Feigning Death (1)
I feel a little embarrassed to admit this, but I wasn't popular in the game.
To be precise, I had plenty of name recognition — I just wasn't well-liked.
The players of Space Survival called me Morph-fucker.
It got so bad that even on foreign community forums, "Morph-fucker" had become a proper noun of sorts, a nickname that referred to me specifically.
Not that I was entirely without fault, of course.
Hey, the character design was always like this. Don't blame me for it.
The Amorph is a species fundamentally specialized in ambush and predation.
Which meant no user played the game by the book, exactly as the developers intended, more faithfully than I did.
Anyway, the reason I'm dredging up the past is because of that familiar trait now applied to my body.
Apparent Death.
For an Amorph, simply staying alive is a brutal struggle until it grows strong enough.
And even if it manages to evolve safely, unlike other species it has no clan or pack to watch its back — it must always fight alone.
So what trait would an Amorph need most of all?
Of the three pillars of survival, devouring, and evolving, the most important thing for an Amorph was, ironically, the very first one.
Surviving.
Lingering stubbornly on, refusing to die like a cockroach — that was the true core of playing an Amorph.
Only by staying alive could everything else follow: the hunts, the evolution, all of it.
But other players weren't fools either; none of them were going to leave a potential threat alone.
Some players hunted Amorphs exclusively, and most of the rest would try to kill one on sight, by any means necessary.
So how did one survive intact?
They want me dead.
That was where I flipped the whole premise on its head.
By giving them exactly what they wanted.
I used to fake my own death on occasion to slip free of enemy surveillance.
The Apparent Death trait did exactly what its name suggested — it placed the user into a state that was half-dead.
In Space Survival, when a player died, the corpse remained where it fell until respawn. So even with my body left behind, the enemies found nothing strange about it.
Because the system judged me deceased in every way that mattered, I looked unmistakably dead through the eyes of any NPC.
Take Mega Corp's scout mercenaries, for example — they couldn't tell whether I had truly died or was faking it with a trait.
They would simply report to their player that they'd found my corpse.
Well, the system's built that way, so it's not really the NPCs' fault.
Once Apparent Death activated, all of the user's vitals and status readouts displayed false information.
Even players with information-reading abilities couldn't distinguish whether I was truly dead or not.
Apart from the user themselves, the only way to break the state was with equipment, techniques, or traits designed to nullify it.
When enemies without such means looked down at my corpse, their reactions usually split two ways.
Most simply walked away.
Either satisfied at having killed me, or concluding that I might be plotting something and hurrying to put distance between themselves and the body.
The ones who stayed wary and left weren't timid or cowardly by nature. They had their reasons for behaving that way.
In my playing days, I always prepared the battlefield with a variety of surprises before any fight.
Setting up a nest in an unexpected location and bursting out of it to ambush my pursuers, and so on.
After all, one of my nest-related traits could switch my respawn point to the nest itself.
I'd turned the tables and won using tricks like these more times than I could count. The more a player had suffered at my hands, the more cautious they became.
Of course, there was never a shortage of brave souls who tried to corpse-camp me.
Players burning with vengeance, their reason dissolved by rage, who came to torment my remains — those definitely existed.
And when that happened, there was only one thing I could do.
An eye for an eye. A corpse-camp for a corpse-camp.
Anyway, I had plenty of enemies, and among them were players on par with — or ranked higher than — myself.
For someone who had always lived in danger, Apparent Death had been one of my most useful traits.
Getting a good trait like this — what luck.
Having offered my thanks to the pork-flavored knight, I shouldered both him and the plasma launcher and set off.
My destination was the place where I had first lured the knights into battle.
Four knight corpses remained there, and I needed to collect them.
The knight goes to the kids. The rest I'll eat myself.
It would have been nice to rig up a new lure with the signal chips I'd hidden along the way, but the state of the sewers made that difficult.
A considerable portion of the surrounding walls had collapsed, so the chips were likely destroyed too.
Not that the signals would carry properly through the aftermath of a psychic breath anyway.
When I reached the site, I cleared away the rubble and pulled out the corpses.
Protected as they'd been by high-grade powered armor, the bodies were in remarkably good condition.
I tossed the knight I'd captured off to the side and picked up the corpses, chewing through them.
I'd love to eat at a leisurely pace, but there's no time.
I had to hurry — I had no idea when more enemies might arrive here.
Same genetics as the last ones? They all taste like pork.
I liked pork as much as anyone, but the same flavor over and over was starting to wear on me.
One left. Should I just save this one for the kids?
Come to think of it, maybe it made more sense for me to eat the knight I'd captured and bring this corpse to them instead.
As I was deliberating over the corpse, my auxiliary organ sent me a signal.
Someone's coming this way.
I submerged into the water, carrying the knight and the remaining corpse.
Pressing my body flat against the bottom, I managed — just barely — to hide everything except my back.
Good thing there's so much debris around.
Disguised among the collapsed wreckage, I listened as voices drifted over from the distance.
"Honestly, do we really need to go rescue those knights ourselves?"
"You think knights are some kind of miracle workers? They die of hunger without food and get crushed under collapsing buildings, same as anyone."
The newcomers numbered six in total.
Every one of them wore a gas mask and mid-grade powered armor, and carried gauss rifles.
The Defense Fleet.
This was a space city managed by T&C. The ones responsible for the city's security and defense were, naturally, soldiers of the Defense Fleet — not a knightly order.
So the two units really are running a joint operation.
I'd suspected as much ever since they deployed dozens of Employees, but now it was confirmed.
Those soldiers had come here looking for the knights who'd been operating in the area. With the sewers collapsed, they must have come to check whether the men were all right.
Unaware I was right beside them, they passed on by.
A joint operation between two houses.
According to the setting, Mega Corp's seven founding families were on perpetually bad terms with one another.
Because they competed for the pinnacle of power — the CEO's seat.
The only caste entitled to put forward a CEO candidate was Noble Capital, but Prime Capital competed against them all the same.
Prime Capital held voting rights but no right to nominate a candidate, so they forever dreamed of promotion into Noble Capital.
And the only way to achieve that was to drag one of the five houses above them down and climb up in their place.
Naturally, that meant they could do nothing but tear each other apart.
With the Board of Directors coming up, this has to be a partnership of convenience.
Edgerton was Prime Capital. T&C was Noble Capital.
More than likely, Edgerton had struck some kind of deal with T&C in exchange for their vote.
If a serious security crisis broke out in the T&C Special Trade Hub — the very site of the Board meeting — it would hurt both conspirators, so they were deliberately pooling their forces.
Could I put this situation to good use?
The truth was, my own circumstances weren't great.
I'd annihilated one knight squad and devoured dozens of Employees, but the overall battle was still tilted against me.
My existence was already known to them, and their arsenals bristled with weapons that could kill me in a single strike.
Granted, the sewers are infrastructure, so they can't attack recklessly either...
But if T&C judged that leaving me alive did more damage than destroying the sewer system, they'd bring in the Defense Fleet's full weight.
Orbital bombardment is something even the Avatar of the Hunt can't stop.
Fighting warships head-on would take a very special trait. Regrettably, nothing like that could be obtained here.
Let me organize the situation. The conditions.
Laying out the intelligence I'd gathered in the sewers, it came down to this:
Right now, my enemies are two houses — T&C and Edgerton.
I threatened them because I was undermining public order ahead of the big event.
To eliminate the loose cannon that was me as quickly as possible, the two of them were running a joint operation in the sewers.
That alliance is what I have to break.
Under Mega Corp's very structure, conflict between the houses was inevitable.
The slightest friction, and the friendship between House Edgerton and House T&C would wobble badly.
Of course, as long as the two were bound by secret agreement, one lone monster like me wasn't going to drive a deep wedge between them. I didn't expect that much either.
Throwing them into confusion is more than enough.
So how could I shake the bond between the two?
Their comms are unstable, so intelligence isn't flowing properly between them...
And as it happened, I had just the tool for setting the Defense Fleet and the knights at each other's throats.
The launcher. And a knight's corpse.
I activated the launcher with a small manipulator limb.
A small terminal mounted atop the elongated, meter-and-a-half barrel lit up.
Launcher's in working order.
I checked the knight's corpse too — apart from the broken neck, everything else was intact.
Unless someone came in close and examined it carefully, nothing about it would strike them as wrong.
Good. The bait goes here.
Before putting the plan in motion, I broke both of the captured knight's arms and legs.
"Mmph!"
A shallow groan leaked out from inside his helmet, but I paid it little mind.
I could have killed him; there was exactly one reason I didn't.
If I kill him myself, he might not count toward the kids' growth conditions.
Unlike me — a creature of reality that nonetheless followed the laws of the game — No. 26 and Adhai were beings native to this world. The rules probably didn't apply to them the same way, but I couldn't be sure.
After stowing the knight securely beneath the water, I picked up the corpse and the launcher and followed the soldiers.
I'd already gotten word to No. 26 along the way.
About what she was to do after my "death."
No. 26 reacted far more violently to the news of my dying than I'd expected.
She declared that if I were going to let myself die, she might as well die with me.
She's surprisingly sensitive about death.
Maybe it was a sign of her growing mind. I hadn't known she'd hate the idea this much.
I coaxed her instead with the promise of bringing her something delicious to eat.
She seemed less interested in the food than in the assurance that I would absolutely come back.
｢If Big Baby doesn't come back, I'm really going to be mad.｣
With those words, she sent no further thought-waves.
Of course I will.
The whole point was to avoid dying. What good would dying do?
Having laid out the plan for No. 26, I picked up speed and closed the distance to the soldiers.
They haven't gotten far.
Unlike the knights in their high-grade powered armor, these men's marching speed was nothing special.
They still had no idea something was trailing them from behind.
This far should do it, right?
After calculating the distance to them, I propped the knight's corpse upright at just the right spot.
Thanks to the full plate-armor design of the powered suit, staging it to look like it was standing was no trouble at all.
From behind the standing knight, half-submerged, I powered up the launcher.
> Charging 10... 20...
A sewer half-ruined, filth up to the waist, darkness.
And somewhere within it, a mysterious monster that might be lying in wait.
A perfect environment for driving men out of their minds.
Turning the enemies against each other wasn't where I intended to stop.
What matters is action — and results.
The chaos had to yield something for me.
In the middle of a free-for-all, anything can happen.
> Charging 40... 70...
Suppose I appeared while they were blazing away at each other with the launcher?
Suppose, in the middle of their firefight, I took a hit from the launcher and "died"?
The hunt for me ends right there.
I — the very reason for this joint operation in the sewers — would be removed from the board, and all that would remain was an unbridgeable gulf between the knights and the Defense Fleet.
Better still, convincing the enemy beyond doubt that I was dead would expand my range of action enormously.
That takes me back.
It had been the same back when I fought four clans on a jungle planet.
Their combined strength had been boundless, and next to them I was nothing but a feeble loner.
The reason I could win those lopsided battles was that I used everything there was to use.
And that everything had included my own death.
> Charging 90... 100%
The moment the terminal's counter hit one hundred, the cutting-edge weapon capable of destroying even a warship opened fire on the soldiers.
"Gas masks and I can still smell it. You have got to be kidding me."
"Ugh. And something about this place feels off. I've had this weird chill running through me for a while now..."
"Oh for f—, you really have to say that now, in this shit situation?"
"When this op is over, I'm proposing to my fiancée. For real."
"Bullshit. You're the guy who logs into VR-TV and jerks off every dawn, and you're talking about a fiancée? Your ass."
"I'm serious! Not at this Special Trade Hub, but on another planet, there was this—"
Midway through the soldiers' banter, a green light suddenly streaked in from behind them.
A searing, sickly pale green beam vaporized not only the soldier's upper body but the wall of the corridor itself, grinding it all into powder.
"Enemy attack! Take cover, everyone!"
"Cover! Get down!"
At the squad leader's shout, the other soldiers moved with trained agility, ducking behind the collapsed wreckage of the sewer.
"Goddamn it! What the hell was that?"
"S-squad leader! It's a plasma launcher!"
"What? Friendly fire?"
"Unlikely, sir. Launchers are governed by small onboard computers."
Which meant someone over there had fired at them deliberately.
The squad leader poked his head slightly out from cover to check on the enemy.
Even in the darkness, the silver armor stood out unmistakably.
Confronted with the worst-case scenario he'd never wanted, he spat out a curse.
"...Have those motherless knight bastards lost their minds? Why the hell are they shooting at us?"
"Maybe they mistook us for the monster, or else—"
"Hold on."
Cutting off his subordinate, the squad leader shouted out from behind cover at the top of his lungs.
"Hey! This is the Defense Fleet over here! We're on your side!"
His voice echoed through the sewer tunnels.
As if in answer, a green light flashed again in the darkness beyond.
"Son of a bitch!"
The squad leader dropped flat into the sewer filth just in time — the plasma beam skimmed over his back by a hair's breadth.
"Squad leader!"
"Those f—ing bastards!"
He survived, but the subordinate who'd been sharing his cover was not so lucky. The man's body was torn apart along with the debris, dissolved by the searing energy.
"We don't have the firepower to fight knights! I'll lay down covering fire — everyone, fall back!"
"Copy that!"
While the squad leader hammered the enemy position with his gauss rifle, the other soldiers broke from cover and sprinted into the darkness.
"Find any team, I don't care which — tell them the knights here have gone insa—AAGH!"
A scream from behind them.
The soldiers didn't need much imagination to picture what had become of their leader.
"S-Squad leader!"
"Forget the squad leader! Run, you bastards, RUN!"
The highest-ranking survivor took charge and led the rest down the corridor at a dead sprint.
The silent ruin filled with the sound of splashing water and the soldiers' ragged gasping.
With two comrades and their squad leader dead, every one of their senses was stretched razor-taut.
Which was how they noticed it.
That among their own footfalls, something alien had blended in.
"Ack!"
A scream, followed by a huge splash. The man at the rear of the column had gone down.
His comrades spun around, but he had already been dragged under the water in an instant, gone from sight.
All that remained where he'd stood was his gauss rifle, floating ownerless on the surface.
"F—!"
"RUN!"
"Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!"
The fleeing soldiers were barely holding on to their sanity.
Darkness, ambush, the sudden deaths of their comrades, and bodies already run ragged for no reason they could name.
All of it combined to reduce well-trained soldiers to a panicked rabble.
The only thought left in their heads as they ran, deaf and blind to everything else, was survive.
Maybe that was why.
No plasma beam had come flying at them since the squad leader's scream, but not one of them noticed anything strange about it.
They ran and ran, until at last they ran into other members of their own force.
"Who goes there!"
"S-save us! Please!"
"Huh? Why are you— hey. Hey! You're all Team 3, aren't you?"
The team the runaways had stumbled upon was a mixed search squad belonging to Team 1.
Among the gas-masked soldiers in mid-grade powered armor, silver-armored knights were visible here and there.
"HIIK?!"
"Have these guys all gone insane? What the hell is wrong with them all of a sudden?"
The moment the runaways laid eyes on the knights, they screamed and crumpled where they stood. While the terrified men dissolved into hysterics, the Team 1 Defense Fleet soldiers looked on in bewilderment — and then the leader of the search squad, the Crisis Management Vice Team Leader, appeared.
"What's going on here?"
"They're Team 3's scouts, sir. They came rushing in out of nowhere and—"
"V-Vice Team Leader, sir! Please, you have to save us!"
"Hm? Did you find the creature? Calm down and tell me."
The Vice Team Leader steadied them with practiced calm.
Once the fugitives had settled somewhat, the highest-ranking man among them jabbed a finger at the knights and shouted.
"Those men! Those knights attacked us with a plasma launcher!"
"What?"
"Three of our six are dead! All of it — all of it from the knights' attack!"
Hearing this, the Vice Team Leader turned his gaze toward the knights' leader, Vice-Commander Vickers.
Vickers hurriedly composed his face, but the Vice Team Leader did not miss it.
The emotion that had surfaced on Vickers's face and vanished just as quickly. It was closer to embarrassment than surprise.
Like a man whose carefully hidden secret had just been dragged into the light.