Chapter 43

Necromancer (1)

Nathan Drake’s life was always on edge.

Even before he saw the light of the world, he had to stand on the border between birth and nonexistence. His drug-addict mother decided to get an abortion when she found out she was pregnant. If she had put it into action, he would not have existed.

However, she changed her mind. She decided to give birth to the baby and rip off child support from the relatively better-pocketed biological father.

It must have been fate that his father, who was also an addict, died a few days after he was born of a heart attack caused by an overdose. His mother did not abandon him because someone tipped her off to get paid by the state. He took a step closer to life like that, from the boundary between life and death.

The street where he lived was where the people on the border between the poor and the low-income bracket gathered. Cheap drugs that suited the poor addicts were distributed here. His mother got her hands on drugs that could not be purchased if she was a homeless person with no money, making his childhood more miserable.

Cheap drugs clouded her mind, and she scratched her skin every day until it bled. His emotions toward his mother were always lost on the border of love and hatred. The word indifference was not on the scale. For the longest time, only one person existed in his world, which was his mother.

The moment the boundaries of the world were broken, his life became a little more miserable.

Other men began to invade the world, in the home where only he and his mother existed. His mother’s boyfriend kept changing. The last boyfriend he remembered beat him whenever his mother wasn’t around. Once he was finished beating him, his right ear would keep ringing, and he couldn’t hear well.

When he was away, Nathan begged his mother. He asked her not to break up with her boyfriend but to take him to the hospital. While Nathan begged and cried, his mother claimed she had no money to buy the drugs, so she called from place to place. She threw the phone and shouted. ‘Please stop bothering me. You were an accident anyway. I’ve never meant to give birth to you. Leave me alone so that I can be happy now!’

He was nine years old at the time.

The nine-year-old Nathan wandered the streets until finally, he was approached by a man in clean clothes. ‘Why are you alone? Where do you live? What about your parents?‘ He shook his head without saying a word. ‘Do you want to come with me?’

Nathan hesitated, not knowing whether this man was dangerous or not. ‘Are you going to hit me?’

The man shook his head. ‘I won’t hit you.’

He took the man’s hand. At that moment, Nathan wasn’t to know there was a terrible pain waiting.

*

There was the fact that Nathan didn’t know. The man was employed by a company called Decker & Jefferson, and they were experimenting with modifying healing potions from the dungeon to apply to non-Awakened people.

Healing potions were used to treat external trauma and Mana potions to help recovering Mana. These two were representative items that acted in response to the Mana core of the Awakened person. Only Hunters could receive healing potion effects. They aimed to overturn this absolute nature.

If successful, it was a study that would affect the entire medical industry; it was followed by competition and lobbying by pharmaceutical companies with other stakeholders. FDA’s approval for clinical trials was a long way off. The failure of all previous studies also affected it. Due to the potion characteristics, which was a dungeon item, it wasn’t easy to experiment if it was not administered directly to a human body.

So Decker and Jefferson changed their direction. They decided to conduct the experiments discreetly so that not only competitors but also the government would not notice them. Of course, they set the subjects of the experiment to live people differently than before. It was unethical, but they did not mind crossing that line.

After the Cataclysm, the overall immigration process, including the Mexican border, became so strict that they had no choice but to seek subjects to be tested in the United States.

Despite the image of being a first-world country, the gap between the rich and the poor in the U.S. was very wide. It was easy to secretly kidnap drug addicts, alcoholics, people who roamed the streets.

Meanwhile, very few of the abductees were around Nathan’s age. The development of drugs for pediatric patients was always behind that for adults. Considering the age, parents’ expected income to pay for medicines are low. The same was true of the priorities of healing potion research.

Nathan Drake was one of the relatively few children. It was a terrible misfortune.

*

‘Oh… it hurts. It hurts…! Stop it, stop it!’

It’s been a while, and the impatient personnel has crossed the line again.

Experiments on recovering the damaged body tissues of the non-Awakened could be very brutal, depending on the researchers’ ethical threshold. As a representative example, the experiment to inject potions that were recovered from a dungeon that had no response to a non-Awakened but was mixed in with a solution that showed a response to non-Awakens. A typical example of the latter was Poison Potion, found in dungeons.

He was injected with it with friends in the ward.

That night, he crossed again the boundaries of life and death, which he had wandered so many times. He felt hot as if the whole body was boiling, and it hurt as if the intestines were being shredded. It was unparalleled to any pain that he had experienced up until now.

When he woke up at dawn after the night that felt like an eternity, he realized that he had survived.

With a slight change, too.

‘What is… that?’

He could see an invisible text, and he could hear an inaudible voice.

He went through cardiac arrest yesterday and dreamed while being halfway up on the threshold of death. He talked with a strange voice in a dark space. He understood the meaning, but he didn’t like it, as if someone was forcefully engraving the words into his head.

It meant beyond his knowledge and intellectual development, but it remained like a tattoo on his brain like it was branded onto him.

He knew that he had Awakened but was not aware at the same time. He trembled with fear in the ward where no one but himself had woken up.

Doctors here called those who showed unusual symptoms different from other experiments as ‘unique individuals.’ The end of those who were called so was not good. They had to go through a much more painful and tormented process, and they usually never came back.

He looked around, trembling.

What about the rest of the kids? What about the elder brothers? What about the men? What happened to them?

‘Chris? Chris… wake up. Chris?’

He tried to wake his friend up, next to him, by shaking him.

However, there was no response. His body was cold. He was not breathing.

‘Chris!’

He was his best friend who arrived here around the same time as he did and had survived until now.

They called each other Chris and Nate. Both originally seemed to have longer names, but they couldn’t remember any of them.

The two always talked about what they wanted to eat, the places they wanted to go, and the games they wanted to play if ever they were to be free.

Even after spending a long time in captivity, he kept his hopes up. He thought that this experiment would end someday, and he dreamed that he could go outside eventually, that he would be able to step out of this place as he stepped out of his house. He solidified the beliefs as he talked to Chris, calming down his fears a little bit.

They were like a symbol to each other to keep such hope from disappearing.

‘No! Chris!’

Nate knew what it was to die. To be cold, immobile, and never being able to come back to this ward again. At this rate, Chris would never come back. However, Chris wouldn’t be able to go home as he would want to.

“No.”

His hands that shook Chris’s body trembled. He thought this should not be the end. He felt that he had to do something.

Then…

Something in Nate’s heart responded in desperation. Something like warm water that had been trapped there moved out.

At the same time, a voice rang in his head. It was similar to what he heard in his dream, but it was a different voice.

“Uhhh… Uhhh…”

Chris opened his eyes.

*

Nate found out that Chris was alive again.

However, his condition was a bit strange. He was very pale. His heart beat slowly, and he breathed very slowly. He didn’t talk or wouldn’t even try to move.

He talked by following his words only when he thought it would be nice to speak. He moved when he thought it would be nice to move. He knew that this condition was also suitable for doctors to name him the ‘unique individual.’

‘That’s the same with me!’

After opening his eyes, Nate realized that his body had changed. It was always painful all around, and he felt weak, but now it wasn’t like that at all. He had never been as energetic as he was now.

Doctors always examined the subjects’ bodies and never missed any changes. This, too, will be discovered.

‘If we’re both going to be classified as unique individuals anyways…’

If classified as the same symptoms, they could be isolated together in the same place.

And so, Nate wished once again that he could look similar to Chris.

Somehow he thought that he could do it. He couldn’t be completely like Chris, but he thought it would be possible to cheat the eyes. Energy drained from the heart, and the wish came true once again. Nate’s face turned as pale as Chris’s, and his eyes blurred.

The blood in his body began to cool down slowly.

*

Researchers who entered the hospital room in the morning watched the experiments and isolated them. Nate whispered in his mind that Chris would move according to their instructions. Surprisingly, Chris moved as if he could read his thoughts.

‘Listen to the doctors! Move!’

Harsh tests continued for a long time.

Nate did not know, but researchers considered the symptoms a side effect of the healing potion experiment. Nate and Chris were quarantined in the same ward as he wished.

After that, time went by again.

*

The researchers considered Nate and Chris’s symptoms as a kind of achievement.

Both of them were not dead, even though they were already in the right physical condition to die. They were on edge enough to interpret it positively.

However, when other individuals did not experience such symptoms, they conducted an infectiousness experiment this time.

The researchers put the subjects in a similar situation as Chris, just before he died, in a two-bed ward with one’s breath barely in place. The experiment was somewhat successful.

Most suffered cardiac arrest, but some woke up again with side effects, and some died like that. Thus, the experiment went on.

For a long time.

*

It was late at night. I flew at high altitude with [Stardust Wing], looking down at Decker & Jefferson’s research facility. I was high enough to prevent myself from being identified by CCTV monitoring the outside.

‘Definitely, it’s a strange structure.‘

The research building itself was small, but the distance from other facilities and research complexes around it was more than necessary. Due to a parking lot that was as wide as a runway and the empty lots, it was distanced from the roads as well.

‘A structure that if someone escapes, they have to run through an open space without anywhere to hide. And there are too many lights around… It’s no different than a prison.‘

I recalled the past.

‘Nate didn’t elaborate on what happened back then.’

Perhaps he had told Angelica.

A few years later, Angelica was the one to visit and recruit Nate when he was rescued when these types of facilities were discovered all at once.

‘Anyway, it sure was a terrible memory.’

When he decided to put the plan forward, he came to the United States instead of meeting Hibiki, who was closer, first. It had only been two months since his reincarnation, but he could have come earlier if he pushed himself to. However, he had no choice to gain the least amount of force he needed.

‘Simple research facility? This could be called a fortress.‘

Mana swirled in places that look like ordinary vacant lots, lighting facilities, and other building structures. My eyes were dizzy due to the many artifacts and barriers they had laid.

It would be impossible to infiltrate quietly.

First of all, to freeze the electronic system, including CCTV, I had to put the Mana in the sword.

Whooooooooooh!

As soon as the purple sword energy boiled, I poured the sword’s energy into the ground as if I were to bombard them. The target was the self-power generating facilities in the complex and the electrical lines that pulled the power from outside sources.

Boom! Boom!

parts of the building and surrounding vacant lots as the Mana collided and flashed. Heavy blast sounds rang several times and shook the night air.

Whoooo!

At this, I descended at a rapid pace.

*

The research center was an enclosed structure that had no room to sneak in. There was no use in [Stealth] if it was this way. I then picked up the sword.

Weeng!

Boom boom!

I destroyed the whole artifact designed to seal the door and tear up the thick iron door. Then, I stepped inside.

Beep beep!

The artifact was the only thing that operated indoors when all the emergency power was out—the alarm sound made by the item tore my ears. Instead of electric lighting, there was a blue light lit inside with magical luminescence.

Hunters that were hired for security sprang up.

“W-What?!”

“It’s an intruder! Shoot!”

Based on their states, the level of hunters hired, after only focusing on getting various artifacts, was terrible.

It was natural. If you were a high-class hunter, you didn’t have to put your hands in this dirty work. They shot, even though it was obvious that their opponent was a hunter.

Ting! Ting-ting!

The Mana Barrier around my body bounced off all the bullets.

Whiz!

I flew to the end of the hall in the blink of an eye. The decapitated hunters had fallen along the path.

[Penetration!]

The building on the ground was a decoy, and a huge space unfolded underground. The real research facility and the room where the abductees were held were there.

‘How much money did they pay in the trial in my previous life?’

The scale was enormous.

Those numerous people were abducted, detained, tested, and even killed illegally, but most researchers and development executives served a few years in prison.

To add, some were scouted by another company instead of Decker & Jefferson, who went bankrupt after being discharged from the prison.

‘Well, most of them did die in mysterious ways afterward.‘

As I continued thinking about that, I finally found the door to the basement.