3 bar menu

Last Embryo Volume 4 Chapter 4 Part 4

Translator: DarkHeartedAlchemist

Instead of some grand reasons beyond the comprehension of mortal men, nowadays wars in the Outer World are being waged on much smaller scale and because of much simpler things: differences in ideologies, religions and geopolitical points of view.

Even if we were to kill all the people taking part in the current wars all over the world, there are two things humans will never be able to completely destroy: thoughts and ideals. Even if a party representing certain ideas were to be killed, the act of killing them would be meaningless as long as there will always be those who would come after them and become the successors of that idea, carrying its torch forward in the name of those who have already perished.

That was one of the most important lessons about life that Canaria has imparted onto Izayoi: that there is no reason to kill all the people fighting and shedding blood on the various battlefields around the world unless they involved things that form the basis of war and humanity itself.

「So, as you could probably guess, instead of hauling our assess around battlefields we did the next best thing that we could. We went to a certain country where a particularly nasty war was going on at the moment and picked a fight with a religious cult that was secretly pulling the war’s strings from behind the scenes, and let me tell you, instead of listing the things they were dealing in, it would be faster to name every thing they were not involved in, but for the sake of my story I will try to boil it down to just their most important crimes: firearms trafficking on an international scale, human trafficking, recruitment of cannibals and engaging in cannibalistic practices. . . but those were not nearly as disgusting and repulsive as their ultimate crime, the one that made us target them in the first place. The most deplorable of their sins. . . was breeding Black Albinos and selling them like cattle to the highest bidder.」

The more Izayoi talked about it, the colder and more distant his eyes grew.

「It was not until much later that I learned that a belief that black people with white skin apparently hold mystic properties has been around African countries as far ago as the ancient times. One of the tidbits of that tradition is especially morbid: it claims that the corpses of the Black Albinos are supposed to be some kind of fortune bringing good luck charms, and that eating a part of a Black Albino’s body would transfer their mystic properties to whoever has eaten it, granting them divine power. I am sure that it is irrelevant to the Great Aryan Migration described in Indian mythology, but I am sure that you are more familiar with that area than I am, so I am going to spare you the details.」

「Yes, I do know all that I should about it. It would put me in quite a troubling spot if I knew less about it than the smaller, local gods or learned about it from them.」

Pritt smiled a little and replied to him in a teasing tone. Izayoi also sighed and relaxed his shoulders for a bit.

「The first impression of the facility that I had when I first set foot in it was that the pungent, rotting odor was infinitely worse than that which could be encountered in animal sheds that have not been cleaned of excrement for a very, very long time. Then again, the only explanation that Canaria gave me when she took me there was that this was 『just』 a human trafficking center, so I went throughout the entire facility without realizing what it actually was.」

「Did Canaria also not know about it, or did she know all alone but it was her intention to purposefully keep you in the dark about it?」

「Oh, you can bet that it was definitely the latter. She was always that kind of troublesome woman who seemed to know everything about everything either beforehand or as soon as she laid her eyes on it, so there is no way that she did not know what that entire place was when she was taking me there. Once we went and searched through the entire place, she even had the audacity to smile at me and be all like: 『The facility up ahead is the last one, so I want you to go ahead and do some solo reconnaissance for me. Think you can handle it?』. That damned she-devil knew that that at that stage in my life I was absorbing every bit of information around me like a giant sponge, and she used that fact against me. Because sure enough, after such a big dosage of encouragement from her, being the hungry knowledge-eating demon like I was, I ran ahead at full speed, not the least bit expecting how big of a surprise was waiting for me there.」

Izayoi laughed in the same hollow way again, knowing that the situation he was put through back then was anything but normal. No matter the reasoning behind it, bringing a young kid to what was basically a human slaughterhouse was too immoral, even if it was supposed to be for his own good.

「Do not tell this to anyone, but when I stepped inside that place and saw what it actually was, that was the first and the last time when I turned pale with sheer terror. When we arrived there, that part of the facility was already meant to be dismantled and then destroyed to cover all the traces of potential evidence, so everything there was literally scattered all over the goddamn place. . . and I am not talking about just the equipment they were using. When I first saw that, I was confused at first, but then. . . it was as if something inside of me snapped at that moment. . . and what followed it cannot even be described as execution, because that would imply that I treated that facility’s personnel with the bare minimum of dignity they deserved as fellow human beings. But no, it was nothing nearly as civilized at that. I simply massacred them all until there would be not even a bloody shred remaining.」

That was the first time when Izayoi released his power, but it would be more appropriate to say that he simply allowed it to explode without holding any of it back. It was the pure kind of power that could only be obtained when he released all of the emotions he was subconsciously suppressing up until that point: all of his violent tendencies, his sense of decency and restraint and all of his sensibilities. Once he set all of them free, he became an unstoppable killing machine, the kind of which could not be stopped or matched by any of the forces of the Outer World. It was the power that caused the ground to crack with every step he took, the one that would turn entire cities into piles of rubble simply by having him walk through them and the one that caused his blood to boil with rage so unrelenting that if felt like his veins were filled with molten-hot iron that was about to burst to the outside and stain his surroundings with the rain of iron blood.

Just like Izayoi said, what he did to all the people he came across that day in that facility could only be described as a unilateral massacre. . . but even putting it like that would be a grave understatement. It would be better and infinitely more fitting to say that he has singlehandedly performed a war crime against humanity that would normally require an entire army’s worth of soldiers.

「By the time I was done and finally came to, the girl I was talking about was the only one left alive in the entire facility, but. . . but calling her state as 『being alive』 would be too far of a stretch. About 30% of the organs from her abdominal region have already been extracted, and she could barely keep functioning as a human being.」

「. . . . . . . . . . I see.」

「Canaria and I. . . and I think that girl too. . . we all knew that she did not have much time left to live.」

Izayoi said that while biting down on his lips, which were trembling slightly. However, the question that was now going through Pritt’s head was how literal Izayoi was when he said that this girl did not have much time left to live. Compared to the gods and other divine beings, human lives are as brittle and fleeting as the flame of a candle burning in the middle of fierce winds, but at the same time humans possess something that gods do not.