The Drive (1)
"Signal confirmed. All units, prepare to move in."
The secret camp had been established by Squad 4 under Yanek's command. Officially, their affiliation was registered as a reserve force under Squad 2 — because Vice Commander Vickers had reported the unit roster to the Defense Fleet as belonging to Squad 2.
In reality, however, that was a lie.
Squad 4 was the unit that had received secret orders directly from Denver. Their mission was not to kill the monster, but to capture it alive.
They had also been given a second directive: if any other Defense Fleet soldiers discovered their operation in the course of carrying it out, those soldiers were to be eliminated as well.
"Captain Yanek. All preparations are complete."
"Good."
The Silver Lion Knights were composed entirely of genetically modified veteran warriors, but the twenty men of Squad 4 had been handpicked from among even those elites.
Furthermore, they had brought out weapons and equipment from the warship's armory, so their level of armament was exceptional.
Besides the Plasma Bolter, the standard-issue weapon of the Order, their additional equipment came down to exactly two things.
The first was the Auto Plasma Gun.
Put simply, it was a Plasma Pistol mounted on the shoulder of one's powered armor — but it outperformed the original in every way. Its durability had been improved over the base model, and above all, it synced directly with the user's field of vision, enabling automatic defensive fire.
The other piece of equipment was the Assault Pack, strapped to the back of every member of Squad 4.
The Assault Pack had been designed for operations in hostile environments, including open space. It multiplied the performance of the powered armor it was mounted on, and came equipped with both jet propulsion and independent oxygen supply.
In short, you could call it powered armor for your powered armor.
Both pieces of equipment commanded astronomical prices — arming twenty men with them would cost as much as a small colonial planet. Even for Prime Capital Edgerton, they were expensive enough to be deployed only in truly critical battles.
"What about the launcher?"
"Bring it along for now."
At Yanek's word, one of his men hefted a Plasma Launcher onto his back.
With every preparation complete, the twenty knights including Yanek entered the sewer.
When the knights came leaping down across the contaminated water, the subterranean dwellers scattered in terror and burrowed into hiding.
"One kilometer to the target."
"Junction ahead. Everyone, right."
The sewer was a labyrinth, but the silver knights moved without a trace of hesitation. The array of mechanical devices built into their helmets fed them a constant stream of information about the tunnels' interior.
"Defense Fleet soldiers spotted twenty meters ahead."
"All units, detour around them."
If the mission demanded it, they were authorized to kill any soldiers they encountered — but that didn't mean they needed to seek out the meeting. The knights moved toward their target while skirting the operational perimeters of the Defense Fleet units displayed on their devices.
"Hold! All units, halt."
At Yanek's shout, the members of Squad 4, who had been slicing through the current at a run, all stopped.
Something pale drifted in the water before them.
It was the corpse of a runaway — dead because of the compliance device.
"Hold position."
Yanek approached the body and examined it.
The corpse was nothing short of horrific.
As if the compliance device melting his brain weren't enough, the eyes had burst, blood streaming down the face.
What was even more gruesome was the state of the abdomen.
There were marks of something that had exploded outward from inside the belly, and the organs had all been thoroughly cooked.
Among the char-blackened flesh, the compliance device and signal chips were still visible.
So this is the thing's work?
The moment Yanek saw the state of the body, he understood at once what the monster had done.
It had forced the runaways to swallow the compliance devices and signal chips.
I should report this.
Yanek raised his communicator to relay the discovery to Jacob of Squad 2.
Squad 4's activities were classified, so they weren't even linked to headquarters or the camera network. Which meant that any important finding had to be reported individually over wireless comms.
Having cut the transmission with Jacob, Yanek turned to his men.
"Stay sharp, everyone. This is no soft target."
"Yes, sir."
They left the corpse behind and set off once more toward the target.
The place where they had vanished.
The corpse, left alone to sway with the current, was suddenly yanked under the water in one swift pull.
They're moving.
After the knights departed, I rose from where I had been crouched low, not far from their path.
Before they arrived, I had been examining the corpse lying along their route.
Because there was something I needed to complete the final piece of my plan.
I was just about to rifle through the body when my auxiliary organs sounded a warning. Judging from the violently churning water, the knights were closing in fast.
I chose to hide and watch the situation unfold rather than confront them head-on.
I know nothing about the enemy's armament level or numbers, after all.
My options were simple: observe, and if they looked like easy prey, strike immediately — if not, gather intelligence and withdraw.
I dove and pressed my body flat against the tunnel floor.
They got here faster than I expected.
At first I wondered whether they'd set up additional camps around the area. But I'd been wrong. One look at them and I understood how they'd closed the distance so quickly.
They were wearing Assault Packs.
An Assault Pack doubled the functions of your powered armor on top of granting a whole host of other useful effects.
That was why, in the game, the Assault Pack was so popular among MegaCorp players that it was practically called the mercenary uniform. Whether or not you had one could completely change which planets you were capable of conquering.
Of course, the price was murderously expensive.
In any case, those knights — high-grade powered armor layered with Assault Packs — were flexing their enhanced physical abilities to the fullest.
In a sewer choked with filthy water, they moved as fast as if they were sprinting across open ground.
That was how they'd caught up to the catfish faster than any of the other squads.
Twenty of them. All equipped with Assault Packs — fighting them head-on like this would be risky.
The Avatar of the Hunt would let me win without much difficulty, but the aftermath was the problem. Thanks to my Endurance trait I wouldn't collapse on the spot, but it would be enough to impair my performance in future battles.
And losing my reason is a problem in itself.
My reason and my knowledge.
Those were my two most important weapons. Lose them, and I become nothing more than a worthless beast.
Turning into a mindless beast while fighting multiple enemies is dangerous.
The enemy was classifying me not as an ordinary animal, but as something a little smarter — still, firmly, within the category of wildlife.
If I let things play out exactly as they wanted in that situation, it was a straight road to defeat.
So I held the fight in reserve.
As a result, the twenty enemies passed by without spotting me.
And besides confirming their equipment level, holding back had yielded one more gain.
Their vision systems aren't much different from knight to knight.
I'd wondered if the Assault Packs might change things, but aside from a few pieces of gear, the rest was more or less identical to standard knights.
Everything I'd observed so far told me the enemy possessed two means of detection: thermal sensing and vibration sensing.
Vibration detection was nearly useless amid this endlessly churning water.
Thermal detection is the same story.
My hide was as cold as ice. I'd been sitting in the sewer's frigid water for a long time. Even if they looked at me through thermal vision, I'd appear identical to the surrounding terrain.
I've got a solid read on their recognition systems now. An ambush should be easy.
The enemies had moved on, and I needed to finish my business quickly and follow them.
I seized the corpse and searched through its melted-open belly.
There you are.
Gripping the signal chips in my small arm, I scratched a shallow groove into the sewer wall with my combat arm.
Then I pressed the chips I was holding into that groove.
They're my new bait — they can't be damaged.
With the chips safely stowed, I picked up the employee's corpse and followed in the direction the knights had vanished.
Now that I'd located a group of knights, it was fair to say the Corpse Catfish had accomplished its first objective.
But if it ended here, where's the fun in that?
Retrieving the chips from the corpse and securing them was all in service of my second plan — the backup to my first.
Chasing the catfish, the enemy will eventually all converge in one place.
Their starting points were close together, so it might happen sooner than I predicted — or they might rally early for some reason I hadn't foreseen.
When that time came, I intended to craft new bait and shake the enemy apart.
Those who've entered the underground know nothing about the Corpse Catfish.
The catfish roaming these tunnels weren't naturally occurring creatures. They had been released by the city's administrators purely for efficient sewer management.
If I had thrown a whole swarm of catfish out as bait from the start, someone among the city's officials would certainly have raised questions.
They would have asked whether I was deliberately using the Corpse Catfish to run a disruption operation.
If they had pursued me warily, fully prepared, the disadvantage would have been all mine.
So I had deliberately implanted the signal chips in a single catfish alone, and let it run.
Before coming down here, the enemy must have thought this:
That I was moving around, devouring employees, with no idea the signal chips existed.
The unfortunate part was that the knights had moved faster than I expected and found the corpse.
I meant to deal with it while I was collecting the chips.
I had planned to eat the body clean so the enemy would go on believing their assumption — but the knights arrived so early that I got caught out.
Of course the catfish's route happened to overlap with where the corpse was.
The other corpses were all far from the catfish's path, unlikely to be found unless someone went looking for them deliberately — but this one had the bad luck to sit squarely on the knights' line of advance.
The mishap came from leaving it out freely instead of puppeting it with a parasite.
The good news was that they still hadn't noticed the catfish.
The corpse being discovered was no great disaster.
As I trailed the knights, I swallowed every remaining scrap of the corpse in my hands, leaving nothing behind.
Twenty knights, the ones I was pursuing now.
Once I'd dealt with them, I would double back to where the chips were hidden.
And then — craft the new bait.
The enemy would be thrown into utter confusion.
Because their bait suddenly became two.
Once they were down in the sewer, questioning the sewer administrators wasn't exactly easy. And while they fumbled with that, if I slipped away, their operation failed automatically.
Not that I have any intention of running.
As the enemy's failure to spot me just now made clear, the knights couldn't detect a Corpse Catfish moving through the water.
I didn't know what caliber of soldier the Defense Fleet protecting the city fielded, but it was hard to imagine their equipment was any better — if anything, worse — than that of these elite knights.
If I'd been bare-skinned, I'd have felt them gliding between my legs.
Then again, if the enemy had been bare-skinned, I wouldn't have needed to rack my brain this hard in the first place.
In any case, an enemy ignorant of the catfish's existence would inevitably split apart again over the doubled signal.
And that means more time for me.
Time to pick off the scattered enemy, one by one, as they chased bait after empty bait.
The foundation of a drive hunt lies in mastering your prey's movements.
The catfish, and the hunters on its tail — both were merely dancing on the palm of my hand.
So where shall I set my aim?
Only a short distance remained to the catfish.
No other enemies nearby.
What that meant was simple.
This situation favored me enormously.
I closed in tight behind a single knight at the rear.
Moving submerged, hugging the sewer floor, I made almost no sound at all.
The water around the hard-running knight churned violently. From beneath the surface, I seized both his legs with my combat arm.
"—!"
As the knight toppled, before he could make a sound, I clamped my jaws onto the back of his neck. My jaw, reinforced by the Bite Force trait, crushed through the knight's cervical vertebrae.
All the while, the knights ahead of him sprinted on, utterly unaware of what had befallen their comrade in the rear.
Too fast cuts both ways, I suppose.
I tore the Assault Pack from the knight's back and crushed the powered armor's battery. The light in the armor died, and the knight's body went limp and slack.
Hauling the limp body of the fallen knight, I melted into the water and vanished.
"Thirty meters to the target. The enemy's speed is dropping."
"All units, halt."
At Yanek's order, the knights froze in place.
A thing that's been moving at blistering speed suddenly slows down?
It had been fast enough that without their Assault Packs, they'd have struggled to keep it in sight. Thanks to that, the other squads were lagging far behind.
For Yanek, whose mission required capturing the monster in secret, the situation was highly favorable.
It slowed down — so it's noticed the pursuit.
Given the creature's intelligence, it might well be lying in wait somewhere, preparing to ambush the knights.
But failing to gauge our strength like this... a beast is a beast after all.
No matter how powerful the monster was, withstanding the combined force of the twenty men assembled here bordered on the impossible.
Yanek made his resolve.
He would teach that savage beast a fundamental truth: above the sky, there is yet another sky.
First, a headcount before combat.
Standing in place, Yanek cast his gaze over his men one by one as they checked their weapons.
Hm? One man is missing?
The man who had been at the very rear was gone.
Startled, Yanek counted again — but counting doesn't conjure a man out of nothing.
Nineteen men stood here.
Where their missing comrade should have been, there was only a thick, deep shadow.
A shadow? Don't tell me—?!
"All units, take defensive positions!"
Yanek bellowed the instant he grasped what that unnatural shadow signified.
But it was already too late.
The shadow surged up through the surface, and a long, colossal serpent erupted from the water, coiling around one of the knights.
In the same instant, the Auto Plasma Gun mounted on the shoulder of the knight standing beside his captured comrade activated and fired.
"Ghak—?!"
"Damn it!"
"Watch your fire! Friendly casualties!"
But the serpent, as if to mock them, hoisted its captive up as a shield. The plasma energy shattered the knight's hard carapace of armor, and blood sprayed into the air.
Carrying off the comrade whose upper half had been blown away, the serpent plunged into the black filth and vanished.
The knights all drew their bolters and raked the water's surface with fire. The light of the green energy bolts flooded the pitch-black sewer.
"Cease fire! Cease fire!"
At Yanek's furious roar, his men stopped shooting.
Where the serpent had disappeared, all that remained of their brother-in-arms was a single right arm, drifting on the water.