Omen (3)
"What? My good sir? I was told there were none on Earth. What's going on here?"
Chloe was caught off guard by the sudden appearance of Akira Yujin.
As far as she knew, Akira was in another star system, far removed from the Solar System. He had been traveling to participate in a summit in his capacity as CEO to mediate an internal conflict.
Akira answered her bewilderment as if it were nothing at all.
"I brought my monument along, just in case. Last time Jason sent out a summons signal and I missed it, didn't I? It would be rather rude of me to do so again."
"...Right."
Chloe did not believe a word of it.
He's got a spy planted on me!
The moment she saw him intrude at precisely the right timing, she understood everything.
She had been the one to request this gathering, and had filed her leave request in advance to arrange it. That was where the information had leaked.
Damn old fossil.
Akira regarded every head of every Noble Capital house as a challenger who could steal the CEO's seat from him at any moment. Viewing everyone but oneself as a rival was a trait common to the Noble Capital as a whole, but Akira took it to an extreme.
The massacres and crimes he had committed to seize control of the Yujin family were infamous among players — and not in a good way.
...Tch. Once I'm out of here, I'll have to clean house, starting with my inner circle.
It irritated her that she would have to waste effort on such nonsense, but she let none of it show.
While she held her tongue, Jubaka gave Akira a brief rundown of the situation.
Akira listened in silence, and his first reaction was a question.
"How is he here of all places... no, that doesn't matter, does it. Of course. Now I understand how TNC managed to produce research results like that back then. Ha, and here I thought I'd seen everything. This is why I never tire of it."
He kept murmuring words that made sense to no one else.
"Akira, what are you talking about?"
"Nothing that concerns you. In any case — an adult form, you say. Cynthia, share the footage with us."
"As you wish."
At Akira's evasive response, Jubaka frowned but let it go.
Moments later, light poured from Cynthia's monument, shooting toward a point in the air. The rays, scattered haphazardly at first, converged into a single stream and coalesced into a hologram.
The footage it displayed was of the Amorph ranker as it had appeared on PH-101 — the planet the Cult called Sigil 08.
"This is the final transmission sent by the sanctuary surveillance satellite watching PH-101, addressed to the assembled members of Mega Corp and the Star Union."
The being on screen was a colossal monster with three heads and pipe-like organs jutting from its back. Aside from being far larger than expected, it bore a striking resemblance to an adult Amorph.
The creature raised its three heads skyward, blazing light pouring from its mouths.
Heat rays like living lightning, and darkness raining down from the heavens. Two immense energies strained against each other in a contest of raw power. The creature was opposing the Cosmic Bolt fired by the Judge of Damos 08.
Then, midway through, it began to channel a new power. Violet energy gathered at its three heads and hurled itself into the sky.
The footage ended there.
"After that point, a magnetic storm erupted across the planet, making further observation by the sanctuary satellite impossible."
"Is there no footage captured from a ship?"
"The only vessel to return is in such poor condition that we are still in the process of restoring its recordings. I'm afraid we cannot expect good results."
"Heh. Well, this is a fine mess."
Even as everyone else sat tense, Akira chuckled without a care in the world.
"Surprising. If that thing really is an adult, then you'd be a target too, Akira."
"That's true enough — if it were truly an adult."
"What do you mean by that?"
Chloe and Jubaka couldn't follow, but Akira reacted as though it were their incomprehension that baffled him.
"As everyone here knows, the Amorph doesn't grow stronger with growth simply because it evolves. It's the 'acquisition of traits in order to fulfill its evolution conditions.' That is the Amorph's true power."
"We know that, Akira. Get to the point."
"The Rank 5 I fought would have subdued an Imperial Mothership far more efficiently than that."
Of everyone present, Akira Yujin had fought the Rank 5 Amorph more than anyone. He had lost more often than he'd won, but he had notched his share of victories as well.
"It doesn't like to face its enemies head-on and break them. Charging in headfirst is nothing more than a last resort it takes when finishing something off — or when it has no other way to defend itself."
Having accumulated extensive combat experience against the Amorph ranker, Akira knew the creature's style inside and out.
Deception strategies that weaponized its enemies' own communications, aerial combat exploiting its flight ability, biochemical terror using viruses and parasites, tactics that turned an enemy's fear against them until they destroyed themselves — the list went on.
By Akira's judgment, the Amorph ranker was no warrior.
It was a hunter. Or a terrorist.
"Couldn't this just be deliberate? A move to exploit our own judgment against us."
"Perhaps, but I think otherwise. Look at the two types of heat rays in this footage. Neither ability has ever appeared in the game. If it had other means of stopping the Imperial Mothership, why use these? And knowing full well the information would be leaked, no less."
"A fair point."
Only now did Chloe grasp where Akira was going with this.
"...You're saying it burned its trump card just to bring down the Mothership?"
"A last resort, was it? That means it is still weak."
"Precisely. If it were truly an adult, it would have finished the Imperial Mothership before the Cosmic Bolt was ever fired. Not in that pathetic fashion."
"Are you suggesting, Lord Akira, that the Amorph has not fully reached its adult form?"
The moment Cynthia finished speaking, a single drug flashed through Chloe's and Jubaka's minds.
And with it — how the creature might have obtained that drug on that planet.
Muriel!
"You all know what it is, don't you? The means by which one can taste that power for a moment, even without fulfilling the conditions for evolution."
"...Psionium."
Chloe gritted her teeth as the realization sank in that the Psionium she herself had developed had played a decisive role in her enemy's survival.
"My hypothesis is this: it already left the planet in order to fulfill its evolution conditions. Evolving into an adult form is impossible on PH-101."
"...Tch. This has become a headache. I'll need to establish a response protocol immediately."
"I must report this to the Prophet Assembly. Though I doubt they will listen to me."
"By all means, do. As it happens, I know somewhere our friend is likely to head. I'll pay them a visit on my way there."
As Chloe raged inwardly at the dead woman who had caused all this —
The players began to discuss how they would deal with the Amorph.
"Gyaaaaaagh... kgh!"
That's the last of them.
Wiping out the Cult survivors posed little difficulty.
Cults serving aboard ships assigned to a Mothership Battle Group were, by definition, elite troops.
Elite troops ought to carry armament to match, but the crash had cost them nearly all of their weapons.
Most of the crew had died from the impact of the crash itself, leaving only a handful of survivors. Near the vessel we had tracked down, ten of them remained — four of them wounded.
It was over so quickly it didn't even count as post-meal exercise.
"...That Mimic Organ trait of yours is repulsive every time I see it."
"Yeah?"
Mother of the Sky grimaced at the sight of me speaking in a female Cultist's voice.
With my Transcendence Stage 2 breakthrough, the restrictions on the Mimic Organ had been lifted entirely.
Now, just as before, I could render the form of my most recent meal through pheromones. The Mimic Organ's voice-replication function was working normally as well.
The problem is that I've grown so much bigger.
The Mimic Organ's effect wasn't to transform my body into a human one. The core of it was emitting pheromones that deceived the senses of other living creatures, making them perceive me as if I were human.
Which meant the larger my body became, the greater the dissonance other creatures felt, and the harder it became to fool them with pheromones alone.
In the game, a young adult was never this massive.
With the combined effects of Perfect Organism, Nightmare Horizon, and Organic Evolution, my body was far larger than an ordinary young adult stage.
Unless I used Organic Evolution to shift into my Clever Underdog form, deceiving an enemy with the Mimic Organ alone would not come as easily as it once had.
Still, my voice is back to normal.
Before, the restrictions had garbled it into something like sound from a broken radio, but now it came out perfectly clear.
I'd considered the restoration of the trait's function a welcome development, but Mother of the Sky clearly felt otherwise.
"A girl's voice coming out of that body. What a sick sense of humor you have...."
In my experience with the game, disguising myself as a woman with the Mimic Organ had always worked better.
Sorry to Mother of the Sky, but I intended to keep using this voice for a while.
The odds are low, but more Cults might come later.
I judged it unlikely that the Cults would dispatch another Imperial Mothership to this planet for a purification. Any other world and they would have shown no mercy, but this one had been designated a 'holy land'.
The Providence occupies a complicated place within Cult society.
To the Cults, 'Providence' held the same status as scripture and code of life all at once — rather like the Quran in real-world Islam.
The great majority of Cult society regarded any act in violation of the Providence as taboo. Of course, much like the religious in the real world who often acted far from their faith, ordinary Cults didn't exactly adhere to the Providence with unwavering rigor.
But it's a different matter for government institutions like the Assembly.
The Providence contained vital prophecies concerning the Cult's future. Some spoke of leading the Cult Empire to revival; others were bound up with its decline.
The problem was that it never spelled out clearly which path led to the brighter future.
In the lore, the Cults had repeatedly met catastrophe through misreading the Providence — or through trying to dodge its prophecies altogether.
Put simply, think of the self-fulfilling prophecies that litter Greek mythology. The tale of a hero who, in fleeing a dark fate, walks straight into a worse one.
To prevent exactly that, the Cults had established a norm of designating the spaces where the Providence's futures could unfold as holy lands — and leaving them untouched as much as possible.
Whether to uphold the Providence or to argue for defying it — that's the crucial question for a Cult player.
The Cult race's signature system was quests, but unifying Cult society was one of the major objectives as well. And the single most important force binding Cult society together was the Providence.
Naturally, as I said, exceptions existed where violating the Providence was unavoidable.
If, say, an Outspacer incursion occurred, or a Vortex One Cult outbreak, opinion would split over whether to leave the holy land be or purify it.
Just moments ago, I had used the Human-Faced Beast trait to comb through the Cults' memories. They had come to this planet under the pretext of purifying a contaminant.
Though they had no clear idea what the contaminant actually was.
The investigation yielded two key pieces of information.
First: the opposing player's power was far greater than I had imagined.
Among the stag-horned Cults, they must hold a very senior post.
A high priest belonging to the Council of Elders, or the head of an Assembly faction. Possibly with connections to a prophet in the Prophet Assembly — or perhaps even holding the offices of priest and prophet simultaneously.
To push through a purification order, one had to persuade the Cult's three organs of power — the Assembly, the Council of Elders, and the Prophet Assembly. So they had to be at least that influential.
But it seems they pushed too hard.
If you were going to manipulate people, you should have seen it through perfectly from start to finish. They hadn't.
No — to be precise, they couldn't.
If you wanted to catch me as quickly as possible, a rushed job was the only option.
That was why they had dispatched an Imperial Mothership without ever explaining what the contaminant actually was.
From this, I could safely conclude that whoever had led this affair — the senior Cult player — had most likely strong-armed the other Cults into agreement by throwing their connections and authority around.
Honestly, their judgment wasn't bad.
If the purification had succeeded, that is.
But the purification had failed. Worse, they had lost an Imperial Mothership and an entire Battle Group because of me.
They had already strained the Providence to its breaking point, and on top of that, an entirely new risk had materialized.
Those who had opposed the player's position would, naturally, push back hard, and even those who had gone along with it would begin reinterpreting the Providence's prophecies.
Even a player of tremendous power would find that political assault far from easy to withstand. By now, they were probably in deep trouble.
Cults are conservatives. It'll take them quite a while to settle on a response.
Of course, since the destruction of the Imperial Mothership was an objective fact, the player might argue for raising the surveillance level over the holy land. Worst case, they'd send a swarm of satellites to comb every inch of the planet.
The silver lining is that the sky is on my side.
My clash with the Imperial Mothership had left the planet gripped by intermittent magnetic storms. The contest between the Cosmic Bolt and God's Whip had destabilized the atmosphere, triggering the storms ahead of their natural cycle.
Once the atmosphere recovered, the magnetic storms would end — so I had to get out before then.
Five days until I can use Nightmare Horizon.
Nothing on the horizon was directly threatening my life at the moment, but I couldn't afford to relax. My position was as precarious as a house built on sand.
Start with what I can do right now.
First, I needed to see whether I could erode this — this warship half-buried in the ground before me.
"I-if you release me, I can tell you everything from the ship's operation to its repairs, in detail!"
"I-I know it better! Let me handle it!"
"Damn it! You're a medic, not an engineer!"
"Shut up!"
"This ship model is a new-class frigate built by the shipwrights of Jasbil 02. The hull is an alloy laced with Moonsilver, and it's equipped with a Reflection system. If you'd only spare my life, I can explain in detai—"
The five faces embedded near the top of my back were chattering noisily among themselves. All of them were Cultist faces I had created with the Human-Faced Beast trait.
Noisy.
I forced them into silence, then extruded my Erosion Tentacles from the holes in my back. As the six tentacles slid over the faces, the Human-Faced Beasts screamed without sound.
Let's take a look.
The tentacles, following my will, began their examination of the buried warship.
Could this vessel be eroded? How long could I sustain the erosion? The tentacles worked busily to provide the information I needed.
Before long, as always, the Erosion Tentacles did not betray my expectations. Having received a satisfactory report, I released my hold on the Human-Faced Beasts.
"You. You seemed to know this ship well."
"Y-yes! Ask me anything at all!"
"I-I know it too! I can answer your questions!"
This vessel was a model I had never even seen in the game. Unlike every ship I had assimilated until now, I knew nothing about its size, armament, or specifications.
So I would have to make use of the collective intelligence of the Cultists who had become my Human-Faced Beasts.
"...That's horrifying."
Mother of the Sky, watching from the side, murmured under her breath. I ignored her.