Prophecy (5)
Prophecy (5) — Lotte Mart, Basement Level 1, Lotte Department Store, Incheon
Just as I thought — this son of a bitch was a mutant, after all.
I hurled the blood-dripping sandbag aside and took to the air.
Scritch-scratch—
A swarm of white mutants, like a colony of ants, scuttled across the ceiling hunting for the source of my sound.
If the Jangsan Zombie's little trick had caught me off guard, I probably would have let that insane aerial assault land more than once.
Sound. These bastards are even more sensitive to sound than I realized.
So I'd turn that sound against them.
Dodging the white afterimages brushing past my back, I flew on toward the toy section. The flashlight beam swept over a thick layer of dust coating the children's toys.
Scritch-scratch—
The sound of ceiling tiles being gouged had arrived directly overhead. Matching that sound beat for beat, the toy swords began orbiting around me.
At a flick of my hand, one of the toy swords drove itself into the floor.
"Pew-pew! Hero of Justice!"
Along with the childish electronic jingle, the blade lit up in garish rainbow colors.
BOOM—
That bright little jingle was instantly devoured by a massive impact.
The white mutants came diving down, pulverizing the toy sword to dust. My evasion routine had gone on long enough that the bastards' patience seemed to snap — several of them ended up clustered together in a single crater.
"Kieeeeeeek!"
Was it simple rage? Or a warning to their brethren that they'd been baited into a trap?
Didn't matter which. My telekinesis came down on the white mutants like a hammer.
Thud— Thud— Thud—
As I kept pounding them into the ground, every toy nearby capable of making noise floated up into the air, weightless.
Viiiiiiing—
My mana accelerated faster, amplifying the Mimic Holy Body. With telekinesis pushed to its absolute limit, I launched every toy I could control downward as if nailing them into the floor.
Ratatatatat—
The toys embedding themselves in the ground all began spitting out their ridiculous sound effects at once.
"Pew-pew! Hero of Justice!"
Following those sound effects as they scattered in every direction, thunderous booms began rocking the floor one after another.
KA-BOOOM—
Every mutant on the ceiling bombed the Lotte Mart floor. Into the craters packed tightly across it, my telekinetic hammer came down again.
BOOM—
Swirling clouds of dust boiled up as the floor itself let out a scream. Finally, unable to endure the relentless impacts, the ground gave way and collapsed.
Through the gaping hole, the corpses were sucked down as if by a vacuum, crashing into the cars parked on the second basement level.
BEEP— BEEP—
The shock-triggered car alarms blared, and a message materialized before my eyes.
You have slain a mutant.
+500 Faith Points acquired.
You have gained knowledge of the mutant!
Mutant: Sound Stalker
The Sound Stalker possesses abnormally developed hearing. They primarily dwell on the ceilings of dark buildings, dropping down to ambush the unwary from above.
Leaving the endless stream of mutant-kill notifications scrolling past behind me, I stared at the enormous hole that had been punched through the floor. The cracks spiderwebbing out from it were slowly widening their reach.
This whole place is coming down soon.
"Fuck — no! My food!"
Before it collapsed, I had to grab everything I needed. I swept up the canned goods I'd been recklessly hurling around earlier, then vacuumed every bottle from the wine corner into my inventory as well. In the middle of blindly stuffing my inventory with anything that looked like it had a long shelf life — without even checking — I suddenly remembered why I'd come here in the first place.
"The White Calamity."
Certainly, the Sound Stalker was far closer to a true calamity than that rabbit bastard's cum-filled doll. A population as infuriatingly numerous as bats, destructive enough to half-shatter a floor with their dive-bombing assaults. And on top of that, their collaboration with the Jangsan Zombies was nothing short of astonishing.
Still, in the end, I won.
Yet I couldn't shake this strangely unsettled feeling. I could write off one ambush as carelessness, but never a second. The Sound Stalker swarm was certainly dangerous — but they were nowhere near a real threat to the Sanctuary.
"Fuck. You're telling me there's something more?"
I stopped blindly filling my inventory and strained my ears once more.
Scritch-scratch—
The sound of Sound Stalkers dragging themselves across the ceiling. Having lost most of their forces, they were retreating.
Wait — retreating?
Gauging the third of my mana that remained, I chased after the white afterimages streaking out of the area at high speed. Apparently noticing my pursuit, the creature sped up — so I lightly crushed its hind legs with telekinesis.
"Kieeeeeeek!"
Even so, the thing fled with a pained shriek, offering no counterattack whatsoever, and darted toward the food court.
Lotte Cinema.
Right beside the food court, I spotted the Sound Stalkers that had fled from me retreating into the theater.
"Stop! You sons of bitches!"
Even though I deliberately let my voice carry, they sprinted desperately toward the theater's interior.
"Kieeeek! Kieeeeeeek!"
I trailed the one whose legs I'd crippled at a leisurely pace, staying alert to my surroundings. The creatures kept burrowing deeper and deeper, until finally they were sucked into a single space.
Screening Room 2?
Every Sound Stalker had piled into the second screening room. And strangely, the longer I watched that space, the worse my gut felt.
"They're in there."
My intuition was screaming it. That the place the Saintess's prophecy had pointed to was right there.
I had neither the time nor the mana to waste another second. The moment I entered Screening Room 2, something soft and squishy squelched underfoot. I hurriedly lifted myself with telekinesis and swept the flashlight across the floor.
A huge mass of flesh was pulsing, throbbing like a living heart.
"Kieeeeeeek!"
As if my very presence were an affront, the Sound Stalkers — the same ones who'd run tail-first from me moments ago — growled at me now. They plastered themselves flat against the floor, straining with everything they had to threaten me.
But a Sound Stalker stripped of its high-ground position and element of surprise was a pitifully easy opponent for the man I'd become.
Crunch-splurch—
"...Fuck."
The quiet curse slipped straight out of my mouth. The flesh I'd stepped on stretched out like veins, long and branching, infiltrating the entire screening room. And packed densely across the front of that crimson chamber were countless white insect eggs.
No —
"Sound Stalker eggs."
Fuck, there were so goddamn many of them. Through the translucent shells, I could see baby Sound Stalkers swimming this way and that.
If all of these bastards had hatched and been holding the Lotte Mart when I arrived, the outcome of that earlier fight could have been very different. And what if they'd kept multiplying like this on their own, then spread outward from the Lotte Mart, slowly expanding their range?
Of course, I had confidence I'd win no matter what — but the lengthened search time that would cost could deal a meaningful blow to the Sanctuary and to my religion.
"Fuck, did they just fuck each other on their own? Or are they hermaphrodites like some kind of earthworms?"
If there were eggs, there had to be a female who laid them. Killing that thing was the top priority.
Crunch— Crunch—
Smashing every egg in sight, I hunted for the queen that had spawned them.
"Come out nice and easy, you bitch! I already killed every one of your males!"
In the middle of my long egg-smashing spree, I caught a clear shape between the shattered shells.
"Found you, you bastard!"
Like a fisherman hooking the catch of a lifetime, I hauled it upward in an instant — and my mouth fell open, unable to close.
"...Fuck. It's a person."
No, to be precise, it was something that had been a person. A body shriveled as if mummified, connected to the eggs by thin strands of blood vessels. Each time those vessels pulsed, the already skeletal body withered a little more.
A human being, drained of nutrients to feed the eggs. The increasingly shrunken corpse was so desiccated that only its unnaturally long head distinguished any outline at all.
A woman.
Suddenly, I remembered the words the Jangsan Zombie had kept repeating. The absurd cries for help that the zombies had supposedly dragged here.
Come to think of it, the Jangsan Zombie was a mutant that learned and repeated things people had said. Which meant someone had actually kept saying those words — and that someone had claimed zombies had dragged her here.
Minds with nothing but hunger in them, food sitting right in front of their faces — and they carried out some other objective instead?
"...What genre of apocalypse is this, exactly?"
Crack-crunch—
I stripped away every blood vessel and crushed the eggs all over again as I thought. If things had gotten this bad, the zombies were destined to remain strictly supporting characters in my story. The signal flare of apocalypse had certainly been fired by the zombies, but the battle for dominance afterward would be a war between awakened ones and awakened ones.
"...The White Calamity."
It felt as though the eggs — grotesquely clinging to the walls no matter how many I killed, how many I smashed — were speaking to me.
Telling me that this world was going to collapse, thoroughly and completely, as a zombie apocalypse.