Disguise (3)
Knights, Defense Fleet, and the monster. Amid the wreckage of the collapsed sewer, a ferocious battle raged between the three forces.
"Vice Team Leader! We can't hold out any longer!"
"We have to fall back—urk!"
With every shot the knights fired from their plasma bolters, another soldier dropped dead. My side was returning fire with the plasma launcher, but it wasn't enough. The launcher required charging time, which made it ill-suited for a chaotic mid-range melee like this one. After all, they had brought it along as a support weapon to fight the monster. Fighting the Order of Knights had never once crossed their minds.
Why are the knights attacking us?
The Crisis Management Vice Team Leader simply could not understand. What could the knights possibly stand to gain by turning on them? The atmosphere had been cordial right up until they entered the sewers, and there had been no real friction during the search operation itself. The vice commander of the knights was a courteous man, and his subordinates were impeccably disciplined.
This isn't a mutiny. The order came from above.
Just moments ago, Vice Commander Vickers had said this: the monster must not be let go. It had to be captured alive.
There's something about that monster we don't know.
Even in the middle of the battlefield—amid his men's screams, with gunfire and plasma energy tearing through the air—the Vice Team Leader's thoughts kept churning onward.
The apartment complex was where the monster first struck. It fought the armed police there and fled. Its next destination was the Port District.
There, the monster had killed the smugglers and escaped. The port police who uncovered it ended up hospitalized. And after that—
The knights paid them a visit. My God. It was evidence destruction!
For the first time, the Vice Team Leader felt his mind truly begin to clear.
That thing is a biological weapon secretly engineered by the Edgerton family!
He didn't know the reason, but the Edgertons had chosen this Special Trade Center as the site for their specimen's combat trials.
Probably because the thing was built for urban warfare.
It had annihilated an armed police squad in the apartment complex—that alone could count as a successful experiment. The ones who appeared next were the smugglers: operatives the Edgerton family had secretly hired to smuggle the creature out of the city.
They were probably planning to sedate the monster and transport it out.
But the operation had failed, and the aftermath was discovered by the detective team investigating the smuggler incident in the Port District. That was when the Edgertons dispatched their knights, under the pretext of protecting an old acquaintance.
Because the witness couldn't be left alive.
A chill ran down the Vice Team Leader's spine. A conspiracy of such massive scale had been unfolding without his knowledge. It was the stuff of novels.
...I have to report this to the Chief Administrator.
But the current situation made that impossible. He had to hold out until communications were restored—only then would he have the chance to report this crucial discovery.
Isn't there some way out of this?
Most of his subordinates were already dead; only a handful remained. A single soldier still manned the launcher, its barrel braced against the ground, pouring everything he had into sustained fire.
The situation was clearly hopeless. And just as he was racking his brain for a way to survive, an entirely unexpected hand reached out to him.
"Vice Team Leader! The monster is only attacking the knights!"
"What?"
"Look over there!"
The Vice Team Leader's gaze followed his subordinate's outstretched finger. The man was right. The monster—long-tailed, many-legged—was carving through the knights.
To the Administrative District it is.
He could not deny that the Edgerton warship was an enticing option. Right now, this place was a gathering ground for elite troops of the higher Capitals in the lead-up to the Board of Directors Meeting. Slipping away before they set their sights on my life was hardly a bad play.
And yet I chose the Administrative District, because on three counts I judged it the more advantageous choice.
First, I need to hunt Cultists to evolve.
Of the conditions required for my evolution into a Young Adult, the Cult portion remained largely unmet. If evolution itself were impossible, then no amount of Genetic Essence would get me past the wall.
There's plenty of Genetic Essence to be had in the Administrative District too.
Whether or not the Edgerton warship carried any Cultists, on the other hand, was unknowable at this point. Given that the knights hadn't deployed any Cultists when they came to capture me, it was reasonable to assume there were none aboard.
And if I boarded the warship, I couldn't bring the kids along.
No. 26 and Adhai. They had only ever benefited me—never once cost me anything. If you asked whether boarding that warship was worth abandoning them, my answer would be no.
Adhai and I have a pact, after all.
In exchange for sparing and protecting her, she had agreed to guide me to the Galagon Nest. If we parted here, I would walk away with nothing.
And finally, the last reason.
T&C knows less about me than the Edgertons do.
In the sewer search, Edgerton and T&C were running a joint operation, but in truth the information gap between the two was considerable. You could tell just by looking at the armament each side had brought underground.
The Edgertons had arrived with weapons more than capable of subduing me. The plasma bolters and Blade Claws could punch through my carapace, and they'd fitted themselves with Assault Packs in anticipation of close-quarters combat.
They even hauled launchers in on top of that.
The launcher was a weapon capable of inflicting severe damage on every part of my body except the head—my single hardest region. The knights had genuinely pulled out all the stops to take me alive.
The Defense Fleet, on the other hand? Not so much.
They had brought launchers too, but only as squad-level support weapons; their other equipment was barely different from what the armed police had worn in the apartment complex battle.
The knights never shared their intelligence.
Presumably to protect their own interests. In any case, thanks to the knights' information lockdown, it was safe to assume the leadership of the Special Trade Center knew very little about me. They certainly regarded me as a threat—but they had no idea just how dangerous I actually was.
And the less my enemies knew, the more options I had. So hiding myself here in the Administrative District worked in my favor.
My mind's made up, then.
All that remained was to act. I lunged at the knights who were attacking the Defense Fleet.
A knight who had just cut down a soldier with his Blade Claw was raising his bolter to aim at another. I charged in from behind and brought him down.
"Wha—?"
Expecting no attack whatsoever, he toppled helplessly. I pinned him down with my combat arms so he couldn't rise, then closed my jaws over his head.
"H-help...!"
The knight thrashed in the tainted water, but with my combat arms locking him firmly in place, his struggling was futile. I crushed his head, helmet and all. The helmet caved in, spraying brains and shards of bone.
Having sucked down everything that spilled from the knight's skull, I abandoned the corpse and threw myself at my next meal.
"Damn it all! Get that thing!"
When I, who had been lurking in the rear, suddenly smashed into the back of a knight's skull up front, Vickers let out a roar of fury. I swung my tail at the knights encircling me. The barbed spikes bristling from its tip sprayed out toward them.
They hastily raised their psychic shields. Shields that had condensed psychic power to an extreme degree, granting them physical resistance—the barriers neutralized my venomous barbs.
The shielded knight's bolter swung toward my head. Just before the weapon could fire, an armor-piercing round came streaking in and punched through his skull.
"Goddamn Defense Fleet!"
Just as Vickers had screamed, the Defense Fleet soldiers were firing their gauss rifles at the knights. Not that they were shooting only at the knights—they were taking potshots at me as well.
"Four men, hold the Defense Fleet! Everyone else, take the monster!"
Can't have that.
The ones who 'killed' me had to be the Defense Fleet, no question. For that, at least two or three of them needed to remain standing.
I wrenched a blood-sucking tentacle free from the right shoulder of my combat arms and lashed it out. The crimson tentacle cracked against one of the four knights' heads. With a sickening sound, the man's neck snapped and he crumpled where he stood.
"You dare!"
Enraged by his comrade's death, a knight screamed and unleashed a torrent of bolter fire at me. I snapped my head up quickly to block the incoming plasma bolts. My head's carapace was the hardest part of my body. The energy rounds collided against it, sending a searing ache rippling through my skull and neck—but it was still bearable.
Two direct hits in a row, though, and I'd be in real danger.
Bearable did not mean without consequence. I pressed myself low into the filthy sludge, down to where it reached the knights' waists, minimizing my target profile. As I scrambled forward on four combat arms and my legs, the knights began to panic.
"Where did it go?"
The water level was low enough that my back broke the surface. But with the wreckage of the collapsed sewer floating everywhere on the water, picking out my shape would be no easy feat.
"There it is!"
One knight, hunting for me with eyes blazing in pursuit of vengeance for his fallen comrade, found me. He leveled his bolter at me.
"You son of a b—!"
"You idiot! Get down!"
Vickers shrieked at him in horror, but it was too late. A plasma beam from the Defense Fleet erased the bolter and the knight's arm in the same instant.
"AAAGH!"
That was the price of ignoring the Defense Fleet to swat one monster. Clutching the stump where his arm had vanished along with his armor, the knight howled in agony.
"Pull that fool to the rear, now!"
I couldn't let an opening like this pass. I fired my venomous barbs at the knight, who had spiraled into panic over his severed arm. The spikes, saturated with neurotoxin, struck precisely at the amputation point.
The screaming knight went limp, and the comrade propping him up froze in bewilderment. I charged them and impaled both men at once on my cranial horn.
"G-ghk! Y-you monster!"
Even with my horn skewering him through the gut, the knight refused to give up. He swung his Blade Claw and sheared away a section of the carapace covering my head.
Good thing that carapace is dull to pain.
If he'd severed the Monster's Tentacles instead, it would have hurt considerably.
Resistance for resistance's sake.
Keeping him impaled on my horn, I wrenched my head violently from side to side. The horn lodged in his belly churned through his organs, and the knight's groan dissolved into a whimper. His arm, raised to smash down on my crown, went slack and dropped.
"Die!"
Another knight targeted my flank. I turned my head in time with the plasma bolt he fired. Naturally, the knight skewered on my horn became a meat shield in my stead. The sound of searing leather was followed by the acrid stench of grilling meat, and it stung my auxiliary organs.
"Watch your friendly fire! Watch your frien—ghk!"
"Vice Commander!"
Vickers, who had been barking orders through gritted teeth, took an armor-piercing round and clutched at his shoulder. At the sight of their wounded commander, the knights' ranks began to waver rapidly.
Since my ambush had begun, the tide of battle had flipped in an instant.
"Now! The Vice Commander is wounded—this is our chance!"
Riding a surge of momentum, the Defense Fleet pressed hard against the knights. The soldiers in front raked the direction of the knights and me with indiscriminate fire, laying down a wall of bullets, while those behind ferried out the wounded and reformed their lines.
The knights, by contrast, had seen their formation completely shattered by my assault. Those who had been engaging the Defense Fleet were mostly incapacitated by my attacks and the fleet's gunfire, and the remaining knights seemed thrown into confusion over whom to strike first. With their commander wounded on top of everything, their deteriorating position only accelerated.
"The operation has failed! All units, retreat!"
At last, the word retreat burst from Vickers's lips as his men carried him.
Should I just let them run?
Even if my meddling had driven the two families' relations into a sharp decline, they would likely maintain their cooperative arrangement for some time thanks to the Board Meeting. If I resumed hunting in the Administrative District, I might well cross paths with them again.
Best not to tempt fate.
It would be wise to eliminate every source of uncertainty I could. I fell upon the retreating knights and cut them down one by one. Nor was I alone in my resolve—the Defense Fleet, it seemed, had decided to annihilate the knights on the spot, and they too hounded the fleeing men's heels.
"Vice Team Leader! What do we do about the monster?"
"Armor-piercing rounds are useless—fire the launcher!"
I was in the middle of slicing through a knight's throat when I heard the Defense Fleet's voice.
About time to play dead, isn't it?
I counted the knights still standing. Six were fleeing, Vickers among them. The Defense Fleet still had dozens left—more than enough to finish the job without me.
Let's end it here.
I couldn't afford to invite suspicion that I'd taken the hit on purpose, so I seized a knight's corpse in my jaws and thrashed it about wildly—like a beast parading its kill.
The Defense Fleet took it as their opening and fired the launcher. A bolt of green light carved across the water's surface, streaking straight for me. My auxiliary organs had already traced exactly how the enemy's attack would come.
I raised my head squarely into the beam's trajectory. The lance that could pierce a warship's outer hull slammed into my cranial carapace.
Ugh!
The force was greater than I'd expected, and I stumbled back several steps without meaning to. My thick carapace absorbed most of the blow, but the shock it failed to contain spread through my body. The carapace on my neck, back, and legs split apart under the impact, blood gushing from within.
...I can still hold on.
In the space of a heartbeat, my whole body was drenched in blood—but I possessed a regeneration trait. So long as the brain in my head remained intact, wounds of this degree would heal in no time.
Activate Feign Death.
Playing at collapsing under the beam, I activated the Feign Death trait. In that instant, all the strength drained out of my body. Beyond my control, my limbs gave way and I toppled into the sewer passage on my own accord. The auxiliary organs beneath my jaw—always my guiding eyes—hung limp, their senses wiped clean entirely.
I could see nothing. I could hear nothing. The only sensation left was a cold so biting it made me shudder.
Death.
It was vivid enough that I caught myself wondering if something had actually gone wrong.
So this is what it feels like. Though somehow... familiar—
The inexplicable sense of déjà vu dissolved along with my scattering consciousness.
And so, I died.