"Humans,
such interesting vessels,"
the girl finally spoke her first words, but her voice had become an androgynous whisper,
"I once tasted your blood during the Warring States Period, and once looked down from the tip of Tamamo-no-Mae's tail as she stirred up a bloody storm in Heian-kyō;
but now, I think I prefer the 'contamination implantation' technology you invented yourselves—"
Hearing that the monster could actually speak normally,
and that even the purification agent said to be capable of eliminating second-tier contamination had done nothing, Yushu, a mere first-tier extraordinary member of the Exorcism Department, felt his back drenched in sweat.
He could only slowly retreat,
and amid the passengers' frantic footsteps, because this was only a small platform, the dozens of passengers had long since fled, not even daring to look back.
Perhaps the Japanese were surprisingly united in this regard.
So, as the monster whose shell merely resembled a young girl slowly approached him, it even remembered to ask:
"What are you afraid of?"
The girl tilted her head, her bell-like question ringing crisply through the silence,
"Are you afraid of me, this contaminated vessel, or..."
She suddenly spread her arms, her silver hair dancing wildly through the air like a swarm of snakes,
"afraid of the perfect genetic carrier you created yourselves?"
At that moment, Yushu saw incantations made of Data Stream emerge across the girl's exposed neck. Classified files that should have been stored on servers now pulsed beneath her skin like blood vessels.
And when countless pitch-black shadows spilled from the cracks extending out of her eyes,
the low-ranking Exorcism Department clerk finally understood why the purification agent had failed:
Because she was not a second-tier contaminated being at all, but a monster from the same source as the substances used to extract those