Rescue Fantasy (8)
"Is it really okay for us to do this?"
Celestia, who was clutching my waist to keep from falling off, suddenly spoke up. I didn't immediately understand what she meant, so I furrowed my brows.
"What do you mean?"
"It feels like we rushed things. We were short on time, so we just threw on the suits and came out."
She had left a message for Eric, but as she said, it was more like just leaving a note—he'd probably only check it in the morning. She was worried that the others, who didn't know the two of us had slipped out, might panic.
"And you're only just worrying about that now?"
Wasn't she already prepared for this when she came out?
"I was spacing out and it suddenly occurred to me. Well, it should be fine. At least I left some kind of message. Hyun-woo, did you tell anyone you were leaving?"
"Of course. It may have seemed rushed, but I followed all the procedures."
Honestly, there wasn't really much to the procedure. As long as I gave Carrot and Licorice a nudge, those two would handle everything.
There weren't many people in the town, and with everyone except the injured working themselves to the bone, any absence would be instantly noticed.
So even if Celestia was missing, it wouldn't cause a huge problem. They'd quickly realize I was gone, too.
If anyone wondered about my absence in the morning, Licorice would explain that I had gone out to retrieve biocells. That would be enough for everyone to understand.
I could easily imagine Eric sighing—but it didn't matter. Even if someone had to hear about it later, it would be Celestia, not me.
"..."
Even as I thought like this, I wasn't taking things lightly. After all, not long ago, Nadia had suffered a grave injury. I couldn't possibly be carefree in this situation.
Celestia joining us only meant I had one more thing to be concerned about. If she really was useless—if she was nothing more than a burden—I would have left her behind, no matter what she said.
Even if she screamed at me not to go and spilled whatever she was holding, I wouldn't have looked back.
But Celestia was going to help me. No—she would help. Or rather, just having someone—anyone—by my side made a difference.
I'd planned on going alone because I had Carry with me, but honestly, I wasn't thrilled about being alone. Space psychosis always strikes when you're by yourself.
From the moment I woke up until now, I've seen more than a few people afflicted by space psychosis. My time here had made it impossible to ignore.
At first, there aren't many outward signs. People just become more tired than usual, get worn out faster, and feel an inexplicable emptiness settle in their hearts. When that builds up past their limit, it manifests as anxiety and depression.
They say there's loneliness within a crowd—feeling alone even when surrounded by people.
Things improved for mid-level workers and above, but low-level workers had nowhere to settle in comfortably here. Everyone else was in the same boat.
Credits didn't come as easily as expected, and if you got hurt, you didn't even get your daily wage. If you couldn't prove that your accident happened despite following all the safety protocols, SSTC wouldn't compensate you, either.
No one was willing to open up—they were too busy chasing after their own problems. Even conversation felt hollow, since no one could share their real thoughts. Getting drunk and lamenting their woes was all anyone really did.
I only managed to endure because I had Carry, and I was able to break free because of Nadia. Those who couldn't hang on either left earlier than planned or gave up on life.
In the back alleys of the residential area, there was a door connected to the sewage system. We called it the Door of Death.
If you passed through there and followed a certain route, a small black market would appear. Around it, there were plenty of people who had fallen apart. Even though it was a small market, it sold all sorts of things.
So, sometimes, people would be assigned to clean up the area. SSTC may keep worker supervision to a minimum, but letting corpses pile up wasn't what they wanted.
Naturally, no one liked cleaning up that place. But the job always finished faster than expected, since there were always those desperate enough to do whatever work came their way.
These were people who couldn't enter the mines anymore. Ironically, they also had the highest chance of becoming the next corpse they were cleaning. Wasn't it strange—like previewing their own gravesite?
Why not just escape Titan? Some might think that, but those people didn't even have the credits for a shuttle ticket. Or rather, they didn't have the will to earn them. Their spirits crushed, they just tried to fill each day with booze.
Unlike me, they could leave at any time, yet they only complained about life. I couldn't understand it.
'Just thinking about that again is making me depressed.'
I forced myself to shake off those tangled thoughts. Fortunately, the external environment helped clear my head. The hover bike shot forward, leaving blue afterimages in its wake.
While not like a shuttle, the hover bike's design gave us a lot of freedom over rough terrain. Detaching the sidecar made it easy to maneuver.
Particles lying on the bluish ice were scattered by the thrusters, as if they were on the move. The way they floated along looked kind of enviable.
We sped up naturally as I absorbed the scenery, headed toward the mining base Heaven. On the way, I checked for signs of pureblood supremacists, but the terrain looked unaltered, with nothing new added. This route was still safe, it seemed.
Just as I was starting to feel relieved, I saw movement between dense crystalline ice structures. I was purposely avoiding an area with inverted icicles, but suddenly, something moving caught my eye.
"...!"
When I abruptly stepped on the brakes, Celestia clung tighter to me, letting out a shocked "Eek!" as we slowed to a halt.
The press of force from behind only lasted a moment, as inertia faded and the sensation of being thrown forward disappeared.
"Ugh... What's wrong? Weren't we almost there?"
"I saw something."
I pulled out my binoculars to inspect the spot that had seemed off. On the ice moon Titan, there were no life forms except humans.
Now, there were ghouls and mimics rampaging about, but there had been no indigenous fauna before.
Long ago—before terraforming—things might have lived here, but they would have died out when the environment changed.
During terraforming, there'd been attempts to introduce cockroaches or rats to propagate, but people had fiercely opposed it, and experimental releases didn't last long before dying out.
But seeing something moving out there—other than us—meant it was either a pureblood supremacist or a monster.
Creak—
I rotated the binoculars to focus. The magnified image soon clarified what I'd seen. Something that looked like a giant sphere was squirming between the ice crystals.
A sphere. I'd seen a similar structure in Heaven. The difference was, the one I saw before was more like a balloon, and this thing now was made out of a constantly writhing mass.
Its feel was different from a mimic's flesh or a ghoul's tissue. Rather than being one merged mass, it looked messily stuffed together by force.
It seemed to have come from the pathway connected to Heaven. Bad news for us.
I paused my decision for a moment and handed the binoculars to Celestia. Realizing this wasn't a light situation, she quickly put them up to her eyes. Her lips parted almost at the same time.
"... What is that?"
"I don't know, either. How is it moving right now?"
"Uh, um... Like you saw earlier, it's barely moving at all."
That's what I'd observed, too. It didn't seem dead, but it wasn't making any active moves.
"So it just twitches now and then?"
"Yeah. How did you even spot it from this distance?"
Celestia tried to estimate the distance through the binoculars and stuck out her tongue in disbelief. I didn't answer. I was surprised myself.
I thought I'd just 'seen' it, but from a moving hover bike, the distance was farther than I'd realized.
"It was just there."
With that halfhearted answer, Celestia let it go. Instead, she asked what I was going to do.
'What's the best move?'
I thought for a moment and said, "Let's catch it."
"We could just pass by."
"That's a fair point, but now's the time to confront it. If it came from Heaven, and if there's more than one of those masses, it's worth finding out in advance."
"Then let's at least check if it's explosive before we go in. If it detonates up close, we're in trouble."
Celestia rummaged in her suit and pulled out a smart pistol.
"I reloaded with more powerful ammo this time."
"How much do we have?"
"Not much. Scraped up what I could... But maybe we can get more in the Heaven central store."
"Put it away for now."
"Aye."
Celestia obediently tucked the pistol back. We couldn't afford to use rare supplies this early. We'd use them if we absolutely needed to, but only if there were no alternatives.
There was no need to insist on the pistol for something far away. Even if I avoided it due to noise, there were firearms left behind by the pureblood supremacists and others I'd specifically requested.
We set off again on the hover bike and approached until the mass of flesh was clearly in view. We made good time as I guided us in.
Once within visible distance, its appearance was unmistakable. I wondered how something so repulsive could even exist. Just as we'd seen before, it was a lump of flesh—but dozens of faces were attached to it.
Not just something "face-like"—actual faces. Many of them were shut as if dead, but some opened their eyes, breathed through their noses, and made noise with their mouths. The sound coming from the mass resembled a sob.
The eerie sound left Celestia frozen. Carry repeatedly picked up and set down a flamethrower.
"... Hyun-woo, I think one of those eyes just looked at me."
"Which one?"
"On the right of the core, one of the younger-looking faces..."
"Then I'll target that one."
"... What?"
Celestia sounded like she couldn't believe I meant to target it. I told her she'd see, then pulled out a steel spear with a sharply honed tip.
Primitive as it looked, a thrown spear was still fearsome. I'd broken a tram-type mimic's core with a spear, hadn't I.
It made almost no noise compared to the guns that rattled the area. It was harder to handle, but I could make up for that with my strength.
I took a spear, spun it in my hand, and took aim for the face that had met eyes with Celestia. There was no point hesitating after all that had happened. The monsters had to die. That was our only chance at survival.
I put some distance between myself and Carry and Celestia to avoid getting them hurt, then took a deep breath. The spear wrapped tightly into my hand with a twisting sound.
Then, the spear flew. The wind blew ice particles into the air like mist, and as the spear flew through, it cleaved a hole in the cloud.
A moment later, the spear struck the mass of flesh. The heavy sphere, unable to overcome its own inertia, rolled back upon impact.
It seemed fairly sturdy and wasn't pierced through. If I'd used black spikes, maybe it would have. Clearly, there was a difference in material.
"... Good."
Celestia stared blankly at the destroyed face—which was now beyond recognition and completely silent. She gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up.
【ദ്ദി(⩌ᴗ⩌)】
Not to be outdone, Carry flashed an original-style thumbs-up. Apparently satisfied, he holstered his flamethrower.
Despite its appearance, it didn't seem explosive. Still, I threw another spear into it to make one more hole. Deceit and trickery were mutations' hallmark—better safe than sorry.
Fortunately, even after several spears were embedded, there were no signs of explosion. I couldn't tell if that was amazing, or just what to expect from a monster. The flesh globe was still alive, its fluids dripping down.
'Disgusting smell.'
As I moved closer to recover my spear and investigate further, a foul stench rode the wind. It was the rot of something that had been buried in muck.
I'd smelled something like that once before—in the sewers. So, was this monster not only from Heaven, but specifically from Heaven's sewers?
A sphere about 2 meters tall. There was nothing noteworthy on the surface. I'd just need to take a sample with a plasma cutter, and check if our equipment worked on it. I left that to Celestia and Carry.
While they were testing its durability, I decided to probe its interior. I twisted the embedded spears in opposite directions to forcibly pull open a ragged gap.
Squish...
With the sound of tough flesh being torn, cloudy red fluid spurted out. My stomach turned, but I couldn't stop. I had to stomach the disgust.
The first thing I noticed was that its surface was a bit sticky. I couldn't tell if it started out watery and thickened from the cold, or if it was always like this.
There wasn't any sign of digestive organs or internal organs you'd expect from a living thing. How was this even alive?
【Uuuuuh...】
Even its groans sounded awkward—like someone who'd never learned to make sounds. The faces were all ages, from children to wrinkled elders, male and female.
Usually, the core would be in the center, so to find it, I had to dig deeper. With my spear now stained a colorless shade by the fluids, I tore further inside and soon found a core about the size of my finger.
For its size, the blue crystal inside was tiny. Even basic ghouls filled their abdomen with a crystal.
'What on earth is this for?'
I compared ghouls freshly emerged from cocoons to the flesh sphere in front of me. Not just ghouls, but all mutated beings seemed incomplete, as if intentionally leaving room for more mutations.
Even so, at least those creatures had some kind of direction. They weren't a chaotic jumble like this.
Ghouls upgrade their claws, becoming more aggressive. Mimics boost their camouflage and mobility. Buds prove their superiority with unique abilities.
Since all creatures were like that, it made sense to think this was created for a particular purpose, too.
'... Raw material?'
Maybe it was nutrition to enable Creep's spread. We'd seen a Stalker store the essence of failed ghouls, then regurgitate it into mutations or Creep cocoons in progress.
That was a liquid, but maybe having it in tissue form wasn't too strange. These things always surprised us.
'Or is it simply unfinished?'
I couldn't rule that out either. If there was just one, there could be more—and if there were multiples, the forms could be diverse.
"Hyun-woo, the tests are pretty much done. The plasma cutter works just fine, but its flame resistance is high. The flamethrower can burn it, but it doesn't really take much damage—the sticky outer coat seems to block most of it."
So physical attacks worked, but not formless fire. This particular one wasn't moving much, but that might not be the case with the next one.
If this sphere could move as quickly or attack as dangerously as a ghoul, it would be better to take it out from a distance.
"What about lasers?"
"Kind of similar to flame. It works a little better than the flamethrower, but until the surface coating dries out, it mostly gets blocked."
I should have brought more metal spears. Still, it was fine. They were made from rebar I could get at the store. If not, I could pull some from a facility.
"Looks like there's nothing else to learn here. Let's go."
I ripped the core keeping the sphere alive out. It was small enough to fit in my palm. I crushed it in my fist, and the tough crystal crumbled away. Blue particles dribbled out like sand.
The flesh sphere could no longer weep. Only the sound of the wind was left.
I summarized what I had learned and sent it to Carrot and Licorice. They soon responded that they had received it.
We boarded the hover bike again. Our first destination was the pipeline connecting the mining base Heaven to the refinery.
-------------= Clacky's Corner -------------=
I'm guessing everytime Hyun-woo crushes the blue crystal cores, he unknowingly absorbs the energy inside the cores.
【ദ്ദി(⩌ᴗ⩌)】