Chapter 198

This city was strange.

Even as I watched the artificial sun rising beyond the window, I just couldn’t shake off that thought. The real problem, however, was that I couldn’t clearly explain what exactly was strange about it.

Something was off.

Right, it should feel strange.

After all, wasn’t this city located inside one of the Stingray bastards’ secret research facilities?

It would be far stranger not to feel a sense of wrongness within this model garden built for experimental subjects to live in.

Strangeness was natural.

It was only natural to feel that something was wrong.

That was the natural state of things.

My head felt muddled.

Something just didn’t fit.

A sudden worry crossed my mind.

Could my brain have been hacked? Maybe this was the work of some Techno-Wizard. It had been a while since I last updated the Anti-Wizard Vaccine.

But even after checking the nanomachine logs, there was nothing unusual — everything was perfectly clean. All the modules were functioning properly.

Then what was the problem?

“You look great!”

“……”

Linda Beta was delighted as she looked at the jumpsuit I was wearing. I didn’t know where she got it from, but it fit my body perfectly.

I found it rather displeasing, as it didn’t match my aesthetic taste at all, but there was no helping it if I wanted to blend naturally among the citizens.

If there was one problem—

“Hmm. What about your hair and eyes?”

Every citizen of Honeycomb City flaunted the same black hair and golden eyes as the Stingray Family. With my gray hair and a prosthetic eye on one side, I was bound to draw unwanted attention.

“There’s no need to worry.”

I activated a module, changing the color of my hair and eyes. It was the ability of a cosmetic module that most upper-class Adaptees owned.

“Wow! That’s amazing. Can everyone outside do that?”

“Not exactly…”

“I see. Anyway, let’s go! It’s the weekend, so there’ll be much more to see!”

“Hmm.”

Whatever it was, I had to head out into the city first.

There was something hidden within this city.

Whether it was a new module or something else entirely, I needed to figure out this place if I wanted to uncover the Stingray bastards’ filthy schemes. And maybe then I’d also learn why that damned Aaron Stingray had been so quiet for an entire day.

I let Linda drag me by the arm toward the busy downtown district.

It struck me again — Linda Beta was truly someone who had not even the slightest sense of danger.

Even after a strange man had trespassed into her room, her fear lasted only for a moment. In less than a day, she was clinging to me like an overly friendly puppy, as if nothing had happened.

But that wasn’t the part that surprised me the most.

“This is the downtown area.”

“There are three streets here too, huh.”

“Yes. Each one leads to the districts for Alpha, Beta, and Gamma classes. You mustn’t carelessly enter another class’s district.”

I casually swept the area ahead with a scanner, and what I saw left me speechless. The infrastructure and quality of goods in each district were so drastically different that they might as well have been separate worlds.

Naturally, the Alpha District was filled with the upper class indulging in luxury and pleasure, while the Beta and Gamma Districts were miserably deprived in comparison.

Of course, since I had been born into privilege and enjoyed all sorts of special rights from birth, such inequality didn’t move me much. What caught my attention wasn’t the infrastructure, but rather the people’s reactions.

Alpha, Beta, Gamma.

The only thing separating the three districts was a single line drawn on the ground. There were no iron fences, no walls dividing the areas like in New Valhalla City.

No one was standing guard, and unlike Elysium, this city’s upper levels weren’t out of reach — there was merely a blue painted line marking the borders.

In other words, Gamma citizens could clearly see the Alphas eating, drinking, and enjoying themselves to their hearts’ content.

Yet no one found it strange.

Human nature, by default, breeds the urge to grab the person ahead of you by the neck and drag them down when they’re doing better.

But whether Beta or Gamma, everyone was fully content to enjoy only what was available within their own district. There was no envy, no jealousy toward the Alphas.

Their expressions were those of people who genuinely believed they possessed the entire world.

And then, something even more bizarre—

—Die! Die! Dieeee!

—Urgh! Aaagh! Th-thank you!

Some Alpha citizens were violently beating Betas and Gammas without reason. Yet instead of resisting, the lower-class citizens willingly offered themselves up, submitting as if they were born solely to be beaten by the Alphas.

“……”

“What’s wrong, Mr. Vladimir?”

“……”

I couldn’t open my mouth in the face of that grotesque absurdity.

There were certainly social classes in New Valhalla City too. Classes that were even more complex and finely divided than those of this Honeycomb City—an invisible hierarchy.

And I was someone who stood at the very top of that Hierarchie. Ruling over others and making people obey me had long been second nature, a habit so ingrained that I could no longer change it.

Even so, seeing this, I couldn’t help but say—

This is strange.

What exactly was strange?

I didn’t know.

In truth, this was nothing more than a simplified display of class and power relationships that existed in New Valhalla City—or rather, in every human civilization. If I were to place myself in this hierarchy, I would undoubtedly belong to the Alpha class.

And perhaps it was precisely because it had been simplified that something within me began to boil—an unexplainable sense of repulsion.

It felt as though the dark, murky underside of human society that should have remained hidden was being exposed in plain sight. Like watching a person completely stripped naked and thrown out into the middle of the street.

…But that feeling didn’t last long.

“Hmm?”

I forgot what I had been thinking. The unease and dissatisfaction that had filled my chest moments ago had completely vanished, and before me was only Linda Beta, smiling brightly.

“Today was so much fun, wasn’t it?”

“What?”

“I didn’t know you could sing so well, Mr. Vladimir! You said it was your first time hearing that song too, didn’t you?”

Singing?

I blinked and tried to recall my memories.

Right, now I could remember bits of it.

Linda had introduced me to some Beta citizens, and I recalled watching a movie and singing together with them—memories that floated up like bubbles.

But were those even real memories?

What the hell was happening?

When I checked the clock, the hour hand already pointed to nine. Outside, the world was dark. It had been around ten in the morning when we went out, which meant that roughly eleven hours had passed.

Another gap in my memory.

What was even stranger was that I still hadn’t heard any news about Aaron Stingray. With his power, he should’ve been able to crush this research facility in less than half a day.

Strange.

Something was wrong.

Fine, I admitted it. This was something I couldn’t handle on my own. Even if it wounded my pride, I had to find Aaron Stingray and deal with this situation together.

With that thought, I immediately opened a comm line and called him—but on the other end, I only heard a sound I had never heard before: “Tuuuuuuu—”

‘What the hell—’

My thoughts were cut off again.

When I came to, an entire month had already passed in this place.

‘What? A month?’

Yes. A month.

During that time, I had been living under Linda Beta’s care.

She shared her allocated food with me and did everything she could to make sure I was comfortable. Gradually, I began to feel a sense of affection toward her.

‘What are you talking about?’

Meanwhile, all contact with Aaron Stingray had been completely severed.

Swallowing my pride, I tried contacting him every single day, but he never answered. No calls, no mails, no messages—nothing.

‘Who’s talking right now? A month? Are you saying I’ve been here that long?’

I was bewildered by how quickly time had passed. It also meant that I had been living a rather content life here.

Sure, compared to New Valhalla City, this place lacked stimulation. There was no alcohol, no Junk Chips, no conflict. Yet one thing was clear—this was a “happy” city, filled with “happy” people.

‘No. I have to leave this place.’

I had to get out of here.

At least, that’s what I thought once.

But since when did life ever go according to one’s will? Life always threw stones from the sky or blocked your path unexpectedly. Then you simply had to find another path—that’s how humans survived.

So I decided that living here wasn’t so bad after all.

I did feel a bit guilty for continuing to rely on Linda Beta, but on the contrary, being able to stay by her side was the biggest reason I chose to remain in this city.

‘No, I…!’

So what if this was Stingray’s secret research facility? This was still a place where people lived, wasn’t it? What was Stingray, what was Militech to me? Here, I could keep living happily, satisfied with a Beta-class life.

‘Something’s wrong. Something’s really wrong!’

No, it wasn’t wrong.

There was nothing wrong at all.

This was paradise.

“Hmm?”

“What’s wrong~?”

“Vladimir’s signal has been cut.”

It had been four hours since I parted ways with him.

With Ciel’s assistance, I was continuing to search for a way to shut down this research facility’s operations.

At first, I had planned to blow up the entire facility. But through hacking, Ciel had discovered that at the core of this research center existed an artificial city called “Honeycomb,” and that it housed as many as one million inhabitants.

One million.

And that was only the portion we could confirm. Even if they were nothing more than artificially created test subjects, the thought of wiping out a million humanlike beings weighed heavily on me.

And even setting that moral hesitation aside, there was an even bigger problem.

It was what I found.

The Director’s Office.

Less than an hour after I infiltrated the facility, I found it—and inside was a corpse.

A man, approximately in his mid-twenties. My scanner indicated he’d been dead for several months.

And his name was—

“Benedict Stingray…”

For some reason—

Benedict was dead.

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