The Age of Adaptation
"Brother... are you really going to kill me?"
He asked it in a choked, miserable sob, a voice thick with hurt and raw injustice.
At that sound, Yoo Sung-jun tightened his grip on the greatsword until it seemed to creak in protest, then lifted it overhead.
The voice pleaded more frantically this time. "Save me... I want to live. So... die!"
[3,000 points acquired.]
The cry to die was made absurd by the wet, tearing sound of flesh being split apart.
The darkness that had stained his vision began to lift.
Yoo Sung-jun looked down at the Jangsanbeom, now cut nearly in half, with a flat, indifferent expression.
It was the kind of thing that took an entire magazine of BK-108 rounds to kill. Its skin was that tough, and its muscles were that dense—an organism more monstrous than one could easily imagine.
And yet Yoo Sung-jun's greatsword had not failed.
That had been thanks to the Omega Suit's timely support.
This is why I can’t ever put the greatsword down.
He exhaled the useless air from his lungs and swept his gaze across the surroundings.
The place was packed with corpses.
All of them were Infector.
When he finally looked away from them, Yoo Sung-jun glared at his younger brother.
Under that sharp stare, his brother flinched.
"What, were you afraid I’d die or something?"
"No... I just... I couldn’t help worrying."
"I told you. No matter how worried you are, you have to stay quiet."
This was reality, where no one knew what variables might appear.
If he hadn’t killed the thing that had heard his brother shout, they would have been finished. If there had been even one more Jangsanbeom nearby. If that creature had managed to get away.
"That bastard would’ve used your voice and his own abilities to throw everything into confusion. That creates even more danger."
"I... got flustered. I won’t do it again."
At this rate, he looked ready to pull duct tape out of nowhere and wrap it over his brother’s mouth.
Still, the fight had ended well enough, and it had served as a reminder of just how dangerous carelessness could be.
He’d said enough already.
With a tired sigh, Yoo Sung-jun pointed at the battlefield around them. "Good work. You’ve gotten pretty good at using your nose, touch, and hearing too."
Most of the credit went to his brother.
The brainwashed Infector swarms of level 1 and level 2.
By now, they no longer had a prayer of resisting his brother and Jeyca's response.
"We’re almost there, aren’t we? Body Reinforcement, level 2."
"Yeah. I just need 80,000 more points."
"What about you, Jeyca?"
"Me? Well... I still have a long way to go. That million-point cure is a pretty high wall."
She gave an embarrassed smile. The 1,000,000 points needed for the cure really was a thick, towering barrier.
Yoo Sung-jun casually checked his remaining points.
[Remaining points: 420,820]
All those hard days over the past two weeks had paid off.
Instead of trying to make huge gains all at once, he’d established a routine.
A mission every day. One day to rest. Making Sunday an absolute day off really was effective.
Other people might be grinding through missions without a break.
It wasn’t as though he felt no impatience about that.
But the more he felt it, the more clearly he understood that he had to go at his own pace.
PTSD. Post-traumatic stress disorder.
The mental damage that came from war, abuse, terror, beatings, accidents, and disaster.
This was war, too. War against the Infector.
He was always fighting off threats to his life, winning, enduring, and forcing himself to keep going.
Stress beyond a certain point simply couldn’t help building up.
That was why he had designed a routine that let him rest properly.
And that was probably why they were seeing efficiency like this.
My adaptability and ability to handle situations have gone up fast. Sung-hwan shouting really was a mistake, but...
Yoo Sung-jun imagined what would have happened if his brother had come here alone.
No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t picture it.
He couldn’t picture his brother losing.
Wanting to protect each other is a little weakness, I guess.
It only became a liability here. In other mission zones, it would probably create synergy instead.
Good things were good things.
And now it was about time they finished this mission, too.
"Everyone gather up."
He moved near the exit and called the other two over.
What he took from his crossbody bag was the reconnaissance orb.
When he pressed the small button on it, light burst upward.
The beams formed a three-dimensional map of the terrain.
It was the map his party had explored so far.
"As you can see, we’re basically at the end of our exploration here."
The two of them looked over the terrain map as a whole.
There were eight entrances to the underground caverns in total.
One on the far side of the unfinished tunnel, others leading east, west, north, and south from the mountains beyond.
In the end, every path connected.
"This is probably the last area we need to search," he said.
The two of them looked at the empty space Yoo Sung-jun pointed to and nodded.
All the paths were aimed downward.
A huge void, one that suggested some kind of space below.
Just from guessing, it was clear that surveying this entire area would be enough.
This wasn’t the exploration quota the mission had assigned them.
This was a complete 100 percent search of the entire underground cavern system.
That was how he intended to put an end to this mission, which had become so familiar it was almost routine.
"So we’re going down through the cavern with the shortest route?"
"We should. That’ll save time."
He tucked the orb away with a shrug.
It was time to move.
"If anyone’s running low on ammo, reload now. If your gear’s worn down or your body’s not in good shape, say so. We can repair and resupply in the Enter Room before we head out."
At Yoo Sung-jun’s words, his brother smiled with confidence.
Jeyca brushed dirt off her notebook and, when their eyes met, gave a bright little grin as well.
Everyone was fully prepared.
"Then let’s go."
Yoo Sung-jun took the lead.
The Omega Suit wrapped around his body in an instant.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
He had been a capable developer.
His work was simple.
Writing code, fixing bugs, creating new code—endless repetition.
It had been a dull life.
It had also been a life of endless stress.
Graphic designers had it easy.
As long as they brought life to what they made, they never had too many complaints.
Planners were the real problem.
Those bastards were an incomprehensible species.
They’d explain things all grandly and elegantly, then what? Ask for it to be made like that?
For fuck’s sake, it wasn’t like he could wave a magic wand and make it happen. At the very least, they should have provided some guidelines, shouldn’t they?
He had to persuade them. Compromise. Make the thing work.
That was how life went.
And then calamity came.
"...Hrrk."
He became a monster. While most had lost their reason and ran wild in all manner of grotesque forms, he alone was different. He had kept his sanity.
It felt like a choice from God.
I am special. His mind had filled with nothing but that thought.
He remembered what that specialness meant he had to do.
Return to his original form.
In this hideous state, his uniqueness would never be proven.
Ten years.
He moved by making use of the longest-lived part of himself: his experience as a developer.
He gathered those who looked similar to him, but were less intelligent.
He built a force and began developing an antidote.
He learned biotechnology, trying to interpret the map of his own genome, turning each impossible reason into something possible, one by one... one by one...
Twenty-five years.
He had thought he could do it. But he couldn’t.
The antidote was an impossible goal.
So he changed his objective. He would become something higher here.
But how?
Fifty years.
Half a century had passed.
From somewhere along the way, he surrendered himself to the instincts embedded in this body.
Thanks to that, it felt as though he had awakened from a very long sleep.
In truth, he had not merely been sleeping.
He had been thinking constantly in his subconscious.
How to become higher. He found the answer.
That, too, had been a difficult problem to realize.
Human beings were no longer left in this world.
Now he would have to eat a species other than his own.
Seventy years.
He had found it... human...
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
The reason he was heading to this last remaining place was simple.
The branching paths along the way had so cleverly pointed to different tunnels.
It had felt like wandering inside an intricately woven deception.
He hadn’t cared back then, because all that mattered was filling out the exploration quota.
He’d only managed to reason it out because every path seemed to point toward the final empty space.
Ordinary Jangsanbeom shouldn’t be able to dig a cavern like this. Which means there’s an entity at the end of this, one that designed the tunnels...
Yoo Sung-jun knew that an Infector’s intelligence was proportional to its strength.
That was usually how it worked.
At higher levels, an Infector became more advanced and more powerful.
So he already had a rough idea of what might be waiting below.
A Jangsanbeom on the verge of evolving into an individual entity. Or maybe one that’s already finished evolving.
If it was the former, this was manageable.
If it was the latter, things became a little harder.
Level 5. Maybe even level 6.
There were usually two ways for an Infector to achieve individual evolution.
Either by devouring a higher-level Infector, or by consuming a user's brain.
If that was the case, then the user was probably the cause.
It was only a rough estimate, but it was a reasonable one.
Yoo Sung-jun asked Loki, "How many participants are left?"
⊳ 3 members
The nine participants they’d started with had gradually dwindled to this.
There had probably been cases like this before.
Had they actually made it back after clearing the mission?
No.
Yoo Sung-jun had been checking the number of participants from time to time.
It was hard to believe that the people who vanished one by one had simply returned after a delay.
This was a cooperative mission. The kind of mission where attempting it alone was a sure way to die.
So returning together was the only sensible outcome.
They never knew when an Infector might launch a ranged attack or close in for the kill.
Which means I have to treat this as a Jangsanbeom that has achieved individual evolution.
Yoo Sung-jun had a great deal of experience fighting Infector that had evolved into unique entities.
Jangsanbeom was one of them.
Back then, it had taken him a month to bring the creature down.
The problem hadn’t been its patterns.
It had been the new trait it gained. That was the issue.
I know how to handle it now, so dealing with it should be easier...
Yoo Sung-jun glanced back.
Sung-hwan and Jeyca. They didn’t know the method.
It wasn’t the sort of thing he could just explain, either, so it was awkward.
Ordinary Jangsanbeom and brainwashed swarms of Infector were the sort of thing he could handle alone now, but an evolved Jangsanbeom was another matter.
At this rate, it’d almost be easier to take it on by myself...
As he moved forward while worrying over that, Yoo Sung-jun suddenly stopped.
The footsteps behind him had cut off all at once.
When he turned around, there was no one there.
...His brother and Jeyca had disappeared.
Yoo Sung-jun looked down at the ground.
A trail dragged out in a long line.
A groove carved by his own feet.
An unintentional stride.
That ability had probably been applied to the two of them as well.
So Yoo Sung-jun looked ahead and surveyed the place, which had somehow transformed from a long underground tunnel into a vast cavern.
He wasn’t alarmed.
It matched his expectations exactly.
"Manipulating sight? You're half-baked, huh?"
Yoo Sung-jun’s taunting words were aimed at the thing in front of him.
An entity twice as large as other Jangsanbeom.
There were no Infector under its command.
What he could see around it were rotten human corpses and the remains of what looked like a Gallophone it had devoured.
So wide. This was the void I was aiming for.
Yoo Sung-jun realized he had reached the place he’d been looking for.
"Why am I... half-baked?"
The thing asked with a thick, clumsy pronunciation, but the meaning was clear enough.
Looking at it, Yoo Sung-jun acted with complete ease.
He shrugged and began to move slowly to the side.
"Usually, they evolve from Blind into Darkness. Since yours stalled at some random intermediate ability, you’re a half-baked one who hasn’t fully evolved yet."
Sight manipulation.
The creature had used certain brain waves to distort the gaze of the three of them.
While they were unaware of where they were looking, it had shifted that gaze elsewhere. Changed it.
Since they hadn’t noticed, they would have believed that what they saw was the correct path and kept moving.
By altering their sense of distance and what they were looking at, it had encouraged them to lengthen their stride.
That was how his brother and Jeyca had ended up taking the wrong path and moving farther and farther away.
As long as Yoo Sung-jun’s silhouette remained visible behind them, creating the illusion that they were still following him, the deception was complete.
"You... walked right into the trap I dug for you."
"Now that I know, I won’t fall for it."
"A ridiculous bluff... Do you know why I lured only you toward my side?"
"Isn’t it obvious? You wanted to eat me."
"Yes... when I saw you, I felt it. You are a more evolved sample than any human I have consumed... so I will devour you and achieve perfect evolution..."
"Honest, aren't you. But do you know something?"
He had already figured it out.
This was the creature’s den.
It was the ruler of this entire place.
His companions were not a concern.
As he’d said, they were both capable enough now to handle a swarm on their own.
So he focused on the thing in front of him.
"This is my place. In this place, I am immortal... die in despair, human..."
"You used to be human, and now you're drawing lines between us? Did you say immortal?"
Yes, at first he had thought it was immortal.
But the game had taught him otherwise.
"An evolved Jangsanbeom spits out and hides its breath-throats in all sorts of different places."
He tapped the hard ground with his foot as he continued.
"The common point is that they’re all transparent, odorless, and colorless. The breath-cords connected to those breath-throats are the same, too. So you can’t trace their location by following the cords. But after fighting you, I figured it out."
"You... fought someone like me...?"
"Something similar. You can hide the breath-cords deep, but not the breath-throats themselves. If you bury them too far into the earth, they get suffocated when they try to breathe, I guess. So if you’ve got a decent enough eye, finding them isn’t hard."
Yoo Sung-jun tapped his own eyes, then took hold of the BK-108.
"Your evolved ability from Blind is sight manipulation. You're going to regret it. You should’ve just stayed Blind."
"What are you—"
"What do you think? Gunfire."
Click. He aimed the muzzle.
Then he fired—not at the creature, but at a corner of the cavern wall behind it.
Bang!
Clods of dirt exploded outward.
Thud! The sound of something bursting open echoed through the cavern.
"Kehk...!"
Apparently rocked by the impact, the Jangsanbeom collapsed onto its ass.
Looking at it, Yoo Sung-jun spoke in a cold voice.
"Let’s make a little wager, you and me—an Infector who can talk, and a human. How about it?"
Click.
He racked the gun and finished his sentence.
"Whichever comes first: your breath-throat getting cut off, or me getting eaten."
[Variable detected! Variable detected! Mission updated.]
...They were quick to say it.
Even as he felt the mission's difficulty and objective change, Yoo Sung-jun didn't hesitate.
"Then let’s begin."
Without the slightest pause, he drove his foot into the ground.
The wager of death had begun.