Nine months had passed since the tragedy that engulfed Elizabeth.
Elizabeth, brought back to YangPass by Kael's own hands, was no longer the same. Her gaze carried a strange calmness, as if she already knew her story was ending — and another's beginning.
The child within her was not just a hybrid of species.
He was the child of manipulation.
The government, desperate and blinded by fear, had laced the injections they gave her with biochemical agents — subtle compounds designed not to save, but to twist. To intensify aggression. To mutate instincts. To breed a weapon.
And it worked.
Elizabeth gave birth.
In the first few minutes, the newborn — barely grasping the reality of this world — began to act. Not cry. Not crawl. Kill.
He tore through steel and bone with monstrous strength, fueled by an untrained but overflowing aura — the life energy that made beings of this world more than flesh.
YangPass — home to over 2 billion humans, 77 species of animals, and 447 million insects — was silenced.
In nine hours.
Not a war. Not a siege.
A birth.
Reinhard stood at the edge of the blood-soaked skyline, silent. Not even a flicker of emotion crossed his face, until...
Until Hancock and Norin — his closest friends — tried to defend a child that could not be saved. Their screams cut through the thunderclouds. Their deaths shattered something inside him. Norin wasn't a human but he was just as smart.
He turned to Kael. His voice cracked for the first time in years.
"You said she could be saved..."
---
Flashback:
Kael had once asked Malric,
> "If Reinhard witnesses something like this... such emotional devastation, won't he abandon everything? Won't he lose faith in unity altogether?"
Malric, expression cold and calculated, had replied:
> "No. He'll lose faith in universal unity, yes. But when he sees Hancock and Norin — two beings from different species — die protecting each other, he'll see a glimpse of what can be.
He'll abandon the dream of uniting all beings… and create a new dream:
Only unite those worthy of uniting."
And just as he predicted — that seed bloomed.
---
Kael died that day, torn apart by the very thing he brought into the world.
Elizabeth followed — either from the trauma of birthing a monstrous force, or because the injections that preserved her were never meant to last beyond the moment she fulfilled her purpose.
The child did not harm Reinhard. Nor Elizabeth.
Why?
Perhaps even this monster followed the echoes of evolutionary biology — the instinct to preserve those with whom it shares the most genes. Kael, despite his relation, wasn't close enough. He became prey.
And when the massacre ended — only silence remained.
In the middle of YangPass, drenched in rain, surrounded by corpses, Kael's broken voice cried out one last time before the void swallowed him:
> "Damn you, mortals...
Other species kill to survive.
You kill your own kind...
For pleasure."
The rain didn't stop.
And Reinhard collapsed.