Muriel (2)
In the game, the effects of Psionium lasted for five minutes.
It was an extremely useful drug—used at the right moment, it could reverse even the most disadvantageous fight—but it had one fatal flaw.
Each use shortens the duration.
The reduced time was randomly determined, anywhere from a few seconds to as much as a full minute. An unlucky player could end up getting only five uses out of it.
Because of that, players either burned through it early in the game, or hoarded it carefully and saved it for a truly critical moment later on.
Those same properties of Psionium operated identically in reality. I would know—since becoming Amorph, I'd used it myself.
I used it during my fight with Sihyeon Yujin.
Having enjoyed its full five minutes back then, if I consumed another Psionium now, I would get at least four minutes out of it.
But Muriel doesn't work that way, apparently.
According to Mother of the Sky, Muriel had used Psionium during their fight, and it had lasted eight minutes.
An improved variant of Psionium? Or a module that amplifies the drug's effects?
So much had changed from the game that I couldn't be certain of the cause.
Doesn't matter. That part isn't important.
What was certain was that Muriel couldn't enjoy the effects of Psionium indefinitely.
If she could have, she would have used it the moment our fight began.
The drug she used when she first fought me was Psychomaniac.
That cigarette she'd been smoking while waiting for me. The liquid inside it hadn't been some synthetic narcotic—it had been Psychomaniac, a combat stimulant that boosted psychic output and precision.
She'd made it look convincing enough, but there was none of the hazy, chemical sweetness of real tobacco in the smoke, and that had given it away immediately.
A woman that smart avoids using a path that would let her crush me effortlessly?
My guess was that even if her Psionium had an extended duration, she hadn't been able to eliminate the drug's original weakness—the shrinking duration with every use.
Waste it casually, and when the moment that truly matters arrives, there won't be enough left to use.
Which meant she had used it only when she judged herself to be in genuine danger.
Maximum duration: under eight minutes. Assuming the same reduction rate as standard Psionium, it would have been under seven.
Frankly, the odds of our fight dragging on for seven or eight minutes were slim.
Both sides moved at speeds that left humanity far behind, so no matter which of us won, the battle wasn't going to last long.
After all, my plan was never to outlast her Psionium in the first place.
From the moment I'd heard the story from Mother of the Sky, I'd thought it through.
What mattered was making it impossible for her to do the things only Psionium could buy her.
"…Even with two of you, nothing changes!"
Muriel, teeth bared, launched her offensive without a moment's hesitation.
The instant her foot left the ground, the golden short spear was already at my nose.
Literally lightning fast.
I swung my Bone Axe up in a rapid parry. My bone met her spear with a sound like a bomb going off.
The Bone Axe shattered even as the spear was driven upward. The enormous recoil broke her stance, and my Erosion Tentacles lunged for her, all five of them spreading their accessory limbs wide to swallow her whole.
"Hah!"
Muriel flung her mechanized left arm wide. Her body slipped out between the tentacles slowed by her Distortion Field like an eel through a net.
Then her left fist clenched. In that brief instant, my auxiliary organs detected a massive flow of energy racing through her body and into her left arm.
The Thunder Arm Module—a top-tier combat module among those a cyborg could equip. It excelled in both destructive power and penetrating force, enough to punch through the carapace of a Young Adult like me.
｢Not today!｣
"Ghk?!"
Mother of the Sky leapt and slammed her body into Muriel's flank.
No matter how high her physical stats climbed, the limits of her frame remained. A charge from a griffin over four meters long and packed solid with muscle could not simply be ignored.
Muriel's stance crumpled, and the mechanical arm's aim skewed slightly. Thanks to that, the yellow lightning she fired grazed past the top of my back.
｢Pain Mitigation, activate!｣
I can take it!
Of course, it hadn't ended without damage. As of this moment, I'd lost two more Erosion Tentacles.
But I had to endure. 'Human Sacrifice' was already active—wounds like these would heal with time.
"Don't you interfere—!"
｢Ugh!｣
Muriel hammered Mother of the Sky with her left arm, still blazing hot from the energy discharge. Burned across the face, her beak cracked, Mother of the Sky was thrown reeling far backward.
Now!
Seizing the moment her attention shifted to another target, I poured every ounce of my strength into my head and rammed her.
"Kuhk!"
My horns shattered her ribs and pierced the organs beneath. She managed to wrench herself back just in time to avoid being run through, but a wound like that was lethal enough on its own.
No! It's not over yet!
Just as I predicted, her body flared purple.
The violet halo floating behind her head. That was the effect of the cross-shaped halo headband she wore—the Harmonizer.
The Harmonizer was one of the mid-to-late stage quest rewards of the Cult faction line, granting its wearer the ability to turn incorporeal and move, five times per day.
The Cult's questline was divided into twelve stages in total, with the Harmonizer unlocked as the reward for Stage 9.
When my acid fungal baptism had struck her, she hadn't used it.
Not because she chose not to—she couldn't, because the conditions weren't met.
But since she'd used it right after consuming the Psionium, there was no doubt she had cleared up through Stage 8.
Either way, she has three uses left.
Muriel had used the Harmonizer twice so far. Once when Mother of the Sky burst out of the ground to ambush her, and once again just now, when my horns had skewered her.
In other words, only three spare lives remained to her.
I predicted where she would reappear and moved fast. About a hundred meters away, violet particles were gathering in the empty air.
"!"
Muriel's incorporeal form ended, and her eyes snapped open at the sight of me charging in.
She raised her left arm to unleash her Distortion Field, but Mother of the Sky wasn't about to just stand and watch.
｢Did you think I'd let you?!｣
Half her face scorched black, Mother of the Sky had somehow gotten behind Muriel. Her half-broken beak clamped down hard on Muriel's left shoulder.
"Ngh!"
With her shoulder blade crushed, the Distortion Field was cancelled mid-manifestation.
Muriel snatched up the High Priest's golden spear and scrambled into a guard. Her spear met my charging horns head-on.
A bone-crushing impact.
"Ughk!"
The collision between spear and horn snapped one of my horns clean off. Pain surged through my skull like someone had swung a solid object into my head with everything they had.
But the damage wasn't mine alone.
All the momentum of my charge had been packed into that horn, so Muriel, who had taken it head-on, couldn't come away unscathed either.
Her spear-bearing right arm went limp and dangling. Only the Nano Spartan Module wrapped around her body was keeping the arm attached at all; inside, it had to have been pulped completely.
"Eeiiiik! DIE!"
Letting out a scream that might have been a battle cry or sheer fury, she activated the Thunder Arm Module a second time. Energy gathered in her left arm, and Mother of the Sky hastily released her bite.
A heartbeat before the energy discharged, I wrenched my body hard sideways. The yellow heat beam grazed the surface of my head carapace by a hair's breadth.
By then, she had already gone incorporeal and vanished—reappearing atop one of the watchtowers positioned around the camp.
"Th-this is impossible…!"
Thanks to the Harmonizer's effect, her body bore not a single wound—but her expression told a different story.
She'd bitten through her lip, blood welling at the corner of her mouth, and her pupils were trembling in fine spasms.
She was unmistakably cowed now, compared to how she'd been before the fight.
Checkmate, Muriel.
If she fought passively and stalled for time, her Psionium would run dry and the Harmonizer would become unusable.
Conversely, if she fought the way she always had—aggressively—the odds of her needing the Harmonizer climbed.
Either way, once she couldn't use the Harmonizer, she would be forced to face us relying solely on the Nano Spartan Module's recovery power.
She should have saved it for running away in the first place.
Starting this fight with us—no, with me—had been the wrong choice from the very first move.
To her, trembling with fear of us, I calmly spoke the truth.
"Two. Left."
"!"
She knew better than anyone what my words meant.
And she knew exactly what would happen to her once those two were spent.
Three years ago.
Muriel had fallen alone into the world of Space Survival.
And she'd possessed a member of a Spacedog cartel, no less.
No matter that she was ranked 20th, the leader of a massive clan—that had all been true only inside the game.
For a girl who had been nothing more than an ordinary college student in the real world, surviving in this brutal dystopia was anything but easy.
If she hadn't inhabited a sturdy cyborg body, or if she hadn't been beautiful enough to earn the boss's affection, she wouldn't have lasted two days.
It was thanks to the Cult-born boss who doted on her that Muriel's life was guaranteed.
A month passed after she became the boss's lover.
Only once her survival was assured could she check what she'd received upon coming to this world.
It was a kind of blessing—a perk granted to those who crossed over.
Her perk was the ability to change the base species underlying her cyborg body to another species entirely.
In the game, a cyborg's base species was always locked to human. But Muriel could switch her base to cyborg, Wolf, Cult, and more.
It was a perk that reflected the nature of the Spacedog—pirate syndicates composed of all manner of species.
In exchange, she couldn't change her base species without restriction.
Her true species was cyborg.
To use the perk, she had to plunder the emblematic organ of another species and refit it as a wearable module. That limitation remained unchanged even after she switched species.
Furthermore, she could only transform into sapient species available to players—unplayable wild animals were off the table.
In any case, once Muriel grasped the potential of her perk, she poisoned her boss to change her base species to Cult.
She hadn't loved him, and he was nothing more than an NPC from the game as far as she was concerned, so the guilt of murder barely registered.
Having turned his horns into a module and converted her species to Cult, she set her sights on the cartel's own members next.
Her cartel happened to be a fairly powerful one, so the fight was far from easy—but she managed to win it anyway.
Afterward, while traveling to the Cult homeworld, she encountered other players and grew stronger with their help.
Two years after arriving in this world, Muriel had become powerful. Powerful enough that nothing in this universe dared treat her lightly.
She even had two rankers sponsoring her. For Muriel, crisis was practically a word that didn't exist.
Right up until this very moment, here in Saintopia 02, when she met Amorph.
"Ngh!"
Muriel raised her short spear and blocked the arm that damned Amorph Young Adult slammed down at her. The blow was no ordinary weight, and she gritted her teeth against it.
Its strength hadn't dropped at all since the fight began. If anything, it felt like the thing was getting stronger the longer the battle dragged on.
To be precise, the enemy wasn't getting stronger—she was getting weaker.
No! There's no way I can lose…!
"Fuuuuck!"
Anxiety crept up on her, slow and cold. She forced the sick feeling down with a curse-laced shout.
The Thunder Arm Module on her left arm roared to life, and yellow lightning punched clean through the creature's limb.
She barely had a moment to relish the sight of the severed arm before Mother of the Sky's forepaw came swinging at her face.
"Ugh!"
She jerked her head back to dodge, but the right side of her face was half torn away by that beast-bitch's attack.
…I can heal this much!
With only two Harmonizer charges remaining, she had to spend them sparingly. Trusting in the Nano Spartan Module's recovery, she swung her spear.
As the High Priest's Golden Spear carved into Mother of the Sky's flank, Amorph's tail came whipping toward her out of nowhere.
Mid-attack, she couldn't dodge it completely. She chose to block it, trusting the solid defense of the Thunder Arm Module—a bad choice.
"Eeik!"
The stupidly massive tail bent her mechanical arm into a grotesque angle. As if that weren't enough, she was sent tumbling through the air, crashing into the ground in a wreck.
"Kehk?!"
Muriel coughed up black blood.
She'd been knocked sprawling several times during the fight, but this was the first time she'd vomited blood.
That motherfucking Amorph bastard and his dirty tricks…!
Only then did she notice the fog that had swallowed the entire camp.
This fog had been produced by Amorph's Nest. She'd fought Amorph plenty of times in the game, so she recognized it at once.
But she had never fought one for this long before, and so she'd underestimated how dangerous the toxic fog really was.
Truthfully, her judgment hadn't been especially foolish.
The Nano Spartan Module's regeneration was terrifyingly strong. No matter how potent the fog's poison was, so long as the module was running, it could purge it in moments.
The module's recovery can't keep up anymore!
If she could hold still even for a short while, the module's healing functions would normalize.
But the enemies wouldn't grant her even that sliver of time.
Mother of the Sky charged at Muriel as she retched up blood. Muriel leapt into the air and kicked away the beast pouncing down on her with both feet.
The enemy went flying into the distance—but another was already attacking her.
She barely batted away the volley of spines pouring in from the front with her spear.
N-no! I can still hold…
The instant she thought it, an enemy tentacle came hurtling in. She deflected it somehow, but she couldn't stop all of it—half of one thigh was ripped away by the blow.
I can fix this with another module!
The moment she rose to her feet, Mother of the Sky's swinging forepaw was already at her face—an attack timed to exploit the narrowed vision on her right side.
If I use the Distortion Field—!
She hastily raised her still-healing left arm and spread the field. Mother of the Sky froze in midair—but from the opposite direction, Amorph's horn was already lined up on her.
"Kuhk!"
Next, I'll—!
Muriel went flying through the air again, blood spilling from her lips.
Her mind kept racing through the next move.
Among the modules she carried, there was one that could break this situation. A precious module with aftereffects too nasty to use casually—but with things this desperate, she had no choice.
I can still win!
Blocked. Both her legs snapped.
She lifted herself off the ground with psychic power techniques and scrambled for the next play.
Among her psychic abilities, there was one that could wipe out enemies in an instant. She'd been hoarding it, but this—this was exactly its moment.
That's it—!
But it was blocked. Deep stab wounds opened across her shoulder and abdomen.
The axe arm she'd shattered moments ago had regenerated without her noticing, and now it came crashing down on her.
With grievous wounds stacking one after another, the nano suit slowed rapidly. Bleeding out, her mind white with pain, she kept thinking.
Next, I'll….
What was she supposed to do?
The thing moved as if it knew every module she carried, every psychic technique she could use.
Before it, she was as good as naked.
And with that thought, the monster in front of her began to loom larger and larger. A thing that fed on her blood, fed on her flesh, fed on her very emotions, grown so vast now that she could no longer bear the sight of it.
Facing that thing, feelings she'd buried deep in her chest long ago came crawling back to life.
Despair.
And fear of death.
"I—I don't want to die!"
With her mind driven to the very brink, Muriel spent the Harmonizer she'd sworn to conserve—yet again.
Her body scattered into violet particles and reformed as far away from that monster as she could manage.
No!
The moment her body regenerated, she regretted it. Only one use remained.
Then the thing spoke.
"One. Left."
Hundreds of meters separated them, and still Amorph's words rang in her ears as if hammered straight into them.