Disguise (2)
"Would you care to explain exactly what it is that's going on here?"
The Crisis Management Vice Team Leader directed the question at Vickers.
On the surface, the words were nothing more than a request for a situation report. The tone, however, was anything but.
It was an unmistakable accusation.
The atmosphere inside the 1st Team's mixed search unit turned glacial in an instant.
"I couldn't say. I'm not entirely sure what you mean."
Vickers parried the question with a face of perfect composure. Behind that composed face, though, his mind was churning.
What in the world is happening here? Don't tell me Yanek actually fired?
The knights present, and in particular the 4th Squad under Yanek, were operating on secret orders from Lord Denver.
Capture the monster. And in the process, if they should encounter the Defense Fleet, eliminate them.
Damn it all. No way to reach them directly — how utterly inconvenient.
At present, Yanek's squad was formally listed under the reserves of the 2nd Squad, under Jacob's command. To issue an order to Yanek, he would have to go through Jacob, Yanek's direct superior.
This tangled chain of command had not been built out of knightly stupidity. It existed so that if a scandal ever came to light, the middle managers could be cut loose without the blade ever reaching their master.
Exactly the kind of situation he found himself in right now, for instance.
No. I still don't know for certain what's actually happening.
Nothing had been confirmed about whether Yanek had attacked. There was no need to bow his head before the facts were in.
Vickers feigned innocence and pressed on.
"And who, precisely, do you mean by 'they'?"
"Who do I mean?"
"Doesn't it strike you as odd? Perhaps they fled from the monster in terror and filed a false report."
At those words, the Vice Team Leader's face twisted.
And with good reason — Vickers was openly disparaging the soldiers of the Defense Fleet to their faces.
"I cannot let that remark pass. My Defense Fleet is not so low-caliber an organization as to deserve such contempt."
"Nor is our knightly order, as I said. We are trained to value our comrades above our own lives. Do you truly believe men like us would open fire on the Defense Fleet?"
At Vickers's words, the Vice Team Leader fell silent.
Vickers seized the momentum, pressing his advantage to put the man on the back foot. If the fleeing soldiers hadn't butted into their exchange, his gambit would have succeeded.
"N-no, sir! Vice Team Leader! The knights attacked us with a plasma launcher!"
As he spoke, the soldier held up the cleanly severed shoulder guard of his powered armor and the sliced-through face of his gauss rifle.
There weren't many tools in existence that could destroy a standard-issue alloy rifle with such surgical precision — and down here in the sewers, fewer still.
The Vice Team Leader gave a scornful snort and fixed Vickers with a hard stare.
"Ah, I see. So the monster carries a launcher around with it, does it?"
"......"
"Launchers, you see, receive firing assistance from a built-in AI. The soldiers' personal data is registered in them, so the weapon fires in a way that minimizes harm to friendlies whenever they're present."
Every word of it was true.
Among the standard-issue weapons owned by the Mega Corp, the plasma launcher ranked near the top in raw destructive power.
Precisely because of that, accidental discharges and enemy captures had historically inflicted enormous damage, and a web of restrictions had been layered onto the weapon to prevent both.
One of those safeguards was the AI-coordinated firing assistance system.
A launcher's AI could be loaded with the personal records of individual soldiers. That data was stored in encrypted form, making it impossible for the launcher to fire on registered allies.
To override it, one had to input a specific code known only to commanders and issue a forced-fire order — or else use a launcher whose registry simply didn't contain the friendlies in question.
A launcher loaded with Defense Fleet personnel data attacking its own side was all but impossible.
In other words, the launcher that had struck the soldiers did not belong to the Defense Fleet. It had been brought in by someone else.
And the only "someone else" down in this underground labyrinth was the Edgerton knightly order.
"Though of course, I'm sure the Vice Commander of the Edgerton family already knows all of this."
"...Ahem."
Cornered, Vickers cleared his throat awkwardly.
The plasma launcher was, after all, a miniaturized adaptation of a warship-mounted cannon. Vickers, a knight of the Edgerton family — famous for its shipbuilding — could not possibly be ignorant of that fact.
Yanek! What in God's name have you done?!
The launchers had been issued to the 4th Squad to smash through the monster's armored hide — not to fire upon the Defense Fleet. The disparity in armament between the two forces was so lopsided that plasma bolters alone would have sufficed for a massacre. He simply could not understand why Yanek had done such a thing.
...Should I cut my losses here?
He wanted to raise Jacob on comms and confirm, but communications in the sewers were barely functional. And even if he could transmit from this spot, it would change nothing — the Vice Team Leader would be watching every word of that call like a hawk.
What do I do?
It was a matter demanding careful assessment, but there was neither the time nor the circumstances for it.
Vickers deliberated — and his deliberation was cut short by a green beam that came slicing out of the darkness.
"Enemy att—!"
The soldier who'd tried to give the warning never finished his sentence. He flash-vaporized into dust. It didn't stop there — the comrades beside him went up in flames as well, swallowed whole by the searing mass of energy.
Every one of the newly dead had been a Defense Fleet soldier.
The moment it became undeniable that the enemy was targeting the soldiers alone, fire kindled in the Vice Team Leader's eyes.
"Vice Commander Vickers!"
"Tch. All units — to arms."
Vickers clicked his tongue and gave the order, and the knights drew their bolters as one.
There was no turning back now.
Before the communications network recovered, every last Defense Fleet soldier in this place would have to die.
—
Good. They're fighting tooth and nail now.
The mood between the two sides had felt dangerously ambiguous, so I'd fired off another launcher shot — and the moment I did, they started tearing into each other like madmen. As if they'd been waiting on my beam to give them permission.
In terms of weaponry, the knights were overwhelmingly superior. In numbers, the soldiers had them hopelessly outnumbered.
The knights slaughtered the soldiers with their bolters; the soldiers hunkered down behind cover and poured out tungsten rounds in reply.
Standard rounds won't cut it, though.
The high-grade powered armor worn by the Edgerton knights was the type that sacrificed weight in exchange for reinforced protection. Only after switching to armor-piercing rounds would they stand a chance at all.
The problem is, the knights have a countermeasure of their own.
"Even-numbered squads, switch all magazines to AP rounds! Odd-numbered squads, suppressive fire!"
"Not a chance. All members — deploy shields."
The moment the Defense Fleet commander barked his order, the knights answered in kind.
A faint violet ripple bloomed from the knights' right gauntlets and solidified into rectangular planes.
Those shields, shaped like purple riot barriers, were the genuine psychic shields that came standard with high-grade powered armor.
A psychic shield bolted onto high-grade powered armor — not bad at all.
Mega Corp players called them "baguettes."
Silly nickname aside, the psychic shield was a formidable piece of protective equipment, offering high resistance to both physical and psychic attacks. You could say it belonged to an entirely different dimension from the cheap knockoffs the armed police had brought to that apartment fight a while back.
Unless the soldiers hauled in dedicated anti-armor munitions, their rifle rounds would never punch through a psychic shield.
"Aaagh!"
"Medic!"
Just as I'd predicted, the shape of the battle barely changed: a small band of knights carving through a much larger force of soldiers.
Aside from the knights faltering for a heartbeat as their shields absorbed the AP fire, the soldiers had no visible path to victory.
As the lopsided bloodletting wore on, the Defense Fleet commander roared out.
"Any launcher crews with a lock — fire!"
"Damn it all! Scatter!"
Launcher firepower would shred those shields like wet paper. The defensive strength of high-grade powered armor? Against beams that reduced warship hulls to powder, it might as well not be worn at all.
Before the knights could disperse, multiple launchers vomited their beams.
Most of them dodged. Some did not. One knight lost half his body to the beam; another lost an arm, or a leg.
"Uwaagh!"
"Pull the wounded to the rear!"
Several knights began carrying their injured comrades back toward my position.
About time I made my entrance, maybe?
I had two objectives: sow discord between the enemy factions, and stage my own death convincingly.
Which means I have to jump in at exactly the right moment.
My enemies were no fools. I had to let them see me struck down by their fire — only then could I deceive not just the people here, but their masters above as well. And for that, the more witnesses to my "death," the better.
I was lying in wait for the timing when a beam meant for the knights came hurtling my way.
This should do nicely.
Bursting from the darkness, I flung a knight's already-dead corpse into the beam's path.
The corpse took the beam head-on and oxidized on the spot. The fact that he had already been dead — his neck snapped by my tentacle — was now a secret known to me alone.
A knight retreating with a wounded comrade over his shoulder saw it and screamed.
"We lost one of our own!"
He'd only witnessed his comrade vaporizing in the beam — it seemed he hadn't seen me at all.
If you didn't see me, someone ought to introduce us.
I charged and slammed into him headfirst. However sturdy his armor, a full-power charge backed by every gram of my strength — crowned with the sharp horns jutting from my skull — was not something he could overcome.
Twin horns punched clean through his flank.
"Gwagh—?!"
The knight let out a short, blood-flecked scream. Holding him skewered, I reared my head up and shook it violently. The wound in his pierced abdomen tore wider, and the horns soaked through with scarlet.
Another knight caught sight of me and shouted.
"There it is!"
I hurled the impaled knight away like a spent skewer and lashed my tail at the shouter. A hail of spines erupted outward, hammering into the knights' powered armor. Some of the spines carried as far as the soldiers, burying themselves in the cover they crouched behind.
"Th-the monster?!"
"Don't panic! It's the target from the sweep! Concentrate all fire on it!"
The soldiers, thrown into confusion at first, recovered their composure quickly under their commander's seasoned hand. Their armor-piercing rounds rained down across my body — but my frame was now doubly reinforced, Physical Enhancement Type layered beneath Perfect Organism.
My carapace chipped and cracked bit by bit, but nothing landed that was truly disabling.
The soldiers redirected their focus onto me. The knights, however, did not.
The knight who appeared to be their commander shouted.
"Those in the rear, keep it pinned! The rest of you — finish off the Defense Fleet!"
"Vice Commander Vickers! Have you lost your mind?!"
"We cannot let them have it. One way or another, we must take the creature alive."
The Defense Fleet commander shouted at the knight commander — the man called Vice Commander Vickers — with sheer disbelief in his voice.
Huh?
That stopped me cold for an instant.
They can't "let them have me"?
It certainly wasn't out of any desire to help me. The knights pumping bolter fire into my hide didn't look remotely friendly.
Think. They know perfectly well I'm not an easy mark. So why are they so desperate to take me alive?
"Die, you— ghk?!"
I twisted aside to evade a Blade Claw swinging at my head and seized the knight with my combat arms — then flung him bodily into the incoming green beam.
The knight managed a strangled syllable before the beam took his entire right upper torso.
What can my body offer someone?
Having finished off another knight, I dove beneath the filthy water and crawled along the bottom. Faintly, through the murk, I could hear the Defense Fleet soldiers shouting, asking where the thing had gone.
That was when I saw a corpse floating in the water.
A man's face, missing half of its upper body. The knight I'd thrown in front of the plasma beam mere moments ago.
His helmet had shattered, and though only half the face remained, it was absurdly handsome.
Natural enough, for a genetically modified human engineered from nothing but superior genes.
Genetically enhanced knights... genes. Wait.
"There it is!"
The knights found me and raked the water with bolter fire. I shot out of the spot in an instant.
Could they be after my genes?
Why had that possibility only occurred to me now? All this time, I'd been reasoning from the in-game lore of the Mega Corp and assumed the Edgerton family had no interest in genetic modification — that gene-craft and Hulk Mutants were the sole domain of the Yujin family.
But this is reality.
There was no enforcing system here — no law decreeing that genes belonged to the Yujins and warships to the Edgertons. Just as I had evolved beyond the game's established parameters, my enemies were adapting and evolving to fit reality too.
The foreshadowing had been there all along. Every single Edgerton knight I'd devoured had been a genetically modified human.
In the game, they were nothing more than randomly generated NPC mercenaries. Occasionally a bolter-wielding non-human or a Cultist made it into the roster, but the base template was always human.
In the game, you'd just reroll until a pretty NPC popped out. This is real life.
The knightly order was composed of humans precisely processed to order by the Edgerton family head — humans spliced with the genes of diverse creatures and remade into ideal instruments of war. Humans, in effect, Hulk-Mutantized.
The Edgerton family head is reaching for the Yujin family's domain.
Through the Edgerton patriarch's eyes, I must look like a succulent slab of genes — a walking bundle of wildly diverse abilities, ripe for the harvest.
"Krahk!"
I fell upon yet another knight and snapped his neck, and there I reached my conclusion.
The knights and the Defense Fleet had descended into these sewers with subtly different goals.
Eliminating me — a threat to the city's public order — was their common aim. Where they diverged was in the specific method of reaching that aim.
The knights' objective was my capture. Failing that, at minimum, an intact corpse.
Only then could they run their research on my body.
And attacking the Defense Fleet — that's probably because they don't want to hand over the remains.
If the T&C family learned that Edgerton coveted me as a premier research specimen, they would inevitably move to negotiate. The two families were cooperating now, true — but they were destined to be rivals again someday, and when the moment came, each would try to bite off whatever piece of the other it could.
No wonder they fought so viciously from the very first exchange. Who knew this was what was going on underneath.
This might actually work in my favor.
My original plan had been to fake my death before the enemy and slip out of these sewers unnoticed. But the situation had shifted — and now I had options.
Do I let the Edgerton family carry me out? Or do I hand myself to T&C?
If I annihilated one of the two factions present, the other would naturally be handed the opportunity to claim my "corpse."
If I go with Edgerton, I'd most likely end up in a laboratory aboard one of their warships.
And if that happened, I could hijack the ship and escape this city entirely.
The only problem is I have no idea how tight the security aboard that warship would be.
A military vessel ran security far stricter than any research vessel. Worse, they were planning to take me alive and in secret — which meant they'd probably carry my corpse to a laboratory on the family head's flagship.
A flagship means even heavier security.
This fight had already been hard enough. A warship would be an order of magnitude harder.
So then — what about T&C?
Judging by how things were unfolding, the Defense Fleet soldiers here didn't seem to know much about me.
Still, once the battle ends and they calm down, they'll piece it together roughly.
That Edgerton wants me because there's something in me that matters enormously. Something so important they'd slaughter their own allies to keep their hands on it.
The soldiers would report up the chain the moment their comms came back online. After that, the people above would take matters into their own hands.
Which means my destination would most likely be the Administrative District.
In the game, the Administrative District held the Monument — that colossal skyscraper. The Trade Center's science laboratories were housed inside it, so they would inevitably study me there.
And the Administrative District is crawling with Cultists.
That was the very reason I'd come to the T&C Special Trade Hub in the first place — the place was dense with species that fit my evolution requirements.
On the other hand, with the Board of Directors Meeting coming, the district will be stuffed with elite troops from every family.
Each path had its strengths and its perils.
What do I do?
My time was nearly up. Hesitate any longer, and the Defense Fleet would be wiped out before I could choose.
Amid the saturation of gunfire and plasma beams, I finally made my decision.