LIGHTNOVELONLINE In the hospital room, a faint smell of disinfectant lingered.
Soft sunlight seeped through the window, gently illuminating the white walls of the space.
There was a woman lying on the bed, gazing out the window.
With her green hair and somewhat clueless expression, it was Eleanor.
Hwaaa…
A long sigh escaped her slightly parted lips.
Recently, she had been sent to an abandoned nuclear facility where she endured a horrifying ordeal. Fortunately, she somehow managed to escape that place, still clinging to life.
Now that everything was over, she was simply enjoying the pleasant breeze coming in from outside, savoring her gratitude for being alive.
BANG!
Suddenly, a loud noise erupted from behind her.
The sound of the hospital room door being flung open roughly.
Without a hint of consideration or decorum, she frowned and turned her head.
But upon seeing who had entered, her face relaxed, and she greeted the approaching person with a smile.
“Oh, Cooper! Long time no see!”
“Yeah. It’s been a while, huh?”
Cooper lightly smiled in response to Eleanor waving her hand.
Although they weren’t people who would normally get along, it was common for individuals to develop a bond after surviving a tough crisis together.
Having gone through multiple life-threatening situations in that place, even in a short time, they had formed a sort of camaraderie worthy of being called friendly.
“I heard your quarantine period is over, so I came to check on you. How are you feeling?”
“Yeah. They said I can start returning to normal soon. I was actually starting to feel a bit stiff, so it’s perfect timing.”
“Really? That’s a relief. I thought something serious happened to you since you were quarantined for so long.”
With that inquiry, he placed the hospital visit gift he had been holding onto the shelf.
Though he seemed indifferent on the surface, truthfully, he was quite worried about her.
He had also been undergoing various checks, so he had been in quarantine for a hefty amount of time too. But compared to the week it took for him to be released, she had been stuck for an unusually long time.
Considering her injuries, a few weeks was an excessive amount of time given the management office’s medical technology.
And he knew well that usually, an unpleasant cause followed such situations.
“Well, not quite… Uhm, how should I put this?”
“What? Something actually happened?”
“No. Honestly, I’m not sure. I just… woke up and it seemed like a lot of time had passed.”
However, the one who experienced the event didn’t feel anything particularly strange.
Seeing her own confusion about what had happened gave Cooper an odd feeling, but he shrugged it off and decided to continue the conversation with his long-lost colleague.
“Oh, speaking of which, how’s Elijah?”
Eleanor brought up the name of someone who wasn’t present there. Her tone was laced with concern.
The last image of him left in her memory was of him being so severely injured that she was curious how he could even move.
“Him? He got discharged a while ago. He’s probably off running some operation somewhere again.”
“Wow… Didn’t he get hurt the most among us?”
“Who knows? At this point, he might as well be a robot or something.”
Yet contrary to her worries, he was the first to get discharged and was already back in the field.
Hearing this made her raise an eyebrow, doubtful about whether he was really still human.
“Speaking of which, have you heard about that little girl?”
“Little girl? Are you talking about the 19th entity?”
“Yeah. I had a hunch, but hearing it for real was just unbelievable.”
Scratching the back of his head, Cooper mumbled as if he still couldn’t wrap his head around it.
In fact, he had been suspecting it to some degree.
After all, it didn’t make sense to think of that girl as just a normal human after witnessing certain scenes.
No matter how much of a specialist you are, there are still boundaries that humans can’t surpass.
And if you considered whether she crossed that boundary or not, she must have long gone over it at this point.
“Well, it didn’t shock me that much, to be honest.”
“What? You’re surprisingly calm about this?”
“Well, experiencing something like that, it’s hard not to understand. I mean, kicking down a door locked because of an anomaly? That’s not something a normal person does.”
“Well, I guess you’ve got a point there. Looking back now, it was filled with nonsensical events.”
When Eleanor showed such a nonchalant reaction, Cooper was briefly surprised before nodding in understanding.
An abnormal phenomenon that communicates and helps humans?
Honestly, in his past self, he would have scoffed at such a concept, but as someone who experienced it firsthand, he couldn’t entirely dismiss it.
Looking at the girl roaming freely outside the isolation room, and researchers here treating it as ordinary.
Seeing Eleanor casually mention it made him feel rather stiff in comparison.
Perhaps, he realized, he was the one holding onto prejudices.
“I can’t believe that little girl wasn’t actually human…”
After a moment, he gazed out the window and casually opened his mouth.
Eleanor, who had been watching him, suddenly grew wide-eyed.
“Eh???????????”
Caught off guard, she looked bewildered, clearly not expecting such a statement.
“…? ”
Cooper furrowed one eyebrow, turning his head toward her. Just moments ago, she had been calmly discussing the girl.
Now, however, her expression was filled with invisible question marks, making her look like she was in disbelief.
“No way… you didn’t know?”
“I-I had no idea! What was that just now?! Is that for real?!”
“Haven’t you been expecting it to some degree?”
“I thought she was just a response specialist!”
Eleanor shouted, her disbelief overflowing.
Since she had never met the response team, she thought of them as superhumans.
And more than that, due to her rank in the special operations unit, she mostly encountered monsters or terrifyingly similar entities.
So, no matter how you saw it, the girl just looked like a small child, completely matching none of the anomalies she’d encountered.
“Aren’t anomalies supposed to refer to the monsters we saw in the facility?! The 19th entity clearly looked like a little girl!”
“No, no. A regular girl can’t stop a falling elevator with one hand.”
Cooper waved his hands dismissively. He thought that couldn’t be right.
Sure, he couldn’t deny that the girl looked cute, but remembering the things that cute little girl had done created a considerable psychological gap.
“Plus, turning monsters into bloody mush using a door and running up vertical walls? Thinking of her as human is a stretch. You remember that from back then, right?”
He gestured with his finger to jog her memory about the events they faced together.
Blood and chunks in the hall, and beasts charging toward them as they climbed the silo’s walls.
If she truly thought about those moments, she should be able to convince herself that the girl was anything but human.
“Uh, um…”
But for some reason, despite having witnessed such memorable sights, she seemed to struggle recalling her memories.
After a long moment of pondering…
“Umm… Did the 19th entity do those things?”
It appeared that she genuinely couldn’t remember, looking puzzled as she turned to him.
“What? You don’t remember? We met again after going into the last Launch Control Room.”
“Uh, um… I’m sorry. I don’t really remember what happened after entering there.”
“What?”
“I heard that partial memory loss can happen due to stress, and I guess I might be experiencing something similar.”
She scratched her head awkwardly and forced a shy smile.
It was somewhat understandable. For two people who experienced the same event, it would be embarrassing for only one to forget due to trauma.
However, being a well-trained operative for the special operations unit, she held a sense of pride.
“…”
Yet rather than teasing her, Cooper merely stared at her quietly.
After all, short-term memory loss doesn’t occur that way.
Unless she suffered a direct blow to the head, he distinctly remembered that she hadn’t experienced anything near a direct hit right before passing out.
And even if she had been hit, it wouldn’t make sense for her to forget only that specific incident.
“Eleanor, you—”
Suddenly, a realization dawned on him about her longer quarantine duration and the selective memory loss.
He remembered the symptoms tied to certain memory-affecting pharmaceuticals used by the management office.
Having recalled the mumbling she did back then, he instinctively wanted to ask something—
Tap, tap
But the sound of footsteps approaching from behind cut him off, prompting him to turn his head toward the person entering the hospital room.