Chapter Eighty-Six: A Sudden Turn

Three days earlier, a disaster no one had foreseen had struck without warning.

Only through that ordeal did Kiyomi and the others learn that in this world, so like the end of days, there were monsters besides the undead.

That day, three of the survivor team’s evolved members had gone out to search for food and returned to the settlement. Along with a certain amount of supplies, they had also brought back a survivor who had been desperately holding on alone.

But the moment they relaxed after returning to the settlement, the monster that had stalked them all the way there and hidden in the shadows finally bared its claws.

It was a creature with the power of invisibility. In its first strike, it took one evolved member’s head clean off in a single bite; then, with one pounce, it tore another open from throat to belly.

The settlement fell into chaos at once. Together with Kiyomi, the remaining evolved members and the ordinary survivors fought back with all they had, exploiting the monster’s weakness—its shape would be revealed wherever blood spattered it. At terrible cost, they finally brought it down.

Once the monster died, the power cloaking it in invisibility at last failed, and only then did they see its true form: a gigantic beast, tigerlike yet not quite a tiger, more than five meters long.

Kiyomi found the corpse increasingly familiar the longer he looked at it, until he finally confirmed that the monster had once been the Bengal tiger he had seen more than once at the Ueno Zoo before the end of the world.

And yet the Bengal tiger in his memory had weighed no more than two hundred kilograms and been only about three meters long—utterly incomparable to the monster the group had slain together.

It was after that day that a new shadow fell over the survivors who had lived through the catastrophe.

Only then did they understand: it was not merely the undead and a small number of humans who had changed. Even animals had mutated.

If a mutated Bengal tiger could be that fearsome, then what of the other animals, even other living things? Did humanity still have any path to survival?

The mutated Bengal tiger dealt the survivor team a devastating blow. Of the six evolved members, three died on the spot, one more was gravely wounded, and the ordinary survivors suffered more than a dozen casualties.

Worse still, the monster’s rampage through the settlement destroyed every wireless device the team had used to communicate with the outside world. The settlement was reduced to an island unto itself; even seeking help from nearby survivor forces had become impossible.

At the thought, Kiyomi clenched his fist in secret. If it were those people, he would rather die than throw in his lot with them.

The deaths of the three evolved members dealt a severe blow to the survivors’ morale.

Among the remaining three evolved members, aside from one who was badly injured, only Kiyomi still had the ability to go out in search of food and fight. Another’s power was only of some use when treating injuries and sickness.

Although food was not yet in immediate short supply after the monster’s death, the consumption of dozens of people would not sustain them for long. It was impossible to hold out until the other combat-type evolved member recovered.

So after one day of rest, Kiyomi chose to go back out to search for food, and to look for any wireless device that might still allow contact with the outside world.

This was Kiyomi’s second day resuming his search for food.

After yesterday’s narrow escape, he was even more cautious today.

The weather was hot, and even the undead did not want to roam the streets. Seeing no movement around him, Kiyomi began to edge forward carefully.

He was already very familiar with this area. As an evolved member, his enhanced control over his own body allowed him to make his footsteps nearly inaudible, and he deliberately avoided places where the undead might be lurking, encountering almost no obstacles along the way.

Now and then he ran into one or two stragglers, and he would at once freeze in place or press himself flat against the ground, disguising himself as a pile of worthless, foul-smelling garbage until they left.

Because the survivor team had already stripped nearly every house in the vicinity that could be searched without disturbing the hordes, Kiyomi’s purpose this time was not really to find normal food, even though much of it had already spoiled apart from a small amount like rice and flour.

At last, Kiyomi stopped before a row of outdoor trash bins.

He lowered himself and used the tall bins to conceal his body, sweeping his gaze around. Nothing seemed out of place.

Thanks to the thorough waste-sorting system the country had established before the disaster, Kiyomi naturally reached into the bin for burnable refuse.

Rotten vegetable leaves, rice balls reeking with sour, rancid stench, eggshells still smeared with traces of egg liquid that had congealed into dark brown-black solids...

Things these days even stray animals might not care to touch, Kiyomi picked them up with surprising ease and stuffed them into the plastic bags he had prepared beneath his coat.

For an instant, he even felt he ought to thank this damned world.

If the disaster had not come and the invisible microorganisms and bacteria in the air had not perished by the half, slowing the spoilage of food so much, he might not have been able to scavenge even a single scrap.

Though such heavily rotten and spoiled food would be hard for the ordinary people in the settlement to stomach if brought back, he, as an evolved member, could eat it.

Food in the settlement was growing scarcer by the day, while the evolved members had large appetites. If he saved a little of his own ration, it would leave more for the ordinary people in the settlement and give them a little more hope of surviving.

If someday in the future the settlement’s food stores were completely exhausted, then they would have no choice but to eat such things just as he did.

Kiyomi’s mind wandered wildly. Anyway, with that fellow, Yagyu Nagi, and her healing ability, they certainly would not be eating themselves to death. They had tried it before.

Once he had filled every plastic bag on his person, Kiyomi stuffed a foul-tasting mass made from assorted kitchen waste into his mouth. The sharp, sickly flavor made tears and mucus gush at once.

This damned world!

Kiyomi kept opening his mouth wide, forcing himself to swallow food that was almost impossible to get down. His face tilted forty-five degrees toward the sky, and two lines of clear tears slid down his cheeks into the filthy collar of his coat.

Then, all at once, the ground gave a faint tremor.

Kiyomi, hiding behind the trash bins, was startled.

He tilted his ear to listen.

A low rumbling sound approached from far away, growing nearer and nearer.

At last Kiyomi was certain: it was the sound of some kind of mechanical wheel grinding against the ground.

The expression on his face shifted from astonishment, to uncertainty, to disbelief, and then to wild delight.

He sprang to his feet, throwing off the shelter of the row of bins entirely.

The undead appeared again on the street nearby, but their attention was already fully seized by the intruder.

A steel monster came crashing into Kiyomi’s sight.

At that moment, tears and snot streamed anew down Kiyomi’s face.