Double Helix (1)
"Hey. Shouldn't we be going too?"
"The boss told us to help Garlic."
"I only signed up because he promised us a fat cut of the take, that son of a—"
In the bridge situation room, the pirates were locked in a heated argument over whether or not to go to their boss's aid.
"Hey, Garlic. How much longer?"
"A-almost done."
"Why the hell does that tin can take so long?"
A cyborg pirate grumbled as he watched Maneul working over the terminal where the ship's management AI was installed.
Half his body was machine, and yet the cyborg was completely illiterate when it came to computers and advanced technology. So illiterate, in fact, that it never once struck him as odd that his own body ran flawlessly, bug-free, day after day.
He was one of those forcibly cyberized by Star Union.
Like most of Star Union's lower class, his attention was devoted not to lofty subjects like robotics or nanocomputing, but to far more worldly concerns.
"It's an older generation model, b-but it's a Mega Corp ship AI. The pinnacle of aerospace and computer science — there's no way it'd be that easy to—"
"Ugh, I don't do hard words. Just wrap it up so we can go help the boss."
The cyborg waved her off as Maneul tried to launch into a complicated explanation.
The pirates lost interest and drifted back into their idle chatter. Maneul flashed them an awkward smile and returned to her work.
No — she pretended to return to her work.
When she turned her head, not a trace of the flustered simpleton remained on her face.
The eyes behind her round lenses were colder than a lump of raw mineral.
Arnold did his job well.
Thanks to her underling's sacrifice, she had been able to discern that the enemy was evolving.
The monster had been caught on the situation room cameras exactly twice. Slyly, both times, it had shrouded itself in smoke — but reading its transformation had posed her no difficulty at all.
Her eyes and spatial senses, thanks to genetic modification, were beyond any comparison with a human being's.
Among the gene samples spliced into her was one taken from a creature known as the Terror Devil.
The Terror Devil was a species of pterosaur native to desert-type planets.
Its habitat was so punishingly barren that the creature's detection abilities had evolved along a rather unique path.
When prey hid itself beneath the sand, the Terror Devil could determine exactly what was buried there by synthesizing a host of environmental cues — shifts in the surrounding terrain, the faintest tremors across the sand's surface.
Its accuracy approached one hundred percent, and the planet's natives came to call the ability Clairvoyance.
Of course, it wasn't truly a matter of seeing what lay behind an obstacle — it was closer to reconstructing the hidden object in one's mind from the surrounding information.
Mega Corp's scientists had concluded that the Terror Devil's 'Clairvoyance' was made possible by an innate, inborn psionic power.
In any case, by wielding the Terror Devil's ability, she had determined that the monster in the footage was an evolving entity.
The creature that had cowered before a plasma pistol appeared the second time clad in a far thicker hide.
By her estimate, it could withstand two more shots at most.
And then it raided the laboratory and absorbed the gene samples.
She was currently browsing the laboratory's records through the ship's main computer.
The computer-illiterate pirates, engrossed in their gossip, had no idea she had finished the actual inspection long ago.
It's not just clever. Not by a long shot.
The loss report the lab's control AI had transmitted made it clear: the creature had scraped the place clean without leaving behind so much as a single sample.
It had targeted the gene samples with surgical precision, touching none of the chemicals or raw materials.
Which meant it knew exactly what abilities it possessed — and exactly how to use them.
A monster that absorbs genes and evolves... is that it?
She knew of a being very much like it.
Someone of my own kind.
That was the conclusion she had reached.
The creature was something like her — a monster that plundered the genes of other organisms and turned them to its own use.
Elchen can't win.
He was nothing but a freak of nature, empowered by another's will. A pathetic creature who didn't even know what had been stuffed inside his own body.
There was no way a nobody like Elchen could defeat a true creator of life — one who molded the very wellspring of biology to his whim.
She shut down the computer, a smile curving her lips. She herself couldn't have known it, but that smile bore a striking resemblance to the one her unknown adversary so often wore.
The smile of a predator.
An infuriating old man, and yet an unexpected windfall.
When she'd spoken with Arnold, she had never dreamed anything this entertaining would unfold.
The deaths of the Noble Capital elders. Akira Yujin's orders. The Dvara Cartel boarding this research vessel.
All of it had gone exactly according to her design. Everything except that fascinating creature.
"Garlic! You done yet?"
"If you're finished, let's move!"
The pirates called out to her, but she did not answer.
Once this mission was over, she would have to infiltrate the next organization entering C-08. Her connection to these men ended here.
And I should thin out the number of genes he'll be able to acquire, shouldn't I?
She rose from her seat.
Not a trace of the timidity she had worn until now remained. Where the meekness and gloom had been, there now sat a ferocity and a languid, feline allure — the kind one might feel standing before a great predatory cat.
"Hm?"
The 'monster' they had called Garlic slowly removed her worthless glasses.
She had borne many names.
Mega Corp's enemies called her the Witch of the Spiral.
Within the family, she was spoken of with awe as a Shadow.
Family Head Akira Yujin designated her Code White.
And the man who had been her father had called her Sihyeon.
The pinnacle of genetic engineering birthed by the Yujin family — and the sole inheritor of a bloodline the family had sought to forget.
Shriiing.
Drawing a blade of white from the back of her hand, Sihyeon Yujin smiled as she gazed upon her flock of 'sheep'.
-
I quietly studied the beast before me. Its master, too, refrained from rushing in, watching me with equal care.
A battle of beasts.
Before baring fangs and claws, we were both probing, testing the waters.
Was it the tension? Or anticipation of the fight? The acid blood coursing through me began to boil, and my outer hide grew hot.
So this is what it feels like.
An exhilaration I could never have known while playing the game.
If I'd still worn a human body, I might have run my tongue across parched lips.
The enemy's muscles coiled. A single stomp of its foot, and it would close the distance in an instant — and for something that massive, its speed was anything but ordinary.
Its fist shattered the deck and sent shards of metal flying. The white fragments soaring upward looked like snow flurries scattering on the wind.
Twisting my body to evade the blow, I plunged into its guard in the same motion.
Perhaps it registered that my movements were nimbler than expected — its retraction of that deck-breaking fist came a beat too slow.
Not that I had any intention of going easy on it. I drove my combat arm straight into its belly.
"Hah!"
Apparently I wasn't the only one who could read an attack. It kicked my arm upward with its knee, defusing the strike.
Knocked back by the knee, I still lashed my tail toward its shoulder. The enemy chose to dodge rather than block.
The hulking Hulk Mutant stomped the alloy plating hard enough to leave a footprint behind, its three-meter frame flying backward a considerable distance through the air.
But it hadn't merely retreated.
Sometime during our exchange of blows — unnoticed by me — it had laid down pulse grenades.
When its first attack missed, I take it?
For a moment its whole body had gone rigid, and I'd taken that for panic. In truth, it had been a feint to buy the throw.
The instant I grasped this, the grenades detonated and a powerful electromagnetic surge swept through my body.
Ugh.
My body was unharmed, but the psionic organ at the back of my head burned like I'd bitten into something scorchingly spicy.
A pulse grenade thrown on the assumption of fighting a combat android. Decent judgment. A fighter of this caliber would likely struggle to find a worthy opponent anywhere.
"Tch. So it's not one of Star Union's new toys."
The boss clicked his tongue in apparent displeasure. He seemed to have reached much the same conclusion as I had — that the enemy in front of him was no pushover.
"...Fuck. Where the hell did this thing crawl in from."
Cursing, he rested a hand on the rifle slung at his hip — a modified laser rifle so long that, on a body his size, it looked like an oversized pistol hanging at his side.
After a moment's deliberation, he released the weapon.
A wise call. Its firepower exceeded a standard rifle's, but a laser weapon was still just that — a laser weapon.
His men had all rushed me with laser rifles and lost. Having confirmed through our exchange just now that I bore no wounds, the reasonable assumption was that laser weapons simply didn't work on me.
He swept a rough hand back through his mane. On the right side of his neck, I could see the switch.
The Berserk Switch.
So he'd chosen to trust his own two fists over any weapon. But just as he moved a finger the size of a beer can toward the switch, he stopped.
"Hey. You understand what I'm saying, right?"
Unexpected.
Not a single being that had faced me until now — No. 26 excepted — had ever spoken to me. All they'd ever left behind were pleas of I don't want to die and please, spare me.
I couldn't fathom his intent, but he had succeeded in piquing my interest. When I lowered my raised tail slightly, the corner of his mouth curled up.
"I've planted a bomb in the reactor. The trigger's synced to my heart. Kill me, and this ship goes up with me — everyone dies."
A bomb?
I checked the Medical Team Leader standing behind the boss. His pale complexion, the way he wiped sweat with his sleeve — it all said the boss wasn't bluffing.
The bomb itself was real. The real question was whether the boss would actually set it off.
He seems awfully attached to living, though.
High intelligence. A transcendent body. And towering arrogance. Not one of those traits spoke of a man ready to throw his life away.
"......."
He'd gone to the trouble of addressing me, yet offered no explanation — only pressed the switch in silence.
At that signal, the transformation unique to the Hulk Mutants began.
The genetic sequences within his cells scrambled, and his flesh twisted.
Bones beneath the skin tore free and jutted outward, while blood that should have been coursing through his veins spilled out onto the surface of his body.
The energy raging within him raised steam from his skin, and as his muscles swelled, the clothes he wore split apart at the seams.
"Gg... ggh... grrrrrrr."
In the throes of transformation, the monster growled.
The Hulk Mutant was an artificial creation, shaped by hands that were never nature's. Its transformation, naturally, was nothing natural at all. It had to be agonizing.
Finishing the change in a remarkably short time, the creature slammed both fists into the deck. The ship lurched violently under the impact.
Even in its base state it had hardly looked human — but the creature that emerged from its berserk metamorphosis deserved the word monster in every sense.
Both of its arms had grown far longer than before.
More than that, the inner bones had erupted through the flesh and reshaped themselves into plating that sheathed each arm, so that it looked as if it wore a pair of small shields.
Not just the arms — its head, its legs, its whole body now bore armor of jutting bone.
The completed form was closer to an armored gorilla than a man.
Across its chest, much like my own body, an additional exoskeleton had formed to shield its vitals.
The difference was the material: the exoskeleton covering its chest was alloy. Rising from its back and wrapping around its entire torso, the metal plating made it look as though a spider of steel had embraced its heart.
Bone bursting through torn skin. Alloy plating still wet with blood from its violent emergence. Arms grotesquely, unnaturally long.
If ever a creature earned the name Hulk Mutant, it was this — its maker might as well have been playing a cruel joke, so complete was its hideousness.
So throwing a pile of genes into a body doesn't make you superior after all.
Gazing at a creature that was, for all intents and purposes, a cheap imitation of Amorph himself, I deduced the genes that had gone into it.
First, the bony sheath covering the arms that would presumably serve as its primary weapons. I had a good idea whose trait that was.
Mountaincrawler.
The Mountaincrawler was a predator sharing its habitat with the Rockwalker — imagine an Armoredskink swollen to ten meters.
Its hide was so preternaturally hard it had earned the nickname Dragon of Rock, and it was notorious even in the game.
The boss seemed to have received only the choicest cuts of the Dragon of Rock's genes.
He tore away the ragged remnants of his clothing with a rough yank.
Standing on the border between feral instinct and reason, the Hulk Mutant beat its chest and roared.
"GRUWAAAAAAAAAH!"
｢Grrrrrrr.｣
Perhaps the cry — pure, unbridled lust for destruction — resonated with Amorph's body. My whole frame trembled, sensing the festival of blood and violence drawing near.
Come.
We roared as one, and charged.