Editing Mushi Uta:Volume 11 Chapter 2 (section)

== 2.04 Daisuke Part 5 ==

“Are you going to be so evasive about your father’s research, too?”

While leading away the swarm of Mushi and running, Daisuke asked the girl on his back.

“…You really are good at handling Mushi.”

And Mikko was trying to change the subject.

Ahead of them, the body of a Mushi appeared. It rolled speedily to assault them, but Daisuke used a flowerpot to jump over it and escape.

The ways to fight and deal with Mushi had been drilled into Daisuke’s body.

It was the crystallization of the knowledge and experience accumulated by the SEPB. For more than a decade, paying for it with many sacrifices.

Although he couldn’t use his Mushi, he wasn’t afraid of some low-grade Mushi.

“If I keep it a secret like this, it seems like it will not end with a mere slap on the cheek… cough.”

She apparently had a sharp intuition. It happened just as he thought about leaving her there.

“My father couldn’t accept my mother’s death. He became deeply worried about life and death, as a result devoting himself to research about immortality. …Cough.”

A large body of water could be seen ahead.

It was a pond.

With the morning dew like mist and the small island in the middle, it really looked like a miniature garden.

“As an attempt to gain the Undying, he soon threw away research about gene manipulation and the like. Since humanity had been unable to reach the Undying from its origin to this day… he wished for a more dramatic change.”

“Enough with the preface. What was the research about?”

While carrying Mikko, Daisuke took a detour around the pond. According to the pamphlet they saw before, there was apparently an artificial pond in the premises.

“Cough… my father’s aim was tying people’s spirits and bodies together.”

“Tying… their spirit and body?”

“Rarely, there are cases where a certain mental state can cause the flesh to reject its death.”

“…”

“A soldier in a war, single-mindedly wanting to save his comrades despite being fatally wounded. A father who was gravely injured in an accident and yet survived because he yearned to meet his daughter. A man who came back from clinical death due to hearing his lover’s voice… strong feelings differing from instincts could allow one to surpass physical death.”

Strong feelings.

Daisuke thought this research was fishy, but these words brought a bad feeling to his mind that kept growing.

“Greed, desire, wish… hope. I do not know how to best call that feeling.”

Or perhaps something like—a dream.

Daisuke groaned in his heart.

“There were people who had their eyes on my father’s theory. People who gained everything: money, position, anything at all, and grew tired of life… they called themselves the Round Table. My father’s research was nothing more than a pipedream, and yet they supplied it with suitable test subjects, not stopping his delusions.”

“Suitable test subjects?”

Even without turning around, Daisuke knew that the large swarm chasing them only kept growing. With a certain space between them, they were followed by the sounds of tremors and buildings being knocked down.

“They were people who desperately wished to obtain something. Almost all of them came not from developed countries, but from other places that had less than blessed environments… they were all people who starved, suffered, raged, saddened, and cried…”

“And what did your father… do to those people?”

“He made them even more hungry, suffering, angry, sad and crying.”

He felt sick just imagining it.

It was obviously illegal, but this research could never be forgiven from a moral standpoint as well.

Making that possible—were the powers called the Round Table.

“Plenty died. But that was still within expectations… My father thought that those test subjects who reached the edge of death and yet didn’t die, or perhaps those who came back to life, held the possibility of becoming Undying… cough.”

“Sounds like a world-class piece of shit.”

“My father lost his sanity. He even stopped letting me, his biological daughter, out of the research facility so that I could take care of the test subjects… but one day, a miracle occurred—”

“…A miracle?”

“I do not know what happened. However, the one you call the dark woman had an effect on another test subject. —Effect, is the only way I can call it. That guinea pig created something. There is a way of referring to that thing. Daisuke, you were the one who taught me it.”

“Mushi—”

Mikko’s arm caressed Daisuke’s head as if in tender care.

“Since there was a result, the research was accelerated. The numbers of test subjects increased, and I felt so bad for those I cared for, so I took them out of the facility with me… my limit was two people, though.”

“A result, you say? What is the connection between Undying and Mushi? Since something completely unrelated was born, wasn’t it a failure?”

“He probably can no longer go back… so he insisted this was a result.”

Mikko said this and closed the conversation, but for Daisuke this was no mere research.

The experiments conducted in secret by the SEPB’s Central Headquarters—

Daisuke had heard about them, albeit only a little.

He came to know of them from a certain disk given to him by Ebina Yuu, as well as his meeting with the other “Daisuke”.

Mikko’s father’s research might be part of it, and it produced these Imperfect Mushi.

“Cough. Among the test subjects, only a very few exhibited the possibility to birth Imperfect Mushi… the one supposedly here at Castello is another one.”

If this research or whatever continued, it would become irreversible.

Inside Daisuke, anxiety was changing into conviction.

The scene he saw inside the milky mist crossed through his mind.

''—If I could return to the past—I would have probably killed all of you the moment we met…

On an abandoned ship who knows where, Mikko said this while crying.

''—Kii-kun, Kasshi, Rui… as well as me… we shouldn’t have come here…

That creepy prophecy.

If it really was no illusion.

''—Because of us, this country will get filled with Mushi and reach its end.

Daisuke had no idea why he was able to see that.

But if that indicated a future of destruction.

Wasn’t it a mistake for Daisuke to keep protecting Mikko and Kii-kun like he did now?

Perhaps what he should have done was, just like Mikko during that scene said—

“Cough… by the way.”

Daisuke came back to himself from Mikko’s voice.

''What am I thinking about—

He was mad at himself for thinking of something idiotic.

“Where is Kii-kun, I wonder?”

Daisuke stopped in place.

As he turned around—there were only the rabid Mushi there.

At some point, the annoying crying boy had vanished.