Escape from the White Shriek Forest
The White Shriek Forest possessed a peculiar geography.
Along its outer reaches, colossal trees formed a dense jungle, yet the further one pressed toward the heart of the woods, the thinner the trees became, until at last the land opened into open plains. At the very center lay fertile grasslands and a mild climate.
Judging by that alone, it seemed a place perfectly suited for human habitation—
Thud! Thud! Crash!
"Kraaaah——!"
—until one laid eyes on the beast. Standing a full four to five meters tall, armed with razor claws and fangs, it was a monster in every sense of the word. Its hide was so tough that most weapons short of laser fire simply bounced off. Its molars could tear through the armor plating of a military mecha. And for all its bulk, it could still hit seventy to eighty kilometers an hour.
The scars crowding the muzzle of the dinosaur-like creature made one thing plain: this was a being that had survived countless trials and accumulated a wealth of hard-won experience.
"Udadadada!!"
A powerfully built young man with blue skin hoisted a deer three or four times his own size onto his shoulders and sprinted toward the treeline.
"He's coming!"
"Start the engines!"
"Hey! Over here!"
Near a cluster of bizarre flowers that looked for all the world like giant cotton candy, hunters who had been lying in wait scrambled into motion, preparing their escape. From within those cotton-candy blossoms, one heavy truck and two medium trucks burst into the open.
"Hyaah!"
Thud!
With the practiced coordination of a team that had done this many times before, the blue-skinned youth heaved the carcass onto the heavy truck that had pulled up beside him and vaulted aboard.
"Go!"
"Decoy team—now!"
At the leader's command, someone hit a detonator switch.
Bang! Rumble—!
"Kyaaaak!"
A small explosion collapsed the ground beneath the dinosaur-beast. Its forequarters plunged into the pit, and it thrashed wildly, struggling to free itself. The hunters had reinforced the trap to bear the creature's crushing weight, then blown out the support pillars to drop it into the hole.
Unlike most hunters, this team worked the forest's interior—and they carried remote-trigger devices that still functioned even within the magnetic field. That was how they pulled it off.
"Run! Run!"
Crash! Crunch! Crack!
The sound of the beast clawing free of the trap and giving chase reached them from behind. But its massive frame kept slamming into trees, robbing it of speed, and the hunters slipped away.
Kraaaaah—!
They left the creature's furious roar echoing in the distance. Still, every one of them knew the real trial was only beginning, and none of them let their guard down.
"Nornil Wolf pack at three o'clock!"
At a hunter's shout, every gaze snapped to the right. A pack of six-legged wolves—black-furred, with an extra pair of legs sprouting from their flanks—was closing in, eyes locked on the hunters.
"Jantag Render at seven!"
At the same moment, from the seven o'clock position, a beast that looked like a giant eagle with a reptilian head threaded acrobatically between the trees on broad wings.
Getting into the forest and taking a kill was the easy part. The hard part was getting back out with the prey still in hand. They had nearly four hundred kilometers to cover without rest—and most of the hunters who made it this deep either died pushing too hard or simply gave up.
The escape that decided life or death had begun.
"We made it!!"
"Waaaaah!"
Hunters whose protective suits hung in tatters, faces mapped with cuts and scrapes, howled their triumph. They had broken free of the White Shriek Forest and reached the safety zone at last.
"Kunlo, you bastard! Thanks for saving my ass back there!"
A bird-headed hunter with a mane of peacock-brilliant plumage dragged the blue-skinned youth into a rough shoulder-clasp, pouring out his gratitude. In the middle of fending off scavengers drawn by the reek of corpses, a Nornil Wolf had lunged from a blind spot straight at him. Only Kunlo's shot had kept the thing from ripping his throat out.
"Does that settle the debt, then?"
"Hell yeah! I knew my gut was right! Boss! Didn't I tell you this guy had good instincts?"
"A sniper who let something get that close has no business sounding so proud."
A man with green-tinged skin and an amphibian cast to his features planted a boot squarely in the peacock hunter's rear.
"Ah—come on! In that mess, even you would've been the same!"
"Shut it! Go rest!"
"Tch. There's a right person for every job, you know."
Still grumbling to the end, the peacock hunter peeled away from Kunlo. Once the leader had confirmed the rest of the team was settling in to recover, he jerked his chin at Kunlo. Alone together, the leader offered a slight bow of the head.
"Your strength made the difference this time, Kunlo."
"Not at all. Without all of us working together—"
"Don't embarrass us. Six of our people are alive because of you."
"……"
He wasn't wrong. Without Kunlo, several of them would almost certainly be dead. Sensing that further humility would only be excessive, Kunlo answered with a silent nod of acknowledgment.
"Have you thought about what I mentioned last time?"
"I'm sorry, but my master—"
"I know that Terran is the master who made you what you are. I've no intention of diminishing that."
The leader had heard Kunlo's stock reply often enough that he cut him off mid-sentence.
"But handing over twenty percent of everything you earn to that man? That doesn't sit right. If you add up everything you've already paid—"
"I'm sorry."
This time it was Kunlo who interrupted.
"I still have a great deal left to learn under my master. If you think of it as tuition, this amount is pocket change."
"…Hah. Fine."
The firmness in Kunlo's voice and face made it clear that pushing further would only sour the air between them.
"Just remember—our team will always welcome you."
"Yes, sir."
With that, the leader ended the conversation and went to rest with the others. After roughly half an hour, the party set out for the village.
"Ah—I'll get off around here. You know my account, right?"
"Don't worry. Same as always—it'll be there by lunch tomorrow."
"Yes. I'll be waiting."
With those words, Kunlo leapt from the moving truck.
Thud-tap!
Anyone else would have gone sprawling. Kunlo hit the ground, bounced as if spring-loaded, dispersed the force of the landing, and set off toward his master's dwelling.
"Every time I see it, it's still weird."
The peacock hunter turned to the leader.
"That guy really never got any cybernetic work or enhancement procedures?"
"Hard to believe, but it's true."
"No cooling ports, no enhancement marks on the neck… so I guess it checks out, but still…"
When the peacock hunter's eyes sharpened into something uncomfortably close to his sniper's stare, the leader gave him a light rap on the head in warning.
"Don't. You know what happened to the ones who thought like you—went after that so-called master for his secrets and got wiped out to the last man?"
"But if you could get power like that…"
"I saw that master fight once. He shot down the bullets coming at him—from every direction."
"What? He shot incoming bullets out of the air?"
"At first I wondered if I'd lost my mind. If I hadn't seen it myself, I'd be thinking the same as you."
He was quiet a moment, then confessed something else.
"Trying to poach Kunlo took a hell of a lot of courage on my part. Honestly? When he turned me down, part of me was relieved."
The peacock hunter had nothing left to say.
"Just what is that Terran, anyway? This isn't the kind of place a Terran would ever come to in the first place."
"Hmm-hmm-hmm~ Hmm-hmm~"
Kunlo hummed the little tune his master always whistled when he was in a good mood, light on his feet as he walked.
Three years of training in the martial arts had accelerated his physical growth, and the boy had become a young man. Handsome by the standards of his own species, he drew the eyes of women every time he went into the village—and had become something of a local celebrity.
He approached the house ringed by a stone wall and stepped inside.
"Halt. Halt. Identity verification."
"Ah, damn it. This piece-of-junk drone—one of these days I'm really going to scrap you."
The moment he entered, a drone with a gun barrel mounted beneath its chassis drifted over and scanned Kunlo's face.
"Identity confirmed."
"I live here too, you know? Can you stop with the damn identity checks already?"
But the drone—salvaged from scrap and repaired—would scan him again the next time he left and came back. That was simply how it was.
"Master, I'm home."
Click—click—
Kunlo headed for where his master was working. Amid a sea of scrap metal, a Terran named Jincheon was gripping pieces of junk and working them with practiced tools. He flicked a glance in Kunlo's direction, then lost interest again.
"You're back."
"We took down a Siloin Elk this time. Same as usual—they said they'll send my share around lunch tomorrow."
"Mm."
Click—click—
Jincheon answered absently and returned his full attention to the scrap in his hands. To a stranger, the exchange would have felt bleak—two people who barely knew each other. But Kunlo, who had watched this man for three years, saw it differently.
He just has no interest in long conversations with men for personal reasons.
The fact that Jincheon responded at all was proof of familiarity. Without any bond between them, he wouldn't have answered in the first place.
Anyone who spent even a little time around Jincheon quickly learned that he liked women. The moment a woman appeared, his eyes would turn serious, scanning her from head to toe as if analyzing something. Once, Kunlo had pointed out the location of a brothel district—and Jincheon's face had twisted with irritation before he landed a punch. It hadn't hurt; it was clearly a warning. But Jincheon almost never struck anyone casually, so the shock of it had been considerable. When Kunlo asked why, the answer was: I have no interest in lowering my standards by eating garbage.
He loves women, but his standards are sky-high… will that day ever actually come?
Wrrrrrm—
Kunlo's wandering thoughts were wiped clean by the startup whine of a fixed turret swinging into motion. Before he'd left for the forest, those piles of scrap had been unrecognizable junk. Now they had become a working turret—hard not to take notice.
"You've gotten really good with machines, Master."
"I've spent three years doing nothing but eating and working on this crap. Of course I have."
The money Jincheon had earned venturing into the White Shriek Forest had gone, first and foremost, into learning technical skills. Starting from the basics, he had reached a level in three years where he could gather scrap iron and turn it into something functional and complete.
Any technician could assemble something from intact parts using a registered blueprint. But repairing broken components and building something new without any blueprint at all—that was the domain of those called masters. In three years, Jincheon had stepped into the realm of a master mechanic.
"All I need now is to tear into a mecha, but that's not exactly easy."
If he could reverse-engineer a mecha—take one apart and map its structure—he could become a veteran technician overnight. But the Zabalcan Empire forbade slave races from so much as approaching a mecha, let alone touching one. Impossible under the circumstances.
Mechas might be common weapons across the galaxy, but military design schematics simply did not exist on any network one could search. Leaving for another planet was no option either—he had no starship, and vessels capable of outer-space navigation were under Zabalcan imperial control.
To reach another star system, I'd need a ship that can protect itself—or one stealthy enough to slip through unnoticed.
While he was absorbing skills and knowledge, there had been no room to look elsewhere. But now—lacking only the formal certification, yet already a master-class veteran technician—Jincheon found himself wanting something more.
He wanted to go to space.