"Somewhere in the ruin, something still breathes. Whether it is hope or horror... depends on who dares to listen."
The forest wasn't supposed to exist.
It was a dead zone—classified Red Area for over a decade, buried beneath toxic fallout and Gastrea infestation. No satellites scanned here anymore. No Monoliths stood to claim it. The land had returned to silence.
But something moved through the trees.
Not a beast. Not a drone.
A girl.
Barefoot. Pale. Her hair was the color of moonlight, hanging in unbrushed waves down to her waist. She wore no protection, no sensor mask—just a hospital gown stained with dirt and old blood. Her eyes reflected faintly in the dark, not with the crimson glow of infection, but with something deeper. A shimmer of thought.
She stepped through the mist, past the ruins of rusted transport trucks and crumbled prefabs overtaken by vines. Gastrea eyes blinked open in the foliage, watching her.
They didn't attack.
They parted.
A Type-III arachnoid the size of a tank lowered its body and let her pass.
"I'm not here to hurt you," she whispered. "I just want to hear."
The girl knelt before a fallen tree, pressing her hand to its mold-slick bark. Her lips moved—too softly for a human to hear.
But the forest listened.
Something answered.
A tremor ran through the ground. It wasn't seismic. It was something older. Language without words.
Behind her, a man watched from a nearby rise—his body cloaked in a black containment suit marked with the faded insignia of the First Outer Wall Division. His rifle remained unslung.
She didn't see him.
Or she pretended not to.
The girl rose and walked deeper into the woods.
The man raised a transmitter to his mouth.
"Subject One is speaking again. No signs of viral aggression. Gastrea remain docile within five-kilometer radius. Confirming psychic resonance."
"Do not engage," came the voice on the other end. "Maintain distance. Observation only."
The man hesitated. Then—
"Understood."
And still the girl walked, speaking to monsters like they were old friends.
Far across the land, beyond the forests and fortified walls, Dr. Albrecht Grunewald stood before a screen filled with strings of mutagenic code and histopathological renderings.
His gloved fingers danced across the console.
"Fascinating," he muttered, eyes gleaming with fervor behind cold medical lenses. "Not communication. Communion."
The room around him was a monolithic laboratory—a relic beneath District 5, its existence unknown to all but a few. Cylindrical tanks lined the walls, filled with pale, drifting children. Some stirred. Some didn't.
In the center of the lab stood a glass column—a containment vessel for something that had no shape, only movement. A living mist. A sample of what the world had forgotten.
Grunewald turned to a series of old blueprints pinned beneath rusted clamps.
"New World Creation Plan—Stage 4: Symbiosis."
He smiled.
"Soon, Rentarō Satomi. You'll see the future I gave your friend. The one you were too afraid to build."
In Tokyo Area, under the polished chandeliers of the Government Palace, Seitenshi leaned over her desk in the private chambers, reading an encrypted intelligence report.
It wasn't labeled urgent.
But her heart pounded.
"...He's not answering any calls?" she asked.
Her aide bowed. "Satomi-dono hasn't returned from the outskirts. His last confirmed location was near District 9's freight corridor."
Her fingers trembled over the paper.
"Rentarō... what are you chasing now?"
She looked out the window toward the fractured skyline, where Monoliths loomed like gravestones over a dying empire.
And somewhere beyond the reach of her voice, Rentarō was already walking a path toward war.
A war she could neither prevent—nor win without him.
Somewhere beneath the city's veins, the girl in white stopped walking.
She tilted her head as if hearing something from far, far away.
"They're waking up again," she said softly.
Then she smiled, not quite like a child.
"It's almost time to choose."