"This is… information on Special Infected?" gumi murmured as she read the sticky note.
From the description, the Special Infected they had just encountered really did match the label.
"A Witch…"
It wasn't the only note.
Several other morgue drawers had sticky notes slapped onto their tal fronts, each one docunting a different Special Infected type in unsettling detail.
[Special Infected: Boor]
[Characteristics: Bloated body, slow movent, an exaggeratedly swollen abdon covered in cysts. Vomits yellow green viscous bile from the mouth.]
[Strengths: The bile has a powerful stench that attracts a large number of ordinary infected. If contaminated, you will face a siege of zombies. If the abdon is attacked, it will explode, spraying a massive amount of bile with a range of about ten ters.]
[Weaknesses: Extrely low defense, extrely slow movent. Direct combat ability is even weaker than ordinary infected]
…
[Special Infected: Hunter]
[Characteristics: Shorter build. Moves on all fours. Usually does not walk normally. Primary movent is climbing and leaping between buildings.]
[Strengths: Extrely high speed and agility. Possesses a certain degree of thinking. Will choose monts when humans are alone to launch pounce attacks that are difficult to react to.]
[Weaknesses: Limbs are mutated and strengthened, but the defense of the body and head is no different from ordinary infected. Cannot pounce continuously.]
"These three types are all ones we've already seen," Kotoko said quietly as she scanned the notes.
Her eyes moved from drawer to drawer.
"There are Smokers, Jockeys, Chargers, Spitter, Tank… Eight Special Infected types in total." She paused, her expression turning thoughtful. "All the ordinary infected have been cleared out, but the Special Infected were kept. They have implanted locators. There's also docuntation this detailed."
She exhaled slowly.
"What does the one controlling all of this actually want?"
Asagiri pulled a morgue drawer open as if he were checking a refrigerator. "Either they're developing biological weapons, or they're chasing human evolution through forced mutation. Classic zombie apocalypse tropes."
Asuna stayed near the doorway. She looked like she was guarding the entrance, but her posture gave her away. She was very obviously avoiding staring too hard at the drawers.
Still, she couldn't help thinking aloud.
"Turning a whole city into infected, and then screening them however they want… what kind of world is this? What kind of organization can do that?"
"We can expand the worldview later," Asagiri replied with a light chuckle. Then he glanced at Kotoko. "Do you feel any strange aura?"
Kotoko lifted a hand and pointed at one specific drawer across the room.
"There."
"Okay."
Asagiri walked over without hesitation and yanked it open.
Inside, curled up on the cold tal slab like a frightened animal, was a trembling male Revenant in a white coat. His face was pale, his body faint and translucent, but the fear in his eyes was painfully human.
"D don't co closer!"
The mont he was exposed, the Revenant tried to retreat deeper into the drawer.
Asagiri simply reached in, grabbed the back of his neck, dragged him out, and tossed him onto the floor.
"Confess. Quickly." His voice was flat, impatient.
The gray mask reappeared on his face. A dark red pattern, like a Hannya demon's outline, crawled across it. Just looking at it made your skin prickle.
"Antibody reagent. Where is it?"
"Gwah…" The Revenant choked on his own fear. "In… in the top floor of Inpatient Building No. 2…"
Kotoko's lips curved slightly.
As expected. The Diplomat really was the Diplomat.
Kotoko's own talent gave her a certain ability to communicate with spiritual beings, but this wasn't her world. The spirits here had no reason to treat her like a princess.
Besides, as the saying went, every profession had its specialty. Kotoko was far better at reading subtle clues and reconstructing the truth from scraps of information.
Negotiation belonged to professionals.
Asagiri crouched in front of the Revenant, the mask's red pattern seeming to deepen.
"Now tell what happened in this city. Can you confess sensibly, or do I have to drag every sentence out of you? Hmm?"
The Revenant shook violently. "P please don't be angry. I I'll talk, I'll talk!"
Asuna, who had been scared of spirits from the start, almost lost her composure watching it.
It had to be Asagiri.
Sure, the Diplomat class enhanced all forms of negotiation, but with his personality, the thod he used most naturally was intimidation. Pair that with the aura that made spirits recoil, plus the Ever changing Mask boosting that kind of approach, and it wasn't surprising the Revenant was falling apart.
But then…
Asuna rembered the last Dungeon, the way Asagiri had coaxed and deceived that strange entity in the form of a little girl nad Alice into becoming his Persona.
He had been disturbingly smooth then, too.
…Was it possible this guy actually had high emotional intelligence, and simply switched to whatever thod worked best depending on the target?
No wonder he was a Diplomat.
"T that… my na is Robin Diaz. I'm thirty three. I was a doctor at this hospital…"
"Get to the point," Asagiri cut in. "Are you introducing yourself? Do you think I'm here on a blind date with you?"
"Y yes! Point, point!" Robin's words tumbled out faster.
"About a month and a half ago, a plague with a mortality rate close to one hundred percent broke out in this city. On the day it started, we began developing antibodies. But less than twelve hours after the outbreak, the dead changed. They turned into monsters that attacked any moving creature they saw…"
gumi couldn't help asking, quietly but clearly, "What about the army? With sothing that serious, there should've been military control, right?"
"The army…" Robin's expression twisted. "They ca on the twentieth day after the disaster."
His voice dropped, and sothing ugly surfaced behind his fear.
"But they didn't co just to clear the monsters. They gathered all the survivors and brought them to this hospital. Then they injected everyone with sothing, like a virus."
His hands trembled.
"Most people turned within twelve hours. The few who didn't… who lasted longer than twelve hours… they were taken away."
Asagiri's gaze sharpened. "And you? You beca a Revenant. That ans you died a normal death."
"Huh?" Robin froze. "What are you saying? Revenant… I'm dead?"
"What do you think?" Asagiri pointed at Robin's chest.
Robin followed the gesture, then stared down in horror.
There was a fist sized hole punched clean through the left side of his chest, still wet with dark blood.
"Holy crap… I'm really dead!?"
Kotoko spoke beside them, calm as a narrator. "You beca a Revenant because of strong obsession. You forgot you were dead. Many Revenant are like that. It's normal."
"Obsession…" Robin's face twitched. Sothing snapped into place.
"My daughter." His voice broke. "My little daughter… she was injected too."
His features warped as if hatred were physically reshaping him. Two lines of bright red blood tears leaked from his eyes, carving dark tracks down his cheeks and staining the once spotless white coat.
"That's right… I tried to stop them…" His breathing turned ragged. "Then there was a gunshot. I rember. I rember everything!"
The air in the morgue seed to drop another degree.
Robin's distortion intensified. His white coat darkened, bleeding into crimson like it had been soaked from the inside out.
Kotoko's expression stayed steady. "Recalling your deepest resentnt turned you into a Banshee."
She sighed, almost sympathetically.
"It seems you've completely lost your sanity."
Kotoko looked at Asagiri. "We can't negotiate anymore. The only thing we can do now is send him on his way."
"Yes," Asagiri replied. "That's the only way."
His Rope Dart snapped forward.
The blade struck perfectly between the Banshee's eyebrows. The curse attribute flared, and the weapon carried the power to erase spiritual entities completely.
"My daughter…"
Even as his form dissolved, Robin's voice still carried endless resentnt, endless obsession.
gumi and Asuna watched the scene with complicated expressions.
"To inject a zombie virus into a daughter right in front of her father…" gumi's voice was low. "What kind of people were that so called army?"
Before anyone could answer, Asuna's expression changed. She leaned toward the doorway, eyes narrowing.
"Wait. Listen… there's noise outside."
The room fell silent.
Sure enough, a muffled thudding sound ca from the corridor, like sothing heavy hamring again and again.
"Thudding?" Asuna's face tightened. "Don't tell …"
She opened the morgue door and stepped out.
The instant she entered the corridor, a violent bang shook the ground. The stairwell fire door was ripped off its hinges and sent flying into the wall like scrap tal.
The next second, a dense mass of zombies poured through the opening.
They shoved and squeezed over each other like a tide of bodies, flooding into the corridor in a writhing wave.
The hallway that had been wide and empty only monts ago was instantly blocked, wall to wall, by the surge.
Asuna's pupils shrank.
Ordinary infected were supposed to be slow. Like the ones back at the apartnt, sluggish enough that even normal people could handle them if they were careful.
So why…
Why did this swarm move like locusts, fast and hungry, rushing forward as if they couldn't wait to devour every last living thing in their path?
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