The Vessel (3)
Cult Empire society and its institutions differed greatly from those of Mega Corp or the Star Union. That was only natural, given that each had developed its civilization in completely different environments.
The Knowledge Keepers who served aboard the Cult Imperial fleets, for instance, were a concept that simply did not exist in Mega Corp or the Star Union. If one had to draw an analogy, they could be described as beings who combined the data storage systems of rival factions with the role of a ship's engineer.
During voyages, a Knowledge Keeper used their exceptional knowledge to advise the captain, and in emergencies they took charge of repairing the ship outright. The importance of their duties was such that on any vessel, a Knowledge Keeper was respected as much as the combat commander.
But even that illustrious post was of precious little help in breaking the situation they now faced.
The intruder who had killed the captain began massacring the crew in the command room.
The monster was a creature even the Knowledge Keeper did not know. Eight arms of varying sizes tipped with blades, a pale woman's face, a hideous tail — a mechanical organism like something out of a nightmare.
The Knowledge Keeper racked his brain desperately, for he knew the rival powers of the Empire well, but identifying the thing proved beyond even him.
If anything matched its outward characteristics, it would be the Star Union's cursed bio-weapon, the Screamer.
But as far as he knew, Screamers could not wield such a diverse arsenal the way this thing did. That wretched hybrid, by contrast, fired lethal energy rounds from both its tail and its mouth.
The Knowledge Keeper knew exactly which weapon emitted that chill, indigo-glowing energy. It was the weapon favored by the Temple Guard — the Demolisher.
"Take cover!"
"Ah, aagh?"
The creature's tail swept around in a great circle. In time with its motion, matter-disintegrating energy rounds poured down over the Cultists' heads.
Some were lucky enough to dodge. Some were not.
"My — my arm! My aaaarm...!"
"...Gkk."
A crewman whose arm had vanished entirely to the matter-disintegration effect. A Cultist struck in the upper body by sheer misfortune, leaving nothing behind but his lower half. Their bodies, bleeding not a single drop as though that had always been the case, were truly horrifying to behold.
"Aim for its tail!"
"It's no use! It fires from its mouth too!"
"Damn it all!"
Those words were no exaggeration. The culprit behind the captain's decapitation had been an energy round fired from that very head.
Even if the thing's only means of attack had been its tail, the situation was unlikely to improve. It moved far too fast — for non-combatants like them, hitting so narrow a target was all but impossible.
"Knowledge Keeper! The captain is dead, so you're in command now!"
"Do something!"
He would have liked to observe further, but the crew was about to be wiped out before he had the chance. The Knowledge Keeper, who had been hiding and watching the enemy, finally issued his orders.
"Bindings, anything — I don't care! If you have any technique that can restrict its movement, dump everything you've got!"
Though only for a short time, the thing had seemed to him to have poor resistance to psychic power.
The evidence was that it had been doing its utmost to evade the psychic rifles the Cultists fired.
The psychic rifles kept on the bridge were not particularly powerful weapons. They were nothing more than tools prepared so that non-combatants could fight when an urgent situation arose.
And yet the creature had been fighting evasively this whole time. It must have realized long ago that the firepower advantage lay with them.
Therefore, one could conclude that the enemy's psychic resistance was low.
At the Knowledge Keeper's shout, the goat-horned Cultists began pooling their psychic power. They were reaching for every technique among the knowledge they had learned that might hold the enemy down, even for a moment.
A current of energy so intense it filled the entire command room wound itself around the creature. The thing's frenzied movements slowed.
"Kirrik?"
Sensing something wrong with its body, the creature cocked its head. Its movements slowed further, and finally stopped altogether.
Its blood-red eyes rolled about in their sockets. It was examining the abnormality that had arisen in its own body.
At length, its eight arms trembled and struggled to move.
"It's enormous strength!"
"We have to finish it off, quickly!"
The command room filled with the sound of the creature's straining joints and the groans of the Cultists straining to hold it.
They had to destroy it as fast as possible. Everyone except those maintaining the technique trained their rifles on the creature's head.
The moment their muzzles were about to belch fire, the Knowledge Keeper doubted his own eyes.
Something was standing at the door — a door where no one had been.
The being had horns on its head, much like the Cultists. Its height was similar as well, and it stood on two legs. But the Knowledge Keeper could feel not even a shred of kinship at the sight of it.
He knew instinctively. That being was every bit as dangerous as the machine organism they had pinned down.
The eyes of the thing standing at the door moved. Clear amber pupils turned toward the Knowledge Keeper.
The instant their gazes met, the Knowledge Keeper felt the amber eyes flare blue. He hurriedly tried to call out to his comrades.
But a voice called to him first.
"Hungry."
"?!"
The words, low as a whisper at his ear, startled him badly. He turned his head, but there was no one behind him.
What was that just now...?
"I'm starving to death!"
"!"
The voice that had felt like a whisper a heartbeat before now rang out loud enough to shake his skull. The Knowledge Keeper threw down his rifle and clamped both hands over his ears.
Even through his covered ears, a curse packed full of obsession whispered its way in. Kill the ones beside you. Fill your belly with their flesh — that was what it said.
He struggled to endure it somehow, but the voices devoured him at terrifying speed. His exceptional knowledge and reason guttered out with astonishing swiftness, and in the empty space they left behind, an endlessly swelling madness took root.
"Knowledge Keeper! What do we do about—huh?"
"Ghh, ghhhhh..."
By the time his comrades realized something was wrong with him, it was far too late. The Knowledge Keeper no longer existed in that place.
There was only a victim, seized by an ice-cold evil spirit.
"Gyaaaaagh!"
"Aaagh!"
The instant the Knowledge Keeper, now a slave of the evil spirit, threw himself at his comrades, the monster outside the command room came in as well. The beast with golden fur banded in black and horns rising from its head lunged at the ones binding the machine organism.
Every time its sharp claws flashed, Cultists fell, spilling blood. As his comrades toppled one by one, the machine organism's bindings could not hold out much longer, and broke.
Two monsters mercilessly tearing the Cultists apart — and the Knowledge Keeper, suddenly gone mad.
The number of Cultists in the command room dwindled rapidly.
When exactly nine remained, the creatures stopped their slaughter. The bipedal monster walked to the Cultist computer and began manipulating something.
All the while, the eight-armed monster had been absorbing the fallen Cultists.
That was no figure of speech. With hook-clawed hands, it drained the life from the corpses. Each time its hands touched a body, the corpse paled in an instant, and soon after shriveled up like a mummy.
The problem was that some of the Cultists lying on the floor were still alive. Even those disabled by grievous wounds became the creature's prey.
"St—stop it! D-don't, aaaaahgkk!"
Its hand came down on a Cultist who was dying with his legs severed. He screamed at the agony of being absorbed alive by the monster. One did not need to hear the scream to know how deep his suffering ran.
When all the work was finished, his body had shrunk to a third of its size. The creature lifted its hands from the Cultist's corpse, extended its mechanical tongue, and licked its claws clean.
The moment it turned toward fresh prey, the command room floor shuddered. Both the creature at the computer and the one devouring the Cultists froze in place.
The vibration echoing through the command room drew steadily closer. Far larger than the tremors when those two had broken down the door.
The nine surviving Cultists realized at once who was making that sound. The thing crawling toward them to put an end to this nightmare of a time.
It was a still greater nightmare.
[Zzzzzzt (Good work)]
"Hardly worth calling work. We've done this a time or two before."
[Zzzzt (True enough)]
The command room was a sea of blood in the truest sense. A delicious scent rose from the scraps of flesh scattered here and there and the blood streaming in rivulets across the floor.
Every trace of it had been left by the Cultists. In the corner of the command room, nine Cultists cowered, disarmed and trembling.
"I figured we'd need them if we want to hide the ship."
[Zzzzzzt Zzzzt (Thanks. Well done)]
We intended to make use of this vessel when we left the planet. I had no plans to erode it right away, so I meant to hide it somewhere for the time being.
Which meant we'd need a crew to maintain it.
I activated the Morphing Organ for the first time in a long while. One of the five sets of genetic information stored inside my body spread throughout my frame.
The vocal organ positioned between my mouth and throat was reconstructed based on the transmitted genetic data, and the minute holes set into my synthetic scales, outer skin, and carapace finished preparing to emit a new pheromone.
I slowly opened my mouth.
"Come here."
At the sound of a kinsman's voice emerging from my jaws, all nine of them jolted violently. The faces of those staring at me slowly drained bone-white.
Thanks to the Morphing Organ's pheromones, they would see me as a Cultist. But my sheer bulk would strike them as profoundly wrong. A monster had suddenly transformed into a kinsman radiating an ominous aura — none of them would want to come anywhere near it.
Not that they have any freedom in the matter.
Aboard a cruiser floating above the clouds, there was nowhere for them to run. The Cult survivors approached me like prisoners being dragged to the executioner's block.
I, sprawled in the corridor outside the command room, implanted parasites in them one by one. The first target thrashed about so wildly that I devoured it with an erosion tentacle, but after that, they were docile and obedient.
"Land this ship."
"...Yes."
I ordered them to set down in the vicinity of where my nest was located. The Cultists, their faces uniformly ashen, began the Cruiser's landing sequence.
I'd like to do it myself, but...
I was now far larger than I had been when I first became a Young Adult. There had been little change in my length, but the carapace thickened by my Bone Beast trait, and my wings — folded, yet still taking up a great deal of volume besides.
Forget entering the command room; even sprawled in the corridor, my body barely fit. If I forced my way in and tried to operate the computer in this state, I'd only end up wrecking it.
So, still lying there, I called for PS-111.
[Zzzzzzt Zzzzzzt Zzzzzzt (I brought back a Demolisher, figured we'd need it)]
"Thank you. But, rather — the other tool 'Amorph' is carrying, that is what is required."
[Zzzzt (This?)]
PS-111 looked at the spoils clutched in my small chest-mounted arms. After hunting the members of the Temple Guard, I had collected their equipment.
The Gallagon Claw Blade, the Dragon Scale Suit — a type of reinforced armor — and assorted secondary armaments were all in my grasp.
Ever since my fight with Muriel, I'd taken to stowing important equipment in my backpack separately — things like the Blood Reaver, the High Priest's Golden Spear, or the Harmonizer.
Not that I'd swapped them out, since I was reaping enormous benefits from God's Whip, gained by devouring the Thunder God.
I'd been planning to bring this new haul of equipment back to the nest as well, but PS-111 seemed to have taken an interest.
[Zzzzzzt Zzzt (Something you want?)]
"A silver tool, containing psychic power and the genetic information of a specific organism."
What the creature selected was the Gallagon Claw Blade. I picked the weapon up with my fingers and handed it over, and it swallowed the thing whole.
Immediately after, the arms tipped with scythe-like claws began to change. The black scythes flooded silver from the tips outward, growing thicker than before. The newly transformed shape looked remarkably similar to the talons of a White Gallagon.
Having replaced its scythes with the Gallagon's claws, the creature gave its arms a single shake. A transparent blade of psychic power erupted forth and sheared into the command room wall.
"Psychic power, now, operational."
The creature nodded in satisfaction as it surveyed the mark it had made.
So that's what they call a new model.
For all it spoke of the feat so casually, this was nothing to take lightly. Its identity was a middle-terminal model of the Mutant Screamer line — something like a prototype of a combat weapon.
Which meant it could be mass-produced.
I had already heard that players were involved in the development of the Mutant Screamers. It was possible that when I fought them, I might face hundreds or thousands of Screamers at PS-111's level.
...Though I doubt it'll come to that.
Of all the Screamers I had seen so far, not a single one possessed power close to PS-111's. If the others had been on a similar level, the players would have conquered the universe long ago, with room to spare.
Finding its superior model will make things certain.
PS-111 had been in poor condition when we found it. Thanks to that, No. 26 had been able to reboot it as an ally — but a considerable portion of the information stored in its memory had been damaged.
The operation plans from when it first entered this planet, its strategic objectives — even PS-111 itself could not recall such things. The top-tier model commanding the middle-terminal models would know all of that.
Fira Eleven, was it?
The supreme commander of the Mutant Screamers. Whether it was a Screamer itself or an android, there was no way to know at present. I was gazing at PS-111, thinking through plans for the future, when Mother of the Sky came up to me.
"I just went through the computer, and there's something interesting in it."
[Zzzt Zzzt (What kind of info?)]
"A creature, presumed to be a Green Gallagon, approached and then pulled back."
[Zzzzzzt Zzzzzzt Zzzzzzt (Pulled back? Was it out on a scouting run?)]
"Doesn't look like it. It advanced to close range before retreating, so it was clearly hunting."
It was rare for a Gallagon, with their aggressive temperament, to retreat in the face of prey. They only withdrew their bodies when scouting, or when they encountered an enemy too powerful for them to handle.
Could it have been because of me?
With my black carapace, Gallagon-like bulk, and tentacles besides, an inexperienced Gallagon might well have mistaken me for something else. The fine details of my form were different, but seen as a silhouette obscured by the clouds, I would look every inch a Black Gallagon.
It's fortunate we didn't come to blows, but...
In this area at present, Ham Ort's pack of White Gallagons — the one keeping Adhai — and Ored Ghad's pack, which had been there from before, were in competition. Which side this one belonged to was unclear.
Whichever faction it is, once they learn about me, they'll be extremely wary.
And Gallagons did not take kindly to a powerful enemy planting itself right before their eyes. They would assuredly try to eliminate me.
It seemed I needed to hurry my preparations for a battle with the Gallagons.