The place where the bus arrived was the underground parking lot of a large shopping mall.
Ordinarily, the space should have been packed with shoppers’ cars. Now it was filled with military trucks, radio antennas, and thick communication cables snaking endlessly across the floor.
Beyond hastily erected partitions, we were herded into the narrow entrance of a civil defense shelter.
Instead of cold metal walls, there were mold-stained concrete surfaces, the droning noise of generators, and the damp, stale odor unique to underground spaces stinging my nose.
It was a far cry from the sleek bases you saw in movies.
If anything, it felt like a temporary command post on a battlefield, so precarious it seemed it might collapse at any moment.
A dozen or so mutants, including me and the owlbear beastman, were seated in a briefing room lined with folding plastic chairs.
Behind us, soldiers in gas masks stood guard with their firearms held at an angle, and on the screen installed beneath the low ceiling at the front, an old font was blinking.
The one who stepped up onto the platform was the officer from earlier.
Having taken off his beret and set it on the table, he had deep creases and beads of sweat on his forehead.
“First, thank you for your cooperation. There is only one reason you have been brought here: to share the vile truth of what we are now fighting against.”
The officer’s face as he spoke was worn down by terrible exhaustion.
I don’t have a good impression of the military.
To begin with, the very fact that I’m here right now is the result of coercion.
There’s no way my impression of them could be good.
But… at the same time, a question occurred to me.
Just what the hell was happening for the military, for the country, to be acting as if there was no way back?
“You must have many questions about the government. Questions such as how the government was able to respond so quickly and systematically to this absurd situation. To state the conclusion first, the government knew this situation was coming.”
At those words, the room stirred.
There were probably people who had heard similar conspiracy theories before, but hearing it admitted outright felt entirely different.
And new questions welled up as well.
How on earth could they have predicted something like this?
The officer swallowed dryly and spoke as if making a firm declaration.
“The government saw the future.”
The future? Was he saying they’d hired some prophet or something?
The air in the conference room rippled with ridicule and suspicion.
But the officer’s next words were bizarre enough to freeze even that ridicule.
“The government made a contract with a demon, and through it, obtained information about the future.”
For a moment, someone let out a hollow laugh.
But the officer did not waver. If anything, his eyes were filled with terrible disgust and fear.
“…You’re joking, right?”
The vampire asked carefully. The officer shook his head.
“I wish it were a joke, but unfortunately, it is true.”
He pointed at the screen. The image changed.
A photograph of a document. Dense writing on old paper. But it was impossible to read.
That was not a language.
No, it was too grotesque to be called a language.
It looked hastily scrawled, yet it was orderly; incomprehensible, yet it seemed to contain some kind of meaning.
‘…My head hurts.’
Just looking at the letters made a headache surge in.
“This is that contract. Three years ago, through this contract, the government obtained information about the events that would unfold. A certain level of information regarding the mutation phenomenon and the blackout zones.”
A heavy silence fell at those words.
That was how difficult it was to accept.
It wasn’t hard to infer that the government had foreseen this situation in advance.
But the method was a contract with a demon?
It was far too unrealistic.
And yet, it didn’t seem entirely impossible either.
The first reason being that I myself had become something straight out of fantasy…
‘And that document doesn’t look ordinary either.’
Perhaps most of them had followed a similar line of thought as me, because they accepted it.
But even if they accepted it, there were still countless questions.
“If it was a contract with a demon… wasn’t there a price?”
One mutant asked.
“That is correct. And that price was…”
The officer answered with the same expressionless face.
“The complete erasure of the president.”
Erasure? For a moment, I was stunned by the unreal word.
But after hearing it, something suddenly came to mind.
“Um… does anyone remember who the president was…?”
One mutant said that.
But no one could answer.
The same went for me.
The face and name that had definitely been on the news until yesterday, that had been cursed at all over the internet… I couldn’t even recall the words.
It felt like scraping desperately at an empty space. When the meaning of the erasure the officer had mentioned sank into my skin, goosebumps rose over me.
‘I thought he’d just disappeared, what with all that talk about an emergency vacancy and all…’
The reality was far more serious.
But at the same time, another question occurred to me.
Even with future information obtained at such a price, why had the government only managed to deal with things this much?
The answer to that was simple.
“Even the information obtained that way was incomplete. We have been carrying things this far with only very fragmented information.”
In any case, that seemed to have been their limit.
At the same time, fear rose in me. Fear of the situation currently unfolding.
Did that mean the situation was serious enough to force a government possessing fragmented future information to take such extreme measures?
If there was a cause, there could only be one.
The blackout zones.
Just what was happening inside them…?
“Even amid the lack of information, there is one threat we have identified with certainty.”
When the officer operated the screen, footage taken from inside a blackout zone began playing amid crackling noise.
In the footage, a person was standing there. No, I thought it was a person.
“……!”
Someone sucked in a breath.
Because the man in the video suddenly grabbed the skin of his own face, then pulled it downward as if tearing wet paper.
A grotesque form of bright red muscle and blood vessels rose up from beneath the skin.
It then draped the skin of another person lying collapsed beside it over itself, and in an instant, transformed into an identical copy of that person.
“The military refers to these as ‘human-skin-clad mimetic beasts.’ They mimic humans by peeling off a person’s skin and wearing it over themselves.”
It was shocking information.
It was a difficult fact to accept, but with video evidence in front of us, there was nothing to argue about.
Surely the government wasn’t trying to show us some low-quality snuff film.
“What’s more, they infect their victims. A victim whose skin has been peeled off will, within twelve hours of being left unattended, mutate into the same kind of human-skin-clad mimetic beast.”
The officer’s explanation was so horribly dry that it made it even more dreadful.
“A family member or acquaintance calling out to you from inside there is highly likely to actually be a monster wearing only their skin. They are highly intelligent, and may even share fragments of the skin owner’s memories.”
The massive body of the owlbear beastman sitting beside me was visibly trembling. His hand, the hand of a man who had said he would go find his grandson and son, clenched as if in a spasm.
The fear that his family inside there might have already had their skin stolen and been turned into monsters.
And…
‘Fuck, that fucking bitch…’
That fear fell over me without exception, too, when I had to find my younger sister.
“…Is there really, truly no way?”
“…When that question comes up, there is a manual answer I can give.”
The officer continued in a half-hoarse voice.
“The inside of the blackout zone is far larger than the actual Gangnam area. As such, there are many areas we have not yet identified, and we have confirmed that there are several survivors. However…”
The officer hesitated briefly, then added.
“They are an extreme minority. In my personal opinion, yes. You should assume there is no hope.”
If only it had ended there.
Unfortunately, the officer’s words did not stop there.
“What is even more despairing is that these things are immortal.”
The officer continued.
“Even if you blow off their heads with guns and pierce their hearts, they are only incapacitated for a short while. The main body beneath the skin regenerates endlessly. All our military can do is shoot them down, throw them into isolation containers, and stack them up. But even that is reaching its limit.”
The officer looked straight at us.
“The moment these things cross the defensive line and hide themselves in society, humanity will be destroyed. Because no one will be able to know who their real family is.”
At those words, everyone drew in a sharp breath.
Because only now had we properly realized the situation.
The reason the government had gone to such extreme lengths.
The reason not a single person among the higher-ups was raising a voice of opposition…
What was happening inside the blackout zones was even more serious than we had imagined.
“Lastly, we will give you a choice. A chance to leave without fighting alongside us.”
The screen blinked and displayed two choices.
[Transfer to an isolation facility after memory erasure.]
Or else… know the whole truth, and fight anyway.