Double Helix (4)
The world she first opened her eyes to was a cold and heavy one.
Pressure that crushed her fragile skin, a temperature so low it felt like blades driven into every inch of her body. A place that certain intelligent beings had defined as the seafloor. That was her homeland.
It was a harsh environment, but she didn't think her home was all that bad. Because there were beings there who protected her.
She and the other pink spheres like her were the most defenseless creatures in that dark, blue world. And so they had chosen a way of life different from the other beings of the gloomy depths.
They lived in schools. And the adults cared for the young and the weak.
They had naturally formed the kind of social structure that intelligent beings would classify as a 'family'.
Of course, so long as dangerous creatures that fed on her kind littered the world in every direction, they were forced to live under constant threat to their lives.
Or so it should have been.
As she grew, she came to realize she was different from the other pink spheres.
She was special.
Intelligence on par with sentient beings, and a slender tentacle growing from her body. Both were things none of her kin possessed.
When she pointed the tentacle — normally kept tucked inside her body — at a dangerous creature, it would slink away.
She used that mysterious power to protect her kin.
In time, despite her youth, she became the matriarch who led the school.
Everyone regarded her as the mother of the school, but her life didn't change much from before. Eating alongside her kin, sleeping pressed close to one another through the night — that was her greatest happiness.
But that happiness did not last.
Beings descended from above tried to drag her kin away. Beings with skin harder and colder than any creature she had ever seen. They seized her kin indiscriminately with claws that seemed as though not a single drop of blood ran through them.
When she heard the anguished screams of her kin, she prayed desperately.
That she might fulfill her duty as matriarch.
That her precious ones might be saved.
Perhaps the tentacle had heard her prayer. An enormous surge of purple energy erupted from its tip, seizing the hard-shelled beings and crushing them.
She thought she had saved everyone in that moment — but alas, it was not to be.
The cold-skinned keep coming from above. Whatever came down seized the pink spheres one after another without restraint.
She prayed for another miracle, but instead of a miracle, what found her was an exhaustion too great to bear.
And so she lost consciousness.
Where the matriarch who had failed her duty awoke was inside a prison of reeking liquid.
From there, she watched. Watched the children who should have been protected by their adults die miserable deaths.
By the time the pure-white being cradling a strange furry animal called her Number 26, not a single one of her kin remained in that prison.
From the very bottom of hell, she prayed.
She didn't care who it was — someone, please, help her.
And if they did.
Then she swore she would devote herself to protecting the children she had failed to protect.
That was her vow.
The two enemies I found most troublesome in the world of Space Survival were, first, fellow Amorph players, and second, MegaCorp users who had completed full genetic modification.
What the two had in common was that their traits were utterly unpredictable. With zero information on your opponent, even the smallest mistake tended to come back around as a fatal outcome.
Because of that, I had focused entirely on what trait Sihyeon Yujin possessed, and paid no attention to how she might differ from players in more concrete ways.
In the game, genetic techniques come with no restrictions.
I had naturally assumed the same would hold true for her.
She had player-grade specs, so without even realizing it, I had treated the fight as a battle against a player. That was my misjudgment.
Looking back, Sihyeon had been fighting using only one ability at a time from the very start. I'd assumed it was bluffing. It wasn't.
Fundamentally different from a player, she suffered a critical limitation on her use of genetic abilities.
"You just keep being a nuisance, don't you? Enough that I want to kill you."
Sihyeon's tone was colder now than it had been at any point before. She was probably trying to threaten me, but it sounded different to my ears — like someone masking clumsiness on purpose.
I need to know how much delay there is whenever she swaps abilities.
No matter how fast she switched, there had to be a gap between powers. A gap in which she became an ordinary, defenseless human.
Which meant it was time to change my strategy.
Overwhelm her. No pause, no mercy.
The psionium's effect was nearly spent too. Two minutes at most.
To win within those two minutes, I couldn't afford to protect myself. Unless it was a mortal wound — a severed limb — I would trust in my regeneration trait and press on.
Legs as unyielding as the hindquarters of a rhinoceros slammed powerfully into the floor. As I tore down the corridor, I kept a sharp eye on her hair.
"Honestly, you never get old."
The tips of her hair flushed crimson.
As I ran, I aimed my left arm at her. A human would have struggled to aim a gun mid-sprint, but Amorph's superior senses made it possible.
Spine darts erupted from the end of my arm. Bone fragments reinforced with chitin sliced through the air, flying to shred her abdomen.
"!"
Her face hardened and she canceled the illusion. Almost the instant her hair returned to black, a white blade jutted out from the back of her hand, parting her own flesh.
There it is — the gap.
It was a window of less than a second, but thanks to my auxiliary organs, I'd confirmed it existed. She blocked my spine darts with a Galagon claw, but I had already closed the distance to her.
"Enough with the cheap tricks!"
She was irritated — but I read the anxiety seeping into the corners of her eyes. Like a fencer extending a blade, my tail struck at her with disciplined precision.
Yet despite her state of mind, her response remained ferocious. She calmly deflected my tail with her claw, and didn't stop there — she pressed a counterattack and severed the venomous stinger at its tip.
Gh!
I'd anticipated it to a degree, but experiencing it firsthand, the pain was nothing to scoff at. Natural enough, considering a limb as good as my own hand had just been cut off.
But I couldn't hesitate here. I flung my severed tail in a wide arc, as if shaking something from my hand. Acid blood and neurotoxin mixed together from the wound and the venom glands, spraying in every direction.
"Tch!"
Sihyeon clicked her tongue and switched abilities. The Galagon claw withdrew, and parts of her body turned silver. Skin harder than the alloy plating of a battleship's hull shielded its owner from the acid blood and neurotoxin.
I expected a defense ability, but superalloy skin?
Superalloy Skin was the genetic trait of the Wolfram Goblin, the heavy subspecies of the Metallic Gremlin. With that power acquired, one's defense rose to the level of top-grade custom reinforcement suits — but in exchange, the body became staggeringly heavy.
Just as I'd predicted, her movements slowed. I raked my claws across the parts of her that had yet to turn silver.
"Kuh!"
For the first time, I drew blood from her body. Sihyeon, that impossible monster of a woman — and yet her blood was the same human red as any other.
"A badly-raised mutt like you needs to be taught some manners!"
Her face contorted in a scowl, and she drove her now-heavy foot into my chest plate. I needed to fight at the closest possible range, so I didn't dodge.
An impact like being struck by a siege ram spread through my whole body. A human would likely have vomited blood and shreds of organs. Even though the chest plate, along with my head, was one of the hardest parts of my body, the pain was far from trivial.
As if I'd lose to this!
Shouting it inwardly, I seized her foot where it was embedded in my chest. Poured every ounce of strength in all four arms into it, and hoisted her up.
"Wha— what are you—!"
God, she's heavy.
The weight was enough to pull a curse out of me unbidden. And what did I intend to do, having gone to the trouble of lifting my enemy? This.
Holding her by the legs, I swung her in a great arc like a baseball bat.
The target was the corridor wall. Or to be precise, the wall that the acid blood had half-melted away.
With a thunderous boom, the entire corridor shook as though an earthquake had struck. Cracks spidered through the wall around the point of impact and split wide open.
Sihyeon, her face imprinted into the alloy wall, wore an expression of pure fury. It seemed my act of hurling her like a rag doll had wounded her pride.
She pulled the Galagon claw free and crossed her arms in an X. So much psychic energy gathered along the white blades that the purple within them glowed vividly.
This was dangerous. Too close to dodge.
I have to block it!
I hurriedly raised all four arms to shield my head and chest. As she swung her crossed arms apart, a crescent of sword-energy unlike anything I had ever seen carved through my body.
My horns, relatively slender, snapped off, and my arms and legs fared no better. My upper right arm lost more than half its length, and my thigh was injured so badly the bone showed through.
Just a little more!
I wrung out the last of my strength and charged her again. It was point-blank range, yet she evaded my charge with astonishing agility, and my head smashed straight into the wall.
"And where, exactly, are you looking?"
She mocked me for missing.
Her gaze swept quickly over my body, and she smiled. My injuries were hardly the kind anyone could call fine even as a figure of speech — she seemed certain she had the victory in hand.
Well. Was that really true?
Sorry to disappoint — but I never missed.
The moment I wrenched my head free, the wall finally gave way. Half-dissolved by acid blood, then hammered by one violent impact after another — no alloy, however well-forged, could endure that.
My target was never you, Sihyeon Yujin. Not from the start.
Beyond the broken wall waited the thing I had been waiting for.
Stars beyond counting, and an abyss of endless darkness — they waited for us both.
"No…!"
The pressure across the whole corridor plummeted, and that black-hole void of space swallowed us up along with the oxygen. The ship's environmental maintenance systems shrieked in warning of catastrophic internal damage.
Even Sihyeon, who had been smiling in certain victory, hadn't accounted for this. Bewilderment flooded her face. She jammed the Galagon claw into the corridor floor, holding on so she wouldn't be flung out into the void.
I had been waiting for this exact moment.
I raised my wounded left arm and aimed it at her.
The barrel pointed at her head.
The distance between us wasn't far.
Precisely speaking, it was just far enough for a spine dart to punch through her forehead and destroy her brain — before she could wrap her head in superalloy skin.
The moment she grasped my intent, the color drained from her face.
"Grraaah! As if I'd fall here, in a place like this!"
Perhaps she had pushed past her limits in the face of death. Blood streamed from her eyes and nose as she tried to bring two abilities to bear at once. From the ends of her black hair, the distinctive silver of superalloy skin began to creep upward, moving to shield her head.
I fired the spine dart before she could finish.
The dart, shaped like an icicle drill, left the end of my arm.
In an age when lasers, plasma, and every manner of outlandish weapon tore through the void, a primitive projectile tore through open air toward her head.
By then, the superalloy skin had already covered more than half of her skull.
The dart was less than five centimeters from her forehead when—
She stopped dead. The superalloy skin froze mid-unfolding, exactly as it had begun.
Her eyes bulged in utter disbelief. And her gaze was fixed on the space behind me.
Number 26?
I didn't need to turn my head to see it. A beam of purple energy was erupting from Number 26's body, binding Sihyeon's head fast.
"You little f—"
The time Number 26 held her was barely an instant — but it was more than enough for the spine dart to reach its target.
The spine dart punched clean through Sihyeon Yujin.
Her body, robbed of its command center, went slack and crumpled.