Descending Above the Sky
Something was flapping.
I swung the flashlight up and found Dr. Myeong, windmilling both arms to catch my eye. The moment our gazes met she launched into some unidentifiable string of hand signals, and I hadn't the faintest idea what any of it meant. Outside the hands she used in surgery, she had no talent for her body at all.
Her mouth, at least, was handing me accurate information.
Lights. Off. Lights. Off.
So she had something in mind. I clicked the flashlight off, and Dr. Myeong went into motion.
In the pitch dark, her red eyes shone with a particular brightness. Keeping a safe distance, she began to shift, slowly, into an angle from which she could look past the hole.
Eyes that had picked out a monster's weak point buried under fur, even with no light at all.
Right. Maybe she could make something out.
The red eyes sank toward the floor and gradually narrowed. Then a red light flared in them, the look of someone who had just understood, and she came padding over, light on her feet.
I ought to go meet her. We linked up halfway, and another presence registered right beside me. The Foreman had come over too.
At last Dr. Myeong opened her mouth. The voice was small, but she shaped it clearly enough to be understood, spitting it out one syllable at a time.
"Not. A. Person."
Thud!
Another enormous impact. I'd been concentrating, so this time the sound alone gave me plenty. Something immensely heavy, slamming the ground. It didn't feel like a weapon being swung, or like an attempt to smash the floor.
Morbid obesity.
A thing that heavy ought to make noise every time it moved. And yet the sounds came only now and then. I had a rough idea why. Might as well check.
Click. The flashlight could go back on for now. The thing's whole body couldn't pass through that doghole. As for a ranged attack... neither a clean yes nor a clean no. Call it a triangle. At this distance, we were safe either way.
The beam found the casing the thing had thrown.
"What. Are. You. Doing."
Dr. Myeong's little shout. We were in a safe spot; she could have spoken the way she usually did, but I decided to leave her to it. It was funny.
I lit the doghole again. The hole sat there exactly as it had been, as if nothing had happened. I had no intention of tossing the casing back through to the other side. Where I meant to throw it—
Ting. It rolled, and came to rest right in front of the doghole.
"I. Said. What. Are. You. Doing."
"An. Explanation. Please."
The Foreman joined in. I answered by waggling the flashlight, and every eye locked onto the doghole the beam indicated.
A moment later—whoosh!—something came in from beyond the hole and snatched the casing away in an instant. As expected. It had been far too fast to make out properly, but I could guess what it was. I made certain the frozen Dr. Myeong and the Foreman fell well back.
"Both of you keep your flashlights up. When I signal, light the hole. I'll be lighting it the whole time myself, but that doesn't matter—you light the hole no matter what."
There was one more thing to prepare.
"What. Are. You. Doing!"
I took a knife and cut a long strip from the hem of the gown Dr. Myeong was wearing. Now we only had to wait for the casing to come back. I couldn't know the exact reason the thing was throwing casings, but it was probably its own version of a probing fight.
A monster, then.
I'd assumed it had to be a hunter. A monster getting into a sealed underground space had seemed unlikely, and the prediction had missed, cleanly. The Foreman had talked as if the passage we'd come through was only newly cut, and an older passage existed somewhere. Had it come in that way? If the security was sloppy, it wasn't impossible, but I wouldn't swear to it. Maybe the rumor made more sense—the one that said monsters occurred naturally. If that was true, a monster suddenly appearing in an underground space would make sense as well.
Not a colony. One monster, plain as day.
Not the last one left after the rest had died. A thing that had never formed a colony to begin with. A boss-class specimen.
Ting! The roll of it again. Sure enough, the casing had come back over.
An ordinary monster's intelligence sat at about a zombie's level, which was to say none at all. Hungry enough, and it might crack its own skull and eat whatever was inside for emergency rations. A boss-class specimen was different. They varied from one to the next, but at minimum this was the sort that would come out behind if it split its own head open just because it was hungry.
All right, then. Let's have a look at that hand.
I wrapped the end of the cut cloth around the casing and threw it in front of the doghole once more, a little farther than last time. Dr. Myeong and the Foreman had gone quiet along with everything else, and the underground sank into stillness. They seemed to have caught on to what I was doing.
The Gentleman and the sentries were surely on the other side, and there wasn't a sound. Had it killed all of them in a single blow? Seeing someone whose living face you knew turned into a zombie was a fine way to earn a nightmare. If they were playing dead, they were doing the right thing. Boss-class specimens tended not to overkill, and getting out of a crisis by playing dead happened more often than you'd think.
A rustle. With my ears wide open, I felt it coming. Any moment now—
Whoosh!
Now. I yanked the cloth wrapped around the casing. The casing slipped the thing's hand by a hair and came back to my side, and the hand that had thrust in didn't pull away. It groped along the floor.
The hand was a tentacle, the kind that brought an octopus's legs to mind. This, too, was as expected.
"Lights!"
The beams Dr. Myeong and the Foreman threw at the same instant struck the tentacle, and the reaction I'd been hoping against happened. The tentacle spasmed and swelled.
Kwehk! Kuhul!
If you didn't know better, it was easy to take that sound for a monster vomiting. It wasn't, at all. It was the sound of power it couldn't contain.
"Euugh, what's wrong with it?"
"It's doing that because it likes it."
A body whose attack power rose when it took in light. Similar to the fur-matted monster I'd met a few days ago, and different. Both of them chased light, but the furball was only sensitive to it; the hours it actually preferred were night. Its vision was developed enough to lock a target even with no light, so fighting it after dark was the advantageous play. This one preferred day. Light made it stronger, while in the dark it went blind as any human with eyes wide open. It lived by instinct, avoiding dark places.
Which meant there was no way it had entered this underground space on its own. Either it had occurred naturally, or someone had let it loose on purpose.
"Get the light off it. Don't kill it entirely."
Whoosh. Whoosh.
It didn't retract the tentacle. Like a snake flicking its tongue, it only stirred the space, reacting to the faint light it could still feel.
"Urp..."
"Postman, did you figure something out? A monster like this has no business being inside the station."
The Foreman couldn't have been here only once or twice. If he was finding it for the first time now, then the monster had appeared very recently.
"We'll get to what I figured out. Foreman, is the only way out of here back the way we came? I thought you said there was another passage."
"Go down to B6, where the Subway Platform is, and there's a way up to the surface. The first passage we ever cut."
So we only had to keep descending, the way we'd planned?
"So... you're going to abandon the three people on the other side?"
Worrying over strangers, and from Dr. Myeong of all people. It didn't suit her. Unfortunate for the three of them, but there was nothing to be done. I might be meeting the Gentleman again in a nightmare.
"I wouldn't call it abandoning them. Unavoidable is closer."
Not that we could go and rescue them. The odds they were even alive were thin to begin with.
Whoosh. Whoosh.
Dr. Myeong flinched at the sound of the tentacle still flailing, and still she brooded. Worry about someone else at a time like this and you were asking for an accident.
"Is it something you heard from the Gentleman that's eating at you?"
"Well... I wouldn't say it isn't eating at me at all."
"Didn't know you took other people's talk so much to heart."
"It's less that, and more... well."
"You just think about surviving."
"I was thinking about that too. If we leave it like this, things will be terribly awkward when the Waste Disposal Squad gets back, don't you think? They were personnel left here to watch us, and having to say that only those exact three died..."
Now that sounded like Dr. Myeong.
"I won't say you killed them."
"I'm being serious."
"Everyone they left to watch us is dead. Put another way, it also means we could simply run for it like this."
Dr. Myeong scratched the back of her head.
"The Foreman just heard every word of that. Is this... all right?"
When her flashlight landed on him, the Foreman was blinking both eyes.
Whoosh. Whoosh.
While the tentacle still thrashed, hunting for light, the Foreman reached his own conclusion.
"What else is there. I'll explain it was an accident that couldn't be helped, and I promise the two of you won't come to harm over this."
"Goes without saying. It's the truth to begin with."
It had been an accident. That much was certain. But the part about not coming to harm over this was meaningless talk. Dr. Myeong was already due to come to harm over something else. If I were thinking only of her safety, bolting right now would be the easiest method. Whatever the case, the thing that had to be done immediately was already settled.
"Let's think it over on the way down."
Whoosh. Whoosh.
The thing kept working its tentacle without a pause until we left the spot.
Whoosh... kuhyul.
The moment the monster's presence had faded, the Foreman opened up with a barrage of questions.
"It's ridiculous asking a postman something like this, but how do we put that thing down?"
"Why? That your job too?"
"Put it down? Me, in person? Not a chance. Take a good look."
The Foreman rolled a sleeve and presented his biceps. More precisely, he tried with everything he had, and nothing showed at all.
"Then just request support from headquarters. It's the station master's ask—they'll send hunters, won't they? They'll know how to kill it."
"I'm asking because it doesn't work that way. Hunters and the military don't help us. Officially, that is."
So they really had no one at their back but Future Tech. Maybe I ought to let on that I already knew as much as there was to know.
"Then who's watching your back?"
"Classified."
"Meaning Future Tech?"
"Classified."
"Wouldn't happen to be someone named Jo. Or handwritten orders in a dainty little hand."
"...What the hell do you actually do? Is postman a cover?"
"Classified."
However hard Future Tech set its jaw, in front of a monster it was a chick just shaken out of a nap. No combat force of its own, and no way to mobilize the military or the hunters. At best it spent money and worked mercenaries from the outside world, and dealing with a boss-class specimen might mean grinding dozens of them down.
"If I tell you how to kill it, do I at least get a lifetime free pass on the Subway?"
"Tss... I'll bring it up."
"A thing like that actually exists?"
"It doesn't. That's why I'll bring it up."
Thud...
The familiar sound, rolling in from quite a ways off. Had it started moving again? Dr. Myeong clapped both hands over a choked little sound trying to escape. The Foreman didn't even try to stop the sigh that got out.
"I'll take your word. You make sure you actually bring it up."
"Lifetime free pass, logged. I swear it on my biceps."
"...?"
"They're properly attached. I was only hiding them earlier. Classified."
It wasn't any great method, and I'd meant to tell him for free anyway. If this station was ever going to be finished, that thing had to be cleared out fast.
"Its tentacles are both arms and legs. Attacking, grabbing things, walking, running—it does all of it with tentacles."
"Then what on earth is that thudding?"
"Unlike the springy tentacles, the torso is hard as metal. Not just the exoskeleton. All the way through, inside as well. So the body isn't large, and still it's immensely heavy. Too heavy for the thing itself to bear. When it's on the move and the strength goes out of the tentacles, it drops right where it stands. That's the sound."
"If it settled down lightly, there wouldn't be a sound, would there?"
"I have seen a specimen that behaved that way."
"So this one, fortunately, is just dim?"
"Maybe, maybe not. At first it may have thought no one was in this space, and that would explain it. Right now it might be looking down on us, or it might not be thinking of us as prey. That would do it too."
In any case, up through the middle of a fight, it belonged to the sort whose approach was relatively easy to grasp.
"The tentacles are soft. First you cut every one of them off and make a fool of it."
"Just listening, it sounds simple."
"The number of them is the problem, if you need a problem. And a blade beats bullets for a clean cut, but the close-quarters difficulty runs high. Because of the number. Drag it out too long and the tentacles regenerate in no time."
"What a pain. So after you've cut them all off? Smash the torso?"
"In short, yes. Armor-piercing rounds work on the torso, but hosing it with special ammunition until it dies costs far too much. The tentacles are already gone by then, so people usually go to a blunt weapon. It's boss-class, so a Core is certain to be in there. Pull that out and you're done."
Put that way, it sounded easy.
"But the smashing is the work."
"Hm? Because it's too hard?"
That wasn't it. From boss-class on up, you couldn't win by being simple and stupid.
"From here on it needs memorizing. You have paper and a pen?"
"Hm. There should be some once we're down. But how do you know all this so well? You're not a postman, are you? Earlier I saw you using a gun you don't see often."
So the Foreman had recognized the Backscratcher.
"I am a postman. Dr. Myeong here will swear to it on her standing as a headquarters physician, which is worth more than your biceps."
"Eh? Why me?"
"You won't?"
"...Well. I can, I suppose."
"Well, I'll be. One tremendous postman."
The Foreman stroked his jaw, sunk in thought. The rasp of a close-shaved beard came through, quiet.
"That boss-class specimen. Telling just one person to face it would be too much, wouldn't it? I happen to know a former hunter who's good with cold steel. His skill's quite decent."
"Then you didn't even need to hear the method from me."
"His time as a hunter was short. He isn't exactly steeped in monsters."
A former hunter. Might be someone I knew. Even if I didn't know him myself, run him past Clock-out Man or Min Yeo-jin and he'd most likely turn out to be an acquaintance once removed.
"If his Core ability is combat-type and he's a veteran built for close quarters, it might be possible. But if you're going by headquarters policy, the formation is three or more. No exceptions."
"Tsk. He's not combat-type."
Then it was no use. And there was a further problem.
"This space is a problem too. Fighting alone in darkness like this is hard. Someone to back you with a light source at the right—"
"Ah, that part's actually fine. That's why I meant to call him."
"Hm?"
"Because he's a remarkable man, the sort who can see ahead even in darkness without a single point of light. Here. This is it."
What the Foreman indicated was a stairway leading down.
B6...
Thinking about it, that was right. By the surface's reckoning this was underground, but viewed from Geofront, this place sat higher than the sky. Space, in effect.
The Subway Platform.
Was I finally about to see space?