Scene shifts — Return to the present timeline.
It has been four months since the tragedy with Elizabeth.
For all these months, her limbs—arms, legs, even her spine—were bound, suspended unnaturally in the air like a puppet caught mid-prayer. Not to restrain her from violence, but from escape. From ending it all.
They kept her hidden, sealed within a "secret" government hospital—though the term was a joke. Nothing is secret when you're being observed every moment. Every breath monitored. Every hormone shift logged.
She wasn't just a prisoner. She was a vessel.
A vessel carrying something that was… not entirely human.
The child—or weapon—inside her is larger than any human being at same time-stage should. Its size and weight pressed against her organs with a monstrous rhythm. Breathing had become a labor. Every moment in her body became painful . Thinking, a torture.
And yet, Elizabeth thought.
She had nothing else to do.
---
Elizabeth's Thoughts:
"I can't move.
I don't even want to think about the damage that's been done to my body after four months of this stillness.
They know I refuse to eat.
But they've pierced me with strange needles, injecting some liquid into me — keeping me alive without my permission, without my will."
"I was older than Reinhard."
Older, and once wiser. She saw things before he did. Saw the cracks in the system. In the town. In the smiles.
"At first, I believed the whole world was like that—tightly controlled, perfect in appearance, rotten in structure."
But the mission… that one mission the Human World Government sent them on—it gave her a glimpse. A sliver of the outside.
The world beyond wasn't perfect either. But it was different. Less manufactured. Less... constructed.
"Our town wasn't a town—it was a lab."
And Marlic, the genius admired by all, treated like royalty in YangPass… he wasn't just a man.
He was the engineer. The designer. The architect of that experiment. And Reinhard?
Reinhard was the subject.
They didn't brainwash her as deeply. Not like they did to him. Not the main experiment. She was secondary. A side-variable. Watched, but not built.
She'd realized it as early as age seven. She knew.
And yet… she did nothing.
"I could've helped him escape this fate," she thought, face trembling as silent tears rolled down her cheeks, "but I... I hid behind Kael."
Kael—the only one who dared to challenge things aloud.
Kael—who Reinhard once half-listened to, just enough to observe what not to do.
Kael—who was punished repeatedly, made into a symbol. A warning. A social scarecrow.
And Elizabeth? She convinced herself that Kael was doing what she wanted to do. That he was her voice. That her silence was safe.
But it was cowardice.
"I was afraid," she admitted to herself, now with no room left for lies, "Afraid of being hated by the very society that claimed to love me."
Her mind circled back to Reinhard.
"He used to care about truth. But the older he grew, the more he listened to the majority. Not the better logic. Not the quieter wisdom. Just the louder noise."
Elizabeth's body shook in her bindings.
"I regret."
The words echoed silently in her mind like a broken bell.
"I regret."
For staying silent.
For surviving.
For bringing this child into the world—this hybrid, this anomaly that might be the future's end or beginning.
They wouldn't let her die.
Not until after the child was born.
Then, when the government had what it needed, they'd release her like an umbrella after the storm—a tool no longer needed.
And she had already made her decision.
"I will kill myself the moment they let me go. I cannot watch Reinhard fail . There's just no way he can defeat all those nation's."
She looked down at her swollen body.
"And right now... I can't even see a path to stop him."