“Hey there, Mr. President. What’s up?”
The kind-looking old man on the large screen faintly raised an eyebrow upon my candor.
The President. The person with the most executive power in this country, as well as the commander-in-chief of the military. Everyone knew of him. Even test subjects of human experiments who had had their official records erased, like me, knew of him.
“You bitch…!”
The irreverent greeting apparently didn’t sit very well with the commander of the compound. I leisurely stretched my hand toward him and squeezed. He spat out blood and collapsed on his knee, his organs suddenly sickly.
The man in his early fifties on the screen stayed implacable with his smile. He didn’t even blink at the supernatural sight.
“Hey yourself, cute little bunny lady. You’re No. 13, correct?”
“Close enough.”
While I might not care to be called by the human name that I’d long since abandoned, these people just kept using ‘No. 13’ all the time. Did they think that those in this country who no longer had a family register didn’t deserve a name? Or had they been seeing me as nothing more than a guinea pig from the very start?
The man slowly nodded. He clasped his hands on the table, fingers interlocked, and leaned deeply back on his chair.
“You don’t show up on digital footage, but you do on this screen, luckily. I’ve seen your battles. Just the damage reports alone were more than enough to tell me how amazing your power is.”
“Thanks for the compliment.”
What was his preamble leading up to? After a while, he began his talk with a politician’s smile, his motions exaggerated as if he was making a public speech.
“I’ll get straight to the point. I want you.”
“I believe we can work together. Join me, and I will give you everything you want. Status. Honor. Fame. Money. Or perhaps you’d like a date with a Hollywood star like girls your age? With my authority, I can give you any lover you want. If you have religious problems, then I can ask that country to issue you ‘indulgences’ by the dozens. And if you really need to fill your stomach, you can get death-row inmates on a regular schedule. Ah, but spare my wife and citizens, alright?” The man chuckled.
“…why would you offer so much?”
He seemed to have taken my response as me sitting down on the negotiations table, if only tentatively. He enthusiastically began his presentation as though he was talking to another world leader.
“You are the perfection we seek. With the use of mana, the infinite energy of the new world, and an Avatar incorporated abilities of paranormal humans, you have passed through evolutions after evolutions to become the ultimate weapon! The militarized monster avatars had been the greatest dream of the researchers ever since they knew of the existence of the new world and mana, and you are the ultimate conclusion! You are a goddess from the machine. You are Dea ex Machina!”
“Wield your extraordinary power! You shall play the part of the Dark Lady as you have done on Yggdrasia, and you will reign as the Evil of Earth. You will justify our nation’s conquest of the world. The eastern countries will inevitably oppose us, and you will annihilate them as the Dark Lady. You will lead an army of militarized monster avatars numbering tens of thousands, all controlled by the best of my soldiers! Your mother may have been an immigrant, but she is one of my people all the same. And even if you’re no longer officially a citizen of ours, your patriotism must surely still be alive! Come, join me! You are… you are…”
As the rapturous man stared at me, slowly, his expression transformed into one of shock.
Color receded from my white skin, turning it into an inhuman alabaster. Crimson escaped from my pupils to invade the whole of my eyes. Blood-red fangs grew to peek out from my lips. White miasma of biting cold overflowed from my body. The fear-paralyzed commander near me froze and rotted, himself still conscious throughout it all.
“…a Demon…”
The man on the screen whispered, his voice shivering.
He really underestimated me, I see… I could see the figures of several guards wearing black and some people who seemed to be his secretaries reflected in his wide-open eyes of shock.
I gently stretched out my hands toward the people I saw in his eyes and joined my fingers, enveloping them all in my palms, and I whispered.
“Causality Alteration, Dimensional Manipulation, parallel activation.”
Then my hands slammed against each other.
“—[Gospel]—”
In that instant, the man on-screen opened wide his eyes in surprise. The people in his sight crumbled as chunks of blood and meat, as all the healed afflictions of their lives suddenly relapsed in their terminal stages.