The rain fell without end, like some dreadful punishment.
The stench of acid rain would make anyone who smelled it suffer unbearably for the first half month, grieving for their tortured nostrils. But once enough time had passed, they no longer cared about that torment.
Because a new torment had arrived.
The factories.
In Nostraman, the word for factory had four syllables. It was awkward to pronounce, and if one said the factory's full name, the number of syllables became truly frightening.
So the workers only used those four syllables.
Besides, what difference did it make which factory they worked in? The end result was always sickness, then death in the Shantytown. They had expected it long ago and felt no particular sorrow over it.
After all, most people had long since gone numb.
A skeletal man squatted in the corner of his home, his back hunched.
His posture was strange. If someone wanted to squat comfortably, they should not have arched their back like that, but he did.
What was more, he did not even feel any discomfort.
Acid rain beat against the rotten wooden boards above his head, seeping through the cracks into his home and forming shallow puddles on the floor. The man's expression was blank. He had no intention of speaking, nor of doing anything about the rainwater pooling on the ground.
He merely endured.
Faint coughing and footsteps came from outside the door. Through the curtain of rain, both drew closer and closer, until the sound of a door being pushed open drowned them out.
"Joseph!" someone rasped from the doorway. "There are more!"
". . . What?"
"More dead people!"
The man calling to him spoke with fear mingled with some complicated emotion. "He did it. There's no doubt about it! There's blood on