The Frozen Planet (3)
"...Daddy, are you not busy today?"
"Not today. Daddy's prepared something special for my precious little one."
"Something special?"
"Mm-hm. We're going to visit Mommy on her film set."
"Wow, really? Oh wait — Mommy said we're not supposed to come."
"This time, let's throw her a surprise party. What do you say?"
"Hehe, that sounds fun! I wanna go!"
"Somebody, help! My child is trapped under the car!"
"The engine's caught fire, it's dangerous! Stand back!"
"■■! No!"
"If you hadn't taken him out that day, none of this would have happened!"
"And that's what you say to me right now? Do you have any idea who's paying these hospital bills?"
"Hah, the bills? You've never cared about your own child once, have you."
"Waaah! Teacher, switch my seat! He smells!"
"Hey, do you guys smell something weird or what?"
"Ugh. There goes the flayed freak."
"■■, if you're unwell, do you really think skipping school solves anything? You can't just lean on your friends' patience — shouldn't the change start with you?"
"Ugh, did you just see that monster?"
"Yeah. Wow, I thought Halloween came early this year."
"Poor thing. If I ever ended up like that, I'd sooner bite my tongue and die."
Pathetic.
Disgusting.
Why even live?
Monster.
Monster.
｢Grr?｣
When I opened my eyes, the faintly cool, humid air greeted me. As my dormant senses switched back on, I became aware of the lukewarm liquid pooling beneath my body.
A dream.
I had rarely dreamed since falling into this world. At most, I'd caught stray visions during evolutions or while working the Transcendence System.
Is it because of those memories from a while back?
The childhood memories I'd relived on my way to Transcendence Stage 2. The days I spent in intensive care because of my burns. It was a past I had no desire to remember.
Sigh.
I'd managed to forget about it all lately, but dredging up my old life had left my mind in disarray.
Ascension — the stage beyond adulthood.
I couldn't say for certain, but if I reached Ascension, there was a good chance I'd be given the means to leave this world.
I wasn't the only one who thought so. According to the Mother of the Sky, the players who arrived before me had aimed for the same thing.
And every one of them failed.
The fallout killed Rank 1, and the surviving players scattered in search of new goals. The seeds of conflict sown back then had grown into the mess of the present.
An ending, huh.
If a difficulty even Rank 1 couldn't clear, I could scarcely imagine how brutal it would be.
Even in the original game, Ascension was infamous for its murderous difficulty. Unlike the other evolution stages, meeting every condition wasn't the end of it — a final battle remained, a last trial handed down by the being that guarded the world's secret, and only passing that trial allowed Ascension. There had been Amorph players who fulfilled the conditions, but I was the only one among them who had ever succeeded.
If the difficulty were identical to the game, other players would have cleared it by now.
The fact that they hadn't meant there were variables I knew nothing about.
Still, I had no intention of giving up midway. I was the Amorph ranker everyone had declared impossible. If rankers above me had failed, then I would simply prepare harder than any of them and go.
Although...
I raised my upper body slightly.
At the movement, the ones near me stirred. No. 26, Adhai, and the Mother of the Sky — the three of them had been sleeping together in the underground cavern that had become a shallow marshland.
What happens to this place if I leave?
Setting aside the cause and manner of my fall into this world.
I didn't believe the world would vanish or collapse just because I disappeared. It had come far too real to be a transmigration into some virtual game. It was more reasonable to see this place as something new — a universe shaped much like Space Survival's, but not quite the same.
Every experience I'd endured here carried real weight. And that fact was what unsettled me most.
It really would be hard to part with them.
The longer I stayed in this world, the deeper my feelings grew. The Mother of the Sky, who had arrived some ten years before me, had even married.
What I felt for my companions wasn't love, not exactly — but it was, without question, deep affection. A special emotion I hadn't known since childhood.
...And there are things that worry me, too.
Could No. 26 and Adhai truly manage without me?
Frankly, two feelings coexisted in me: the wish for them to thrive, and the wish that they wouldn't.
The first was a pure, simple hope — that they would live out the full span of their lives in happiness.
The second, though...
That's a twisted desire.
The filthy little wish that they would grieve my absence — that they would remember me, and ache with loneliness.
Tsk.
The road to Ascension was still long, and here I was wasting thought on nonsense.
The damned dream had shattered my sleep entirely and left my head a mess, so I might as well get some work done.
The nest's still a bit too cold, isn't it?
The underground cavern, once nothing but dirt and ice, had been transformed under my care into an entirely different environment — thanks to two of my nest-related traits, Marsh Creation and Master of the Environment.
Both were traits I had acquired while sweeping through the Great Swamplands before ascending to Transcendence Stage 2.
They were both useless in the game, and yet look at them now.
Marsh Creation did exactly what the name implied — it turned the nest into a marsh. On its own it was nearly worthless, a trait that only became worth trying in combination with others that sprayed toxins or pathogens.
It could be used the way I had once spread space bacteria through the sewers of the T&C Special Trade Hub. Of course, in the game, powerful healing skills and equipment were common enough that nothing I did would ever have that kind of reach.
At best, Marsh Creation saw use as a way to stack debuffs.
And for all its grand name, Master of the Environment had been similarly unhelpful in the game.
Its effects overlap with the nest itself.
The trait's power was the ability to reshape the environment above the nest as I saw fit — utterly useless to an Amorph, whose nest already allowed it to manipulate its surroundings.
An Amorph's nest creates conditions favorable to its survival: boosting regeneration, replenishing depleted energy, effects of that kind.
Master of the Environment, by contrast, offered nothing beyond adjusting temperature or the look of the landscape.
To think a trait like that would find use here.
I had kept it on the off chance it might serve as Transcendence material, like the psionic organ had — and instead it found a purpose I never imagined.
Thanks to Master of the Environment, the nest's temperature was maintained at a pleasantly cool level. The ceiling and walls were coated in the nest's mucus, which kept the ice from melting through.
And over it all lay the marsh. If light reached this deep, you would have seen steam rising gently off its surface.
Heat Dissipation plus Marsh Creation. I'm probably the first to ever combine the two.
By lying in the marsh atop the nest and slowly radiating heat, I had turned the place into a genuine mud-bath hot spring. Thanks to that, even Adhai and the Mother of the Sky — both of them sensitive to the cold — had been able to sleep in comfort.
Come to think of it, the psionic organ aside, my unused traits keep getting excavated one by one.
I used to believe no Amorph player had ever played as flexibly as I had. I suppose I owe myself an apology.
I still have much to learn.
With that thought, I adjusted the heat I was releasing. As the warmth pouring from my body intensified, the marsh's temperature rose with it.
｢Big Baby? What are you doing?｣
[Zzz Zzz Zzzzzzz (Sorry. I woke you up, didn't I.)]
She must have felt my movement through the ripples in the water — No. 26 sent a thought-wave my way. I stopped radiating heat and stretched out a hand to stroke her.
[Zzzzzz Zz Zz (Never mind me. Sleep.)]
｢Big Baby, aren't sleepy? Then I'll put you to sleep!｣
Before I could politely decline, she wrapped her enormous bulk around my head in a tight hug.
Even inflated to her ten-meter balloon size, she was less than half my body — but she made a perfectly serviceable pillow.
Well, this is a novel sensation.
She had climbed onto my head plenty of times before, but I'd never once rested on top of her. Perhaps it was her body, which stayed comfortably, faintly cool to the touch.
｢Good night, Big Baby.｣
Wrapped in an inexplicable sense of ease, I closed my eyes.
The Noble Capitals of Megacorp possess colony planets scattered across the cosmos.
Some are strategic strongholds other factions covet at every opportunity; others remain all but unknown to the galaxy at large.
The Yujin family, too, holds dominion over countless worlds — worlds needed to source the raw materials for gene modification and the production of Hulk Mutants.
Among them was one nameless planet.
Discovered personally by Akira Yujin during an expedition in his earlier days, it appeared on no shared star charts belonging to any of the major factions.
On that world — a world without so much as a name — lay a nest of Galagons, the dragons of space.
That frigid, frozen planet was the sole supply source of Galagon genetic material.
But there was not a single Galagon that wasn't vicious to its core, and so setting foot on that world meant wagering one's life. A hundred who entered might, at best, see a single one return. It was a place of extraordinary cruelty.
Danger and value.
For those two reasons, the planet's location was known only to a tiny handful even within the Yujin family.
And Sihyeon Yujin was one of that handful.
After all, the Galagon genes woven into her body had come from this very place — there was no way she couldn't know of it.
Yet the reason she understood so keenly just how dangerous this world was went far beyond the matter of genes.
She was the only Noble Capital, apart from Akira Yujin himself, who had ever set foot here in person.
Because she had once stolen a Galagon egg from this planet — and captured a mutant Blue Galagon besides.
Her forces, pursued by the vengeful Galagons, had suffered catastrophic losses on that day.
She might be a clone now, but she carried the bulk of the original's memories. She knew very well how terrifying an enraged Galagon could be.
She had never dreamed, not in her wildest imaginings, that she would return to this place.
And yet here she stood, her feet planted once more on the planet where the Galagons dwelled.
"...He's gone."
Rising slowly from the snow, Sihyeon wore the White Maiden, her custom-built reinforced suit. At her words, the people hidden around her rose to their feet one by one.
Her subordinates wore specially commissioned suits — a standard powered suit's power source would have frozen solid in moments.
White as snowfall and thick enough to pass for a spacesuit, these reinforced suits were equipment designed for exploring volcanic worlds or frozen ones like this. Their comms gear, their weapons — everything they carried had been specially treated to keep it from freezing over.
Layla Chamberlain, her outer shell painted white with camouflage coating like everyone else's, approached Sihyeon.
｢The Galagons seem remarkably industrious. Do they usually roam about that much?｣
"No. They don't. Apart from hunts, they almost never leave the nest."
A White Galagon had appeared without warning mere moments ago, forcing every member of the landing party to dive for cover.
｢Thank goodness the flagship didn't make planetfall. If it had, the expedition would have ended three days ago.｣
Sihyeon's flagship had arrived at the nameless planet three days earlier.
Just as Layla said, Sihyeon had chosen to descend via transport shuttle rather than bring the flagship down to the surface.
A capital ship of that size would be easily spotted by the Galagons — and should outside support prove necessary, it might well be lost. The choice had been a deliberate one.
And looking at the situation now, that judgment had paid for itself.
Something's wrong. They were never this active before.
The Galagons were this planet's apex predators, but plenty of other creatures possessed strength rivaling theirs. It was the White Galagons' duty to defend the nest from those rivals.
For them to keep leaving the nest outside of hunts was unmistakably abnormal behavior.
"Captain Nern. You said you buried the relic in that mountain range, didn't you?"
"That I did. But a moment — the map, if you would."
Sihyeon handed a small computer pad to Nern, the middle-aged Cultist with the yak horns.
Once the captain of the Imperial Mothership Judge of Damos 08, he had lost his ship and his crew to the being known as the Three-Headed Demon, and had come to this planet in pursuit of vengeance.
Skilled with human tools to a degree unusual for his kind, he marked a red dot on a point in the mountain range rendered on the map.
"I buried it here."
"That's quite a distance."
"Yet this route will cut the travel time considerably."
｢I wouldn't recommend heading that way. The White Galagon could come flying over again at any moment.｣
Nern and Layla both had a point.
｢What about cutting straight across that plain instead? It doesn't seem like it would take long at all.｣
"That won't do. There's a dangerous monster on the Frozen Plain."
Beneath the ground Layla indicated with her mechanical hand dwelt an exceedingly powerful beast. When Sihyeon had come here before, the creature had cost her more than a hundred soldiers.
They hadn't died fighting Galagons — they had been lost to an existence no one had anticipated. That was a humiliation she could never forget, however hard she tried.
If that thing is still alive, that route is too dangerous.
"No help for it, then. Even if it means a detour, we take the safe road."
Sihyeon's time was hardly unlimited, but if she failed here, Minseok waiting on the flagship would stop trusting her altogether.
I still need his trust. For now.
Tearing her eyes from the map, she glared out at the terrain ahead.
A black barrier sprawled across the horizon. In one of those peaks lay the relic she sought.