Foresight (2)
“You’ve lost your damn mind. Completely insane. Do you even understand what you’ve done?”
“Yes, I understand perfectly.”
“...You deployed a bioweapon that has only just passed basic control training. In the middle of the city, no less.”
“That was sufficient.”
“Dr. Jung Ah-woon, are you still not grasping the gravity of this situation? If the public finds out, even I won’t be able to protect you anymore.”
The director was trying his best to make me understand, his voice as serious as possible. But his face told a different story. The wrinkles around his eyes were flushed with rage, and one hand was viciously crumpling the papers on his desk.
“I’ll ask you one more time. Do you truly comprehend the consequences of your actions?”
He was swallowing his fury as best he could, forcing himself to speak calmly, but I could see the curses rising in his throat, barely held back.
“...Don’t worry. I won’t disappoint you.”
“...What the hell?”
The long-haired woman I rushed out to meet. The school had been a slaughterhouse of blood and screams just moments ago. As if I’d woken from a nightmare, the crimson liquid and chunks of meat scattered at my feet vanished. Even the metallic stench that clashed so violently with the city air I’d breathed my whole life disappeared in an instant. The strange woman in front of me, too.
Am I finally going crazy? The thought crossed my mind, yet I couldn’t shake the creeping dread that crawled from my left shoulder to my right. It wasn’t just any warning. It was that ominous instinct inside my head.
It was ridiculous to trust something so blindly, but thinking back, that voice had never been wrong.
“...Then what the hell was that...”
Conflicting thoughts and wild guesses tangled in my skull, triggering a headache. What had that been? Had I really gone mad? Was it a side effect of the petals? Or that glowing fruit I’d eaten before?
“....”
The warnings echoed in my mind.
Different from us.
Something’s wrong.
Abnormal.
Dangerous.
Along with the warnings came fleeting images.
“...Wait. Images?”
Every time my danger sense had triggered before, fragmented images and messages had appeared together in my mind. But what I’d just heard was only the message. No image.
What if the scene I’d witnessed moments ago was the image of a danger that was about to happen? What if it was showing me the future, just like the images of situations I’d already survived or barely avoided?
“.....”
Before I could even finish the thought, my legs were already sprinting toward the school gate with everything they had.
I passed several students.
That guy over there—in the image I saw, his face had been split clean in two as he died.
That person would be torn apart, every limb shredded.
“Goddammit...”
I knew it wasn’t my place to say it, but whoever sent that thing was completely, utterly insane.
I still didn’t know exactly what that woman was, but I could guess who had sent her without even trying. A woman in a straitjacket, arms bound, had massacred several people. It had to be them. Even if they were desperate to capture us, wasn’t this going way too far?
The massacre that monster of a woman would commit. A bloodbath right in the middle of a university campus, in front of countless witnesses. That wasn’t exactly a welcome development for us either.
If such an enormous, impossible-to-cover-up incident occurred, the existence of ancient creatures would be exposed to the public. What the hell were they thinking? Revealing to people that such absurd monsters existed couldn’t possibly be good for them either.
But none of that mattered right now. The priority was the woman standing in front of me.
“.....”
“Human...?”
Her speech was clumsy. She wore a straitjacket not yet stained with blood, long, disheveled hair hanging down. I had to stop her. She looked dazed and haggard—exactly the kind of appearance that would draw attention. Where the hell had she come from? That outfit should have been impossible to miss.
.....
An awkward silence pressed down on me heavily. Was it because of the image I’d seen? My body refused to move recklessly.
“Hey. Can you understand what I’m saying?”
“.....”
“...Say something, at least...”
Run.
Right side.
“Fuck!”
A cold, razor-sharp sensation raced up my spine and spread throughout my body. I jerked my head back as fast as I could, but something invisible still sliced across the bridge of my nose. I felt a lukewarm liquid tracing a curve down my face, which had been chilled by the cold air.
“Blocking path. Talking too much. Kill the person.”
So that was why so many people died in the image. I already knew she was out of her mind, but this confirmed it.
“...Who told you to?”
“That. Secret.”
Whoever it was had trained her well, at least. Leaving that aside—what the hell had that attack been? I hadn’t seen anything. If my danger sense hadn’t warned me, it would have been my face split in half.
An invisible, razor-sharp something had ridden the wind and slashed my face. But the woman hadn’t moved at all. Her arms were still tightly bound, unable to move.
“....”
I had to think. Everyone in the image had been torn and sliced apart. I had just experienced it firsthand. If I couldn’t figure it out, I would die. Actually, even if I did figure it out, could I even avoid it?
I’d think about that later. First, I needed to lure her as far away from the school as possible. Somewhere with no people. The mountain behind our school—the place where I had obtained the glowing fruit. No one would be there, and nothing would leak out.
The problem was how to get her there.
“...I don’t know...!!”
After eating the fruit, my strength had already surpassed human limits, and it had grown even stronger. For now, I would trust only that.
The attack the woman had launched earlier had been fast, but not so fast that I couldn’t dodge it. Keeping that in mind, I sprinted toward her with all my might.
No matter how well I could dodge, there was a limit to avoiding something I couldn’t see. The invisible blades tore through my clothes and flesh. The distance between us closed in an instant, and I slammed into her with everything I had.
“....Ugh..?!”
The moment I collided, I wrapped both arms around her waist and lifted her. She lost her balance instantly. I didn’t miss the opening. Without holding back even a little, I hurled her toward the mountain behind the school.
“.....!!”
“...It worked, right?!”
Watching her fly through the air, I felt a brief surge of satisfaction at my ridiculous plan actually succeeding. But in that moment, something grabbed both of my shoulders.
With terrifying strength, my body was lifted into the air along with her. Like a villain in a cartoon getting blasted away after losing to the hero, I screamed uselessly as we both crashed through the trees.
“Cough! Cough! Uuuugh...”
“......”
The unexpected impact had forced me to inhale a lungful of dirt. My contaminated respiratory system was desperately gathering oxygen to breathe properly again. Fortunately, I soon managed to breathe normally and finally looked around.
Instead of the wide-open sky from before, thick trees now blocked out the sunlight. Looking back, the plan had been absurd, but somehow it had worked.
And that woman. Her once-clean straitjacket was now filthy with dirt and wood chips. A long wooden splinter was lodged in her lower left abdomen.
“....”
Without even letting out a groan, she casually pulled out the invisible object that had impaled her. Blood gushed from the wound like a faucet, but it gradually slowed, and the hole began to fill with new flesh.
“Strength. Not human.”
“You don’t look human either.”
“Must take you.”
...I didn’t know her exact objective, but it was clear she was trying to take me somewhere. Another heavy silence fell—the kind that came right before something happened. It didn’t even last one or two seconds before it shattered.
Below.
Left.
Upper left.
Following the warnings in my head, I rolled across the dirt floor, dodging whatever was coming. To anyone watching, I must have looked ridiculous—caked in dirt, tumbling around in front of a woman like a clown. But if I didn’t dodge, I would die.
“How. Dodge?”
The woman tilted her head, expressing genuine confusion.
“That’s a secret too, you crazy bitch.”
I spat out the curse and kept dodging the invisible slashes flying at me. I wondered if I was just putting on a show, but when I saw the rocks and branches where I had been standing get cleanly sliced in half, a chill ran down my spine.
Just dodging like this wasn’t going to end it. I needed to attack somehow, but I had no idea how. Even when I picked up a rock and threw it with all my strength, it split in two before it could even reach her.
“....Uuuugh!!”
If I could just figure out what this attack was.
Think. Think, damn it.
Subjectively, it felt like ten minutes had passed while dodging, but when I came to my senses, barely thirty seconds had gone by. At that moment, while I was only focused on evasion, something sliced through the branch above my head. Sunlight poured through the gap.
The ray of light illuminated both me and the woman. And in that light, I—who had been choking on nothing but dirt—finally saw it.
Ah. I get it now.