Chapter 99: Captain Mori!
Gunfire—furious, relentless gunfire rattled along the South Wall.
Down below, marsh octofish and mutated frog monsters surged forward in a relentless tide. The operatives of the special strike team repelled wave after agonizing wave.
Scattered among them were armored bone-fish monsters, their jaws gnawing rabidly at the stone foundations.
“Still no word from Mori?!”
At the base of the wall, Yves listened to the frantic updates crackling from above, his brow furrowed into deep, rigid trenches.
“None, sir! The strike team reports that… the cries of the B-rank mutant can still be heard out in the marsh.”
The B-rank monstrosity seemed to still be directing the bone-fish to assault the fortification.
The lone figure who had descended from the ramparts had vanished without a trace.
The tether was severed; no signals returned from the dark beyond.
No matter how hard they fought against the realization, the desperate, frantic tempo of the gunfire on the wall laid the operatives’ true feelings bare.
No one had officially pronounced Mori dead.
Yet not a soul could afford to be optimistic.
It had been a desperate, suicidal gamble from the start.
Two hours had passed. No updates. No way to provide fire support.
What were the odds of Captain Mori surviving out there?
Raw agony and burning rage were channeled straight through rifle muzzles, unleashing a furious storm of lead down upon the swarming horrors.
“Waaahhh—!”
From deep within the black mire, an eerie, spine-chilling shriek pierced the din once more.
The B-rank mutant.
Yet this cry sounded different from before.
It was no longer that haunting, sorrowful mimicry of a weeping human.
A gargantuan, pitch-black silhouette rose slowly from the swamp below the ramparts. Its silhouette evoked a colossal whale, yet shifted like the bulbous mantle of a monstrous octopus.
Then, a light flared—a dull, sickly amber glow.
An eagle-eyed spotter caught only a fleeting glimpse before violent vertigo slammed into his skull.
The psychic shockwave forced him to shut his eyes instantly. Clamping a hand onto the parapet to keep from collapsing, he roared at the top of his lungs, “Don’t look at the light! It carries massive mental corruption!”
In that single, fractured glimpse, he had seen a writhing, tightly packed carpet of fish-like eyes embedded within that sickly amber mass.
What was that? The beast’s true eyes? Or the grotesque assimilation of countless aquatic abominations?
This was the very first time the B-rank horror had exposed its sensory organs.
“Wuuu—!”
Another baleful wail ripped through the dark.
Hearing the spotter’s warning, Officer Two averted his gaze immediately, his peripheral vision catching a sudden shift beside the massive behemoth.
Was that… a person?
Vaulting airborne off the petrified, hardened trunks of the mutated swamp palms.
Officer Two’s heart surged straight into his throat. He bellowed into his comms, “Avert your eyes from the glow—concentrate fire support! Cover that vector!”
Support?
Cover what?
Rifle teams along the ramparts hesitated, freezing for a fraction of a second before the realization hit like a physical blow.
Captain Mori!
…
Suspended high in midair, Mori locked her gaze onto the sprawling cluster of dull-amber, pulsating eyeballs.
She was calculating her point of impact.
Her replacement hazard suit had been chewed to ragged ribbons, coated head to toe in thick, reeking black silt.
Wounds wept blood all over her frame.
Yet her limbs surged with boundless vigor.
This was no ordinary physical endurance; it was a strange, intoxicating phenomenon—pure kinetic energy.
The emerald corruption had receded entirely from Mori’s skin, concentrating into vibrant, piercing green within her irises.
Moments earlier…
Having tangled with the B-rank horror for what felt like an eternity, Mori had reached the absolute end of her rope.
Her flesh was an open map of jagged bites from every parasitic terror lurking in the fen, her stamina completely spent.
Had it not been for that braised offal platter granting complete immunity to parasitism and mental corruption, Mori knew her body would have long become an incubator for marsh octofish larvae.
Nor would she have stumbled upon the B-rank entity’s fatal vulnerability—its eyes.
It was the epicentre of its psychic blight, yet it was also the sole patch of tissue across its armored hide where a piton could penetrate.
When the beast attempted to crush her sanity, that sprawling blanket of sickly amber globes had surfaced from the depths of the black mire.
It had exposed its core.
Yet its psychic terror slid off Mori completely.
The B-rank mutant had toyed with her like an insect. Her munitions were exhausted, having managed only shallow gouges in its armored carapace.
Without heavy suppressive fire, her strikes were nothing more than mosquito bites to the colossus.
And with a mere shudder of its bulk, it could summon legions of razor-toothed bone-fish to tear her apart.
Her body wracked with agonizing pain, Mori spat a mouthful of dark blood onto the mire. Setting her jaw, she lined up her grappling launcher with a scarred bullet furrow on the beast’s flank and fired.
Releasing her grip on the mutated swamp reed, she let the retraction cable haul her flush against the monster’s hide, pulling herself right to the perimeter of that hideous amber mass.
The creature finally seemed to register a flicker of alarm—or perhaps raw indignation.
It plunged straight down, seeking to drag this irritating flea beneath the suffocating silt.
Mori didn’t fight the descent. Instead, she locked both hands around the hardened stem of a mutated swamp rush.
The mutant stem was slender, razor-sharp, and unyielding as tempered steel, spanning a full meter in length.
She was dragged down into the freezing black mud.
Suffocation hit like a physical fist, clogging her mouth and nostrils, the immense hydrostatic pressure threatening to crush her ribcage.
Then came the hypothermia.
Beneath the swamp, the cold bit far deeper than the night air above.
Mori gave no thought to whether she would live or die.
Her only thought was that this monstrosity could not be allowed to breach the South Wall.
White-knuckling the tether, she gathered every scrap of strength left in her marrow, violently fighting the viscous drag of the mire, and drove the rush stem straight into the beast’s exposed sensory cluster.
Laser-focused, blind to pain, she channeled her entire existence into that single, downward thrust.
—A miraculous sensation manifested at that exact precipice.
The oppressive drag of the mud vanished.
Or rather, Mori’s physical threshold and kinetic output had experienced a sudden, violent ascension.
The hardened rush stem buried itself hilt-deep into the B-rank mutant’s eye cluster.
“Waaahhh—!”
Agonized, the B-rank monstrosity heaved its massive bulk out of the silt, violently thrashing its spine to fling off the parasite clinging to its flesh.
Mori was hurled hard against the trunk of a swamp palm, hitting the wood with bone-jarring force.
Yet it caused her virtually no harm.
Her awakening had forged her flesh into something far more resilient.
Seizing the fronds of the palm, she coiled her legs and launched herself back into the sky.
Astride the ramparts, the operatives saw a solitary silhouette appear before the creature’s field of amber eyes.
A razor-sharp sonic crack split the air.
Trailing an invisible wake of cutting wind, Mori sliced clean through the sprawling mass of eyeballs!
“Aaaagh—!”
A horrific, human-like shriek tore from the beast’s throat. The leviathan went completely berserk, finally realizing that this flea wielded an entirely different brand of power.
It reared up to its full, terrifying height, its bulk eclipsing half the towering ramparts. It unhinged a cavernous maw lined with concentric rows of jagged fangs, lunging forward to snap the descending Mori straight out of the air.
Bang— Bang, bang, bang—!
Defensive fire from the wall rained down in an instant, pouring a desperate deluge of heavy lead straight into the monster’s gaping gullet.
Rotten flesh sprouting green fungal spores tore open inside its foul mouth, its sickly reddish-green fluid instantly blackening under the barrage.
[Wind Blade].
The designation of her ability echoed clearly within Mori’s consciousness. With a single focus of will, razor-sharp gales materialized before her, whistling forward in a lethal salvo aimed at the beast’s remaining eye cluster.
Free-falling made trajectory adjustments nearly impossible. The gaping maw lunging toward her braved the gunfire from the wall, dead-set on grinding her to paste.
Mori was equally resolved to bring the horror down with her. Utterly unconcerned with what those rancid fangs would do to her flesh, she poured every drop of awakened energy into her gale-force blades, furiously lacerating the creature’s amber sensory core.
The foul stench rushed over her face; the jagged teeth snapped shut inches from her skin.
She was hurtling straight into its jaws—
Suddenly, her body moved on its own.
Defying all laws of momentum, she flickered several meters laterally through empty air.
Clearing the snapping jaws by a hair’s breadth.
Mori plunged into the mud below.
“Wuuu—”
Boom—!
The amber eye cluster was shredded into ruined, pulpy ribbons, pulverized by the gale blades and saturated with heavy rounds.
The colossal frame crashed sideways into the swamp, sending up a massive wave of black water.
Thwip—
The mechanical bite of a grappling launcher.
Mori hauled in the line, planting her boots firmly atop the twitching carcass.
Amidst the creature’s dying spasms, she drove her blade through the ruined mass of eyeballs and pried out a deep purple beast core.
Bang—!
A vibrant blue flare detonated high above.
The rally signal from the ramparts—a recovery team was already rappelling down to secure her.
Mori exhaled a long, shuddering breath, wiping the foul slime from her visor.
Her mind lingered on that impossible, involuntary midair shift.
It had snatched her from the jaws of death at the final microsecond.
[Braised Offal Platter]
—Grants a 2% chance to dodge incoming attacks.
