Kill Intent Closing In
Blood was splattered everywhere. The floor and walls still bore the sharp, torn scars of something that had ripped through them with savage force. Those marks alone were enough to show how desperate the fight for survival had been.
The strange part was that not a single human corpse — not even a scrap of flesh — remained. That was because Crypters were not machines. They were organisms.
A Mother birthed Crypters, but building them from raw materials cost far less energy than creating them from nothing. So every corpse, every shred of meat, was gathered up and absorbed. The monsters that emerged from that process came in varieties beyond counting. Even so, each newborn Crypter was given a role, and they were classified by the abilities that role demanded.
"Ha. Fuck. This is some real bullshit."
A man muttered under his breath as he checked the bio-radar and edged forward, careful not to alert any Watchers. "Dumping every last rookie on us — what the hell are we supposed to do with that?"
He wore a thick battle suit and was armed to the teeth with a laser gatling. Jincheon's group, by contrast, had shown up with nothing but a laser sword and a laser pistol, and he made no secret of how little he liked it. Laser weapons hit hard enough, sure — but looking ahead to the fighting to come, the shortfall in firepower was going to fall on his team. Hell, he wasn't even sure those people would fight properly once they actually saw a Crypter.
"Quiet."
The grumbling was soft, but Team 2's leader was already wound tight. He snapped the order without looking back.
"Captain, doesn't this whole situation piss you off? We should call in right now and reassign the tea—"
"I said quiet."
"…Yes, sir."
Aside from Jincheon's party, every member of Team 2 had originally been one unit. The numbers had simply lined up, so Jincheon's group had been slotted in — and the leader was no happier about it than anyone else. In a place where one mistake could kill you, babysitting rookies was the last thing anyone wanted. Properly geared rookies might have been tolerable. These ones had come in light kit. The man whose guts were twisting hardest was Team 2's leader.
Still… the way they moved when we first assembled, they're definitely wearing decent nano-suits. Right now, that's all I've got to trust.
Jincheon, for his part, had stripped off his spacesuit the moment he stepped into the freighter. It was too confining; he couldn't move properly in it. Even knowing the air generators could fail at any second and leave them in vacuum, he had taken it off — which was exactly why the Team 2 leader assumed he was wearing a nano-suit — and the leader kept pressing forward.
"Watchers."
The woman at point raised a hand in warning. Cybernetic work had replaced her eyes and part of her nervous system; she pushed the feed she was seeing straight to the rest of the team. In thermal mode, a mass roughly the size of a human head writhed where it clung to the floor.
"Jegan."
The Team 2 leader spoke the name quietly. A man in a light battle suit drew a small rectangular box from his waist.
Whoosh—
He threw it. The box unfolded wing-like to either side, glided over the mass—
Zing! Crack!
—and when he hit the switch on his arm, a translucent shield bloomed out from the box and split the thing cleanly in two. The device was meant to throw up cover in a firefight, but anything caught in the space where the shield formed got sheared apart. Used that way, it was a silent kill. Not the proper method — a dirty little exploit — but it worked.
Team 2 moved again. Jegan dropped the shield and caught the box before it hit the deck.
Interesting way of handling it. So they don't go down like extras in a horror movie, is that it?
They were professionals in this line of work, and aside from Jincheon's group they had always been one team. Minimal talk. Clean execution.
"Watchers come in two flavors — vibration-sensing and surveillance. That one was vibration-sensing."
The rear guard, a massive mercenary with bony protrusions along his frame, rumbled the explanation in a low voice clearly meant for Jincheon's party. "Leaving Watchers out in the open like that means an inexperienced Mother. You lot got lucky."
He scanned the corridor again and fell back into the line. For all the brutal look of him, he seemed the careful type who actually looked after beginners.
After that it was pure repetition. Advance on bio-radar. Life sign appears. Kill the Watcher. Advance again.
So a Mother doesn't even flinch when the link to a Watcher goes dead.
Jincheon had looked Crypters up on the way in. They seemed a full tier below the Overmind from StarCraft — that old Korean folk classic. Well. If they really were Zerg-class, planets would already have been eaten.
They were a cosmic hazard, but Mothers didn't pack together, and there had never been a report of one hitting a planet or a station.
About ten minutes of that dull, looping advance later, boredom was starting to itch at Jincheon. He was just thinking about stirring something up when—
Hmm?
Kill intent hit from every direction at once. He spread his sensory field.
Kill intent. It's been a while since I've felt it this raw.
This was not ordinary killing intent. More violent, more primal, than any beast's. A beast's kill intent was the struggle to live. This was pure hostility aimed at any life that was not their own.
The source of it, by Jincheon's reading, was widening left and right in step with their advance — holding distance, staying off the bio-radar.
Did another team get made? Or was it those Watchers…?
What was certain was this: the deeper they went, the more they were walking into a net the enemy had already laid.
Jincheon had no interest in sitting on the information and then catching the blame later — why didn't you say anything? — so he opened Team 2's frequency.
"B-9. I've got a warning."
"Hm?"
He used his callsign, ignored the sidelong looks the others threw him while still watching their sectors, and said what needed saying.
"Outside radar range, things that feel like Crypters are spreading left and right. Keep going like this and we walk straight into an encirclement."
"How did you confirm that?"
The Team 2 leader asked it low, still scanning. The volume was small, but the comms auto-caught it cleanly enough.
"Kill intent."
"What?"
"I can feel the kill intent."
Silence settled over Team 2. They were usually quiet. This silence was colder.
"Pfft. Rookie bastard. Dressing up 'I'm scared' to sound all weighty."
"Heh heh heh."
"Shut up, man."
"You're laughing too."
Everyone but Jincheon's group snickered out loud.
"…B-9. I get that you're scared. But we can't turn back now."
"I warned you clearly. If you come crying later asking why I didn't push harder, I'm putting a fist in your face. Just so we're clear."
The Team 2 leader wrote it off as classic rookie overreaction, dismissed it, and started them forward again.
"Hey, B-9. Did you pack a diaper?"
"B-5. Shut it."
"Yessir."
B-5 — heavy weapons, and sour on Jincheon from the first minute — sneered. The leader stamped the spark out before it could catch.
Jincheon. Why warn them like that?
Exactly. Put it that way and of course they won't listen.
Heliane and Calsira, who had been following in silence, scolded him over the voice transmission they had learned the day before arrival. Their own sensory fields had opened; they could feel the kill intent ringing them in too. They had been fretting over how to phrase a proper warning. Then Jincheon had gone and delivered it like an idiot — so now nothing either of them said would land.
Why should I carefully explain anything for people who aren't even my women?
He shot it straight back. Why rack his brains to put outsiders on alert?
Anyone who knows me would be shocked I even gave male bastards this much of a warning. Whether they take it or not is their problem. Not ours.
He was certain he could walk out of anything — every one of them dead, the worst case on the board — so he simply decided the ones who ignored the warning were the problem and moved on. The two women once again registered that Jincheon's values did not run on the same rails as ordinary people's.
When the Crypters show, we take the rear.
What about the others?
I said I'd make this mission a free ride. Gotta deliver.
Jincheon chuckled over the transmission, already settling in to enjoy what was coming. If these people ever learned he was treating their life-or-death work as entertainment, what faces would they make?
They pushed on for another ten-odd minutes, clearing Watchers, progress smooth as glass — but Jincheon's senses kept counting. The Crypter numbers were climbing.
Kill intent's getting thicker. About time for them to hit.
As he expected, the Crypters had finished the ring and were ready to strike. When it started, they would pour from every door and wall the team had already passed.
"All stop."
The Team 2 leader raised a hand. Things had gone too clean. In purification work, even with top pros, combat usually kicked off inside ten to twenty minutes. The freighter was huge, yes — but even allowing for that, this was too smooth.
"This is Team 2. Team 1, Team 3, do you copy?"
"Team 1, copy."
"Team 3, copy. What's up?"
"Situation's too smooth. Anyone else feeling that?"
"…Yeah. Too smooth."
"So it wasn't just me."
Every leader on the channel was reading the same wrongness. Experience talking — the gut sense that something was off.
"Proposal. We fall back to the start point and reassess. Thoughts?"
"Mmm… we've come this far. That's a bit—"
"Doing that much is… wait—"
Teams 1 and 3 balked at turning around after the ground already covered. Then the Team 3 leader seemed to catch something and broke off mid-reply to start issuing orders.
"C-3. Launch a remote radar that way—"
The order never finished. Team 2's radar specialist went white and shouted.
"Captain! Life signs! They're herding us — surrounding us!"
"!!"
At that cry, Team 2 peeled off the walls and swung muzzles into every open sector.
Crack! Boom!
"Kyaaaaah!"
"Kikekekek!"
"Team 1! Under attack!"
"We're surrounded!"
The first wave hit like giant pill bugs — thick bodies, massive maws, pointed forelegs like fangs. Behind them came humanoid things reduced to bone and hide, claws out, charging hard.
Tukakakakakang! Pikikikiking!
"Hyaaat!"
"Fuckfuckfuckfuck!"
Crypters poured from every direction. The mercenaries opened up like madmen. For a second the ring had looked hopeless — then high-powered weapons turned the charging mass into meat in moments.
"Cover fire!"
A mercenary in a heavy battle suit hurled a massive disc from his back toward the ceiling. It locked on and began spitting rounds through evenly spaced ports.
"Straight ahead! Nonstop run for the power sourc—"
Kakakakang!
"Kh—!"
The leader tried to order the sprint. His nano-suit's shield caught a burst and he grunted. Ahead, soldiers with scraps of flesh hanging from their necks were firing on them.
They can use human weapons!
He had written this Mother off as green. Complete misread. Ambush tactics good enough to ring them in — and the skill to run human arms. This Mother was experienced.
Pshooook! Boom!
From the front, the heavy-weapons suit launched a small missile from its arm and blew an auto-turret off the ceiling.
Tukakakakakang!
A minigun joined the push. The only path left looked like retreat.
"Hup!"
Jegan threw a box forward and raised a shield. Incoming rounds hammered it. Concentrated fire started putting cracks in the barrier.
"Captain!"
"What do we do?!"
Crypters nonstop from every side. A fire net from the front built out of soldier corpses. Retreat was the only option left — but then—
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
"Kuheeeek!"
From the rear, alone, a Crypter of abnormal bulk stepped into view — iron plates sunk into its body, multiple mantis-like arms, roaring.
What now? Force a breakthrough and eat the losses? Punch one side of the net and make for a wall?
Fully surrounded, the leader spun the options, hunting for the best way to open an exit.
"Tsk."
Through the chaos, Jincheon's tongue-click cut clean — a presence that had been oddly faint until now.
"You lot were talking so big I figured you had some brilliant card left. This is all you've got?"
Jincheon stood in the middle of the mess with his hands behind his back, completely at ease. The leader's face twisted.
Everyone else was fighting to live. And this bastard was lounging?
"Hey. That thing's weak point is a left hook."
Jincheon said it flat, eyes on the monster coming from the rear.
"Damn it! This isn't the time for jokes — shut up!"
Even in the middle of it, the leader snapped at the smug tone.
"You don't believe me. Then I'll just have to show you."
He walked toward the monster bare-handed. No laser sword. No pistol.
"Kieeek!"
Several Crypters lunged from left and right the moment he stepped out of formation—
Seogeogeogeok!
—and Jincheon put Sword Gang on his fingernails, flicked his fingers like a conductor, and the Crypters came apart in clean, uniform chunks.
"Wha…"
The leader's mind tangled further under the sheer unreality of it.
"Kkyaaak!"
In that gap the iron-plated giant closed the distance and swung its many arms to impale him.
Kakakakak!
Jincheon vanished. Only the floor got shredded.
"Kruk?"
The Crypter peered around, hunting for the man who had just disappeared.
"Watch closely."
Jincheon was already on its left. He drove a left hook into the flank — light, almost casual — and with it Fist Gang and penetrating force.
Poooong!
Both sides burst. The internal energy riding the fist churned the Crypter's insides like a blender.
"Kr… kruu…"
The exterior still looked mostly whole. Inside, it was no longer a living thing. The giant Crypter sagged and went down, foul fluid spilling from the holes in its flanks.
"See?"
"…"
Even with orders still waiting to be given, Team 2's leader's face went blank.