Ch.334If… A Red Thread Had Been Cut (2)

Tonight is the night. Surveillance drones swarm the skies of Hollowed Creek like a plague of locusts, and people who never learn to look up endure another day… but only until today.

When the moonlight, barely visible through the smog, casts an unstable and muffled glow like a TV channel behind a signal shield, a surveillance screen on the deserted street suddenly turns on.

And that’s not all. One by one, like a spreading plague, all the displays in the city light up, from massive billboards to personal surveillance smartwatches.

Each activated screen displays the same message. The faces of the elderly who recognize it turn white as plaster. They try desperately to turn off the screens with trembling hands. Futile.

‘Normal device operation suspended. National emergency declared. Emergency action notification issued. All digital devices are currently displaying this emergency action notification…’

The screens inside Hollowed Creek Cathedral were no exception. All screens were staring at John Rutherford. He felt a chill. A passing remark he’d heard months ago came to mind.

When the sun and moon rise simultaneously, and the extinction war-era alert system screams, run. John Rutherford rarely followed others’ advice, but this time could be an exception.

That alert was only broadcast during the extinction war when strategic weapons were about to fall on American soil. Whatever that young man on the other end of the communication channel had done, John Rutherford needed to flee.

He could have broadcast an evacuation alert for Hollowed Creek, but the cathedral was in the center of the city. Such an alert would completely block all routes out of the city.

“Inquisitor, prepare to leave the city with the Eves. Don’t tell the other Adams and Eves. Which city has our largest Hollowed Creek branch?”

“Lake Havasu, where the acquisition is in final stages and only our followers remain. Prepare to move immediately! But, Your Holiness, what is this broadcast? It looks like nothing more than a malfunction…”

Since he had already prepared to take action before asking, John Rutherford wasn’t angry. His hand grabbed the collar of the questioning inquisitor and headed toward the edge of the cathedral.

A clear sparkle appeared near the muffled moonlight. It hadn’t been there moments before. The sun and moon were about to rise simultaneously. John Rutherford spoke as if swallowing his words.

“Does that look like a malfunction too? If anything’s malfunctioning, it’s the world itself. Damn… Some ungrateful bastard has activated a strategic weapon from the war era.”

At those words, the inquisitor offered no further objections. Anything related to the extinction war was trauma engraved in their genes. The resurrection of a ghost from the extinction war era was clearly something to flee from.

It took less than 20 minutes for a convoy of vehicles to leave Hollowed Creek. The screens and digital devices filling those vehicles continued to broadcast only the alert, not functioning properly.

At that moment, the alert broadcast stopped repeating its monotonous warning. Someone’s voice began to come through clearly. A voice John Rutherford remembered.

The content was… the Bible. Words that kindly whispered what was about to happen. John Rutherford could feel his body inside the exosuit trembling uncontrollably.

He hoped all this was just bluster. He wanted to believe it was just some foolish act by an associate of the broker’s gang he had killed… but the voice on the broadcast channel maintained only calmness.

“Thus says the Lord God: Because the Philistines acted revengefully and took vengeance with malice of heart to destroy with perpetual enmity…”

As that single verse was recited, the streak of fire that seemed embedded in the sky next to the moonlight began to intensify. It became increasingly distinct and started taking form.

“Therefore thus says the Lord God, I will stretch out my hand against the Philistines, and I will cut off the Cherethites and destroy the rest of the seacoast…”

Soon, the sun and moon truly rose simultaneously in the sky. The Patriarch’s Eves who had been left behind in Hollowed Creek, having never been chosen to leave, screamed as they witnessed the launch scene of Phaethon Station in person.

“I will execute great vengeance on them with wrathful rebukes. Then they will know that I am the LORD, when I lay my vengeance upon them.”

The sound of a book slowly closing echoed through the emergency channel, followed by a truly monotonous voice. If what came before was a warning, what followed was action.

“Drive the sun chariot low. Don’t be stupid enough to sit and die in Hollowed Creek, John. Since you’re the type to run away even without me telling you… I’m not particularly worried. See you around.”

A gentle voice leaked from the melting displays. Among people screaming as their bodies cooked, the liquid crystal in devices began to drip. The beam wasn’t visible yet.

Soon the rocks in the wasteland surrounding Hollowed Creek began to boil, and concrete buildings exploded as moisture inside expanded. The sacred paintings in Hollowed Creek Cathedral began to melt and flow down.

That’s when it happened. A silent flash erupted, and a beam of light as thick as a building connected the sky to Hollowed Creek. The sky, incandescent with golden light, began to scream.

John Rutherford bit his lip with his gums and began to tremble. He hadn’t forgotten this terror either. That was undoubtedly the real Phaethon Station.

“He’s insane. The Phaethon Station really…”

At that moment, the inquisitor swerved the car sharply. The Patriarch nearly tumbled over inside the car and was about to rage, but it wasn’t difficult to understand why he had veered off the road.

The aftershock was approaching. Plasmatized air swirled like a storm, rushing forward with clouds of wasteland dust, threatening to swallow the entire road. The Patriarch’s vehicle began to roll on the ground.

John Rutherford emerged from the vehicle, tearing off the door, crushing the remains of an Eve who had been smashed against his exosuit. The extinction war-era exosuit was barely withstanding the heat.

Everything around was terribly bright. So bright that raising his hand revealed the skeleton inside his exosuit. He could endure. European goods were sturdy. John gritted his teeth.

Hollowed Creek, which had been exploding and melting, now began to sublimate. The residue left after sublimation began to fuse into black, sooty glass chunks, and only the sound of boiling glass announced the city’s death.

Hundreds of thousands of lives evaporated at a single command to drive the sun chariot low. And they disappeared not even for the purpose of killing someone, but merely to deceive and torment.

The heat ray from Phaethon Station only stopped after turning Hollowed Creek into a city-sized glass paste bubbling in a massive crater of bedrock, but its aftermath didn’t end easily.

The sky glowed like an ominous aurora, perhaps due to the sublimated metals. John Rutherford couldn’t help but vomit into the wasteland as he watched the sky undulating with orange light. The extinction war had been revived.

Still, it took only a few hours to reach Lake Havasu City by running in his exosuit. And the moment Lake Havasu came into his view… an ear-splitting sound erupted.

A sound like crushing a paper bag multiplied a billion times reverberated, and a dust storm enveloped him and threw him away. When the storm cleared, Lake Havasu City was gone.

All that remained was a reverse-engineered replica of DARPA’s gravitational wave generator. The city had been crushed in an instant, leaving only a layer of what used to be a city, sunk seventy-five centimeters into the ground.

Fortunately, inquisitors who had hurriedly left the city to prepare a welcome for the arriving Patriarch found him, and John Rutherford could continue his escape. He had to go west.

He didn’t know who was chasing him, but John was confident they wouldn’t be stupid enough to unleash extinction war-era weapons on Belwether.

Additionally, since Hollowed Creek was also a Belwether partner, Belwether would at least provide protection to the chairman of a partner company.

However, the city of Needles, which the inquisitor reached with him on the way to San Francisco Island… was filled with endless screams and sirens.

The Hollowed Creek branch there was empty. The walls and floors of the building were covered with marks that looked exactly like X-ray images, the charred remains of human skeletons, and fire was spreading from the branch.

One of the inquisitors searching the branch interior with John suddenly began to shout urgently. A survivor? No. Certainly not.

“Your Holiness! There’s someone alive over there…”

Before he could finish, the inquisitor’s arms crossed inward, then were crushed flat as if squeezed by some massive being.

As the mangled mass of flesh and metal tumbled to the floor, other inquisitors drew their guns but froze when they saw blue-white light flickering in strange patterns from the silhouette.

More precisely, they were convulsing inside their exosuits, unable to regain their senses. One by one, they died as their breathing holes were blocked by the foam they coughed up during their seizures. The silhouette remained silent.

The same pattern of light flickered from the dead men’s artificial eyes, but fortunately, or unfortunately, John Rutherford was not the type to use artificial eyes. The silhouette whispered.

“I don’t understand you, John. Why do you live doing these things every day? I couldn’t enjoy tormenting people or killing lives indiscriminately as if they were just numbers.”

Though the silhouette’s form wasn’t clearly visible, John could still see its two wide-open eyes in the darkness. Those murky eyes, like black holes, looked almost bestial.

As the silhouette slowly raised its hand, John’s body rose into the air. Though his exosuit was clearly from the extinction war era, he couldn’t resist. What he wore was merely an inner lining.

It was just an abandoned inner lining with gloves forcibly attached, worn as if it were a relic from the extinction war era, so it was no match for someone armed with technologies that were experimental even during the actual extinction war.

As he slowly opened his outstretched hand, John Rutherford’s exosuit began to tear apart. His limbs were ripped off brutally, but the torso portion was delicately peeled away layer by layer of fluid-fiber.

The control was perfect. The silhouette’s innate excellence was fully displayed even now. As soon as he made a fist-clenching gesture, John screamed in agony, and the silhouette burst into laughter.

“Ah, haha. This is quite fun… But I wouldn’t just burst you to death, John. I’m actually going to save you. I wanted to try out the life support system I found in the DARPA bunker.”

With a light gesture from the silhouette, John Rutherford’s wrist was torn off, and a handful of nanomachines began to pour into the opening. Bone, nerves, and muscle began to grow from the severed wrist.

“Fortunately, it works well. It was the only prototype left at the base, but who cares? I’m not doing this for my own benefit, am I? I’m doing it hoping your life will be eternal and hellish.”

After saying this quite casually, the silhouette slowly emerged from the darkness. In one hand was a flamethrower from a Hollowed Creek inquisitor, and in the other, a fuel tank.

As John Rutherford writhed in the air like a beast, screaming, Arthur returned a smile. When John begged and pleaded, he clicked his tongue soothingly as if calming a child.

There was no room for dialogue. Perhaps he himself had eliminated it. Having sufficiently enjoyed John’s reactions, Arthur bid farewell in a cheerful voice.

“Farewell, Fortunato. May you have a happy eternal life!”

Afterward, Arthur returned the flame that John had given him. It was tit for tat, retaliation in kind, and to put it somewhat humorously, a response believing that John Rutherford had followed the Golden Rule.

The slowly closing wound of the extinction war burst open again that night and began to fester anew. The fear of Phaethon Station and the fact that replicas of gravitational wave generators existed came as a shock.

Belwether felt the need to work toward the true end of the extinction war and resolved to invest more in mutant hunting. The Metamutant Department would now receive better equipment and personnel.

The federal government screamed. Learning that someone possessed the activation codes for Phaethon Station and was insane enough to actually use it, they immediately began a search.

As a result, conflicts with Belwether became increasingly frequent, and many people began to share anxious whispers about where these escalating local battles might lead. The anxiety continued to grow.

Panacea Meditech eventually had to abandon its morphotype protection policy. While many companies previously had no reason to harbor malice toward morphotypes, that was no longer the case.

The Boogeyman’s name became legendary. It became a legend like a gloomy ghost story reminiscent of extinction war-era horrors, and people became afraid to even speak his name.

Nevertheless, Arthur was not a person with childlike malice who innocently burned ants with a magnifying glass or tore off butterfly wings. He chose to quietly retreat into seclusion in the wasteland.

Günter went back to the bunker where he had found Prometheus to search for him, but all that was newly added there was a single urn with the name Mila Joyce.

He once stationed the chairman’s security team at the columbarium where Eve No. 113764’s urn was kept, but the rescue team sent to find them after communications were cut off found only spheres of compressed human remains and exosuits.

Even now, on the anniversary of her death, Polaris music she loved flows like a funeral dirge from the emergency alert system, though no authorized users remain.

Arthur was free, as if thrown into the empty universe where neither gravity, heat, air, light, nor anything else could bind him.