The Age of Adaptation
Shanghai, China.
A city that was always packed with tourists.
Take a cruise up the Huangpu River, and Shanghai’s landmarks—the Oriental Pearl Tower and the forest of skyscrapers around it—stretch out along the waterfront like a panoramic painting.
The way the lights spilling from the buildings flowed over the river like a beautiful melody was enough to make anyone feel, all over again, that this was the largest city in China.
And yet Shanghai was dark, like a city of the dead.
Even though night had fallen, not a single tourist could be seen, nor even the residents.
Only a bleak wind slid through the empty streets.
The flyers scattered across the ground and the headlines splashed across the front page of the newspapers all said the same thing.
-The nation has collapsed. Government, open your silent mouths and speak!-
Splosh.
A foot came down hard on the newspaper, slowly soaking through in the rainwater pooled on the pavement.
The hurried footsteps carried into an alley.
"Huff... huff... Shit, damn it. How the hell are those monster bastards... why the hell are they after me!"
The middle-aged man’s eyes were wide with panic, twitching uncontrollably.
Still mumbling in disbelief, he groped at the inside of his jacket.
What came tumbling into his hand was an silver aluminum rod.
He placed a finger on the protruding button and hid behind a trash can tucked into a shadowy corner.
Taking a breath, the man only peeked out slightly, then scanned the alley ahead and behind him with bloodshot eyes.
Rustle. A sheet of wrapping paper for Shanghai street food, jianbing, was crushed underfoot.
"Shit, you're in the way."
He kicked it away roughly with his foot.
At that very moment, the wind surged, and the wrapping paper fluttered wildly.
For some reason, his eyes were drawn to that fluttering scrap.
Then, beyond it, over the alley wall, the man saw two silhouettes, and his face stiffened.
At the same time, the moment he thrust the rod toward them—
Crack!
The rod shattered to pieces, and the hand that held it snapped backward.
A hollow sensation. Then a wave of excruciating pain.
"A... Aaaagh!"
The middle-aged man screamed as he stared at the pale bone exposed above his severed wrist and the spray of blood bursting upward.
The smartphone that would have let him enter the Enter Room had been destroyed long ago.
There was no escape.
The man had no choice but to accept the reality before his eyes.
The two reapers who had slaughtered his clan members were walking toward him.
"A laser pointer. With a single press of the button, it fired a high-temperature laser. I’m sure he killed plenty of people with this."
Jack Kalt spoke as he picked up the fragments of the aluminum rod—the shattered remains of the assassination weapon, the laser pointer—scattered beside the man.
"Seems that way. But it’s over now. That’ll bring the number of clans in this vast country down to fifty-one, won’t it?"
It was Choi Hyun-seok who answered Jack Kalt’s remark.
At the counterquestion, Jack Kalt gave a thin smile.
He crouched before the man, who was writhing in pain.
"If you were going to ask about a safe area, you should’ve chosen a neutral zone. What’s the point of targeting a clan bunker?"
"Ghh...! I didn’t know! If I’d known it belonged to Blood Rain and Quantum, I’d have backed off long ago!"
"So what should we do?"
It wasn’t a question asked of a man who was thrashing around and enduring pain.
At Jack Kalt’s look, Choi Hyun-seok shrugged.
"Excuses are all the same, one and all."
"Haha, yes, they are."
A light motion of the hand followed.
With the sound of a watermelon bursting, the trembling man toppled over.
Nothing remained above his neck.
Only thin convulsions ran through him as blood spurting from his severed neck pulsed wildly along his arms.
With that, the long, tedious chase was over.
Watching him light a cigarette, Choi Hyun-seok stretched his arms.
"Does smoking really help with the tension?"
"Pff. Would you like to try?"
"Haha. I don’t have the habit of relying on something that does nothing but harm."
"By tomorrow, the world will be full of chaos. You’ve got quite a strong will. This is just... something I smoke out of habit. It’s stuck to me."
Was it really strong-willed to not smoke at all?
Choi Hyun-seok tilted his head, then counted the number of clan members they had cleared.
That makes three.
Most of the time, Choi Hyun-seok handled the pursuit, while Jack Kalt carried out the extermination.
But it was fair to say Jack Kalt had done most of the work.
He was the one who had led the charge from tracking down the group to wiping out the enemy.
All Choi Hyun-seok had done was use his innate talent to lead the pursuit of the remnants.
"Mr. Choi’s innate talent is Wave Detection, is it not? To think you can pinpoint a target’s unique vibration and track them so precisely—you must have discovered a new application for it."
He had indeed.
The 100 grams of Muaz’s Brain he had bought from Yoo Sung-jun, and the remaining 400 grams had been resold to team leaders with the greatest growth potential.
But I can’t tell Jack that.
They weren’t close enough yet to share everything.
He was clearly assuming that the new application had been obtained through the Higher Being.
So Choi Hyun-seok nodded.
"It’s a fairly useful ability. More importantly, what a waste of talent this is. I wonder whether Meteor even realizes the effort we’re putting in."
"Haha. This is an operation involving two users who’ve surpassed the normal standard, after all. Still, this isn’t only for Meteor’s sake, so let’s keep at it a little longer."
All of this was for safety after the Dark Cover.
They had to cut out the bad sprouts before they took root, if they wanted the shelter to expand smoothly.
"Still, seeing the clan members do their jobs well in their own places makes us feel responsible for this too."
"That makes sense, Mr. Choi."
Jack Kalt reached toward the corpse.
At that sight, Choi Hyun-seok’s eyes widened.
There it was. That was his innate talent.
It had been hard to analyze exactly what kind of talent it was in this situation, but now he could see it clearly.
Startled by what he’d figured out, Choi Hyun-seok opened and closed his mouth dumbly.
"Mm-hm. It matches exactly what I’d inferred. He seems to have eliminated everyone connected to it."
After touching the dead man a few more times, he turned away with a relieved expression.
Seeing that, Choi Hyun-seok asked in a daze, "Jack. Your innate talent isn’t... Analysis, is it?"
Jack Kalt only answered with a faint, silent smile.
***
Yoon Choi trusted her innate talent and her equipment.
And by trust, she didn’t mean blind faith.
She said it because everything had already been perfectly proven.
Tool Master pushed every piece of equipment beyond its limits.
Her innate talent helped her use equipment at its absolute best.
Thanks to that, even basic equipment could be driven to a hundred percent or more of its performance.
That meant that when she used equipment like the map scanner or the trace chaser—gear excellent for tracking and navigation—she could become a guide better than anyone else.
So what the hell was this situation?
I clearly got an answer that there were no traces or omens of any kind...
Countless infectors were surging toward her, filling every inch of the hole’s walls—top, bottom, left, and right.
According to the scan, there had definitely been no trace of anything, and she had only tracked the slime unique to the monstrous life-form Meteor had been looking for.
And yet—
"What the hell are those..."
If you shaped a hand into an animal, would it look like that?
The middle finger became a long neck and head.
The remaining long, extended fingers made quadrupedal movement possible.
An infector with pale hide, as large as a human head, one she had never seen before.
From the looks of it, even Meteor seemed to be reacting as though it was his first time seeing them.
I can’t afford to stand here blankly.
Yoon Choi pushed the Omega Suit to full power.
Operating rate to fifty percent, power usage at twenty-five.
She converted that force into speed, increased her mobility, and ran.
The optimal place—the one where she could keep Meteor in sight while securing her own safety.
There!
She hid her body in the pit she had passed.
Holding her breath, she watched Meteor’s response.
He had said that, in exchange for a nine-to-one point distribution, he would block all threats himself.
So she intended to watch.
Did he really possess the kind of skill worthy of being called Meteor, even in real life?
Thunk! Bang!
The nano-tech firearm, the NU-101, burst into flame.
It was a weapon made for a single target.
And yet it scattered nano-particle rounds like a shotgun.
The multiple enemies before him became honeycombed in an instant.
Equipment modification bench.
Yoon Choi immediately figured out why his weapon had changed into something like a shotgun.
The nano-particles that pierced the enemies returned to the Omega Suit.
White masses crashed down in heaps.
Between them, black dust billowed and was absorbed into him.
The sight was so grand it almost looked sacred.
Yoon Choi stared dumbly at Meteor’s divine display, then widened her eyes.
Huh?
The infectors’ condition looked strange, as if they’d reached the target distance.
Their heads split into four.
The middle fingers being torn apart was grotesque.
From those split heads, they fired white beams of light.
That was...
Penetration ability?
BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM!
Yoon Choi resisted the shockwave surging toward her with a deafening roar.
She planted her feet into the ground and held herself in place when her body tried to be pushed back.
Holy shit!
She knew that ability too.
The Kalakwa strategy video Meteor had made.
The ability of the little finger she had seen there.
The beam fired by that giant bastard pierced through everything and ruthlessly shattered it.
Now it made sense.
The identity of the monstrous life-form inside this hole.
So it wasn’t just the middle finger of Kalaqua—its little finger came outside the lair too?
How such tiny infectors had been multiplied still puzzled her.
Yoon Choi entertained several theories while worrying about Meteor, who was facing thousands of thin penetration beams.
But that worry was unnecessary.
Thunk. Thunk.
What the hell is that too...
How much more did this mission intend to shock her?
Through the thick haze of dust, Yoon Choi heard a pulsing sound.
As the space gradually cleared, she could see his back standing tall in the center.
Thunk!
Meteor was simply standing there.
The greatsword that had been on his back was nowhere to be seen.
Instead, his body was wrapped in a pitch-black suit of armor.
Even after being bombarded by the penetration beams, the matte armor did not have a single scratch on it.
The penetration ability she had just seen was nothing compared to what she’d seen in the video.
But it was still a powerful ability.
It was the kind that ruthlessly shattered and pierced through every object in its path.
And he took that barrage head-on?
That must have been another power obtained from the equipment modification bench.
But that alone wasn’t enough.
It had already been proven that nano-particles couldn’t withstand the penetration ability.
As Yoon Choi searched for another way to reinforce the gear, she roughly brushed the dust off her visor.
No way...
Where had the 1.26 million points she’d received from Choi Hyun-seok gone?
Thunk. The final pulse.
The armor wrapping the suit returned to its original form.
The greatsword came into Yoo Sung-jun’s grasp, proudly displaying its intact form.
He gripped the hilt of the NWA greatsword.
With that, the pommel turned and drew out the greatsword’s new power.
Fsssssht!
The blade expanded to the point of seeming unstable.
So large it had become nearly transparent, as though a gust of wind would scatter it apart at any moment.
But it did not collapse.
Nanoparticles spread out like fine threads, holding it firmly together.
The greatsword crackled endlessly like a screen filled with static.
"Krrrgh!"
Swallowing the sound between his teeth, he stepped forward once, then used his breath to trigger a momentary reinforcement.
Then he swung the blade’s flat side like a fan.
Whoosh—!
A black storm slammed into the infectors.
It swallowed the creatures just as they were preparing to manifest their second ability.
Both they and the entire hole before him were swept away by the storm of nano-particles.
The instant he pulled back the hilt, the particles rushed together again.
They took the shape of the greatsword and settled back onto his back.
Nothing remained in front of Meteor now.
Protecting his body wasn’t a function of the greatsword.
It must have been a skill added at the Station, through the Omega Suit’s third level of reinforcement via one million points.
A skill that built armor around his body for an instant by borrowing nanoparticles.
Iron Wall. And what he just showed was the ability he gained by modifying the greatsword.
She didn’t know what that was.
Hardly anyone used greatswords, so there was no information on it.
Shaking off the chain of thoughts, Yoon Choi climbed out of the pit.
Wanting to refocus on the mission, she stood beside Meteor again.
"These things used Kalakwa’s little finger’s penetration ability, right?"
"Yeah."
A curt answer.
Yoon Choi nodded and laid out her theory.
"Then the monstrous life-form is probably the little finger... which means it either reproduced its offspring, or it split itself?"
"No idea."
Meteor—Yoo Sung-jun—brushed flesh from his shoulder.
"Maybe it escaped Kalaqua’s will and is preparing to evolve as an individual. We can probably treat these as guards set up for that."
He said it while kicking at a corpse fragment lying on the ground.
Honestly, Yoo Sung-jun hoped his guess was right.
That way he could cut the bastard down right now, without having to worry about Kalaqua waking up.
"Guide."
"It’s Yoon Choi."
"How much farther to the end of the hole?"
"You don’t even listen to me, do you? At alarm speed, it’s about thirty minutes from here. Though that’s weird... how did they swarm in without my equipment picking them up?"
"Because they’re mutants. The equipment probably couldn’t recognize unrecorded entity data."
"You really do answer your own thoughts, huh..."
Yoo Sung-jun shrugged and moved forward.
Just a little farther now.
The end of this slick, sticky hole.
And there, he would find it—the little finger of Kalaqua.
---