A hundred and twenty thousand lives turned to glass and ash in a single night—and from the ruins of the Seventh City, a new nightmare begins to stir.
Galen Vollhardt, former subordinate to the man who caused that massacre, walks through the scorched grave of a dead Plant with a golden eye that sees what others cannot. He is searching for a legacy: the final weapon his revered leader left behind, a device called "Absolute Zero," said to be capable of stripping humanity of everything it depends o
Gunman's Requiem —Echoes of a Black Gunshot— - The Azure Phosphorescence of the Seventh Ruin
The wind was dead.
What hung over the scorched earth was the smell of ash and a faint, metallic aftertaste of something burned. In a darkness lit only by starlight, Galen Vollhardt let his short silver-gray hair stir slightly and came to a halt. His right eye was a deep, dark blue; his left was covered by a black eyepatch—and beneath it, the golden prosthetic eye implanted with plant cells prickled and throbbed.
This was the place once called the Seventh City. Now it was the Seventh Cradle. A colossal gravestone where a hundred and twenty thousand lives had burned to nothing.
"...So this is it."
Galen muttered in a hoarse voice.
The melted, glasslike sand caught the moonlight and gave off a sickly, pallid phosphorescence. But what he saw through his left prosthetic eye was more than that. Strands of residual energy crawled across the earth like the lingering scent of dead souls. And every one of them was being drawn toward a single point—toward the massive, sprawling wreck of a Plant.
A hundred and twenty meters tall. It was the skeleton of some enormous living thing.
Once, it had been the Plant Bulb Tower rising at the center of the Seventh City. Now it lay on its side, crushed, torn, dead. Yet at its core, something was still alive. Galen's golden prosthetic eye could feel it.
He moved his right index finger ever so slightly. It was a habit. A small ritual to keep himself the cold, calculating man he needed to be.
"We're going in."
He gave the order without turning to the three subordinates waiting behind him.
"Understood."
A short reply. The men wore modified black military uniforms with the Plant emblem embroidered on the left shoulder—all of them former mercenaries or fanatics. Either way, to Galen they were tools. Expendable. But he never wasted them. That was his way.
He slipped through a rent in the crushed steel.
The interior was a ruin. The walls were charred black, the floor melted and sagging in places, the wreckage of wiring exposed everywhere. The air was bone-dry, and every breath scraped his throat.
And yet Galen's left prosthetic eye caught it clearly. Deep within this corpse, something like a heart that still pulsed.
"Ah."
He let out a breath.
(So this is where—where my brother killed a hundred and twenty thousand people.)
He imagined it. Knives. That man standing in this place, arms spread wide, commanding the energy of the stars to burn human beings to nothing. It must have been beautiful. Galen thought so. He believed it, helplessly.
He had been Knives's direct subordinate. He had served as a technical officer and witnessed that mad ideal firsthand. A paradise for Plants alone. The extermination of humanity—those vermin. Spoken aloud, it was an absurd dream. But Knives could do it. That was exactly why Galen had been drawn to him. Envied him. And—resented him.
(Only with his younger brother Vash did he ever seem to let his guard down.)
Vash the Stampede. The "Human Typhoon." A ridiculous gunman who refused to kill. Knives had always looked at that brother with something different in his eyes. Galen could not forgive that. He had to prove that he, and no one else, was worthy of inheriting Knives's will.
"Lieutenant."
One of his subordinates stopped. Before a room where charred consoles lay scattered. The remains of the old Plant control room.
Galen entered alone.
At the center of the room lay a massive circular device. Once it must have been an interface for communicating with the Plants. Now it was just scrap metal. But beneath it—
His left prosthetic eye flashed.
What the golden pupil caught was a fragment of data, shining blue. Drifting in the void like a firefly.
"So you survived."
Galen twisted his mouth. It was a smile. A warped joy made his dry lips tremble.
He knelt and touched the burned-out console. Even through his gloves, he felt a faint heat. He drew a small data-recovery device from inside his coat and pressed it against the point where the blue phosphorescence gathered.
The device trembled slightly.
Data flowed in. Fragmentary, riddled with noise, impossible to read. But there—the string "Absolute Zero" flickered across the screen.
(This is it.)
The final weapon Knives had left behind. The ultimate trap to render all humanity powerless.
Galen stood. The old burn scar running from the left side of his head to his forehead stung, perhaps reacting to the residual energy. But he didn't care about the pain.
"We're pulling out. Back to the mobile base."
He gave the order and turned. The three subordinates followed in silence. Behind them, the dead earth sank back into stillness.
□
At the outer edge of the Seventh City ruins.
A colossal beast floated in the darkness. Three hundred meters long. An armored convoy converted from the wreckage of an old-era transport ship—the Caravan Noir. Twelve linked vehicles clad in black steel, the headquarters of Grief, forever moving through the desert. Its power source was a semi-perpetual engine using Plant cells. It never came to a complete stop.
The moment Galen returned to the operations room, he shed his coat and dropped into a chair. A single coffee cup sat on the desk. It had gone cold. No one dared touch it.
"Call Kestra."
That was all he said, and he set the recovered data on the analysis terminal.
In less than a few minutes, the operations room door opened.
The one who appeared was a woman. Deep crimson hair pulled high into a single knot. Sharp, narrow amber eyes that always seemed to be appraising prey. A hundred and seventy-four centimeters tall. Clad in a black modified uniform, the same Plant emblem embroidered on her left shoulder as Galen's.
She was Kestra Vael. Twenty-eight years old. Grief's adjutant, and once a Plant engineer in December Port.
"You called."
There was no emotion in her voice. Loyalty to Galen—and, above that, a cold realism that took priority. That was always her stance.
"Analyze this."
Galen pointed at the terminal. Kestra nodded without a word, sat down, and began running her slender fingers across the keyboard. Her amber eyes tracked the strings of text.
She had once worked as a Plant engineer in December Port, the largest trading city on the planet. Her social standing had been above that of a doctor. A monthly salary of fifteen hundred double dollars. A life without want. But deep in her heart, there had always been anger.
(Humans do nothing but exploit the Plants.)
They produced water, supplied electricity, sent out purified air. And while enjoying those blessings, no one treated the Plants as sacred. No one gave thanks. They were handled like mere machines. She could not forgive that.
So she had resonated with Knives's ideology. And from the Fall—a hundred and fifty years since the immigrant fleet had crashed onto this harsh planet, No Man's Land—humanity had depended on the Plants, a history she knew better than anyone.
"...What is this."
Kestra's fingers stopped. Her amber eyes widened slightly.
"What is it."
Galen asked.
"A fragment of the activation sequence. It's incomplete. But—it records the elements essential for activation."
She turned the display toward Galen. A string of fragmentary code. Within it, a phrase appeared again and again.
"Biometric authentication required. Affinity threshold: 0.97 or higher. Standard Plant-dependent individuals unacceptable. Self-sustaining-level resonance required."
"In other words, activating it requires a special kind of human."
Galen moved his right index finger.
"Not necessarily human. A life form with high affinity for the Plants—somewhere on this planet."
"Likely. But the planet's population is three million eight hundred thousand. We won't find one by searching blindly."
"Then investigate."
Galen rose from his chair and stared at the map of the planet pinned to the wall. Continents, deserts, scattered cities. All of it the canvas Knives had dreamed of.
"The planet-wide Plant output monitoring network. Cross-reference ten years of anomalous data. Which Plant, what minute fluctuations—all of it."
Kestra opened her mouth for a moment, then closed it. Her amber eyes watched Galen's back.
(This man intends to go all the way.)
She thought. And at the same time, she already understood where that path would lead. While revering the Plants as gods, while hating humanity—still, somewhere in her heart, there was a sympathy for the Plants themselves. A pity for beings that were only ever exploited.
But she would never say it aloud.
"Understood. Cross-referencing the data will take several days."
"One day."
Galen did not turn around. He simply gave the order, short and sharp.
□
That night, the village of Elma was quiet.
A hundred and twenty kilometers northeast of Kared City. A small settlement of barely eight hundred people. A poor land where a single aging Plant barely kept running. Water was rationed, two liters per person per day. And still the people lived here, knowing that if the Plant died, they would die with it.
Near the Plant Bulb stood one shabby dwelling.
At its window, Arisa sat.
Her long, straight silver-white hair, reaching to her waist, caught the Plant's pale light and shone as if dusted with stardust. Her large, pale aquamarine eyes were turned toward the night sky. Sixteen years old. Her features still held a child's softness, but deep in her eyes there sometimes surfaced a loneliness far older than her years.
"...You didn't come again today."
She murmured softly.
In her hands was a single dog tag. A metal identification tag. The engraved letters were faded, but they were certainly there—"Vash the Stampede."
It had happened a few years ago.
She had been caught in a sandstorm near the settlement. A grand storm—one that should have occurred only a few times a season—had suddenly broken out. Arisa, unable to flee in time, was half-buried in sand, on the verge of losing consciousness. And then—
A shadow appeared out of the wind.
A red coat. Golden hair. And a gentle smile.
"Are you all right?"
The man had lifted Arisa in his arms and carried her to safety. Then he had removed his own dog tag and pressed it into her hand.
"If you're ever in trouble, show this. Say my name, and someone will surely help you."
With that, he had gone.
What remained was the desert wind—and the dog tag, and the pounding of her heart.
Arisa had never forgotten him since.
People called him the "Human Typhoon" and feared him. The bounty was sixty billion double dollars. But to Arisa, none of that mattered.
(Vash...)
She clutched the dog tag and closed her eyes.
In that instant—
The Plant Bulb pulsed faintly.
Just a little brighter than usual. And then it returned to normal at once.
Arisa didn't notice. Or even if she had, she would have thought it was her imagination. She had no way of knowing that she was unconsciously resonating with the Plant.
Her peculiar constitution was still unknown to anyone—
That night, she dreamed. She dreamed of Vash. Wishing for the day she might see that gentle smile again.
□
The communications room of the Caravan Noir.
The hour had passed midnight. Even so, Kestra Vael did not move from before the terminal, her amber eyes tracking the torrent of data. The single knot of her long crimson hair swayed in the light of the screen.
She was brilliant. The knowledge and skill she had cultivated as a former Plant engineer were now indispensable to Grief. She hacked into the Plant output monitoring networks across the planet and collected ten years of logs. All to find the key to activating Absolute Zero.
"...What is this."
Her fingers stopped.
The Plant data of the village of Elma. Output low, aging advanced. A small settlement that drew almost no attention. But—
What was recorded there were minute fluctuations below the detection threshold. That in itself was not unusual. Environmental changes or the precursors of sandstorms could cause them. But this fluctuation pattern was clearly irregular, without
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