Became a Failed Experimental Subject-Chapter 67: It’s Artificial

Gu Seoryong picked up one of the wriggling bugs with a reluctant expression and put it in her mouth.

“You’re eating that?”

“I’m not eating it because I want to. I’m eating it to analyze it with my ability.”

“Analyze?”

“Venom Alchemist. I can break down any component in detail with this tongue.”

Chew chew—she spat out what she’d been rolling around in her mouth and pointed to Sagugu with interest.

“Gugu? Can you clean up the rest of this mess?”

“Meow!”

“Also, bring me just one of those.”

CRACK! Sagugu, who’d been playing by chasing bug monsters, erased the area filled with corpses.

She froze the remaining bugs with a mist of ice and knocked them to the ground, then brought back a single monster corpse clamped in her mouth.

Gu Seoryong accepted the ice chunk and patted Sagugu’s head.

“Good girl, that’s our Gugu.”

“Gyaa~rururu....”

“Yeah, yeah. Go keep playing over there.”

“Meowww!”

Rubbing up against Gu Seoryong’s body in the form of a black panther, Sagugu immediately resumed her bug-chasing the moment she was dismissed.

With a scowl, Gu Seoryong bit into the bug trapped in the ice—about the size of a human palm—and crushed it.

She chewed thoughtfully, then spat it out with a ptooey.

From the disgusting clump of mud-colored sludge, a limp white thread-worm crawled out.

“As expected... these things are messed up.”

Gu Seoryong dissolved the muddy mass with acid venom, then pulled a flat metal flask from her jacket pocket.

The sharp smell of alcohol—she rinsed her mouth with harsh liquor and flicked her fingers habitually.

“These big beetles are definitely monsters. They’re tiny, but they’ve got cores. Just weak enough to avoid setting off the alarm systems—a swarm of Kill-Class and below bug-type monsters. You see it a lot with these kinds.”

The alarm only detects core fluctuations from monsters of Kill-Class and above.

Weaker monsters—weak enough that even normal humans can resist—don’t trigger it.

If a bug swarm grows large enough, it can be detected, but this swarm wasn’t big enough.

“And these thread-like worms... their bodily fluids match a monster’s composition, but they don’t have cores.”

“Monster fluid? Are you saying these bugs are monsters?”

I had already thought it strange that bugs were crawling out of human bodies—but monster fluid?

Still, without cores, they couldn’t be monsters.

Even by my senses, the tiny thread-worms didn’t feel like monsters.

“Well... can we really call them monsters? I don’t know either. They don’t have cores, and yet they somehow have monster-like fluids....”

“Maybe their cores are just too small to detect?”

“Nope. That’s why I bit into it, remember? This bug definitely doesn’t have a core. It’s like... neither bug nor monster. Where the hell did these things come from? Oh my—!”

Neither bug nor monster—

Just then, Sagugu landed in front of Gu Seoryong with a beetle in her mouth.

Seeing her, Gu Seoryong freaked out and smacked Sagugu on the head.

“Mewww!”

“Didn’t I tell you not to eat those?! Bad. Bad girl. Spit it out.”

“Mew-nyaa....”

“Ah, come on. Say ‘Ah~’”

Ptooey. When Sagugu spat out the beetle monster’s corpse, Gu Seoryong pried open her mouth and started pulling out thread-worms one by one—crushing them as she went.

Shockingly, the thread-worms had already burrowed into the mucous membranes of a Despair-Class monster.

“Incredible.”

“Right? Parasites in a Despair-Class monster—ridiculous.”

“Parasites?”

“What, you don’t know what parasites are? Bugs that burrow into and live inside another creature’s body.”

Gu Seoryong shrugged and sighed as she sat down on Sagugu’s back.

“I’m seriously losing it. Sagugu went and ate a bunch of these beetles somewhere, then suddenly started acting out.”

“Acting out?”

“Not to the point you’d care, no. Just stuff like ‘It’s itchy,’ ‘I’m hungry,’ ‘I’m thirsty’—whining, not listening, being stubborn, breaking stuff.”

“Meowng!”

Having her cheeks pinched, Sagugu mewled in protest and rubbed her head against me.

To Sagugu—who saw me as her Oppa—that was a plea.

I answered by placing my hand on her head and gently pushing it away.

“Thanks to her, the hideout I just built got trashed. Seriously, why do cat brats love breaking shit so much?”

“I’m not a cat.”

“Meow?”

“...Anyway, if you swallow those parasites wrong, they’ll settle in your core and trigger monster instincts. I managed to pull all of them out of Sagugu’s body, but if they dig into you, I wouldn’t be able to do a thing.”

“Mm.”

Triggering instinct—that means amplifying the hunger to eat humans.

If that happened to me, someone suppressing those instincts by force... I might actually devour a human.

Worried, I picked up one of the beetles and placed it in my mouth.

“Hey—what are you doing?”

“I’m checking whether they can burrow into my body.”

As the heat of my mouth spread, the limp thread-worms began to stir and tried to dig in.

They secreted anesthetic, and astonishingly, dissolved my inner membranes without any pain.

To think something this weak could injure my body—I transformed into my Phoenix form, intrigued.

Even then, the worms maintained their shape inside the flames—for a few seconds.

FWOOSH.

As the worms burned to ash, Gu Seoryong muttered in disbelief.

“You really went for the dumbest possible method....”

“It’s the fastest and most certain.”

“Hmph. Well, good thing you don’t seem like someone who needs to worry. I’d really rather not be hunted down by a CXI who’s lost his mind to instinct.”

Gu Seoryong seemed relieved by how easily I incinerated the worms.

In the end, they were weak.

No matter how deep they burrow, if you can shift into a form made of fire or lightning, you can eliminate them instantly.

But... the sensation I felt during those brief seconds when they did survive—that was the problem.

“No... these things tried to sync with my monster core.”

“Huh? So that’s why Sagugu couldn’t shake them off even when she used Shadowform?”

When a body is transformed into a formless shape, the core synchronizes with the monster’s physical body.

The parasites tried to insert themselves into that synchronization, attempting to transform into an energy form with it.

They couldn’t withstand my output and burned away—but if it had been an ordinary Despair-Class monster... the moment the parasite embedded itself, it would be impossible to remove it with their own power.

“Fascinating.”

How could something like this even exist?

As a monster, I couldn’t comprehend the existence of such a creature.

At that moment, another handful of beetle monsters spilled from the sky.

A barely-alarming swarm—just enough to stay under the radar of the detection system—these beetles quickly began tearing into the corpses of the suicides.

Something about it felt wrong.

“I came out to do a bit of pest control so parasites wouldn’t latch onto Sagugu, but instead I find humans offing themselves, chanting ‘Black Cat, Black Cat’—seriously, this is weird. The Samwon Church I know used to say nonsense like, ‘Even if we die to monsters, it’s all God’s will,’ and comforted each other. They weren’t this far gone. Why are they crazier now?”

“They called me the Apostle of God. They begged for salvation.”

“So they’re literally asking you to kill them? Their corpses swarm with parasites, then after a while, beetles come down and eat them... Doesn’t that sound messed up to you?”

I nodded at Gu Seoryong’s words.

Humans infested with thread-worms. Beetles dropping from the sky in just the right numbers to avoid triggering the alarms. Thread-worms burrowing into beetle bodies to escape.

The corpses of the suicides get devoured without a trace—and once their meal is done, the beetles don’t attack others, but flee skyward.

Humans, parasites, bug monsters—working in perfect mechanical sequence, like gears in a machine.

“It feels like the whole point is to get them into your body, right?”

“That’s what it seems like.”

“So basically... they’re trying to plant those parasites all over inside you. But who?”

The whole setup was too artificial.

This wasn’t behavior driven by monster instinct.

Something—or someone—was directing the beetle monsters.

To feed me humans carrying these thread-worms.

“Only dropping in numbers that won’t set off alarms? It’s way too deliberate. No way these bugs know about detection systems. Something has to be controlling the monsters. Probably tied to someone high up in Samwon Church. The cult leader, maybe? But if the cult leader’s just a human, how would they control monsters? Even if they’re weaker than Kill-Class, they’re still monsters.”

“Maybe they’re controlling them with the parasites?”

“But those parasites are monsters too, right? That makes it even weirder. How do you manipulate something that dumb—things that shouldn’t even have a speck of intelligence?”

Gu Seoryong picked up a piece of a human corpse and bit into it.

She chewed, spat it out, and wiped her mouth.

“I don’t get it either. There’s no trace of mind-control chemicals in the leftover blood... but I’m certain their impulses are being manipulated.”

Hearing that, something clicked, and I asked Gu Seoryong:

“Then are the people who kill themselves being controlled too?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. Humans already have suicidal tendencies, right? If someone can mess with Sagugu’s impulses, messing with humans is probably easy.”

“Is there a way to remove the parasites from humans?”

“Nope. It’s not like they regenerate constantly like Sagugu. Do you have any idea how hard it was to pull each one out of her? Had to knock her out with anesthetic, inject luminous fluid, cut into the wounds and yank them out as they tunneled through her body. That kind of thing—only I can do it, and only regenerating monsters can endure it.”

“Hunyaa...”

Sagugu trembled in fear as Gu Seoryong described the parasite removal process.

In short, they look like humans—but in reality, they can’t be considered human anymore.

Living nests of parasites.

Not human.

Things I can’t distinguish.

“Haaah... For now, I guess Sagugu and I will have to help the humans.”

“Help the humans?”

“I hate having things like this in my territory. I’ll be stepping out quietly now and then to do some pest control. Infected humans, bugs—Gugu, come on.”

“Bye-bye, Oppa!”

With those ominous words, Gu Seoryong stood up and pointed to her shadow, and Sagugu sank into it.

Then she approached the leftover corpses the beetles hadn’t managed to devour and sprayed them with acid venom.

“I’m only saying this because I care about you—going forward, you’d better kill anything like this the moment you see it.”

Sssssss— Disgusting smoke rose as she left behind one final warning:

“These things? I think they’re going to be way more annoying than the Bad Cats.”

****

After the night I met Sagugu and Gu Seoryong in front of the human corpses,

I started not only clearing underground monsters—but keeping a close watch on the sky too.

Sitting on a tall rooftop, catching beetle monsters, I’d sometimes feel Sagugu’s spatial manipulation far in the distance.

But just like normal insects, no matter how many I eliminated, the bug-type monsters never stopped.

Unlike underground monsters, who stayed gone for a while after a cleanup, the beetles flying through the sky would just return, filling the gaps left behind.

Wherever the beetles gathered, humans from Samwon Church would show up.

And the moment they saw me, they’d kill themselves, ⊛ Nоvеlιght ⊛ (Read the full story) begging to be eaten.

Whenever I saw one of their corpses, I burned it before the beetles could take a bite—killing the parasites.

But no matter how many times I burned them, the humans from Samwon Church and the beetles just kept appearing.

How many times had this repeated?

Eventually, I began to understand the meaning behind Gu Seoryong’s warning.

“Ooooh... Black Cat...!”

“Black Cat! Please!”

Some even started wearing their W-City citizen badges around their necks, to avoid being interrogated by heroes asking, “Are you really a W-City citizen?”

One of them climbed a rooftop and took their own life.

From the slowly cooling corpse of a W-City citizen, white threads began to crawl out.