Lara had noticed the problem too. Constrained by conventional thinking, she hadn't considered the possibility of supernatural forces — she simply felt the coincidences were too convenient. She even suspected one of the three women might be a traitor. Bella had taken two bullets, fought like hell, and was now sick and battered — she didn't look like someone playing both sides. That left the Doctor as Lara's prime suspect.
It wasn't entirely unreasonable. Girls Lara's age rarely trusted middle-aged women by default, and the Doctor's unconscious wariness — those small, careful glances she couldn't quite hide — read to Lara like guilt.
"You want to find them?" Lara asked.
Bella's voice was ice. "No. I want to destroy them."
Lara wanted to find her father. More than that, she wanted to know what these people were really after — what scheme they were running from the shadows.
She nodded and agreed on the spot.
Using what spare time she had, Lara fashioned a makeshift bow and a handful of arrows. Bella retrieved her Undying Blade. Both women were armed.
The confiscated handgun was a German HK45, with seven rounds still in the magazine. The moment either of them fired it, the noise would give them away — exactly the opposite of what they needed for a stealth operation. Bella passed on it, and the pistol went to Lara's hip instead.
With their preparations done, they slipped out of the cave and set off at a run. Finding the right direction was easy. The mysterious armed faction was blasting the mountains without a care in the world; all they had to do was follow the sound.
From above, a bird's-eye view would have shown Bella and Lara creeping inward from the island's outermost edge, moving carefully toward the interior.
At the island's center, the armed faction was struggling. Without Lara and her father to guide them in theory, they couldn't pinpoint the true location of Queen Himiko's tomb — the burial site of the Queen of Yamatai. They were forced to cast a wide net across more than 200 square kilometers (roughly 77 square miles), doing it the hard way.
Blast. Dig. Sift. Not a single inch of ground was spared. And that was how they'd been doing it — for seven years.
Fishermen whose boats had been wrecked by the storms surrounding Yamatai Island, Southeast Asian migrants trying to reach Japan through secret routes — all of them had been captured and dragged to the camp. They were the faction's labor force, working at gunpoint.
Some had already been on the island for over thirty years, seized the moment the armed faction arrived. Others, like Lu Ren and Trent, had only been there a single day.
But in the island's deepest interior, nestled within a range of soaring mountains, lay a magnificent underground palace.
And within it: Himiko — Queen of Yamatai, granted the title Queen of Wa, Friendly to Wei by the kingdom of Cao Wei — had been enthroned for over eighteen hundred years.
Surviving to that age, she was obviously no ordinary woman.
Apocalypse had lived five thousand years. Himiko had lived nearly two thousand. Ogun had lived four hundred. In any meaningful sense, there was no real difference between them.
All three were powerful mutants who sustained themselves through body-snatching — forcing their consciousness into new hosts, using an endless succession of fresh bodies to keep themselves alive.
The only distinctions were scale: Apocalypse was the most powerful, with the longest history; Himiko came second; Ogun was the weakest. Beyond that, the three were fundamentally the same.
Himiko, too, needed new vessels to house her soul. She had personally developed much of the Ghost Path faith — its doctrines, its practices. Her mental strength far exceeded Ogun's, and she only needed to snatch a new body once per century.
She used the Ghost Path's teachings to draw in young women from across the land. She taught them knowledge, passed along rudimentary magic, and presided over them with fairness and generosity — the very image of a worthy queen and mentor. But every hundred years, she chose one of her followers as her next vessel.
Every generation of Yamatai's queen bore the name Himiko. And every generation was told the same lie: that the winner of a sacred trial among the priestesses would inherit the name and the kingdom. It was all fiction — a ruse to lower her host's psychological defenses and make the body-snatching easier. From beginning to end, there had only ever been one Himiko. She had no successors. She had simply never stopped living.
Within the Ghost Path, Himiko had established a ritual to test how well a new vessel's soul would harmonize with her own.
After a candidate completed her studies, she underwent a ceremony called the Flame Purification — a rite in which her body was engulfed in fire. If the flames went out on their own, it meant the new body could contain the storm-force within Himiko's soul. If the flames consumed the candidate alive, she was deemed incompatible.
The scheme had proceeded without a hitch — until a high priestess from the previous generation uncovered the truth. Filled with hatred, the priestess had struck Himiko during a critical moment of the ritual before turning the blade on herself.
Himiko was left with no choice. In her ancient, deteriorating body, she feigned death and waited — waited for the chance to snatch a new host.
She transformed her most loyal soldiers into Stormguard warriors, using them to protect her while she gathered survivors who washed up on the island. Among them, she appointed a man named Mathias as the leader of the faith, tasking him with finding her a new host.
Mathias didn't dare challenge the armed faction dug into the island's center. His people had a few wooden spears. The other side had submachine guns and pistols. There was simply no contest.
It had been Mathias who sent his people to communicate with the armed faction earlier — who leaked the exact timing of Lara's group's arrival on the island.
But just as he was preparing to deepen the partnership, Himiko issued a "divine oracle" directly to him: abandon the cooperation. Bring one of the women who came ashore to her.
That was how Sadako and the Doctor — landing on a separate beach — had been ambushed and knocked unconscious by the deathless Stormguard warriors, then carried through a hidden ravine and brought into Himiko's tomb.
The Doctor was older, but her bloodline carried a deep taint of Deep One heritage. In Himiko's eyes, the foreign woman who looked like something out of a nightmare still had value.
If it came down to it, she could make do.
But standing beside that second option was a gem beyond compare — and next to her, the Doctor's inherited fishfolk blood was hardly worth mentioning.
Himiko's body remained in its death-feigning state, but her spirit turned to look at Sadako Yamamura.
Perfect.
She was so satisfied she didn't even know where to begin.
This woman was even better than Himiko's own body had been, eighteen hundred years ago.
First: she was Japanese. Her appearance matched Himiko's aesthetic perfectly.
Second: her aura. As the founder of the Ghost Path faith, Himiko had spent centuries studying the nature of spirits. Looking at Sadako now, she felt the woman embodied every one of the faith's core principles. If not for the fact that she was clearly flesh and blood, and her expression just a little too timid, Himiko would have sworn she was looking at a ghost — a powerful, wrathful ghost.
She genuinely could not fathom how the material world had produced something like this. A living person drenched in the stench of the underworld — by her understanding, this was a reikon of the most ancient kind: a living spirit-wraith, the sort spoken of in old texts as appearing perhaps once in a billion lifetimes.
And then there was the third reason — the one that drew Himiko most of all: Sadako's mutant ability.
She recognized it the moment she saw it. Healing. The power to mend others — and by extension, herself. If she didn't want to die, she theoretically never had to again.