The Ghost Ship of C-08 (2)
Infiltrating the battleship wasn't particularly difficult.
They had some kind of security system in place, but it was crude — embarrassing to even compare with the research ship's.
Well, they're pirates.
They'd only ever been the ones doing the plundering. It probably never occurred to them that someone might plunder them in return.
The auxiliary organ beneath my jaw began tracing the flow of vibrations. The metal heart of the battleship wasn't far off.
Having located the reactor, I ran along the corridor.
It was filthy inside the battleship — hard to believe it had ever been a military vessel. The walls were patched together from what looked like hull plating torn off other ships, every panel a different color, and crates of loot lay stacked haphazardly across the floor.
I was sprinting down what amounted to a garbage dump of a corridor when I sensed enemy movement. Two of them — one human, one Insectman.
I'll deal with them here.
I crouched behind a stack of crates nearby. Footsteps drew close, and just as the human was about to pass me, my tail found his throat with perfect precision.
"Ghk—!"
A fountain of blood erupted from the headless corpse. The Insectman, having lost his comrade in an instant, gaped at the sight.
Ordinary people would have frozen in shock, but this was a pirate after all. Even mid-panic, the creature fumbled for his communicator.
I spread my palm, and the Sawtooth Tentacles shot out, coiling around his wrist. The serrated blades running along them mercilessly shredded the flesh from his arm.
"KYAAAAAAGH!"
His forearm was left looking like it had been fed through an industrial grinder. The communicator dropped uselessly from his hand, its purpose unfulfilled.
As I retracted the tentacles, dripping with the Insectman's peculiar green blood, everything clinging to their surface was absorbed straight into my body — and a flavor unlike anything human rang sharply through my mind.
Green grapes.
Human blood had a stimulating, electric taste, while Insectman blood was refreshingly fruity. I would have liked to savor it a little longer, but unfortunately, the situation left no room for leisure.
I drove my weight into him. It was a short charge, but thanks to the added mass from my Physical Enhancement Type, it carried devastating force. The creature slammed into the corridor wall and crumpled against it.
"Khek!"
A short scream followed, along with the crack of snapping bones.
A human would have already died of shock, but Insectmen were stubbornly hard to kill. He was still alive, squirming and clawing at the floor in a desperate bid to escape.
I pinned both his arms with my lower limbs and gripped his vertically split jaw with my upper pair.
"KYAAAGH! S-spare me… khek."
I'd heard begging for mercy so many times it bored me now.
With a hard pull on his jaw, I tore upward. He died with his skull split apart.
I left the human corpse where it lay and hurriedly devoured the Insectman's body.
Right — NPC races don't count.
In the game, Insectmen were classified as intelligent life, but they weren't a playable species. Which meant they didn't count toward the sub-adult evolution requirement.
Finish this meal and move on.
Any other time I'd have taken my leisure, but there was still so much left to do. I quickly chewed through his flesh and swallowed.
After licking up every last drop of blood from the floor, I stuffed the human corpse into one of the crates.
I gave a rough answer into the communicator the Insectman had dropped before dying. Thanks to my Voice Mimicry trait, the other side never suspected that the communicator's owner had already ended up in my stomach.
With the brief skirmish over, I set off toward the reactor again. I encountered no new enemies on the way.
I'd hoped the reactor's security would be just as flimsy, but my wish went ungranted. Android guards were stationed around it.
Pirates who wouldn't spend a single credit on security suddenly fielding expensive androids? They must have deployed plundered units here.
Androids are a bit of a hassle.
Destroying them wasn't hard in itself — the problem was what came after. The moment I attacked, the android would transmit a signal to the battleship's central AI. Unless I wanted an all-out war, I had to refrain from striking them directly.
How do I take them down?
The auxiliary organ under my jaw wriggled, hunting for weak points.
Unlike humans, androids were machines — there was nothing you could call a gap in their defenses. And moving along the ceiling or walls like I had on the research ship was out; their thermal trackers would catch me.
I don't have to fight them head-on.
I turned and headed for the deck above the reactor. Past rusted iron staircases and corridors in complete disarray, I arrived at someone's sleeping quarters.
The room stank — a rank, sour odor. The mattress serving as a bed had yellowed with grime, and empty liquor bottles rolled across the floor.
I heaved the mattress aside with four of my hands. The bugs hiding beneath it scattered in a startled scurry.
It was around here, right?
Standing where the mattress had been, I extruded spores from my lower hands.
Slime seeping from the acid spores began dissolving the floor. A pungent smoke rose, and a hole opened in the filthy steel plating within moments.
Through the hole, the upper section of the reactor came into view.
A human would have noticed the deck above the reactor melting away, but these were androids — machines running on fixed programs, and thus hopelessly vulnerable to anything outside their expectations.
Engine: cleared.
I poured the spores down onto the reactor.
It had already been ten years since Elchen Dvara turned to piracy.
A Hulk Mutant turned pirate. No one had ever imagined Elchen would last this long.
Hulk Mutants had short lifespans by design — their genes were engineered to kill them early, usually within two years.
And then there was piracy itself. The average survival span of a Space Dogs recruit was less than a month; even veterans rarely lasted past a year.
Elchen had defied both sets of odds.
As a Hulk Mutant modified by the Egerton family, his lifespan was long, and his intelligence far surpassed that of ordinary pirates — which was how he'd endured this long. He'd even earned himself a reputation as an elder among the Space Dogs.
Yet even Elchen, who had survived every kind of hell imaginable, found the scene unfolding before him genuinely shocking.
The archived footage from the situation room's computers ended on those screams. The hologram flickered out, but not a single person in the room could open their mouth.
What the hell is going on out there?
Something had struck Elchen as odd from the moment they boarded the ship. Set aside the strange growths clinging to every surface — there hadn't been a single person aboard.
Even if an attack had killed everyone, there should have been traces left on the walls or floors. Bloodstains, spent shell casings, something.
But none of that existed on this ship. There was no trace of human presence at all — as if the research ship had been a ghost ship from the very start.
Elchen decided he needed to learn more about the attacker. So he'd ordered his men to comb through the archived footage and piece together the situation.
That was the recording they'd just watched.
Even to him — a brutal pirate by trade — the defenders holed up in the situation room against some unidentified thing looked absolutely wretched.
Several battles had clearly taken place before they reached this point; hardly any of them were in one piece. One was missing a limb, another had an intact body but a shattered mind.
The footage ended with the situation room door giving way. It was easy to imagine what became of them.
"Hey. Play the earlier one."
His subordinate pulled up a recording from an earlier time.
On screen, a soldier with close-cropped hair and a muscular frame was issuing orders through the comms officer. Beside him stood a crowd of figures in expensive clothing.
The footage documented their first encounter with the unknown monster and the search that followed.
The soldier must be in charge of the ship's defense. And that soft-looking bastard in the back is probably Yu Seong Samuel.
It had started uneventfully, but it didn't take long for the atmosphere to turn. Soldiers' screams crackled through the communicators, and the command staff inside the situation room began to waver.
The deployed squad was wiped out.
He'd thought that was the end of it — but the situation was far from over. What happened next genuinely stunned Elchen.
While the command staff scrambled in confusion, the unidentified monster suddenly burst into the room.
It struck here of all places?
Who knew how it had gotten in, but the thing thrashed like a fish in water, slaughtering everyone in reach.
The white temple adrift on the black star-sea ran red with blood.
The one who barely managed to stop it was the soldier commanding the troops. He drew a Plasma Pistol from inside his uniform and attacked.
The monster clearly understood how dangerous the soldier's weapon was; unlike before, it kept its distance. It lurked in cover, laid down smoke with an extinguisher, then lunged at the soldier.
Intelligent, as I suspected.
And not just intelligent — a high-threat creature with very sharp wits.
Having undergone gene-modification procedures and encountered all manner of lifeforms, Elchen knew at a glance that this monster was a species never before discovered in this universe. Because if Mega Corp had known such a dangerous creature existed, they'd have captured it long ago and extracted its genes.
In any case, the battle between monster and soldier ended in the monster's victory. Not because the soldier fought poorly — the monster had simply been lucky. A soldier's stray shot had dealt the man devastating damage, and that loss decided his defeat.
As if it knew reinforcements were coming, the thing killed the soldier and immediately withdrew.
"…Goddammit."
When Elchen had first decided to take this job, his biggest worry had been how to handle reprisals from the Noble Capital — above all, the Yujin family.
But after watching that footage, it seemed he should worry about simply recovering the bodies from this ship alive before anything else.
"Hey, Garlic."
"Y-yes?"
Elchen called Garlic, who was in the situation room.
She was so lost in thought that her eyes hadn't left the hologram. Only when Elchen called her did she snap back to her usual timid self.
"Contact was lost yesterday, was it?"
"Ye-yes. The arrangement was to meet yesterday. But since the ship didn't show, we spent the day searching for it."
He'd already reviewed the research ship's personnel manifest on the way here. 222 people aboard, 96 of them soldiers. If he ordered his men to wipe them out, it would take less than half a day.
The problem is, we have no idea what the thing actually is.
Watching the footage, he'd quickly grasped the monster's strength. It compensated for its lacking raw power with intelligence and a diverse arsenal of abilities. Attacking it blind was tantamount to ordering his men to commit suicide.
Not that Elchen cared whether his underlings lived or died — but he didn't enjoy wasting manpower either. They would have to extract every scrap of information about it before they were allowed to die.
"Still, that's a relief."
"What is?"
"It doesn't know we're here."
They were all seasoned pirates, and they had boarded the research ship as quietly as possible. Unless the thing had cameras strung across the entire vessel, the odds of it detecting their movements were close to zero.
"First we find the thing and crush it. We hunt for the bodies after."
Just as Elchen was about to issue orders to his men, one of the subordinates outside came sprinting toward him, communicator in hand, his face deathly pale with shock.
"B-Boss! We've got a problem!"
"What?"
"The battleship's engine is destroyed!"
"What?!"
Elchen bellowed.
A perfectly functional engine suddenly destroyed — what kind of nonsense was that? He couldn't make sense of it.
Delivering bad news to an enraged boss was agony, but his man had no choice. If he hid it now and got caught later, he wouldn't just lose his head for it.
The subordinate squeezed his eyes shut and forced out the rest.
"We checked with the engine crew — the whole thing's melted through. It's beyond repair!"
"You son of a—! Give me that!"
Elchen snatched the communicator from his man.
After hearing the full account from the other end, he crushed the device in his fist.
"Goddamn rotten sons of bitches!"
That wasn't enough to vent his fury, so he grabbed the alloy chair bolted to the situation room floor and tore it apart like paper. At the sight, his men swiftly bowed their heads.
"Fuck — Garlic!"
"Yes!"
"Can you get this ship moving?"
"I-I'd have to check…"
"Ah, for fuck's sake."
"N-no, wait. We can move it!"
"You, you, and you — help Garlic. The rest of you come with me to catch that fucking monster bastard. Move out."
"Yes, sir!"
Elchen led his men out of the situation room.
He made himself a promise: when he caught the thing, peeling off its scalp would only be the beginning.
Oho. He's furious. Furious indeed.
Back in my nest, I tracked their every movement. The boss, his hearts beating at twice their normal rate, stomped around the ship in a rampage, and his men scurried busily after him to help.
I'll wait until they split up.
The research ship had far more complicated sections and facilities than the battleship, and these enemies had only just arrived. To search an unfamiliar vessel efficiently, they'd have no choice but to divide their forces.
They didn't know it, but there were still survivors on this ship. Including the captain and a few command staff, roughly twenty people were hiding here and there.
Needless to say, I hadn't spared them out of mercy.
Mega Corp absolutely despises pirates.
Some might surrender, but most would fight the pirates to the death. And while they were busy killing each other, all I had to do was gather the fruit falling from the tree.
But that person — it's flagged.
A human still inside the situation room. The being disguised as an ordinary crewman kept moving about the room, working on something.
Only three others were with it. It would have been the perfect moment to strike — and yet an uneasy premonition held me back.
Amorph's particular instincts were warning me: that being was dangerous. I would need to take every precaution.
Could that be the master Arnold spoke of?
Sihyeon Yujin.
The one Arnold had claimed was similar to me. What had he seen to make that comparison?
Probably a gene-modified human.
Mega Corp was a species steeped in extreme materialism, one that prized competition above all else — and their obsession with life extension ran monstrously deep. The Noble Capital at the very top of the pyramid in particular would commit any atrocity without hesitation, so long as it let them live longer.
Mega Corp's advanced gene-modification technology was a direct product of that social climate. Hulk Mutants were nothing more than a byproduct of it.
For Mega Corp players too, the endgame was gene-modding.
Even in the game, plenty of users looked human on the surface but had modded themselves to absurd degrees. There were all sorts — ones with psychic enhancements wielding Cult-only relics, ones who flew through open space without a ship, you name it.
Given all that, it was entirely possible this Yujin family scion had been modified beyond human limits.
Kisaragi was worthless, but what about this one?
As expected of a gene-modified human, they would be a formidable opponent for the current me. Just as the enemy knew nothing of my abilities, I had no way of knowing what powers they might hold. If they'd been modded to player standards, even evolving into a sub-adult wouldn't guarantee victory.
A gene-modded human. It's been a while.
I said winning would be hard — I never said I'd lose.
I'd devoured rankers among Mega Corp's players without a second thought. Faced with a strong enemy, the thrill rose alongside the sense of danger.
For now, that being presumed to be Sihyeon Yujin is on hold. The pirates come first.
If reinforcements showed up mid-fight for no reason, things would get messy. I turned my attention back to the pirates.
Right on cue, they were closing in on the captain's quarters, where the survivors were hiding.