Young Adult (3)
"Hey, shift change."
"Phew, I was bored out of my skull."
"The acting captain's asking for you. Go see him before you turn in."
"Tch. Where the hell's the guy who's supposed to take my post? Off jerking it somewhere?"
The pirate who'd been standing watch outside the ship kicked at the dirt in irritation, and the man arriving to relieve him gave a wry smile and offered what comfort he could.
"Nothing to envy, buddy. He's gotta write up the report on the cargo we shipped out a few days back."
"Ah, that? Y'know, the one where they sent off all those Wolf slaves to that big camp in the jungle?"
"Yeah. Dozens of bodies on the manifest. He won't be sleeping tonight."
"Heh heh. Sucks to be him. Should've gotten it done sooner. Poor bastard's proper screwed."
Laughing at the colleague doomed to overtime, the two settled into idle chatter. Watch duty ran on three rotating shifts, and it was so mind-numbingly dull that without gossip you simply couldn't endure it.
"Want to take a drag or two?"
"The replacement's gonna be here any minute."
"It's an e-cig, who cares."
"Fair point."
The pirate who'd spoken first pulled a vaporizer from his coat and thumbed the switch. He drew a deep lungful of the heavy synthetic narcosis packed into the cartridge, and a hazy smile spread across his face.
"Hoo... fuck, that's better than sex."
"Lemme get one hit too and... huh?"
The makeshift streetlight above their heads flickered once, then died with a snap.
As darkness came crashing down, they switched on the headlamps mounted to their helmets.
"What the hell happened?"
"Everywhere else is still lit?"
"What's going on over there?"
"Our streetlight just went out!"
To the distant colleagues calling over, they waved a hand—nothing to worry about. The lamps above the far-off sentries were still burning bright.
"Power outage? Why all of a sudden... tch!"
"What's wrong?"
"A goddamn mosquito flew in my ear!"
The pirate with the cigarette irritably swatted at his ear and swung his headlamp up toward the dead streetlight.
"Huh?"
"What is that?"
As the two of them examined the fixture, something strange caught their eyes. From the base of the streetlight, where it was anchored into the ground, something like silvery moss was creeping upward. It had already spread all the way to the lamp housing.
"That's moss, right?"
"Since when was there moss? And why's the ground so damp? It hasn't even rained."
The moment the words left his mouth, the wet soil began to heave. Then, bursting up through the dirt, a brilliantly colored plant emerged.
It looked like a vine, blazing a vivid crimson, its surface studded with clusters of tiny rake-shaped tendrils.
"Now what is this? A mushroom? What the hell is it?"
"......"
The pirate holding the vaporizer frowned at the mysterious plant. The color was so beautiful it lifted the mood just to look at it—and yet something about it felt off, somehow wrong.
He pulled out his communicator and called to his partner, who was still staring at the plant in a daze.
"Hey, we should report this up the chain."
"...It's beautiful."
"What?"
"It's so beautiful I'm losing my mind!"
The pirate who hadn't been smoking pressed his face close to the plant, his expression rapturous. The dormant vine whipped out faster than the eye could follow and coiled around his face.
"Oh shit—!"
"Heh... hehe... hehehehe."
The pirate recoiled in horror at the sight of his partner kneeling there, face buried in the vine. Fumbling, he activated his communicator and tried to raise the cruiser's interior.
He would have managed it, too—if not for the voice calling him from somewhere far away.
"A woman?"
What reached his ears was unmistakably the heated moan of a woman in heat. It resonated like a sound echoing out from deep inside a cave, but there was no mistaking it.
He loved nothing more than bedding a woman.
"Perfect timing. Been a while since I drained the pipes."
Bloodshot eyes tracking the voice, the pirate plunged after it. He was so focused that he never even noticed the blood trickling from his own ear.
"You dirty bitch. You're dead now."
Chasing the voice, he dove into the underbrush—and a familiar sound clicked in his ear.
It was the arming mechanism of a landmine, buried in the soil all around him. A column of superheated flame rose from the ground and swallowed him whole.
So it's begun.
The nest, buried deep underground, reported to me. Vibrations great and small were erupting across the surface, one after another.
Lounging comfortably in the nest, linked into it, I could observe everything happening above ground in perfect detachment.
As the pirates infected with the Hallucination Bug leapt onto the landmines, chaos consumed the area around the cruiser. But even the ones who'd dodged the bug's assault were far from safe.
The seductive pheromones pouring from the Sundews sprouting from the soil were already wrapping around them.
The Sundew was, as its name suggested, a carnivorous plant that devoured any victim who strayed too close to the nest. It had almost no direct combat power, but it exhaled a signature lure pheromone that pinned enemies in place.
By design, the Sundew's pheromone worked like a narcotic, granting its prey a fantasy of pure ecstasy. It had no effect on foes whose bodies had been replaced by machinery—cyborgs and androids—but against races like humans, it worked devastatingly well.
Anyone who smells that probably wants to eat the whole fistful of dirt under them.
On top of that, I currently possessed a pheromone-enhancing trait. The nest inherited a portion of my body-related traits, so enduring the Sundew's pheromone would be no easy feat for any of them.
I'd used this trait so often to bait people in the old days that one player on the community forums had taken to calling me Junkie-Morph.
Hey, it's the victim's fault for getting caught.
At any rate, with their comrades suddenly going berserk all around them, the Heavy Walkers standing guard alongside them must have been utterly dumbfounded.
They would scramble to respond to the all-out assault erupting from every direction—but would it really be that easy?
The biosensors installed inside the walkers would be registering absolutely nothing around the cruiser.
To the naked eye, visibility was zero, thanks to the thick fog hanging over everything. The Smog Towers born from the nest had been continuously venting toxic mist around the cruiser.
It fell far short of the fog blanketing the Great Swamplands, but this mist was plenty lethal in its own right. Linger in it too long without protection, and your lungs would corrode until you died.
In fact, some of the walker pilots had already gone still—perhaps their lungs had been weak to begin with. The other walkers seemed paralyzed with terror as their comrades suddenly collapsed, vomiting blood.
And with all hell breaking loose outside, what was happening inside the ship?
They're probably trying to figure out what's going on out there.
That was impossible.
The cameras wired into the makeshift streetlights had all been devoured into uselessness by the Gremlin Moss. The Stormguns, being machines as well, were no different.
Gremlin Moss was a counter-trait that worked on machinery through an entirely different mechanism than Hijacking or Radio Jamming.
Whereas Hijacking and Radio Jamming seized or disabled machines through harmonic waves, Gremlin Moss required direct physical infection—the moss itself had to make contact with the machine. Any infected machine was rendered completely inoperable until the moss's twenty-minute lifespan ran out.
It had one drawback—a machine infected once could never be infected again—but it also had advantages: it could be deployed remotely from the nest, as it was now, and unlike Hijacking, which could control only one machine at a time, it could cripple many at once.
It's hard to infect constantly moving targets like walkers, or something as massive as the cruiser.
A few walkers were still standing, but I'd apparently managed to neutralize a good portion of the enemies' defensive line.
Now it was time to move to the next phase.
I severed my link with the nest and began digging through the earth directly above my head.
Straight up from here was the underside of the cruiser itself.
The distance was only a hundred meters or so, and with a body twenty-five meters long carving out the tunnel, I reached the surface in no time.
When I poked my head up through the soil, a landing strut loomed right in front of me.
Through the auxiliary organs beneath my jaw—now four of them—I swept the cruiser's full silhouette.
A long, slender diamond-shaped hull, unmistakably Cult design.
Unlike the crude plating of Mega Corp or Star Union vessels, the exterior armor was as smooth as an eggshell, gleaming ivory.
No wonder nobody ever mistakes a Cult warship for anything else. They built the whole thing out of Moonsilver.
Where Blacksilver was an anti-psychic metal, Moonsilver did the opposite: it amplified the effect of psychic power.
Good thing I'm raiding the cruiser first.
The pirate captain's race was Cult—which meant he fell squarely within Moonsilver's amplification.
Not anymore, though.
The metallic footsteps of walkers wandered through the dense fog nearby. They hadn't the faintest inkling that I was directly beneath their cruiser.
I opened my jaws wide and pressed them flush against the cruiser's belly. The Acidic Fungal Gland near my esophagus responded to my intent, churning out fungus of truly horrifying potency.
The Acidic Fungal Gland was a fusion trait I'd created using Acid Blood—the Juvenile trait I'd once carried—as its base material.
Before, I could only use Acid Blood by wounding myself first. Now I could vent a hyper-corrosive substance at any target I chose, whenever I chose.
In moments, the freshly generated acidic fungus came surging out of my mouth.
The yellow-green acidic fungus latched onto the cruiser's belly and devoured the ivory Moonsilver plating in seconds.
While the fungus worked away diligently, I activated the Tooth Fairy Nest. The nests along my spine burst open one after another, spitting out flesh-eating fleas.
Reinforced by my Type, the Tooth Fairies had changed appearance from before. They were the same palm-sized creatures as ever, but chitinous carapaces had grown over their heads and bodies.
Looks like fleas wearing little helmets.
As if they'd read my thought, the Tooth Fairies snapped to attention in salute. It was rather adorable.
Crawl inside the ship and chew through every cable connected to the critical systems. Feel free to eat the crew if you need to.
Dozens of Tooth Fairies swarmed into the ship through the melted hole.
Feeling the flesh-eating fleas dispersing to every corner of the vessel, I waited for the hole to widen further. I could sense the pirates inside thrown into confusion.
Ambushes erupting on all sides outside, sudden damage blossoming from the ship's belly—everything was beyond their expectations.
While I monitored the interior through my auxiliary organs, I sensed movement approaching the hole from within the ship.
About time I went in, no?
I gripped the still-melting edges of the hole with my combat arms. Pulling with all four, I stretched it wide enough to barely squeeze my body through.
"Gaah!"
"Shit! Open fire! Everyone!"
The instant I heaved myself up through the hole in the floor, the Cult members and human pirates in reinforced suits spotted me.
They were clearly the elite assigned to guard the cruiser—they kept their composure and opened fire with the Purple Spray Guns in their hands.
Composed, I'll give them that.
The problem was that I happened to have the Psychic Reflection Carapace.
Which reflects a portion of psychic attacks right back.
The Psychic Reflection Carapace was best understood as a lesser—or purely defensive—version of the psychic technique Reflection. Whenever I took damage from a psychic attack, thirty percent of it was automatically reflected back at the attacker.
Psychic flame coiled around my outer hide. Having upgraded my plating upon reaching Young Adult stage, the burn was no longer anything like as agonizing as it used to be.
Pain Mitigation isn't even kicking in.
To me it was merely an unpleasant heat—but what about them?
A portion of the flame engulfing me reversed course and flowed back the way it came.
At the end of that reversal stood the pirates wielding their Purple Spray Guns. As the torrent of violet fire came flying back at them, the color drained from their faces.
"Aaaagh?"
"Fall ba—guuaaaargh!"
With my carapace as sturdy as it was, the Purple Spray Gun couldn't do me any real damage. But they were another story entirely.
The pirates in reinforced suits desperately tried to smother the flames that refused to die—but they knew better than anyone that it was a losing battle.
The situation room was up this way, if I recall.
Paying no mind to the pirates collapsing one by one, I began to walk.
Straight above me lay the situation room.
A defensive fortress erected a considerable distance from the cruiser.
The closer one drew to the central jungle of the Saintopia 02 continent—home of the Temple of the Forgotten Earth—the worse the radio interference became, thanks to the peculiar energy field the temple emitted.
That was why Muriel had constructed a fortress between the cruiser and the temple: a forward bastion that could double as a temporary command post in case of unforeseen disaster.
"We'll be staying here tonight."
Muriel and her subordinates, returning from dismantling the camp near the temple, had decided to spend the night at the fortress. Come early tomorrow morning, they were due to board a transport and return to the cruiser.
Even with an enemy player's assault considered half-certain, Muriel had her reasons for not hurrying back. The intermittent radio interference around this area was one—but more importantly, she'd been waiting to extract more information about the Amorph player from Mother of the Sky.
「Guaaaaargh! Hkk! Hkk!」
"Boys. You're not going to die either way, so just turn it nice and tight."
"Yes, ma'am."
Despite the late hour, the torture of Mother of the Sky was in full swing in the fortress courtyard. As the wheel turned and her entrails, bound in wire, were shredded, she howled in agony.
Muriel watched the scene with a bored expression.
"That must hurt like crazy. At this point, shouldn't you just start talking?"
「Screw you, bitch! Even if I talked, there's nothing you could do with the information!」
"That's for me to decide. And I'm quite certain—you've fought him before."
Muriel had changed her approach because something about Mother of the Sky's attitude had struck her as strange.
She's met him before. Definitely.
She knew as well as anyone that the rank-5 Amorph player's infamy stretched across the stars.
But Mother of the Sky's attitude was unmistakably abnormal.
The woman was a ranker, same as Muriel—a Wolf ranker, ranked fifteenth, even higher than herself.
So what if the Amorph had outranked her in the past? Right now he was nothing more than a Sub-adult, wasn't he?
Besides, the Mother of the Sky Muriel had witnessed here had been exceptionally skilled.
She's even learned Apotheosis.
Apotheosis was an advanced Wolf technique, known to be notoriously difficult to master.
As far as Muriel knew, Mother of the Sky lacked the desperate hunger for improvement that drove other players. She'd chosen to live among the planet's current inhabitants rather than pursue power like the rest—and even so, she'd learned Apotheosis. That made her formidable beyond question.
If I hadn't brought that equipment, I couldn't have beaten her.
It was a "weapon" she'd originally packed to subdue the Father of the Earth, at that.
And yet here was this magnificent Mother of the Sky, terrified of the Amorph. Muriel simply couldn't understand it.
A Wolf who'd mastered Apotheosis. Muriel, who'd subdued that very Wolf. There was no reason on earth for her to fear the creature.
They must have met and fought in the old game. That has to be it.
That reaction was one only a person who'd suffered something terrible at his hands could wear.
Mother of the Sky was probably crushed utterly and completely.
She feared him because of that memory—that was what Muriel concluded.
"If he's as terrifying as all that, then you're not safe either. If you don't want to die... then start talking."
「Pah! You killed my family. If I could kill you, I'd gladly sell my soul to that Amorph!」
"Mmm. Is that so?"
Nobody understood better than Muriel, the device's designer, just how agonizing that torture was. And still Mother of the Sky refused to break.
Muriel gestured to a pirate, and the wheel stopped turning.
"Then shall we have a chat with your beloved family instead?"
「What?」
She snapped her fingers, and other pirates dragged in a group of Wolf prisoners. Every one of them wore an iron chain around his neck—every one of them a young boy.
「You fucking bitch!」
"Now then, boys. Bring the wheels."
「Stop it!」
The pirates carried in wheels much like the instrument that had been used on Mother of the Sky. At the sight of the gruesome devices, the young Wolves began to tremble pitifully.
"I'll ask one last time. If you don't answer, all these little Wolf friends of yours are going to give a talent show."
「A bitch too vile to eat raw! You're a person, same as me! How can you do this!?」
"Aaah, you're so loud. Come on, hurry up and answer, would you? Otherwise the boys might do something very naughty."
Mother of the Sky could tell that Muriel's threat was no bluff.
That vicious pirate captain was more than capable of following through.
「...I'll talk. I'll tell you everything. Just don't touch them.」
"That depends entirely on the attitude you take."
「What do you want to know?」
"You've fought him, haven't you? Start with that. Tell me exactly what happened."
And so, broken at last by Muriel's threats, Mother of the Sky began to speak in a subdued voice.
「...You know about that too, don't you? The Battle of Planet Shepherd.」
"The one where four clans gathered on that jungle planet and fought over a single player... wait. Don't tell me."
「Yes. We all gathered there trying to catch that Amorph player. I was the leader of the Savage Clan—one of the four clans that took part.」
That Mother of the Sky had once been a clan leader was news even to Muriel.
Small wonder—Mother of the Sky had been famous even in the game for turning down every recruitment offer from the renowned clans.
「Back then he wasn't even a ranker. His evolution stage was still just Young Adult. So we assumed it would be an easy win. But...」
"But?"
「Less than an hour after we landed on the planet, he destroyed our ships. He wiped out the communication towers that relayed to the fleet outside—left only a single one standing.」
"...What?"
「It was to cut off our retreat. After that, he hunted us down through the jungle one or two at a time. He moved as though he knew our every plan inside and out, so nothing we tried ever worked.」
"......"
「Flayed corpses? That was child's play. He toyed with us in every bizarre, unthinkable way you can imagine. Because of him we fractured. We turned on each other. Well—that was his intention too, I imagine.」
Mother of the Sky's voice stayed flat and even, but something heavy was steeped deep beneath it.
"...You said one tower was left? Why not just contact the outside and call for reinforcements?"
「Heh heh heh. We did. Only one clan's tower survived, so at first we thought that clan had betrayed us. But as time passed, we came to lean on each other. Waiting for the reinforcements that clan had called for.」
Mother of the Sky's voice was bitter.
From her expression, Muriel could guess how the story ended.
Those reinforcements almost certainly never came.
But the truth that fell from Mother of the Sky's mouth exceeded even her imagination.
「I found out later there was a reason that tower had been left standing.」
"Which was?"
「He left it there on purpose.」
"What?"
「The clan members manning that tower were already dead. He'd been impersonating them the whole time. He knew everything we discussed in our councils, and he was filing false reports to the outside.」
"......"
「After that he deceived us again and again. We couldn't hold out, and we were annihilated. My clan shattered completely. We'd been lied to so many times that we could no longer trust one another.」
Hearing this, Muriel reached two conclusions.
That Amorph player was properly, certifiably insane.
And that she herself was in a properly, certifiably screwed position.
"W-well, it's just a game anyw—"
「Right. A game. Except this is reality now. And he's out here in it. You have no idea what kind of horrific tactics he's capable of—so how can you be this goddamn complacent?」
"...He's barely even a Sub-adult!"
「While you sit here playing—」
Mother of the Sky's roar cut her off. The raw force behind that single instant was so terrifying that Muriel flinched.
「—he'll have finished every last preparation to destroy you. By now your cruiser's probably already in his hands?」
The moment the words landed, a cold panic began to spread through Muriel's chest.
What if...? No. No way. Impossible.
Forcing herself to look calm, she called over the subordinate in charge of communications. She needed to raise the cruiser.
Because of the radio interference blanketing the jungle, only specialized equipment could get a signal through, so it took some time to establish the connection.
Before long, the subordinate brought over an activated communicator. Taking it in hand, she asked the cruiser a question, her voice trembling despite herself.
"Boys? Nothing's wrong over there, right?"
「Kzzzzzzt」
Nothing but static answered her. When her gaze snapped to the subordinate, he gave a hand sign: the connection was already live.
"Anybody alive over there, answer me!"
「Kzzt. It's... y o u? Kzzzzzzt」
At the words drifting through the communicator, she felt it—
fear, and a shiver crawling up her spine.