Young Adult (1)
Deep in the central forest of the Saintopia 02 continent lies a place where all electronic devices and communications equipment are rendered useless.
The site is shielded by a powerful energy field, making it invisible to observation from orbit or from the skies above. The only way to reach it is to walk the labyrinth of the jungle on foot.
Its name is the Temple of the Forgotten Earth.
Only the Father of the Earth, worshipped by the Volfs of Saintopia 02, is supposed to know the path to the Temple of the Forgotten Earth.
That is how it should have been.
But those who now stood within the temple were not Volfs.
Broken fragments of statues, along with the corpses of humans and Cultists, lay strewn across the temple grounds both inside and out.
Within the temple, a certain group moved about, cleaning up after the dead.
They were horned Cultists—young humans—but they all had two things in common: every last one of them was strikingly handsome, and every last one of them was male.
The intruders were members of a formidable pirate organization: the Humanity Cartel.
All of the pirates were strained and exhausted from cleaning up after the battle—every one of them except a single girl.
The Cult girl with deer antlers sprouting from her temples wore a smile that filled her entire face. In her hand, she held a golden short spear.
"Hee hee~ Nothing beats snagging the good loot before anyone else does. It's just free wins all around."
A voice as lovely as her looks flowed from her lips.
Her name was Muriel.
Boss of the Humanity Cartel.
As she turned the spear this way and that with evident satisfaction, one of her men approached her.
"Boss."
"What is it, oppa?"
"W-we have some wounded, ma'am."
Her gaze drifted to the pirates sprawled behind him. They had taken grave injuries fighting the statues that guarded the temple.
"Aww, are my oppas hurting?"
"N-no, ma'am!"
"We're fine! It's just a few scratches!"
The wounded pirates panicked and scrambled to insist they were perfectly fine.
Muriel walked over and gave them a single leisurely once-over. Then she furrowed her brow.
"Oppa, you're too ugly now. That's no good."
"P-please spare me! Ghhk—!"
"You too, oppa."
"Please... agh!"
Muriel didn't even pretend to listen. One by one, she ran her spear through any pirate whose wounds were serious or whose face had been marred.
Strangely enough, the golden short spear gleamed brighter with every pirate it killed—as if it were savoring a mouthful of fresh blood.
"Thanks to you oppas, the experiment was a total success~"
Gazing at the short spear, now radiant enough to light up the temple's interior, she nodded in satisfaction.
With every casualty dealt with, Muriel led her men out of the temple.
Some distance away from it stood a temporary camp the Humanity Cartel had set up. When she arrived, her subordinates who had been waiting there came out to greet her.
"You've returned, Boss."
"Where's the Mother of the Sky?"
"Being educated, just as you ordered."
Muriel headed deeper into the camp with her subordinate. At the center of it, a three-meter beast lay bound in chains.
The creature—with the head of an eagle and the body of a lioness—was in a truly wretched state.
Its entire body was coated in a crust of hardened dried blood, and its wounds had festered to the point that maggots squirmed within them.
Thick iron spikes had been driven through all four of its legs, and a steel collar studded with inward-facing barbs bit into its neck.
Worse still, a thick steel wire connected to a wheel had been wound tight around its intestines, which spilled out from a gash in its flank.
To the beast—who looked as though she might die at any moment—Muriel spoke up in a bright, cheerful voice.
"Hey there, Choi Seo... ah, no, sorry. Mother of the Sky. How have you been holding up?"
「.......」
When the beast called the Mother of the Sky gave no answer, Muriel shot a glance at one of her pirates. The pirate turned the wheel, and the wire pulled taut, dragging the beast's entrails further out of her body.
「KRAAAAAAGH! You fucking bitch!」
"When a person asks you something, you answer."
「Grrrrgh... s-stop it!」
"I was just trying to thank you for the lovely treasure, and you're giving me the silent treatment? Do you still find me funny?"
「AAAAAAARGH!」
The agony of her entrails being torn made the Mother of the Sky lose control of her bladder entirely.
"Fufufu... You still haven't dropped your transformation, even after all this. Impressive, honestly."
「Uuurrrgh... you bitch...」
"Now then, I wonder how much longer you can hold out."
As Muriel sneered down at the miserable creature, one of her subordinates hurried over with a terminal pad.
"Boss, urgent transmission from the cruiser."
"I'm busy right now."
"They insist it's extremely urgent."
"...Tch."
Muriel reluctantly took the pad.
On its screen were video recordings transmitted from a camera mounted on powered armor.
'Phew.'
Once the aftereffects of the Hunter's Avatar wore off and my head cleared, I looked around. I had worried I might have stumbled out of the cave, but nothing of the sort had happened.
'I made a mess of myself eating, though.'
Both the cave walls and my body were drenched in blood. Leftover entrails dangled from my fingers in glistening strands, and shards of shattered bone and scraps of flesh lay scattered across the floor.
'Time to prepare, then.'
After stuffing every last piece of the prey I'd stockpiled into my stomach and processing it all, I left the cave.
Meeting every condition for evolution did not mean I could evolve on the spot.
An Amorph is at its most vulnerable when it seals itself inside a cocoon to evolve. If I were attacked during that time, I would die without being able to resist at all.
'So far, evolution has taken six hours each time.'
Evolving into a Young Adult would probably take just as long, or longer. To stay safe in this jungle for a minimum of six hours, I needed preparation.
'Seal the cave entrance first.'
I went outside and headed for the nearby pirate camp. The pirates had all been devoured, so the camp stood empty.
Apart from the boxes of calorie bars that Wood Devils and their ilk had carried off, everything in the camp remained exactly where it had been.
I grabbed a small explosive from the camp, returned to the cave, and set it at the entrance. When the charge detonated, the mouth of the cave collapsed in on itself, and darkness swallowed the interior.
'Let's do this.'
Deep within the cave was a chamber wide enough to accommodate my evolution without issue.
Following the wall into the depths of that chamber, I settled into a suitable spot.
Evolution conditions for Sub-adult → Young Adult have been fulfilled. Do you wish to evolve?
God, I'd waited so long for this.
To the text box patiently awaiting my response, I gave my answer.
I would evolve.
The instant I did, an enormous volume of mucus secreted from my body in a flash. Wrapped in the sticky film coating me from head to tail, I laid myself down on the cold floor of the cave.
The mucus enveloped not only my entire body but spread across the whole chamber as well, gradually hardening and building itself into the shape of an egg. Within that hardening mass, I quietly closed my eyes.
And then—
'Hm?'
I opened my eyes in a familiar space.
'Where am I?'
The place I stood was someone's bedroom.
A computer and a VR headset tucked into the corner, posters of classic sci-fi films on the wall, a bedding roll tidied up on the floor.
I knew exactly what this place was.
'My room?'
For a moment I wondered if I'd returned to reality, and I looked down at my own palm.
There sat the familiar hand of an Amorph—shrunk to human size, but otherwise unchanged.
'What's going on?'
It was far too vivid to be a dream. The stale, lived-in smell unique to a bachelor's rented room, the scent of kimchi jjigae drifting in from outside—there was no way these were fabrications.
I stepped over to the computer and powered on the VR headset, its cables still connected.
The display shining through the semi-translucent visor was unmistakably the login screen for Space Survival.
'Different from when I evolved into a Sub-adult.'
Back then, I had guessed this space was a mental world. It made sense—the room I stood in had felt utterly unreal.
But now, that boundary was dangerously blurred.
Judging from the weight of the headset in my hands, I could hardly tell whether this was reality or illusion.
I set the VR headset down and opened the door of the room.
'Huh?'
The moment I opened it, I was standing in yet another space.
This one was some kind of family home.
'This place...'
A picture frame hung in the entryway.
The drawing inside was one I had made back in kindergarten.
Stepping inside, I could see a middle-aged man and woman arguing in the hallway.
Both of them had their faces smeared with black paint, and their voices buzzed with mechanical distortion, garbled beyond comprehension.
As if unaware that I occupied the same space, they kept quarreling among themselves.
'......'
I walked past them and entered the innermost room.
A bed, a desk, and a closet—that was all the room contained. It felt even bleaker than the bachelor's apartment I'd just seen.
Without sparing the bed or desk a glance, I approached the closet and pulled the doors open with both hands.
"......"
Inside the closet was a small child, hands pressed over their ears.
No—more precisely, a child with burn scars across half of their face.
The child looked up at me, eyes gone wide, welling with tears.
Without thinking, I reached out toward the child. The child reached back, mirroring my gesture exactly.
And the moment our hands met, the child's expression changed.
The instant I recognized it as a smile—
Everything around me plunged into a deep, impenetrable darkness.
'I'm back.'
I stretched out my 'sixth arm' and tore open the membrane covering my body.
The mucus that had filled the membrane came pouring out, and the cave's signature chill—cold yet faintly musty air—wrapped itself around me.
It felt like the pleasant coolness of stepping out after a bath in warm water.
Tensing my 'tail', I slowly raised myself up.
Not a single ray of light entered the cave, so my eyes saw nothing at all—but I could feel everything.
My auxiliary organs beneath my jaw, now doubled from two to four, were relaying the changes in my body to me with vivid clarity.
'So this is a Young Adult.'
The Hatchling had resembled a spider or a scorpion.
The Juvenile and Sub-adult had walked upright like a human or an ape.
Then what animal did the Young Adult resemble?
I would say a giant serpent. A serpent with eight arms.
My new body no longer had anything one could properly call legs. The arms that had once served as legs had been remodeled into new combat arms, bringing my total count of combat arms to six.
'Upper arms, middle arms, and lower arms, I suppose.'
The combat arms were positioned near my shoulders, along my flanks, and below my pelvis respectively. With my legs transformed into arms, my upper body had grown longer as well.
And my legs, now gone entirely, had been replaced by a tail as thick as my own torso.
In short, my current form could be summed up as something close to the Naga—the half-human, half-serpent monster of Hindu mythology.
Losing my legs might seem like it would slow me down, but that wasn't the case.
From now on, the blunt claws studded densely along my tail would carry me instead. The power of those tail claws was tremendous, letting me run across land far faster than I ever had before.
'And they'll be useful for burrowing underground or swimming, too.'
Thanks to these changes, a Young Adult could operate far more easily across a much wider range of environments—burrowing into the earth to lie in ambush, or chasing down fleeing prey into the water, and so on.
Besides, since my tail had become a vital means of locomotion and support, it too was armored with carapace plates split into scales like those on my head.
The plates were finely segmented to allow free movement, but that didn't mean its defenses could be dismissed. If I whipped my tail into an enemy, it would hit with roughly the force of one of my full-power charges.
'I used to kill plenty of enemies by coiling this tail around them, back in the day.'
The Swamp King I devoured before this evolution—if I clamped down on its belly shell with this tail, it wouldn't last more than a few minutes before crumpling. Of course, the creature was no fool either; it wouldn't just sit there and let me squeeze it.
With my overall body plan so drastically changed, the belly armor enlarged by the Nightmare Horizon's effects had shifted shape slightly as well. The crude, heavy plating had slimmed down into a longer, less bulky form to match my serpent-like silhouette.
'Let's see here.'
From now on, I would no longer walk on two legs but support myself with my tail. Experimentally, I set the tail in motion.
Ssss-shhhh
'Oh?'
I'd honestly expected it to be hard to adapt to, but it came surprisingly easily. Moving the tail felt much like flexing my hips and whipping my body this way and that.
'Speaking of which, I've gotten big.'
My old body measured twelve meters from snout to tail tip—twenty meters when using the Hunter's Avatar.
Now, with the tail taking on such a crucial role, I exceeded twenty-five meters even without invoking the Avatar.
The changes that came with becoming a Young Adult didn't stop at my increased size and serpentine lower half, either.
「Grrrrl」
I opened my jaws as wide as I could. My lower jaw split into two branches, and my mouth gaped open to a size incomparable to anything before.
Within the bifurcated jaws, rows of sharp teeth packed tightly together.
'The tail is powerful, but...'
The true strength of the Young Adult stage lay in a single new trait.
And that was these jaws.
In other words, I no longer needed to devour an entire corpse—the head alone would activate the Predation Effect.
With the Essence Harvester's Jaw, I could harvest an enemy's Genetic Essence mid-battle at tremendous speed.
Which meant I could now grow far faster than ever before.
'This is exactly why the other players started trying to kill each other by any means necessary the moment they reached Young Adult.'
With every change confirmed, I no longer had any reason to linger in this cramped cave.
Lowering my body, I crawled toward the cave entrance.
The passage narrowed as I neared the mouth, but it caused me no trouble—I simply clawed my way forward with all six combat arms gouging into the walls around me.
Bursting easily through the collapsed entrance, I climbed a redwood nearby.
Coiling my tail to push my body upward while my combat arms joined in, my climbing speed was remarkably fast.
Ssss-shhhh
The best part was how little sound I made.
Just as a serpent glides without a whisper, my movements now were every bit as silent.
Proof of that lay in the Nightstalker sprawled on a branch above me, completely oblivious to my presence directly behind it. Apparently bored of waiting for prey, the creature was yawning its head off.
I lunged, and my split jaws sheared its head off in a single bite.
"Kyeng?!"
Decapitated in an instant, the Nightstalker's headless corpse dropped away below.
'There is nothing left on this continent that can hold me in check.'
Now that I was a Young Adult, predators like the Horned Gigant or the Swamp King were no match for me.
The only remaining threat was the pirate player.
Once she was out of the picture, nothing in existence could stand in the way of my evolution.
'I'll try talking to her first, but...'
If the negotiations collapsed, whatever followed would be on her head.
Her head—and the Genetic Essence she carried.