Monster (4)
A woman?
A woman with thoroughly unremarkable features was glancing around as she made her way toward the alley.
Contrary to my expectations, Lars's coworker was a woman. Judging by the name alone, I'd assumed Lloyd was a man. I had been wrong.
Well, I suppose there's no rule that says women can't visit those kinds of establishments.
Going by her looks, I doubted she could pluck a single flower — but who knew what she got up to at the brothels. For all I knew, she went around ripping out people's spines.
I rose from my spot and waved her over.
"Over here."
"Why on earth did you want to meet in a place like this?"
"It's not exactly the kind of thing we can talk about out in the open, is it?"
"Fair point. Still…."
Lloyd approached me. A moment ago her face had been bright with greeting, but now she tilted her head, puzzled.
"Didn't you quit? Why are you still wearing that?"
"Huh?"
"Isn't that your work uniform?"
She pointed at my body as she spoke.
The Morphing Organ's pheromones didn't work on me, so I had no way of knowing what I looked like to her.
In the game, when you used the Morphing Organ, the target appeared as they looked before death….
When I had devoured Lars, he hadn't changed his clothes. He'd collapsed drunk in his work uniform, after all.
From what Lloyd was saying, in reality — just like in the game — the organ seemed to mimic its victim as they appeared in their final moments.
Right, the Morphing Organ copies clothing too.
It was true that the organ acquired genetic information and built its hallucinogenic pheromones from it, but it didn't rely on genetics alone. It also gathered data from auxiliary senses — sight among them — and wove it all together to produce a far more precise illusion.
Visual details like clothes, shoes, buttons, and wrinkles were collected and fed to the organ, then layered over the body it constructed from the victim's genetic information before being reflected in the hallucination. Which meant that projecting a different outfit into the illusion was impossible; the only clothing that could be replicated was whatever the consumed target had been wearing at the time.
That's a problem I never saw coming. If the clothes don't match the situation, someone might find it suspicious.
The game had no concept of clothing that didn't fit the circumstances. Few players bothered to swap out their combat gear just because they'd entered a city.
So while some had seen through the Morphing Organ's illusions because of the uncanny valley effect, nobody had ever been caught out because of what their equipment looked like.
This is reality, though. Everything works differently here. I'll have to be more careful.
If Lloyd hadn't pointed it out, I would have landed myself in serious trouble.
I fudged an excuse for her.
"Ah — I just didn't have anything decent to wear."
"Tch. Put some actual thought into your wardrobe. A guy who's quit his job and all… huh?"
She clicked her tongue, then stopped mid-sentence. Her face scrunched up in a deep frown.
"There's been a weird smell this whole time…."
"Skip the commentary. You know all about the broker, don't you?"
"We're talking about this here?"
"Too many ears in the bars."
"I guess it's not the kind of thing I should be blabbing about anyway."
Nodding, she pulled a USB drive from her pocket.
"Everything on the dealings with the broker is on here. Fair warning — the files become inaccessible after twenty-four hours."
"Complicated, aren't we."
"It's not exactly clean business. I'll shoot you the broker's contact info through the comm."
She took out her communicator. The narrow, dark alley brightened under the glow of the little device.
She typed in the contact and hit send, and the communicator in my hand buzzed.
S?
A message bearing the broker's initial and phone number had arrived on Lars's communicator. Apparently they addressed each other only by initials, as insurance in case any one of them was ever arrested.
"That's everything. Now let's go get a drink."
"Sure."
I was still looking at the screen when she gave my arm a playful jab.
"You, of all people, turning down a drink— huh?"
The moment her hand met flesh that felt nothing like a human body, she flinched back in shock.
The Morphing Organ could deceive the eye, but not the sense of touch. If someone touched me, they would feel my true form directly. She must have realized it the instant she jabbed me — from that wrong, alien texture.
That the man waiting for her in the alley was not Lars at all.
"You— you're not— what are you?!"
Lloyd stammered, backing away.
I had the information and the contact now. She was no longer of any use to me.
My long tail lashed out and coiled around her as she tried to run.
"Hel— mmph!"
Before the scream could leave her throat, my combat arm clamped over her mouth.
She seemed utterly bewildered by the invisible thing that had seized her.
She could see with her own eyes that this wasn't Lars — but the pheromone's effect still held. Her sense of touch registered multiple arms and a tail binding her body, while her eyes stubbornly insisted she was looking at Lars. To her, it must have felt like unseen limbs were gripping her out of thin air.
"Mmm… mmmm…."
Lloyd's eyes pleaded with me to spare her. Her once-plain face was now smeared with tears and snot.
It was a pitiful sight. My decision did not change.
I tightened my tail, and her waist crumpled. The light faded from her eyes, and her head lolled.
I'll dispose of the body here.
Right where she fell, I devoured Lloyd's corpse.
Lloyd tasted like ordinariness itself. Not exactly bad, not exactly good — an ambiguous middle ground. Honestly, she was only a little better than the sandwich from next door to Lars's place.
Now I can transform into Lloyd. Next….
I needed to contact the broker. Once I got home and checked the USB, I'd decide whether to meet or not.
After licking up every last drop of blood from the ground, I slipped back through the secret passage.
｢Smell of food.｣
[Zzz-zzz zzzz (I went and ate)]
｢Mine?｣
Oh.
From now on, I'd have to leave something aside for No. 26 to eat too.
Sander, an official in the Port District's Cargo Storage Team, had a side business.
His trade was supplying strange and exotic creatures to suit the refined tastes of Mega Corp's upper crust.
Smuggling, in a word — crime, in plain terms — but Sander had never particularly felt that what he did was wrong.
Having a capability and refusing to use it? That's practically a sin.
Under a mindset that was Mega Corp to its marrow, he had chosen a line of work that let him exploit his official position to the fullest.
His duties brought him into frequent contact with the Smuggled Animal Monitoring Team, so Sander approached their team leader with a proposal for mutual benefit — one they accepted without hesitation.
The arrangement was simple: the Monitoring Team passed him information on confiscated creatures, and he falsified the cargo storage paperwork to have them shipped off to other planets instead.
That way, the illicit alliance between two rotten public institutions had endured for over a year. Before long, Sander had grown into a broker influential enough to hold connections with the police themselves.
If not for the Board of Directors meeting, he'd have earned enough credits by now to relocate to another planet.
Damn it. That godforsaken Board and its meetings — no opening in sight.
As of yesterday, thirty days remained until the conclave. Thanks to it, security across the entire city had spiked, and moving creatures in secret had become nearly impossible.
Sons of bitches. Do you know how much money I've shoveled at you people, and you can't punch through a single lockdown?
The strict order had come down personally from the Port District chief, so even the officials had no choice in the matter — but there was no way Sander knew that.
"Hey, Sander. You not heading home?"
"I'll go a bit later."
"Right. Take it easy."
Once he'd confirmed the other employees had left, Sander pulled a personal laptop from his bag. He typed in his password, and the screen displayed the list of creatures slated for smuggling out.
Every one of these is money.
The entire list was checked off as SCHEDULED. In a normal week, the cargo would have been loaded onto a ship bound for another planet by this morning — but with surveillance this airtight, he hadn't been able to squeeze in so much as a finger.
The tightened scrutiny of the Port District meant that even outgoing goods were now caught in the dragnet, and brokers like him were caught in it too.
And so the creatures that should have been shipped out long ago lay sleeping peacefully in containers across the Port District. Barely a day had passed, and yet the losses were staggering. Sander clicked his tongue.
Just then, his communicator rang. The screen showed a single letter: L.
"Tch. I told them things are tense these days."
L's message wasn't long. A request to trade in Outspacers.
Someone actually wants to buy those?
Sander tilted his head at the unexpected demand. As far as he knew, Outspacers were extremely dangerous creatures, and the people willing to trade in them were vanishingly rare.
It wasn't that the trade didn't exist at all. The Outspacers in cold storage here in the Port District had, after all, originally been seized by the Smuggled Animal Monitoring Team in the first place.
But in all the time since that confiscation, not a single person had ever approached Sander asking to trade in Outspacers.
While he was still puzzling over it, another message arrived.
"Hm. A Cult from the Administrative District is the buyer, is it?"
Normally Sander mediated the trades himself, but this time it seemed the other side had found the customer.
Probably the Monitoring Team leader's doing. The man has connections with the Cults in the Administrative District.
He'd thought the team leader reasonably competent — but he hadn't expected him to have strings to pull among the Cults. Sander let out a low whistle of admiration.
And if the buyer was a Cult, the reason for wanting Outspacers made sense. The Cults adored collecting rare animals and curious relics.
The Administrative District, of all places. Thank god for that — no need to ship anything off-world.
Had the delivery been bound for another planet, he'd have refused; a move within the city itself posed no great problem.
Sander wrote down the meeting place, the time, and the credits he demanded, and sent it all to L.
The location, as always, was beside the cranes at the container offloading docks in the Port District. The time, same as ever, was set for ten at night.
This wasn't his first rodeo; trusting the rest would sort itself out on their end, he was about to put it out of his mind when another reply came in.
"…They want to move the meeting to the early hours?"
Wrinkles creased Sander's brow. The time had always been his to set, and never once had the other side changed it. If he pulled out, the smuggling deal itself collapsed — so it had always been this way: him on top, them beneath.
So why now?
They'd requested the trade at the very height of the crackdown, and now they wanted to move the hour too? On its face, it stank.
After a moment's deliberation, Sander pressed the call button.
The signal rang out from the handset, then clicked, and the other party's voice came through.
"Hello?"
"Hey. What's this about?"
"Sorry?"
"Changing the meeting time. That's never happened before."
"Ah, that. I've got overtime…."
"Overtime?"
Sander was about to snap a question at this sudden overtime business when he paused.
It came back to him — a coworker had mentioned the other day that some idiot had gotten caught trying to smuggle out a Mountaincrawler juvenile, and everything had gone sideways because of it.
"This wouldn't have anything to do with the Mountaincrawler, would it?"
"Yes, sir. Everyone's been run off their feet over it."
"Tch. Sounds rough. Should we push it to a different day entirely, then?"
"They say the buyers want it as soon as possible."
"Is that so? Fine, understood. One a.m., you said? Let's meet then."
Having grasped the full situation, Sander ended the call.
Spiriting the Outspacers out meant the storage and transfer paperwork had to be doctored as well, so he powered on his work PC.
Partway through the falsification work, a thought suddenly struck him as strange.
Even for a Cult — who deals in the dead of night?
Suspicion, once planted in the human heart, had a way of multiplying. Nothing about their demands was objectively strange, and yet Sander couldn't shake a creeping sense of foreboding.
I need insurance.
Torn, he picked his communicator back up and dialed a number.
"Hey, it's me. You'll come along with me. Yeah. Yeah. You know the place? Be there by one a.m."
The man he called was the leader of the bodyguards Sander kept on personal retainer.
His line of work was thick with illegality, and every so often it put him face to face with dangerous people. On those occasions, he brought his bodyguards along to the meeting.
I don't know what game you're playing, but try anything funny and I'll grind you into the dirt.
Every member of Sander's security detail was an ex-soldier or ex-cop, each one boasting superb combat prowess. On top of that, he'd poured credits into their equipment without stinting — the entire squad was outfitted in low-grade reinforced suits and armed with laser weaponry. Plenty of customers had tried to menace Sander before, but one look at the human war machines he employed and every one of them had folded like a cheap suit.
And that was against clients who weren't used to shoveling smuggled-animal dung every day. Anyone who didn't wet themselves at the sight of those bodyguards could count themselves lucky.
Everything was under his control. Reassured, Sander bent back over his work.