Jungle (2)
‘Small camp, my ass.’
The dead pilot had been right about one thing—the camp wasn't all that big.
Counting the people milling about and those detected by auxiliary sensors, there were barely ten of them.
The problem wasn't the numbers.
‘There's a walker.’
A six-meter-tall open-cockpit bipedal war machine slumbered beside one of the camp's tents.
Walkers were robotic war machines used by the Star Union.
The model stationed here was a light walker, the type deployed for reconnaissance and infantry support.
Being an open-cockpit model, its defenses were laughable—but in exchange, it mounted a Stormgun on each hand, and its raw firepower was monstrous.
‘No cyborgs at the camp, though.’
A walker could only be piloted by a cyborg, wired into the machine through a special device called a brain connector.
Since I couldn't sense the faint electromagnetic haze unique to cyborgs anywhere nearby, this walker had apparently been modified so an ordinary human could use it.
What's more, the camp's walker carried a Stormgun only on its left hand; the right arm had been replaced with some kind of crane mechanism. Probably converted for resource collection and hauling cargo.
‘No wonder they attacked so boldly.’
Pirates running a modified walker on top of a Cult cruiser.
If a small outpost could field a walker, headquarters—where the boss and vice-boss sat—would have far more of them.
And beyond that, who knew how many more weapons they were still hiding.
‘Confidence like theirs is earned, I suppose.’
This level of firepower would rank them among the top-tier cartels even in the game.
They were my enemies, granted—but I had to admit they were formidable ones.
‘Not that I can't beat them.’
I summoned the tooth fairies and quietly climbed down from the tree.
As I approached the perimeter of the camp, a pirate stood guard with his eyes practically burning with vigilance.
I sent the tooth fairy swarm around to the opposite side of the camp and had them make noise.
"Hm?"
The instant he turned his head toward the rustling sound—
"Urk?!"
—my erosion tentacles snatched his head and yanked him away in one fluid pull.
Only the gun he'd been carrying remained behind, masterless and lonely in its spot.
"The hell? Where'd this bastard go?"
"Hey! Did he go take a piss?"
A moment later, two other pirates came over. I fired spine needles at the one standing farther back.
"Ack?"
While the pirate collapsed clutching the back of his neck, I closed in on the other.
"Huh? Wha—"
The moment he turned toward the footsteps behind him, my bone axe came down on his shoulder. The blow split him clean in two.
Leaving behind the steaming warmth rising from his spilled entrails, I stepped into the camp.
At the heart of the camp, a pirate sat by the bonfire roasting meat.
With earphones jammed in his ears, he had no idea whatsoever what had just happened behind him.
I crept up directly behind him, opened my jaws wide, and swallowed his head whole.
The startled pirate thrashed, but his resistance didn't last long. When I clamped down with my jaws and crushed his head while he was still alive, a Cult pirate walked out of a nearby tent.
"Huh?"
「Grrrrrr」
The goat-horned Cultist just stood there, dumbfounded, unable to process what he was seeing.
As I swallowed the pirate down to his torso, I lashed my tail out.
"Kghaaaah…"
Spine needles buried themselves in the Cultist's neck, and he went down with a wheezing hiss like a punctured balloon.
"Aaaargh!"
Just then, with a scream, a blood-soaked pirate came tumbling out of another tent.
While I'd been clearing out the pirates, the tooth fairies that had crawled into the other tents had attacked the pirates inside them.
The bleeding pirate saw me and panicked, scrambling to run—but the tooth fairies weren't letting him go.
The corpse fleas came hopping and bouncing, swarming onto his back. Dozens of the bugs piled onto him at once, and he couldn't bear their combined weight. He went down.
"AAAAAGH!"
"Which one of you bastards is being so lou—urk?!"
At the sound of their comrade's screams, the pirates all poked their heads out of their tents at once—and froze in horror at the slaughter I had laid out for them.
Swallowing the last of the cook-pirate, I charged straight at the tents.
The force packed into my five-meter frame was truly terrifying. The tents shattered like bowling pins under my momentum, and the pirates inside were pulped in an instant.
While his comrades were being torn apart, one pirate who'd been moving in secret made it into the walker.
"You son of a bitch! You're dead now!"
Climbing into the walker, the pirate strapped on a peculiar piece of equipment. It resembled a reinforcement suit, but it covered only the head and chest, with several socket-like devices studded along the nape of the neck.
‘So that's what hooks into the brain connector.’
That equipment hadn't existed in the game. A pretty interesting piece of kit—but I'd inspect it later.
The six-meter walker rose to its feet and aimed its Stormgun at me.
The pirate piloting it wore a smug, triumphant grin.
He firmly believed the depleted uranium shells loaded into that Stormgun would tear me to shreds.
But his hope would never become reality.
Because the radio waves emitted from the armored plates on my back had severed the walker's electrical signals, shutting it down cold.
"Huh? Wh-wha—?"
The pirate cried out in flustered confusion as the walker, which had been moving so smoothly, went slack. Since the jamming effect wouldn't last long, I extended my combat arm and yanked him right out of the cockpit.
"Gwak!"
Slammed limp into the ground by my hand, he vomited blood.
Since I wanted to examine his equipment at my leisure, I paralyzed him with a spine needle.
"……"
The last pirate left standing was trembling like a leaf, aiming his gun at me. Rich pirate that he was, the weapon in his hands was a gauss rifle.
When I turned my head, he pulled the trigger. Tungsten rounds shrieked through the air and slammed against my carapace.
Sad for him, but tungsten couldn't so much as scratch my hide. When the deformed rounds pinged off and dropped to the ground, the pirate's jaw fell open.
As I closed the last few meters, he stumbled backward and collapsed onto the spot. I raised my bone axe high.
"W-wai—!"
Few people survive having their heads split open. With the final pirate dealt with, I called the tooth fairies back.
‘Three captives.’
The rest were all dead.
I gathered both the captured pirates and the corpses at the center of the camp.
With no one left to contact headquarters, the enemy would figure out their comrades had been hit soon enough. Before this night was over, they'd come looking.
‘Since they went to all the trouble of coming out here, I should give them a present.’
A present by the name of terror.
Among Spacedogs, there had never been concepts like rank or kingship.
Every conceivable species mingled together there, and the bosses of each cartel were, almost without exception, the type to guard their pride unto death—the very notion of one serving another simply couldn't take root.
That said, it was an undeniable fact that a hierarchy existed between cartels, and cartels powerful enough to approach the stature of kings or nobles did rise.
The cartel that had come to the Saintopia 02 Continent on planet PH-101—Humanity—was one of those colossi.
The Humanity Cartel, ranked among the top five of all Spacedog cartels, was remarkable for far more than its unusual name.
"Vice-boss."
"What?"
"We've lost contact with Camp 21 and Camp 17, sir?"
At his aide's words, Dylan—the vice-boss, lounging half-reclined and chewing on a meat skewer—knitted his handsome brow.
"21 and 17?"
"Yes, sir."
"What's that thing called—electro-whatsit? You know, that thing. Could it be because of that?"
"If you mean the electromagnetic storm, we're not in season for those, so—"
"Are you showing off how smart you are in front of me, you fucking bastard?"
"N-no, sir."
The moment profanity burst straight out of the delicate-featured, beautiful Cult vice-boss's mouth, the aide immediately bowed his head.
Dylan debated whether to run the skewer he was holding through his subordinate's skull, then finally opened his mouth.
"21 and 17, huh. Those are the camps out on the jungle perimeter, aren't they."
"Th-that's right."
"There aren't any dangerous animals out there. Could it be the stragglers from those ones you shot down this afternoon?"
"I couldn't really say…"
Dylan swallowed the rest of his meat skewer and waved his hand.
"Send some random guys to check on it."
"A wise judgment, sir!"
"I know that, you damn brat."
The aide bowed and stepped out of the tent.
The light of an enormous fire demon washed over the tents surrounding the vice-boss's quarters.
The fire was no bonfire. One of the Volf villages that had endured on the Saintopia 02 Continent for hundreds of years was burning at the pirates' hands.
"Gyaaaaaagh!"
"Aaaaargh!"
Pirates of Cult and human stock roamed through the village, setting the traditional houses alight or dragging the Volfs inside out into the open.
One thing stood out: every single pirate taking part in the raid was a handsome man, their good looks at odds with the ugliness of their brutality.
"The good-looking ones go to the boss—keep them alive!"
"Yes sir!"
"The women, do whatever you want with!"
Just as someone had shouted, the pirates fitted electric collars around the necks of handsome male Volfs and young children and took them captive.
"Sob, guardian gods!"
"Kghk! Please, hear our prayers!"
Wracked with pain by the electric collars, the Volfs cried out desperately to their gods.
This village had never been weak enough to suffer such humiliation. It was one of the villages blessed by the two guardian gods known as the Parents of All Creation.
But the Parents of All Creation had stopped answering their prayers days ago.
"There they go again."
"Kukuk, morons. That bitch they worship as a god already got herself ravaged by the boss."
The pirates guarding the captives sneered at the Volfs.
And they spoke the truth—the guardian gods who had protected the village had been defeated by the Humanity Cartel.
The male god called the Father of the Earth had been beheaded by the pirate boss, and the female goddess, the Mother of the Sky, was currently held prisoner.
But the pirates kept that to themselves. They found it entertaining to watch the Volfs cling to false hope and despair.
As the vice-aide left the camp to survey the pillaging, a pirate came up to him holding a female Volf and a Volf child.
"What do we do with this Volf bastard?"
"Please, at least spare this child!"
"Not the boss's type. Dispose of it."
"W-wai—gyaaaaagh!"
The pirate killed the young Volf and dragged the mother away.
The boss of the Humanity Cartel was a woman, and she loathed women and ugly men alike with a passion, killing them with exquisite cruelty.
To the prisoners here, being violated by the pirate underlings and burned alive felt like mercy by comparison.
Indeed, the captured Mother of the Sky was undergoing torture so gruesome it gave even the pirates the creeps.
Not that telling a Volf who'd just lost her child any of this would have made it any easier to bear.
Feeling he'd shown his own share of mercy, the vice-aide was approached by another underling.
"What did the vice-boss say?"
"Says to send a few of the boys. Whoever's got nothing to do, send them over."
"Got it."
The underling left, and the vice-aide returned to work as well.
He had to keep hustling through the night if he meant to gather prisoners worthy of tribute to the boss.
An hour after the vice-aide's meeting with Dylan—
Ten heavily armed pirates boarded a transport ship and set out for Camp 17.
Eight of the ten wore mid-grade reinforcement suits, and two were seated in walkers. The walkers carried plasma launchers, and all eight on foot were armed with gauss rifles.
It was enough firepower to handle even a stronger-than-expected enemy appearing around the camp.
"Once we're back, there won't be anything left worth eating, huh?"
"Guess not. Or we'll just rotate through the other prisoners."
"Ha-shit, that's like eating corpses. Kills the mood."
All ten had been conscripted half against their will, and they grumbled about it—but there was nothing to be done. Their boss and vice-boss were both of a savagely cruel temperament.
The transport ship, arriving in the airspace near Camp 17, touched down on a clearing the pirates had prepared in advance.
"Check for biological signs in the area."
"Nothing unusual, sir."
Their transport carried a bio scanner, the kind you'd expect to find on a warship.
The Humanity Cartel held genetic data on virtually every dangerous organism on this planet, so the pirates could easily verify whether any hostile animals were lurking about.
After one full sweep with the bio scanner, they judged the surroundings safe, disembarked, and ran for Camp 17.
Right up to that moment, they had no inkling of what had happened at the camp. They'd assumed it was, at worst, a communications outage from some mechanical malfunction.
But what awaited them was no communications failure.
In place of a warm bonfire and the rowdy singing of pirates, cold darkness and dead silence filled Camp 17.
"Something's wrong here."
"Where did everybody go?"
Only then realizing that something had gone gravely wrong, the pirates began to warily scan their surroundings.
One of them, sweeping his helmet light across the camp, discovered a sinister trace.
"Look at this!"
"What—ghk?!"
It was an enormous pool of blood.
The bloodstains scattered across the center of the camp stretched in a trail all the way into the forest.
"Everyone, combat readiness!"
The pirates, wound tight as bowstrings, raised their weapons. With the walkers taking point, they pushed into the forest.
The trail of blood, which seemed like it would stretch on forever, gradually thinned—and then broke off in front of an ancient tree.
"Did it fly up into the sky?"
"Don't say stupid things. No carnivorous pterosaurs come down around here."
"I know, but…huh?"
A drop of liquid fell onto one pirate's shoulder. Thinking it was rain, he wiped it away—but it wasn't water.
His palm, lit by his helmet's light, was smeared with blood.
"……"
Every eye locked onto his hand. He swallowed hard and slowly tilted his head upward.
And up there—
the ‘comrades' they'd been searching for were waiting for them.
"C-contact the vice-boss, now!"
"No—the transport ship! Get the transport ready first!"
"Transport ship! Respond! Emergency! Get over here right now!"
The sight that had struck even these ruthless, bloodthirsty pirates cold with terror—
Pirates with their skin flayed off, hanging from the trees.