Chapter 444
Chapter 444
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Translator: Ace
Chapter: 444
Chapter Title: The Day of the Full Moon (8)
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“Kikiki! Humans are amusing. Their emotions are written all over their faces.”
Garas, pinning Plu down, stuck out his long tongue.
Born late, he'd had all the breeding partners stolen by his siblings. To him, the human before him was the ultimate prey.
Just as Garas said, Plu's eyes were filled with terror. But it wasn't fear of the horrible things to come.
In truth, she had vaguely suspected it.
The constant headaches, the disjointed feeling in her thoughts, however faint.
She had wondered if it might be true—no, she was certain that even her original self would have reached the same conclusion.
Death is a profoundly personal thing. The fear of annihilation is the same for the original as it is for the clone.
That was why Plu could manage a dry smile in the face of death—the satisfaction of having fulfilled her duty as a mage.
“Eat this.”
Garas didn't know the meaning behind a human raising their middle finger.
In that brief moment of confusion, Plu's eyes slowly closed.
‘Shirone, you have to become a great mage.’
The documents Shirone saw must have contained proof that she was a clone.
‘Thank you, for saying that.’
He said he'd come save me.
She was happy that, until the very end, he had acknowledged her not as a cloned lifeform, but as Plu.
A clone's lifespan is only a week.
Still, it was a wonderful life.
Plu's hand fell limply to the floor, and only then did Garas realize the creature beneath him had become an object.
Reproduction was, after all, the drive to preserve the species. He felt no interest in a being that could no longer produce offspring.
However, the emotional plunge from peak excitement to the depths of the abyss was unbearably frustrating.
“Kuaaaaaah!”
Grabbing Plu's neck and throwing her against the wall, Garas reared back and let out a tremendous roar.
A living being! I need a living being!
His sense of smell, which had evolved to an extreme degree solely for matters of reproduction, detected another lifeform in the distance.
“I won't let this one get away!”
Chasing the scent of life, Garas's afterimage stretched down the corridor like a black wind.
* * *
Reisis struggled with all her might.
But as her muscle fibers dissolved strand by strand in the plasm, her limbs moved in ways contrary to her will.
‘No! I have to change it back!’
Shirone, currently trapped in Glass Sphere 1, was Type B, equipped with the Ultima System.
With him also set as the main type, if the Art of Oneness proceeded as is, all organic matter would converge around Shirone.
‘How in the world did she survive?’
Even seeing Plu with her own eyes, she couldn't believe the situation.
Could she get out of the glass sphere? How had things ended up this way? Was the woman before her truly Plu?
She knew she had to think, but she was trapped in a circular swamp, with only a few questions spinning in her mind.
Plu, having adjusted the Physics Machine, slowly turned around. At almost the same moment, the plasm filled to the brim, submerging Reisis.
As Plu approached the glass sphere with a calm gait, *Thwack!* Reisis's palm slapped against the inside.
Reisis pressed her face against the glass. Her eyelids were gone, creating a look of shock, and her eyes still held an unresolved question.
Plu held up the ring finger of her right hand. The spot where the Kubrick should have been was much paler than the rest of her skin.
‘Then... the original? But since when...?’
Plu had removed the Kubrick a week ago, when she had spied on the underground lab while Shirone was away.
After examining the clone isolation chamber, she had intuited Reisis's true intentions for bringing Shirone to the command center.
To mass-produce Shirone's clones, Reisis would use Plu, who shared genes from the same world.
Furthermore, by adding Garas's traits, it would be possible to rapidly grow the clones to adulthood.
Having investigated the Physics Machine, the memory transfer device, and the traits of various organisms, she embarked on a plan.
Transfer the original's memories to the clone trapped in the isolation chamber.
Cutting out only the final memory, handing the drone and Kubrick to the clone, and then entering the isolation chamber herself to await a chance to strike back—it was a physically and psychologically grueling task, but its effect was potent.
The most perfect way to defeat an enemy is to stab them in the back.
It was a tactic that exploited the psychological blind spot of the entire command center, true to the assassin's maxim that even a god can be killed if you find their blind spot.
‘Don't tell me, you were hiding in the isolation chamber?’
Reisis stared at Plu with a dumbfounded expression.
Why had she never once suspected?
The Kubrick she always wore, even during physical exams. The subconscious assumption that she couldn't even communicate without the drone had left no room to consider a new possibility.
“Wipe that stupid look off your face and disappear, you devil.”
Submerged in the liquid, Reisis couldn't hear Plu's words clearly. But a feeling far more powerful than what she'd heard surged within her.
‘How dare you...!’
Reisis ground her teeth with a grating sound. Her teeth, which had become as soft as rubber, instantly crumbled.
“It doesn’t matter! Nothing changes! Everything will become one anyway! I will achieve perfect beauty! I've won!”
Leaving Reisis's muffled cries behind, Plu ran to Glass Sphere 1, where Shirone was, and pounded on the wall.
“Shirone, snap out of it! Shirone!”
By the time she escaped the isolation chamber and arrived here, the Art of Oneness was already well underway.
Her first thought was to cancel it, but that was a decision driven too much by emotion.
If she canceled it and Shirone was already more than halfway dissolved by the plasm, there would be nothing to gain.
It was better to let it proceed, but change the main type to Shirone. That way, even if he became a monster, the project could continue.
Shirone would understand.
That's what it means to be a mage.
“Shirone! Shirone!”
But in her heart, she was desperately praying for Shirone to wake up and do something right now.
The moment Plu's voice traveled through the liquid medium, Shirone's stopped heart twitched and contracted.
Unlike Reisis, who was seventy percent dissolved, Shirone's body, protected by Armand, was not yet damaged.
Armand, integrated with Shirone through the Ultima System, attempted a last resort, driven by its basic instinct for survival.
It delivered a shock so powerful it felt like his heart would explode, and Shirone's body convulsed violently in the fluid.
Another shock came, and as his heart was compressed again, his pupils dilated wide and air escaped from his lips.
“Gasp! Gack!”
In shock from being pulled back from the brink of death, Shirone flailed his arms and legs.
A dull thud echoed from the glass wall, and he could faintly hear Plu's voice.
‘Senior?’
She was alive. Reaching that single conclusion, he quickly regained his composure.
It was a speed of mental recovery that would have been impossible had he not experienced the Ice Prison in the second stage of the survival test.
‘Cold. The coldest state of mind.’
He could finally feel Armand melting into him. This meant he was trapped in the glass sphere, and if things continued, he would be absorbed by Reisis.
‘If I cast Berserk...?’
The moment he thought of breaking the glass sphere to escape, the memory of his near-death experience connected, and he hastily reversed his decision.
Reisis was a Quadra-Mara, something he had never even heard of.
Having already lost one battle, escaping now would only make him prey for an even more powerful Reisis.
Though his process was different, Shirone reached the same conclusion as Plu. He withdrew his Spirit Zone and reinforced Armand instead.
‘Endure. I have to endure!’
He didn't know which consciousness would become dominant when the Art of Oneness was complete, but with Armand equipped with the Ultima System, he had a fighting chance against the Quadra-Mara.
Armand's organic matter regenerated to its limit, protecting Shirone's body from the plasm.
And when he finally endured for a full minute, the plasm began to drain from the bottom of the glass sphere.
“Krrrrgh!”
Like shedding a shell and metamorphosing, Shirone pulled Armand down and emerged above the surface.
He had saved his life, but he couldn't guarantee the outcome.
If Armand lost control to Reisis, what would be created in the central glass tube wouldn't be a magic sword, but the devil itself.
Kuuuuuuuuh!
At the sound of air seeming to burn, Reisis opened her eyes. In her liquid state, everything was clear.
The surging fluidity, the electrical stimuli that sparked life, Ikasa's Valhalla Action, the demonic power of Galtomic the Jinmaishikjong, Ringer's hard armor—everything integrated and flooded into her at once.
Everything in the world is one.
The beautiful and the ugly, did they not all originate from one?
As a blue light descended from afar, dyeing the whole world silver, Reisis smiled happily.
Reflected in the light was the image of herself before she met Satan.
Her pure white skin, a chest slightly more developed than others, firm thighs...
‘Huhu. My feet are still ugly, though.’
Reisis shed clear tears.
It was the most beautiful form in the world, the one she had wanted so desperately, the one she had yearned for.
‘Now... it's enough.’
The blue light flared like a flash, and everything returned to one.
“Cough! Cough!”
With Plu's help, Shirone climbed out of the glass sphere and vomited up all the murky liquid.
The pain was excruciating, as if his stomach had melted.
“Shirone, are you okay?”
“No. It hurts a lot. But Senior, how...?”
Just then, the central glass tube flashed, and the Art of Oneness concluded.
Shirone and Plu stopped talking and watched with tense expressions as the glass tube opened with a clunk.
A brilliantly colored Armand revealed its form.
“Success. It's a success.”
Armand's Ultima System had clearly acted as the main type, integrating all the other traits.
With no time to rejoice, Shirone walked forward. His stomach was damaged, and he needed to activate Geumgang Mujang as quickly as possible.
KWAAAAANG!
Garas of all shapes and sizes crashed through the lab door and poured in. With no more breeding targets left in the underground lab, it was only natural for all of them to flock here.
“Kiik! Kiiiik!”
Hundreds of Garas, consumed by unfulfilled desire, were in a state of peak excitement.
The moment Shirone grabbed Armand, Plu activated Bonghwangjeong.
Even without Phoenix, the power of Bonghwangjeong was immense, but the burning Garas charged forward, defying even death.
“Kikiki! Found you.”
Plu, who was desperately holding back the Garas, turned her gaze toward the door.
All the other Garas stopped their attacks and parted to make way for a single Garas that had just arrived.
Plu's upper body bent back by the Dawkins Algorithm as immense pressure bore down on her.
She saw nothing but a black afterimage flash before her eyes. In terms of speed alone, it surpassed her.
“Kikiki! This is interesting indeed!”
Seeing a human with the exact same form as the one who had died while raising a middle finger, its subsided excitement surged higher than before, activating its cells.
The real-time evolution finally transcended the gaps of the missing link, achieving its final form.
Its bent spine straightened, and its face became more human, closely resembling the bald man.
The moment Plu, sensing the shimmering in the surrounding atmosphere, raised an Air Shield, the air expanded like an explosion, pushing her back.
‘Kgh! Spirit Force...!’
The Spirit Affinity that only a Nor could possess. Though born from the bald man, this Garas's power was far greater.
“It would be best to tear off your arms and legs!”
As Garas transformed into a black afterimage and charged, Plu gritted her teeth and braced for impact.
She could probably evade with the Dawkins Algorithm, but she would have to be prepared for her spine to snap.
“Kuaaaaack!”
At that moment, Garas froze. As if tied by strings, its shoulders completely constricted, it threw its head back and shrieked. Plu hastily looked behind her.
Shirone, having activated Geumgang Mujang, was glaring at the Garas with a terrifying gaze.
“Antithesis?”
It was a form of Geumgang Mujang completely different from anything she had ever known.