Third-person POV
"How come you're fine and can stand up like that?" Nato asked while inspecting Shu's body for any leftover wounds or other ailments.
There were none other than the sniper shot wound.
"Well…" replied Shu back while being a little bit embarrassed about his little, mental survival-focused secret, "…I can't tell you that…"
"Come on! You can't just walk off like that! Here, I'll treat your wounds now.
Shu stood still, and Nato treated his shot wound carefully before sending him back to the headquarters with Mara, Martha, Ichiro, and two of his soldiers as his guards.
Shu accepted it and went back to Gen's headquarters with them via one of YKY's only three trucks, which were once mobile delivery systems of spreading the zombie virus (via soldiers with zombie-laced weapons and with zombies loaded in the trucks' backs) and now as the rescue mobile systems for the survivors and the YKY soldiers' campaigns against their own biologically depraved creations. Along the way, Ichiro glanced at a calm Shu and remembered his guilt of killing his mother on that night in the early days of the zombie outbreak. The time was just 10:59 a.m., making everything slightly faster than yesterday. Arriving there at roughly 11:20 a.m., Gen, Arashi, and two of the YKY researchers were shocked to see that Shu had a sniper-originated gunshot wound on his chest.
"Shu-kun!"
"What happened to you?"
"You had been shot…"
Maintaining a positive-to-neutral face, Shu calmly responded back with a faint smile, "I was shot by a sniper."
"It was a zombie-infected one, Gen-san," added one of the accompanying soldiers, the YKY driver Makato Murata, said to Gen.
"That zombie wielded a sniper rifle!" Martha interjected as Mara nodded frantically.
"That's what Nato-san had said to us," Ichiro calmly added.
"No way, how's that possible?" Gen couldn't believe his ears.
"We don't know, sir," the second YKY soldier who accompanied Shu and his group answered back.
"That looks weird…" Ichiro muttered while his voice was muffled by his black balaclava mask.
"That virus might've been mutated to allow its hosts to wield weapons now…" Arashi said with a hypothesis.
"If we are going slower on our research for the cure…" one of the lab coated YKY researchers responded, "...probably, many zombies would be mutated and start brandishing weapons at us and any survivor."
Gen and others agreed that they should double their efforts against the zombies.
And so, Shu went in with Mara. Martha, and Ichiro, and the two soldiers went back on their mission with Nato. Gen then gave a treatment to Shu, while Mara and Martha gave a relaxing comfort for him. Later, Shu was resting up in his room with Gen. He didn't tell him about the serum he made this early morning.
Sousuke is now wrapping Shu's wound with a roll of clean cloth until it healed.
"Hey, Gen-san…" Shu said to Gen while looking down in guilt.
"Yes?" Gen replied back, willing and ready to listen to whatever Shu would say to him.
"I am thinking about warning people against seeking revenge."
"Is that so?"
Shu then nodded. "Yes, I don't want them to tread the same path I once did in the past and to suffer how I suffer now."
Gen understood his reasons why he doesn't want other people to do the same thing he once did.
That thing is considered a mistake for Shu.
Meanwhile, Mara and Martha looked at the wreckage of Kawasaki from the window of the third floor of the main building, wondering where are their parents by now. The slightly dimmed lights provided a slightly dreaded backdrop around them.
Meanwhile, in a storage room, Ichiro was on his knees praying for Shu's Spanish mother's soul in front of a Japanese butsudan. He repeated his vow to be a brother to Shu in his darkest times and in the turmoil of his own mind, plus a vow to keep the atonement of Gen's organization well. The storage room had been a sanctuary of atonement, prayer, and incense sticks for everyone in the YKY.