Binary Star

Pathogenesis

A cold, primal terror bloomed in Tsukasa's chest when he heard the first anguished howl. It was a sound so visceral, inhuman, and raw, that its concussive force clawed furiously up his spine like a blazing, hungry electrical current that wholly eclipsed his senses. With a grim frown, Tsukasa adjusted his grip on his spear and through his periphery he saw Hyoga do the same.

The garbled howling had frozen them all in their tracks.

"What was that?" Yuzuriha asked in a quiet voice, arms protectively cradling the basket full of medicinal herbs and plants they had all gathered that afternoon. Beside her, Taiju stepped a little closer to her, placing his body between Yuzuriha and the perceived direction of the noise, his shoulders squared and his earnest and easygoing smile nowhere to be seen.

"Is it an animal?" Minami asked in hushed tones. Even quieter, she asked, "A person?"

"It's this way," Tsukasa said, quick to pinpoint exactly where the ghoulish sound was coming from and took off in that direction with a fast but certain pace. The others quickly followed behind.

The forest around them was thick with brush and dense with foliage. Twigs broke sharply beneath his weight and he felt rich, dark earth under his feet. After 3,700 years, nature had long reclaimed the planet back from humans. This forest, if it could even be called as such for how truly endless it appeared to be, belonged to no one.

That was how it was meant to be. This is the 'Empire' he wanted.

(And wasn't it interesting that the guys, newly revived and joking around the campfire, had started calling their encampment 'the Empire.' Half-seriously, half-jokingly, they'd constructed for him a throne. It was a joke, but their desires for a leader in this new world were true.

And so, he had accepted the throne.

How easily they had decided to let him rule over them.)

Tsukasa knew he had finally located the source of the noise when he brushed aside another branch and found himself in a small clearing. Near the edge of that clearing on the other side he saw a person.

For one moment that was so brief it might as well not have happened, Tsukasa thought the figure standing in front of them looking over their shoulder at their approach was Senku. It wasn't.

Instead, it was a slim, young woman who looked about fifteen or sixteen. When she heard the branch snap from underfoot, she had hastily switched from a crouched position and assumed a standing one instead. She stood there with a guarded air of self-assurance as they approached her, eyeing them more sharply and warily the closer they got. Previously, she had been watching with rapt attention something on the other side of the fallen tree of which Tsukasa suspected was the origin of the noise in the forest they had just heard. The pale blue eyes and western facial features marked her as a foreigner, but what concerned Tsukasa more were the mirrored winglike petrifaction scars that curved ever so slightly up her cheekbones and framed the corners of her eyes.

Now that marked her unmistakably as one of the revived.

Tsukasa's hand tightened its grip on his spear as he shot his companions a glance. He had wondered if the girl he'd run across earlier, the one with the blond hair and blue dress, had been revived by Senku and the others, but she had turned out to be what was probably a generations-removed child of one of the revived. Primitive. Simple. Unknowing and innocent. 

The young woman before him now however, with those petrification scars up on her face, was none other than a modern generation individual.

His glance towards Taiju and Yuzuriha revealed their genuinely surprised expressions. Then, this was a truly anomalously awakened individual. Like Senku.