Wearing King Crimson's disguise, Inori Yuzuriha walked unchallenged straight into the trafficking ring's main base of operations.
— This must be the place.
She looked up at the massive, weathered roll-up shutter before her. Before Lost Christmas, back when this area wasn't yet a quarantine zone, it would have served as a storage warehouse. Without a second thought, she had King Crimson drive a fist through the door — then wrenched the steel casing aside with brute force, tearing open a gap wide enough to squeeze through. The noise was more than enough to alert whoever was inside.
"Who's there!"
"Stop — or I shoot!"
— King Crimson.
Time leapt forward. Inori erased four seconds. The dense burst of submachine gun fire passed straight through her — like bullets plunging into water, stirring nothing but faint ripples. She didn't feel a thing. She was already moving, driving forward with King Crimson in a full sprint, circling behind the three traffickers, slipping into their blind spots.
— Time resumes.
"What happened? Where did she go?"
One hit. Two hits. A kick for good measure. In an instant, those men went down without even registering they'd been struck. The one who caught the kick fared worst — he was launched off his feet and slammed into the wall, gone silent. That one wouldn't be getting up.
Inori didn't spare them another glance. She turned and pressed on — and stopped.
Before her: towers of cardboard boxes stacked to the ceiling.
No question. The drugs. Clearly they'd been in the middle of relocating the stockpile. She was glad she'd moved when she did; her habit of clearing everything before allowing herself to rest had served her well again.
She crossed to one of the downed armed men and unclipped a grenade from his kit, already planning to reduce all of this to ash — and then she heard it. A low, keening sound from somewhere else in the warehouse. She immediately snatched up a fallen submachine gun and called out sharply.
"If you don't want to die, drop your weapon, put your hands on your head, and walk out where I can see you!"
The only answer was more wordless moaning. Inori tensed, hand tightening on the trigger, already preparing to have King Crimson neutralize the threat with absolute certainty — and then she heard it: the unmistakable scrape of stone grinding against stone.
The person emerged.
A middle-aged woman. Half her body was already crystallized by the Apocalypse Virus, so advanced she could barely walk without dragging herself along — a terminal case, deep into her illness. But her appearance was stranger than that. Her eyes were vacant and unfocused. She was skeletal. Yet her arms reached out like she was grasping at something that wasn't there, completely oblivious to Inori and King Crimson standing right in front of her.
"Has she taken too much already?"
Inori blinked.
She'd done her research on this drug. Apparently it induced a state where users became lost in their happiest memories, unable to return — a formula designed to paralyze mind and body alike. She'd read about it in secondhand accounts before; actually witnessing it was something else entirely. Most users only turned to it because they could no longer bear the pain the Apocalypse Virus inflicted on them. But choosing this was the same as choosing to die — cutting off every last thread of the will to survive. Those bastard traffickers.
The men outside had just mentioned it themselves: a GHQ superior was running this operation under the table. In the face of trafficking profits, human decency meant nothing — and they had no reason to care whether the "rabble" living in the quarantine zones who refused GHQ's control lived or died. Sell enough of this, and no one would be left with the will to resist.
Ruthless. And completely rational.
Inori moved deeper into the warehouse until she found what looked like a control room. She didn't hesitate — she pushed the door open and walked straight in.
"Back off — I'll kill you! Don't come in!"
A gaunt man with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks was hunched at a computer terminal. The moment the door opened he snatched a handgun from the desk and leveled it at Inori and King Crimson, screaming.
She'd already heard some variation of that line at least ten times today.
Red light flashed. The man who had been standing outside the room was suddenly right in front of him.
Inori gave a cold half-smile and had King Crimson seize the man's gun hand — then rotate the wrist smoothly in the wrong direction. A clean, sharp crack of bone. The man's screaming filled the room as the gun clattered to the floor.
He was already biting through his lip from the pain — and this was only the beginning. He sat in his chair, staring up at the towering hooded figure above him, the dim light making it look like something between a demon and a god. Beneath the hood: nothing but darkness.
Crack.
King Crimson's fist landed square on his nose. The man went limp, unconscious before he finished falling, his face caved in and twisted — an expression of pure terror frozen on it, as though he'd seen something he could never unsee.
It was an ugly sight. But when Inori thought of all the innocent people ruined by what these men sold — any trace of sympathy evaporated.
His blood had sprayed across the computer monitor he'd been using. Inori noticed a particular phrase on the screen. She shoved the man's body aside like garbage, took the mouse, and began reading.
This was his personal email interface. It appeared he'd managed to send a message to someone right as Inori was storming the warehouse. She immediately had King Crimson pull up the sent messages — and they hadn't been deleted in time. The recipient was——
Gai Tsutsugami?
"Yare yare daze~"
Inori raised an eyebrow. Surprised and pleased in equal measure — she hadn't expected a windfall like this. But the excitement lasted only a few seconds before a troubling question asserted itself.
Why would Gai have dealings with a drug trafficker?
The man was admittedly unconventional in every respect — running off to become a child soldier overseas at barely eleven or twelve, returning to Japan after forging himself into something formidable, and founding Funeral Parlor with revolution as its stated purpose. In the original timeline, the first Inori had been rescued by chance during an operation Gai led — and that rescue had set the main plot of the anime in motion.
He was dramatic to a fault, and everything he fought for ultimately came down to wanting to hold Mana Ouma one more time. But as a person, there wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with him. So why was he mixed up with a drug operation?
Inori opened the message.
— Genome. D-19 Research Lab. Inside the Skeletal Christmas Tree.
"This — this is——?"
For a moment Inori was so startled she forgot to use her fake voice. Her own sweet, clear tone slipped out of the hulking hooded figure's body.
She steadied herself and kept reading. Most of the sent history was this man's string of increasingly desperate pleas to Funeral Parlor — but threading through them all, Inori was able to piece together what she'd suspected. This man had connections to GHQ's inner circle; Gai had been using him as an intelligence source to track the "genome's" location; and in exchange, Gai had been providing him protection.
Quite a reach for a small-time drug runner. Then again — there really was nothing impossible when the stakes were high enough.
And that "genome" — it had to be the thread running through the entire anime's plot: the Void Genome, also known as the Void Chromosome. Inject it into a human host and the recipient gains the King's Power — the ability to reach into another person's chest and draw out their Void, a unique weapon shaped by who they are. Every Void was one of a kind. The only limitation was that it could only be extracted from people aged seventeen or younger.
— The message was already sent. Gai would have it. He'd be moving soon.
In the original story, this genome was supposed to be stolen by Inori. But that Inori no longer existed — the timeline had already shifted. Still, Gai would never abandon the genome. He'd find a way in regardless of the risk. Most likely he'd go himself, or send someone equally capable.
— Gai's goal was fundamentally the same as Inori's, at its core — both of them wanted Mana Ouma. And so——
Inori stared at the location data on the screen. A bold but feasible new plan began to take shape, slowly rising to the surface of her mind.
If things went this way, Mana's soul would also be within reach — and restoring Epitaph was now in sight.
She was still absorbed in reading the messages — which was exactly why she didn't notice.
Behind her, someone was moving closer.
A hand shot out and grabbed King Crimson's hood — and yanked it back.
> Author's Note: Volume 2 will be JO4!