#13. The Sewer Calamity (3)
#13. The Sewer Calamity (3)
A monster born from humans. The number of eyeballs embedded across its body tells you how many people were sacrificed to forge the Chimera Beast.
The real thing was more grotesque and revolting than anything I'd imagined. Red chunks of flesh crudely stitched together with rat hide, and eyeballs studded into that hide. The thing's appearance triggered a visceral wave of disgust and rejection. The Rat Man was both a monster and an Alchemist. The one ironclad taboo their kind held sacred — this monstrous Alchemist had shattered it with a sneer. A horrific abomination beyond the iron bars. I'd already scoped out its Status with Spying, and it was not to be underestimated. If I'd never come down here, that would be one thing. But the moment I'd turned that key and opened the door, the fight was inevitable.
What bothered me wasn't the disgust. It was the thing's strength. More precisely, its skill. Rapid Recovery. A C-rank skill, two full grades above my own E-rank Weak Regeneration. Sure, it looked like a patched-together wreck, but the very fact that it was alive in that state was proof of a C-rank skill's power.
The novel's protagonist might have felt pity or sorrow. Apparently, I'm not that noble. I felt nothing but revulsion as its eyeballs rolled around in their sockets. Each one swiveled in a different direction before locking onto me. Having clearly registered my presence, it hurled itself against the bars — BAM! The iron shuddered violently as if about to give way, but if it would break that easily, the Rat Man wouldn't have caged it in the first place... right?
—BAM—!
Fuck. What was I expecting from sewer-grade bars? I was an idiot to trust the Rat Man. The bastard was an Alchemist. He probably had some method I didn't know about for keeping a chimera docile.
Before the cage gave way entirely — right now, while it was still trapped — was my window. I pulled up my mana fast. After hitting Level 16, my MP had risen to 49, and it seethed inside me.
I scrambled for a way to put it down. A Mana Bolt would punch clean through, but that would just make it easier to heal. Did it have a vital point? Did it even have one?
In the novel, they'd overwhelmed it with numbers. For one thing, the monster hadn't appeared in the sewers at all — it had shown up in Busan, and it wasn't that strong to begin with. It was only during the mop-up after dealing with the Busan calamity that they'd discovered the enemy's true base of operations was down here.
Still. I had to do something. I improvised, gathering my mana into a single blunt mass and slamming it down like a hammer. Crunch! It flattened like a piece of chewed gum — then immediately began swelling back up in real time.
Just as I'd expected. The power of a C-rank skill. The impact sent chunks of its flesh flying and popped eyeballs out to roll across the floor, but even those scraps were already squirming, crawling back toward the main body. As long as the shredded tissue could wriggle its way home, it would recover. I could inflict all the damage I wanted — the speed at which that damage was undone was simply irrational.
Was I still too weak to beat a monster with a C-rank skill? No. That wasn't it. I did have a way to win. It was just... the absolute last resort I didn't want to think about.
The bars were nearly bent out of shape by now. One, maybe two more hits, and they'd collapse.
The moment of choice was closing in.
'—I have to eat it.'
If I ate it, I could win. Which also meant: if I didn't eat it, I couldn't win.
A thought flickered through my mind — what if I just ran?
That was an option too. The trade-off being, once this thing got out of the sewers, innocent people would die.
...But this was fiction, wasn't it? It's all just a novel world. Besides, they're all fated to die anyway.
I clenched my jaw and shook the thought off hard. If I went that far, what little humanity I'd managed to cling to would shatter completely. I had a gut feeling — I'd turn into a real monster. That, at least, I couldn't bring myself to do.
A chimera made from human materials. So was this human flesh? Would eating the chimera be cannibalism? Which was worse — eating human meat, or standing by and letting humans die? I agonized over it, then looked at the buckling iron bars and made up my mind.
[Empty Stomach (E) Lv.6 proficiency at maximum. Empty Stomach (E) Lv.6 → Empty Stomach (E) Lv.7]
KRASH—! The cage finally gave way, and the thing crawled out. I had to fight down my gag reflex. Out in the open, under the bulb's light, I could see it even more clearly. The impact had burst its retinas and lenses into a white slurry smeared across the hide-covered flesh.
——Don't think about it.
Even if it makes me want to throw up, I can't win unless I eat it. I knew that. I just kept repeating it to myself, forcing my mind to focus on nothing but the fight. The thing's Agility was barely around 80. Incomparable to a normal human, sure, but to me, it was so slow I could yawn. The only things it had going for it were raw power and regeneration. Just those two.
I lunged and opened my jaws wide. A bit tough, but chewable. I ripped into the squelching flesh and hide and ground it down. An eyeball rolled — crunched between my teeth and ran like a raw egg. Again and again I lunged, and it couldn't catch me — or so I thought, until long tentacles shot out from its body. Only three or four of them, but they sliced through the air with a menacing whump-whump.
They say the only human-wielded weapon that can break the sound barrier is a whip.
The principle is that the whip tapers from handle to tip. The momentum generated by the swing transfers to the narrow end, and because the tip's mass is far less than the handle's, the velocity doubles. These tentacles weren't about to hit supersonic speeds, but they weren't exactly easy to dodge either. The thing's Strength was 265. A number I couldn't dismiss. If I took a hit from that kind of force at that kind of speed, all my Damage Reduction and Hardening combined wouldn't save me.
Which meant I had to dodge everything. Fortunately, there weren't that many of them. No matter how fast they were, if I could read their trajectories in advance with Perception and Intuition, I could avoid them.
Just move a beat ahead. I slipped past two incoming tentacles, then leaped to evade the one thrusting at me from the front.
In midair, I engaged Elasticity and added a Charge correction on top of it. The weakness of a long-reach weapon is that once you get inside its range, it's hard to use properly. The tentacles were now useless— no, wait!
The thing didn't stop. I barely dodged. Its tentacles kept going without pause and drove deep into its own body. Thanks to that, I got a firsthand look at just how fearsome the power I'd only imagined really was.
——I'd assumed that if it went too deep, it would stop. Bad assumption. If I'd caught on to that even a moment later, I'd be the one going down.
It didn't hesitate. This wasn't a living creature governed by fear and terror. It was just a chimera that had lost its reason. I doubted it even felt pain, and even if it did, it wouldn't fear that pain. Besides, the thing had a C-rank skill called Rapid Recovery. Even if attacking itself carried risk, eliminating me was the rational move.
Crunch—! I gnashed down on a mouthful of flesh and activated Spying.
[Weight 166kg]
Still a long way to go. How much more did I have to devour before this thing stopped moving? Half its body mass? Maybe more. If it weren't for Evil Devouring's Contact Intake, I wouldn't have been able to rip off 3kg in a single bite anyway.
It was regenerating, yes, but the tissue was barely oozing back into shape — just enough to hold a form. To put it simply, the thing was like modeling clay. You can reshape clay to hide the part that was ripped away, but the missing clay doesn't just reappear. If it had mana, that might be a different story...
This was not Regeneration. The thing could not heal.
The difference between restoring a wound and healing it. At a glance, Regeneration looks like the superior version of Recovery, but Recovery has the advantage of being usable on others.
In other words, the outcome of this fight depended entirely on whether I could devour it before it killed me.
***
"......"
This was definitely the entrance. They'd combed through every building with a basement level, but no matter where they looked, they couldn't figure out how to get any deeper than this...
"......"
The Vice Team Leader looked up at the sky. Not a damn cloud in sight — ideal weather, really. How nice would it be to have an outdoor picnic on a day like this? And then he lowered his head, and there it was. Reality. The truth.
"Why the fuck are these crazy bastards in the sewer?!"
After hesitating for a long while, the Vice Team Leader opened Pandora's Box with trembling hands.
"Ah, shit! BLEEAAARGH!"
...He regretted it within one second.
***
[Weight 146kg]
146kg. Down over 20kg from its initial 169kg. I could tell just by looking that it had shrunk. Nearly half the eyeballs studding its body had burst, but those would recover anyway.
I was gradually getting used to its movements. Dodging the whip-like tentacles wasn't so hard anymore. The real problem was that the number of tentacles kept multiplying.
Whether it was enraged beyond reason or something else, the tentacle count had swelled to a full ten. I could no longer guarantee a dodge. No — it was worse than that. I had no confidence.
[Perception (E) Lv.3 proficiency at maximum. Perception (E) Lv.3 → Perception (E) Lv.4]
The moment Perception leveled up, a good idea struck me.
'...Now that I think about it, do I really need to fight this hard?'
I looked back. The moment I withdrew a step, the thing advanced to close the gap. It would attack with tentacles from a set distance, or if I got too close, it would just body-check me. Simple, brutish, with no trace of intelligence in its fighting style. Maybe it could be fooled. If it worked, great; if not, I'd lost nothing.
With that in mind, I spun around and bolted. The thing must have taken that for an opening, because its tentacles hammered the spot where I'd just been standing. Stone floor shattered and sent chips flying as the creature squirmed after me.
Naturally, this was my pace, and faster than any human sprint. Unless you're Usain Bolt, you'd probably be better off giving up on running. In any case, I used that sprint as a run-up and leaped.
"......?"
Something I hadn't expected at all happened then. I cleared the 10-meter channel far too easily.
"......?"
No, did that even make sense? I'd done a run-up, sure, but the ceiling was too low for a proper launch. Yet I'd sailed over what had to be a 10-meter-wide channel effortlessly. I hadn't even used Elasticity. Had I been lowballing my own limits all along? If this was the case, I really hadn't needed to dunk myself in the water earlier...
No. I would've gone in for the Experience Points regardless.
Just then, the thing hurled its own body into the channel, and I inwardly cheered.
That massive bulk plunged under, then bobbed back up to the surface. It could float, and it was moving toward me, but painfully slowly. I grinned — everything was going exactly as I'd hoped. Unlike me, who could move freely through water thanks to the corrections from Swimming and Diving, the thing could barely manage not to sink. Splash, splash — it flailed with its tentacles, paddling furiously to reach the other side. But I dove deep and bit into it. Its tentacles lashed out like whips, but under the water's resistance, they couldn't bring even half their force to bear.
At this level, I could endure with Hardening. It must have gotten angry watching me take almost zero damage, because it tried to ram me with its body, but the water made it far from threatening.
[110kg]
Its limited intelligence prioritized useless attacks over escaping the channel. Eventually, once it realized the whip-strikes weren't doing anything, it thrashed underwater to try and peel me off. A real Warg would've had its ribs crushed and suffocated, but to an amorphous creature like me, that kind of pressure meant nothing. I slipped right out of its grip.
[Satiety at maximum. Satiety converted to Experience Points via Evil Devouring (D) Lv.1.]
The flesh I'd belatedly digested was converted into EXP. It caught me several more times, and I wriggled free every time. With no need to even spend mana, the thing steadily became my meal. It made one last desperate struggle, but I chewed through even its tentacles, steadily whittling its weight down.
[91kg]
At some point, the thing had shrunk to nearly half its original size, and its eyes were now shot through with red. Filth fouled them, and with no eyelids, the eyes couldn't protect themselves. The bitterness of the victims used as test subjects... I doubt it was capable of feeling any such thing, yet each and every eyeball seemed to radiate agony.
"—————!"
A final act of defiance? The thing spewed out a long tentacle. Instead of ten, it produced a single, extended one. The tentacle thrashed wildly through the channel, but I wasn't about to fall for a telegraph punch. The moment I sneered, the thing gave up on catching me and switched targets.
Its tentacle shot upward at last, reaching for ground level. It must have calculated that if it shrank its own body mass, it could haul itself out. And that calculation was correct. If we weren't in the water, I don't know how this fight would have played out. But I had no intention of letting it leave quietly.
I wasn't letting it climb out. I bit down and dragged it back, but the force pulling upward was stronger than I'd expected. Thud, thud — we reeled back and forth, slamming into the channel walls.
Even underwater, it fixed its bloodshot eyes on me, trying to shake me off no matter what. One trying to climb out, the other trying to drag it down. The tug-of-war continued, and I lost. In Agility, with skill corrections, I could hold my own against faster opponents — but Strength was a different story.
Still, it was enough by then. Thanks to the Contact Intake I'd had since my Devouring days, our struggle had let me absorb a substantial amount of the thing.
[Weight 64kg]
A ridiculously shrunken mass compared to the start. I'd figured it would die once I'd eaten about half, but either Rapid Recovery was more impressive than I'd thought, or the thing was still clinging to life.
Even at this stage, it hadn't let out a single scream. Then again, the Rat Man had built it in secret down here in the sewers — he'd probably made it incapable of producing sound in the first place, to avoid detection.
There were still places to search after I finished it off. What remained was only 64kg. I roused the mana I'd been conserving all this time.
Reinforce the body with mana. The Rat Man had already shown me how. Despite its diminished mass, the thing's tentacles had multiplied to fourteen, and they whipped through the air with a vicious hiss.
My paws left the ground and I surged forward. A Charge correction for acceleration. I dodged four tentacles — ten remained. Immediately, Intuition and Perception set off alarm bells. The two skills showed me the path to take, and I didn't hesitate. Five tentacles — I used Elasticity to evade. Three tentacles lay in wait. I glanced the other way: two tentacles. A pincer maneuver meant to trap me from both sides. But before the tentacles could even register and respond, my mana-reinforced body had already ripped through the encirclement. I tore a bite free in one move and rolled. Three tentacles that had arrived too late struck the thing's own body, and even if it couldn't feel pain, the impact made it reel.
[57kg]
Two tentacles bitten off. The remaining twelve squirmed. Just as Rapid Recovery restored it, Weak Regeneration restored me too. I readied the next strike. When I pulled my mana up again, a powerful wave of vertigo hit me. That moment's opening was all it took for the tentacles to close in — then stop right in front of my face.
'......!'
I let out the breath I'd been holding. A hard fight? No, I wouldn't call it that. It had been a tough opponent, but I hadn't let a single attack land. But mentally, it was exhausting. On top of that, the headache and dizziness I felt in real time kept whispering seductively: Mana. Don't you want to use more? It was absurd, but I genuinely felt an urge to spend my mana.
I clenched my teeth and crushed that desire down somehow. I was not about to get drunk on omnipotence and black out like an idiot in enemy territory. Brushing off the seductive whisper, I drove my head into the dead chimera's remaining flesh.
[Chimera Beast consumed. Experience Points and Satiety increase.]
The complete death of the Chimera Beast.
——That meant, right here, right now, I had successfully overcome the Sewer Calamity. For the first time in my life, I'd conquered a calamity, and despite the headache and dizziness, I let out a silent cheer.