What? You intend to eliminate it as is? Didn't I say this is a special anomaly?"
"I'm a Foundation Union employee, Mr. Friedrich. I have to follow orders. I belong to the anomaly suppression team."
As she finished speaking, the sealed research building doors slid open quietly.
Two teams, each with three members.
Cosette, who had been crouching in front of Friedrich, stood up.
Agents from the field unit, clad in black military uniforms, approached and saluted her with precise movements.
The sound of their boots hitting the firm lab floor echoed, and the lead agent handed Cosette a bulletproof vest.
The zipper was pulled up, revealing a white Foundation logo with 'H.C.F' clearly printed.
She tied back her hair completely, strapped on suspenders and a Glock magazine, and kindly replied to Friedrich as she moved forward.
"If you don't know the image, it's better to destroy everything inside the anomaly. Code name Cosette, entering with additional reinforcements."
Friedrich shouted inside his mind.
Crazy woman! Soldiers always think everything can be solved by just wiping it out!
But Cosette was someone who did what she said.
Since the first exploration took about eight minutes, Cosette planned to finish everything within five.
She wasn't going in to secure the core image of the anomaly.
Instead, she intended to destroy that thoroughly and completely erase this anomaly.
Five minutes.
What could I possibly do in five minutes?
Friedrich stared blankly at the headless man and the agents entering the autopsy room, then sprang up.
There was no time for hesitation. He had to do whatever he could.
The last thing Raimund remembered was the red number dropping from 1 to 0.
Sensing his death, he closed his eyes—and then nothing.
A truly strange thing. Nothing at all. No sight, no smell, no sound, no touch, no taste.
No thoughts or consciousness remained.
Talking about existence to someone who had completely vanished was pointless.
He knew that himself. How he "knew" was unclear, but he just did.
But just when he finally let go of Raimund Geppert, prepared to forget everything—
He suddenly realized he was shaking. And panicked.
Shaking? Why? How? Is death supposed to be this uncomfortable? Is it like riding a bike over gravel and feeling like throwing up?
They say after death, everyone rests forever in peace.
But all Raimund felt was as if someone had put him in a barrel and rolled him downhill, an unpleasant sensation.
When he finally opened his eyes, he found a pair of piercing blue eyes staring intently at him.
Gasp.
"Can you hear me?"
What? Where is this?
Raimund shifted his gaze around. His neck felt stiff and wouldn't turn well.
Moreover, the voice he heard sounded distant and faint, as if shouted from afar.
"If you can hear me properly, blink once."
Is that directed at me?
Raimund blinked without understanding. The man had long white hair tangled around bright blue eyes.
Who was he? Someone Raimund had never seen before.
More importantly, where was he? Why couldn't his body move?
"It's unfortunate you're in this state due to the urgent situation. But right now, we have somewhere to go."
Where?
Raimund struggled to speak. It was as if he had forgotten how to use his vocal cords.
The white-haired man turned his back.
Suddenly Raimund's perspective rose sharply.
Seeing all around, Raimund felt even more confused.
It looked like a restaurant. There were three or four tables, and a microwave oven on one side.
But why was he here?
Where is this place?
"You might get a bit carsick, but this is the only way. Please bear with it."
As the man's voice ended, the world began to shake vertically again.
Only then did Raimund realize the man was running.
Wait, is he carrying me while running? It was bewildering.
No matter how tall or big Raimund was, the man's movement was incredibly fast.
Moreover, Raimund was moving in exactly the same direction as the man.
How did he hold Raimund's body to run like this?
Amid the confusion, the man kept running.
After passing the place they had been in, a siren blared somewhere, accompanied by flashing red lights.
Suppressing his rising disgust instinctively, Raimund tried to glance at passing objects.
But that didn't last long.
As the man and Raimund passed a transparent glass window, Raimund saw himself reflected under intense red warning lights and opened his mouth wide.
The white-haired man was running while carrying Raimund in a transparent glass jar. And Raimund was...
In a jar.
A head in a jar.
A head submerged in transparent mucus.
That was undoubtedly himself.
Though some unknown sensor was attached between the strands of his golden hair,
Though his head hung without anything below his ears,
Though one side of his face had skin completely blown off by an explosion!
Raimund screamed. No, he tried to scream without knowing what he was doing.
But he had no vocal cords. He had no neck where vocal cords should be.
He thought his body couldn't move, or that he was tied up, but it was because there was literally nothing to move.
Ah, of course!
He kept shouting silently. No tears came out.
He couldn't even spit out the mucus filling his nose.
A specimen. A taxidermy.
Unable to bear the reality, he wanted to faint—but he couldn't.
Electrodes connected through his hair forcibly kept Raimund awake against his will.
While Raimund struggled with suffocating fear and unreality, the man moved swiftly.
Passing through a room flashing light painfully bright enough to hurt the eyes, they opened a door somewhere—
Pitch black background.
A path and fence drawn like graffiti on the wall.
Smoke rising here and there, with crimson sparks flying from charred edges.
The paper dolls marching toward the gates of heaven were all brutally blown to pieces.
Along the path lay only gray ashes.
The end of the path. The gates of heaven.
But where the intruders had once trampled, smoke and flames rose.
The acrid smoke, carried by wind that shouldn't exist in this world, floated this way.
The white-haired man turned the glass jar so Raimund could see the scene clearly and said:
"This is where you were."
Raimund thought: Don't lie. When was I ever in a place like this?
"To be exact, it might be a world you created. It's a hypothesis, though. I haven't figured out how you made this. And those—"
The man with black gloves pointed in the direction where continuous gunshots sounded like machine-gun fire.
"Are trying to destroy this place while burying the truth. If that happens, the opportunity to investigate here will vanish completely.
Your torso, excluding your head, is here too, but if this place disappears, it will vanish as well."
My body is here?
Raimund's common sense failed to keep up with the man's explanation.
But the man didn't seem to care and said:
"You have only… three minutes left to think like this."
Three minutes? Then what happens to me after that?
"You should think of what to say to those demolishing this world. Hopefully, you can change their minds."
With that, the man ran again.
Smoke, sparks, dolls, ashes, everything burning along the path.
Meanwhile, Raimund zoned out.
Three minutes.
He really died back then.
Looking back now, it was an absurd amount of money.
Even knowing this could happen, blinded by gold, he did it.
No, it's not gold. It's the greed for what gold could buy.
Fioni, Olive, Hazel.
I just did it for you all.
Without thinking…
A faint explosion sounded again.
In the smoke-filled sky, a hand covered by clouds twisted and burned in pain.
Raimund felt like he had seen that hand somewhere before.
In front of the ruined gates of heaven, people stood.
Heaven was burning, accompanied by the terrible agonized screams of paper dolls inside a black cabinet.
As the white-haired man approached, a woman who had tied her hair high lowered the balaclava covering her nose and turned around.
"Mr. Friedrich?"
Without a word, the man offered the glass jar containing Raimund.
The woman's eyes met Raimund's.
Cold? Surface-level? An expression impossible to read.
But Raimund realized this was the moment the white-haired man had spoken of.
So he said what he wanted most to say now.
"Please save me."
The woman's eyes narrowed sharply at the movement of his cracked, dry lips.