Night Hunt (1)
"We've arrived."
"Move out."
Six Heavy Walkers and one beast disembarked from the transport ship.
Under Muriel's orders, they had come to search the site where the Thunder God's lightning had struck, to determine whether any survivors remained.
A land that had teemed with life just hours before was now a wasteland of ash, sand, and death.
With every detection device running, they swept across the withered wilderness.
"Huh? Hey! There's something over here!"
One of the walkers spotted marks left on the ground and called to the others. As a second walker clanked its way over, the first used the video camera mounted on its chassis to record the trail.
"Boss, did you see this? There's a dragging mark here."
「Ha. That crazy monster bastard. It survived?」
"Looks that way."
「Ask the Mother of the Sky. What condition is it in?」
"Yes, ma'am."
One of the walkers yanked hard on the heavy chain it carried. The Mother of the Sky, a collar cinched around her neck, was dragged helplessly forward.
「Kgh!」
"Hey, take a look. This is its trail, right?"
"Far as we know, the thing walks upright on two legs, but look—these marks show something being dragged along the ground. What's going on?"
「You'd better answer straight. Unless you don't want to watch your 'family' die.」
「…Tch. Wait.」
Left with no choice, the Mother of the Sky examined the tracks closely. Her senses, sharper than any advanced machinery, told her exactly what state the creature that left them was in, and she spoke.
「…He was dragging half his body along. Given the shed carapace fragments scattered in the gouges and the acid residue on the ground, he's wounded too. Judging by the direction, he went into that forest.」
「You're not lying, are you?」
「I can read it plainly enough. Why don't you go check for yourself?」
Implanted in the back of the Mother of the Sky's skull was a special chip Muriel had installed.
It read the wearer's brainwave patterns to determine whether she was lying or harboring treacherous intent. As long as that chip sat in her head, the Mother of the Sky could not speak a single falsehood.
「Hm? Fine by me. Then again, nothing that tanked a Thunder God strike could've come out unscathed.」
"What are your orders?"
「It's wounded, so it can't have gone far. Find it and kill it. The Mother of the Sky should be able to manage that much. Right?」
「A wounded sub-adult, I can kill.」
「Hehe, you boys heard her, right?」
"Yes, ma'am!"
The transmission ended, and the Heavy Walkers collected the shed carapace fragments and followed the trail into the forest.
Above their heads, the transport ship flew on, scanning the burning jungle to confirm the trail continued deeper within.
Not one of Muriel's underlings harbored the slightest doubt that they would easily destroy the monster that had left those tracks behind.
But there was something they didn't know.
The Mother of the Sky had told no lies—she had simply answered Muriel's questions with perfect, literal precision.
In the opposite direction from where they were heading, there was another trail, one the walkers had failed to detect.
It was a half-collapsed crater.
The land around it was pocked with pits where redwoods and boulders had been torn out of the earth whole, so the pirates assumed it was no different from the other marks scattered across the plain. But the Mother of the Sky, with her extraordinary Super Sense, could tell the truth.
It was a hole made by a long, serpentine body dragging itself into the ground.
'Ha. That morph-fucker. He actually evolved into a Young Adult.'
The Mother of the Sky concealed what only she knew.
Chained like a slave to the pirates, her eyes glinted cold.
There are a few things I always check before beginning a hunt.
Information, timing, and terrain.
First, information.
Who is the enemy? What equipment, traits, and skills do they possess? What strategy will they employ? And how much do they know about me? Only by understanding all of this can I steer a battle toward an easy outcome.
The Amorph is a species that grows terrifyingly powerful with every successful evolution, but the road to that power is brutal—because everyone in the universe but me is my enemy. How much information I gather is, quite literally, a matter of survival.
Next is timing.
Whether I strike by day or by night, whether the enemy has noticed my approach—or if so, when they will notice—these are all weighed and considered before I choose the right moment to hunt.
Last is terrain.
Where the enemy is, what the ground offers, where I will lure them, and where I will finish the fight—I need to know all of it.
So how many advantages did I hold going into this?
On the information front, neither she nor I knew much about the other, but at minimum, I had the edge.
'Muriel believes I'm still a Sub-adult.'
Deploying the Thunder God had been a sound choice on her part—if I truly had been a Sub-adult. No matter how fast I fled, escaping its blast radius would have been nearly impossible.
'But she'll want confirmation.'
This was a woman who rigged her own cruiser with bombs in case it got hijacked. She would absolutely check whether I was dead. Once her people swept the blast site, it wouldn't take them long to realize I had survived.
'And that's where the real game begins.'
She will assume I took critical damage from the Thunder God.
In truth, the explosions of the Thunder God and the cruiser had wounded me—only lightly, but wounded all the same. My outer skin had scorched under the heat, and chunks of my carapace had been blasted loose.
Even now, fragments of shed skin littered the trail I'd crawled into the forest.
Every last one of them had been left deliberately.
To make my enemies believe I was in bad shape.
Hide my evolution stage. Hide my condition. Make them misjudge exactly what they were hunting.
The information war had begun the moment I emerged from underground and slipped into the jungle.
'They'll try to follow my trail, but….'
Detection equipment tended to malfunction in this jungle. The pirates wouldn't lose me entirely, but it would take them a good while to actually find me.
And while they closed in slowly, my own tasks were already set.
Confirm where Muriel was. Reshape the battlefield to my advantage.
Fortunately, before the cruiser went down, I had read through the data stored in its ship computer.
Thanks to that, I already knew where she would likely be.
There were two possible locations for her large encampment.
The vast jungle expanse spreading out from the continent's center, and the canyon region home to the native Volf villages.
I was certain Muriel would be in the jungle.
'The Temple of the Forgotten Earth sits at the heart of the continent.'
The Temple of the Forgotten Earth was, in the parlance of other games, a kind of dungeon—one that held powerful Unique-grade equipment.
But the entry conditions were punishing, and the Volf statues guarding its interior were formidable, so conquering it demanded serious preparation.
Chief among the obstacles was the special energy field surrounding the temple.
It defied detection from long range, and the closer one got, the more frequently communications equipment failed. With bad luck, a transport ship in flight could simply cut out mid-air and crash.
That was why players attempting the temple always established supply camps at a safe distance. Muriel, like every player before her, would have built her large base camp deep in the jungle for the assault.
'When I checked the cargo manifests, it was nothing but weapons.'
And the steady stream of supply transfers made it clear—they had all gone toward the temple raid. By now, she may have already cleared it and claimed her reward.
'The High Priest's Golden Spear, wasn't it?'
A weapon whose attack power grows with every sentient being its wielder kills. Each death adds only a sliver, but there is no cap to the growth—the more sentients slaughtered, the more infinitely powerful it becomes.
The moment she learned I was alive, she'd butcher every minion and slave she had to feed it.
'I'll need to verify that part firsthand.'
Half-buried in the earth from my work, I lifted my head.
Thirty minutes earlier, I had arrived near the large encampment where Muriel was stationed.
I had sprinted here at full power without a single rest, covering the distance in a day and a half.
I now sat a few kilometers away from the encampment.
And here, I was preparing my battlefield.
There was not a single patch of ground within sight that wasn't blanketed in black mucus.
The lush grass had all twisted and died, replaced in its place by blood-red vines that grew like veins. Nestled among the vines sat spores that spewed toxic mist without pause.
The towering redwoods rising from the corrupted soil looked healthy on the outside, but their cores were rotting away. Peel back the thick bark, and black slime and wriggling worms burst out from within.
Nail-sized winged insects—the Phantom Whispers—flitted about, searching for any uninfected host nearby.
Having confirmed that the nest was growing along perfectly on its own, I released the link and rose from my spot.
'That makes three.'
I was building my nests in a ring around the encampment. Just as the Physical Enhancement Type and Psionic Enhancement Type each granted their own perks, the Nest Enhancement Type came with a bonus of its own.
When multiple nests merged into one, all trait effects were doubled.
When that happened, Muriel's encampment would be bathed in toxic mist more virulent than the depths of the Great Swamplands of Saintopia 02 itself.
'And if the fight happens there, the Human Sacrifice trait will shine.'
Before my evolution into a Young Adult, I had acquired a trait from the swamplands called Human Sacrifice. On its own, it does nothing. But the moment a corpse falls within my nest's terrain, everything changes.
With Human Sacrifice, the nest absorbs the corpse and channels its energy directly to the nest's master. Even if my limbs are torn off, the energy drawn in through Human Sacrifice accelerates my regeneration, restoring me to full within minutes.
In other words, so long as corpses keep coming, I become something very close to a living zombie.
'And it doubles as a counter to that Golden Spear, besides.'
I moved on to find the site for my next nest.
Nest-building drained enormous energy, so I made sure to replenish myself between bouts of work.
"Gwaek?!"
I swallowed a gorilla with an ant's head whole through my erosion tentacles.
A carnivore called an Andril, it boasted raw stats beyond even a Nightstalker's—but it was nothing against a Young Adult like me.
'If I had the leisure, I'd at least savor the taste.'
Alas, that was a luxury I couldn't afford.
After devouring a few more Andrils, I found a suitable spot to plant a nest and lowered myself down.
Just as mucus was pouring from my body and the nest was taking shape, a thunderous roar split the air above me.
Hm?
It was the scream of transport engines.
Careless of the blighted trees, the ship dropped into low-altitude flight—and then I felt seven massive objects falling toward the ground.
'They found me already?'
Even with a Bio Scanner, locating me in this jungle wouldn't be easy. Detection systems here frequently went dark or reset themselves mid-sweep.
Wait.
The landed forces, apparently having not found me with any Bio Scanner, began moving in an entirely different direction. They were heading toward the trail I'd left crawling into the forest.
'No idea what's going on, but….'
I'd have to deal with them before the nest was discovered. Losing a nest would cost me far more than losing my cover.
I released the link with my fourth nest and climbed up into the trees.
Then I moved toward the enemy in complete silence.
My elongated body was a blessing here—where the gaps between trees were short, I simply stretched my way across, and where they weren't, I used my gliding membranes.
Once I'd closed the distance, I could see exactly how they had tracked me.
Their party consisted of six Heavy Walkers and a single beast.
That creature at the head of the column—I had seen its kind in the game a few times myself.
'A Volf who learned Divine Ascension?'
An eagle's head, a lion's body—the beast resembled a griffon straight out of mythology, and it was unmistakably a Volf.
Unlike the Amorph, which pursues endless evolution, a Volf's story centers on the journey to reclaim the divinity sleeping within its own blood.
The Volf shapeshifting ability is deeply tied to this lore: the closer a Volf draws to its divine nature, the more it transforms—not into mere animals, but into sacred beasts like griffons or unicorns.
So that griffon-shaped Volf, in Amorph terms, sat somewhere between Sub-adult and Young Adult.
'A griffon could track me, sure. But something's off.'
A griffon's eyes rival an Amorph's Super Sense, sharp enough to follow my trail even from high altitude.
How they'd followed me from the transport ship, I could understand. But one fundamental question remained.
'It's clearly a named player—so why is it with pirates… Hm?'
As I watched the pirates with my Camouflage active, the griffon turned its head—and for an instant, our eyes met.
It appeared not to have spotted me, smoothly looking away. But with my Amorph Super Sense, I knew better.
It had registered me. It was pretending it hadn't.
'Why, I couldn't say.'
But that was easy enough to learn—I'd simply catch it and ask.
Quietly, carefully, I crept above the Heavy Walkers.