Night Hunt (4)
"M-Monster! It's a monster!"
"Kill it!"
When I burst up through the center of their fortified camp, the pirates screamed themselves hoarse. A merciless rain of light followed. Over a hundred pirates, dozens of walkers, and defensive turrets mounted at every corner opened fire all at once, and the wall of death they wove together was nothing short of overwhelming.
If I'd still been a Young Adult, that attack would have left me with wounds beyond any hope of recovery.
Not anymore, though.
As the storm poured down on me, the sound of rain hammering a tin roof rang out from my hide. Against the defenses of my carapace—a living suit of armor—their firepower might as well have been nothing at all.
Time to teach these wastrels a lesson about conserving ammunition.
I tore straight through the crossfire and plunged into their midst.
All six of my combat arms shot out at once, hunting down armed pirates. Having grown to over twenty meters since evolving into a Young Adult, my arms and claws had grown along with me. Every time a claw grazed a pirate, his body split apart; every time a combat arm scooped one up, he went flying to be smashed against the camp's outer wall.
"Aaagh! You're insane!"
"Aaaah! Die, die, die!"
When the Bone Axe at the tip of a combat arm took off someone's head, my Erosion Tentacles caught and swallowed it before it could hit the ground—ever diligent, my tentacles.
A few pirates, in what must have been a last desperate gambit, drew Sonic Blades from their belts and charged me. Ultra-vibrating blades with cutting power enough to shear through thick timber and hardened steel came flying at me.
"Huh?"
Those very blades that had put the fear of death into me so many times before snapped with almost laughable ease. The pirates stared, wearing the stupid expressions of men who couldn't believe what was happening in front of their eyes. Losing your composure mid-battle is more fatal than anything.
They paid for it with their useless heads, separated from their bodies.
"Damn it! Just blast him!"
"Fuck!"
The Heavy Walkers, watching me carve through their comrades at arm's length, emptied the stormguns and plasma launchers mounted on both arms into me. A baptism of absurdly massive depleted uranium shells and devastating plasma beams churned the ground where I stood into a cratered wasteland. The pirates I was tearing limb from limb were ripped apart by the stray fire, mashed into six ragged pieces within seconds.
What a waste.
I was mourning the squandered Genetic Essence when a bolt of plasma energy—an order of magnitude beyond anything a gauss rifle could produce—slammed into my head.
Grrrrr.
An attack that would have hurled even a Sub-adult sprawling backward.
Now? It tilted my head slightly. That was all.
"He's—he's insane!"
"The plasma launchers aren't even working!"
I could hear the pilot-operators of the Heavy Walkers screaming in horror. Honestly, the damage wasn't literally zero—the hide where the beam struck had glowed red from the heat, and I felt pain too.
But it was pain I could endure. Pain I could carry.
Time to return what you gave me.
My jaw split open along both sides, and the two organs deep inside my body kicked into high gear. The Acidic Fungal Gland—a fusion trait built from my original Acid Blood. The Rot Fungi Organ—a throat organ that brews spores saturated with rot fungi. The twin instruments of hell made their diligent preparations to visit exquisite suffering upon my enemies.
Then yellowish-green liquid and black spores rushed up my throats together and erupted from my mouths. Contamination lethal to both machines and men came hurtling toward the Heavy Walkers and the pirates clustered around them.
When the acidic fungus—something that melts alloy like butter—burned through the walkers' armor, the rot fungi seeped into the gaps and set to work on human flesh. The pilots had no time to bail out; they wore the fungus like a shroud and howled.
"Graaaaagh! S-Save me!"
"Gaaack!"
"Eh—ehhhh! Careful—gaahk!"
The walkers' thick armor, designed to shield their pilots from every hostile element, had become the very cages that trapped them. Linked to their pilots' minds, the walkers stopped firing and began thrashing wildly in place—and the pirates using them as cover were crushed to paste under the feet of multi-meter columns of steel.
"We can't win this!"
"The Boss! We need the Boss!"
As I blew apart pirates and walkers alike without discrimination, the survivors' morale shattered and they bolted.
There was no need to chase them. The fog blanketing the fortress, and the nest crawling up from beneath the ground, would see to them.
"Gahk—gaaak?!"
"The fog's poison—guh!"
Within a few steps they realized their respiratory systems were failing. Forgetting all about escape, the pirates collapsed where they stood and vomited blood mixed with shreds of their own flesh.
Every pirate in the fortress had been wearing reinforced suits. Their helmets had gas protection—but against the toxic fog belched out by the smog towers, ten times stronger now that ten nests had merged into one, it fell far short.
Even if it held, they wouldn't have lasted long.
The tenfold-strengthened toxic fog carried venom just a shade weaker than that of the Great Swamplands on the Saintopia 02 continent. A suit's built-in protection would buy you a few minutes at most.
Some pirates had suffered less from the fog, but they weren't safe either.
"Ugh! G-Ghosts! Ghosts!"
"Hee, hehehe... the flowers... the flowers are so beautiful..."
Auditory-hallucination worms had awakened from the nest's spores, and sticky flytraps glistening like they'd been grown on pirate blood were stalking them. Those, too, had been strengthened tenfold, and the pirates found them anything but easy to avoid.
The pirates had believed this fortified camp was the safest place on the planet. They were wrong. They should have left this world even if it meant defying Muriel's orders.
You chose the wrong option.
Even in the thick of battle, my Erosion Tentacles never stopped working, harvesting the heads of pirates lying dying on the ground. As casually as picking fruit from a tree.
"All walkers, fall back to the central plaza!"
"Retreat! Retreat!"
The surviving walkers broke off their assault and scrambled rearward. I knew exactly what they were hoping for.
In the central plaza stood the most powerful being in this camp: Muriel, Boss of the Humanity Cartel and Rank 20. She was waiting for me.
I pressed my upper body flat to the ground and crawled after the walkers. Heavy Walkers were built to hold the line and pour out firepower, not for mobile warfare. They moved faster than any human, sure—but against me, moving like a runaway train, it made no difference.
Every time I closed on a walker, I struck it from behind. With the toxic fog lying thick outside, they couldn't dream of leaving their cockpits; they could only wait for death.
By the time the remaining walkers could be counted on one hand, the fleeing machines and I reached the central plaza.
"..."
There stood the horned Cultist, golden short spear in hand. A cross-shaped halo headband shimmered with faint purple light above her head, and she wore a full-body reinforced suit. Battle-ready from head to toe, Muriel stood gazing at me with an e-cigarette between her lips.
I pounced on one of the fleeing walkers and dragged its pilot out. Then, right in front of her, I seized the man by both arms and both legs and pulled.
"B-Boss! Save m—KYAAAAAAAAAH!"
My combat arms could tear through a starship's hull barehanded. Even in a reinforced suit, no ordinary human could withstand that strength. The pirate screamed for his boss with his last breath as his upper and lower body parted ways.
Muriel frowned at the sight.
"Tsk. Barbaric, much."
"How·un·ex·pect·ed."
"Unexpected? Pfft, that's my line. I seriously didn't think you'd made it to Young Adult."
Muriel spat and grumbled in irritation. Even knowing I'd evolved into a Young Adult, she showed no real shock or fear. The way she carried herself right now was the bearing of someone utterly convinced she held the overwhelming advantage.
"I·didn't·know·you'd·stand·your·ground·in·stead·of·run·ning."
At my words, she snorted as if she'd just heard a good joke.
"Run? Me? I think you've got something backwards..."
With that, Muriel raised the lighter in her left hand—or rather, the lighter-shaped terminal—and pressed down hard on its switch.
At once, eight small spider-like machines burst from the soil around me and latched onto my body. They were so fast my auxiliary organs could barely register them, let alone give me time to dodge. As the machines glowed red, my body began to grow heavy, like waterlogged cotton—as if they were drinking the very life out of me.
Blood Reavers!
The machines clinging to my body were Blood Reavers—one of the Star Union's Unique-grade weapons of war. They latched onto their victims at blinding speed and rapidly drained their vitality, and with monstrous durability, once one attached itself, smashing it off alone was next to impossible. On top of that, as I'd just experienced, they were nearly impossible to detect, and their ambush speed was terrifying.
Thanks to these qualities, the Blood Reaver had been one of the assassination weapons of choice against biological players in the game.
Unable to resist at all, my face slammed into the dirt. No matter how desperately I tried to rise, I couldn't so much as flex a finger.
"Did you really think I'd fight a monster like you with no preparation at all?"
Muriel strutted toward me, grinning triumphantly, and raised her short spear high.
In that instant, I hammered my combat arm into her flank.
"Hk?!"
She dodged by a hair's breadth. My razor claws left a thin gash across her waist. As she sprang backward, my Erosion Tentacles lashed out from six directions at once; she batted them aside in a blur with her spear, and while she was deflecting them, I—who had been lying prone—wrenched free the Bone Axe and swung for her ankle.
"Not a chance!"
Her body glowed violet and shot into the air. My Bone Axe gouged across empty ground as she landed lightly a good distance away. Her suit writhed for a moment and healed the gash at her waist; within seconds her body was back to fighting condition.
Her face, on the other hand, had lost a good deal of its composure compared to a moment ago.
"How are you moving with the Blood Reavers attached?"
"You·mean·these?"
Instead of answering, I rose to my feet and peeled the Blood Reavers off my body, one after another. Silver moss had grown in pale patches across the black, spider-like machines.
Had I not known in advance, that could have been bad.
Even a single Blood Reaver produced a stronger effect than the neural venom I could inject into a biological enemy. Anyone struck by these machines was drained of life while their body locked up in paralysis—defense became impossible.
They don't call them Unique-grade for nothing.
Mother of the Sky had told me Muriel owned two Blood Reavers—because Muriel had used both of them when they fought. As a Volf, whose combat effectiveness depended so heavily on her physical body, Mother of the Sky must have fought Muriel in a drastically crippled state.
And she's throwing eight of them at me?
Contrary to what Mother of the Sky had said, Muriel had eight. And she'd used all eight on me. Not even in the game had anyone ever hit me with eight at once—Unique-grade weapons weren't exactly easy to come by.
As a Sub-adult, I'd be dead right now.
Even as a Young Adult, eight had latched on and I couldn't twitch a finger. A Sub-adult would have been drained dry and dead in moments.
Clever girl. But still...
I had activated my Gremlin Moss before ever engaging her—insurance against exactly this kind of surprise. The silver moss had been poised to pour out at any moment through the pores across my hide and carapace, and thanks to it, her trump card had been beautifully neutralized.
Infected by Gremlin Moss, those Blood Reavers are useless bricks for twenty minutes.
And as for the vitality they'd already drained from me—no cause for concern. Thanks to the Human Sacrifice trait, every corpse that died on the soil of the nest—of this camp—was energy in my bank. Even now, my tail, flat against the ground, was gulping down the energy the nest sent surging into me.
I plucked the last spider machine from my head and tossed it at her feet.
"Did·you·really·think·I'd·fight·a·mon·ster·like·you·with·no·prep·a·ra·tion·at·all?"
"..."
Throwing her own words back at her, I watched Muriel's face freeze solid.
"...You're the worst kind of oppa. I could gut you right now just to show you your own intestines."
"A·fas·ci·nat·ing·thought. I'll·keep·it·in·mind."
Muriel leveled her short spear and dropped into a fighting stance. I had no way of knowing what she was thinking, what plan she was forming. My auxiliary organs could read her heart rate and physical responses to guess at her state of mind, but they were never perfectly accurate.
It didn't matter. She knew nothing about me—but I had gathered a wealth of useful intelligence about her.
Victory in a fight comes down to the difference in information.
Before striking this camp, I had shaped the terrain to my advantage as I built the nest. And I had gathered every scrap of information on the enemies I would hunt, constructing my strategy for dealing with them in advance.
Terrain and intelligence—holding the upper hand in both, only one thing remained for me.
To win.