||Race: Human||

||Species: Not enough data||

||Details: Sample contains a sizable amount of C1, present in all humanoid races to a relatively high percentage when compared to human beings, and trace amounts of C42, a compost that denotes the existence of a symbiotic microorganism. The spectrum of biologically similar, yet undoubtedly different, humanoids with C42 is so large that most of them have yet to be cataloged, it is not unusual to find a new species amongst them||

No matter how many times he read it, he still couldn’t believe it. Rather, who would believe in such a thing?

-C42? New species? There's no way...

-Why, though? Giant ants and human-insect hybrids exist, but you can’t be a strange crossbreed? Hehe...

“Ai, just what are you playing at?”

[Information regarding the Research Lab will be disclosed once you discover its location]

“...Tsk”

-So, did you bring me here just to see my reaction?

Kyel pushed forward similar envelopes holding a black card. Different subject codes flashed by Seven’s eyes as he opened them one by one. Most of the tests were made before his, past midnight and into the early morning.

“Composts, polarity differential, symbiotic microorganisms, blood sharing, extra-chemical differential? What is all that?”

He kept skimming through the cards and the subjects with many different composts he never heard of appeared very often. Those that could be accurately classified as homo sapiens species could be counted on a single hand.

"Some of them are explicitly not humans, Kyel also tested the ants..."

-What about the Queen Ant?

-The test is underway.

Seven used a brief moment of silence to digest the information before Kyel interrupted his chain of thoughts.

-There are in total 18 types of... Hybrids, yeah, that’s an ok name. 4 of them vanished in between casualties, C172 and C192 are quite common, ECD96 and PD120 are unique... But I won’t bother you with the rest of the details. Let’s talk about why we’re having this talk, to begin with. Take a guess!

“...”

-I have no idea.

-Awww – he made an exaggerated expression – ok, no choice then! I want a sample of Natalya.

Seven frowned instantly.

-Can’t you just collect some yourself? It’s not that hard.

-Natalya doesn’t leave anything behind for me to use. An opportunity should appear in the future if I’m patient, but I can’t wait that long, the requirements for a Data Compatibility Test or DC Test on the research lab aren’t friendly, multiple samples are needed.

“... She doesn’t leave anything behind?”

As if he was reading his mind, Kyel spoke cheerfully.

-Toilet paper, tableware, bandages, plastic bottles, she basically destroys them. Not a strand of hair is left behind in her bed. She always cleans after her own mess, nothing goes unnoticed.

Seven thought that conduct was strange, but then again, it further delineated the image of a loner in his mind.

It was as if Natalya wanted to erase the traces of her existence.

The urge to write flowed in his blood as he thought of showing further developments to her character.

Seven quickly searched for his book. It would be somewhere inside that room, since Kyel read it and wouldn’t let it fall on the hands of others. Once he got his hands on the item, everything in the room turned still as he furiously wrote page after page and phased through them before the ink had time to settle.

He couldn’t feel his pulsing lungs or his beating heart, nor the pain of something cold and hot stuffed in his chest. Ideas boiled inside and he unceremoniously translated them into words that spewed forth like hot lava.

It was refining.

A sudden insight on his fictional character that made him go back every few minutes and change the passages to give them a deeper meaning.

The action-horror turned a few degrees into the road of abnormality as the prose grew heavy and impactful.

Once he finished with adapting the passages and creating new content, the pen dropped from his hand and he felt the fatigue taking its toll on his body.

Feeling the cold sweat wrapping the folds of his clothes and coating his back, he reclined on the chair and gazed up to the ceiling with an absent-minded look.

A brief moment of satisfaction.

Once he broke out of the stupor, Kyel was nowhere to be seen, a white piece of paper was left behind in front of the table. Seven picked it up to discover slightly childish handwriting, with heart shapes and demon tails coloring every corner of the purple letters.

“Two odd months of the first half are 62 days. In 1 week, there are 5 business days. The 1st half of the year is 6 months. Each month has 4 weeks and two odd months almost add 1 more... Is that supposed to be a clue?”

After writing to his heart’s content, he wasn’t in the right mind to think about the meaning of Kyel’s message.

“I’ll have to think about it later. Right now, there’s still one more thing I have to check”

Seven left to Area 1 Queen Ant’s chamber to properly investigate, bringing a torch.

The rotten carcass of the giant monster half-blocked the entrance and its stench was unbearable, yet there were traces of the corpse being harvested for materials. The only people he could envision doing this were Natalya herself or Kyel’s goons.

With the torch lit, he looked around every corner of the cave.

“Nothing is out of place...”

Aside from the Queen’s corpse, the only change he noticed was that the pile of crystals was nowhere in sight.

Another half an hour later, he finished his meticulous search with a strange feeling.

“She lied...”

There was no place where a regular human could hide from the Queen Ant’s grasp in the entire room. This meant that Anna Rosenheim, the person who accepted his party request and was immediately kicked out due to death, was near the Queen Ant the whole time.

“Now that I think about it, there is one suspicious slit in the Queen’s nape that doesn’t look like it was harvested from...”

Seven was thankful that rats and cockroaches didn’t seem active around this area, as he hated insects. His hate was proportional to how small their size was and their speed, thus he wasn’t as disgusted from the ants. Wrapping his arm in an extra thick layer of cloth, he plunged it in the hole and widened it.

Yet again he confirmed how inconvenient it was to have only a single arm, but the original hole was big enough for him to stretch a large part.

Giving up on maintaining the hole open, he used the torch to slowly burn down the brim of that thick tissue and dropped a piece of flaming cloth inside.

It fell for about 5 meters and showed a quick glimpse of the interior.

Seven’s arm was nowhere long enough to make past the barrier of flesh on the Queen’s body, it had to be at least 2.5 meters tall, which was wishful thinking. However, the way the torch’s light dispersed after those 2.5 meters suggested the existence of void space inside of the Queen, like a chamber of sorts.

“Anna Rosenheim, maybe she was residing inside of the Queen... Who was she?”

When Seven turned around to leave, he was surprised to see the figure of a shadow reflected by the torch’s light. It was a distinct shape he had burned in his memory, how could he not recognize it?

Natalya didn’t budge. For a moment he could envision the glowing eyes of a predator on her, gloomy white slits thrown at his direction. He felt uncomfortable, was his mind playing tricks? Kyel’s words resounded in his head.

“Natalya is not human”

In the span of a second, the shadow was nowhere to be seen, it took some time for Seven to break out of his stupor and walk to the entrance. There, he noticed a piece of paper at the place Natalya was standing.

“Be careful when fighting monsters, lest you become one...”

Seven left to look for the research lab, all the way pondering why he was given that message. It was the same phrase he had engraved on his book’s hidden agendas.

“Are you issuing a warning, or speaking from experience?”

***

[The marked subjects shall be terminated in one minute, please leave through the nearest exit gate]

At the time the announcement sounded, Arthur and his crew were already past Terminal F-8 on the sub-terrain level.

-Are you sure you want to come with us?

Arthur was worried about Kate, she was usually near him whenever things went south with the mission, and she always barely managed to go safe. He thanked her for the help, but he was skeptical about her newfound abilities.

-Yes, I am 100% sure.

She spearheaded the way silently, showing enough confidence for the whole group. People couldn’t help but follow after her lead.

The sub-terrain was not as shocking as the other ground levels, there was no destroyed city or blood river, at least not in so clear a view. It was a downward slope the majority of the way, the space was cramped so it was understandable that no ant came from underground. If any did, it would be worker ants.

It took them more than an hour to go down the slope, but the stress only piled up as no one knew when a monster would appear. Still, Kate didn’t seem worried at all, it was as if she already expected what was awaiting them.

Arthur was quite good at detecting other people’s worries, he couldn’t shake the feeling of something off about Kate’s actions.

-Kate, are you alright? Just like you did for me, I can also lend you an ear.

Kate looked back on reflex, but with that poor light, her features couldn’t be discerned.

-If I had something to say, I wouldn’t keep it to myself. Don’t sweat it, Arthur, I’m fine, everything will work out just fine too, trust me.

A moment of silence encompassed the two, ending on Arthur’s honest smile.

-I trust you.

Another ten minutes passed.

-Hey, it’s getting brighter – someone commented.

-Now that you said it...

-We’re getting closer to the place, aren’t we?

They steeled themselves for what was to come. Although a bunch of weaklings and problematic people, they weren’t the same as before, not after seeing the bloody scene past Terminal A-1.

And yet, none could expect what was waiting for them at the lowest level.

They didn’t know what the presence of light implied.

***

Seven had been racking his brains to understand the message Kyel had left, but due to his trickster nature, Seven thought guessing the location of the Research Lab from scratch was the way to go. It was quite a simple thought process.

“It’s inside the protected area. Either a place Arthur didn’t scout yet, or it is hidden in plain view.”

If it was the latter, he would accept the gamble of going for Kyel’s hint, but if it was the former, the answer was clear.

Moreso, he started with obvious clues compared to Kate and Kyel.

It was the cave, the location where they first heard Ai’s annoying outputs and started with this dance of death. He bit on his thumb and let the pain flood his senses, it was a space that held meaning to Seven since it kickstarted his new life as a normal human – at least in terms of possibilities.

“Abandon hope... It was one of the first things Ai told us when we reached here.”

7th Research Facility: HOPE. Linking the two pieces of information, the hidden message was “leave this place”. Outside was despair, and their hope of survival lied there, such was the meaning he extracted.

“Considering Ai’s sadistic tendencies, it’s plausible for it to see us off to the lowest level of hell”

It was on purpose that the abducted subjects knew nothing about each other from before. If someone you knew died in this place and for some reason you couldn’t locate him, there was a likelihood of going back to retrieve the corpse and instead stumbling on a hidden passage.

Compared to the other facilities, that was the only that didn’t fit the highly technological characteristics.

Seven stood on watch for any abnormalities and found a part of the wall that was roughly squared. Looking closely, the smooth part could be slid up, revealing a digital locket with a password. It consisted of 4 characters, amongst capitalized letters and numbers.

-Tsk...

Seven was pissed off at a sudden realization: Kyel’s message was completely pointless, as he would be able to figure out everything easily.

Kyel created a riddle to waste Seven’s time and in a way that, if the research lab was found beforehand, the logic behind it turned bare.

The digital root of the numbers in each sentence, lined together, became 8 – 1/5 – 1/6 – 4/1. The last sentence implied that 4 should be added to 1, so 8 – 15 – 16 – 5. If each number was the position of a letter in the alphabet, they became H – O – P – E.

A clue he already had.

“Really talented at pissing people off...”

[Password clear. Entry granted]