Chapter Text
Ren closes his eyes in pain at the wet squelching sound, feels the warmth of the still-fresh blood sink into his clothes. He opens them again quickly, aware that being unobservant could cost him his life, for all that Arsene's and exhausted mess at the back of his mind. They've been defending the little conglomeration of people huddled together that had been unexpectedly attacked after they thought themselves safe for the night, and it was finally taking its toll on Ren. He stares down at the battered mess of rotting flesh, at the gaping wound his dagger had carved into the... thing's skull as it writhed on the ground in its last desperate moments before becoming unnaturally still, just as the many before it.
A quick glance at their surroundings reveals the carnage left behind by Ren and his persona, the flesh-eating mutations strewn across the dense woodland. Ren sighs, wipes the thickly congealing blood from his weapon of choice, and turns around and back towards the camp, located at what had been the outskirts of Osaka not even half a year ago. Everything was overtaken by nature, now, homes fallen to thick vines and trees erupting from the grounds in what most of the survivors call the cataclysm. Four months ago, the first person to be overtaken by this strange mutagen had emerged, and chaos followed in its wake as the very nature seemed to rebel against humanity. Cities were overtaken in days, villages in even less, humans becoming infected one after another until the survivors had to band together in groups to kill their loved ones to prevent being turned as well. Even the Metaverse was affected, shadows free-roaming and most of them just as infected by the mutagen, the air heavy with magic after the second month, another dangerous factor in the face of the feeble surviving humanity.
Japan had lost contact with the outside world relatively quickly, and the last of the inter-country communication had been taken six weeks ago when it was presumed that the earth took back the radio and WiFi networks.
It's been seven weeks since Ren's heard any word from his Thieves, most of them starting in Tokyo as the nightmare begun, but scattered into three groups of survivors scattered across the capital city. Ren was doing his best to reach Futaba's group somewhere in the vicinity of the Beika ward where she'd holed up with Sojiro and a bunch of civilians inside some laboratory space last he's heard of her, the closest to his current location near Osaka.
Ren had been in his hometown with Morgana when word reached of them of the mutagen, and he'd been unable to convince his family to leave for their safety. Out of the two thousand or so residents only about a hundred survived the first week, one of them another persona user who had tried to defend her family before breaking down and killing herself, the wails of her persona still haunting Ren's ears.
"Oh--" Akira Konoe hissed, eyeing Ren's torn sleeves after he'd arrived back at their little encampment. His arm was bleeding sluggishly, blood a worrying shade of almost-black.
Ren sighs. "I'm leaving for Tokyo, Konoe-san. Thank you for taking me in."
The man blinks, his terror replaced by conflict. "You shouldn't-- your arm--" Konoe's the one responsible for the survival of this particular group that Ren's become part of for the past three weeks; the man was a tech mogul and an avid kendo performer. Between him and Hattori, the group should be able to stay safe from the more dangerous infected as long as something like today doesn't happen.
But word would spread amongst the people, and within two days, Ren would be forced to leave anyways. He shakes his head. "I'm getting my things and I'll go. Tell the others- tell them that I died."
He might as well be, with how many times he's been bitten. Persona-users seem to be immune to the mutagen, though not to infection from the bite wounds; Ren can still feel the coarseness and heat from Morgana's small limp body as he was being cooked alive from the inside, his immune system unable to cope with the size of the wound. No person wanted to offer aid or even bandages to what amounted to a wounded pet if there were dying humans around them, after all.
"...take care, Amamiya." Konoe says, resigned. Ren had appeared at the camp the same way he left it now: silent as a phantom.