All Yesterday 5

The letter bearing a rose seal that Rafinya sent finally reached Fury's hands a few weeks later.

"There are absolutely no records of us? How is that possible?"

Dan alternated between reading the excerpts Rafinya had attached, examining them in detail. Every mention of the Diablo by the Luminus throughout history, from the earliest records written over a thousand years ago to those from just a few hundred years ago, had been compiled together—yet instead of solving the mystery, it had only made it even larger.

"You're saying that you people just suddenly appeared a few hundred years ago? That's hard to believe."

Princess Nora's opinion was partly correct... but the fact that this information came from the Luminus was precisely what made it interesting.

Senior Thomasin Mayfield was there as well, earnestly analyzing the chronicles.

"Your Highness, there's something rather strange about this."

"What is it, Senior Thomasin?"

"It's true that there are no mentions of Diablo with a human-like body structure... but all the distinctive elements of the Diablo people are still present."

Their sharp armor, hard shells, enormous bodies, and beast-like appearances.

None of these characteristics had ever disappeared from the historical accounts.

The only thing that was truly missing was their "human-like body structure."

No humans lived on the island of Diablo. Not even monkeys, the creatures most similar to humans, could be found there. So what had caused the Diablo to develop two arms, two legs, and an upright posture?

The three fell silent, looking at one another as though waiting for an answer that would never come.

Then Thomasin spread out a chart profiling the organisms.

"What if we divided the life-forms in Diablo into ordinary animals, monsters, and the Diablo people?"

Thomasin's question struck a chord with Prince Fury. He whipped around and pointed a finger.

"Look for patterns in their evolution."

Once they had compiled the data, more than 2,000 different specimens were classified and grouped.

Normal Fauna: Ordinary organisms within the ecosystem, such as rock-shore crabs, mountain hawks, and pine-forest wolves.

Monsters/Beasts: Naturally occurring creatures with high magical energy, such as dragons, giant desert worms, and leviathans.

Diablo Organisms: Organisms possessing the distinctive characteristics of the Diablo.

A puzzling trend emerged from the results...

There really was a pattern hidden among them.

A fossilized sea turtle shell, millions of years old, had similarities to another Diablo specimen whose skeletal structure was identical to that of a sea turtle. However, this specimen possessed a pitch-black exoskeleton, with sharp, grotesquely twisted spikes protruding from its shell.

An ordinary trilobite from a rock stratum resembled a Diablo trilobite with two heads and spiny projections like those of a sea urchin.

Even coastal crabs had their own Diablo counterparts—ordinary crabs covered in thick basalt armor, with pincers structurally resembling steel-cutting shears.

Some ordinary animals and monsters had their own counterparts in Diablo versions.

The laboratory fell into complete silence, broken only by the faint hum of the cooling systems inside the specimen preservation cabinets.

"It's almost like a 'mimicry mechanism'..."

Thomasin was perplexed by the relationship they had just discovered.

"D-Specimens are like Diablo versions of ordinary organisms... They don't seem to have any originality of their own."

"What the hell is this..."

Even Prince Fury himself, a genuine member of the Diablo, could hardly believe his own eyes.

All the evidence pointed in the same direction.

Diablo Organisms appeared to be living things that observed and copied the organisms around them, adopting those characteristics as their own.

A thousand years ago, they copied reptiles and marine creatures... A hundred years ago, they copied four-legged beasts...

That was when the pieces began to click into place.

When humanity began to establish dominion over the world, dispatching fleets, conducting explorations, and expanding its influence...

"That thing" on Diablo had begun the process of copying the human form—the humanoid body.

Which would make sense... because back then, Luminus was the nation that invaded the island of Diablo and carried out the extermination of its demons...

There was only one human nation known to have traveled to the island of Diablo during the past 5,000 years.

That was the humans of Luminus.

"If 'that thing' had survived Luminus's great demon extermination campaign a thousand years ago... could it have used that period to evolve itself into something resembling the creatures stronger than it?"

After the three of them made this discovery,

six months later...

Professor Pi'erre and his team published a research paper that reignited excitement throughout the global paleontological community.

It revealed the relationship between Diablo Organisms and the other life-forms on this world—a relationship supported by more than 4,000 specimens discovered on the island of Diablo and over 2,000 D-Specimens providing compelling evidence.

Diablo Organisms possessed a survival strategy unlike anything this world had ever encountered.

They evolved themselves according to the characteristics of every kind of organism around them, particularly anything that had ever hunted them.

This imitation extended to behavior and habitat, but it was never an exact copy.

There were always distortions, much like someone trying to remember an original image and redraw it from memory without having the reference in front of them. They would inevitably add something of their own... something that had never existed in the original.

The reason Diablo Organisms had not gone extinct wasn't simply that they evolved themselves into predators.

If they survived an extermination campaign, they would return even stronger than before.

And because of this, the research presented both an extraordinary advantage and a considerable challenge.

On the one hand, researchers could trace the evolutionary lineages of Diablo Organisms with remarkable accuracy because these creatures imitated the very predators that hunted them.

But the curse was this...

What had their original ancestors actually looked like?

And where were they now?

This question concerned the "Diablo Organism" that existed as the very first draft—the earliest form of Diablo Organism that had yet to learn to evolve by imitating other living things.

The findings astonished every party involved, including the scholars of Luminus who read the publication.

Where had they come from?

What exactly were they?

Professor Pi'erre proposed a new hypothesis on the final page of the publication:

If we could prove that Diablo Organisms shared common ancestors with every other living thing on this planet, we might be able to declare without hesitation that the Diablo people were evolutionarily perfect organisms.

Their survival strategy was exceptionally well suited to the very purpose of survival. They didn't need to spend millions of years going through evolutionary trial and error.

They simply observed whatever hunted them, evolved to imitate it, and then went back to hunt their hunters in return.

Lark Battalion; Newcastle, Luminus

Rafinya Saint Pauli had entered her sixth month of military training.

Less than a month remained before her training would be complete.

She walked past the office of a senior military officer—or, to be precise, the eldest son of the main branch of the Pauli family.

Four-chevron Paladin — Rodan Saint Pauli of the Army.

"What the hell is this..."

The young woman heard her eldest brother swearing in his office. She poked her head inside to take a look.

What her eldest brother had just placed on his desk was a newspaper featuring sensational headlines about Professor Pi'erre's research.

The right-wing media outlets attacked the research, claiming that it was backed by demons, funded with the blood money of the Diablo, and all manner of similar accusations.

The left-wing outlets reacted with no less alarm, albeit from a different perspective.

But everyone had received the same message by then.

There was a very strong possibility that the Diablo people shared common ancestry with humanity.

The discovery of Diablo trilobites indicated that the ancestors of the Diablo had existed since the Cambrian explosion, an era before humans existed, when all life still inhabited the water.

Rafinya picked up the newspaper and began reading, while her elder brother removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes, hoping he had somehow read the article incorrectly...

The Church had undoubtedly learned about it as well.

Cut to: a clear sky over the middle of the rice fields.

The Newcastle unit Rafinya had joined was a border patrol force stationed along the frontier between her Newcastle and Velmount's Sunderland.

She had chosen to come here of her own accord, even though she could easily have used her father's connections to secure a comfortable internship in an office, handling light paperwork and administrative duties.

There were two reasons for her choice.

First, Rafinya hated desk jobs.

Second... she wanted to become a general whom her subordinates respected, just as Fury was respected by his soldiers.

Over the past six months, the letters exchanged between Rafinya and Dan could practically be counted on one's fingers.

But when she asked Fury what kind of general he respected, his answer was that it was a general who went into battle and died alongside his soldiers.

The young woman turned to look at a heron catching and eating fish in the rice paddy...

And at that very moment, a young man jumped down from a tree above.

Yildiz.

His hair had grown longer, making him look almost like a llama. His expression and demeanor, however, remained exactly the same.

He was still as clingy toward Rafinya as ever.

"Greetings, my human companion."

"How many times have you sneaked into Luminus now?"

"Fifteen."

"You're answering that proudly, without a single shred of shame, aren't you?"

"Fifteen times, and nobody's caught me. Pretty good, huh?"

"This might be your last time."

"I've traveled all this way, you know. At least look happy to see me."

"Does Princess Fiorentina really let you get away with this much?"

"You make it sound like I'm bringing shame upon Diablo or something."

Rafinya, dressed in her Luminus knight uniform, rose from the ground and walked past him.

"Isn't that exactly what you're doing?"

"Yeaaah~"