After the special forces pleted the clearing operation, the regur officers from the Metropolitan Police Department moved in to iigate the back mountain.
Naturally, Iure was among them.
"…"
Even with his years of experien the force, the se before him left him speechless.
He had seen many gruesome crime ses throughout his career.
But this... this was different.
Seeing the lifeless bodies of middle-aged victims was already tragiough.
But now, several of those corpses beloo children.
The horror of that realization made his stomach .
Megure lowered the brim of his hat.
"It looks like things on this isnd are far more plicated than I thought."
He had initially assumed that ohe drug dealers were subdued, the remaining work would simply involve colleg evideed t produ.
fisg the drugs and dismantling the equipment should've beeraightforward step.
But he'd uimated the scale of the crime.
What y before him wasn't just about illegal drugs.
They were dealing with a massacre, dozens of i lives, snuffed out in the name of experimentation.
He approached one of the b tables and examihe sheets of paper pio its surface.
Chemical formus and data were scrawled across the pages.
The cold, ical precision of the text trasted with the brutality of the acts itted here.
There were no names listed, only numerical designations.
But the patterns clearly referred to test subjects.
Human subjects.
Megure ched his teeth so hard his jaw ached.
He olice officer, he'd seen his fair share of human cruelty.
But this crossed into something else entirely.
Even so, he knew he couldn't let his emotions cloud his judgment.
Taking a deep breath, he pulled out his phone and dialed his superior.
The line ected after a few seds.
"Superinte Matsumoto, sir. The clearing operation has been pleted."
"Good work, Megure," came Matsumoto Kiyonaga's voice from the other end.
Megure hesitated before tinuing. "Sir... the back mountain was indeed a drug dealer's base. We've firmed it was being used as a drug manufacturing b."
"…"
The brief pause from Matsumoto told Megure that his superior was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
"There's more, isn't there?" Matsumoto asked, his voice low.
"Yes."
Megure steeled himself.
"In the basement of the drug b... we discovered a hidden facility."
"There were dozens of bodies, sir. Men, women... the elderly... even children."
"We're certain the drug dealers were using living people to test new drug formus."
"What!?"
Matsumoto Kiyonaga's voice shot through the phone like a bullet.
Live human experiments?
On that scale?
The impliade his mind reel.
Drug dealers had always treated drug traffig as a profit-driveerprise.
But now, it seemed they'd crossed a line, moving from distribution into experimentation.
The goal? Developing new drugs at the cost of i lives.
Who the hell gave them the audacity to try something like this?
Matsumoto's grip tightened around the receiver.
This wasn't something they could quietly sweep uhe rug.
The Metropolitan Police Department had already mobilized signifit resources for the raid. The public would be expeg answers.
And, more wly, if the data from these experiments had already been shared with other drug syndicates...
The sequences could be catastrophic.
"Megure, secure the se," Matsumoto ordered, his voice sharp.
"I need a full, detailed report as soon as possible."
"Uood, sir."
The li dead.
Megure lowered the phone and looked around the b.
The stench of death g to the air.
The corpses hadn't fully decayed yet, but their torted expressions and visible wounds told the story of their suffering.
"These victims..." he muttered to himself.
"They were locals. People from Tsukikage Isnd."
He knew what had to be done.
Identifying each victim, one by one, was going to be a painstaking process.
But it was the only way t closure to the families left behind and to build an airtight case against those responsible.
He sighed and rubbed his temples.
Today was supposed to be his day off.
He'd po spend the weekend rexing at home with his wife.
But now...
He'd be lucky to make it home before week.
"Looks like I'll o apologize to her ter," he muttered, f himself to focus.
---
After resting for a while, the girls at the hot spring hotel seemed to be in slightly better dition.
Unfortunately, none of them had much of an appetite left after what they'd witnessed.
"Ugh… I feel awful…"
Chika groaned. After vomiting so many times, eveomach acid was gone.
Her limbs felt weak, and she could only lean against Ren for support.
Being close to him was the only thing keeping her fear and bay.
Re out a quiet sigh.
He gently patted her back, just as he'd done earlier, hoping it would help ease her disfort.
"This is why I said some things aren't meant for you to see."
"Ugh... yeah… I definitely get that now."
Chika finally uood how out of her depth she'd been.
It wasn't about gender e.
There are just some ses that the human mind isn't built to process.
Even now, when she closed her eyes, the images of those mangled corpses haunted her.
The bodies of those children, especially, were burned into her memory.
"What kind of torture did those kids gh?" she whispered, her voice trembling.
Rely tapped her forehead with his knuckles.
"Don't dwell on that," he said softly.
"Trying to imagine what those kids experienced without any crete information will only drag you into endless mental exhaustion."
"If you obsess over it too much... you might end up with sting psychological damage."
Chika rubbed her forehead where he'd tapped her aantly abahe thought.
"Okay... so what should we focus on instead?"
The question seemed to resoh everyone else.
The others, who had been silently processing the horror they'd seen, turheir attention toward Amamiya Ren.
"What we should be fog on," he said, "is how to hold on to our humanity."
"Humanity?" Chika repeated, fused.
"Wait... are you saying the drug dealers lost their humanity?"
"Exactly," Ren replied, nodding.
He turo look at Shinomiya Kaguya.
"Shinomiya-san, remember what I said to you earlier?"
Kaguya's expression shifted as the memory surfaced.
"You said... that oneone gains power, they'll start pushing past the limits of their humanity without even realizing it."
"That's right," Ren firmed.
She lowered her gaze.
It hadn't evehat long since she'd obtaihe Ice-Ice Fruit and her first instinct had been to think about how it could help her escape the straints of her family.
"Humanity isn't just about morals or kindness," Ren tinued.
"It's about empathy."
"Oneone loses the ability to empathize with others, they stop being human."
"Without empathy, there's nothi but instinct, desire, and a hunger for more power."
The room grew heavy with silence again.
"But... if they lose their humanity, aren't they still teically human?" Ran asked hesitantly.
Ren shook his head.
"No."
"Someone who discards their humanity in pursuit of power isn't human anymore."
"They're just mohat happen to look like people."
The words sent chills through everyone present.
Monsters.
The drug dealers they had seen earlier fit that description perfectly.
They had looked like ordinary people but their as had proven how little of their humanity remained.
Ren's gaze sharpened.
"This isn't just a philosophical debate," he said.
"It's directly tied to the path I'm walking."
"The path of Sequence... is the path of human nature."
Even gods, after all, needed an anchor to hold on to their humanity.
Sequence 0 wasn't the end.
It was simply the stage where one became powerful enough to bear the responsibility of retaining their humanity, no matter the temptation.
Because oneone became ed by their powers...
They stopped being the master of their abilities.
And became the sve of the power itself.
***
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