Monster (3)
I should take care of this before we leave.
There were things to be done while Number 26 was eating the brain. I severed the ankle of the man from the neighboring unit and stowed it in the refrigerator.
Once Lars's role is finished, I'll need to disguise myself as this one.
The Morphing Organ was a trait that consumed flesh, analyzed its genes, and copied what it found. Just like when triggering the Predation Effect, there was no need to devour every last scrap of meat.
No point storing all of it — a single part will do.
Keeping it refrigerated would at least slow the rate of decay. Even then, stretching it past two days would be pushing it.
With the body dealt with, I picked up the communicator.
Next….
Who should I summon? Scrolling through the contacts made one thing plain: Lars's social circle was pathetically narrow. Aside from the team leader, there was no one here who plausibly knew a broker.
The team leader, though, would be a heavy lift.
As I'd learned aboard the research vessel, a department team leader in a space city's civil administration ranked Middle Capital or better.
Even at the low end, he'd be Middle Capital; higher up the ladder, perhaps Third Capital. He was a different breed entirely from a disposable cog like Lars — the kind of man whose absence would be noticed immediately.
It's a different situation from when I killed Kisaragi Yujin.
She had been Noble Capital — a rank so high the people on that research vessel couldn't have afforded to cross her.
Mega Corp was a society of cutthroat competition, yet at the same time a contradictory organism: a rigid pyramid with the castes locked firmly in place.
The higher the Capital, the more savagely its members tended to behave, determined to keep anyone below from climbing.
Noble Capital sat at the very apex of that pyramid, and they were the worst of all.
That was why everyone had feared Noble retaliation, why they could only respond to her death with such pusillanimous half-measures. And of course, that clumsy response had ultimately invited a far greater misfortune.
How ironic. The death of the person at the very top gets buried, while the death of someone lowly gets broadcast.
Either way, the Smuggled Animal Monitoring Team's leader was not an attractive target. The team already looked swamped; lose its supervisor on top of everything else and there would be pandemonium. I had to choose someone else.
Not this one… not him either… hm?
One contact kept cropping up again and again in the stream of messages.
The contents never amounted to more than "getting drinks after work," but this person was by far the most frequent name in Lars's correspondence.
Worth checking out.
The contact's name was Lloyd — a friend who shared Lars's more unsavory pastimes.
In the Special Trade Hub, the entertainment establishments were infamous even on the online communities. They laid the ugliness of this dystopian world bare for anyone to see — so much so that they'd been called out on the news more than once over the ethics of it all.
At any rate, this was someone who enjoyed immoral entertainment. There was a decent chance they knew something about brokers.
He seems fairly close to Lars, too.
They'd still been trading messages as recently as yesterday — by all appearances, quite the intimate friendship.
Using my small arm, I sent Lloyd a message.
It felt clumsy, raising the subject so abruptly, but I had no real choice. I didn't know how Lars actually talked — his cadence, his tone, his turns of phrase. The longer the conversation dragged on, the wider the cracks in my impersonation would grow.
Better to wrap this up as quickly as possible.
Had the question demanded more thought than I'd expected? The contact who had been replying the instant my messages landed went silent this time. Several minutes passed before the communicator finally chimed again.
The last message gave me a moment of genuine pause, but Lloyd raised no particular suspicion, and the conversation slid past without a hitch.
Things are going smoothly.
I sent him a message with the place and the time.
The location was an alley on the edge of the Port District — as close as I could get to the manhole that connected to the underground passage.
I set the meeting for evening. If I wanted to move with my body hidden in darkness, meeting after nightfall was the obvious choice.
Besides, you have to eat them after their shift ends. No loose ends that way.
The reply came almost as soon as the message went out — idle chatter about how boring it would be, traipsing through the entertainment district alone now that he was out of a job.
Worry about the wrong things, why don't you.
He'd be walking the same road as Lars soon enough anyway.
Confirmation secured.
There was still time to kill until evening. Harvesting genetic essence from this apartment was out of the question for now, so I had to spend the interval here in Lars's unit.
So full.
While I'd been dealing with Lloyd, Number 26 had finished her meal. She'd eaten until she was ready to burst, her body swollen taut and round. Wobbling over to the soft bed, she hauled herself up onto it and dropped straight into sleep.
She's still young. Young ones need their sleep.
After tucking the covers around her, I opened the laptop again. I might as well comb through the list until it was time to head out for the evening.
Going through the records meticulously, I flagged every case where large numbers of a single species had been seized together.
The Predation Effect triggers probabilistically, so the more specimens of the same species, the better.
Ticking off entries as I went, I found an astonishing menagerie. Every one of these creatures was something I'd seen at least once in the game — and a few of them made me wonder whether anyone had actually set out to smuggle them at all.
There's even a Mountaincrawler juvenile. How did they haul that thing in? And… oh?
As I marveled at the smugglers' sheer audacity, a striking name caught my eye.
They captured Outspacers?
I hurriedly checked the column beside the entry. The transfer field was blank — which meant the Outspacers were still here.
Twenty of them.
By the numbers, they were likely nothing more than soldier-caste specimens, but even that was a substantial windfall.
Outspacer genes are useful.
The Outspacers were, as their name implied, an extragalactic alien species in the setting — a race that crossed over from beyond the stars. They hoarded genes to empower themselves and treated every species outside their own kind as an enemy. In many ways they resembled the Amorph.
The differences: unlike the Amorph, players operated them not as a single organism but as a hive, and Outspacers of the same swarm could cooperate and communicate with one another.
To put it simply, the Amorph had been modeled on an action hero, while the Outspacers drew inspiration from the swarms of classic strategy games.
My obsession with alien creatures being what it was, I'd logged a great many hours on the Outspacers too.
Functionally, they're a straight upgrade over the Amorph.
Choose the Outspacer faction, and you became the hive queen of the species, with growing your colony as the primary objective.
Capture other creatures, absorb their genes, and those genes were reflected in the soldiers your queen birthed. Stronger soldiers meant gathering stronger genes, and the colony swelled in turn.
That was the Outspacer: a species built on classic king-class mechanics.
And unlike the Amorph — another king-class species, but treated with utter contempt — the Outspacers were rated in the community as a high-difficulty race with serious potential.
The reason was simple: depending on the player's choices, the colony could be grown into any number of different forms.
On pure performance, too, they were a race that snowballed hard once you survived the punishing early game, which earned them plenty of love from the stats-obsessed crowd.
I still liked the Amorph better, though.
Be that as it may, anyone playing the Amorph wanted to get their hands on Outspacer genes by any means necessary. There were plenty of useful traits in there, and the collection factored into Type acquisition as well.
Those first. Before anything else.
From then on, I flagged every other useful meal I came across.
Was smuggling, in the end, just smuggling? Sadly, cases with ten or more specimens of a kind were few and far between.
At this rate, even stripping the place bare wouldn't yield many traits.
That part I'll have to leave to luck.
By the time I'd finished picking out everything that needed eating, shadows had pooled deep across the room.
The hour of the hunt was drawing near.
I woke Number 26, and together we slipped out of the apartment.
A thick, suffocating darkness had settled over the entire city, and in that dark residential district the streetlamps burned bright.
Last time I only smashed them because there were people around….
Police patrols circled the Residential District's perimeter late at night.
Before, I'd broken the lamps to avoid prying eyes, but I couldn't keep doing it. Someone would start asking questions.
Tonight I would keep to the shadows between the lights as much as I could.
I moved across the rooftops and outer walls, bounding between the densely packed apartment blocks. The gaps between buildings were considerable, but the Strength Enhancement trait carried me the distance without trouble, and on landing I spread the wings along my back to smother the sound as much as possible.
Good thing it's still before the end of the workday — hardly anyone out.
Moving fast, I closed in on the manhole cover in short order. It sat right in front of me, but instead of rushing over I melted into concealment.
Baby, what's wrong?
[Zzzz (Enemy)]
Enemy?
An android was patrolling near the manhole.
A combat model.
Unlike the androids I'd seen aboard the pirate ship, this one had three arms. Beyond the two shaped like a human's, a combat-grade right arm fitted with a gauss rifle protruded from its lower torso.
That's odd. A gauss rifle? On an android?
The gauss rifle sat just below plasma weapons on the firepower ladder — a high-yield weapon that excelled against heavily armored targets. Call it a plasma weapon with the price and the destructive ceiling scaled down.
Even so, it was expensive equipment, far beyond the standard issue for ordinary soldiers or androids. The ammunition above all was ruinously costly.
Tungsten alloy rounds. Of course they're expensive.
By my understanding, the arming level of ordinary androids never came close to that. However much money this city had, it wasn't flush enough to hand a single patrol android a gauss rifle and burn tungsten rounds like water — not unless there were actual grounds to arm it that heavily.
Could there be an event or a festival coming?
The T&C Special Trade Hub had hosted all manner of events in the game. It was a tourist city; a festival I didn't know about wouldn't be strange at all.
When a festival brought in the crowds, the security and surveillance level rose accordingly. Maybe the android was armed above its usual grade for exactly that reason.
Should I call that good luck or bad?
I'd entered the city without incident, and of all times, a festival just happened to be on the horizon. A new variable had entered the board.
While I stood lost in thought, the heavily armed android paced back and forth around the manhole, then wandered off somewhere. Once I'd confirmed the area was empty, I approached.
I lifted the heavy slab of metal with ease and sent Number 26 down first. One last sweep of my surroundings, and I followed her inside.
As the cover settled back into place, a blackness without a single point of light — a black hole of a dark — greeted us.
Baby, where are we going?
[Zzzz zzzzz (Back the way we came. To the destination.)]
Neither of us was blind just because there was no light. She sensed air currents and pressure waves with her whole body, and I had my auxiliary organs.
I could see it now — a tunnel perhaps five meters high, stretching dead straight toward the far end of the earth.
Scattered across the floor were garbage the workers of some forgotten era had abandoned, cigarette butts some city-dweller above had dropped through the seams of a manhole cover.
From the walls ringing the tunnel, dust trickled down in slow, rhythmic cascades, shaken loose by the passage of the subway trains.
I set off toward our destination, Number 26 at my side.
I'll lay down spores along the way while we go.
The original plan had been to seed the spores after building the nest, but with a festival looming, that math changed. A surveillance web laid down in advance would make any unforeseen development far easier to handle.
I activated the Contamination Organ in the lower right of my combat arms. A viscous, dark-brown slime oozed out, mingled with spores. Once the mass left my body, it spread without haste through the tunnel, as if telling me not to worry.
The Contamination Organ benefited from the enhancement effects too. Within a couple of days, the spores would grow to the standard of a nest built by my own hands.
Surveillance web — handled.
By the time the route linking the Residential District to the Port District was clothed in spores, we had reached our destination. I carefully lifted the manhole cover and checked outside.
Empty, as expected.
This stretch sat on the border between districts, and no one walked it. Anyone traveling between districts took the subway — nobody strolled.
[Zzzzz zzz (Wait here.)]
Why? I want to come too.
[Zzz zzzzzz zzz (The bad people are afraid of you.)]
She must have remembered how Lars had trembled at the sight of her, because she hunched down, crestfallen.
I was sorry for it, but people feared Number 26, and there was nothing to be done. I tucked her away beneath the manhole and headed for the meeting spot.
Lloyd hadn't arrived yet. With the Morphing Organ active, I crouched low in the pitch-dark alley and waited.
Here he comes.
About ten minutes had passed when the sound of footsteps approached — someone walking straight toward me.