The Hunt (2)
How terrifying. So very terrifying.
The enemies sprayed plasma bolts in every direction, but underwater as they were, not a single shot found its mark.
I slipped safely through the saturating barrage of plasma fire, retracted my blood-drinking tentacle, and reeled in the knight it had snared.
"…Ghk!"
The knight caught in my tentacle struggled however he could, drawing a Blade Claw with his remaining left arm.
Not going to happen.
Those razor-sharp claws on the back of his hand could shear even my reinforced tentacle clean off in one bite.
Responding to my will, the tentacle wormed its way into the shattered gap in his armor.
"AAAGH!"
The tentacle, lined on its inner face with saw-like teeth, slipped beneath his armor and tore through his body. It was as if a saw were grinding away at the stump where his arm had been severed, and the knight thrashed in agony.
Maybe a mouthful of water will calm him down.
Thanks to his Assault Pack, the knight was receiving oxygen through the helmet connected to it even while submerged.
I yanked him toward me and stripped off his helmet with one combat arm.
Shoulder-length blonde hair spilled out from inside.
Huh? A woman?
I'd assumed it was a man, but she was a woman. Genetic modification, probably — she was quite beautiful, too.
"Damn it…!"
The knight's face was contorted with excruciating pain.
A lot of Mega Corp players used to try to roll female mercenaries in the game.
The knighthood provided as a perk of the Edgerton family assigned both names and appearances entirely at random. Sometimes you'd get a hulking, muscle-bound black man; sometimes, like the knight before me, a blonde white woman.
That was why quite a few Mega Corp players wanted to build their mercenary companies exclusively out of pretty knights. Guides on how to roll only beautiful girl knights were all over the community forums.
Personally, I always preferred the Amorph.
That said, I was still an ordinary man at heart, and seeing a beautiful woman had once stirred something in me.
But now, with my body in this state, even a stunning face evoked nothing at all.
Anyway — a female knight, then.
Looking at her, an interesting idea occurred to me.
A woman might have her uses.
I opened my jaws and gently bit the back of her neck.
"Ghk?!"
She shuddered violently.
I'd bitten softly, so it wasn't pain doing that. Probably a visceral revulsion toward the Amorph, or something along those lines.
As the neurotoxin in my saliva took effect, her expression rapidly went slack. She likely couldn't even feel the pain from her severed arm anymore.
Once I confirmed she was paralyzed, I fitted the helmet I'd just removed back onto her head.
To reconnect it to the Assault Pack… ah, here it is.
The moment I joined the tubes at her neck and shoulder, light returned to the helmet. With power restored, the recon chip inside would be active again too.
You're going to be my bait.
In my experience, female comrades made perfect bait. Most people react far more sharply to a woman dying than to a man.
Would there still be gentlemen in the space age who'd come running to rescue a woman? It was worth an experiment.
So the tracker was bait?
Yanek rechecked the signal.
Before his squad had arrived, the beacon had been sitting thirty meters away; now it was rapidly receding again.
There's another living creature here?
He considered it briefly, then shook his head.
No. The odds of a wild animal cooperating with the creature's intentions this precisely are negligible.
It was far more plausible to assume the monster possessed a fission ability. Creatures that split their own bodies were rare, but they did exist.
Splitting its body to plant the chip and sow confusion. The thing is a strategist.
And not just any strategist — a genuinely gifted one.
Yanek judged that his threat assessment of the creature needed broadening.
Fire breath, projectile spines, invisibility, fission — and high intelligence. Truly worthy of His Lordship's desires.
Yanek had hunted hundreds of beasts, and never once had he seen a creature with such a diverse array of abilities.
Even the current Hulk Mutant production technology couldn't cram that many different traits into a single body.
The genetically modified humans of the Eugene family were said to carry a broad range of traits, but no matter how he looked at it, the monster's shape was nothing like human.
From what I saw earlier, its defining feature is the serpent form.
The reason it hadn't used the invisibility it had employed at the hospital and the station was probably this place — too much flowing water.
"Commander Yanek! Catherine's vital signs are still valid!"
"What?"
At one of his squad's shout, Yanek operated the terminal on his wrist.
Within moments, the inside of his visor displayed the vital signs of Squad 4's remaining members, along with the feed from the camera of their lost comrade Catherine.
She's still alive?
Catherine's signal was faint, but she lived. Her field of view suggested she was leaning against the wall somewhere along the corridor.
"Commander, Catherine isn't dead yet. If we don't retrieve her soon, it may be too late."
"……."
Yanek said nothing.
A trap.
This was a creature that had used a tracking beacon to run a deception operation.
Assuming some hidden agenda was the reasonable call.
"The thing is highly intelligent. It would never leave a wounded man behind for no reason."
"She might have fought back, though. With the Assault Pack boosting her physical capabilities, a Blade Cutter would slice through its body easily enough."
That much was true.
They hadn't blundered into the sewers blind. The Silver Lion Knights knew roughly how tough the monster's hide was, pieced together from the armament level of the comrades who'd died fighting it at the hospital and the station, the traces left on those battlefields, and various other intelligence.
Computer simulations of the collected data had concluded that the creature's carapace could not withstand a Blade Cutter swung by a knight with Assault Pack-enhanced physical capabilities.
"Commander. We came here to capture the thing covertly. If we're late and the defense force finds us, everything goes sideways. There's no more time to hesitate."
That was also true.
The enemy was far more intelligent than they'd anticipated, which was headache enough — and if the defense force got involved on top of it, the situation would become far messier still.
As the man said, they needed to deal with the creature as quickly as possible. And in the process, they would save their comrade too.
"Understood. I'll report to Lord Jacob immediately and—"
The moment he raised his communicator, something came flying from behind them down the corridor.
Thin and elongated, it buried itself squarely in the communicator in Yanek's hand.
A spine needle!
The instant his gaze snapped toward the rear of the corridor, the Auto Plasma Gun mounted on his shoulder fired on its own. Green energy bolts streaked down the passage, lighting it as they flew.
In that brief flash, he caught a glimpse of something serpentine diving beneath the water's surface. The black shadow that had flickered above it for an instant vanished beyond the far end of the corridor.
"Commander!"
"I'm fine."
The cunning beast had waited for the moment his guard would slip while he raised his communicator.
Damn it!
Yanek gingerly sifted through the wreckage of the communicator in his palm.
As long as the chip survived!
Fortunately, the comm chip itself remained intact.
Phew. Good thing it wasn't destroyed.
He slotted the chip into the terminal on his forearm. Immediately, the terminal's file and message transmission functions came online, and Yanek sent Lord Jacob a brief warning message along with the data recorded by his camera.
Now we've left evidence behind, but…
Operating on a covert mission, they'd deliberately used a communicator linked to an independent network. Any data sent through the wrist terminal would pass through the defense fleet's comms grid without fail. Unless the people over there were fools, they would almost certainly start asking questions about why this unit had been running a secret operation.
The thing has far exceeded anything we anticipated. Nothing to be done.
He could only trust that their master, Denver, would somehow smooth it over.
"Then we move."
Having successfully transmitted the intel to Jacob, Yanek set out again at the head of his men.
The warriors of steel surged down the corridor in a mass of armored bulk.
Even the foul wastewater that filled half the corridor could not stop the charge of eighteen knights standing over two meters tall.
Whether it was their fury, or simply bodies empowered by the Assault Packs and reinforced suits, the hard floor of the sewer corridor buckled and cratered with every stride they took.
"Fifteen meters to Catherine."
"All of you — slow down and watch your surroundings."
As Catherine's position drew near, the knights reduced their pace.
Their vigilance now at a fever pitch, the knights swept the area meticulously. Their Auto Plasma Guns roved busily, ready to fire on any target their wearers designated at a moment's notice.
"It doesn't appear to be in this area."
Apart from the current of the water, no movement was detected.
At Yanek's gesture, two of the knights approached Catherine.
She hung with only her upper body above the surface, her head bowed.
She looked for all the world like a corpse, but every knight had been monitoring her vital signs continuously, and they knew better.
She was still alive.
"Hey, Catherine. You all right?"
"……."
One of the knights moved close, gripped her left shoulder, and shook her. A muffled stirring came from her.
"What was that?"
"…!"
Her voice from inside the helmet — she seemed to be trying to shout, but something was suppressing it, choking the words off.
"Ba…ck? Dan…gerous? She's saying it's dangerous?"
The instant the words left his murmuring lips, two red tentacles burst from the water on the far side of her — directly behind the knights.
"Gah?!"
"Ugh!"
The tentacles lashed across the throats of the two knights in the rear rank with crushing force.
No matter how well the reinforced suits protected them, they were still human, and the throat is a vulnerable place. A tentacle as thick as an adult man's thigh, striking the neck dead-on — there was no chance of walking that off. Both knights' heads tore loose from their proper place and twisted at sickening angles.
"CONTACT!"
At Yanek's roar, every knight's gaze snapped rearward in unison. Green energy bolts spat from the Auto Plasma Guns, and one of the tentacles took a hit.
Half of the struck tentacle sheared away. In that instant, the other vanished beneath the water.
"Kill it!"
The knights leveled their bolters at where the tentacles had been.
But the creature's attack was far from over.
While every eye was fixed behind them, the tentacles' true body — hiding beneath Catherine's feet — erupted from the water.
What it had truly been after all along were the two knights who had come close to check on Catherine's condition.
"Wha—?"
The knight let out the word, dazed. When he turned his head, he saw small white blades — and darkness. The yawning black engulfed his entire head.
"You son of a— GHK?!"
Having watched it devour his comrade's head whole in a heartbeat, the knight frantically swung his Blade Claw.
Had something not coiled around his leg, he would have cleaved the monster's skull cleanly.
His stance collapsed violently — but he was a veteran among veterans. Boosted as he was by his Assault Pack, he managed to correct the claw's arc even as his footing fell apart.
Thanks to that, his Blade Claw succeeded in carving into the monster's shoulder. Blood fountained from the wound and sprayed across his helmet.
The monster must have found this blow painful too, for it flung its jaws — still gripping the comrade's head — wide open.
｢GRRRRR!｣
"Got it… ghk?"
Everything up to that point had gone well — but what came next, even the knight could not have predicted.
The blood-soaked helmet began melting away with alarming speed.
"Wh-what?! AAAGH?!"
"It's nearby! Do NOT remove your helmets!"
It was obvious the helmet — and the head inside it — would be dissolved along with the rest if he left it on, so the knight tore it off in a panic.
Yanek, belatedly realizing that the creature's true body had been hiding in front of them rather than behind, shouted at the sight — but his warning came far too late.
The tail of it — the same tail that had tripped the knight's leg — burst from the water and punched through the back of his skull.
"Ghk."
The knight with the hole in his head crumpled.
"Damn it! The main body's on our flank! OPEN FIRE!"
Yanek and the knights hammered the creature with their bolters. Struck several times in the head, the monster scrambled away down the corridor.
"One man stays to guard the wounded! Everyone else, with me!"
Thirteen knights gave chase at full sprint.
The creature was still fast. But the head wound must have been serious, because it couldn't seem to open any distance between itself and the knights.
The gap closed, little by little. Yanek, pouring bolter fire and Auto Plasma rounds into it one after another, ground his teeth.
I misjudged! We should have held position and called for reinforcements!
In the span of mere minutes, four of his men were dead and one wounded. They had wounded the thing in return, but by any accounting the losses on their side were far heavier.
"It's moving into a narrow passage!"
"According to the map, the passage dead-ends ahead."
"Good!"
The one bright spot was that the monster had panicked.
Unaccustomed to injury, it was flailing so badly that it had driven itself into a dead end.
Well, of course. A monster that clever would hardly be used to getting hurt.
Creatures born mighty from the cradle grow expert at trampling others, but never at being trampled themselves.
Every one of the powerful dangerous organisms the Silver Lion Knights had ever faced had been exactly like that. They inflicted terrible losses on the order — and then, undone by some small wound to their own bodies, they were hunted down in the end.
And the trophies taken from those beasts flowed in the veins of the knights themselves.
Now. This is the moment.
They had to subdue it while it couldn't think straight — that was the only way to keep the casualties from climbing higher.
With that resolve, Yanek and his knights plunged into the narrow passage.
Ow ow ow. That really hurts.
I surveyed the wounds riddling my body.
Thanks to my regeneration, the carapace around my head had nearly recovered, but the shoulder wound had yet to fully close. And my left blood-drinking tentacle had been shorn away almost to the halfway mark — it would take considerable time to restore.
There's no question — without the Paragon of the Hunt, this is rough.
My carapace was hard, certainly, but it struggled to stop a Blade Cutter or a plasma strike.
Is the Perfect Organism trait not enough on its own?
Physical Enhancement Type layered under the Perfect Organism effect had made my hide more than twice as tough — and it still fell short in places.
Though to be fair, I did let my guard down on purpose.
Banking my head's carapace against the plasma barrage had been a calculated risk, but taking that Blade Claw hit was genuinely unexpected. It hurt far worse than I'd imagined — enough that I'd cried out without meaning to.
Plenty more enemies to fight after this. I'd better be more careful.
Besides, it was nearly over now.
I lay coiled at the dead end of a passage so narrow my body could barely squeeze inside.
Even without focusing my auxiliary organs, I could hear the enemies pursuing me into the passage.
They're angry.
The water's surface was churning violently — they must be absolutely livid.
Losing your composure mid-battle is dangerous, though.
I settled into position, half-submerged in the water.
This cramped passage was a single road, nothing more.
Enemies over two meters tall could stand, at best, two abreast in it — more likely just one. Which meant that if a powerful area attack landed here, there would be nowhere to take cover at all.
Psionic Enhancement Type — plus the Perfect Organism trait that amplifies a Type's effects.
The Psychic Breath fired from the tentacles of a monster boosted by both of those.
Just how powerful would it be?
Time to find out.
The moment I first gained the Psionic Enhancement Type, I had known it instinctively: the Type had raised the limit on my Psychic Breath, letting me fire it up to twice.
Normally, one use and I'd black out.
Not anymore.
The current of the water strengthened — the distance between us was nearly spent.
They're in deep enough.
I had to time this perfectly, in case they turned tail and fled. Even with two uses, I couldn't afford to squander so precious an ability as Psychic Breath.
"Ten meters to the target."
The enemy's voice carried through the dark. I could make out the outline of the lead knight at the front of the column.
I faced the mouth of the passage and activated the monster's tentacles.
The bundle of purple tentacles sprouting from the back of my skull quivered into motion. Long, thick violet appendages swung forward in unison, training themselves on the space ahead of my head — as if to flaunt the power of dragons.
"There it is, I've got visua— wait! Something's wrong!"
"What is—? Ev-everyone, shields, no—!"
The knight who seemed to be their commander shouted a hasty warning. A decent decision — but would a shield actually stop this?
A colossal volume of psionic power, unlike anything I had ever produced since becoming the Amorph, gathered before my head.
The filthy sludge filling the narrow passage boiled and seethed, unable to endure the energy.
Before, it had felt as though every ounce of my life force and the entirety of my mental strength were being sucked out through my skull. This time, it wasn't like that at all.
Instead, it was hot.
As if a magma flow or a blast furnace were burning before me, my carapace glowed cherry-red.
And then—
A purple sun, a thing only the great dragons of the universe could wield, was loosed.
The water flash-vaporized. The metal walls that formed the sewer crumbled to dust.
The violet light on the knights' deployed shields didn't even qualify as a shadow compared to the pure energy burning through the passage. The instant the violet heat ray touched them, the shields guttered out as if they had never existed at all.
The knights' sturdy armor, their expensive Assault Packs, bodies carrying a dozen engineered genes — the heat ray swallowed them all.
When the Psychic Breath finally faded, nothing remained before me at all.