Echo
The apocalypse had risen abruptly, as if it had been waiting for its cue.
It had not been brought on by a mutual-assured-destruction pact, nor by some great catastrophe wrought by climate change.
It wasn’t the result of a meteor falling from the sky, or of a supervolcano erupting without warning, either.
The end had come from the outside world, and it had a name: the Origin Species.
For humanity, it was a word that had become all too familiar.
Ever since the historical turning point known as the fall of magic, humans had lived in an endless cycle of life-and-death battles against the Origin Species.
Whenever they faded from memory, those things would tear open gates and launch full-scale invasions.
For a thousand years.
For a thousand years, history had been written not in peace, but in struggle—human against human, human against Origin Species.
And I, at the very end of that history, was developing weapons to stand against them.
The Origin Species could not be killed with conventional weapons.
After the fall of magic, with magic gone from the world, humanity had turned to science in search of substitutes to prepare for the next invasion of the Origin Species, and had created them.
That was the Mystery Armament.
If I were to summarize my research here, it was the development of a new Mystery Armament with greater firepower than the existing models.
And for that purpose, almost every authority had been handed over to me.
Of course, ordinary Origin Species could be dealt with by small, portable Mystery Armaments that a single person could carry.
The problem was the special Origin Species, which stood far above that level.
From the moment of the great invasion, those special variants had multiplied at an exponential rate.
From small-scale disasters that overturned a single place to large-scale incidents that opened strategic-grade gates.
To face a special specimen head-on, ordinary soldiers were worthless, and a weapon of equal caliber was necessary.
Even then, they were quickly outnumbered, and the advantage we managed to seize spread into cracks we could no longer contain.
Of course, there were excuses to be made.
From my perspective, the response itself had been fast.
The instant the anomaly was detected, promising figures of every sort were gathered one after another into the First Bureau of the Research and Development Institute, which I had been assigned to.
On top of that, I was given authority across nearly every field, to the point that it might as well have been all of it.
Promoted so rapidly it was almost absurd, I had become the director of the First Bureau of the Research and Development Institute before I knew it.
It was a small thing to admit, but that brief sense of power and effectiveness had been rather sweet.
Before I could fully savor the authority I’d been granted, a sense of crisis came crashing down behind it.
But I repeat: the response itself was incredibly fast.
For humans, who had grown dull and complacent, that was.
Very few people sensed early on that the massive gate, the rapidly multiplying special specimens, would lead straight to the end of the world.
Late as it was, I could still say with some pride that I did nearly everything possible to solve the apocalypse.
First to stop it, and when that failed, to delay it somehow; when even that was impossible, to save at least a handful of survivors.
The completion of the next-generation power source prototype, the design of new weapons, the construction of an ark.
In the end, though, none of it ever became a true result.
And so I met the apocalypse.
Consciousness swelled up.
The sensation that had begun in my head ran along my central nervous system and spread into my limbs.
The damp touch at my fingertips returned. The moment I blinked, my vision suddenly cleared.
The earth was thick with grass, and the smell of water rose strongly from it. Raindrops slid along my bangs, then dropped away with a soft patter.
Overhead, droplets kept falling one after another, waking senses that had yet to come fully alive.
The crisp sound of raindrops striking the ground.
It was raining. I was standing in the middle of it, without even an umbrella open over my head.
Why?
I looked around.
Stone markers stood in rows in a clearing surrounded by a conifer forest.
I slowly shifted my gaze from the farthest point in sight to the nearest.
The pair of gravestones directly in front of me didn’t seem very old; there were no dark stains, no chips, no signs of time at all.
The earth behind them looked freshly turned as well, with grass still sparse in places.
“This is…”
What was this?
My voice sounded thin.
Not only that, but my eye level was lower than it should have been.
Instinctively, I lowered my gaze to my hands, and the sense of wrongness that had been coiled up within me burst like fireworks and spread through my entire body.
“…What the hell is this.”
How was I supposed to explain the feeling that this body was not my own?
My body was small.
Not just small, but slender.
Even the limbs attached to my head and torso were thin.
The movement of the muscles pulsing beneath my skin was much weaker, and even the organs inside me felt distinctly different.
My consciousness couldn’t keep up with the change in my body. The two hands in my sight trembled like aspen leaves.
“Ugh….”
My stomach turned, perhaps because of the chill filling my body.
No matter how often reason urged me to calm down, my awareness stubbornly rejected the body’s sensations.
The unsettled wrongness felt like a heavy hammer striking the back of my head again and again.
My consciousness shook violently, and when that shaking reached its limit, sour water surged up into my throat.
My upper body tilted forward.
My knees bent on their own and touched the grass. A dry, choking cough escaped my mouth.
My eyes met the gravestones ahead.
“Klaus Schumacher.”
“Sabine Wallenstein.”
My parents’ names.
In the past that lived in my memory, I had come here only once.
The memory rose around me like mist from the rain.
With fingers that were still trembling from the cold, I brushed away the rainwater sliding over the stone—no, over the grave marker—and looked at the words hidden beneath it.
“Here lie…”
It was now ten years before the great invasion.
Exactly one month since my parents had been killed by the Origin Species and laid in the earth.
I looked pitiful, drenched to the skin.
That at least was what the owner of the inn, whom I’d finally found after trudging through the rain, seemed to think, given that he hurriedly handed me a towel even before I’d paid him a cent.
The city itself was tucked away in a corner of nowhere, so I’d been worried it might be cash only, but apparently that wasn’t the case; the credit card I handed over was processed without issue.
The room I’d be staying in for the time being was on the third floor. The owner had told me he’d already turned on the boiler, so hot water would come out right away.
Thankfully, the cold had made my face red.
If it hadn’t, he would have seen my ears burning bright red with embarrassment.
“…No time to worry about appearances, I guess.”
I threw off my rain-soaked clothes and stepped into the bathroom.
With my mind in complete disarray, I yanked the faucet open without even checking whether it was hot or cold water.
Cold water poured over my head, cooling the body that had been burning up. The sourness surging in my throat finally lost some of its force and sank back down again.
But the nausea still remained, prowling deep in my stomach as if ready to rise again at any moment.
What a pathetic sight.
The memories of my consciousness and the memories of this body had become horribly tangled together.
I struggled to sort through the thoughts in my head and, in the process, spent what might have been tens of seconds or several minutes with cold water streaming over me.
Water ran along the lines of my body, and by the time it reached the end, I could vividly feel it turning lukewarm from my own body heat.
Reality was just as cold as the cold water splashing over my head.
The contours of this body, felt through the water, were too slight; the skin was too thin.
There was no way this could be real. Yet the chill seeping through every part of me seized hold of that refusal and would not let go.
“What the hell happened?”
Those were the only two words I could force out.
It wasn’t even my own voice, but the only person in the bathroom was me.
The voice echoing back from the bathroom walls was sweet and thin beyond belief.
My body began to tremble at once.
Under the bathroom light, my reflection shimmered in the mirror clouded with steam.
The vaguely visible figure felt so foreign I could hardly bear to look at it.
I turned the faucet from cold to hot. When the warm water poured over my body, my floating sense of self finally found its place again.
For now, I needed to check.
Without hesitation—or perhaps without even the luxury of hesitation—I wiped away the white fog clouding the mirror.
I should have prepared myself first.
That thought came when I had cleared away only half the steam on the mirror, and right after that I let out a dry cough.
The girl was beautiful.
A thin stream of water ran down from the ends of her black hair, which hung limp along her shoulders.
Her shoulders were narrow and rounded.
Eyes the same color as her hair trembled at me from within the mirror, and her brows curved in perfect imitation of a girl’s stunned disbelief.
Her lips, caught in the shape of that cough, froze there, and a bead of water slid down her jawline before falling from the end of her chin.
“Is this… really me?”
Beautiful, I thought without meaning to, and found myself unable to laugh or be angry.