Darwinian Demon (1)
The world spun.
Sky and earth flipped over each other; walls became floors, then ceilings, again and again. I curled around my endlessly falling body and tucked in tight.
Was this how I died?
The power of the bloodstone lodged in my heart had run dry, and no path to survival presented itself. Even if luck somehow let me survive the fall, there was no escape from this cramped space—and no chance of living through the demon that waited inside it.
I forced my thoughts onward, then suddenly spotted a tiny light shining from far away.
Is that… a drone?
A drone, in the middle of collapsing ruins. What on earth was going on?
I never got the chance to think it through. Consciousness slipped away.
“Ugh…”
When I opened my eyes, a faint light filtered down from high above, and below it stretched a silence so absolute it felt oppressive—the landscape of the underground.
“I’m alive…?”
How?
Judging by the height of the hole the light poured through, I had fallen at least five hundred meters straight down. Dropping from the equivalent of a hundred-story building in a body weaker than an ordinary person’s should have been impossible to survive.
What is this, some nonsense about survival odds scaling with cliff height?
A hollow laugh escaped me.
In that same moment I felt the sticky wetness coating my entire body.
“This is…?”
I forced myself upright. Black tentacles filled my vision.
Not the demon’s. The demon’s tentacles were dozens of times thicker and harder, armored in thin carapace. These were far simpler—the limbs of a far more basic life-form.
“Darwin.”
Not long before everything went wrong I had ordered her delivered to the mansion through the unmanned courier system. How had she ended up here?
I puzzled over it for a second, then remembered: the Wittelsbach mansion had collapsed. With the delivery address gone, the drone’s GPS had simply dumped Darwin somewhere in the general area and left.
“You… saved me?”
Darwin lifted a tentacle and nodded in place of a head. At the same instant a clear affirmative intent traveled along my senses straight into my brain.
Telepathy?
The sensation was so alien I started to form a question—but before I could voice it, Darwin pointed at my heart as if she had already read the thought.
“My heart…? You synchronized with me…?”
Exchanging meaning with nothing but thought, without a single spoken word, was completely new. I worked to understand what she was telling me, and soon I grasped what she had done.
“I get the gist.”
She had taken in the power of the bloodstone that had been inside me. The fragment used to activate her had been tiny. Now, though, she was drawing energy from a bloodstone that—while not on Yekaterina’s level—still possessed a genuine unique ability. No wonder she felt so much more lively.
“Still… how do we get out of here…”
I stared up at the endless ceiling and sighed. Climbing a wall over five hundred meters high was effectively impossible. Calling a helicopter was just as hopeless; the dense demonic energy saturating the area would fry any control systems the moment they entered, sending the craft straight down. Even the helicopter Yekaterina had brought earlier had refused to climb more than fifty meters above the ground out of sheer terror of the miasma. This place the demon had created had to be dozens of times thicker with it.
And then there was the other problem: an S-class demon that would take at least three S-class heroes to handle was prowling this confined zone.
I tried calling Laplace on my phone, but there was no signal and no reply. In open city fighting I could lean on her; here, in this sealed pocket, her power was out of reach. The realization stung.
Rumble—!
Far off, the sound of a cliff face collapsing reached me.
What now…?
I ran through the possibilities and arrived at the answer almost at once.
“The demon and Yekaterina.”
Only two beings could have survived a fall from this height.
What do I do?
Coldly assessed, the outcome of that fight was already clear. Yekaterina was a monster beyond S-class, one of the ten strongest people on the planet—yet against a true demon she still came up short. Facing one head-on required the handful of people in the world who held the title of Empress. Someone like the Frost Empress.
Right now she still had reserves and seemed to be holding her own, but time would only tilt the scales against her.
In the end, only one choice remained.
I have to help Yekaterina.
If she died, I would be next. That much was certain.
“Darwin. Can you show me what you can do?”
Darwin shot a tentacle toward a nearby rock. The tip speared a cockroach scuttling beneath it; the insect died instantly.
“Uh… anything else?”
At my words Darwin seemed to ask me to wait. She confirmed the cockroach was dead, then drew the corpse into her own body. Ten seconds later I stared, eyes wide, at the change that overtook her.
“This is…”
Her tentacles were now sheathed in exoskeleton. Over the once single-celled simplicity of her form, chitinous plating had grown; the tips of the tentacles ended in sharp spikes.
How was I even supposed to describe it? The grotesque shape of a life-form I had never seen before defied comparison—there was simply nothing it resembled.
“You absorbed the cockroach’s genes?”
I had built her myself, yet I still couldn’t believe it. When she first finished, her unimpressive appearance had made me lower my expectations. Watching her apply the genes of whatever she consumed directly to her own body, though, finally gave me something solid to rely on.
Crack—!
Yekaterina’s great scythe carved through empty air. The demon dodged and seized her with tentacles erupting from its own body.
“Kh—!”
Yekaterina detonated the blood inside herself. Streams of it burst free, shaped themselves into razor-edged daggers, and sliced the tentacles wrapping her body to pieces.
“Keep your filthy hands off me…!”
Even as she raged at the demon she calmly checked how much blood she had left.
How many more minutes can I last? Ten? If I conserve and don’t counterattack, maybe fifteen?
She was running low. The demon did not bleed, and there were no corpses nearby from which to harvest more.
Should I have taken a little longer and stocked up more blood?
Yekaterina clenched her teeth, but the demon’s posture remained leisurely. Moments earlier it had been on the brink of death; now it was restoring itself with demonic energy siphoned from the monsters around them.
Trapped, she fought on in despair.
Once, an army of thousands formed from blood rose from the earth.
Once, a tidal wave of blood crashed over the demon.
Once, the shape of a reaper wrought from blood lunged for the demon’s throat.
Every attempt failed.
The army of thousands severed most of the tentacles yet never pierced the true body. The blood tide toppled the demon but could not finish it. The reaper cut its throat, yet even with its breath gone the creature kept moving without pause.
When the last of her prepared blood finally ran dry, Yekaterina felt her end approaching.
She was not especially afraid. She had already died hundreds of times. In six hundred sixty-six days she would simply wake somewhere else in the world.
Still, it had been so long since her last rebirth that the idea felt a little awkward.
The last time I died was a hundred years ago, wasn’t it?
She had fallen during the Red-White Civil War, so a bit longer than that.
Leviathan is a shame… but it can’t be helped. I can always rebuild the organization.
Perhaps, in the next life, taking a short rest would not be so bad. She had been running for far too long.
Yekaterina watched the demon close in, determined to at least spit one last insult in its face before she died.
Then the demon began to thrash wildly.
“What…?”
She sharpened her vision and found the creature clinging to the demon’s body. At a glance it looked very much like the demon itself, yet the details were different: bone spikes sprouting from every tentacle, black limbs armored in exoskeleton, rows of razor teeth.
The thing perched atop the demon drove its spiked tentacles deep into the larger body and began secreting a black slime. Wherever the corrosive fluid touched, white smoke rose from the skin.
The demon roared in pain and hurled the creature into the far wall with a tentacle.
Boom—!
Yekaterina fully expected the black life-form to shatter on impact. Instead it merely shook off a mild ache, dusted itself, and stood up as if nothing had happened.
Could it be… because of that shell?
Thanks to the insect-like exoskeleton that had absorbed the damage so efficiently, the creature began tearing free the scraps of flesh caught between its spikes and devouring them. As it finished the last of the meat, its form steadily shifted until it more and more closely resembled the demon itself.