Ant Hell (4)
As many sentient species as there are living in Space Survival, there are just as many kinds of monsters.
Everything from creatures that look like Earth wildlife, to horrors straight out of a slasher film, to godlike beings that inspire something close to religious awe.
And a few of those species possess a very particular ability.
The power to mimic sentient beings.
The classic example is a predator called the Red Mist. It's a jaguar-like beast with a burning red mane, famous for exhaling a hallucinogenic pheromone that is virtually impossible to defend against.
Once the pheromone cloud spreads, the beast imitates human speech to lure players astray. Supposedly it runs on some algorithm that replicates players' conversations and movements, and the results are disturbingly convincing.
The hallucination alone is hard enough to shake off, but with the thing carrying on like a comrade right beside you, any player who doesn't know what a Red Mist is has no choice but to fall for it.
'It's not the apex predator of jungle-type planets for nothing.'
Why else would its nickname in the game's early days have been the "Space Jangsan Tiger"—after the beast of Korean legend that lures its victims by crying out in a human voice?
As time passed and the veterans piled up, fewer and fewer players fell for its tricks. No matter how clever the AI, from a human's point of view something always felt off.
'But what if the one doing the deceiving is human?'
What if it wore the face of a friend you'd been gaming with until yesterday—someone who knew exactly what gear you carried and what tactics you favored?
Could anyone truly refuse to be fooled?
In short, the best deceiver of humankind is another human.
Or to put it more precisely: a human who knows their mark inside and out.
And I am, quite possibly, the Amorph who deceived more people than anyone else in the game.
'Shall we begin, then?'
With every preparation complete, I closed in on the enemy group. As I drew near, they came to a halt.
'The Temple Guard, as expected.'
Impressive. Since arriving in this world, I could count on one hand the enemies who had sensed my approach in time to prepare for it.
I heard blades whispering free of their Galagon-claw sheaths, heard the Demolisher gunners racking their weapons—but not a single voice among them. No doubt they were debating their response furiously over telepathy.
'Good.'
My task here was not to ambush them in secret. What I wanted was to cultivate distrust among them.
Beyond the fork of the broad ice corridor, I parted my jaws slightly. In my throat, in roughly the spot where a human keeps a thyroid, sits a very special organ.
A vocal apparatus born of the Mimic Organ trait—one that resets with every new gene I absorb, letting me don a fresh voice each time.
The "weapon" that had deceived and devoured countless prey hummed to life once more.
"H-help me!"
A woman's voice spilled from my mouth.
The voice of a Cult member Adhai had cut down as she fled the cavern where the Ice Horror's corpse lay. Adhai had handed the body over to me, and I'd taken a single bite to feed the Mimic Organ.
There was exactly one reason I'd chosen this particular Cultist.
'Because she seemed rather important.'
The others had bought time with their lives so that she could escape. That marked her, with high probability, as a user of psychic information-transmission techniques.
It's the same everywhere: credibility and importance rise with the speaker's rank. If her comrades died to send her out alive, the enemy would have to stop and think hard about what to do with her.
"What is that?!"
"It's Selene!"
Just as I'd predicted, they began to waver the instant they heard the voice.
"Everyone, hold!"
Then a woman barked in a deep, commanding tone. Judging by the voice alone, she was the leader of this detachment.
The wavering Cultists froze in unison. Silence followed—a telepathic conference, surely.
'Just as I thought.'
When I mimicked Selene's voice, they had two broad options: rush over to help, or come on wary and ready to attack. Since I was a target slated for immediate extermination, retreat should never have been on the table.
Yet the enemy chose neither. They held their watch and spoke through telepathy alone.
And what does that tell me?
'They've already been briefed, haven't they?'
The highest-ranking soul here—the Cult priest.
That grizzled old veteran of Space Survival had clearly explained to them what I am.
'Anyone who truly knows me wouldn't come at all.'
Because there's no telling what kind of trap I might have laid. And this is reality, not a game—when you die here, that's the end. Even if their skill is genuinely formidable, would they really gamble so lightly? I know I wouldn't.
'Which is exactly what I'm exploiting.'
The Cult player will refuse to approach for fear of traps—even knowing full well I might be right beside him.
He'd almost certainly mapped out how far my nest had spread the moment he heard of the first attack. The reason he halted his advance, too, was his judgment that fighting atop the nest would be a losing proposition.
The safest card he could play was to pull his subordinates back first. After that, he'd rethink his strategy and move again.
True to his intent, the detachment began retracing their steps. Their footfalls had a slightly heated edge—dissatisfaction, plain to hear.
'Of course they're angry.'
Learning things the hard way isn't a human monopoly. The Cult is no different.
And these were the Temple Guard, one of the finest ground forces the empire possesses. How galling must it feel for soldiers of such renown to be abandoned when no one could even say whether the enemy out there was foe or friend?
'Time to hammer the wedge in, then.'
I propped the female Cultist against the wall in a leaning pose.
Mother of the Sky had snapped her neck vertebrae, leaving her body paralyzed—a stroke of luck that had made the "work" considerably easier.
I turned her head so that she faced me. The moment her gaze met mine, her pupils bloomed wide.
Her eyes were brimming with disbelief—refusing to accept that the reality before her could be real.
The instant she saw me, the retreating members stopped dead.
"What—?!"
"Lady Aliya! Do you see it?!"
Soul Link is a formidable technique. On a battlefield where information is life itself, nothing matters more than an expanded field of vision.
And if you can call up an ally's sight whenever you wish, operations become that much smoother to execute.
Thanks to this technique, the Cult boasted not only exceptional individual strength but dominance in team play as well.
Now consider the reverse.
What if that information is wrong? What if what I'm seeing differs from reality itself?
"She was alive all along!"
"Selene saved her!"
I looked down at the Cultist slumped against the wall, sweating cold.
She had grasped what I intended to do, and her pupils were trembling like a madwoman's.
I asked her, silently.
What do I look like to you?
Jason, the Rank 10 player, had a long and bitter history with the Amorphs.
He was a concept player who had built his entire persona around what he called "aesthetic supremacy."
His creed was simple: slaughter the ugly aliens, and enslave the beautiful ones.
This brand of playstyle wasn't anything special in itself. Space Survival crawled with every species of weirdo imaginable, and other games had their share of players who enjoyed the same brand of mischief.
The reason Jason, this perfectly "ordinary" concept player, became infamous was that his harassment of monster players went far beyond any acceptable line. More than a few players rage-quit the game outright, unable to endure his torments.
Players like that tend to collect enemies easily, yet he survived intact thanks to the fans who flocked to him.
Jason was an internet streamer with Space Survival as his flagship content, and his follower count was substantial. He leveraged that following to command a considerable in-game faction as well.
Because of that, even ranked monster players found it difficult to move against him. One might say, "Just strike when he's alone"—but Jason was the Rank 10 player. He was never an easy mark.
Come to think of it, the reason a "humanist" concept player like him chose the Cult rather than the human race was pure performance metrics. A stronger species meant his comparatively modest skill wouldn't get him steamrolled.
And so he savored the game, dealing out every brand of villainy, until one day—
his ending came for him too.
A ranker of the most loathsome species.
A player so despised that rival rankers—bitter enemies of one another—formed an alliance and posted a bounty on his head.
The Rank 5 Amorph player had begun hunting him.
For more than half a year, that bastard tailed him every single day, toying with him through tactics that defied all reason.
The legend of the moment his character stepped into the sleep chamber to log out—only for the hidden bastard to pounce—was retold in the community like an urban legend.
Because of the Morph-fucker, two clans built by his followers were obliterated, and his friendships with fellow rankers shattered one by one.
In the end, unable to bear it any longer, Jason brought the affair to a close by publishing a public apology on the community boards.
Not long afterward he crossed into the game's world, and it all became ancient history.
His time spent in the world of Space Survival had not been short.
He'd believed it was finally something he could forget.
Until he came here—no, until he came face to face with him, he had believed that. But he'd been wrong. The telepathy winging toward him had stirred a nightmare long sunk into slumber.
"Jason! You're watching too, aren't you? Look through Billone's eyes! We're both alive—we made it!"
His lover Aliya's telepathy grated on him beyond endurance.
He understood, of course.
A Soul Link does not sever until its subject dies or the caster dissolves it. And through the eyes of Billone—the woman that monster had taken—there was a female Cultist, alive and whole.
She was one of the twelve he'd dispatched to purge anything capable of disrupting psychic power: Selene. A member trained in the Memory Storage Technique. Under ordinary circumstances, a person to be protected at all costs.
But Jason, who had been stung by the Morph-fucker before, knew better.
'It's a trap.'
The Cultist in Billone's sight. Gravely wounded, barely able to move, crying out desperately for her comrades.
The darkness hid her face, but the voice alone was pitiful beyond measure—as if she might collapse at any moment.
'Bullshit! That vile Morph-fucker bastard...!'
Watching that performance, he could feel the old trauma rising like a slow poison.
He was certain of it. The owner of that voice was already dead, and Billone—still linked through the Soul Link—was infected with parasites.
If they went to the rescue now, that parasite-puppeted Cultist would inflict catastrophic losses. Even in the game, the bastard had once demonstrated the firepower to detonate an entire battleship using controlled NPCs.
'He can copy anyone's appearance perfectly. And worse, he slurps up their memories too.'
"...Then what about Billone? Are you saying Billone's being controlled as well?"
"Yes. His parasite is puppeting her right now."
"I've never heard of a monster like that existing."
Naturally not.
Even in the game, the exact nature of his transformation skill was never revealed to the end. The Outspacer players could only speculate—that it was a fusion trait assembled from an absurdly rare combination of genes, or a reward from hunting Vortex One.
Whatever that transformation truly was, no other monster or player alive combined parasites and shapeshifting the way he did. Jason hated the Morph-fucker with a pathological passion, but even he acknowledged the man's skill.
Honestly, judged purely on trait utilization, there was probably little daylight between him and Rank 3 or Rank 4.
'...I know all of this.'
But the Temple Guard here did not. They had encountered him only through intelligence reports; this was their first time meeting him blade to blade.
Their hard-earned experience against countless monsters was working against them at this very moment. To their eyes, he was a creature that could not possibly exist.
Who would ever guess that the true power of the monster which annihilated a mothership flotilla lay in deception—parasites and mimicry?
"I'll say it one more time, Aliya. Give it up and fall back to me."
"Jason..."
Aliya hesitated.
He had aimed at this too. Sapping his authority as commander, and driving a quarrel between him and his subordinates.
He sent his telepathy to his lover once more.
Perhaps his earnestness finally reached her. Just as she finished steadying her people and turned to move—
an anomaly erupted in the Soul Link's shared vision.
Selene flinched, jerking as though she'd discovered something. Behind her, out of the darkness, a monster emerged.
'What is that?'
An eagle's head, amber eyes, and the golden-maned body of a lion. The newly arrived monster was a phantom beast called a griffin.
'That's a Wolf who's learned Apotheosis, isn't it? Why would she be here of all places...?'
The griffin drew closer to the shared vision. Its razor beak gleamed with menace—and then Selene suddenly planted herself in front of the sight, arms spread wide.
As if to say it would not pass while she still drew breath.
That image was the killing blow.
'Damn it! There's no other way! Lady Aliya!'
"...Jason. Forgive me."
"Wait! Everyone, hold! That's a trick! Damn it all—you can't go!"
Jason fired off telepathy in a panic, but no answer came back. Aliya and her subordinates had severed the telepathic link entirely.
In its place, through the Soul Link, he watched his members' backs as they sprinted down the corridor.
Then, in perfect unison, they stopped.
Before them stood Selene, unharmed, and Billone propped against the wall. The griffin Wolf of moments ago was nowhere to be seen.
But the members, Aliya—and Jason, whose sight was bound to hers—could all feel it.
That the "thing" standing before them was not a Cultist at all.
The vision streaming through Aliya trembled faintly. Her shaken heart had seeped into her pupils.
And that vision read the movement of "its" mouth.
It was saying:
What do I look like to you?