"Manager Seok-woo! Chang-soo and Young-jun are both dead. I watched with my own eyes as Manager Park went mad and bit a woman on the street. We doomed Korea — it was us! The source of all of this is YS Biotech, that pharmaceutical company we hyped back to life! We're guilty. Our work killed all these people! Manager Seok-woo, don't you feel any guilt at all?"
Deputy Kim, whose face still looked boyishly young, wept blood from his eyes, drowning in grief — and yet the corners of his mouth were curled into a wild, vicious grin. Two utterly opposite expressions on a single face. Bella signaled the others to fall back at once. This man was infected, and the infection ran deep.
Seok-woo's eyes went vacant, his arms and legs limp as he sagged against a seat.
No one else had understood Deputy Kim's words, but Seok-woo had.
Through a mountain of financial maneuvering, they had raised a pharmaceutical company called YS Biotech from the dead and pocketed enormous profits — and that company, always poorly regarded within the industry, had brought about the catastrophe engulfing Korea today. Only now did he grasp where it all began. The source was himself.
He had orchestrated the whole thing with his own hands. Just as Deputy Kim said, he was a sinner — a sinner against all of Korea, against the entire world.
The crushing weight of it pushed him to the brink of collapse. Thinking back on the wretched scenes he'd witnessed the whole way here, this fund manager — usually so glib, and no coward when it counted — had his defenses shattered completely by the truth.
Deputy Kim didn't notice anything wrong with himself at all. He laughed, and the laugh was unbearably desolate.
"Manager Seok-woo, that day I asked you, 'If we pull our capital out in such a rush, what happens to the retail investors?' And you asked me right back, 'Do you work for the retail investors?' Hahahaha—!" Deputy Kim howled with laughter. "Manager Seok-woo, there are no retail investors anymore! And after today, I'm afraid there won't be a Korea either!"
Sang-hwa and the high school students slowly pieced together the gist of it, and now they glared at Seok-woo and Deputy Kim.
Bella wasn't sure what stance she was supposed to take at a moment like this. She looked up at the ceiling of the car, where there was a human-shaped hole ringed with the marks of tearing fingers — plainly clawed open by this Deputy Kim. The man must have run the whole way, driven by the power in his cells, chasing the train from Seoul all the way to Daejeon.
Deputy Kim looked small and thin, his features unremarkable; who'd have guessed his compatibility with the Uroboros Virus ran so high?
In ordinary people, blood contact with the Uroboros Virus meant infection within seconds, a dozen at most — the virus eroded its host several times faster than the traditional T-virus or G-virus. Both the female zombie who'd become that flesh tree earlier and Deputy Kim here had survived the virus's first cycle of erosion, and the fact that Deputy Kim could still hold on to some thread of conscious thought meant his cells matched the Uroboros Virus a notch better still.
But only a notch. His current frenzy proved he hadn't passed the virus's screening either. The virus was working its way through his brain bit by bit, detonating every scrap of negative emotion inside him.
"Bang." Bella put a round through the middle-aged man in the suit, who had already turned and was wobbling to his feet. A bloody hole opened in his forehead, and he crashed down again — this time for good.
"None of you are armed. Head back first." Bella called on her psionics, threading a note of compulsion into her voice, and the high school students turned back on instinct. Seok-woo drifted along after them in a daze. Only the wrestler stayed rooted in place.
Bella had to add one more line. "Think of your wife. Think of the child in her belly. They need you."
The words struck straight at the wrestler's resolve. He wavered, then withdrew from the car as well.
Robbed of anyone to confess to, Deputy Kim's face twisted into something savage. This young man, who looked barely out of university, still hadn't met the Uroboros Virus's screening threshold. His subconscious seemed to be suppressing the virus's erosion of his body — but his cells could no longer contain any more energy.
"Hhhk— hhhk— save… save me!" His frame began to swell like a balloon, and in the last second before his mind gave way entirely, he caught sight of Bella making strange gestures. A flash of clarity broke through his mind, and on pure instinct he cried out for help.
"I'm truly sorry. I can't save you — it's too late."
Bella's apology was sincere, even as her hands moved with lightning speed.
Immense pressure, a natural culmination of accumulated strength, deep knowledge, a firm grasp of how the world worked, and the fury she'd stored up over these past days — all of it had carried Bella to a breakthrough back while she was driving the train. Her Mind Lake had sunk one step deeper into the world where all minds meet and merge. Her psionics grew more profound and more crystalline than before, and riding that momentum, she took hold of her very first sixth-level spell.
She'd assumed it would be Disintegrate — she still had a Disintegrate scroll on her, after all, and had turned it over and studied it for a good long while. But the result caught her off guard: the first sixth-level spell she mastered turned out to be Flesh to Stone.
The spell could petrify its target, and for a living thing that meant certain death. It was simple and brutal, with no fuss to it — one point of the finger and the target turned to stone. Bella had seen someone use this once before: the White Witch.
Now, watching the Uroboros Virus inside Deputy Kim about to run wild, she cast fast, and a lead-gray ray shot from between the index and middle fingers of her right hand, striking straight into his forehead.
Flesh to Stone began to take hold. Bella drew on her psionics like a woman possessed — the spell would be complete the moment she guided it to wrap the target's body entirely in stone.
The spell wasn't much use against enormous foes. Against something like Kong, she'd never manage to encase the whole creature in the limited time she had, which meant it was useless on Kong or Godzilla. And the fantasy of pointing a single finger and turning the whole planet to stone was even further out of reach.
Against an enemy thrashing violently, its effect was cut in half, too.
Deputy Kim was thrashing like mad at that very moment. Bella's Flesh to Stone covered his entire front, and then she marshaled her psionics to creep across his back — but the Uroboros Virus inside him ran on its own. A great seam split open along his spine, and a tide of pent-up energy dragged flesh surging out through the breach.
A tentacle over two meters (some seven feet) long and thick enough for a person to wrap both arms around shot out of the gap.
She'd seen this move on the female zombie before. For Bella, a trick that worked once wouldn't work a second time — she'd come prepared, and instantly marshaled her psionics to drag Flesh to Stone across and seal the breach.