Evolution (2)
This is an era where life has no value.
These days, no one bats an eye at the buying and selling of human lives with money. The funny thing is that even now, in this dystopian age, the custom of honoring the dead has somehow survived. Corpses that could simply be tossed out into the void of space are laid to rest with this much care.
The morgue held the two bodies I had created.
If there hadn't been anyone guarding the place, I would have already gone down there and torn into them.
Three outside, one inside.
Perhaps because two people had died, the armament of the guards posted outside was far from ordinary. All three of them wore reinforced suits.
One of them I could handle. Three is too many.
A drawn-out fight would summon their comrades, so engaging them was best avoided altogether.
The one inside is a civilian.
The smell of disinfectant and formaldehyde clinging to him marked him as a doctor. He had earphones in, listening to music.
It was a perfect setup for an ambush, but there was a problem: his face was angled toward the vent.
Earplugs or not, if I dropped down as I was, he'd spot me instantly.
I need to draw his attention away.
Distracting your prey is hunting 101. And I happened to have a shiny new trait I'd been meaning to put to use.
First, I repositioned myself. Out of the doctor's line of sight, I lightly raked my claw along my forearm. From the thin gash, blood the color of tar came welling out.
Droplets slid down my arm and dripped onto the alloy panel below. The panel hissed, belched acrid smoke, and began to melt.
The Acid Blood trait.
One of the traits I had acquired automatically upon evolving into a Juvenile. It acidified my blood, damaging any enemy that came into close contact with me.
Like the reinforced exoskeleton, Acid Blood was easy to dismiss as a purely defensive trait, but its true worth lay elsewhere.
It's excellent for infiltration—or for shredding armor.
The acid was potent enough to rival chemical weapons, capable of melting through alloy structures with ease. Early on, it could serve to strip an enemy's protective gear, or to breach an enemy base or spaceship for a covert entry.
"Hm? *Sniff sniff.* What's that smell?"
The doctor reacted to the toxic fumes rising from the melting ceiling. Pinching his nose, he kept twisting his head around.
"Why is that…?"
His gaze found the hole in the ceiling. The acid was already gnawing its way through the stainless steel cart below it.
The doctor rose from his seat and approached the dissolving cart.
The fruit had ripened just right. It had to be harvested before it rotted, or there'd be trouble.
I pushed open the vent and dropped.
The smell and the earphones—between the two of them, he never registered my movement. I landed on the floor in one lithe motion and slowly rose to my full height.
"Acid solution? Where's it leaking from—"
The acrid stench finally registered as toxic gas, and he quickly raised his collar over his mouth.
While he stared up at the ruined ceiling, I closed the distance, step by careful step.
"Security, there's—*huk!*"
He spun around, and there I was. The breath died in his throat, and his face drained bone-white.
I stood a little over a meter tall. He had the height advantage, but he couldn't feel it. He was too busy being overwhelmed by what he saw.
A chitinous carapace gleaming black as the abyss of space.
Four arms, long and massive enough to touch the ground when outstretched, and thick, powerful legs.
A tail strong enough to punch through alloy.
A jaw that could crunch human bone like so much crackers.
A creature that looked like it had crawled up from the deepest floor of a nightmare stood right before his eyes.
His mouth opened whether he willed it or not. He could feel his lungs filling with air, air pushing up through his vocal cords, desperate to burst free.
He tried to scream. He failed.
Because a tail nearly a meter long had slammed into his open mouth. A razor-sharp barb punched through the cavity, out the back of his skull.
"Grrrrrrk…."
His body shuddered like weeds in the wind. Blood-flecked froth, panicked as a cornered crab, spilled ceaselessly from his mouth. The white coat he wore turned crimson, stained by the evidence of his guttering life.
The trembling of his pupils slowed, then faded. The light drained from eyes brimming with terror.
And so the prey died.
I retracted my tail and gingerly laid the dead doctor down.
Fortunately, the men at the door seemed entirely unaware that a murder had just taken place. Not the slightest change in their movements.
An unplanned hunt, but a successful one.
Honestly, it was a good outcome. My meal count had gone up by one, after all.
Leaving the doctor's body where it lay, I went looking for Kisaragi.
Most of the cold-storage units for the dead stood empty.
Well, how often did people die aboard a mere research vessel—hardly a battleship? Finding her was no trouble at all.
Kisaragi Yujin's body lay on a chilled slab, her severed head and neck still unfused, exactly as they had been left.
I could roughly guess why.
Noble Prime, I suppose. They don't even let anyone touch their corpses.
Chemical treatment could damage a body, so the doctors had simply left her as she was.
I reached out and lifted her severed head. Eyes closed, she looked like someone sleeping soundly.
Seeing her like that stirred something strange in me.
No matter how well-versed I was in Space Survival, my mind still belonged to an ordinary college student in the thick of graduation prep.
And yet I had killed people. Was that all? Even now, as I plotted to eat their corpses, not a shred of guilt stirred in me.
They say every human heart harbors evil.
Had I simply warped to fit my new environment when I became an Amorph? Or had this ruthless, murdering monster been my true self all along?
Worrying about it solves nothing.
Apologizing with a meek "I'm sorry" after killing three people would be laughable. And an apology wouldn't stop them from coming for my hide anyway.
To live, I had to keep killing. That was how an Amorph survived. It was how I would have to adapt, too.
Eat first. Think later.
Having finished my evolution, I was ravenously hungry. Standing before the already dead, agonizing over philosophy was pointless.
I unhinged my supple jaws wide. A mouth stretched anaconda-wide swallowed the human head whole.
My fangs split the skin, and bite force that could crumple steel crushed the skull. The brain—long since offline—burst, gray matter spilling free.
…Delicious.
It was the supreme flavor I'd been expecting. So much so that my past self, agonizing over whether or not to kill people, seemed like a complete fool.
Eating it was like eating lobster: crack the thick, hard skull, and the soft flesh inside slides down your throat. The hair was a bit of a nuisance, but I decided to chalk that up to character.
On the whole, the human head was a fascinating flavor. The quality was a given—but compared to the cats, how to put it…
A taste from a different dimension.
That was probably the best way to put it.
What I mean is, cat was like a chain fast-food joint—a flavor engineered through rigorous experimentation, hitting you with an immediate, addictive punch the second it touched your tongue.
Human was different. It was complex, like a dish an old restaurant's master craftsman had simmered for decades.
*Smack.*
I polished off the head in one go and licked my lips.
The hunger branded into me at the species level urged me on: finish every last corpse.
True to my instincts, I devoured the rest of her as well.
Her body's a whole different experience.
Tearing off a leg and chewing, the ratio of muscle to fat was nothing short of perfect. The cats I'd eaten had been almost nine parts fat to one part muscle, but Kisaragi was portioned just right for eating. It was as if someone had genetically engineered her for it—flawless.
Skin and muscle were springy and chewy, a genuine pleasure to eat. The bones were dense, satisfying to crunch. The organs in her belly were as soft as well-simmered tomatoes.
Hm?
Mid-meal, something hard ground between my teeth. I spat it out onto my small palm—*ptoo*—and found a tiny machine shaped like a button.
Didn't this come from her heart?
A heart-rate monitor or something—who knew. Maybe she'd had a bad heart after all; nothing about her had suggested it.
I thought nothing more of it and crushed the device underfoot.
Nothing else artificial turned up in her body after that. As with the cats, I left not a single drop of blood behind.
Predation Effect activated! Successfully acquired the Genetic Essence of Psionic Organ.
Stole the biological trait Psionic Organ from Human.
Apply Psionic Organ?
Called it.
The Psionic Organ. As predicted, Kisaragi Yujin had possessed the psychic power trait.
Aside from the Cult and a handful of species, any race hoping to wield psychic power needed a psionic organ to do it.
Of all things, a psionic organ?
The Amorph was one of the few species that could use psychic power traits without one.
Without that gift, I'd have died in moments, unable even to use my Super Sense.
And now, of all things, I pull a psionic organ. The card Kisaragi had dealt me was, for all practical purposes, a dud.
…*Smack.* Don't be so negative about it.
No feast is won with the first spoonful. Things had simply gone better than expected so far—by nature, most attempts end in failure.
Either way, I'd need a full complement of traits to secure a Type, so I decided to look on the bright side.
The moment I accepted, a signal pulsed from the back of my skull. Something tore free of the flesh there and pushed its way outward.
Cupping the back of my head with a large hand, I found a small bundle of tentacles. Unlike a human's, the Amorph's psionic organ took the form of feelers.
So this is what the Amorph version looks like. Neat.
Even back when I played the game, I'd never once acquired a psionic organ. I was the type who never bothered collecting useless traits.
You never know, though.
Who can say how the world will turn? Who's to say the psionic organ won't get lucky and fuse with another trait into something useful?
Predator Sense set the precedent, after all.
After fiddling with the tentacles for a while, I turned my attention back to the feast.
Opening the compartment next to Kisaragi's, I found the guard's body—the one who had died protecting her. Killed by me, in the line of duty.
I dragged the corpse out and took a big bite.
Mmmh.
The guard's corpse was an odd one—subtle. Not bad, exactly. Just pleasantly, unremarkably good.
Unlike the cats, bursting with juice at every bite, or Kisaragi, a full course dinner unto himself, this was just… serviceable fare. I couldn't say why the difference was so stark, but I settled for treating it as fuel. Still, all that muscle gave it a satisfying chew—eating it felt like downing grilled intestines, and that made it decent enough.
?
Midway through the guard, sounds drifted in from outside. My blood-slicked auxiliary organ writhed, reading the scene beyond the door.
The guards changed shifts.
There must not have been many reinforced suits stationed aboard the ship—the guards were handing theirs over to the new arrivals. Valuable intel, that: reinforced suits were scarce. But it created a problem.
The doctor will rotate out too, won't he?
About forty minutes had passed since I started on Kisaragi. The relief crew could walk in at any moment.
The doctor inside was dead, despite the soldiers posted outside the door.
In any sane era, they'd be muttering about locked-room murders. But this was the space age—an age when unidentifiable aliens numbered as many as the stars overhead. How would a man of that world read this scene?
They'll suspect a monster.
People becoming conscious of my existence was the last thing I wanted. The moment someone believes they're being hunted, their vigilance sharpens on its own.
I wasn't yet strong enough for open war with my enemies. Until I grew stronger, the prime suspect needed to be some other crew member—not me.
Should I just eat everything and pass it off as a disappearance? No. Too slow.
As I stared at the doctor's corpse, weighing my options, my eye fell on the melted cart. Smoke still curled up from the shapeless lump the Acid Blood had made of it.
Smoke, huh.
And where was I? The morgue—a chamber stocked to the brim with preservatives for treating corpses, alongside every flammable chemical imaginable.
Then a delightful idea came to me.
A most profitable scheme—one that would carry me through my crisis and make life miserable for the crew.