Kanter had a typical Western face.
Despite the agony of being driven from his homeland, the fact that his wife and daughter were still with him made him, one of the last twenty million humans, a case of incredible luck amidst profound misfortune.
Even though the family of three was squeezed into a fifteen-square-meter room, he had no complaints.
Except for one thing...
A secret he hadn't dared to tell anyone: the Honkai Sickness he had contracted during their escape.
Other than a few spiderweb-like purple fissures on the surface of his skin, Kanter didn't feel any different. In fact, he felt that his physical strength had even increased compared to when he was at his healthiest. According to the official information provided by Fire Moth, this was a sign of "Good" grade Honkai energy adaptability.
According to Kanter's original way of thinking, in a chaotic era, a family simply being together should be enough to ask for nothing more. But where could a true paradise exist in a cruel apocalypse?
His daughter was average in both her studies and physical abilities, but as fate would have it, she possessed looks far above the ordinary. This had once been his and his wife's greatest source of pride... but even after finding a place of refuge, he could not change his status as a "refugee."
One had to understand, the words "nation destroyed, family lost" were put together for a reason—they were never separate occurrences.
Kanter had no way of knowing about the bullying his daughter endured at school.
The school, under near-military administration, would not permit an ordinary person like him to go and "cause trouble." The last one who tried, his skeleton was now part of the filler in the reinforced concrete; as for the one before that, a "former official of Great Britain" who had barely managed to survive with his son, was sent whole into a furnace to be rendered into asphalt material.
As a former government employee, Kanter had once had relatively close contact with Fire Moth.
But now, those old friends had long since perished in battle after battle, leaving not a single person he could talk to.
And the Fire Moth of today...
Besides providing essential resources for the still-operating schools (which was the key reason students were still sent to school), they only provided "instructors" for training. These dispatched personnel were almost all low-level, or rather, unofficial members, whose character and mental state were far from good.
Humanity had just defeated a new Herrscher... and although the price was agonizingly high, it shouldn't have been enough to turn these "elites" into walking corpses who seemed to have lost all hope.
Turning the street corner, a crimson telephone booth—the only effective means of communication in the city now that mobile phones were unusable—with its transparent door blown open by the wind, nearly slammed into Kanter's nose.
His leather shoes, caked with hardened mud, stamped an earthy yellow mark onto an old newspaper that had drifted to his feet. This wasn't news, but a "private collection" used to pass the time in an era of scarce communication resources.
Beside a crimson fire hydrant, a temporarily established "Registration Office" was his destination. The hurried Kanter lowered the brim of his hat, raised his collar, and amidst the surprised or disgusted gazes of passersby, opened the door to the "Registration Office" as quickly as he could.
---o---
Behind a simple wooden desk riddled with wormholes, sat a bald, burly man who was clearly not—or at least, should not have been—a professional clerk. The dense tattoos covering his arms alone were enough to make Kanter, who had never fought with anyone, feel the urge to retreat.
"Name?"
The man was clearly aware that someone had entered the room.
But the extremely busy work at hand made the burly man, who had never done this kind of thing before, extremely irritable. Between loyalty and competence, his "leader" had chosen the more loyal him, but the price was that he, with his elementary school dropout status, had to finish these damn forms... and do so conscientiously, without a single word of complaint.
After all, in this society, the most worthless thing was a human life.
"Kanter."
The burly man still didn't look up.
As an old Londoner who once roamed Downing Street and the Thames, even if he was just a street loafer... he was a street loafer from under the old Union Jack.
"Original nationality?"
"Great Britain."
"Great Britain...?"
Hearing this answer, the burly man finally put down the fountain pen in his hand, which could only scratch out tadpole-like scrawls on the rough paper. The existence of this paper and pen was only due to Zenith City's sacrificial traditions, "originally invalid resources" that had been stored away, now unexpectedly serving a small purpose.
The face was familiar, but he didn't recognize him.
The burly man glanced at the middle-aged man before him, whose clothes were neither clean nor neat. He was likely a minor clerk from a former government agency; they might have even crossed paths once or twice.
Regardless, as a rare "compatriot"—the number of survivors who dared to call themselves "remnants of Great Britain" was now less than a mere fifty thousand, as the British mainland had been destroyed during the Black Emperor's first invasion of Fire Moth, i.e., the first Beast Tide War—the burly man prepared to show a little goodwill... After all, the reason he had been chosen for this job was that the overly weak British contingent was not worthy of having a political stance.
"This."
The burly man pulled out an A4-sized form, heavily corrected, from a disorganized pile of papers in the corner of his desk. Then, from a wooden frame on the desk, he took out a stamp-like device equipped with a dense array of miniature needles.
"Fill out the form truthfully."
"This thing, press it against the most obvious site of infection."
"The experimental class will be..."
The burly man glanced at the mechanical watch that was a bit tight on his wrist. This thing, a dream to own in the era of peace and absolutely unaffordable with his status, seemed like nothing special now...
Having to wind it himself, a "feature" that once felt very prestigious, now only seemed incredibly troublesome.
"They'll collect the sample in half an hour."
"The results usually take no more than two hours. If you're quick, you can come back here before midnight to collect your 'Targeted Cure Potion'."
The burly man coughed lightly, then made the universal gesture for money, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together in the air.
"Remember to prepare a little something..."
"Since you've come here, you should have heard about the rules. I'm not on the night shift, and some things... don't say I didn't warn you."
"..."
Kanter, of course, understood what the man meant.
There were certainly hesitant observers, but many others chose to ignore this place because they couldn't afford the "overtime fee." The plight of those with Honkai Sickness in the various cities was once plain for all to see. If it weren't truly a matter of life and death, no one would be willing to expose their status.
"No."
"Sir, you may have misunderstood my meaning."
Kanter rolled up his sleeve.
On his upper arm, a faint bluish-purple hidden beneath the skin instantly brightened as the veins on Kanter's arm bulged.
"I have read the requirements for 'that' many times."
"I believe... I should be qualified to become a 'volunteer'."