The girl puts down the nail and covers her eyes with her hands.
It’s orthodox that her weapon of last resort is an iron crowbar.
Then she crouches down, picks up the nail again, and walks towards me.
Ah, she doesn’t forget that. It’s truly terrifying that as she approaches, the memory of the fighter inside me says there are no openings, at least at the girl’s level.
“Is a 25-foot monster throwing a tantrum because it doesn’t want to go home?”
Right now, a memory in my faded memories is shining as if a supernova just exploded. Say that again. What did you just blabber! It’s such a violent shining. Why is this memory so obsessed with mere units?
“Down there, I couldn’t move, and it was endlessly cold. All I could do was look up at the starry sky. I’ve finally gotten out, so I don’t want to go back.”
Ignoring the shining memory, I tell the truth as it is. The advantage of telling the truth is clear. So far, not a single person has listened to my words carelessly.
Besides, it’s convenient too.
If you lack intelligence, it’s better not to lie.
Of course, it’s possible to adjust by not telling all the facts!
“What, were you trapped in some kind of box or something?”
“It was spacious.”
Because a complete, endless plane stretched out infinitely.
She approaches me with a very skeptical expression. The fighter’s memory warns me. That one, if push comes to shove, she’ll drive in the nail, then beat it in with the iron crowbar.
She’s aggressive.
Is she really special forces?
At least according to the Sahaggin’s memory, they just kidnapped people indiscriminately from nearby villages, whether citizens or tourists.
“Why don’t you try killing me like you crushed those corpses earlier? Or are you scared of this?”
Somehow, she raises the nail to show it to me in detail. Strange symbols are engraved on the head of the large nail. According to the Sahaggin’s memory, it’s like a sacred object of this world’s god.
They say if you’re stabbed with it, the magic in your body stops working completely and you die from drowning on land. Well. It’s not strange that they use magic, which has reversible and explosive effects for environmental adaptation, since their original form is aquatic.
Anyway, I answer the question.
“I did that because they were dead people. I can get warmth from the dead. As long as I’m not attacked, I don’t want to harm the living.”
And I have doubts about whether I would die even if stabbed with the nail. From the beginning, I can’t use magic no matter what body I enter.
The girl ponders.
Then she raises her head, looks at my face, and asks.
“Do you eat people?”
“No. Until recently, I was human too?”
All I gained was warmth. Memories are copied, not stolen.
I’ve never put material into my body, decomposed it, and absorbed it, so I haven’t eaten. Haven’t eaten at all.
If it were necessary to gain warmth, I wouldn’t hesitate to do it, but if not, well. There’s no particular reason to do it.
The girl blinks her eyes.
Well, it’s not strange to find it odd if a giant says they used to be human.
“Then, you mean that’s not your original body?”
“Yes. It’s my first time entering a vessel like this.”
At that moment, the girl’s eyes sharpen, and she stares straight at me. Did I make a mistake in my words?
“A vessel, you say. You, you entered a human body before.”
I made a mistake.
Is she a detective?
Moreover, she’s subtly moving her arm to change her posture so she can immediately drive in the nail?
That nail and iron crowbar. They were originally Sahaggin items, so she must have started using them just yesterday evening at the earliest.
No, isn’t it strange that a single girl, who was captured, annihilated a secret religious cult of fish people overnight?
For now, I answer her question.
“Yes. I’ve been called exactly twice. The first time was a pseudo-religious cult. The second time was also a pseudo-religious cult hiding inside another pseudo-religious cult.”
“It’s all pseudo-religious cults.”
Because those are the kind of groups most likely to reach out to me. A monster like me isn’t the kind that people call thinking everything will go well.
I crouch down to look at her and then look around.
A huge dome-shaped building. But it’s smaller than the knowledge that the Great Kraken spread to his vanguard. The vanguard didn’t settle properly, so they lacked the resources to build according to the blueprint.
So they used the trick of simply scaling down the size.
The problem is that the body at the time of summoning is based on the blueprint, and the door to exit is too small to pass through.
If the Great Kraken had come, he would have killed all the fish people who designed this.
“It seems I’m trapped here, what should we do?”
At my words, the girl looks around.
After seeing all the passages leading outside, she looks at me with a skeptical expression.
“The doors are small.”
“There’s no barrier-free access.”
“Pffft!”
For some reason, my words made the girl laugh, giggling.
“No, how could there be a social minority consideration program here?”
Even if you say that.
“Aren’t most immigrants social minorities?”
For some reason, my words made her laugh even harder this time, completely guffawing.
I crouch and watch quietly as she laughs for a while before standing up.
“You, what’s your name?”
A name, huh.
“I don’t have one.”
The body I’m currently in is a body cultivated for the Great Kraken to enter originally.
The essence of the Great Kraken’s bioengineering.
Around me are objects that served as culture medium and incubators. From the outside, it looks like a spawning ground, but those who know, know.
But this isn’t a perfect body. It’s a temporary body to use until a real body is created after coming to this world and spending a long time.
For that purpose, they prepared the body of Choseol, and planned to enter Choseol’s child. But things went wrong and it all failed.
“You don’t have a name?”
“No. In the previous world, I used the name of the person whose body I was in, but this is a manufactured object.”
“Ah, come to think of it, I overheard the monsters talking about their god hatching.”
Knowledge level check.
I thought it was the early 19th century, but there’s a possibility that the technology is more advanced than expected. Not just technology, but culturally as well, it’s quite developed.
Caring about the disabled requires quite a developed culture.
“But isn’t it a bit surreal for a huge monster like you to speak politely while I speak casually?”
The fact that she uses the expression ‘surreal’ shows that the art world is quite developed as well. It’s not a world where wild hunters roam around as it appears.
It means it’s a world with leeway.
While subtly adjusting the world’s level upwards, I pointed at the iron crowbar with my hand.
“I should use polite speech to someone holding a universe-destroying weapon.”
“Huh? This is just a simple crowbar! Shouldn’t you be pointing at the nail?”
“I don’t know what the nail is. But that’s dangerous.”
Especially since she used it to not just crack Sahaggin heads but attempt to exterminate them overnight.
The final step.
She failed there.
If the Great Kraken had been alive, there’s a high possibility that the Great Kraken would have appeared and suffered a terrible fate.
Given this girl’s tenacity, there’s also a possibility that she would have somehow sent him back.
Additionally, not all people are such superhumans.
If that were the case, the Sahaggin wouldn’t have chosen humans as the easiest target to hunt for using souls and bodies as resources.
“I don’t think that’s something I should hear from a monster over 25 feet tall.”
“People are afraid of scorpions, right?”
“You’re saying I’m a scorpion…”
She approaches me holding the nail.
But since her expression doesn’t look like she’s trying to kill me, I just watch quietly, and she says this to me:
“Move aside. There’s something I need to destroy.”
As I move aside, she, with an expression that shows she really can’t figure out what I am, drives the nail into the ground. Exactly in the center of this dome.
Click click
As the sound of machinery moving is heard, the Great Kraken’s memory flashes.
A self-destruct device made for emergencies.
The nail is a device for executing heretics, and also a device for annihilating when the den is full of heretics.
For reference, heretics are those.
Those who have found freedom.
It’s about killing everyone who refuses bondage and decides to live as an individual personality.
It’s roughly similar to if a unit defected during a war.
Being a religious group, they deal with apostates to the point of paranoia.
Because if they leave them be, leaks will continue, so they must be caught.
The problem is that this doesn’t consider the user at all.
“Why did you drive it in? This whole place. It’s collapsing.”
Indeed, the doors around us started collapsing first. Stone pillars burst from the inside, blocking the way, and water is sucked in from the inside to close off any escape routes.
“Ah, as expected.”
She drops the iron crowbar with a thud and sits on the floor.
“No, there’s something wrong with me. I don’t want to change like those guys in the prison, you know.”
As she says this, she lifts up her blood-stained top. The inside of the clothes.
Where there should be white skin, blue scales have appeared. And near the ribs. Gills are flapping.
Ah. Right.
Human resources are resources too. By the time they’re completely mutated, they’re brainwashed with hormones and pleasure substances to increase affinity towards their own kind.
“You seem like a victim too, so die with me.”
Is that how you’re going to play it?
“What’s your name?”
“My name? It’s Victoria, why?”
So that’s her name.
“Then, Victoria. Let me say this in such a desperate situation. Don’t you want to return to your original body? I can promise. If you truly, desperately wish to avoid this miserable death and return to your original body, to go back to your family’s embrace, let’s make a contract.”
And I say this.
“I’ll give myself to you. In exchange, I’ll take everything you have when you finish everything later. How about it?”
Victoria, who was looking up at me with a dumb expression, hardened her expression and after a moment.
In a situation where water was rising to her ankles, she nodded.
Hehe.
The first harvest.
Complete.