Chimera (1)
"He's either a late-stage Depth 4 or an early Depth 5."
"Then it should be fine to use this one."
"Agreed."
The moment Alan finished speaking, Taylor's face split into a mischievous grin. He pressed the button.
Da-da-da-da!
The machine gun woke from its slumber and unleashed a torrent of rounds at the branch manager. Spent casings rained down, scattering sunlight in every direction.
The branch manager was evidently quite powerful, enduring the barrage for a considerable stretch of time.
"Tough bastard. What the hell is with that skin?"
"He suddenly transformed like a pangolin. Some kind of procedure?"
He tried to dodge the assault, but there was no escaping a helicopter looking down from above. Glaring up at the sky, the branch manager let out a great roar.
"You sons of bitches! Come down here and fight me!"
Those were his last words. A single shell caught him on the head, and he crumpled to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.
"Still got some left."
Taylor sounded almost disappointed, but firing any further would obviously have killed him.
Priests arriving on the scene bound the branch manager, then moved to check the armored car for survivors—before stopping themselves.
"A missile detonated inside. There's no way anyone's alive in there. Alan, where are you off to?"
"To watch the branch manager."
Alan leapt down, and Taylor brought the helicopter in for a slow landing.
Once again the priests gathered around the branch manager and attempted a forced conversion. But unlike the other cartel members, the surgery was proving sluggish and inconclusive.
For one thing, his skin was so hard that scalpels broke easily. And even when they finally managed to crack the shell open, his flesh regenerated at speed.
The priests paused and conferred.
"His body's strange. Can you see this?"
"There are mana stones embedded in his muscle tissue. Wait—the muscle isn't human either. That's a regenerative-agent organ from inside a troll."
The branch manager's body looked as if it had been assembled from whatever came to hand and stitched together.
Kamiro (3) — End
Chimera (1)
The Brain Expansion Device was, as its name suggested, magicware directly linked to the brain, and had to be handled with extreme delicacy. The branch manager's body kept regenerating, and each time it fused back with the artificial neural mesh, so the conversion was put on hold.
Sister Alana woke the branch manager before the specialist arrived. Despite having been roasted by a machine gun, he opened his eyes without trouble.
"Hah… so I'm captured."
"You know full well who we are. The Mother Church."
"What is it with women and that much bulk? Since you're at it, could you shade me from the sun?"
Alana obliged his request, if only for the moment. With shade over him, the branch manager drew a deep breath.
"So. You beat my men half to death, and now you're curious about something? Why not just kill me and be done with it?"
"A regrettable necessity. But those still alive have the chance to repent. A path of atonement is open to you as well—surrender sincerely and cooperate."
"Bowing my head to your commands, unable to speak properly—is that what you call being alive?"
Alana remained unshaken by his barbed tone. Having weathered every conceivable horror in the Purification Volunteer Corps, perhaps that was only natural. She leaned her face in close, pressing him instead.
"If you didn't want that, you shouldn't have sinned."
"Sin? Of what? What's the difference between livestock and people? The city is my cattle ranch, and I was nothing more than a farmer."
"Not a farmer—an industrial rancher."
At Alan's correction, the branch manager turned on him with murderous eyes.
"You. You were the one riding the helicopter. Despicable—"
"Thank you for the compliment."
"That's not what I meant."
"In this line of work, 'despicable' and 'underhanded' are synonyms for praise. Also, the way you're trussed up like that makes you look rather like a grub."
The branch manager bared his teeth, then, realizing he couldn't be seen through the visor, simply turned his head away.
In any case, mana practitioners and body-modification enthusiasts alike were prone to the same kind of supremacism the branch manager embodied.
And not without reason—they truly were different. While an ordinary person sprinted one hundred meters flat-out, they could lope back and forth across the distance a few times with ease, and with magicware grafted on or biological enhancement surgery done, deadlifting five hundred kilograms dropped to the level of a warm-up.
Naturally, they couldn't help but look down on and despise others. No—it was fortunate if they treated others as human at all.
To hold a conversation with someone ruled by the logic of survival of the fittest, like the branch manager, you first had to force them to their knees with power. The point was to show him that you were not the livestock he spoke of, but the same kind of people.
"Why did you attack us?"
"Ha!"
The skinhead scoffed at Alana's question. He laughed so hard, twisting his whole body, that a little cloud of dust rose around him.
"That's the best question you've got? What do you do when a mosquito gets into your house?"
"Just let it out."
Hearing that, Taylor tried the comm.
One of the spiders climbed over Alan's shoulder and elbow before settling onto his palm. The sleek smoothness of metal, combined with its tiny size, made it look like a toy.
Just then, a fly—of the kind that laid eggs even in animal, even human, skin—drifted nearby. As vile a pest as any, it sought to slip into a person's gap, but before it could, a laser fired from the spider burned the thing away.
Beyond the spider that had completed its duty, Shiva focused his gaze on where the nun and the branch manager sat.
The branch manager showed no intention of giving Sister Alana the answer she wanted.
"So, will you resort to torture after all?"
"There's a better way, even if it takes more work. And look—the sisters who specialize in treatment are coming now."
A single off-road vehicle pulled up to the site. Nuns more delicately built than the others climbed out.
Alana had been right—they really were specialists, and even the tools they carried were far from ordinary. As they approached slowly, wearing Hippocrates, precision surgical auxiliary prosthetics, the branch manager snickered.
Taylor circled his finger near his temple.
"He's lost his mind. Guess he's given up."
"Magicware activation detected. Looks like a hormone regulator. His brain is about to be drenched in endorphins, serotonin, adrenaline, and the like."
"So that's why he's laughing so—"
Boom!
The branch manager's head exploded, and the black habits of the nuns conducting the surgery turned a deep, dark red.
"He went out with a bang."
Fortunately, no one was hurt. Despite the carnage, the nuns moved their Hippocrates units. The head was gone, but the body remained—and sometimes flesh held more information than words ever could.
A field dissection had begun without warning. Except for a few with strong stomachs, people drifted away from the scene.
Alan, naturally, belonged to the former camp, and he widened his field of vision, catching even the nuns' conversation in his ears.
"Barely a handful of installed magicware. The rest is all flesh."
The Mother Church ran hospitals, and their knowledge of medicine and human anatomy was superb; biotechnology and medicine overlapped considerably.
And so the nuns were able to analyze the branch manager's body at speed.
"He was never a whole person."
Even measured against their experience, the branch manager's flesh was alien. Where the Mother Church practiced medicine to restore the body to its original state, his body had been made by gathering many into one.
That "many" included monster organs and bioengineered tissue created through gene manipulation. It was beyond patchwork—so seamless that you could believe it was how he'd been born.
After a long silence, one nun's mouth opened.
"The Seamstress…"
"Sister. Did I hear that correctly? The Seamstress? You're saying a monster like that is behind the Electo Cartel?"
Alana, who had been arms-crossed and surveying the area, whipped around in alarm. The nun's expression turned ambiguous.
"For now, the resemblance to her techniques is very strong."
"Could it be some organization imitating her deliberately, to pin the blame?"
"And what good would drawing her attention do them? As you well know, Sister Alana, east of Kamiro lies the thicket where Sandra has coiled herself."
"Same continent, not another—and right next door at that. Hard to imagine they'd risk that."
"It may not be her, but a disciple."
The region where the Seamstress Sandra had settled was called the Primeval Forest. It was, literally, a jungle packed dense with trees descended from time immemorial, and in its age dwelt monsters beyond imagining.
Its reach was so vast it could be said to spread roots across the whole upper expanse of the Southern Continent; anyone who set foot in carelessly would find getting out no easy matter.
The sudden mention of such a heavyweight cast a pall over the mood—but the Mother Church had no intention of withdrawing from Kamiro.
"If not us, then who will help these people?"
Shiva's words and the priests' thoughts aligned almost perfectly.
Even as their worries deepened, the fighting went on. Electo operatives hidden throughout Pisto fought like guerrillas.
The rift between the two sides ran too deep. Pisto's vigilantes had no intention of leaving the Cartel alive, and the Cartel members had no intention of dying quietly in return.
Several days passed. Contrary to their fears, the Seamstress never appeared, and Pisto was largely cleansed compared to before.
The vigilante captain nodded before Sister Alana.
"We'll be fine. We'll handle the rest ourselves, so please, take the Mother Church to wherever else they're needed."
"Then we'll be going."
"May fortune go with you."
They had to move quickly, for their brothers and sisters elsewhere. Pisto was a small city on Kamiro's outskirts, and the cleanup there had been swift—but the closer they drew to the heartland, to the capital itself, the fiercer the battles became.
Alan gazed back at Pisto, shrinking in the distance, for a long while.
"What is it?"
"They say people change once they gain power."
"They show their true colors, more like. On the flip side, if you want to see what the people around you really think, all you have to do is become weak."
"What do you suppose will become of the vigilantes?"
"The Mother Church is around, so they won't spiral into the kind of madness the Cartel did. But what if the real Seamstress really is waiting behind all this?"
"Then we turn around and go back."
Ten years ago, a certain group had discovered a remarkable tree in the Primeval Forest. It bore fruit that slowed the rate of aging to an extreme degree.
The Primeval Forest was so enormous that many nations bordered it, and one of their dictators dispatched his army. The army tore through the forest, and Sandra—apparently displeased—appeared in person.
Samramansang still held footage left behind by one of the survivors of that day.
"It's paywalled."
Information was power, and power was money. It had all become so familiar by now that Alan completed the payment without a second thought. The frozen image began to move again.
[AAAAAGH!]
[Hell. It's hell.]
The footage was saturated with screams. The cameraman's ragged breathing lent it no small support.
Tentacles like twisted braids of muscle burst out from every direction. Each time one lashed out, soldiers were dragged away, and they fused together into a single mass, birthing a colossal gore golem—all of them still conscious.
The army fought back as best it could. Mana rounds, bombardment, every means at their disposal—but nothing stopped the golem as it swelled to the height of the trees themselves. Regenerating itself with people as raw material, it was doubtful it could ever have been dealt with in the first place.
The short video delivered a shock of tremendous force.
"Biotechnology is a fascinating field, isn't it?"
"Alan…"
"When it's used well, of course."
"Did I say anything that needed you to tack on 'when it's used well'?"
"You really should let people finish their sentences."
It was undeniable that biotechnology—and magic alike—were powerful and useful disciplines. After all, the body of anyone who handled them was itself made of life.
"So you're planning to study it too?"
"Yes."
It would be hard to claim biotechnology was a branch of magitech engineering, but the fields shared plenty of common ground.
Considering his Mana Overload condition, one might even say he'd taken an interest late. Alan had his reasons.
I thought the Bloodroot Flower would be enough…
He had miscalculated. Even the flower Yohwa had poured her own devotion into could not fully soothe Mana Overload. So the illness remained incurable, as ever.
Unless there was another way.
Then I have no choice but to overcome it with my own hands.
Alan's eyes, reflected in the window glass, carried a fierce resolve. In his field of view wound a snaking road, rolling uneven hills, and strange lifeforms cavorting across them.
Needless to say, his look shifted from intensity to warning. Creatures with exposed muscle where hide and fur should have been existed only as monsters.
Alana's transmission came through, brief and clipped. The occupants of the other vehicles bustled into motion—