XI

"Where am I?" Arima asked. A deep red colour was spread all around him.

"THAT'S NOT THE QUESTION YOU SHOULD ASK RIGHT NOW..." A voice echoed in the surrounding. It was the same sharp voice that kept echoing in his head.

"Who are you?" Arima asked as he looked around, confused.

"AGAIN THE WRONG QUESTION..."

"Fucking answer me already. Where am I... And where's Evan."

"DON'T WORRY ABOUT HIM RIGHT NOW. WHAT YOU SHOULD WORRY ABOUT IS YOURSELF..."

"What is it that I should know about myself."

"THAT... IS THE CORRECT QUESTION..." The strange voice exclaimed.

The Calamity that bit Arima on that fateful night appeared in front of him. "I'm not some monster that you call calamities. I'm known as 'the Creator'"

"I used to be a scientist, you might have heard my name in history books, Nathaniel Estbury"

"The person who was responsible for the obtaining the new metal arionar?" Arima asked. "There's much more than that metal. The world as we knew was divided broadly into two nations, the 'great allied powers' consisting of the eastern and southern part of Asia and majority of the American continents. The rest of the world came under the 'Palmer Sphinx federation'."

"During the great war I was serving as a weapon inventor for the allies. I was in a process of making a genetically enhanced race of humans. For that I invented a virus and made some samples to be injected. But war doesn't give time to create patiently. The samples were directly tested on human soldiers. That led to the creation of the monsters now called Calamities. The Calamities were discarded inside the enemy borders."

"The improved samples were kept a secret and were given to atleast 50% of the soldiers of the alliance. The soldiers became more agile and had faster and improved regeneration as compared to a normal human being."

"But some miscalculation made the advanced race hungry for human flesh. The chaos that war brought was enough to keep them nourished and usable, if you know what I mean. But after the war, when the nation of Neo Argos was formed, there was no need of these soldiers anymore."

"They were regarded as 'mistakes of nuclear war' and started being hunted down. I was also in the list of people to be killed, ofcourse for my inventions. But I had already thought about that happening and created and safekept a virus that would give me the ability to transform into a calamity at will."

"The virus modified my genes but gave me a hunger for human flesh as well. I resisted up until I was not able to transform into more than a snake sized Calamity. It also gave me the ability to not die until my brain is destroyed, the reason I'm here before you after a hundred and fifty years after the war."

Arima listened to all this patiently and then asked "But why did you make my life more of a hell than it already was. I wasn't involved in any of this. So why me?"