3 Days Ago Before Apocalypse
"Father, I don't want to become like them..." Arisu's voice trembled with something she rarely ever showed—genuine vulnerability, raw disgust, and the first stirrings of fear she couldn't intellectualize away.
Her eyes were fixed on the CCTV monitors banked across the security room, each screen displaying a different angle of hell.
The school grounds, once pristine and orderly, had become a charnel house.
Bodies stumbled and shambled through the night streets, their movements jerky and wrong, flesh rotting on living bone.
"They're disgusting... That rotten flesh, the way they move, the sounds they make... Is that going to be us, Father? Is that what we become?"
Chairman Sakayanagi stood rigid beside her, his reflection ghosting across the screens—a tired old man superimposed over images of the damned.
His jaw was clenched so tight his teeth ached. His hands, usually so steady when signing documents or lighting cigarettes, were balled into white-knuckled fists at his sides.
"Everyone is infected, Arisu." The words came out rough, scraped raw by the effort of saying them aloud. "Every single person on this planet. We can't stop this. We can't outrun it. We can only survive it and pray something comes afterward."
He turned away from the screens, unable to watch any longer, and when he spoke again, his voice cracked with a rage so pure it was almost holy. "Those people! The Umbrella Corporation, the bastards in boardrooms who decided that this was acceptable collateral damage—I swear to you, Arisu, if I cross paths with any of them in the future, in this life or whatever comes after, I will kill them. I will make them pay for every single corpse walking those streets."
His fist slammed against the console, making the monitors jump.
Arisu absorbed his outburst in silence, letting the rage wash over her.
When she spoke again, her voice was smaller, almost childlike—a tone she hadn't used since she was old enough to understand her own exceptional nature.
"Father... is there a cure? There has to be one, right? The people who made this virus—they wouldn't release it without having something to protect themselves. An antidote. A vaccine. Something."
He looked at her then—really looked—and saw the desperate hope flickering behind those intelligent eyes.
His precious daughter. His Arisu. The girl who had never begged for anything in her life was begging now, without using the words.
He couldn't kill that hope. Even if it was irrational. Even if the odds were astronomical. He couldn't.
Because he knew her. He knew how deeply she was obsessed with excellence, with genetic superiority, with the purity of bloodline.
She had built her entire worldview around the belief that talent was fixed at birth, determined by blood and genes, not luck or effort. She stressed this to everyone she deemed opponent or inferior.
It was her religion, her identity, the foundation upon which she had constructed her entire sense of self.
And now that foundation was crumbling.
For someone like her—someone who measured worth in genetic quality, who saw herself as the apex of human potential—the knowledge that she carried the seeds of her own monstrous transformation inside her body was psychological torture.
Every breath she took reminded her that her perfect genes, her superior bloodline, would one day turn her into that.
Rotting flesh. Shambling corpse. Mindless hunger.
"Please, Father..." Her voice firmed, the vulnerability hardening into something steely and absolute. "I hate this. I hate knowing that my future children—my genes, everything I am, everything I could pass on—will be contaminated. Turned into those things. I would rather die than live with that. I would rather end myself now than become one of them."
The determination in her face was absolute. There was no bluff in those eyes. No dramatic exaggeration. She meant every word.
He believed her.
"Then follow me, Arisu." His voice was steady now, the rage banked but not extinguished, transformed into something colder and more purposeful. "I need you to survive. That's my only request to you—not as chairman, not as the man who runs this institution, but as your father. Survive. Whatever it takes. Whatever you have to become."
He reached into his pocket and withdrew a small case, gleaming chrome, temperature-regulated, stamped with a logo that would one day be synonymous with the end of the world.
Inside, nestled in sterile foam, was a single vial of luminous green fluid.
The T-Virus.
He had access because of his position. Because of the deals he'd made in shadows, the compromises he'd accepted, the blood on his hands that had never quite washed clean.
It was meant for subjects like Manabu—controlled, monitored, experimented upon in sterile laboratories.
Not for his daughter.
Not for Arisu.
But the world had ended, and the rules had ended with it.
"This is a gamble, Arisu." His hand trembled slightly as he held out the case. "A huge gamble. I won't lie to you—the odds are not in your favor. Your genes are excellent, the best this school has ever produced, but the T-Virus doesn't care about excellence. It cares about compatibility, about something deeper than grades or accomplishments. I don't know if you'll survive. I don't know what you'll become if you do. All I know is..."
He stopped, swallowing hard.
"All I know is that this is the only chance you have. The only chance any of us have. To be more than just waiting to die. To be more than future zombies."
Arisu looked at the vial. Looked at her father's face—the face of the man who had raised her, shaped her, made her into the person she was.
The man who had never shown weakness, never admitted doubt, never once let her see him afraid.
She saw fear now. In his eyes. In the tremor of his hand. In the way he couldn't quite meet her gaze.
"Then let's find out, Father," she said softly, reaching for the case. "Let's find out if my genes are as excellent as you always told me they were."
He didn't stop her.
Outside, the dead shambled and moaned.
Inside, a girl prepared to become something else entirely.