Rule Four.
1. If for any reason personnel are unable to exit the facility, they must evacuate to the shelter on Basement 2.
2. Once evacuated, personnel must seal the entrance and refrain from responding to any sounds coming from outside the door.
3. In the shelter, personnel must ignore all communications except those coming from the Morse code receiver.
4. When the facility has returned to normal, the facility administrator will send the designated code via the Morse code receiver, and personnel in the shelter will return to the exterior posts of the facility.
The consciousness was sinking.
Like someone deeply asleep.
Trapped in a profound subconscious without even dreaming.
―――!
Suddenly, a sound began to echo.
The consciousness of someone wriggling and moving.
Like a stone thrown into a still pond, the consciousness interrupted in its rest,
began to ripple like waves in a lake, gradually amplifying its movement.
“Eleanor!”
At the sound of a familiar voice.
The deeply sunk consciousness surged to the surface, and at last, she opened her eyes to reality.
“Ugh, huh…?”
Eleanor of the Echo-5 unit woke up.
Still dazed from having just regained consciousness, she looked around with a blank expression.
“Eleanor! Are you okay?”
A voice came from beside her.
A familiar voice she had heard many times before.
When she turned her head, there was a person from her team, dressed in Echo-5 attire, sitting in a chair.
From the voice she had just heard, she realized that this person was one of her seniors.
“Wesley… Senior?”
However, even upon seeing him, Eleanor couldn’t feel joy or relief—only confusion.
After all, the appearance of her senior right in front of her was one bound by ropes, forcibly sitting in a chair.
“What the…?”
Her hazy consciousness began to clear completely.
When she looked down at her own body, she realized at once that she, too, was entirely deprived of her physical freedom.
Eleanor, understanding her situation, tried to exert strength in her body, but the ropes binding her showed no sign of budging.
She tried to move more vigorously to loosen the ropes but soon noticed someone else’s presence in front of her.
Click,
It sounded as if little devices were deliberately notifying her of her existence.
The sound of a bolt sliding forward, a bullet being loaded into the chamber.
Having heard that sound countless times before, she instinctively halted her movements, sensing a threat.
“You’re awake.”
A stranger’s voice echoed.
As she slowly turned her head forward, she saw someone standing a little distance away, looking at her.
From beneath the shadow, obscured by darkness, she could see the barrel of a gun aimed directly at her.
Realizing the grim situation, she quickly comprehended what was happening to her.
I’ve been kidnapped…?
There were quite a few organizations aware of the existence of Abnormal Phenomena besides the Management Office.
Those hostile groups, as they are often called, had frequently resorted to kidnapping personnel affiliated with the Management Office to extract information.
It wasn’t unusual for special operation forces, who were active in the front lines, to be among the targets for kidnapping.
“…Who are you?”
“I don’t need to know.”
Eleanor asked, but the unidentified man answered with a cold voice.
“Just answer my questions.”
Though his face was hidden in the shadows, the outline of the gun aiming at her was clearly illuminated by the faint light in the room.
“What’s your name?”
“….”
He asked, but Eleanor did not respond.
According to the Management Office’s guidelines, providing information to hostile organizations was strictly forbidden.
Especially as someone trained in a special operations unit, she had no intention of revealing any information to this unknown individual who had kidnapped her.
“Name—speak it!”
His voice grew menacingly strong.
Still, she remained resolute in her silence.
In the tense atmosphere, the man’s finger twitched as if about to pull the trigger—
“Damn it, stop! You’re with the Management Office too! We came to rescue you!”
The other team member, tied up next to Eleanor, shouted, prompting her to finally open her mouth in the presence of the unidentified man.
“…Are you a worker of Abnormal Phenomena 4891?”
“I’ll say this one last time. Say your name.”
Yet, despite her question, the man’s stance remained unchanged.
Eleanor alternated her gaze between her senior and the man before her, finally making a resolute decision.
“Eleanor, Eleanor Green.”
With a small sigh, she spoke her name.
“What’s your affiliation?”
“I can’t say. You already know why.”
“Are you with the special operations unit? Just say that.”
“…Yes.”
After their brief exchange, the man slowly stepped forward, revealing his obscured figure from the shadows.
He looked like an ordinary man wearing an expression that spoke of fatigue, one that a cynical person might wear.
He raised the gun that had been aimed at her and began to grumble complaints.
“Well, you came quickly. It’s been a few days since the NC7-T alert went off.”
“If you have complaints, take it up with the higher-ups. We’re just following orders.”
As the man vented his frustrations, another team member interjected sharply.
It seemed the man’s demeanor didn’t sit well with him.
“Hey, what’s going on?! Where are the other members?”
After the tension slightly eased, Eleanor, still in shock, demanded an explanation of the current situation as she tried to grasp why this was happening.
She was clearly dispatched to deal with the Abnormal Phenomenon 4891, and she vividly remembered descending to Basement 4 with her captain and two other seniors,
but for some reason, there was a sudden gap in her memory afterward, as if she had fainted.
Having just regained consciousness not long ago, she was desperately trying to clear her dazed mind to piece together the current situation—
“They’re probably all dead.”
“…What?”
Soon, the man’s indifferent comment left her momentarily stunned, and she stared blankly at him.
“You bastard…!”
“Why? It’s the truth. The firing timer is still running, and no special support has come from the Management Office. So what does that mean? It means they all died during the mission.”
A different team member attempted to protest, but the man interrupted him.
The relentless truths continued to unfold.
Eleanor looked at her senior in shock, but he purposely averted his gaze.
Not long after, he let out a long sigh and confirmed the man’s statement.
“…Yeah, it’s true.”
His words were organized and easy to understand, yet Eleanor still couldn’t accurately grasp her situation.
After all, it was hard to accept that she had lost all her comrades, who had only recently been with her due to some unknown entity.
It would have been better if she could have seen them getting hurt in front of her.
Waking up to find most of her comrades dead was something she simply couldn’t accept with her still-reeling mind.
“I don’t want to sound pessimistic, but… they probably all met an unfortunate fate.”
However, her senior didn’t appear to be joking, and from the tension in the air, she felt acutely that the gravity of the situation was far from normal.
In the heavy atmosphere, trying to clear her foggy mind,
she sat there with a dazed expression while indulging in meaningless thoughts.
“Hey, how long are you planning to keep us tied up? We answered everything you asked. Or do you still have more questions?”
Leaving the shocked Eleanor behind, the team member glared at the man as he turned his head towards him.
He had provided answers for all of the questions, and Eleanor had also responded in kind.
Given that there were no lies in those answers, it was clear that the interrogation should have been complete,
and the team member asked the man to untie him.
“No, I’ve heard enough. Thanks to you, I’m convinced.”
“Then can you untie us now? It’s getting hard to breathe――”
It seemed the man acknowledged that the interrogation had already concluded, as he turned his body towards the bound team member, taking a step closer.
i
i
*i>——Bang!
In an instant, the man regripped his gun, aiming at the team member without the slightest hesitation, he pulled the trigger aimed at his head.
―――――
The deafening gunshot.
With the sharp sound hitting her eardrums, Eleanor couldn’t even comprehend what was happening right in front of her,
before swiftly witnessing her senior’s body slump lifelessly.
“Wes, Wesley-senpai!”
She called out to him, but there was no sign of a response.
Of course, there wouldn’t be. Her senior had just been shot in the forehead.
And the fate of a person shot in the forehead typically meant death on the spot.
“What the hell are you doing…!”
Eleanor growled in a low voice at the man,
but he didn’t even acknowledge her as he slowly walked towards the team member he just shot.
Finally, when he reached her senior’s limp body, he stretched out his hand to remove the mask that was covering his face,
and Eleanor, bound by the ropes, could only watch helplessly—
“…!?”
At the bizarre sight that unfolded before her.
The anger that had filled her heart just moments ago vanished in an instant,
leaving only shock on her face as she struggled to make sense of what she was witnessing.
When the man removed her senior’s mask, what came out beneath was not only her senior’s face with a bullet hole between his eyebrows and his eyes rolled back,
but truly, there was nothing else.
Just empty space where no one existed, as if the person dressed in that outfit had never been here in the first place, cascading into the chair below.
