"Let's eat."
Given that most of them were growing children with hearty appetites, the state of the dining hall resembled nothing so much as a battlefield.
However, since each child had been served a set portion, there was no fighting over food.
It often felt a bit sparse for children in the midst of their growth spurts, but snatching another child's food was absolutely forbidden.
In truth, even if they did manage to steal it, some of them couldn't eat it anyway.
That was because every child here carried special circumstances, and as a result, their food was managed with extreme precision.
This was an orphanage operated by the
More precisely, it was an orphanage that also functioned as a hospital.
The children in this orphanage were subjects of
It was an orphanage established to shelter and treat children who had been rescued from Potimas's research facilities across the land.
And they were chimeras — creations made by Potimas.
Beings produced through Taboo experiments that used humans as a base and incorporated a variety of animal and plant organisms.
The few who had survived.
When the police investigated Potimas's research facilities, they uncovered a staggering number of humans who had been subjected to experimentation.
Most of them had lost their lives.
Those for whom the experiments ended in failure, those who succeeded but lived short lives, those who died after being subjected to further experiments.
The reports, which recorded experimental results in dispassionate detail, documented the fates of all these victims.
In them could be found descriptions of human lives treated with the same cold indifference as laboratory animals.
The children sheltered in this orphanage were the ones who had miraculously survived that selection process.
Even so, they still suffered from aftereffects of the experiments or handicaps they had been born with, so the orphanage doubled as a treatment facility to provide them with care.
At the same time, it served to hide the children from the prying eyes of the outside world.
A small boy with green skin.
A girl whose ears came to slight points.
A girl covered in scales.
These children, who bore appearances different from the norm, needed to be concealed.
Potimas had gone into hiding and been placed on an international wanted list — this was known throughout the world.
And the nature of his research had somehow leaked out and spread as rumors among the citizenry.
Everything from outright fabrications to claims containing kernels of truth was circulating without restraint.
Among those rumors was one claiming that Potimas had created monsters of aberrant form.
That claim was true in some respects and false in others.
The truth lay in the existence of chimeras not based on humans.
Chimeras produced by crossbreeding various animals had been created under Potimas's hand.
Among them were certainly some grotesque, unsettling organisms.
And in particular, there were chimeras into which dragon factors had been incorporated — where Potimas had obtained them was anyone's guess — that could be called dragon knockoffs. Though far inferior to the real thing, they possessed formidable combat abilities. There had even been an incident in which police officers who stormed a research facility were mowed down by rampaging dragon copies.
These incidents became the seeds of exaggerated rumors.
The problem was that the children's existence had gotten swept up into those aberrant rumors as well.
The rumors, sensationalized for entertainment, told of children transformed into abnormal forms by experiments who went on to attack people.
They were passed around like badly told ghost stories.
The people spreading the rumors bore no ill will.
After all, they didn't truly believe such children actually existed.
The tales simply accumulated embellishments as they circulated, dismissed as absurd tall tales with no credibility.
But if it became known that experiment victims who were children genuinely existed and that they bore physically aberrant traits, what had been mere rumor would cease to be mere rumor.
If the outside world learned of this, it would inevitably harm the children to some degree — that much was plain to see.
That was precisely why the children's existence was known only to a select, understanding few, and kept secret from the public.
Sariel took the lead in caring for these children.
With their largest benefactor, Fodway, gone, the scope of the Sariella Church's operations had visibly contracted.
However, for an entirely separate reason, Sariel had also been forced into hiding.
Which was why she was working at this orphanage.
The reason Sariel had been driven underground was that she had denied MA Energy.
Potimas, after going into hiding, had publicly announced his MA Energy theory.
It claimed to produce an energy source that could be used endlessly without ever running out, and that it could be accomplished with remarkable ease.
Moreover, the method of human Evolution announced alongside it also shocked the world.
But Sariel knew the truth.
She knew that MA Energy was nothing less than the very Life force of the star itself being drained away.
The term "god" was a collective designation for beings that possessed vast quantities of energy.
By that theoretical framework, a star could also be considered a type of god.
Stars contained enormous reserves of energy.
Energy that could not be observed through conventional physics.
It was the star's very Life force, and if it were depleted, the star would die.
MA Energy was that stellar energy — using it meant nothing other than shortening the star's lifespan.
Sariel had publicly revealed this truth immediately after the MA Energy theory was announced.
But her words were not accepted.
Part of it was that people were captivated by the convenience of MA Energy, but more than that, Sariel had no proof to back her claims.
MA Energy was a mysterious energy, and aside from Potimas, no one knew what it truly was.
No one even understood the mechanism by which it was generated.
In other words, even if Sariel publicly declared the true nature of MA Energy, she could not prove it was correct.
Compounding matters, various researchers had already published their own theories about the true nature of MA Energy, and so Sariel's announcement was dismissed as just one more among many.
Furthermore, Sariel was the head of a charitable organization.
She was neither a researcher nor anything of the sort, so virtually no one considered her claims credible.
On the contrary, she was treated as a delusional person spouting nonsense.
One contributing factor was that the Dragon Faith had made identical claims.
The Dragon Faith, as the name suggested, was a group that worshipped dragons.
However, beginning with the Tragedy of Tethmania and extending onward, dragons were universally recognized among the people as objects of fear and revulsion.
The general public regarded those who venerated such dragons as a lunatic fringe.
And when the Sariella Church made the same announcement as that group, the people regarded it with deep suspicion.
Even though it was the truth.
Even so, Sariel persisted in warning of the dangers of MA Energy.
She knew what would happen if it were used.
She was absolutely certain it had to be stopped, and she tried every conceivable means to convince people.
But her efforts bore no fruit.
And then, certain fanatical proponents of MA Energy began to take violent action against Sariel for her negative stance.
Threatening letters sent to her home.
When Sariel refused to cease her activities despite this, they even sent assassins.
Sariel herself was not the type to be killed so easily, but incidents occurred in which uninvolved people connected to the Sariella Church were attacked by mobs, and Sariel had no choice but to suspend her public activities.
Sariel chose the safety of those close to her over the fate of the world.
No one could fault her for that.
And so, while in hiding, Sariel devoted herself to caring for the children.
Even as the footfalls of approaching doom grew ever nearer, there were gentle moments to be found there.