The severed piece writhed violently on the ground like a beheaded worm, spraying fountains of black liquid.

But there was no time to celebrate, the perfect cut had also destroyed the plane’s balance.

The Lofty Cloud spiraled out of control, crashing into the heart of the crater, tumbling violently as both wings snapped apart.

Yet in that chaos, most of the drones clinging to the fuselage were crushed to pieces, scattered across the scorched ground by the time the wreck finally came to rest.

Now, only the cockpit remained. It was dented, burned, and stripped bare.

The stainless-steel hull of the Lofty Cloud was battered beyond recognition with not a single panel left unscarred.

If it had been any ordinary pilot, surviving that series of maneuvers with a body intact would already qualify as a medical miracle.

But Falling Feather was anything but ordinary. Actually, he wasn’t even entirely human anymore.

Two seconds after his heart stopped, the pale-red Slime Mold clinging to his chest suddenly contracted twice.

Roughly half a minute later, the unconscious Falling Feather coughed violently, spitting out several mouthfuls of bloody tissue before gasping back to life.

“Yiwu!”

The delighted cry in his ear told him immediately, Little Feather had saved him again.

“Thanks...”

“Yiwuuuu!” (As long as you’re okay.)

Forcing a faint smile, Falling Feather drew a deep breath and unbuckled the harness pressing on his chest.

His reflection on the cracked canopy showed only half of his once-handsome face. Touching the faint red growth with his finger, he gave a wry laugh.

The accelerated-regeneration buff really worked. The only downside was that he looked less and less human.

Though, to be fair, it wasn’t exactly ugly.

Maybe he’d simply gotten used to it. At first, he’d found Little Feather’s sub-entity form rather unsettling, but after spending so much time together, he thought it wasn’t so bad, even... strangely delicate.

Perhaps his own sense of aesthetics was quietly changing, or perhaps Little Feather itself was slowly adapting to human standards of beauty.

As a completely different life-form, in a way it was no different from the androids or AIs living within the New Alliance, gradually assimilated into human society. It was just like the cats and dogs that once lived near human settlements thousands of years ago. Cooperation was always the more efficient way to survive in this perilous universe.

But that future was still far away.

For the time being, Little Feather was the one-in-a-billion exception among countless mutant fungal evolutionary paths, while the monster entrenched at the heart of Clearspring City was no gentle pet.

It was a blood-thirsty wolf.

The cockpit canopy was jammed shut. Falling Feather tried the release handle with no luck. So he reached under the seat, pulled a window-breaker from the toolkit, and smashed the glass with a sharp crack!

Crawling out with a submachine gun in hand, he chambered a round and surveyed the scene.

He was near the center of the nuclear crater, a barren expanse ringed by the crater’s rising rim.

As he tried to contact command through the onboard radio, the ground suddenly began to shake again.

His expression tightened.

He braced himself, expecting the Main Mother Body to repeat its old trick and swallow him whole, but instead, about twenty meters away, the soil burst upward in a cloud of dust.

A gaping, flower-like maw erupted from the ground like a breaching whale.

At first, Falling Feather thought it had simply missed and was biting off-target. He raised his gun to fire, but quickly realized something was wrong.

The huge mouth was writhing in pain, gagging and retching violently as it spewed sand and stone.

Falling Feather froze in disbelief.

“What the hell?! What’s going on!?”

Had it... eaten something bad?

Apparently so. The monstrous mouth kept vomiting, heaving up half the dirt beneath the city.

As debris rained down around him, Falling Feather dove aside to dodge the falling rubble.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a dark shape flung from the dust, crashing into the ground five meters away.

The figure lay sprawled in a star-shaped heap, a short axe slick with black blood still clutched in his hand.

A second later, something else hit the ground with a thud. It was a severed arm.

Falling Feather ran over, pried off the fallen man’s helmet, and found Old White’s battered face staring back at him.

Seeing him, Old White gave a sheepish grin.

“Kinda embarrassing, brother. Don’t laugh... Ahem... Hey, what’re you doing down here?”

And what’s with that face of yours?

Falling Feather gave a tired chuckle. “Don’t ask... this Main Mother Body has hacks stacked on hacks. I’ve flown for years, but I’ve never faced anything this absurd.”

“Yeah, no kidding...” Hauling himself up, Old White wiped the black stuff from his face, only to smear it worse, then gave up and instead picked up Gale’s severed mechanical hand.

The poor bastard had been the unluckiest. The instant the mouth shut, a tendril had impaled him from below, leaving only his indigestible arm behind.

Since the founding of the Burning Corps, they had fought countless battles, but never taken losses this brutal.

Even the highest-level, toughest beasts in the entire server looked like wrecks.

Falling Feather swallowed hard.

“What the hell did you guys run into?”

“Exactly what you saw, we got swallowed,” Old White said, glancing at the still-heaving maw. “It probably wanted to crack open our skulls and see what’s inside, so it dragged us deeper underground... but that beast underestimated us.”

They had indeed been caught off guard, but only for a moment.

Right after Gale got skewered, the rest reacted fast, firing into the closing mouth.

When standard rounds proved useless, Ample Time drew his Daybreaker and loosed a charged explosive arrow.

The blast inside the Slime Mold worked wonders. The Main Mother Body convulsed violently, showing signs of indigestion.

Encouraged, everyone unleashed whatever gear they had on the writhing red interior.

The craziest of them all was Night Ten.

Since being rebuilt into a cyborg by the lass, acid and digestive enzymes barely affected him, and his armor was nearly indestructible.

A tendril jabbed him straight between the legs. It was the kind of hit that could skewer a man through, but all it did was send him flying.

Then, Night Ten grabbed that same tendril, triggered the electrodes built into his body, and delivered a massive electric shock directly into the Main Mother Body’s digestive system.

The 100,000-volt discharge drained his exosuit’s battery almost instantly, but the result was spectacular.[1]

The Main Mother Body convulsed as if hit by a laxative, and moments later, sand and rock began spewing upward beneath their feet.

Clearly, it couldn’t handle the fight anymore.

It had given up on digesting them, and was vomiting them out.

As the two talked, Ample Time was the next to be spat out, landing nearby with a heavy thud.

“Damn, Ample Time? You’re alive?” Old White stared in surprise. He’d thought Ample Time was a goner after a swarm of tendrils dragged him down following his first explosive shot.

“Barely...” Pulling off his cracked helmet, Ample Time scowled at the twisting maw.

He nearly died the instant they landed. In all his gaming years, he had never looked this pathetic.

Old White reached out and helped him up. “Where’s Night Ten?”

Ample Time paused, recalling what he’d seen before being spat out.

“Probably still hanging onto that tendril... though I doubt he’s got much juice left.”

Then he noticed Falling Feather standing nearby, and froze slightly when he saw half of his face overtaken by fungal tissue. “Falling Feather...?”

Falling Feather coughed lightly. “Don’t ask. I got shot down. And this face? Let’s just say Little Feather patched me up.”

But Ample Time wasn’t bothered. Stepping forward, he grabbed Falling Feather’s shoulders with shining eyes. “I’m not asking about that. I mean, how do you feel right now?”

The intensity of his stare made Falling Feather instinctively step back half a pace. “I... feel fine? Why?”

That look, it was exactly like Mosquito’s whenever he was about to rope him into some stupid test flight.

Seeing Falling Feather’s wary face, Ample Time cleared his throat and spoke gravely. “Night Ten won’t last long... and I’ve realized something, conventional weapons can’t kill this thing.”

“Can’t kill it? As in...?”

“Exactly as it sounds! It’s already fused with the land. Its body spreads through every tunnel under the city center. Think about it, our weapons aren’t stronger than what the Post-War Reconstruction Committee had centuries ago. If the official archives weren’t lying, then the entire idea of destroying the Main Mother Body with explosives was doomed from the start. It doesn’t exist in one place, it’s everywhere!”

That might explain why the old exploration teams never found where its core actually lay.

Every coordinate they discovered had been correct, just fragments of the same creature.

And every time they destroyed a part of it, it would go dormant for a few years, then return, stronger, with all its previous combat experience intact.

Falling Feather stared at him in disbelief. “But you, didn’t you guys...”

“Hurt it? Sure,” Ample Time interrupted, nodding. “But that’s like a flea bite. Even if we hit it with everything we’ve got, the best we can do is what the Post-War Reconstruction Committee did, force it to hibernate for a couple of years. There’s only one way left to end it for good.”

Falling Feather knew exactly what he meant. They needed to unleash Plan B, the contingency the administrator had given them.

If the Main Mother Body couldn’t be destroyed, the one carrying Little Feather’s sub-entity, Falling Feather himself, would have to consume it.

But that required getting close enough to do it.

Noticing Falling Feather’s hesitation, Ample Time turned his gaze toward the still-retching maw.

“We’re standing right on the Main Mother Body’s head, and it's directly beneath our feet.”

“That,” he said, pointing toward the heaving pit, “Is the nearest entrance.”

1. PIKACHU I CHOOSE YOU ☜