Tests on the Living

A police force assault unit moves in on a home where there have been many brutal murders, with one family member's severed head discovered in the basket of a child's bicycle. Inside, the team encounters a crying little girl who turns out to be a Diclonius and slaughters at least two officers before a hail of gunfire ends her life.

This turns out to be part of a report in which Kurama relates how these horned girls have been appearing recently in Kanagawa Prefecture and most particularly in Kamakura, and how they begin killing shortly after toddling age. Their appearance led, according to his account, to the creation of The National Research Institute On Human Evolution, which isolates and studies these horned girls.

The scene switches to a horned girl, chained against a wall and having blunt objects fired at her at accelerating rates of speed till her vectors cannot slow or stop it, and she is struck full in the face, her pleas to stop are ignored, with only Kurama at all concerned. These concerns are brushed aside by the younger Kakuzawa, who defends their practices by saying that future results will redeem their more questionable activities. They also both wonder about the timing of this outbreak, with all births being within the last four years. This debate is broken up by several comic (though tragic with hindsight) missteps on the part of Kisaragi.

Going home, Kurama is greeted by his wife Hiromi, who hopes to cheer him with the news that she has undergone In Vitro fertilization, the culmination of several unsuccessful efforts for the couple to conceive a child, given Hiromi's relative physical frailty. She notes Kurama is still lost in thought, wondering how long it has been since his last smile.

Kurama's narrative reveals that at that time, they had no idea about the existence of either the Diclonius virus, or Lucy, this spoken against a backdrop of young Lucy causing a woman to have a sudden stroke by pushing her vectors through the woman's brain.