[542] The Forbidden Sanctuary (2)
* * *
A metal arm suddenly thrust through the elevator ceiling.
The elevator's steel casing clattered and split open, and the ceiling gave way as Shirone and Yo dropped out.
"Not as deep as I thought."
By the height, the lift had stopped at B1.
"What if we break through the floor?"
Since Mucus had blocked the stairs, going too deep from the outset felt dangerous.
A crackle of electricity sparked from the ceiling and the elevator buttons lit up.
"There's power…?"
Before Shirone could steady his racing heart, the elevator doors slid open on their own.
The corridor lights came on in sequence along the long hallway, revealing the drab interior of a laboratory.
Slime streaks were smeared here and there, but there was plenty of room to move.
"Let's start searching from here."
Shirone took Yo's arm and walked down the lab corridor.
Each room had pneumatic seals, and behind the glass walls dozens of electric cages were stacked like blocks.
'Quarantine facility. Animal testing, maybe?'
When they entered the only open room—the central control—the stale air hit Shirone's nose.
Faint streaks of blood marked the walls, and Mucus had run down along them as if it had flowed in from the surface.
"Looks like a fight happened here."
Broken equipment lay scattered and blood stained the floor.
"It wasn't a fight. It was a one-sided massacre."
The scene left no doubt of that.
"The fact there's electricity means—"
Shirone pressed the admin button in the control room on a hunch.
There was a low hum as holographic monitors lit up, projecting a flood of three-dimensional images.
"Su—subterraneans…!"
Yo tensed into a combat stance, but Shirone raised a hand to stop him.
"Don't worry. It's just a projection."
Shirone studied the cylindrical hologram closely.
Humans and apes rotated side by side, then the hologram fused them into a composite creature showing subterranean traits.
'What on earth is this?'
Shirone adjusted the hologram settings and a document appeared on a side monitor.
"Is that an ancient script? What does it say?"
Shirone fished through memories from before his hibernation and read aloud.
"Dynamic Human Project. Official government approval."
He fell silent after that and read only with his eyes.
He began to understand—at least a little—why the Children of the Sun and the subterraneans had shunned this place.
'My God…'
The document was horrifying.
After the nuclear war, eighty percent of humanity suffered mutations, deformities, and loss of biological function.
Humanity, swollen with recessive genes, could no longer produce healthy offspring. The Dynamic Human Project had been the attempted solution.
Combine artificially cultivated primates with human genetics to create humans far stronger than before.
They believed that way they might at least survive in a ruined world.
"Regent. What does it say? That the subterraneans will soon be punished?"
This place was literally a forbidden sanctuary, and Shirone found himself at a loss for words.
"Are you all right? You look pale."
At that moment, a smear of Mucus slid silently down the rear wall and two eyes opened in the two-meter-high mass of slime.
The rolling eyes swept the room and locked onto Shirone and Yo. The Mucus bulged outward and began to take on a human shape.
"So what this means is—"
At that instant, Shirone sensed something in the Spirit Zone and spun around.
"What—!"
There was nothing there.
Yo relaxed and asked, "What's wrong?"
"There definitely was something."
"Maybe you're just tense?"
"No. The shape of that Mucus is different."
Even when it had been pushed up to the ceiling the first time they came, its form had been completely different. Yo couldn't quite pick up that difference with just his eyesight.
"Want to just leave if you're worried?"
Shirone pressed his lips together and thought.
Now that he knew what this place was, he couldn't just return to the colony as if nothing had happened.
'There's definitely an answer here. Maybe I can recover my memories if I'm lucky.'
Having decided, Shirone said, "Let's search a little more."
They left the lab and began looking for a way further underground.
* * *
"The explosions stopped."
At Miro's words, Fermi accelerated.
"I'll check it out."
Skating over the blocks on his air skates, he rounded a corner and signaled that the way ahead was clear.
Rian arrived late and looked up at the tall buildings.
"This one's the least damaged."
Marsha nodded.
"You're more alert than before. Still, this whole scene is weird."
They spread out, each watching a different direction, when Miro pointed at a building.
"See that?"
A skyscraper was covered in Mucus.
"Someone went inside."
The thick sheets of slime had crude paths cut through them—clearly manmade.
"Mucus is a nuisance. And at this scale…"
Who knew how much of the building's interior was filled.
"We've got to check it out."
Miro stepped forward and the other three followed.
The lobby was surprisingly clean, but the stairs upward were clogged with Mucus.
"Shall we try to break through?"
Miro pointed at the stairs while Fermi rounded the corner and took a position toward the elevator shaft.
"They seem to have gone down there."
Marsha pressed herself to the wall and peered down into the elevator shaft.
A faint light glowed inside the metal box.
"There's light. An Abyss Walker?"
"We'll see once we go down."
As the four of them descended into the shaft, something thudded from the lobby ceiling and fell.
A human-shaped form of Mucus.
Horrific, as if its skin had been stripped away, yet its features were distinct and its eyes were clear.
A Mucus Man, as they called them.
"...."
The slime dripping from the crown of the Mucus Man who was looking toward the elevator slowly flowed, then latched onto his face like a drop and pulled him up toward the ceiling.
* * *
On Basement 4, Shirone inhaled the clear air deeply.
"Wow…"
Yo's eyes shone with joy as she looked around.
It was an arboretum straight out of the tropics: countless leaves climbed the walls and lush greenery flourished.
"An ecological environment underground. How did this survive so long?"
Without strict control of temperature, humidity, and light, it would have been impossible.
"Let's just go down. I don't like this place."
Shirone hesitated about exploring the fourth floor with Yo in tow.
"There's a bigger tree over there."
But she stepped forward on her own.
They entered a large arboretum sealed behind glass. Numerous computer systems hummed, and a massive tree stood at its center.
Shirone, entering a moment later, could guess Yo's expression just from her stunned silhouette.
"Uh—uh?"
Before Yo was a tree of life—smaller than it looked from the outside, but unmistakably a life tree.
Fetuses with umbilical stubs hung like fruit from its branches, and broad glass tanks imprisoning the roots were filled with slime.
"How could this… we—"
As Yo murmured, the slime in one of the glass tanks rose, grabbed a fetus, and pulled.
A stub snapped with a wet sound, and Yo watched the fetus fall into the slime. Her face went white and she screamed.
"Kyahhh!"
"Calm down! If you scream—!"
Yo had lost her composure.
"Regent! What is this? Why is there a life tree here? The Sun—!"
Shirone had no immediate answer, but he could check the control system. He pressed an option and another hologram lit up with further explanations.
'Project to prevent human extinction. Unofficial government approval. Of course…'
Like the Dynamic Human Project, the Children of the Sun were not a naturally evolved branch of humanity.
The document revealed facts even more shocking than those on the first floor.
With over seventy percent of flora and fauna extinct and resources exhausted, humanity finally realized something:
Humans must no longer be the agents of energy. Human greed had ruined everything.
Humanity needed special managers who weren't driven by desire. They created a local energy circulation system: Mucus.
Mucus's purpose was to generate the energy an ecosystem needed by digesting plants and animals into slime.
But as local energy sources dried up, the system destroyed its own boundaries and began to expand.
Judging ecosystem stability more important than preserving particular individuals, the system even consumed humans.
With the planet running dry, humanity concluded they had to redesign the human power mechanism from scratch.
Under government direction, Silence Artificial Hibernation Co., Ltd., which had been running human survival projects, contacted the last surviving fairy descendants and established Fairy Biomimetics.
Their result was the life tree powered by solar energy.
If a living organism could survive on photosynthesis and water alone, humanity would endure even if the world perished.
And now, a future they could never have imagined unfolded before Shirone.
'Mutants were the manifestation of fairy traits. Their obsession with preserving the human species is terrifying. But—'
Shirone looked around the lab with sorrow in his eyes.
'Is this truly the future they dreamed of?'
Bang! Yo dropped to her knees.
"No."
Tears ran down her cheeks.
"Is this real? Am I dreaming? We… the Children of the Sun—weren't we a people blessed by Ra?"
Long ago, the Dynamic Humans and the Children of the Sun may well have known of this place.
But it was a truth they must never know; instinct sealed it away—turning it into a forbidden sanctuary.
"Regent! Tell us! What are we? Are we even human?"
"That's not the point. What matters is that you're the ones still alive in this world."
"But until now we—!"
A patch of Mucus under the life tree stirred and a Mucus Man burst out.
"Danger!"
Shirone scooped Yo into his arms and rolled as slime streamed down from the ceiling and plastered the walls.
"What the hell is that?"
Holding Yo, Shirone turned and recoiled at the Mucus Man's grotesque form.
"High-efficiency energy—"
As a Mucus arm stretched like rubber and surged forward, Shirone threw himself and fired his photon cannon in rapid bursts.
The Mucus Man's shoulder and abdomen exploded, but when he sprang up, slime from the ceiling dragged him away and absorbed him.
"Damn it!"
Killing visible enemies wasn't enough; the entire mass of Mucus in the building was hostile.
Given new bodies, Mucus Men scuttled along the walls like spiders and dissolved into slime whenever Shirone struck them.
'How am I supposed to fight something like this?'
A Mucus Man shot up from the floor and swung a fist; Shirone dove the other way.
At the same time, thick tentacles shot out from the slime smeared on the walls.
"Regent!"
Just as Yo, finally coming to her senses, was about to leap forward, the arboretum doors swung open and a huge man strode past her.
Ignoring momentum, he planted himself in front of Shirone and swung a greatsword, cleaving a tentacle with a solid thud.
"Shirone! You okay?"
When the blue-haired man turned his head, Shirone's dazed expression shifted.
A rush of memories surged into his mind and began to reconnect with countless others.
"…Rian?"
Shirone — information recovery rate: 69%.