The Cult's High Priest (3)
Snowflakes began drifting down from a sky that had still been dark when I first hauled myself out of the underground. The blizzard that had gone quiet was stirring back to life.
With the falling snow between us, the Cultist and I glared at each other.
"What, you got a problem with the fact that I can get big too?"
The enemy player sneered at me with an easy, unbothered face. Even through the swirling snow, his golden construct gleamed brilliantly, standing firm in its protection of its summoner.
Ignoring his mockery, I replayed the exchange we'd just had in my mind.
Those mysterious particles.
One thing was certain: they weren't made of psychic power. If they had been, my Psychic Reflection Carapace would have reflected at least a fraction of the damage.
And their size means nothing either.
The golden construct was, at most, five or six meters tall — but that was a lie. When it had swung its sword-shaped arm a moment ago, the length had stretched out in a flash.
No — more precisely, the instant it swung, the arrangement of the golden particles composing the arm had shifted, transforming it into a thin, extended blade of golden energy.
It looks like sword qi, but it's entirely under his control.
In other words, that golden construct was a summon capable of freely reshaping its own body. No such concept existed among summons in the game.
Either a new skill, or…
It might be the effect of a perk. Just as I had killed Muriel and stolen her Plunderer's Amorphous Polyhedron, he too might have murdered someone and robbed them of their special ability.
At least two perks. Possibly more.
On the off chance I could learn something, I used Insight on the enemy player, but nothing useful surfaced — only the same message I'd gotten with Muriel, noting that certain information was unreadable.
The one thing I did learn was the enemy player's name.
Jason.
His real name failing to appear was another thing he had in common with Muriel.
Even beyond Insight, the Predator Sense I'd activated underground had failed to clearly surface his name. Worse, it had flickered in fragmented glimpses through a haze of static.
Is it because he's a player?
I had no idea why it manifested that way, but that was a question for later.
Having organized my thoughts in a matter of seconds, I moved again.
My blunt claws at the tail and lower body, along with the spikes grown from Bone Beast, dug hard into the snow and ice.
My hundred-meter body shot forward like a storm. In an instant I was right on top of the Cult player — no, Jason — and brought my combat arms crashing down on him.
"Hmph."
The golden construct blocked my attack with a derisive snort. The moment my arm struck his shield, the bone spikes along it snapped off in droves.
"Told you it's useless."
Jason, his left arm raised in perfect mirror of the construct, gave a flick of his right. Syncing with the summon's movement, the golden construct lunged at me again.
The golden blade carved across my head carapace. Sparks crackled violently where my head met his sword.
My head plating — boasting the best defense on my body alongside the pincer at the tip of my tail — did not shear away easily. It couldn't prevent a gash several tens of centimeters deep from being scored into it, though.
"Let's see how long you can hold out…"
While he reset his stance, I pulled all six of my Erosion Tentacles from my back. Like serpents bursting from a jar, the tentacles lashed out and wound themselves around the golden construct.
Holding them there, I flexed the tentacles and hauled the construct toward me. For a split second, Jason — linked to the construct — staggered.
Toward the stumbling man, my tail swept low across the snow-covered ground and came hurtling in. The pincer at its tip spread wide open.
Thanks to Bone Beast, the pincer measured roughly ten meters. Caught in jaws as hard as the Ice Horror's carapace, even the Dragonslayer Set could not have escaped.
"…Or so I thought."
But Jason was still perfectly at ease. The moment he opened his mouth, the golden construct disassembled into a swarm of particles and slipped free between my tentacles.
Reconstructed in the blink of an eye, the shape rapidly formed a shield and deflected my pincer. Its shield-shaped left arm gleamed a distinctly deeper gold than the rest of its body.
"Easy."
Then the golden construct counterattacked, thrusting like a fencer's lunge. The strike came screaming in for the auxiliary organs beneath my jaw, and I jerked my head upward to evade it.
But his assault wasn't finished. Jason, who had been standing still until now, kicked off the ground and launched himself into the air.
The shield enveloping him vanished as my tail brushed past beneath his feet, and he climbed the empty air as though the falling snow were stair steps, rising above me to carve a gash up my chest.
Jason was tiny compared to me, so his own blade was hardly a concern. The problem was the summon clinging to his back.
Because from behind the airborne man, the reconstructed golden construct's enormous blade came flying, aiming to split my body in two.
Damn it!
Dodging sideways wasn't an option. I hurriedly spread the Glide Membranes attached to my combat arms wide open.
The Glide Membrane was built for gliding, not for powered flight over the ground.
But as my body had swelled to its current size, the membranes on each of my six arms had expanded along with it. Six wings, each easily spanning tens of meters, could manage lifting my body for a moment, at least.
Membranes spread, I whipped my arms downward in a furious beat. A gale roared beneath me and my body lurched upward.
"Shit—!"
The surge of wind caught Jason mid-air, and he blinked. The blade that had been about to slice through my abdomen scattered into golden particles in that instant.
"Cute tricks!"
With his roar, the blade — momentarily robbed of its physical form — snapped back to solid state and raked a shallow cut across my exoskeleton. By then I had already risen into the air, and I fell backward while swinging my tail forward like a great sweeping broom.
Given how things had gone before, I expected him to form a shield from the construct again — but this time he did something different. He spread his left hand wide, and an invisible energy field materialized, shoving my tail away in the opposite direction.
Reflection — the psychic technique that reflects an opponent's attacks back at them.
The energy stored in my tail bounced back, and a staggering recoil slammed into my body — but I turned that recoil to my advantage. My massive frame rode the reflected current of energy and was driven far back across the plain.
As I landed in the snowfield, a colossal spear of golden particles came hurtling at me. The enemy's attack, relentlessly zeroing in on my auxiliary organs, met my Erosion Tentacles head-on.
Its trajectory warped by the tentacles, the spear dissolved into glittering motes of light and flowed back into its master's body.
"You filthy vermin. Running away is all you're good for, isn't it?"
"…"
"Why the silence, hmm? Where's that famous Rank 5 arrogance? Hm?"
Jason taunted me, but I didn't answer.
Because there was something far more important at stake.
That, just now — did you see it?
In a span of mere minutes, I had picked up two critical pieces of intelligence.
The construct loses its substance whenever he blinks.
The wind from my launch into the air had made Jason blink for the briefest of moments. In that fractional instant, the golden construct had broken apart into particles.
Truly the blink of an eye — but I hadn't missed it.
That construct is bound to his senses.
Vision in particular seemed to play a crucial role in shaping it. Which meant that his sword qi and thrown spears would very likely lose their power the moment they left his field of view.
And there's a cooldown when it changes form.
After blinking, the reconstructed construct had tried to cut me down again with its blade — and failed. Right after that, when my tail came swinging at him, he didn't morph it into a shield to block.
Unlike at the start, he used Reflection instead.
I wasn't certain about that part yet. He might have laid a trap, or he might simply have acted without thinking. I couldn't rule out either possibility.
Let's run an experiment.
I spread my membranes wide and raked the ground with tremendous force. The earth in front of me split open, and shards of ice along with freshly fallen snow burst into the air, veiling everything before my eyes.
Then I wheeled around and began sprinting in the opposite direction.
"Planning to run, with no cover anywhere in sight?"
Run? Of course not.
My battle had left the ice plains jagged with craters and ridges, but there was nowhere that could properly shelter my body. And unlike my pitch-black hide, the land here was buried in nothing but pure white snow — no place to hide, either.
Doesn't matter.
Because what I was about to do only had to look like I was trying to hide.
—
Figures. That Morph-fucker bastard caught on fast.
Standing amid the blanketing white, Jason clicked his tongue. They'd barely been fighting, and already the monster had picked apart the weakness of his perk.
The golden construct linked to his spine was, in truth, a colony of parasites — minuscule living organisms, each far too small to see.
Only because the creatures were so tiny, and so tightly interlinked with one another, did the colony as a whole appear to be a single solid form.
Ordinarily they were stored inside Jason's body; each time he activated the perk, they emerged and linked to his spinal cord like now, assembling into the golden shape.
In other words, Jason was a living nest — and, functionally, the brain — of the golden parasites. Which meant the construct was profoundly dependent on his cognition.
What he could not see, the parasites could not see. What he did not know, they did not know either.
"Catching that in a split second. The man's a lunatic."
For all his words, Jason wasn't particularly worried.
He was a psychic of such magnitude that he'd held the office of High Priest in the Cult Empire. He had any number of means to reinforce his perception and senses.
Jason drew an ornately designed vial from a pocket on his armor. Psychomaniac — a drug that heightened psychic precision. He downed it in one go.
"Gulp. Hah."
Enhanced by the Psychomaniac, he activated his tracking technique.
Information on where the creature had gone poured steadily into his mind.
The monster's rapidly receding presence, a thread of thought-signal flying off somewhere like a taut hairline of light — Jason missed nothing, registering every scrap of data down to the last speck.
A thought-signal. Calling for his slave, is he?
He already knew the creature kept a Wolf as an enslaved servant — he'd seen it through the eyes of the Temple Guard.
Come to think of it, that gryphon Wolf — could it be a player?
Judging by the circumstances, the odds were high it was a Wolf player, just as Muriel's final message had claimed.
A player, huh.
If it was male, it was useless beyond its perk, so he'd kill it on the spot. If female…
It's been a while since I've had a Wolf slave.
Deciding he'd play with it a while before killing it, Jason ambled along the trail the Morph-fucker had left behind.
The deepening snowfall had all but erased the creature's tracks, but that posed no obstacle to him. Psychic power didn't gutter out over a little snow.
He pursued the creature with Memory Sight — the technique that read the memories held within objects — fully active.
There would be no escaping him.
Five minutes or so passed. Jason came to a halt atop a featureless mound of snow.
Ha. What in the world did he do here.
Reading the last lingering impressions, he found the creature had been diligently digging through the snow right where he stood.
This was no child's game. After all that fleeing, the thing it chose to do was bury itself under the snow. At the sheer pathetic absurdity of it, a scornful laugh escaped Jason before he could stop it.
Still, better safe than sorry.
He activated defensive psychic techniques like Reflection, then raised his arm high toward the sky. At once, the sword on the golden construct clinging to his back expanded to a length of tens of meters.
This should do it, right?
Having swelled the construct to a size that would easily swallow a third of the creature's body, Jason brought his arm sweeping down toward the snow mound. The golden blade, now large enough to be visible even from the distant mountain range, plunged into the snow.
With a thunderous boom, countless fragments scattered into the air.
Through his sharpened senses, he could feel that among the debris were chunks of flesh torn from the creature's body.
Examining the pieces strewn across the ground, the section he'd just destroyed appeared to be one of its arms. Finger joints each easily exceeding five meters lay tumbled across the snow.
Hm?
Jason flinched — the wreckage was larger than he'd calculated. Even accounting for the creature's hundred-meter frame, its fingers shouldn't have been this big.
What's big enough to… wait.
Sensing that something was wrong, Jason frantically kicked off the ground and lifted himself skyward. In that instant, something colossal erupted from beneath the snow mound where he'd been standing.
"You gotta be fuc—?!"
For a heartbeat, Jason thought two small mountains had sprouted from the ground at his feet. They easily vaulted tens of meters into the air — and unbelievably, they were jaws.
The jaws that had lain spread wide on either side beneath the snow all this time were now snapping shut, aiming to swallow him whole — like a bear trap hidden beneath a scattering of leaves.
There was no time to time a shield activation. Reflection was already running, but it couldn't possibly block a maw of that magnitude closing in from every direction.
Yanking himself backward was the only option. He kicked off the empty air and shot rapidly away.
Dodging between the closing jaws like the wall traps of some ancient tomb, Jason barely wrenched himself free. But he had never anticipated a mouth that easily spanned tens of meters, and he did not escape unscathed — in the final instant before breaking clear, one of his legs raked across the teeth embedded in that maw.
"Ghk—!"
Scraped was far too gentle a word — each individual tooth stood taller than he did. When teeth like that raked past your leg, the truth of it was that the leg had been torn open.
"Shit — fuck! FUCK!"
Thanks to the Dragonslayer Set he wore, the wound knitted itself closed at speed, but it did nothing to erase the pain. And it had been a long time since he'd felt agony this searing, so Jason spewed out raw, primal curses.
Before him, the owner of that mouth began slowly rising to its feet, as though answering his profanity in kind.
"You filthy Morph-fu— wh-wh-wha…?"
For one instant he thought an eclipse had swallowed the planet. But it was no eclipse.
It was not the shadow of any moon. It was a shadow cast by a living thing.
The master of the shadow spreading across the snowy plain was a being he knew all too well.
The creature Jason despised more than anything else in existence — and…
…the monster he hadn't wanted to face even in his nightmares.
The Amorph, its body spanning several hundred meters, roared directly into his face.