Beast of the Underground (4)
Vickers could not believe what was unfolding before his eyes.
Signals bloomed across the screen one after another, an unbroken cascade of chaos.
What the hell is going on!
It was obviously an emergency, but Vickers did not immediately deploy Squad 4.
First, assess the situation.
He summoned the Crisis Management Vice Team Leader and the Human Resources Management Team Leader, who were out in the field with him. A broad-shouldered man and a woman in a crisp uniform came into the camp looking for him.
"Look at this."
"What in the—"
"Hmm…."
Both of them frowned at the monitor, murmuring low. Neither had anticipated anything like this.
Vickers turned to the Vice Team Leader.
"Could a transmission malfunction cause this?"
"Radio instability's been a problem across the whole city since the recent EMP countermeasures went in, sir, but it doesn't produce errors like this."
"Then you're saying every one of these is a deserter?"
"It's unlikely, but possibly…."
The Vice Team Leader trailed off, and Vickers shifted his gaze to the HR Management Team Leader. She shook her head as if the very idea were absurd.
"Impossible. Every one of them has an obedience device implanted in their skull. They all know exactly what happens to them if they run."
"Then can we cross-reference the deserter signals against the obedience device signals right now?"
"You mean compare the two signal sets?"
"That's right."
"Let me check."
The team leader manipulated her terminal pad and linked it to the signal monitor. After tapping away for a while, two kinds of signals appeared on the screen — and their positions overlapped almost perfectly.
"That can't be right. It appears they really have all deserted."
"How is that even possible?"
"Honestly? This is a first for me too."
The team leader worked the pad a few more times, disbelief written across her face, but the result never changed. A swarm of signals raged across the screen. All of them — defectors who had defied orders.
Every single one came from Squad 3.
Had Squad 3 simply been seeded with more reactionaries than the rest?
Sensing his doubt, the team leader added an explanation of her own.
"Our T&C Special Trade Hub operates on one principle: the customer always receives products of the finest quality. Anything found defective during rigorous inspection is never delivered — it's disposed of on the spot."
"Hm."
Vickers judged her words to be sound. If incidents like this happened regularly, the Special Trade Hub could never have stayed in operation.
"Vice Team Leader. Something about the signals is bothering me."
At that moment, the man who had been studying the screen intently offered his own observation.
"Look at the deserter signals here — they're clustered together, unnaturally so."
"Perhaps they're moving as a group?"
"Even if we assume that, they're pressed too close together. As if one or two people were carrying multiple devices and chips around with them."
"The chips I can't speak for, but an individual cannot remove a device. It's embedded deep in the brain — it takes specialized equipment to extract it."
Listening to the two of them, a thought flashed through Vickers's mind.
It's a trap.
The monster they were hunting was a cunning, devious creature. Whatever trick it had played, the possibility that this situation too was one of its traps could not be dismissed.
It has any number of special abilities. Among them might be one that lets it control humans.
Edgerton's Silver Lion Knights had spent years collecting a vast library of genes for use in the Hulk Mutant projects.
Which meant they had fought desperately dangerous wild creatures time and time again. Vickers himself had survived more than one battle bloody enough to kill over half his comrades. That was precisely why he never underestimated an enemy.
"HR Management Team Leader."
"Yes?"
"It's my judgment that the enemy has laid a trap. So I ask you — can you activate the obedience devices from here?"
"……."
When an obedience device activated, it emitted electromagnetic waves lethally harmful to the human body. The radiation was powerful enough to cook a brain like an egg in a microwave. And needless to say, no one survived their brain melting.
If the signals keep moving after the devices fire, then the monster will be wherever those signals are.
Vickers concluded that the monster must be carrying a transponder. Whether it was somehow puppeteering the deserters, or had simply devoured them and now carried the devices inside its body — one thing was certain. Somewhere in that swarm of signals was the beast itself.
The Vice Team Leader nodded at the proposal, but the HR Management Team Leader looked far from pleased. She knit her neatly groomed brows and spoke.
"These are resources already promised to a leaseholder, so it isn't really my place to say — but do you intend to squander precious assets like this?"
"Hardly. I don't mean to throw them away for nothing. The thing we're chasing is a highly intelligent, dangerous organism. With a mind like that, using deserters to jam our signals is well within its capability."
"Is that true, Vice Team Leader?"
"I agree with the Deputy Commander, ma'am. The creature has already slipped the investigative nets of androids and police in the Port District and the Residential District multiple times. Using bait to expose its schemes works in our favor."
"When the obedience devices fire, most of these signals will go dead. Whatever is still moving afterward — that is the signal the creature is sending us."
The team leader pushed back against their reasoning.
"We keep the devices running at maximum output at all times in case of unexpected incidents, you understand. The moment the electromagnetic waves fire, the transponders will stop working too."
"That's no problem. They're military-issue — built to withstand strong electromagnetic pulses and physical shock."
At the Vice Team Leader's answer, the team leader let out a short sigh.
"…I pray it isn't a waste. Activating the obedience devices now."
She worked her terminal pad. A moment later, a confirmation window popped up on the screen asking to authorize activation. When she touched the pad lightly, every signal on the monitor froze in place, as if time itself had stopped.
The ones who had crawled into the sewer chasing the hollow dream of freedom.
They had died down there, in the filth.
Where? Where are you?
All three held their breath and stared at the screen.
Beep.
There!
A single signal flickered back to life and began to move.
Vickers snatched up his comm unit.
"Vickers of Squad 1! All Squad 2 and 3 units — the moving signal on the transponder grid is the target! Send the standby forces and hunt it down!"
While the channel was still open, Vickers pressed a button on the small mechanical device in his pocket, hidden from the two team leaders. By now, the signal would have reached Yanek, waiting on the surface.
You — I will not let you slip away. Not ever.
Operation Demon Hunt.
Vickers never once doubted it would end in success.
The human mind is a funny thing.
Once suspicion takes root, it never stops growing — but the moment you start believing in something, even a glaring oddity is easy to wave away. Just like now.
A silver helm hung from the crude frame of bone stacked before me.
If you asked where its owner had gone, I could answer that half of him was in my stomach, and the other half had been shredded to bits and was currently dangling from my combat arms.
Everything's going smoothly.
The enemy still had no idea what was happening down here.
I took a bite out of the knight's leg I was holding. Like cracking open a boiled crab, the hard armor split to spill out steaming meat and hot juice.
One of the great things about being an Amorph is that your teeth are hard enough to chew through boiled crab shell without any tools.
Good thing too, because honestly, the Employees were awful.
I'd eaten a few dozen of the humans besides the ones I'd seeded with parasites, and every one of them tasted like garbage. If the flavor had been the only problem, fine — but the Predation Effect only triggered once, too.
Well, at least I got a good trait out of it. I'll take that as consolation.
The trait I'd gained from devouring the Employees was called Dexterity.
True to its name, it enhanced my hands' functionality to the point where genuine craftwork became possible. With Dexterity applied, the small arms on my chest could now perform a far wider range of tasks.
Take this bone structure in front of me, for instance — assembled from the bones and scraps of the Employees using my small arms. I'd dug a shallow pit in the sewer floor and anchored the frame over it, and now it could hold together against anything short of a violent external shock.
Unless I whipped up a serious current, the odds of it collapsing were slim. Which meant I could set the knight's helm down here and enjoy my meal in comfort.
God, genetically modified humans taste good.
Call it a flavor threshold. After nothing but garbage, biting into something delicious made me so happy I nearly started humming.
Once I'd devoured every last scrap of the knight, I picked up the comm unit and rose from my spot.
By now they've probably noticed something's happened underground, right?
Of the Employees who had entered the sewer, I'd ambushed five teams first, planting parasites in each team while leaving exactly one member alive per team. Then I'd waited for them to finish their assigned routes.
Because once they hit their designated points, they swap routes with each other.
When every route was complete, all the teams of Squad 3 converged on a single spot — the cavern where they'd first set out. Where I had been sitting just moments before.
What waited for them on their return was not a knight. It was me.
That way I hunted everyone except those five, then divided the chips and devices harvested from the dead among the five survivors.
A few of them protested that they could hardly be called unarmed, but my solution was simple.
Just swallow them.
No need to lug devices and chips around by hand. When I growled, all five of them obeyed me like lambs.
Once the devices and chips were stored inside their bodies, I released all but one of them. Told them to leave the sewer, do whatever they liked.
Not that escape is actually possible.
Their futures were sealed, but they refused to let go of that fraying thread of hope. Clinging to the belief that somehow, if they got out of here, they'd live — they left the cavern.
Time's about up. Time to collect this one too.
I snatched a Corpse Catfish swimming through the water. It thrashed and fought against my grip, but when I tightened my hand just slightly, it soon went docile.
Carrying the live Corpse Catfish, I went to find the one Employee I hadn't released. Right on cue, I spotted the back of a head far off in the distance, someone trudging wearily through the murky water.
Brody, survivor of Team 15 — the first team I'd ambushed. Just in case, I'd ordered him to follow his original route exactly as planned.
As I approached, he tremblingly handed over his device and chips.
"S-so, this means you're letting me go? Right?"
It was a question that needed no answer, so I didn't bother giving one. Everyone down here was going to die whether the obedience devices fired or not — they'd all been infected by the space bacteria leaking out of my body.
"Please! Please, just let me li—urk?!"
Brody, mid-plea, froze in place — then clutched his head with both hands.
"Aaagh! Agh! It hurts, it hurts so bad! Aaaaagh!"
Brody began screaming like a madman, forgetting I was even there. Smoke curled up from his ears, and the backs of the hands clawing at his own skull had flushed a searing red.
There it goes.
They'd noticed the desertion on their end and activated the obedience devices. Watching even Brody — moving along his proper route — writhing in agony, it seemed they intended to execute every Employee assigned to Squad 3.
Then I felt a violent wave of heat and resonance pouring from the obedience device in my own hand.
The electromagnetic radiation from these devices is ferociously strong. An ordinary person suffers catastrophic damage just from holding one.
Well, that's what it's made for.
I gazed down at the device spewing lethal radiation into my palm.
My body isn't an ordinary person's — it's an Amorph's, so it doesn't bother me in the slightest. Even without any special traits, Amorph hide comes pre-loaded with high heat resistance, radiation immunity, and a whole assortment of other perks. The species can survive for a limited time in open space, after all.
It's only in this world — where plasma energy, psychic power, and countless transcendental weaponry fly around in abundance — that those qualities look pale.
At any rate, Brody, whose brain was nowhere near as durable as an Amorph's hide, had no defense against the device's radiation. His brain completely poached, he crumpled where he stood.
I tossed aside the now-spent obedience device and fed the signal chip to the Corpse Catfish. Then I cut wounds into the creature's skin, deep enough to draw blood.
Normally I'd use a parasite for this.
All five parasites currently at my disposal were dead.
Since the obedience devices melt brains outright, the parasites latched onto their hosts' brains to puppet them had no chance of surviving the activation.
They'd be replenished eventually even after being fully expended, but right now I had none to spare. So I'd have to track the creature's movements through its blood instead.
It's the decoy, after all.
Confirming the blood was flowing, I let the Corpse Catfish go. It shrieked in terror and scurried off into the darkness of the sewer.
I dove under the surface to track the scent of blood. The auxiliary organ beneath my jaw had no trouble catching the fading trail of blood drifting through the water.
Up above, they'll assume the catfish is the monster they've been hunting.
A signal chip and an obedience device, both inside one body — and when the device fires, the person dies. Yet the chip keeps moving. Given that, there's only one conclusion they can reach: that thing is the monster.
They'll assume I've been eating people and moving around, won't they?
From here on, they'd throw everything they had into chasing the catfish. Just as the enemy had split the underground survey teams into fragments rather than keeping them together, the forces waiting topside were likely split up too.
And the catfish is fast, so they'll be rushing to keep up. Guaranteed.
The odds of the surface teams converging at a single point underground before slowly tracking the catfish were low. If they lost it that way, they'd have to relaunch the entire survey operation from scratch.
I had to strike at the moment they gave chase — while they were still scattered, not yet massed together.
Divide and destroy. One at a time.
I devoured Brody's corpse down to the last scrap, then went after the catfish.
While the enemy splintered into pieces pursuing it, I would walk in their footsteps, a step behind.
The moment they reached the wrong target and began to celebrate — that instant would be exactly when I fell on them.
Just as the enemy had laid a trap for me, so had I laid one for them.
They had thrown out bait — and so had I.
This sewer would become the grave of arrogant foes. The grave of the silver knights.