The objective was set. Then there was no reason to hesitate any longer.
We walked down the third-floor corridor, keeping watch on our surroundings.
We had only searched the nearby area, but we could already find a difference from the other floors.
“It’s kind of……”
“Normal?”
“Yes, it is.”
It was quite different from the other floors, where space had been distorted into all sorts of bizarre forms.
There were no spiral-twisted corridors here. Unlike the other floors, which had felt as if we had fallen into another dimension, this place was ordinary.
Everything was normal.
So normal that we might have mistaken it for an ordinary obstetrics and gynecology building.
“…Damn.”
Old Man Owlbear muttered that.
He was keeping watch with only a sledgehammer gripped in his right hand.
After the last collision with the Land Leviathan, his shield had been crumpled beyond use.
Fortunately, at least the arm that had been holding the shield seemed mostly fine.
He even brushed off my offer to heal it, just in case.
Old Man Owlbear stopped scanning the area and said,
“This is strange. By now, mimic beasts should be popping out……”
It was too quiet.
Just look at when we first went up to the fourth floor. Back then, the moment the door opened, a swarm of small mimic beasts poured out.
The other floors had been no different when it came to being overrun with mimic beasts.
After all, they were immortal monsters that wouldn’t die without my ability.
Even if the soldiers had already gone back and forth through this place several times, their numbers were bound to remain at a certain level.
And there was one more question that suddenly occurred to me.
“When we came up here last time, didn’t it reek of blood?”
The smell of blood had been so thick that not only Min Aji, with her keen sense of smell, but even the rest of us could smell it.
But now that we had actually reached the third floor, that smell was completely gone.
“……Damn.”
Under normal circumstances, I might have considered it a good sign.
After all, just having that raw stench of blood disappear would raise one’s quality of life by a whole level.
But this was inside a blackout zone.
A world with different laws from the real world.
“I don’t think we can possibly take this as a good sign.”
There was no effect without a cause.
If that thick smell of blood had vanished entirely, something must have happened.
But the one saving grace was that this wasn’t our first time here.
I asked Captain Kim about the previous records.
“Is there anything useful in the past records on the third floor?”
“No. From what I heard, unlike the other places, the third floor’s space wasn’t distorted, but it was packed with that many more mimic beasts.”
It was no longer a saving grace.
So much for being useful.
“…Let’s tighten our guard and move forward.”
In the end, that was the only measure we could take.
We continued searching the area in silence.
There wasn’t much farther to go before the central corridor area occupied by the Mother.
At this rate, we might even reach the Mother without encountering any threats at all.
Then, suddenly, Old Man Owlbear’s ears perked up.
“…!”
Damn it. That didn’t seem like a good sign.
“A song……”
“Pardon?”
“Someone is singing a lullaby.”
A lullaby.
In the middle of this hell, in a blackout zone where blood and flesh should be flying and monsters should be roaming, a lullaby.
A chilling shiver ran down my spine.
It would have been less bizarre if hundreds of monsters had come charging at us, shrieking hideously.
“And…… I can also hear something wet and sticky. Slurp, sluuurp. Like a giant leech sucking something in.”
It certainly didn’t sound pleasant.
Old Man Owlbear’s feathers stood on end as if he had goosebumps, and he shuddered.
‘…Are the two connected somehow?’
The empty third floor, and the smell of blood that had vanished without a trace.
It was probably related somehow to the sound Old Man Owlbear had heard.
At least, those were the only two clues we had so far.
It was just as I found that faint connection.
—Click.
A door in the distance suddenly opened.
It seemed a mimic beast that had been hiding behind the door had come out.
This was better, at least. Better than maintaining this silence with nothing coming out……
All of us brought our muzzles to bear on the thing that had emerged.
But no fire burst from those muzzles.
“Ggh… gghuugh……”
It seemed to be a mimic beast.
But I couldn’t be sure.
At least, it was a little different from the mimic beasts we had seen so far.
“…It looks like a mummy.”
Yu Inha muttered.
The mimic beast was writhing, its gaunt body exposed like a withered branch.
It seemed to be alive.
Well, if it was a mimic beast, then because of its peculiar immortality, it probably couldn’t die even if it wanted to.
And its outward features weren’t limited to its withered body.
“…It looks white. I’m not the only one seeing that, right?”
Its color was different from the other mimic beasts.
They grew on human bodies whose skin had been flayed off.
As a result, their main bodies were red, or else dark red where the blood had clotted and stuck.
But this one was different.
As if it had been thrown into bleach and spun around, its body was dyed completely white.
Fuck. Because of that, the body that had once been human—or now resembled a human in a way beyond our understanding—was plainly visible.
With the other mimic beasts, at least the blood made it hard to see things like the grain of their muscles.
“It’s not exactly a pleasant sight……”
While we were exchanging various opinions about this type of mimic beast we were seeing for the first time—
“Ggh, gghh……?”
The mimic beast, which had been letting out grotesque groans, discovered us.
The moment it discovered us, the fine trembling of its body also stopped.
An ominous feeling instinctively rose in me.
It immediately crawled toward us.
Its movements were nothing if not desperate.
As if some of its joints no longer moved properly, it came toward us using only its left foot and one arm made of a biological blade.
The sight of it coming to kill us with such desperation even in that state was truly bizarre.
Of course, its speed was pathetically slow.
It provoked instinctive disgust, but it wasn’t an actual threat.
“Should I shoot?”
“…Yes.”
Bang—!
The mimic beast crawling toward us went limp.
The thing that had been desperately approaching us was neutralized that easily.
“…Ha, damn it.”
In conclusion, its appearance posed no threat to us.
It merely forced us to chew over the bottomless hatred they bore toward us.
Of course, it wasn’t as if it ended with us simply feeling awful.
“Whatever that phenomenon is… At any rate, it seems like the abnormal situation happening now is because of that, doesn’t it?”
The vanished smell of blood and the mimic beasts that were nowhere to be seen.
The questions about those had been answered to some extent.
“Yes. Looking at the current situation… it seems there is something that is hostile to mimic beasts.”
Something had been roaming around and had neutralized the mimic beasts like that, as if bleaching them.
In the current situation, that was the most reasonable way to see it.
“It wouldn’t be the Land Leviathan, would it?”
“The Land Leviathan pays no attention to mimic beasts. It probably isn’t that.”
“And it’s certain that only mimic beasts are here?”
“At least according to the previous records, yes.”
Captain Kim answered Yu Inha’s question like that.
Good. Then the Land Leviathan was eliminated from the list of candidates.
In that case, there was only one candidate left.
“…Identification name, Mother. There is a high possibility that it is the culprit. But I’ve never heard that the Mother had an ability like that.”
Captain Kim muttered.
Hearing that, I recalled the previous briefing.
‘They didn’t tell us much about the Mother.’
Since the objective this time was the purification of the Incubator, information on the Mother, the gatekeeper of the third floor, had not been treated as a central topic.
In truth, there wasn’t much information to speak of about the Mother to begin with.
The number of times the national army had engaged the Mother over the past days was three.
Two times, they were wiped out and failed to obtain proper information, but on the final attempt, there were two things they brought back.
‘The Mother’s basic specs are close to an enhanced version of a mimic beast.’
Of course, if that had been all, the soldiers who came before wouldn’t have been wiped out.
Unlike the Incubator, where you had to target the core, this was something that could be dealt with by pouring firepower into it.
The problem was the Mother’s special ability.
‘Unlike other mimic beasts, even after being neutralized, it can revive one more time.’
In other words, it had a second phase.
Of course, unlike boss monsters in games, it didn’t get stronger just because it entered its second phase.
The issue was that if you didn’t know that and engaged it for the first time, you could let your guard down after neutralizing it the first time, thinking it was all over.
It was a gimmick that preyed on ignorance.
But if you knew about it, it was a gimmick you couldn’t really fall for even if you tried.
All you had to do was not relax just because you knocked it down once, and pour firepower into it again from a distance.
And that was the extent of the information we knew about the Mother.
“What are the chances that it has awakened a new ability we don’t know about?”
“There have been no such cases discovered so far, but it is difficult to declare it outright impossible.”
Good. Then let’s assume for a moment.
If the Mother had awakened the power to neutralize mimic beasts and even thoroughly bleach them afterward—
What benefit would it gain as a result?
‘…Strengthening its main body.’
Connecting it that way would be the most intuitive.
“…Wait.”
In the middle of that chain of thought, Old Man Owlbear’s ears perked up.
“…Just around the corner ahead. It’s that lullaby from before.”
The sound of the lullaby the old man mentioned soon reached us as well.
It was a sound closer to a phlegmy humming.
It was a wonder he had managed to recognize it as a lullaby. If anything, it seemed closer to the sound of sheet metal being scraped at a construction site.
But even amid that noise, Captain Kim seemed to have some idea what it was.
“Prenatal music……”