Hitori Nojima - Death Stranding - The Official Novelization, Volume Two

Although Sam could identify the handprints and presence of the BTs, his heart was still tormented with speculation and suspicion. He never thought being unable to see them would frighten him this much. The empty area on his chest that was usually occupied by Lou felt heavier than ever.

He grew light-headed as his body begged for oxygen. He couldn’t hold his breath any longer. But the handprints were still circling. Sam used his numb hand to remove the glove on his right. The tips of his fingers had turned dark and bruise-like. It was a sign of frostbite. He sank his teeth into his wrist, felt the warmth of his own blood spurt forth, and spread it thickly over his face. Even though it had been coursing through his own veins, it still smelled foul and only made him feel even more wretched. Still, he sensed the BTs flinch.

The handprints stopped moving.

Sam removed one side of the cuff link, exposing the cutter. It was the same cutter that had sliced through Mama’s umbilical cord. Normally, a unit attached to a blood bag would be inserted into a broken blood vessel to maximize the amount of blood drawn. Sam felt a pain like his heart was exploding. Steam rose from the cutter as blood trickled out. Sam groped around for his backpack with his left hand and removed a hematic grenade. It was connected to a full blood pack. Sam had no idea how many BTs there were, or where they were prowling.

He closed his eyes. If he couldn’t see them in the first place then there was no point in looking. He prayed to his absent BB.

Protect me, Lou.

He thought that he heard Lou’s voice in response. Even if he was just hearing things, all he could do was believe in it. Sam threw the grenade, like a separate heart filled with his own blood, overhead toward the voice.

There was a small explosion and blood rained back down on Sam. The blood hit the BTs, revealing the outlines of their bodies and where they were. They soon broke down into particles, but Sam knew that he would have to do more to get rid of them all.

Sam stood and advanced forward, brandishing his blood-covered cuff links like a whip. The BTs shrunk back. Sam’s vision began to spin until he could no longer tell what was up and what was down.

Maybe it was because of all the blood he had lost that all the color began to drain out of Sam’s world, turning it monochromatic. He kept moving forward as black blood scattered across the white snow. He was like a saint, parting tempestuous seas and walking between them toward the promised land. But there were no living people following in his footsteps behind him.

By the time Sam was sure that he was out of BT territory, he no longer had the strength to stand. He barely had any energy left at all. He used the last of his strength to stem the bleeding from his wrists and stitch himself up with a medical stapler. He followed up by throwing some blood replacement supplements and smart drugs into his mouth, and chewed. He even appreciated the cryptobiote that he found in the bottom of his backpack.

The cuff links picked up a weak radio signal, telling him he was close to the Geologist’s shelter. Once he had descended the slope, it would be around three kilometers away, but at that very moment that distance felt almost impossible. Sam found himself some exposed bedrock, thrust in a pile, and tied his strand around his waist. He descended the rest of the slope depending on a literal lifeline.

The Geologist’s shelter lay a distance away that Sam would normally have been able to cover on foot within thirty minutes, but he needed much more time than that now. Thankfully, oxygen levels had increased and the snow had stopped falling once he had descended down the mountainside. Since he took a break partway down, he found some of his strength had returned as well.

The Geologist was a Bridges scientist, and even on the hologram you could see how emaciated he had become. When Sam finally handed over the medicine he had brought, the Geologist was overcome with joy and tears, and could only thank Sam over and over again.

“Thank you, Sam Bridges. I can’t tell you how grateful I am. I was feeling giddy or getting majorly depressed over the smallest of things. I’ve never experienced anything like it. I thought that all these haywire emotions were because I was out here all alone at first, but it turned out that wasn’t the case. It was because of chiral contamination. I always knew that it was a possibility, but I never thought it would actually happen to me. It was a sign that the chiral rays the chiralium was giving off were having an effect on both my body and mental state. It presents very similarly to stress, so that’s what I thought it was at first. At this rate, I probably would have started contemplating suicide, but thanks to you I’m going to get better.”

Sam could see some slight effects of the chiral contamination in the speed and breathlessness in the Geologist’s speech. Sam wanted to tell the Geologist to just hurry up and take the medicine, but he couldn’t get a word in edgeways.

“It was approximately 3.8 billion years ago when life first emerged on this planet, and ever since then we have seen repeated mass extinction events of varying scales. Out of all these events, the largest ones are known as the Big Five. They each occurred at the ends of the Ordovician Period, the Devonian Period, the Permian Period, the Triassic Period and the Cretaceous Period respectively, wiping out most of the life on the Earth’s surface.

“But why does a phenomenon that eradicates all life on this planet occur in the first place? By what mechanism does it take place? And was the Death Stranding the sixth mass extinction event? I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of all these questions together with Heartman and my colleagues, but the only result that we’ve turned up so far is the discovery of a fossil Beach. Do you understand what that means? When an earthquake occurs, frictional heat at the fault line forms a stratum called pseudotachylyte. They’re known as fossilized earthquakes, therefore making this a fossilized Beach. We were looking at strata from the end of the Cretaceous Period, when we found this strange thing mixed in with dinosaur and ammonite fossils. But it’s not something that can be seen with the naked eye. The term ‘fossil’ is more of a metaphor here. We detected the chiralium and that chiralium is what first caused these symptoms.

“Speaking of chiralium, chiralium was only found after the Death Stranding occurred. It was brought here via the special dimension that we call the Beach. Some of us think that it always existed somewhere, just like the Higgs Particle and dark matter, and we just hadn’t found it yet. This fossilized Beach proves that. It also proves that this isn’t the first time the Beach has appeared on this planet. At the very least, there’s a chance that it also appeared during the extinction event that took place at the end of the Cretaceous Period. We haven’t been able to accurately verify this yet, but we can assume that there is at least some kind of relationship between the occurrence of the Beach and extinction events. By investigating the strata formed during other periods of extinction, we might find other fossilized Beaches, meaning that the Beach is involved in mass extinction events. Are you following me?

“Look, I don’t really understand the Beach. I know that it is linked to the spirit of each person and that it can be used as paths on the Chiral Network, and I kind of get that it is something that can’t be physically touched, but whenever I listen to the stories of people like you with DOOMS, it almost feels as if the place actually exists.”