The man recovered quickly, calling out, “Hey, where did you come from? Are you hurt?”

He must have felt from the boy’s appearance that something had happened. And it was just a small boy; he couldn’t leave him out in the wilderness alone.

Suddenly, the guard collapsed. As far as the records indicated, he was the first victim.

“This is a video of the event. The guard had a camera on his helmet, which recorded the whole thing.”

The speaker was the researcher Shiraishi, as he showed the video to Asaka Takatou in a conference room at the facility. Thanks to the overgrown nature of the forest, it was hard to tell what time of day the video had been taken at, but the clock at the bottom right of the screen showed that it had been around noon. While it was a little dark, the quality of the camera was quite high, so even small details were visible.

“So, the video doesn’t actually show him? Well, not like I want to see any more, anyway.”

It was supposed to be a recording of Yogiri Takatou, codenamed ＡΩ, but the boy himself couldn’t be seen on the screen. Instead, a blurry mosaic had taken his place, making him barely distinguishable as a human being. Something had appeared from the brush, the camera had fallen over, then the figure had wandered away. That’s all the footage showed.

...

“That’s because we’re working hard to prevent the end of the world here. Anyway, of course information about him is top secret, but that’s not why the video was altered.”

For those who knew of Yogiri’s power, any information they could acquire about him was worth its weight in gold. They’d be willing to pay anything to obtain even the vaguest details.

“Then why?”

“Because anyone who watched it died.”

Asaka blinked dumbly. “What?”

“Just what I said. Everyone who watched the original video died, no exceptions.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’m pretty sure I haven’t lied to you yet. It was quite a disaster, honestly. Well, given what happened afterwards, it kind of fell off the radar a bit.”

“Um, I don’t understand what you’re saying. I know he’s got an unbelievable ability, but like, this is just a picture, right?” Yogiri could kill anyone by thinking it, but that was a far cry from killing everyone who saw a video of him.

“The camera captured the moment his power activated. His mind was likely fairly hazy, so he was probably just targeting anyone looking at him. At least that’s our theory so far.”

“So, what, he can kill people even if it’s not in real time?!”

“We’re deep into the occult now, aren’t we? It’s like a cursed video,” Shiraishi said, apparently amused by the whole ordeal.

“Hey, don’t say it like you’re having so much fun.”

“I tried a bit of an experiment. Even when we copied it over to another disc or reduced the visual quality, it still worked.”

“And you wonder why I call this an evil organization.” Strictly for the sake of his experiment, he had shown the video to others, knowing the risk. And thanks to that, a considerable number of people had died. They didn’t put any value on human life here at all, Asaka knew.

“Regardless of your feelings, as I’ve said before, this facility was created to develop a weapon.”

Asaka recalled their conversation from her first day on the job, where she’d been told that they were developing a weapon to defend against the threat of nuclear arms.

“In this case, anyone who saw him activate his power was killed,” Shiraishi continued. “Even those who had no idea about ＡΩ’s existence were affected by it the moment they saw the video. We tried distorting it to differing degrees, but people only stopped dying once he became entirely unrecognizable.”

“But how did you even edit it in the first place? Wouldn’t anyone who looked at it to make those edits suffer the same fate?”

“Automatically altering a video to blur a human figure isn’t difficult. But the more you think about it, the more interesting it gets. Basically, what determines whether you live or die is whether you recognize what you’re seeing or not. Also fascinating is that animals with no ability to distinguish between individual humans were unharmed as well.”

-Volume 3 pages 190-193