Monster (5)
Broker S. A careful man.
The moment anything felt off, he'd picked up the phone immediately — a cautious human, no doubt about it. If our conversation had smelled even slightly suspicious, he would have canceled the deal on the spot. Thank god it had gone over smoothly.
Then again, he has plenty of reason to be careful.
Thanks to the USB Lloyd had handed over, I had a rough idea of who he was.
Either a confiscated-goods manager on the Materials Storage Team, or a guard on the Port Security Team.
Only those two could get seized biological cargo loaded onto a ship through legitimate channels.
The Materials Storage Team handles every piece of cargo that arrives at the port, so falsifying paperwork would be easy for them.
A port guard, on the other hand, could manipulate the surveillance cameras. Of course, given the current state of emergency, tampering with all of them would be impossible — he'd probably just deactivate a few cameras when moving the creatures.
Maybe he's both.
It was possible someone working on the Storage Team had bribed a guard.
Either way, one thing was certain: he wasn't upper management, but he wasn't bottom-rung labor either — he sat squarely in the middle-manager zone. And he was smart enough to run a long-term smuggling operation without getting caught.
In short, a man who would not be easy for me to kill.
If my target has real influence, that creates a problem.
Eat him carelessly, and it becomes a headache.
He's nothing like day-laborers — the Lloyds and Larses of the world. If S is a middle manager, plenty of people are connected to him. If he suddenly vanished, the people around him would start asking questions.
And by my count, the number of teams he's already bribed was over two.
The Smuggled Animal Monitoring Team and Port Security. There could be more.
Criminals keep their networks tight, so if he disappeared, they'd move heaven and earth to find out why.
Even if I mimicked S and formally processed a resignation, a man holding key responsibilities within his team can't quit on a whim. If the office called asking for him, I'd be in an awkward spot.
But squeezing confiscated creatures through S has its limits too.
I'd told S I'd found him a customer — a lie, of course. The commission I could pay him was limited. The credits of the people I'd eaten didn't amount to much.
Like most residents of this Residential District, my victims had been day-laborers at best, or people who blew everything they earned in a day in the Entertainment District. The man next door at least had some credits to his name, but Lars was flat broke.
A man who calls just to reschedule a time — the second he learns I'm broke, he'll cut me off.
So how could I keep him alive and useful for the long haul, without complications?
Truthfully, there was a way. The problem was that it hinged on a great deal of luck.
The Outspacer Genetic Essence.
Among the Outspacers' traits was one that could solve this entire problem. If I acquired it through a Predation Effect, the Broker S issue would resolve itself.
Once this deal is done, I can eat an Outspacer. I'll decide the rest after I see the results.
The transaction with the broker was already half sealed. Unless something went wrong when we met, the Outspacer would land in my hands regardless. With so many variables in play right now, it was smarter to re-plan after consuming it.
There's plenty to do before I leave this place anyway.
Beyond the broker business, loose ends remained. Like Lars, Lloyd needed a resignation filed on her behalf.
Using the communicator I'd pocketed after killing her, I sent a resignation email to the Smuggled Animal Monitoring Team. Everyone had already gone home for the night, apparently — the team leader never followed up.
By the time I finished erasing Lloyd from the payroll and checked the clock, it was already past midnight.
The appointed hour was drawing near.
I left No. 26 sleeping and slipped out of the apartment.
This wasn't the Entertainment District, so there were hardly any residents wandering about. Only tired-faced police officers and androids patrolled the empty streets.
Avoiding their eyes, I eased myself down into the secret underground passage.
The container unloading dock.
The route was blanketed with cameras. His side had probably pulled strings to keep some of them dark for the sake of their illegal trade, but I'd have to dodge as many as I could anyway.
The auxiliary organ can detect electromagnetic waves, after all.
Emerging from the manhole, I focused my senses through the auxiliary organ. The two tendrils beneath my jaw — longer and thicker since my evolution — writhed at my command.
The smell of dawn steeped in asphalt residue, the scent of steel and aluminum bleeding from the forest of containers. The faint tremor of subway trains beneath my feet, the pulse of a colossal city that never slept, day or night.
The Port District was still stuffed to the brim with things that titillated every one of my five senses.
The auxiliary organ sifted through the flood of sensory input and plucked out the thin, thread-like electromagnetic waves the cameras were emitting.
Three cameras ahead.
As I wove between stacks of five or six containers, I steered clear of every camera's line of sight. A few of them, just as I'd predicted, were already dead.
He does have connections with the guards too, then.
Dark cameras warranted no caution, so I simply passed them by.
And then, as I moved, I felt movement in the distance — living bodies.
Ten people in total. All but one of them armed.
Hah.
I'd thought his paranoia was extraordinary, but he'd actually brought company.
And here I thought this would be easy.
I activated the Morphing Organ and revealed myself before them.
Beneath the red glow of the floodlights hanging from the container cranes, all ten figures turned as one to stare at me.
The fat man at the center with his head shaved to the scalp — Broker S — greeted me with a nod.
"You made it."
"Who are they?"
"Ah, pay them no mind. They're insurance."
It was hard to disregard them when every last one wore an expression that went well beyond unfriendly. Their laser muzzles were trained on me.
A show of force.
Most of them were humans in powered armor or cyborgs, but exactly one figure stood out from the rest.
A Wolf.
Wolves were shapeshifting humanoid intelligences — a beastfolk race with the heads of what we'd call ordinary animals. Half-human, half-beast, their physical abilities far surpassed those of baseline humans, and their senses were razor-sharp.
The female Wolf S had brought along was already wrinkling her nose and glaring at me.
My Morphing Organ worked through pheromones. It could deceive a Wolf, but the dissonance would be far worse for her than for any other species.
I'll have to wrap this up fast, then.
Nothing good ever came from lingering near a Wolf. I cut straight to business.
"Where's the goods?"
"Your merchandise is in that freezer container over there. I'll give you the passcode once the payment clears."
"Understood."
"You've done this before, so you know the drill. Enter the account here."
He handed me a laptop. A single program ran on the screen — enter a personal credit account, and the credits would transfer to him automatically.
I'd already checked the man next door's credit account on his personal PC back at his apartment, so I had no trouble at all.
The balance was cutting it close, honestly.
The transfer went through without a hitch. S closed the laptop with a satisfied look on his face.
"And with that, one headache is gone."
"Headache?"
"The Outspacer, of course. No idea what kind of lunatic would buy such a dangerous creature. The Cult truly is an incomprehensible bunch."
"They certainly are."
I played along with S as he badmouthed a faction that, in this world, didn't even exist.
I couldn't speak for reality, but in the game, the Cult and the Outspacers were sworn enemies — by story and by game design alike.
The Outspacers' ultimate goal was to return to the homeland Vortex One had destroyed.
To do that, they needed psychic power strong enough to blanket an entire galaxy — which was why they devoured Cultists to accumulate it.
One might ask why they couldn't simply acquire psychic-related Genetic Essences and apply them to the swarm, but the Outspacers were restricted from using certain classes of traits.
Outspacers can't use psychic power at all.
Lore held that Vortex One had stripped psychic ability from the entire species — and because of it, Outspacers couldn't use any psionic-related trait. With a single exception: resistance to psychic attacks.
Thanks to that innate resistance, they could shrug off weak psychic assaults, but they remained vulnerable to potent psychic techniques. In other words, the Outspacers carried only the bare minimum of psychic defense, and were hard-pressed to answer the full spectrum of psionic attacks.
Which is exactly why the Cult counters them.
The Cult was psychic power incarnate — the playable race with access to the widest variety of psionic techniques of them all.
Even against the Outspacers' psychic resistance, they had more than enough tools to route around it.
A Cult, physically frail but capable of psychic attacks in a dozen different forms, versus an Outspacer swarm that could breed endless legions but crumbled before psychic power. Community forums had never once run out of arguments over which of the two held the advantage.
Judging by what he's saying, the two of them don't seem to be at each other's throats in reality.
I'd have to meet a Cultist myself to know the details.
Either way, my business with the broker was finished. Time to withdraw.
"The deal's done, so I'll be going."
"Hey, hold on."
"Yes?"
"The one who cracked the Cult side — that was your team leader, wasn't it?"
"Sorry? Ah... yes."
"Word is that man is something else entirely. Think you couldn't put in a word for me too?"
"A word about what, exactly?"
"Cult connections. Every time a deal with them goes through from now on, I'll see you're taken care of. For you alone, of course, L."
He really was an influential broker — now he was trying to negotiate with me. The longer he talked, the harder he'd be to deceive, and I wanted none of it.
"I'm sorry, but I'll have to decline."
"Tch. Pity, that."
"Good night."
I bid farewell to the smacking-lipped man and turned to leave — but this time, someone else stopped me.
"Wait. Stop right there."
"Kate? What is it?"
The one who'd halted me was, of course, the Wolf. Kate, the wolf-headed beastfolk, padded up to me and pressed her nose close, sniffing.
"This one is suspicious."
"Suspicious? I've done business with L any number of times."
"I can't say precisely. But something is being hidden."
"Hidden?"
At her words, S's expression turned to ice.
"Hey. What's this supposed to mean?"
"Sir?"
"Kate's sense of smell is sharper than any other Wolf's. And the Security Team has been acting strange lately — don't tell me you're one of their little spies? Everyone, seize her!"
The bodyguards who had been flanking S leveled their guns at me and advanced with slow, deliberate steps.
So it comes to this after all.
As far as I knew, Wolves in the game couldn't fully pierce the Morphing Organ's effect. Whether Kate was exceptional, or whether reality had sharpened the Wolf senses beyond what I remembered, I couldn't say.
Think about that later. First — kill everyone except S.
I'd hoped for a peaceful resolution, but it wasn't to be.
Everything from here on was of their own making. I lashed my tail out and speared Kate through the thigh.
"Kaghk!"
Letting out a howl befitting a wolf-beast, she crumpled to the ground, a hole punched clean through her leg.
She wore low-grade powered armor, but that tier of suit offered little in the way of protection. Unless it was high-grade armor with a built-in shield, stopping my attacks was out of the question.
"Kate!"
"You goddamn bitch!"
Leaving her twitching uselessly under the paralytic neurotoxin, I threw myself at the bodyguards.
Mid-charge, a rain of lasers erupted from eight barrels and hammered into my body — but my frame had been fortified by the Physical Enhancement Type and a host of other traits. Naturally, not a single wound appeared.
I swung a combat arm at the human standing closest.
"Gkk!"
Two down.
Having shattered the man's jaw and knocked him out of the fight, I fired spike-bones at the cyborg beside him.
The bullet-sharp projectile punched straight through the cyborg's skull — and kept going, skewering the head of another human standing behind him.
Four.
Before the two corpses even hit the ground, I kicked off the earth and launched myself skyward. My target: the tallest cyborg among them. The moment I came flying, the color drained from his face.
"Gaaagh!"
I slammed into him and bore him down, raking wildly with all four combat arms. His thin powered armor tore apart without resistance beneath my razor claws.
"Aaaaagh! Help me!"
"Oh, for fuck's—!"
To their eyes, I was swinging only two arms while their comrades were shredded by something invisible. The sight of mechanical parts and viscera bursting from the cyborg's torso wrung a strangled, chicken-squawk of terror out of Broker S.
"F-fuck! We can't handle this!"
"I'll hold it — get the VIP out of here!"
A scar-faced human barked orders at the other guards. Three of them broke away, hauling S toward escape.
"Uraaaaaaagh!"
The scar-faced man retreated, spraying me wildly with his laser rifle. Crimson bolts crackled against my hide — but the result he was praying for never came.
My body right now was a living tank. Unless he showed up with plasma weaponry or, at the very least, gauss-grade arms, wounding me was simply impossible.
Realizing the futility of laser fire, he soon stopped shooting.
"Damn it...!"
Hurling the rifle aside, he drew a small rod from inside his coat. The same model as the Sonic Blade the pirate who'd boarded the research vessel had carried.
First that pirate, now this — same organization?
Spacedog syndicates were full of retired soldiers and mercenaries. Their tactics were similar, their weapons similar — maybe the two of them had served in the same outfit, then retired and gone their separate ways.
Not that it matters. They both die all the same.
"Even if I die, you're not getting past me."
Admirable professionalism. I had no intention of honoring it. I swept my tail in a great arc across the ground.
The scarred man read the attack and sprang backward — but my assault didn't end there.
A spike-bone hurtled toward his abdomen. His pupils dilated, and he threw up his Sonic Blade in a desperate parry.
His reflexes were decent; his luck wasn't. With an ear-grating shriek of metal, the blade sheared clean in two.
"Oh no—!"
I lunged the short distance and rammed my head into his side. The thick horn jutting from my skull punched through his flimsy powered armor and shredded his organs.
"M-monster..."
Shaking my head violently, I flung him — still skewered on my horn — far away. Half of his flank torn away, he was dead before he ever hit the ground.
"Uuu... uuuuh..."
Kate, the last one left, trembled all over as she watched me, her body locked in full paralysis.
A Wolf. Perfect timing, actually.
Wolves counted as a playable, shapeshifting race. Which meant, in turn, that eating one counted toward my evolution requirements.
I approached her.
I don't need to turn into Lloyd anymore.
Her resignation was filed, and any future meet-ups with the broker had collapsed.
Whether I killed him or ate an Outspacer, gained its trait, and kept using him that way — either way, Lloyd had outlived her usefulness.
With no more need to wear her face, there was no reason not to consume a Wolf's genes.
I deactivated the Morphing Organ. A membrane slid shut over the tiny pores in my hide, and the pheromones hanging in the air died away.
"Uu — uuuuuh!"
When Kate saw me return to my monstrous form, her eyes shook violently. She thrashed, clawing at any escape she could find — a futile struggle. The neurotoxin had become a net, binding her body fast.
I seized her firmly with all four arms and opened my jaws wide.
"Uuu, uuuuk!"
Well then — thanks for the meal.
My mouth, gaping like a serpent's, closed over her head and bit down. Her muscles gave one last shudder — a dying flicker — and then went utterly slack.
Hm.
The Wolf's head was better than I'd expected. Minus that mountain of fur, it actually verged on delicious.
Tastes something like cat.
Like biting into a juicy, meat-laden hamburger. My threshold had clearly risen since that first cat — it no longer delivered quite the same euphoric rush.
I'll savor the rest later.
Regrettable, but S and his bodyguards were still out there. Better to finish them off first, then feast.
I gathered up the corpses scattered across the dock and stashed them beyond the reach of the cameras.
Good.
As I finished the cleanup, the auxiliary organ murmured its report: the fugitives hadn't gotten far.
The hunt was not yet over.