'I didn't mean to kill him. Really.'
Looking at the researcher, who had drowned in the end exactly as he wished, I shrugged. Thanks to the ability, apparently, I could even breathe underwater.
After tearing the card key from the researcher's neck, I pushed through the water, which had slowly begun to recede, and headed for the door.
The one thing that left a bad taste was that the researcher had left last words.
'I will pray you escape. Haha......, but will it be any different out there?' Seriously.
Isn't that a horror thriller cliché?
I erased those last words from my memory at once.
However much of a hell the place I am headed for may be, it is better than here. The experiment succeeded, so I will live comfortably now? Do not even dream of it.
'Sticking close to bastards with something to hide only gets you a life you live because you can't die.'
This was a secret laboratory built by the government.
That is why an inhumane facility was running without a hitch.
A secret committee on the government's side wrapped the facility up prettily and referred to it publicly as a science research institute.
By now you get it.
In this damn world, the greatest evil was the government and the state.
Even if I had to kneel to the protagonist to survive, I did not have a speck of intention of siding with the government.
'That place is nothing but garbage that's clean on the outside.'
The best thing the protagonist ever did was blow the government away.
And now this villain character was at risk of getting blown away along with it.
'Even thinking it over again, it's truly bleak.......'
When the bulkhead opened, the water still remaining poured into the corridor all at once.
Swept along by the current and shoved a good distance, I rubbed my eyes at the flickering of the crackling LED lights and carefully surveyed my surroundings.
The laboratory, which I remembered as housing quite a lot of people, was nothing but quiet thanks to the swift report from the now-deceased researcher.
Between the red alarm lights, a repeating evacuation announcement rang out from the speakers.
The same corridors, the same doors, the same lighting, even the same smell.
'This feels a bit.......'
I walked along the faintly grotesque white corridor that looked as though it did not hold a single speck of dust.
Since I was still wet, water marks trailed along the floor with each sticky step. Around the time even that began to feel like something clinging along behind me, nibbling away at my nerves.
Before long, I found numbers written on the floor. The numbers, which at a glance looked irregular, carried a consistent pattern.
Markers indicating, for instance, whether the direction I was heading led to the research wing or the dormitory wing.
The researcher's security grade must have been high, since there was not a single door the card key would not open, which was a small mercy.
I glanced up and stared at the camera tracking me, then decided on a route.
'The minimum. Let's do only the minimum. Mm, right.'
And while I was at it, I would mix a bit of efficiency into that minimal movement.
***
It was not that I knew the way, but when I called up the basic floor plan, there were a few places I could infer.
The most notable of them was the control room.
In truth, it was thanks to luckily stumbling onto a floor map while wandering, but anyway.
There were only two people in the control room.
One screamed the instant he laid eyes on me and ran away, and the other—
"F*ck, if you run off alone, what am I supposed to do......? G-get away!"
—trembled as he aimed a crude handgun at me. Perhaps he had never actually used one, because for a security employee he was nothing but clumsy.
'There's no need to even use my ability......— huh?'
BANG—!
I had only stepped closer to subdue him, but the security officer, consumed by terror, pulled that clumsy finger and blew his own head off.
I recalled that the ghost story about being turned into a monster if an ability user devoured you had been fairly famous in the original work.
'Still, his own head......— these people are terrifying.'
Wiping the blood splattered on my face, I cast my gaze at the monitors filling one wall.
In the areas close to the research wing the evacuation was nearly complete, while the dormitory wing and the external reception room were not there yet.
Judging by how orderly the tail ends of the scrambling crowds were, they must have drilled properly.
'It's nice of them to get scared and run, but what did I even do.......'
I felt a little wronged.
Surely I did not warrant running away like that. It is not as if I openly look like a monster.
I checked the internal data, which was my purpose in coming here.
I intended to delete the portions of the CCTV record files that showed me. The detailed data would be gathered separately, but fortunately, the stored footage only covered the last three months.
And most of that was nothing but footage of me suffering through experiments.
'Well now, I'm even frailer than I thought.'
A camera had captured a front-on view of me a short while ago as I escaped the research wing.
I stared blankly at the sight for a moment, then ruffled my hair.
My still-damp hair fell back stickily.
A body that at best looked as though it had only just turned twenty, pallid skin, thin arms and legs.
The pitch-black hair, long and plastered down, steeped in the color of the water, looks like kelp.
'Ha, I really am that villain.'
The hair length was different, but the features were exactly as I had seen them in the comic.
That sharp impression, that madman's face.
'I can't even deny reality anymore. That I......, that I'm that son of a bitch.'
Tears blurred my vision.
I pressed the button, deleted every last video, and let out a sigh.
Being possessed into a damned place like this was unfair enough, and on top of it, a terminal sentence with no way of knowing how long I would have to thrash about just to live.
I think I lived a rather exhausting life in my past life too, so having it be like this here as well is a bit much.
'I lived hard, you know. I did.'
While rubbing the back of my neck, I finally checked the pain in my palm, and there was a scrape, probably from being grazed by a shard when the cage shattered.
The blood had spread through the water and stained half my palm red, but the fortunate part was that it was closing up little by little.
'Thanks to the ability?'
It made me feel all the more like something other than human, which left an even more bitter taste.......
'This is a bit of a blow.'
If they were going to give me an ability anyway, they could at least have given me a noticeable healing speed. Looking at the wound knitting itself shut at that sluggish pace, all I could do was sigh.
I watched the water droplets drip down and pool on the floor, then raised my head.
On the screens showing real time, most of the people had already finished evacuating.
'The director's office is empty?'
The cowardly Laboratory Director did seem like the sort to run first, but the problem was that the secretary and a cluster of the security team were still holding their positions in front of the director's office.
And he was not among the other evacuating people either.
'Ha......, is it now, maybe? Him bolting?'
Bundling up armloads of data and vanishing. Do not tell me that is today? No, they said he had not selected the delivery contractor!
Drained of color, I scanned the screens quickly.
The author's Q&A had stated as setting that there was a place the Laboratory Director had specially commissioned to be designed for use as an escape route in an emergency.
So I had to find him before the Laboratory Director moved into a CCTV blind spot.
'Ah, there.'
He had appeared in a few panels of the original work as well, but the Laboratory Director, bulkier than I expected, was caught by a camera inside the cafeteria. Carrying a bag that looked suspicious at a glance, no less.
The cafeteria has a separate supply route for easily bringing in outside materials. It is a kind of convenience facility built so that deliveries can be made without going through complicated procedures.
'So the entrance was there?'
Having confirmed the Laboratory Director's backside heading for the emergency exit, I let out a sigh of relief.
Fortunately, when I checked the internal security blueprints, it was a considerable distance from the escape exit that led outside the laboratory.
Without a shred of hesitation, I switched the screens and brought up the cameras showing the exterior.
'Government troops?'
Above the laboratory's quiet landscaped lawn, pitch-black government troops were waiting in neat ranks and files.
Their numbers were small, but according to my memory, those government troops were each a match for a hundred men, capable of handling even ability users.
'So this is why the director is bolting already.'
In the original work, the government troops tried to strike the Laboratory Director from behind and instead took a heavy hit themselves, and the panel cut off there.
That the government troops recovered 99 in the process was purely luck, owing to the Laboratory Director having fled without knowing the experiment had succeeded.
He overlooked the researcher's passion and the variable I had introduced.
My head throbbed.
Avoid the government troops and catch the Laboratory Director.
Can we not do without time-limited quests?
I would have to revise my plan of leisurely destroying the evidence, siphoning off the data, and escaping.
I left the control room in pursuit of the Laboratory Director as he fled in a scramble.
***
The place I headed for was not the cafeteria.
Chasing after the Laboratory Director from the start would have been beyond this frail body.
When I followed the emergency evacuation route while checking the number markers, I saw a large ventilation duct filling the corridor.
Through the gap of the ventilation duct, its blades that should have been spinning fast now halted and its operation stopped, the person I had been waiting for finally appeared.
"Wh-what?!"
The Laboratory Director, frozen in shock as though he had seen a monster, clutched the bag in his hand and floundered.
The bat-like eyes of the flabbily fattened Laboratory Director went round, and he took one hesitant step backward.
"You, you, how— did the experiment truly succeed?! Yes, if I sell you off—"
That remark is unpleasant from the standpoint of the object hearing it.
"—Ugh!"
Water is a primary component of a human being.
And water listens to me very well.
I smiled brightly and stepped toward the Laboratory Director.
"D-do not come closer!"
The Laboratory Director was a coward, so he had prepared several corners to slip out through. One of them was classified information related to the research.
That was as good as his life.
By holding it in his hand and giving it up to no one, it served as a shield that protected him.
But it was a double-edged sword.
The reason 99 was moved elsewhere after the experiment succeeded was that the Laboratory Director's ulterior thoughts had crossed the line.
"Do not be like that. Listen to me. Do you understand speech? If you come with me, the world will hold you up in praise! They will come to you carrying bundles of money!"
The Laboratory Director, his judgment clouded by fear, ended up taking money under the table while siphoning off the research data, which amounted to walking into a pit of fire on his own.
"Once you leave here, there are people waiting to receive you. Did you happen to see the government troops? You cannot get out alone. You know that, hmm?"
Research that can grant supernatural abilities to taste?
It was quite an appetizing subject in the private sector as well.
Private organizations spared no support, and the escaped Laboratory Director was slated to become a fairly troublesome opponent.
'Well, that's if things go as in the original work.'
The important thing is that the Laboratory Director, who only sat around wearing the official hat and did not even know how to use his body, got out of here safely.
'That won't do. Whatever else happens, the director has to be taken down here.'
My precious research data is in the director's hands, after all.
Letting that walk out would be like stamping a confirmed expiration date on my life.
I do not know the process in between, but the research data he is carrying now is slated to be largely lost somewhere along the way.
'Do not know, my foot. That's a trace of the author throwing the plausibility together and patching it up.'
At any rate, for these reasons, the Laboratory Director's life will have to close here.
"Y-you must not treat me like this. You will regret it later!"
Listening to him, there is nothing he will not say.
"To me......."
My faintly recovered voice came out heavily scraped. It hurt, but I had to say one thing.
"......that was fine, then?"
Humans are weak creatures.
They say humans do not die easily, but the fact that they can die easily from simple excessive bleeding says otherwise.
'Yes, it's really easy.'
The Laboratory Director, collapsing from the inside out, bled from every single hole in his face and retched dryly.
The emotions that had stayed calm even while I endured torture-like experiments after coming here flipped upside down at the sight of a creature lower than human.
"This place, cough. It will be blown up soon. The cowardly old men who feared you will pull the covers over their heads and tremble. Hahaha, hurgh. To do this to me....... Yes, I am sorry. I misspoke. With marketability like yours, something better—, ngh!"
The garbage is barking away.