!!"
My emotions exploded. Light tore apart, sound warped, and the virus surrounding my entire body convulsed as if it were devouring me.
Biomass wrapped around my entire body, and my shadow stretched out like a twisted shriek.
I was no longer looking at this space. I was consuming it.
I could not endure it. There was no room in a human form to contain these emotions.
Everything in the containment chamber rippled beneath the waves of my fury.
It was a pulse no different from the shock Mother had unleashed when Father died.
And in that moment—
I understood.
Why Father had died here.
Why Mother had turned this city upside down.
And...
Why I had been born.
All those answers were howling like beasts inside me now.
"■■■... I’ll... I’ll destroy■■... everything■■..."
My vision was dyed red.
A crimson storm of frenzy ripped through the containment chamber. Metal melted, laboratory instruments bent like screaming bodies, and the floor overturned, spewing red madness.
And I—
Following the scent left by Father’s blood, following the lingering echo of the despair Mother had unleashed, burst out into the whole city.
With my consciousness in fragments, I hurled myself at the containment chamber wall.
KRAAAASH!!!
The wall tore open, and I leaped out into the world again.
The world had abandoned me, so I decided to abandon the world too.
Father was dead.
Mother had become a monster.
And I...
Was only another monster caught between the two of them.
Blood-soaked hatred roared toward Manhattan.
"■■■■■■■■■■■■—!!!!!"
That howl was the first scream a monster—not a boy—carved into the world.
*
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