Chapter 43 (1/2)

Necromancer (1)

Nathan Drake’s life was always on edge.

Even before he saw the light of the world, he had to stand on the border between birth and nonexistence. His drug-addict mother decided to get an abortion when she found out she was pregnant. If she had put it into action, he would not have existed.

However, she changed her mind. She decided to give birth to the baby and rip off child support from the relatively better-pocketed biological father.

It must have been fate that his father, who was also an addict, died a few days after he was born of a heart attack caused by an overdose. His mother did not abandon him because someone tipped her off to get paid by the state. He took a step closer to life like that, from the boundary between life and death.

The street where he lived was where the people on the border between the poor and the low-income bracket gathered. Cheap drugs that suited the poor addicts were distributed here. His mother got her hands on drugs that could not be purchased if she was a homeless person with no money, making his childhood more miserable.

Cheap drugs clouded her mind, and she scratched her skin every day until it bled. His emotions toward his mother were always lost on the border of love and hatred. The word indifference was not on the scale. For the longest time, only one person existed in his world, which was his mother.

The moment the boundaries of the world were broken, his life became a little more miserable.

Other men began to invade the world, in the home where only he and his mother existed. His mother’s boyfriend kept changing. The last boyfriend he remembered beat him whenever his mother wasn’t around. Once he was finished beating him, his right ear would keep ringing, and he couldn’t hear well.

When he was away, Nathan begged his mother. He asked her not to break up with her boyfriend but to take him to the hospital. While Nathan begged and cried, his mother claimed she had no money to buy the drugs, so she called from place to place. She threw the phone and shouted. ‘Please stop bothering me. You were an accident anyway. I’ve never meant to give birth to you. Leave me alone so that I can be happy now!’

He was nine years old at the time.

The nine-year-old Nathan wandered the streets until finally, he was approached by a man in clean clothes. ‘Why are you alone? Where do you live? What about your parents?‘ He shook his head without saying a word. ‘Do you want to come with me?’

Nathan hesitated, not knowing whether this man was dangerous or not. ‘Are you going to hit me?’

The man shook his head. ‘I won’t hit you.’

He took the man’s hand. At that moment, Nathan wasn’t to know there was a terrible pain waiting.

*

There was the fact that Nathan didn’t know. The man was employed by a company called Decker & Jefferson, and they were experimenting with modifying healing potions from the dungeon to apply to non-Awakened people.

Healing potions were used to treat external trauma and Mana potions to help recovering Mana. These two were representative items that acted in response to the Mana core of the Awakened person. Only Hunters could receive healing potion effects. They aimed to overturn this absolute nature.

If successful, it was a study that would affect the entire medical industry; it was followed by competition and lobbying by pharmaceutical companies with other stakeholders. FDA’s approval for clinical trials was a long way off. The failure of all previous studies also affected it. Due to the potion characteristics, which was a dungeon item, it wasn’t easy to experiment if it was not administered directly to a human body.

So Decker and Jefferson changed their direction. They decided to conduct the experiments discreetly so that not only competitors but also the government would not notice them. Of course, they set the subjects of the experiment to live people differently than before. It was unethical, but they did not mind crossing that line.

After the Cataclysm, the overall immigration process, including the Mexican border, became so strict that they had no choice but to seek subjects to be tested in the United States.

Despite the image of being a first-world country, the gap between the rich and the poor in the U.S. was very wide. It was easy to secretly kidnap drug addicts, alcoholics, people who roamed the streets.

Meanwhile, very few of the abductees were around Nathan’s age. The development of drugs for pediatric patients was always behind that for adults. Considering the age, parents’ expected income to pay for medicines are low. The same was true of the priorities of healing potion research.

Nathan Drake was one of the relatively few children. It was a terrible misfortune.

*

‘Oh… it hurts. It hurts…! Stop it, stop it!’

It’s been a while, and the impatient personnel has crossed the line again.

Experiments on recovering the damaged body tissues of the non-Awakened could be very brutal, depending on the researchers’ ethical threshold. As a representative example, the experiment to inject potions that were recovered from a dungeon that had no response to a non-Awakened but was mixed in with a solution that showed a response to non-Awakens. A typical example of the latter was Poison Potion, found in dungeons.

He was injected with it with friends in the ward.

That night, he crossed again the boundaries of life and death, which he had wandered so many times. He felt hot as if the whole body was boiling, and it hurt as if the intestines were being shredded. It was unparalleled to any pain that he had experienced up until now.

When he woke up at dawn after the night that felt like an eternity, he realized that he had survived.

With a slight change, too.

‘What is… that?’

He could see an invisible text, and he could hear an inaudible voice.

He went through cardiac arrest yesterday and dreamed while being halfway up on the threshold of death. He talked with a strange voice in a dark space. He understood the meaning, but he didn’t like it, as if someone was forcefully engraving the words into his head.

It meant beyond his knowledge and intellectual development, but it remained like a tattoo on his brain like it was branded onto him.

He knew that he had Awakened but was not aware at the same time. He trembled with fear in the ward where no one but himself had woken up.

Doctors here called those who showed unusual symptoms different from other experiments as ‘unique individuals.’ The end of those who were called so was not good. They had to go through a much more painful and tormented process, and they usually never came back.

He looked around, trembling.

What about the rest of the kids? What about the elder brothers? What about the men? What happened to them?

‘Chris? Chris… wake up. Chris?’

He tried to wake his friend up, next to him, by shaking him.

However, there was no response. His body was cold. He was not breathing.

‘Chris!’

He was his best friend who arrived here around the same time as he did and had survived until now.

They called each other Chris and Nate. Both originally seemed to have longer names, but they couldn’t remember any of them.

The two always talked about what they wanted to eat, the places they wanted to go, and the games they wanted to play if ever they were to be free.

Even after spending a long time in captivity, he kept his hopes up. He thought that this experiment would end someday, and he dreamed that he could go outside eventually, that he would be able to step out of this place as he stepped out of his house. He solidified the beliefs as he talked to Chris, calming down his fears a little bit.

They were like a symbol to each other to keep such hope from disappearing.

‘No! Chris!’

Nate knew what it was to die. To be cold, immobile, and never being able to come back to this ward again. At this rate, Chris would never come back. However, Chris wouldn’t be able to go home as he would want to.

“No.”

His hands that shook Chris’s body trembled. He thought this should not be the end. He felt that he had to do something.

Then…

Something in Nate’s heart responded in desperation. Something like warm water that had been trapped there moved out.

At the same time, a voice rang in his head. It was similar to what he heard in his dream, but it was a different voice.

“Uhhh… Uhhh…”

Chris opened his eyes.

*

Nate found out that Chris was alive again.

However, his condition was a bit strange. He was very pale. His heart beat slowly, and he breathed very slowly. He didn’t talk or wouldn’t even try to move.

He talked by following his words only when he thought it would be nice to speak. He moved when he thought it would be nice to move. He knew that this condition was also suitable for doctors to name him the ‘unique individual.’

‘That’s the same with me!’

After opening his eyes, Nate realized that his body had changed. It was always painful all around, and he felt weak, but now it wasn’t like that at all. He had never been as energetic as he was now.