[At first, you had paid little attention to the war that had suddenly erupted on the distant European continent.]
[Judging by the two belligerents' strategic objectives, whoever won or lost was unlikely to have any substantial, direct impact on Japan, far away on the edge of Asia. The tangled web of interests behind it had even less to do with your grand ultimate goal of erasing every curse from the world.]
[At most, over the next few years, the war would cause sharp fluctuations in global energy prices and make the world economy's growth curve look rather ugly.]
[That was until Yuki Tsukumo sent you several battlefield photographs late one night, their image quality somewhat rough, yet steeped in a sickening sense of bloodshed.]
[When you opened the first photograph, the screen's dim backlight illuminated your suddenly frozen gaze.]
[The background showed devastated trenches and scorched frozen earth. At the center stood a special forces soldier wearing no national insignia, yet armed to the teeth.]
[The soldier was kneeling beside a comrade's corpse, its lower half blasted into pulp by artillery fire.]
[What made it horrifying was that he was neither mourning nor gathering the dead man's belongings. With one knee pinning his comrade's mutilated torso down, he gripped a tactical knife and, expressionless, sliced savagely along the edge of his comrade's mangled skull with almost mechanical precision.]
[The peeled-back scalp and faintly visible gray-white skull silently proclaimed his horrifying purpose: he wanted to remove his comrade's brain intact.]
[At first, you frowned slightly, unable to immediately understand why Yuki Tsukumo had sent you such a photograph.]
[Then, a flash of lightning split your mind.]
[Through the soldier's brutal act of extracting a brain and the cold backdrop of modern warfare, a dangerous term buried for years awoke like a