Ghost Ship of C-08 (1)
The era when the cosmos visible overhead ceased to be myth and became reality.
Humanity in space had split into two great powers: the Mega Corp and the Star Union.
Both were mighty enough to dominate dozens, even hundreds of star systems — yet compared to the vast, boundless universe, they were little more than dust motes.
The infinite expanse, crammed with countless galaxies and celestial bodies, overflowed with places their feet had never touched.
C-08 was one such place.
In that realm, beyond the reach of Mega Corp, the Star Union, and every other intelligence, beings hostile to humankind lay coiled in wait.
C-08 was territory managed by the Spacedogs — and among them, a cartel rumored to be exceptionally cruel.
The Dvara Cartel.
The infamous raiders were, at that very moment, savaging prey that had wandered into their domain.
"Aaaagh! Please, spare me!"
"Kyaaaaah!"
Shrieks of anguish filled the passenger liner, its interior garlanded with lavish ornamentation. Across the decks lay armed security guards and innocent victims alike.
"Take everything they've got!"
"Kill the men! Rape the women!"
There was nothing ordinary about these merciless plunderers. One had the head of an ant; another was half machine. Some chuckled as they hoisted their loot, while others, faces twisted with dark intent, dragged noblewomen away into the shadows.
The raiders differed wildly in appearance and conduct, yet they shared one thing in common.
Every one of them bore a blood-red clover tattoo near the shoulder. And the tattoo carried a single meaning.
They enjoyed the protection of Elchen Dvara, godfather of the Dvara Cartel.
Since every member of the Dvara Cartel was a former soldier, mercenary, or criminal, they all tended to run large. Each one flaunted a brutish, above-average frame — but among them, one was colossal even by those standards.
He stood three meters tall, his entire body packed with muscle, his head resembling a lion's with a red mane and beast's ears. One eye and his right arm had been replaced with machinery.
A chimera of man, beast, and machine — he was Elchen Dvara, the patriarch who led a family of fifty.
He sat sprawled sideways in the captain's chair, watching his subordinates plunder with an air of utter boredom. Beside the chair, the tribute his men had offered him lay piled like a mountain, but he seemed to have no interest in it whatsoever.
Tch. Pocket change like this. What a waste of effort.
As Elchen clicked his tongue, his eyes met those of a prisoner being dragged past by one of his men. The prisoner — no, the man who had been captain of this ship — stared at Elchen and shouted.
"You there, godfather! How could you do this to us!"
"Do what?"
"We hired your mercenary company for protection! Where in the hell do you get off pulling something like this?"
A former Mega Corp Hulk Mutant, Elchen ranked among the extraordinary even when measured against other cartel bosses. Those who didn't know him would be struck by his gene-wrenched bulk — but Elchen's true weapon was never his body.
Elchen's weapon was cunning.
He ran a Spacedog cartel, yet had brazenly registered it as a legitimate Mega Corp mercenary company. His signature move was to work as hired muscle, then knife the client in the back the moment he judged them easy pickings.
"You stupid bastard. Only a moron hands his security over to mercenaries."
"Wh-what?!"
"Are we friends, you and me? It's you who's insane — tossing a few credits at a total stranger and expecting everything to work out fine."
"The sheer gall of—!"
"Oh, come off it. You only did it to save money, didn't you? Mega Corp pigs are always the same."
"You goddamn son of a bitch!"
Elchen owed no duty to answer every yap from the defeated. He responded to the captain's tirade by picking at his ear.
"By now the Mega Corp Defense Force has received our distress signal and mobilized! When they arrive, every one of you will be executed!"
"Oooh. Scary stuff. Alright, drag him off."
"Eeek! Death's too good for the likes of you. I'll speak to the Defense Force myself. I'll tell them to turn every last one of you into Hulk Mutants."
"...Hold on."
Elchen's brow twitched. His bestial ears trembled between the folds of his mane, mirroring his displeasure.
Nothing angered him more than being told he would be made into a Hulk Mutant. Because he himself had been "Employed" by Mega Corp and forcibly subjected to genetic modification.
The foolish captain had touched the beast's reverse scale.
Elchen rose from his seat and advanced on the captain.
When he held out a hand to the subordinate gripping the captain, the man drew the machete at his hip and passed it over.
Held in the hand of a three-meter giant, the machete — commonly called a jungle knife — looked no bigger than a stiletto. It was a sight quite, no, extremely frightening, and the captain's throat bobbed as he swallowed.
"Wh-what are you doing?"
"Look, Captain. You don't seem to know much about the Mega Corp Mercenary Code, so let me teach you."
"Huh?"
"A mercenary who betrays a client during a contract commits a serious crime — but if there's no witness to prove it happened, the charge is void. Didn't you know?"
"What did you say?"
"Calling the Defense Force? What a wasted effort. Seeing as there's nobody left to testify for you."
Understanding dawned, and the captain's face drained white.
"Y-you mean to murder us all!"
"I don't know about such refined phrasing. But at least one thing is certain..."
Elchen seized the captain roughly by the hair. The man howled in pain and kicked at him, but against those monstrous muscles it was no more than an infant's flailing.
"...that my hobby is flaying the skin off Mega Corp pigs."
The machete in Elchen's hand gleamed, menacing.
By the time his pastime concluded, not a single living human remained aboard the liner. As always, once the raid was over, only a foul silence hung in the emptied ship.
While his men cleaned up, Elchen returned to his own assault ship. Every pirate aboard came out to greet him.
"Welcome back, boss."
"Yeah. Take that and process it like usual."
"Yes, sir."
The first mate took the strip of facial skin Elchen tossed him and vanished somewhere with it. That skin, after proper treatment, would be mounted on Elchen's throne.
"Come to think of it, don't we have something else on the docket today?"
"What do you mean, boss?"
"Not you. Get Garlic in here."
Before long, one of his men ushered in a petite woman.
With long black hair and glasses, she was the sole female of the Dvara Cartel. Her comrades called her Garlic, on account of the smell that clung to her.
Hair hanging loose, shoulders hunched, Garlic looked timid to any observer. She greeted Elchen in a voice trembling uncontrollably.
"H-hello, boss. D-did you call for me?"
"Yeah. I hear there's work around here. What's the status?"
"W-we were supposed to meet with them today, but contact suddenly went dead on their end, so..."
"What?"
"Eeek?!"
The moment Elchen's face soured, Garlic crumpled in on herself.
Had it been any other subordinate, he'd have beaten them half to death on the spot. But Garlic was the sharpest mind in the cartel. He had no idea where the woman had crawled in from, but she was clever and obedient, and he treasured her.
Elchen suppressed his temper and demanded an explanation.
"Explain. Properly."
"An, an acquaintance of mine is aboard a research vessel captained by someone named Yu Seong S-Samuel. They sent us a request to dispose of a corpse that came from the ship."
"The Samuel family? Those people are out here?"
"You know of them?"
"They're the Third Capital of Titan, aren't they? Came all this way sniffing for scraps, huh? Fine. So whose corpse is it?"
"A-a Noble Capital, sir. A w-woman of the Yujin family..."
The Third Capital of Titan, asking for the disposal of a Noble Capital corpse from Earth. Given the gulf between them, it was a request that both could and could not exist.
"Crazy bastards. What's the pay?"
"A-at their last transmission, they said they could pay one h-hundred million credits."
"Ha. A hundred million?"
Elchen snorted.
He knew all too well how obsessively the Noble Capital venerated their dead. Even ten million — no, a billion credits wouldn't have made this offer acceptable.
There's a conspiracy here.
Elchen was well aware that the atmosphere inside Mega Corp had grown strange of late. Whispers kept drifting in that the young blood of Mars, the Edgerton family, was challenging the ancient kings of Earth, the Yujin family.
It had nothing to do with Elchen, a Spacedog — but he could smell money.
The Edgerton family's flagship business was ship development, yet behind closed doors they had been pouring resources into genetic modification.
Elchen knew the Edgerton family's secret because he was the prototype of the new-generation Hulk Mutant they had been developing in secret.
Wait a second. What if I seize the corpse and hand it over to the Edgertons?
He had no idea who the corpse belonged to, but if she truly came from the Yujin family, she would have been subjected to outlandish genetic modifications without question. She was practically the distilled essence of that lineage — the Edgertons would pay a fortune to get their hands on her.
Of course, Elchen despised the Edgerton family with every fiber of his being. But grudges and credits were separate matters entirely.
And if this makes Edgerton and Yujin tear into each other, they'll both be screwed. Works out great for me.
Having resolved to steal the corpse, Elchen turned back to Garlic.
"You said contact went dead? Were they attacked?"
"I-I couldn't say for certain..."
"I don't know what pig bastard is behind it, but he's got some gall. So there's a hog wandering loose in my territory, is there?"
Elchen rose to his feet and barked orders at his men.
"We depart as soon as the cleanup's finished. Destination: Yu Seong Samuel's ship. Get comms tracking ready."
"Yes, sir!"
Leaving his subordinates snapping into motion with military precision, Elchen began plotting his next move.
Garlic quietly withdrew, leaving her boss to his brooding.
Once the cleanup crews returned aboard, the Dvara assault ship vanished from the spot in a superluminal jump.
The abandoned liner soon vanished in a burst of flame, scattered into the dust of space. Not a soul in the universe would ever know that a pitiable host of souls had ever existed here.
Hm?
I opened my eyes from my rest. A faint impact had occurred somewhere along the ship's exterior. At first I wondered if we'd collided with space debris, but the shocks and vibrations rippling through the outer hull were far too deliberate for that.
As if someone were knocking at the door, trying to force their way inside.
So it's them.
I focused my senses, linked to the nest, on the point of impact. The ship's hull became as vivid to me as my own flesh, and the outlines of those responsible took shape in my mind.
Unlike our rounded, oval research vessel, it was a warship with a slender design that called a blade to mind. Painted across its hull was a red clover.
Nobody scrawls graffiti on a warship except Spacedogs.
The warship pressed itself tight against the research vessel and was attempting a forced docking. When plasma cutters chewed through the outer wall, several figures slipped through the breach into our ship.
Fast, aren't they?
True professionals of ship-to-ship warfare, without question — their movements were flawlessly coordinated. The moment they breached the research vessel, they made straight for the bridge.
Are they clever, or just stupid?
Any ordinary intelligence would have recognized that this ship was in a profoundly wrong state — and yet there was no hesitation in their movements whatsoever.
Yu Seong's research vessel had already degenerated far beyond any resemblance to its original form.
This pinnacle of advanced engineering, built to endure the harshest environments the cosmos could devise, was useless before Amorph.
The corridors of seamless alloy plating had been corroded by dark-brown stalks into something grotesque, streaked with bulging, vein-like growths. From ceiling and floor, spores poured forth an unceasing mixture of neurotoxin and acid. Where the melted plating had fallen away, the nest's mucus had filled the gaps in its place.
Unless someone told them this place had once been a ship, no one would ever guess it had been an artificial structure.
In a sense, since this place had been deliberately shaped for the sake of one particular being, it was fair to call it a kind of garden. And the master of that garden was me — Amorph.
Like grave robbers hunting treasure, they were blinded by greed. They had no idea what ground they were standing on.
At this moment I lay in my second nest, established inside the Research Laboratory, surveilling the intruders.
The oblivious intruders were operating a communicator on the bridge. My psionic organs, amplified through the nest, read the flow of their transmissions.
The one trading words in that gangster drawl was, evidently, the boss. A figure whose presence dwarfed everyone else's crossed over to the research vessel.
A Hulk Mutant.
I could hear the twin high-output, gene-boosted hearts pounding in his chest. Faint electromagnetic currents coursed across his skin — a fair number of machine implants, too, by the look of it.
Following the boss, the others poured steadily into the research vessel. I checked each newcomer off, one by one.
He's secreting pheromones — an Insectman of the Insect Folk clan. This one's heartbeat comes out as machine noise. A Star Union cyborg. A multi-species cartel, huh. Convenient.
The Sub-adult evolution requirement was to kill ten members each from two distinct playable intelligent races and consume their genes. I had already filled half the quota with humans, so the rest had to come from ten members of a single non-human species.
It wasn't something you could satisfy by eating any random ten — all ten had to belong to the same species for the condition to register.
So far the Star Union leads the count at twelve. Let's see how this plays out.
In the game they'd counted as a separate race, so it hadn't mattered — but in reality, who knew. By the lore, they were human beings same as Mega Corp's people. Whether the system would treat them as human or as an independent species, I supposed I'd have to eat one and find out.
As I kept waiting, the total number who had boarded the research vessel came to twenty-nine. I assumed that was the lot of them — and then, at the very last, one more human crossed over.
Hm?
The newcomer was profoundly ordinary. So ordinary that I nearly brushed it off without a second thought — but looking again, something about the figure felt strangely off.
Can a person really be this average?
I had devoured well over a hundred humans by now, and not one of them had possessed anything you could call a normal, or even average, bodily state. Every human body carried its own unique signature of movement and sound, like fingerprints.
But the one who had just boarded did not. The figure was average itself, as though someone had computed the mean of all humanity, fed it into a machine, and printed the result.
In short, this body was fabricated. As if there were a computer sitting in that skull where a brain should be, meticulously performing the role of "ordinary."
...A person of interest. I'll remember that one.
With that suspicious figure, the flow of arrivals stopped for good.
Which meant it was my turn now.
I severed my link with the nest and rose. No. 26, resting at my side, reacted to my movement.
｢Where are you going, Big Baby?｣
[Zzzt (Going out)]
｢I'm coming too.｣
[Zzzt zzzt (It's dangerous, stay here)]
She puffed herself up in protest, but I couldn't grant this one.
I intended to pay a visit to the enemy's warship and come back.
[Zzzt zzzt zzzt (Instead, guard that)]
｢That?｣
I indicated the plasma launcher resting in the corner. That heavy weapon — built by human hands yet destined to slaughter humans, a supreme irony — was on a brief respite after completing its duty.
[Zzzt zzzt (It's important)]
｢Yes! Big Baby, you can count on me!｣
Count on her, she says. Did she even understand what those words meant? In any case, entrusted with an important mission, she hopped up and down with delight.
With her sending me off, I emerged from the Cooling Room.
The enemy's vigilance had thinned — this window, and only this window, was my chance to cripple the warship. I had to destroy its power source and make retreat impossible before I could corner them all in one place.
After that, the enemy would face two choices: split their forces to defend both the research vessel and the warship, or concentrate every hand on one ship and abandon the other.
They were greedy creatures. They would hate to lose both — which meant they would almost certainly divide into a plunder team and a defense team.
And the moment their numbers scattered, my hunt would begin.