Ch.7171. The True Nature of the Nanosuit

The severed head of the monster (Hive Starlight) falls to the ground, with a fountain of blood gushing from the neck of its collapsing body.

‘…What is this thing?’

Despite clearly being the victor, the agent’s expression remained dark.

The reason was simple—the mid-level monster he had just faced was far stronger than he had imagined.

As an agent, he was merely a C-rank psychic user at best, but in terms of pure close combat skill, he was among the top handful of fighters in the entire country.

Even during his time at the National Hunter Academy, his swordsmanship surpassed that of active-duty hunters, and with practical experience, his abilities had fully blossomed, making him extraordinarily powerful.

Yet now, this top-tier mid-level agent equipped with high-grade equipment to compensate for any deficiencies had struggled against a mere humanoid monster.

From their first encounter, the monster had reacted and moved a step faster, and during their exchange, every attack it launched was potentially lethal.

Even for a Hive Mind monster that could enhance its abilities through collective intelligence, it made no sense to allocate such sophisticated combat skills to a mere mid-level monster.

Surely, something was hidden here…

‘Ah, forget it. I should just report and get out of here.’

As a field agent, it wasn’t his place to know such things. He shook the blood from his energy sword and prepared to move on.

But then.

‘…Wait a minute.’

Looking at the cross-section of the severed neck of the humanoid monster, an ominous thought struck him, and he approached the head lying on the ground.

Though his position had been detected by the Hive Mind and he needed to evacuate quickly, that seemed trivial compared to what concerned him now.

‘…’

The agent bent down to pick up the head, inserted his fingers between the carapace and flesh of the head section, and peeled away the outer shell—

“Oh.”

What emerged beneath the facial carapace was, surprisingly, the face of a young blonde girl, still bearing traces of youth.

Thud.

Shocked by the revelation, the agent dropped the head.

He had been controlling his emotions by rationalizing that he was killing humanity’s enemies rather than intelligent beings that resembled humans—not in a negative sense of self-justification, but to ease his mental burden. Now, a decapitated head appeared before him.

Naturally, an agent who had experience cutting down monsters but not humans couldn’t help but be shaken…

‘Looking at the legs… it’s definitely humanoid, but not human.’

The reverse-jointed legs and twisted skeletal structure below the neck were clearly different from a human’s, allowing him to quickly calm himself and prepare to hastily retreat.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

‘…Too late.’

A male-form humanoid monster similar to the one he had just defeated dropped from the sky, pointing four energy shooters—two on its arms and two on auxiliary arms extending from its back—directly at him.

Wooooooong—!

‘Activate!’

KWAGAGAGAGAGAGAGAGAGAGAGAGANGGG—!!!!!

Energy bullets rained down on the agent as he hastily activated his psychic barrier. The bullets exploded upon contact, creating a thunderous noise and making the barrier fluctuate violently.

No matter how specialized his suit was for prolonged combat, there was no way to withstand such bombardment for an extended period.

He was about to activate his energy sword again to make a decisive move when—at that moment, he sensed something strange about the monster before him.

The source of this feeling was the monster’s appearance.

While it shared the characteristic of being a humanoid monster that seemed to wear metal armor, strangely, this one’s armor appeared severely damaged and deteriorated.

Pieces of armor were torn away in various places, revealing unhealed, wounded flesh underneath.

Moreover, noticing his intention to engage in close combat, the monster had already put away its weapons and instead held something in its hand that looked oddly familiar…

“What is that?!”

At that moment, he recognized the weapon. What this tattered machine was holding was none other than—the NS-34’s standard-issue weapon, the Nano-Chain Sword, commonly known as the Whirling Blade.

The famous weapon, whose blade emitted light as nanometer-sized teeth rotated at ultra-high speeds, was now in the hands of this monster… no, that classification seemed inadequate now.

“What the hell? Why is something like that… here?”

Faced with these inexplicable phenomena, the agent felt his frustration mounting, but he still prepared to confront the enemy—

“Gack! Keuuuuuuuuuh—!!!”

Suddenly, an excruciating pain spread from his spine where the nano-suit control device was attached throughout his entire body, causing him to scream and collapse to the ground.

The pain felt like his skin was being peeled back and the flesh underneath slowly torn away—enough to justify such a reaction.

As time passed, the pain intensified until it enveloped his entire body, but eventually, as it maintained a constant intensity, he adapted to it and began to feel something strange.

‘I can’t feel my body… but how am I moving right now?’

Literally, all physical sensations were numb, yet bizarrely, he could barely detect through his severely weakened psychic abilities that his body was still moving.

Unable to comprehend the situation, he agonized endlessly before finally reaching a desperate conclusion.

‘…No way.’

He suspected that his entire body was now controlled by the nano-suit, which was itself under the psychic control of the monster—and this guess was almost entirely correct.

With one exception: the nano-suit had been designed from the beginning as an infiltration-type monster meant to take over its wearer and use them as a psychic battery.

He could not move his mouth, could not do anything except scream.

※ ※ ※

Separate from the incident unfolding in the deep forest, the current war situation was… well, what was there to say?

With most of its territory lost and surrounded, the Pyongyang Hive Mind was trapped, and simply waiting patiently would cause it to wither away.

Its territory had shrunk to less than 1/10 of its original size, all external passages were blocked by my monsters, and every pipeline bringing in external energy had been severed.

Most of its subordinate monsters had been turned into metal statues by the nano-virus, and its headquarters in Pyongyang, having consumed too much energy for too long, could barely maintain its biological facilities without external supply.

The energy it had hidden deep underground had been spent on repairing facilities previously destroyed by the Special Order and on producing monsters, naturally limiting the number of remaining monsters in Pyongyang to an estimated 100,000 at most.

In contrast, our forces numbered just over 1 billion. Obviously, virus-infected monsters that were half-metallized had no chance against healthy monsters that outnumbered them more than a thousand to one—so all we had to do was wait.

Using the anti-psychic ability—a type of transcendent psychic power I gained upon reaching Grade 0—I searched for any surviving monsters outside the encirclement to completely eliminate the Pyongyang Hive Mind, which could revive as long as even one of its subordinates remained alive.

There were surprisingly many monsters outside the encirclement around Pyongyang, but most were just remnants that could be easily captured if the Hive Starlight ganged up on them.

Additionally, we were developing a machine that could temporarily isolate specific spaces and cut off all psychic connections within them, so hunting down the remnants would soon be a non-issue.

Anyway, while we were hunting these remnants, the Pyongyang Hive Mind was naturally trying to break through the encirclement and send out its remaining forces.

It concentrated its few monsters at single points for breakthrough attempts and actively utilized its last remaining high-grade (Grade 2) monsters to somehow create openings—

KWAGAGAGAGAGAGAGAGAGAGAGAGA—

‘Oh great, another Meteor? Doesn’t it ever get tired of that?’

The most annoying thing was the wide-area psychic attacks that the damned thing kept casting.