Night Hunt (3)
"……"
Sitting in the commander's camp within the defensive perimeter, Muriel stared at the monitor with icy eyes.
The biometric graph that had been surging violently only moments ago now lay perfectly flat, tracing an unbroken line across the screen.
There was only one thing that could mean.
「Boss, there's a large quantity of blood residue here.」
The footage sent by her subordinates showed pools of blood. The genetic scanner's verdict was unambiguous—it had all come from Mother of the Sky.
With that much blood spilled, and the chip's signal no longer detectable, the conclusion about what had happened to Mother of the Sky practically wrote itself.
Amorph does not make companions. By now, her body would be torn into shreds, drifting through the acid depths of his stomach.
"Tch. What a pain in the ass."
The only reason Muriel had kept Mother of the Sky alive was that one of her allies, who shared her cause, had wanted a female Wolf slave.
Mother of the Sky had fit her associate's exacting tastes perfectly. The plan had been to break her in, then hand her over—until everything went sideways.
That goddamn bastard.
If that infamous Morph-fucker had eaten Mother of the Sky and gained her traits, things were about to get far more complicated.
She knew, of course, that the odds of Amorph actually acquiring a trait were low.
But the universe had a habit of keeping its secrets.
Not that I ever expect to lose…
Muriel opened the safe inside the camp.
Within it sat an aged communicator and a diamond-shaped kit.
The most destructive weapon in Muriel's arsenal was the Thunder God.
But the Thunder God was, in the end, merely a tool for tilting a battle in her favor.
The weapon she was best at wielding was contained within this very kit.
She tucked the communicator into her bodice, lifted the kit carefully with both hands, and sat down before her computer.
"Tsk. I'll have to restock once this fight's over."
Clicking her tongue, she opened the kit with the slow deliberateness of someone handling something precious. Inside lay an assortment of drugs and small mechanical devices.
Psionium, which elevated the user's latent potential by an entire tier. The Ultra Controller, a drug that dramatically sharpened the precision of psychic techniques. The Nano Spartan Module, which hardened the body's skin to absurd degrees while accelerating regeneration. And more besides.
Every one of them was powerful—and every one of them came with side effects nothing to sneeze at. Had she not possessed a body different from ordinary humans thanks to her 'perk,' she would have thought long and hard before using any of them.
After inspecting the contents thoroughly, she closed the kit and called for a subordinate outside.
"You called, Boss?"
"Oppa, they're going to hit us soon. Round up every slave we've been holding and gather them in the central plaza."
"The slaves? Understood."
The Wolf slaves had all been earmarked as reinforcement material for her spears.
For a fleeting moment she felt a pang of regret at throwing away toys she'd gone to such lengths to collect—but she shook her head.
Consumables like those could always be replaced.
More pressing was the tally: a cruiser, the hard-won prize of Mother of the Sky, and now her precious drugs and enhancement modules as well.
The losses Amorph had inflicted on her were by no means trivial.
Morph-fucker bastard. Forget about dying peacefully.
In all her life, Muriel had never once let someone who cost her go unpunished.
The Rank 5 Amorph would pay his debt with his own blood.
It's done.
Having confirmed that the tenth nest was swelling on its own, I severed the link.
My adorable spores were belching out slime and toxic fog in thick plumes, while the black tide carpeting the ground crawled forward without pause.
Until now, I had circled Muriel's encampment, planting nests in an encircling pattern. Ten in all—five on the surface, five underground—and nine of them had already fused together into a single contiguous mass.
Within ten minutes, the tenth would merge with the rest.
And then my aerial bombardment of the enemy's lair would begin.
Though there's something I need to check first.
I made my way through a pre-dug tunnel toward the sixth nest.
The underground world that had once been packed with soil, stone, and tree roots no longer existed. The space was now thick with clinging mucus, malignant tumors, pustules that vomited up revolting slime, and spores that poisoned the air without end.
Anyone else might have found it nauseating, but to me it felt like home.
Passing through the long tunnel, I emerged into the subterranean chamber I had hollowed out, where the sixth nest greeted me.
Stretched across the nest lay a Wolf in a half-human, half-beast form.
She had the head of an eagle and a mane-like cascade of long hair, atop a body that mingled lion and woman. Her hands and upper torso were those of a woman covered in a lion's pelt, her lower half that of a lioness—though she had no tail.
Beastlike features. So her deification stage must be fairly advanced.
Had her injuries not been so severe, she might have made for a genuinely tough opponent.
Thanks to the Symbiote Spores, she was recovering rapidly now, but a full recovery would still take several more days.
I lowered myself into the center of the nest and called out to her.
"If·you're·awake,·then·get·up."
「……」
I had known she was awake ever since I entered the nest. Her heartbeat was nothing like it had been when she'd been unconscious.
The gryphon Wolf quietly opened her eyes.
「Surprising. You're not going to kill me?」
"No."
「Hm?」
"Your·body·will·be·useful·later."
Sparing the gryphon Wolf didn't mean I intended to keep her alive indefinitely.
I crawled close to her, dipped a finger into the blood pooled on the ground, and slipped it into my mouth. A sweetness spread across my tongue—honey-sweet, as if she carried honey in her veins instead of blood.
Shame I can't eat her right now.
Keeping the gryphon Wolf alive benefited me in a number of ways.
Short term, she was a wellspring of useful intelligence—starting with what I'd need to fight Muriel, and extending to information about players in general.
One might ask: why not simply extract what I need about Muriel and kill her afterward? But that would be a mistake.
Even if I later captured Muriel and wrung the truth about players out of her, without a second source to cross-check against, I'd have no way of knowing what was truth and what was lies.
And the gryphon Wolf hates Muriel.
By my own assessment, the gryphon Wolf's skills were respectable. Taking her into a fight against Muriel would give me a solid asset.
Betrayal was impossible—I'd implanted a parasite in her while she was unconscious. Thanks to my Infection Enhancement Type, the pain the parasite could inflict had climbed to extraordinary levels; if she turned on me, she would die instantly.
Unless I personally commanded the parasite to release her, her options for escaping my control were severely limited.
Beyond the short-term advantages, she'd prove useful in the long run as well.
She'll come in handy when I need to meet the conditions for Ascension.
From the Young Adult stage onward, the requirements for evolution became far more demanding than before. It was no longer a matter of devouring a few sapient beings and collecting a few Types.
Instead, I'd need to hunt specific creatures or acquire Unique Traits.
I pulled up my newly updated evolution conditions.
Some conditions for evolution from 'Young Adult' to 'Adult' have been met.
APEX Kills:0 / 30(Unfulfilled)
Unique Traits Held:2 / 10(Unfulfilled)
Types Held:4 / 6(Unfulfilled)
To evolve from Young Adult to Adult, I would have to hunt thirty rare creatures classified as supreme apex predators—APEX organisms—and secure ten of the Unique Traits they possessed.
The difference from before was that the kills now counted toward the condition even if I didn't eat my prey. That change had come about because I'd acquired traits that affected the Genetic Essence absorption mechanism, like the Essence Harvester's Jaw.
Not that it actually got any easier.
The APEX category encompassed everything from potent psychic organisms like the Gallagons to creatures of overwhelming power like the Skywhale and its higher breed, the Arcane Orca. Every organism classified as APEX was immensely strong—and exceedingly rare, so much so that merely finding one was an ordeal.
My pact with Adhai was made for the same reason—to get past the Young Adult stage.
Gallagons were a textbook example of APEX organisms. If Adhai guided me to the Dragon's Nest, I could meet the evolution conditions without much difficulty.
There's also the option of leaning hard on the Transcendence System, but…
At present, I possessed two Unique Traits—both obtained through the Transcendence System.
One might think that with the Transcendence System, there'd be no need to hunt APEX organisms at all. But there were problems with that logic.
Not knowing a trait's effects, and the restrictions imposed on using other traits.
Those two things were the great weaknesses of the Transcendence System.
Unique Traits gained through the system were entirely new—traits that had never existed in the game.
Which meant it was hard to judge whether they were immediately useful to me, and what restrictions they would impose remained unknowable until after I acquired them.
I'll have to balance APEX hunting and the Transcendence System appropriately.
In any case, keeping the gryphon Wolf alive sprang from the same logic as my pact with Adhai.
The ascent from Adult to Ascension demanded conditions incomparably harsher than anything before. I couldn't know how things would unfold—but at this point in time, the odds were good that her life would become necessary.
「Ha. Same as ever, aren't you.」
She seemed to have a rough sense of why I hadn't killed her.
And yet she showed no particular rage or disgust toward me.
Not that hostility would get her anywhere.
Her injuries were still critical, and thanks to the symbiotes I'd attached to her body, she was receiving both healing effects and immunity to the contaminants flooding the nest.
I didn't even need the parasite. Simply withdrawing the symbiotes would kill her.
Besides, she was a player who knew me well. She understood exactly how foolish resistance would be in her position.
「Doesn't matter. As long as you keep your promise.」
"Mu·ri·el·will·die·in·agony."
「Good. I, Mother of the Sky, will follow you.」
Just as I'd expected.
She who called herself Mother of the Sky had made the wise choice.
The gryphon Wolf forced herself upright and bowed her head to me.
「…I'll recover as fast as I can, so I can be of use.」
"Un·nec·es·sary. Use·your·body·as·you·see·fit."
In truth, her inability to rise wasn't solely due to the damage Muriel had inflicted.
Half of it was my fault, but there was no need to mention that.
When I'd decided to spare her, I had removed the biometric chip from the back of her skull with my Ghost Claws.
And in the process, I'd made a small mistake.
Extracting a chip with nothing but the Ghost Claws—no Dexterity trait to assist—was no easy feat, and as a result I'd left her with a tremendous amount of bleeding and lingering aftereffects.
Well, a gryphon Wolf should bounce back quickly enough.
An ordinary Wolf would have died the moment I pulled the chip out. She was not an ordinary Wolf.
Her 'deification' stage was advanced enough that even in her untransformed state, she had inherited the abilities and appearance of her gryphon mode.
With a gryphon's regeneration stacked on top of the Symbiote Spores' healing, she would recover enough to move alongside me when I went after Muriel.
More urgently, though, there was something I needed right now.
"M·u·r·i·e·l's·weaknesses. Speak."
Until the nests were finished, I needed to learn everything I could about Muriel's equipment, her strengths and weaknesses, her habits in combat.
Who Mother of the Sky really was, and everything about the players—those questions could wait until Muriel was dealt with.
Though it was the dead of night, the interior of the defensive camp and the surrounding forest blazed as bright as noon.
The massive floodlamps atop the towering watchtowers never once stopped sweeping the barricades ringing the camp and the terrain beyond, while inside, hundreds of pirates stood wide-eyed and braced for the enemy's assault.
The pirates' unblinking vigilance would have put actual soldiers to shame—and the reason they threw themselves so completely into the watch was their boss, Muriel.
She had skewered the Wolf slaves gathered in the plaza to death, one by one, with her spear.
Butchering livestock—that was the closest comparison.
The pirates of the Humanity Cartel knew all too well what fate awaited anyone who displeased their enraged boss. Discipline, naturally, held firm.
Worse, word had just come that every bit of contact with the search parties sent outside had gone dark—a fact that wound the fortress's defenders tighter still.
「Watchtower One, all clear.」
「Watchtower Two, all clear.」
「Watchtower Three, fog's rolling in out of nowhere.」
"This is Watchtower Four—seeing the same fog here as Three."
「Watchtower Five, fog? It hasn't even rained, why all of a sudden—huh, it's showing up on our side too.」
As ominous radio chatter crackled between the watchtowers, three pirates were hauling Wolf corpses from the plaza toward a warehouse.
"Boss looks properly pissed, huh?"
"Damn it. I just want to get through tonight in one piece."
"Hey, I've got a lucky charm on me. Want it? Could save your life."
About halfway through the job, a thick, murky fog settled over the defensive camp.
Fog rolling in at midnight from a hot, humid jungle wasn't strange in itself—but fog this dense, without a drop of rain, was another matter entirely.
And there was a smell riding on it. A bad smell. One that anyone who'd worked as a Spacedog knew all too well.
It was the smell of death. The kind of stench only carrion crows circling rotting corpses could love.
"Khugh!"
"Gah, what is that, rotting corpse…?"
"Ugh, let's just finish up and get out of here."
Gagging, the pirates cleaning up the bodies hurried their steps toward the warehouse.
Once inside, they tipped the cart and dumped its cargo of corpses into a corner. Dozens of Wolf corpses were already piled there in a grim pyramid. The earthen floor was thoroughly soaked with the blood that had drained from them and the scraps of their viscera.
Every last corpse in that pile lay with its eyes wide open—as if to say they would not forget their killers' sins, even in death.
One pirate shuddered at the gruesome sight.
"Fuck, that's top-three on the list of the most fucked-up things I've ever seen."
"Spare me the bitching and give us a hand."
"Tch. Fine. Ptoo!"
Spitting on the ground, the pirate moved to help his comrades gather the corpses that had tumbled out onto the floor.
"Huh?"
He would have done exactly that—had he not seen a corpse twitch before he could turn away.
"What the hell was that?"
He rubbed his eyes and stared at the bodies again.
As if to prove he hadn't imagined it, the corpses nearest the ground were being absorbed into the pitch-black soil.
He moved to tell his comrades about the grotesque phenomenon.
The instant he opened his mouth, a long, massive hand burst up out of the ground. He never even managed to scream before he was dragged down into the earth.
"Hey! Give us a han—huh? Where'd he go?"
"Wha—? He was right there a second ago!"
Electric lamps hung from the warehouse ceiling, keeping the interior from being truly dark. And in that well-lit space, their comrade had simply vanished.
"You—you little shit! Quit screwing around!"
"A joke? Now of all times?! Come out already!"
Perhaps their missing comrade had heard them shouting—because the heap of corpses abruptly came collapsing down.
The pirates hoped it was their friend playing some sick prank. But what rose up from among the bodies was not their comrade.
It was a serpent bearing six sharp appendages.
The snake tore into a pirate's head at bullet speed.
In an instant, the head was gone, and blood geysered from the neck of the headless body.
"Wha—?"
The pirate standing beside him only came to his senses when his comrade's blood splattered across his face. Only then did he register that two of his friends had just been murdered inside the warehouse.
"U—uaaagh!"
He screamed and toppled backward—and that fall, by a hair's breadth, saved him from the serpent's next strike.
Horrified by the sight of the snake plunging into the ground between his legs, he scrambled and crawled his way out of the warehouse.
The moment he was outside, he blew the whistle hanging around his neck with everything he had. A shriek like a raptor crying across the open sky rang out across the entire defensive camp.
"Enemy attack!"
"Where?!"
"The warehouse!"
Pirates' voices erupted from every corner of the camp, and the whistle-blower somehow dragged himself to his feet, desperate to run.
Then, behind him, came a thunderous roar. It was unmistakably the sound of support girders and a roof being blown apart.
As he sprinted, he saw fragments of what had been the warehouse hurtling into the sky.
And then, directly above the fleeing pirate's head, something as thick and long as a redwood came crashing down.
CRUNCH.
He never got the chance to scream, crushed flat beneath the enormous mass. And so he died without ever learning that the massive object was, in fact, a living creature's tail.
「■-------!」
The thing that had flattened a pirate into a pulp with its tail reared back and bellowed to the heavens.
As if to announce that the night hunt inside this fortress began now.