Volume 1, Chapter 10: The Thing Underground Came Out
When the alert went off, the supermarket's first reaction wasn't chaos, but silence.
Almost everyone's phones let out a piercing tone at the same time; at the registers, along the shelves, in the refrigerated section, people who had been picking out items and chatting all looked down at their screens. It wasn't until a few seconds later, when someone read the words "large-scale abnormal reading" out loud, that the stalled noise seemed to be switched back on and burst out all at once.
"Underground?"
"What does large-scale mean?"
"Isn't East District right here?"
"Another calamity beast? Didn't one just come yesterday?"
Tanaka Makoto strode out of his office with his phone still clenched in his hand. He glanced outside, then at the crowd already starting to bunch up by the entrance, and his face darkened at once.
"Nobody push toward the door!"
His voice cut through everything around him.
"The notice says to get into a shelter, not to stand out on the street gawking! The underground garage isn't open today. Go out the back door of the supermarket and two hundred meters west is the community shelter. Staff, take the seniors and people with kids over first. Forget the registers, if anything gets stolen, it's on me!"
The young clerk was just about to ask whether that really counted, when the ground shook again.
This time everyone felt it.
Glass bottles on the shelves clinked against one another in a string of fine tinkling, the hanging signs on the ceiling swayed side to side, and several customers went pale in an instant.
Nobody asked anything more.
When Shuichi came out of the stockroom, Mio was already standing by the registers.
Their eyes met briefly across the evacuating crowd.
Mio's expression was completely different from usual. Her lips were pressed tight, her right hand gripped her phone, and the screen showed not the city alert, but the special interface only she could see.
A great patch of red was rapidly spreading across the center of the map.
Yusei ran over from the drinks section.
"What's going on?"
Mio didn't answer right away.
She zoomed in on the map.
The center of the red zone was right on the south side of Old Town.
Almost exactly where that noon thread had guessed.
"It really is a Mother Hive."
She said.
Yusei froze for a moment.
Shuichi stood to one side and didn't make a sound.
Another tremor came up from underground.
This one was heavier than all the ones before.
The supermarket's glass doors gave off a low hum.
Someone suddenly screamed out on the street in the distance.
Everyone instinctively looked outside.
Through the huge floor-to-ceiling windows by the entrance, they could see an intersection a few hundred meters away slowly heaving upward.
It wasn't their imagination.
First a thin crack appeared in the middle of the flat asphalt, then the crack raced out to either side, and the road surface bulged up bit by bit as if something beneath were pushing it, while two cars parked on top slid off to the side at the same time.
The next second.
BOOM—!
The whole road blew apart.
Black soil, chunks of concrete, and severed underground pipes shot more than ten meters into the air together, and a dark-red pillar of flesh as thick as an adult's waist burst up out of the earth, its surface covered in fine, vein-like patterns; once it landed, it spread rapidly forward along the street.
Then a second.
A third.
More and more.
"What is that thing..."
Someone standing at the supermarket entrance had gone completely white.
Tanaka Makoto grabbed the person and hauled them straight back.
"Stop looking! Go!"
The crowd finally started moving for real.
But Shuichi didn't go.
His gaze stayed fixed on the pillars of flesh drilling up out of the ground.
Just like in the records.
No.
Bigger than in the records.
Those things weren't tentacles, and they weren't organs meant purely for attacking; once they broke the surface, they spread rapidly along building walls, drain openings, and cracks in the street, like an enormous network of flesh and blood turning itself up from the bottom of the city.
The mother wasn't getting ready to come out.
It was turning this place into its own body.
"Shuichi."
Yusei called his name.
Shuichi snapped out of it.
"What?"
"Go to the shelter with the manager."
"Okay."
The answer was very prompt.
Mio had already put her phone away.
"Yusei."
"I know."
Yusei glanced outside.
"You're going."
"Yes."
"Then I'm going too."
This time Mio didn't even argue. She just looked at him and said, "Don't get too far from me."
Yusei was taken aback.
It was the first time she had said something like that on her own.
"Okay."
Shuichi looked at the two of them.
He suddenly felt an irritation he couldn't quite name.
Not because the two of them were getting close too fast.
Although that was a little bit of it.
It was more that Mio was actually planning to go over there just like this.
That thing wasn't one of the spawn she'd run into these past few days anymore.
"You two."
They both turned around.
Shuichi pointed at the street outside, which was already starting to be covered in red tissue.
"Why not wait for the professionals?"
Yusei said, "Isn't she a professional?"
"That's not what I meant."
Mio looked at Shuichi.
Shuichi paused.
He couldn't exactly say that she might die if she went.
That would be saying too much.
He tried a different approach.
"This thing looks bigger than the ones from the last few days."
"That's exactly why it can't be left alone."
"Other people will come too, right?"
"Maybe."
"Then wait a bit?"
Mio shook her head.
"There's no time."
She pointed into the distance.
A dark-red pillar of flesh had already climbed up a six-story building; several round holes suddenly split open on its surface, and the next second, a mass of black things the size of fists came spraying out of them.
Like bugs.
But not quite.
Once they landed on the walls and the ground, they immediately unfolded their limbs and scuttled off in all directions.
Screams rose from the street again.
Mio didn't say anything more; she turned and ran.
Yusei followed right behind her.
Shuichi stood at the supermarket entrance, watching the two of them disappear beyond the crowd.
Tanaka Makoto clapped him on the shoulder from behind.
"What are you spacing out for? Let's go."
"Yeah."
Shuichi turned to follow.
He took three steps.
And looked back once more.
In the distance, a streak of blue light had already risen.
"..."
Last time.
No.
He probably wouldn't be needed today.
Yusei was there.
Mio was much stronger than before too.
And this was only the beginning.
Shuichi started toward the shelter again.
This time he didn't look back.
***
The city's internet completely blew up within ten minutes.
By the time Shuichi was sitting in a corner of the community shelter, the Girl Hero Observatory's front page had already turned into a temporary disaster livestream page.
The shelter was set up in the basement of an old gymnasium, with several hundred people packed into the hall. The air conditioning was turned very low, but it couldn't hold back the stuffy heat of the crowd. Children crying, phone calls, and staff keeping order all blended together, and the walls were lined with bottled water and makeshift first-aid kits.
Tanaka Makoto was counting his employees not far away.
Shuichi, meanwhile, leaned against the wall in the farthest corner, looking down at his phone.
A line of big red characters hung at the very top of the Girl Hero Observatory front page.
【Linjiang City East District Large-Scale Calamity Beast Incident—Live Roundup】
More than a dozen updates had already been posted below.
【15:18 Large-scale abnormal tissue appears underground in East District.】
【15:21 At least seven ground ruptures confirmed.】
【15:24 Blue Lance appears.】
【15:25 Yesterday's suspected "mysterious strongman" seen again near the scene.】
【15:27 Multiple livestream signals disrupted.】
The comments were refreshing almost too fast to read.
【Blue Lance again? Has she even rested these past few days?】
【That guy's here again!】
【Told you those two are definitely connected.】
【Stop shipping them, there's MEAT growing out of the ground, hello!】
【Isn't this thing's range way too big?】
【Roads in Old Town are already closed.】
【My friend's in East District, says the ground won't stop rumbling.】
【Will any other heroes show up today?】
【Somebody's probably already on the way.】
Shuichi scrolled down.
A netizen had uploaded a photo taken from a high-rise far away.
The whole of Old Town looked as if something had speared through it from underground; a dozen or so dark-red pillars of flesh were scattered among the streets and buildings, and deeper in, a gigantic white structure had risen.
Only part of it showed.
Like bone.
Or some kind of shell.
Shuichi zoomed in.
He looked for a few seconds.
His brows slowly drew together.
White.
The shell of a mature mother body.
This thing wasn't just starting to develop.
It had finished growing underground long ago.
It had only now chosen to come out.
"Trouble."
Shuichi said under his breath.
The middle-aged man next to him, looking at his own phone, didn't catch it.
"What?"
"Nothing."
He turned his volume down.
The livestream picture had just come back.
The camera was on a high-rise nearly a kilometer from the battlefield; zoomed in, the picture was a little blurry, but the blue-white figure in the middle of the street could still be made out.
Mio was fighting.
She was in better shape today than she had ever been.
The evolved blue-and-white battle attire stood out sharply in the sunlight and dust, and every swing of her lance left behind a gold-and-blue afterimage.
The ordinary black larvae couldn't get anywhere near her at all; often, the moment one crawled out of a flesh pillar, it was run clean through by the gleam of her lance the next second.
Farther away.
Yusei was there too.
He wasn't fighting those things head-on, but helping evacuate people who hadn't made it out yet.
A chunk of a building's outer wall came down.
He simply raised his arms and held it up.
A small car, squeezed over onto its side by a flesh pillar, was blocking an intersection.
He grabbed the back end and dragged it clear by brute force.
His movements were already much more practiced than yesterday.
At least he wasn't ripping things apart anymore because he couldn't control his strength.
The livestream comments immediately started pouring in.
【Strongman Bro leveled up again?】
【Yesterday he pried open a bus, today he's shoving cars.】
【Seriously, what is this guy's deal?】
【I'm more curious why he shows up with Blue Lance every single time.】
【Her manager?】
【Your manager lifts walls bare-handed?】
【A support hero?】
【Can guys even be heroes?】
【There aren't any male heroes in the public records so far.】
【Which is exactly why it's weird.】
Shuichi looked at the comments.
He kind of wanted to laugh.
"Her manager..."
He did kind of fit the part.
Just with a bit too much authority.
In the livestream, Mio suddenly stopped.
She stood in the middle of the street.
There were far fewer larvae around her now.
But those huge pillars of flesh hadn't stopped moving.
On the contrary.
As if they'd realized ordinary spawn couldn't handle Blue Lance at all, they began contracting toward the center at the same time.
RUMBLE—
Even through a phone's microphone, the tremors from underground could still be heard.
The camera shook violently.
The ground split open again.
A huge white point slowly rose out of the earth.
The first piece.
The second.
The third.
Like petals.
Or some kind of overlapping carapace.
All the white structures drew together bit by bit, until they formed a gigantic cocoon nearly a hundred meters wide.
It was as if a huge white egg had suddenly grown in the middle of Old Town.
The comments section went much quieter for an instant.
Then exploded.
【What the fuck is that?】
【The Mother Hive?】
【That thread from noon actually called it?!】
【Where's that OP? Come out and get your praise!】
【Forget the praise, there's no way in hell Blue Lance can fight this thing alone.】
【Where are the other heroes?!】
【Two have been confirmed heading toward Linjiang, but it'll take them ten-plus minutes at the fastest.】
When Shuichi read that far.
His brows didn't unknit.
Ten-plus minutes.
Long enough.
The surface of the huge white cocoon was slowly pulsing.
Every time it pulsed, the flesh pillars around it contracted along with it.
Like a heart.
And the rhythm kept getting faster.
Shuichi knew this state all too well.
It was getting ready to hatch.
***
The center of the battlefield.
Mio stood on top of an overturned car, looking up at the enormous white cocoon.
"This is the mother?"
Yusei caught up from behind.
He was already covered in dust, and his right sleeve had been slashed open by a piece of building debris, but he himself wasn't hurt.
Mio shook her head.
"It might just be the shell."
"It can get bigger?"
"I don't know."
She tightened her grip on her lance.
The golden King's Mark lit up along the outside of her left leg.
Her body was in great shape.
Too great, even.
After fighting nonstop up to now, she wasn't noticeably tired, and her power hadn't dropped much either.
Yusei's connection had been supporting her the whole time.
But facing this thing, for the first time, Mio felt the lance in her hands was a little small.
"Attack first?"
Yusei asked.
Mio glanced at him.
"Since when are you this eager?"
"We can't exactly wait for it to come out."
That was Mio's thinking too.
She jumped down from the car.
Held the lance at her side.
"I'll test it first."
"What about the authority?"
"Seventy percent first."
Yusei closed his eyes to feel it out.
By now he could tell Mio's power state fairly accurately.
"You're already at seventy percent."
Mio's steps paused.
"Then what about yesterday?"
"Normally it's about sixty percent."
"..."
She was silent for two seconds.
"So I've never been using all of it?"
"Looks like it."
Mio suddenly felt a little annoyed.
Not at Yusei.
At herself.
All this time, she'd only ever been able to use that much.
"Then open it all the way."
Yusei didn't do it right away.
"Straight to full?"
"Yes."
"Your body—"
Mio turned her head.
"I'm in great shape right now."
"..."
"Trust me."
Yusei went quiet for a moment.
It was the first time Mio had said it like that.
Not "I can handle it."
Not "Stay out of it."
But—
Trust me.
He let out a breath.
"Okay."
The golden connection opened completely.
BOOM!
The blue light around Mio surged sharply higher.
Her lance let out a clear, ringing cry, and golden lines lit up all the way from its butt to its tip.
The distant livestream went wild in an instant.
【Here it comes!】
【That golden state from yesterday again!】
【Blue Lance at full power?】
【The effects today are insanely cool.】
Mio charged.
Even faster than yesterday.
The tens of meters of distance vanished almost in a blink.
She leapt in front of the huge white cocoon.
Her body drew out a perfectly straight gold-and-blue afterimage.
The lance pointed forward.
Every bit of power compressed to a single point.
"Pierce."
The tip struck the white shell.
BOOM—!!!
The shockwave swept across the entire district.
Every window nearby shattered at once.
The dust and rubble on the ground were blown back into a huge ring.
Yusei threw up an arm to shield his face.
The livestream went white in an instant.
A few seconds later.
The smoke and dust slowly cleared.
Mio was still holding her thrusting stance.
The lance tip was pressed against the surface of the white shell.
There was a dent there.
Only a few centimeters deep.
For the first time, the look in Mio's eyes truly changed.
"...You've got to be kidding."
The next second.
A muffled sound came from inside the white shell.
THUD.
The shell in front of Mio suddenly split open.
Not pierced open by her.
It opened on its own.
A pale, slender arm reached out through the crack.
Its five fingers spread.
And seized the lance shaft.
Mio's pupils shrank.
"Let go!"
Yusei sensed the danger at almost the same moment.
But it was already too late.
The hand gave only a light tug.
And Mio was yanked over, lance and all.
And then—
BANG!
A terrifying force burst from inside the huge white cocoon.
Mio flew backward like a cannonball.
Smashing clean through two buildings in a row.
And finally crashing into an abandoned shopping mall.
"Asakawa!"
Yusei shot forward instantly.
At the same time.
The huge white cocoon began to open completely.
One piece.
Two pieces.
Layer after layer of white carapace unfolded outward.
The thing inside slowly stood up.
A little over three meters tall.
A long, slender body.
Almost feminine.
Pale carapace covered it from head to toe, with no skin in any normal sense. The contours of its chest, waist, and limbs all carried an eerie, humanlike beauty, yet its head had no eyes and no mouth, only six white bone petals closed together.
From its back extended eight extremely long bony limbs.
Like wings.
Or like a spider's legs.
From the end of each one hung dark-red filaments.
After a brief silence, the Girl Hero Observatory's livestream comments started refreshing like mad.
【Why is this thing humanoid?】
【Is it female?】
【Don't talk nonsense, there's nothing human about it.】
【Kind of looks like a white doll...】
【Where's Blue Lance?!】
【She just got sent flying!】
【Holy shit, first time I've ever seen Blue Lance knocked that far by one hit.】
Someone quickly came up with a name for it.
【White Mother.】
Someone immediately objected below.
【That sounds awful.】
【How about Cocoon Princess?】
【Can you all please worry about whether she can even win first!】
Shuichi sat in the corner of the shelter, looking at the figure that had risen out of the white cocoon.
The light of his phone screen was reflected on his face.
He wasn't smiling.
"..."
Of course.
It wasn't an ordinary Mother Hive.
And the way it had grabbed Mio's lance just now...
Too precise.
It had known in advance where she would come from.
The mother had already devoured everything the earlier spawn had sent back.
It knew how Mio fought.
It knew how a Kingship-boosted Mio fought.
Shuichi's fingers slowly tightened around his phone.
On the screen.
Yusei had already dashed into the abandoned mall.
A few seconds later, he leapt back out through the shattered wall carrying Mio in his arms.
There was blood at the corner of Mio's mouth.
But she was still conscious.
The first thing she said was:
"Put me down."
Yusei ignored her.
"You just got slapped through two buildings."
"Three."
"Is that the point?"
"The third one didn't go all the way through."
"..."
Still correcting people at a time like this.
Looked like her brain was fine.
Yusei set her down on the ground.
The first thing Mio did once she was steady on her feet was look up at the Cocoon Princess.
"It knows."
"Knows what?"
"It knew I was going to attack there."
Mio wiped the corner of her mouth.
Her eyes went completely cold.
"It didn't react after seeing it just now."
"It was already waiting in advance."
Yusei's face changed too.
"Those things from the past few days..."
"Were collecting my fighting style."
The two of them realized it at the same moment.
The Cocoon Princess didn't give chase.
It just stood there.
The six white bone petals on its head slowly opened.
There was still no human face inside.
Only a vertically grown dark-red crystal.
The crystal lit up.
The next instant.
A shrill, high-frequency shriek swept across the entire district.
"Ugh!"
Mio's body suddenly went limp.
The blue light on her lance went out almost entirely.
She dropped to one knee.
Yusei's face changed.
"Asakawa!"
"Don't touch..."
Mio clenched her teeth.
It wasn't just pain.
She could feel it.
The deeply familiar connection between herself and her power was being forcibly jammed by something.
Like countless streams of noise stuffed into her head.
The blue energy began to spiral out of control.
The edges of her battle attire started flickering unstably.
Someone in the Girl Hero Observatory livestream even noticed immediately.
【What's wrong with Blue Lance?】
【Her outfit's flickering.】
【Unstable transformation?】
【The Cocoon Princess has a jamming ability?!】
Mio braced one hand against the ground.
Her lance began to turn transparent.
No.
It was going to release.
But the very next second.
The golden King's Mark on the outside of her left leg suddenly lit up.
HUMMM.
A very faint golden glow spread outward from inside her body.
The vanishing battle attire stabilized again.
The lance solidified once more.
Mio froze.
She looked up at Yusei.
Yusei stood a few meters away.
Just as stunned.
He could feel it.
For one instant just now.
Some connection on Mio that had originally belonged to her alone had been cut.
But another one was still there.
The one between them.
"I..."
Yusei looked at his own hands.
"I can still sense you."
Mio slowly stood up.
She could feel it too.
Her blue power really had weakened in part.
But it hadn't disappeared.
The golden connection was like an unremarkable rope that, after everything else had snapped, had suddenly become the only thing still holding on to her tightly.
She looked down at her hand.
Then smiled a little.
Very faintly.
"That's enough, then."
The Cocoon Princess moved.
The eight bony limbs on its back spread at once.
The next second.
Its three-meter body vanished from where it stood.
Yusei's pupils shrank sharply.
"On your right!"
Mio had already turned.
Her lance swept across.
CLANG—!
A bone blade crashed into the lance shaft.
The massive force drove her skidding back more than ten meters.
This time she didn't go flying.
Yusei's power was flowing into her through the connection without pause.
The Cocoon Princess vanished again.
Mio looked up.
Left.
Behind.
Above.
Every attack landed precisely at the angle hardest for her to handle.
As if it had already fought her hundreds of times.
Yusei kept warning her through the connection.
"Behind you!"
"I see it!"
"Left!"
"Stop yelling, I have eyes!"
"You almost got cut just now!"
"Shut up!"
It was the first time the two of them had truly fought together.
And they were overwhelmed from the very start.
Meanwhile, in the shelter.
Shuichi stared at his phone.
One minute.
Two minutes.
Three minutes.
He didn't move.
Mio could still hold on.
Yusei was fine too.
The other heroes were on their way.
He wasn't needed.
The picture on his phone suddenly lurched violently.
One of the Cocoon Princess's bony limbs pierced through Mio's shoulder.
Blood sprayed out.
Yusei rushed forward.
The next bone blade slashed straight at his neck.
Mio's pupils shrank sharply.
"Yusei!"
At that exact moment, the livestream signal went completely black.
【Connection lost.】
Gasps rose all through the shelter.
Everyone started refreshing their pages.
【Why'd it go black?】
【Where's the stream?!】
【The signal's completely cut!】
【Every stream at the scene just dropped!】
Shuichi didn't refresh.
He just looked at the black screen.
A few seconds later.
Another extremely heavy tremor came from underground.
This time.
Even the shelter shook.
And in the moment before the screen went dark, he had seen the dark-red tissue that had burrowed out of the earth all closing in on the center of the battlefield at once.
Not to attack.
But to seal it off.
The Mother Hive was starting to wall off its core zone.
Shuichi lowered his head.
He was silent for a few seconds.
Then he stood up.
Tanaka Makoto saw him from across the room.
"Where are you going?"
Shuichi looked back.
"Bathroom."
"It's that way."
Tanaka Makoto pointed in a different direction.
"..."
Shuichi paused.
"I know."
Then he actually did head for the bathroom first.
He had to get out through the emergency exit on that side, at least.
Otherwise it would be too obvious.
He pushed open the bathroom door.
No one inside.
The mirror reflected a somewhat pale man's face.
Shuichi looked at himself.
He was silent for a few seconds.
"Yusei's there."
No one answered.
"And Mio won't die that easily."
Still no answer.
He lowered his head and splashed his face.
Cold water dripped from his chin.
"The others will be here any minute."
Once he'd said it.
Even Shuichi found it irritating.
Because each of those reasons sounded more useless than the last.
He turned off the faucet.
Looked up at the mirror.
"..."
Last time.
How many times had he said that now?
He couldn't remember.
Shuichi sighed.
He turned and pushed open the emergency exit door.
"What a pain."
The door swung softly shut behind him.