Crunch. Crunch.
Crunch. Crunch.
Blood sprayed. Entrails sprayed. Every time the jaws snapped shut, some unknowable secretion soaked the ground.
A moment ago, it had been human. Human, right up until the syringe went into the body. Then that human wrenched his face into a grotesque bend, seized the person beside him, and the face stretched—and he chewed the man down in a single bite.
"What... is that?"
Someone stumbled backward, rigid with terror. No. Terror was spreading through the place like a plague.
Cloud—or rather, what had been Cloud—rolled its bulging eyes in a wet, restless frenzy.
"Hun...gry..."
The voice broke off in little taps, obscene to hear. It was no sound a person could take in.
As if it could not settle into itself, the thing fidgeted. With every motion, the way a body learns a shape newly made, it warped. Human legs became roots. Human eyes became red husks of bark. Human hands thinned into branches. Human hair thickened into a crown of leaves. The human body became bark, scaled fine and dense.
A few breaths, and the human form was gone. Something unknowable stood where it had been.
Why is that thing there...?
Thought seized up. None of it could be understood. Damn it—this was no time to sort it out. I had to move. That thing must not be fed.
I knew it in my head, and still I could not move. I had locked. Faced with a terror past any word for it, the body itself had taken fright.
Adapt. Hurry.
"Give... me... food...!"
It moved. The back reared up like a tree, and yet the motion felt hunched, bent low. Its arms and fingers lengthened. Longer, and longer, until the shadow they threw was wide enough to cover us all.
Before I knew it, the sky had become a sky of branches. And that sky was slowly coming down.
"Run!!!"
Someone's scream was the signal. Terror blew apart.
"Don't...!!!"
Sensing its prey in flight, the thing brought its arms crashing down. For a moment it had been the sky. In the next, it poured over us as a net.
"Aaaaaagh!!!"
"Hurgh—gack!!!"
"Khak...!!!"
Caught in the net, some retched on nothing. Some screamed. Some could not even manage that, and died.
"Food...!"
Like a fisherman hauling in a catch, it took hold of people and drew the net tight. The fish wept and thrashed, trying to tear free, and one by one, the moment they touched it, they went still.
It ate with the ravenous greed of someone starved for days. Crunch. Crunch. The corners of its eyes lifted, as if it were tasting the highest pleasure there was. It was glad. It ate as though eating were the happiest thing in the world.
But happiness is brief.
When it closed its mouth and still found nothing left to chew, it dropped its gaze. Only the husks that had clothed its meal, and the fluids burst out of them, announced that the meal was done.
"Food..."
Eyes brimming with hunger swept the surroundings. Pupils painted in red life turned on me.
"Food!"
Its body swelled the way a child shoots up. Leaves stretched long, still fixed to their branches; the hands thickened; the trunk lengthened; the roots drove deep into the earth. When the growth was finished, it still looked hungry. It was a whining child.
"Heh! Heh!"
Yanking its roots free, it came this way, drool pattering from its mouth. I was staring at it in a blank daze when something shot past beside me.
"Graaaaah!!!"
A tiger burst out. No—a half-tiger, human and beast mingled, had beaten down its fear and charged. Hwang Seokgu, transformed by his power. His fist, turned tiger, smashed the thing across the face.
"Kkeh...eh...!"
Bark split. The meat beneath showed through. The tiger's fist made it vomit blood.
"Snap out of it! You planning to die where you stand?!"
Hwang Seokgu's roar finally got my body moving. Dan Miryu, beside me, moved with it.
"Graaah!!!"
Hwang Seokgu kept driving his fists into the monster, and with every blow shards of it flew. Even so, his face had gone white.
"Mr. Hwang!"
Through the pain, the thing seized both his hands.
"Bad...!!!"
Whether the pain—the first it had ever known—had curdled into rage, it shrieked and opened its mouth. Red stains and gobbets of flesh stood in where teeth should have been. Hwang Seokgu tried to wrench his hands free, but branches were slowly coiling up his arms.
"Sir!!!"
Dan Miryu charged in with the Stone of Resurrection thrown open. A fist wrapped in green light hammered the thing's body, and the impact boomed through the ground.
"Kii!!! Eh!!! Eh!!!"
It howled in agony, spilling dark crimson as it rolled across the dirt. Dan Miryu hauled the gasping Hwang Seokgu over to me.
"Phantom! Do you know what that monster is?!"
He asked it like a scream. Sweat ran down his face, and there was something pitiful in the sight of him asking.
"...That is a monster born from the side effects of D-1."
D-1. The most vicious thing in the D-series. An object that had stepped over a taboo.
"Is it like what Sword injected?"
I nodded.
"The raw material is the same. D-1, though, is different from the ground up."
Where D-2 borrows, D-1 comes to resemble.
"D-1 calls up the source of the D-series."
The thing rose. Whatever harm Dan Miryu and Hwang Seokgu had done to it, the damage was already gone; not a wound remained. Where faint scraps of human flesh had lingered before, it was now perfectly a tree.
"The source of the D-series is a certain tree. A tree that takes root in a planet and drinks life without stopping until everything on it is destroyed. Its name is the Devil's Tree. That monster is growing to resemble it."
"...That's a tree? You're telling me something like that exists on Earth?!"
"It does. Exactly one, on Earth."
Laughable as it was, next to the source, the thing in front of us was garbage.
"...This is insane. Something like that can be made by human hands?!"
"..."
At my silence, Dan Miryu's face twisted. He chewed on a rage he had no way to spit out.
"...Is there a way to kill it?"
Hwang Seokgu asked it, the color back in his face.
"Left as it is, it will destroy itself. The likes of Cloud can't withstand D-1."
The other way around: overcome that power, and something beyond human would be born.
"...So the body collapses on its own."
"That's right."
But the more that thing ate, the longer it could put the collapse off. And it would grow stronger. It was digesting its meal even now. Given time, it would be stronger still.
"...But we can't just run, can we."
He was right. It ate everything. So long as a thing could replenish it, tree or soil, it ate whatever it met.
"Let that reach the city and there'll be hell to pay."
Even if we ran and lived, it would not stop until it had eaten every living thing on Jeju.
"...How do we kill it?"
Hwang Seokgu's body swelled. His clothes tore, unable to contain the growing frame. Even as a half-tiger he had been huge enough; now he had grown to nearly three meters. The half-beast vanished, and only a giant tiger remained.
Korea's strongest hero. Hwang Seokgu, the tiger. He was here.
"Overwhelming firepower—or an infinite energy even a monster would be hard-pressed to bear."
I looked at Dan Miryu. An infinite energy of life was there.
"There is no other way."
"...So it comes down to me."
The light pouring off Dan Miryu's whole body deepened. Each time it wound around him, he shed the frame of a human, stepping into a realm that must not be touched and closing his hand on a power not meant to be held. In this place rank with death, Life bloomed. A transcendent descended—the one who had laid to rest the evil spirit that reached the limit of what a human could be.
Fierce light blasted from his eyes as he glared at the thing. The thing looked back. Had it felt the infinite energy coming off him?
"Hee! Eh! Eh! Eh!"
It was raving as never before, slapping its hands together, beside itself—almost as if it had fallen in love.
Dan Miryu's brow creased.
"It'll come for me first."
"Yes. It won't have eyes for anything else."
Which was why he had to be protected.
"Mr. Hwang and I will be the bait."
"...All right."
Hwang Seokgu looked back. Heroes of the Temporary Hero Association were still there, the ones who had not yet fled.
"Take Jisu and Byeongnam and get out of here. Now."
"...We wish you fortune in the fight."
They knew they would be no help. They bowed their heads to Hwang Seokgu and ran.
He looked unburdened.
"Feel better?"
"...When I told them to run, they wouldn't. Not if it killed them."
"Your enemies must all have been weak."
"...So it seems."
Hwang Seokgu's tiger eyes lit. The long-split pupils took their prey in whole.
"Means this one's that strong."
His presence changed. The tiger gathered killing intent.
"You're not running?"
"It isn't exactly my field."
Hardly a place for a phantom thief to wedge himself in.
"But what can I do? I'm one of the strongest pieces Korea has."
Hwang Seokgu did not deny it.
"When we get back, let's have a drink."
"I'd rather not be the one pouring at a funeral."
"Heh heh heh. Think I won't be the one pouring?"
A light joke loosened the air. Dan Miryu, listening beside us, smiled as well.
Then the mood went cold again.
The thing had come back to itself. More twisted than before, more grotesque, it clacked its jaws. Nothing occupied its gaze but Dan Miryu.
"Here it comes!"
"Food!!!"
The devil's dregs were coming.