The Monument (4)

The moment I applied the newly acquired fusion trait, a mutation spread through my body.

The change had taken place along my back.

Aside from the two arm-blades and my wings, that area had been nothing but unbroken carapace — hard chitin filling every inch of it. Now, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠new organs were budding there.

Thin plates of bone had sprouted in two rows along my spine, rising from the base of my back all the way up to just short of the bristled tip of my tail.

The plates were rough and irregular in shape, unrefined, and their color was a deep, absolute black.

It was a perfect blackness, so complete that it swallowed even light — not plates of bone at all, but as if I carried shards of polished obsidian studding my spine.

This was originally a passive ability held by Metallic Gremlins, but as the Amorph absorbed it, the trait was reborn in an entirely different form.

With these plates alone, I could trigger malfunctions in every device in the surrounding area.

Let's give it a try, shall we?

I'd used this trait countless times in the game, but this was my first time in reality.

Half-crouched, I focused my senses on my back. Tensing the muscles there the way one exercises the spine, I felt the plates begin to tremble.

The plates ground against one another, producing an eerie sound — one that, at a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠distance, might almost have passed for the droning of cicadas.

It was faint and thin, yet woven into it was a discordant, ominous rhythm fundamentally unlike anything a mere animal could produce.

To an ordinary person forced to listen to it for long, it would be grating enough to sour the stomach.

But the true value of the plates lay not in their unpleasant noise.

Thanks to the Paragon of the Hunt, I was stronger than ever before — and I could feel it.

I could feel the wavelengths pouring off the plates, the ones that broke machines.

If someone capable of reading electrical currents and wavelengths had been standing here, they might have glimpsed what was happening across my back.

As the plates keened and their wavelengths rippled outward, the lights of the Cold Storage began to die, one by one.

"Aaagh!"

"E-everyone, stay calm!"

"I can't see anything!"

The instant the storage plunged into darkness, the researchers screamed.

Next — Hijacking.

Within the range of my hyper-developed auxiliary organs, I detected no movement from the male Cultist.

Determined to finish my work before he arrived, I fixed my senses on the terminal beside the Cold Storage door.

Auxiliary organs and bone plates working in concert, I sifted through the minute electrical signals flowing through the terminal until I found it — the control signal descending from somewhere far above.

The moment my wavelength located its target, it sharpened into a pair of scissors and cut the control signal clean through.

Then the wavelength remolded itself, mimicking the signal it had severed, tuning into a shape nearly identical to it — taking the place of what had been cut away.

And as my wavelength became the new control signal, information on operating the terminal flowed into my auxiliary organs.

Open sesame.

With those words, the door of the Cold Storage slid open.

Hijacking was, true to its name, the power to rob electronic devices of their authority — to hijack them outright.

Ordinarily, this door would only open to a verified ID card. Not anymore.

The door's authority belonged to me now.

With this trait, hijacking an entire starship would be possible too.

Though the time limit is short enough that it'd be hard to pull off in practice.

The Paragon of the Hunt had extended the duration, but under normal circumstances, the window of control granted by Hijacking was three minutes.

Ironically, precisely because that window was so brief, the trait saw far more use in other applications than in stealing ships.

Perfect for infiltration. Perfect for sabotage.

Moving without ever being caught on camera, or facing an enemy in close or medium range and disabling their weapons without laying a hand on them — the possibilities multiplied.

That's enough experimenting with the new trait.

I relaxed the muscles of my back.

The wavelengths ceased, the trait deactivated, and everything around me returned to normal.

The conditions for the Transcendence System are met.

But I had no intention of using it just yet.

Two reasons.

First — I don't know what Unique Trait I'll get.

A Unique Trait produced through the Transcendence System was something entirely new, something that had never existed before.

Being unique, its effects would undoubtedly be powerful — but there was no telling what form it might take, and that was the problem.

And on top of that, I have to account for penalties.

When I obtained the Perfect Organism, both my wings and my Morphing Organ were placed under a prohibition.

The wings were one thing, but the Morphing Organ had been a trait I used aggressively, constantly, during my hunts in the city.

Because of those restrictions, I'd been forced to overhaul my entire strategy for taking this city.

Who's to say what penalty the next Unique Trait will bring?

With bad luck, the ban could fall on something like the Parasitic Colony or my neurotoxin glands — traits I relied on constantly.

So the decision demanded caution.

Hijacking, on the other hand, will help me take the Monument right now.

In this skyscraper crammed to the rafters with cutting-edge technology, there was no need to explain how valuable a counter to electronics could be.

I'd planned to slowly work through this place with parasites... but.

With Hijacking in hand, the range of operations had widened enormously.

No longer needing to fear surveillance systems and cameras was a tremendous advantage in itself.

Good. The Transcendence trait stays on hold until I'm on safer footing.

Decision made, I rose ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to my feet.

I could sense movement in the corridor outside the Cold Storage.

Time to prepare a proper welcome for my guest.

When I turned around, the researchers flinched.

They still had work left to do.

The male Cultist Andre had migrated to Mega Corp alongside his colleague Anna.

Just as Mega Corp was an arena where seven great families clawed at one another's throats, the Cult too had been racked by internal warfare for untold generations.

Andre and every other Cultist working in the Monument had all fled here for the same reason — they could no longer bear to watch their own kin tear each other apart.

"Ugh. It's tedious out there, and it's tedious in here."

But where intelligent beings gathered, conflict was inevitable.

An outsider though he was, Andre knew exactly what was happening in this place right now.

They called it the Board of Directors Meeting or some such grandiose name, but in truth it was nothing more than an ugly contest of greed, each faction scrambling to fill its own pockets.

He'd emigrated as a child and even changed his name — yet lately he found himself wondering whether working in this city was really the right choice at all.

"All this grief, because of a pack of savage monkeys. Tch."

Clicking his tongue, he stepped out of the elevator.

One more corridor, and he would reach the Cold Storage.

As he walked, he waved a hand at the camera mounted in the hallway.

Thinking of his fellow countrywoman Anna always improved his mood a little.

Come to think of it, Jennet could've at least said goodbye before leaving.

Thoughts of his own kind brought to mind the coworker who'd once shared their shifts.

Right before the Board of Directors Meeting, she had abruptly submitted her resignation and vanished.

"Tsk. She was a pretty decent one, too... hm?"

Walking the corridor, Andre was suddenly seized by a strange feeling.

The hallway, paved with bright silver metal panels in neat rows, looked exactly as it always did.

And yet its utter ordinariness struck him as alien.

An indefinable wrongness filled the space from wall to wall.

What is this?

Had he lived out his days on the Cult's homeworld, he would have known at once what this sensation was.

It was a warning.

"Why is it so cold in here?"

Hugging his goosefleshed arms, Andre walked slowly down the corridor.

Reaching the Cold Storage at the corridor's end, he drew out the 3rd Central Monitoring Room's master card.

A short mechanical chirp, the door opened — and a wave of cold poured out, incomparably deeper than anything he'd felt before.

"Whew, that's brutal."

Given how ferociously cold it was, the cooling systems themselves seemed perfectly functional.

Stepping inside the storage, he called for the researchers.

"Hello? Anyone!"

No answer came.

Sensing that something was gravely wrong, he snatched up his communicator.

"This is Andre of the 3rd Central Monitoring Room! Do you copy?"

"Andre, 3rd Central Monitoring Room. Anomalous situation in progress. What the—!"

Nothing but static answered him from the communicator.

Andre turned to head back outside and flag the cameras — and then he heard a sound nearby.

"Who's there?"

"Ugh... uuuuh..."

"Are you a researcher?"

"U-uuuh!"

The sound was the pain-wracked groan of a human male.

Andre moved toward it.

Beneath lighting the blue of glacial ice, corpses hung dangling from metal hooks in the ceiling, and fragments of biological matter lay strewn carelessly across the steel tables.

It was a scene that chilled even Andre's spine, though he was no longer human.

After passing a stainless steel table where some enormous creature lay crouched, he finally spotted the two men.

One lay sprawled and drenched in blood, and beside him another researcher knelt on one knee.

Wearing an expression of utter helplessness, the kneeling man was trying to stanch his fallen colleague's wounds.

"Gah! Are you alright?"

The floor and the man's hands were soaked through with blood.

Swallowing a groan, Andre hastily raised his communicator and tried again.

The device still emitted nothing but that zzzt-ing static — and the kneeling researcher pleaded with him for help.

"Please, you have to help us!"

At the researcher's desperate cry, Andre rushed over and examined the fallen man.

"He's losing too much blood! We have to get him up to the hospital, now!"

As far as Andre could tell, the researcher's condition was critical.

The communicator was completely fried.

His wound's far too large to move him right away.

Trying somehow to stop the bleeding, Andre pressed down hard on the wound.

"I'll keep watch on him. Quickly, go get the others—"

He shouted for the other researcher to run outside and call for medics.

But the man behind him didn't move. The answer that floated back from behind shattered every one of Andre's expectations.

"Uuuh... I-I'm... sorry..."

"I'm sorry?"

Andre began to protest the researcher's absurd apology.

And in that very instant, the enormous creature crouched on the table behind him twitched.

"When did he go down there? What's taking him so long?"

Seated in the monitoring room, Anna picked up her communicator.

Several minutes had passed since her coworker went downstairs, and she meant to call the man who hadn't answered a single check-in.

Only after the signal tone rang for a long while did he pick up.

"What's keeping you? Is something going on down there?"

"Really? Because this communicator of yours is acting up. There's all kinds of static in it. Get it checked when you come up."

"Yeah."

The call ended, and Anna turned back to the camera feeds.

The corridor before the Cold Storage.

She was waiting for her coworker to emerge when the camera feed suddenly distorted, warping badly.

"What the—?"

She gave the monitor a light smack, and the image snapped back to normal.

But something was clearly wrong — the camera feeds began flickering into distortion and repairing themselves, one after another, over and over.

"What is wrong with this thing?"

Irritated, Anna grabbed her communicator to call the maintenance team.

Just as her finger hovered over the call button, the camera feeds blinked hard once — and then stabilized for good.

"Huh?"

The corridor on screen looked exactly as it had moments before.

But Anna had seen it. Plainly.

Just before the feed restored itself, something black had swept past behind the lens.

What was that?

Setting the communicator down, she worked the console.

Before long, the footage from the moment of the error through the recovery printed itself into the air as a row of holograms.

Anna lined the images up and studied them closely.

The bright silver corridors captured by the cameras appeared utterly empty.

Or rather — empty everywhere except one single spot.

"What is that?"

In the corner of one frame, something small was present. It resembled a long, sharp spike.

Those spikes appeared in every single frame — their positions shifting slightly from one to the next, but present in all of them.

Just as Anna leaned her face in close to the display for a better look—

Beep.

Behind her, the door terminal chimed as it read a master card.

Only one person would be coming to the 3rd Central Monitoring Room at this hour.

Andre — the coworker she'd sent down to investigate.

"What kept you?"

Anna turned to toss off the remark — and then stopped dead as a thought struck her.

Wait. He never showed up on the cameras, did he?

The cameras had been running the entire time she was reviewing the footage.

And not one of those feeds had captured Andre making his way here.

Hiss.

With a sound of escaping air, the door opened.