Ch.7373. Ultimate Weapon

I was startled by the powerful wave emanating from Pyongyang that shook my very soul, but that was only momentary.

Quickly regaining my senses, I hurriedly turned my gaze toward the monsters that had been surrounding me───

‘…So this is how it ends.’

Seeing the devastated encirclement destroyed by the powerful wave that was strong enough to shake even my Grade 0 monster soul, I couldn’t hide my bitterness as I thought this.

Most of the monsters had their bodies ruptured, leaving no trace of their original form and becoming mere chunks of meat, while the facilities built for the encirclement had all been reduced to heaps of scrap metal.

It was the very definition of absurdity. Like a ninja suddenly barging into the middle of a story and massacring all the characters.

But regardless of that, the encirclement meant to trap and kill that thing from Pyongyang shouldn’t have ended up like this.

So I planned to gather the souls of the monsters shattered by the wave, call in reinforcements from the surrounding area to complete repairs, and only then check on the situation in Pyongyang, but…

‘…Good heavens.’

Looking at it now, that doesn’t seem to be necessary.

What I saw before my eyes was a terrifying giant, seemingly a kilometer tall, existing somewhere between rock and living creature.

Is this what it would look like if you skinned a living being and stuffed rocks inside instead? But the seams are too clean for that. For this being before me, the rock is simply part of its body.

But that’s not all. I could see the power moving this giant, and naturally, the identity of that power was the Pyongyang Hive Mind, or more precisely, judging by its strength, the main body…

‘…What?’

It was enough to make me doubt my eyes, but no matter how many times I looked, there was no mistake. Right now, the mental entity that could be called the main body of the Pyongyang Hive Mind was completely inhabiting that stone giant.

‘No, how is this…’

This was impossible even by the common sense of this world, and in the game, there had never been such a case. Until now, there had been variables, but they were more or less understandable… but this was truly a different matter.

A Grade 0 Hive Mind, clearly a psychic dimensional being designed as a psychic life form whose very essence exists in the psychic dimension, had directly appeared in the physical world.

When a psychic life form’s main body is composed of psychic energy, in the physical world, the psychic energy that makes up its body cannot stay cohesive and breaks apart wildly.

To use an analogy, the psychic dimension is like air, the physical world is like water, and the psychic energy that makes up psychic life forms is like hardened lumps of paint.

Therefore, if a psychic life form were to appear in the physical world as its main body without any preparation, it should dissolve and scatter like a lump of paint dropped in water…

Yet strangely, that thing’s main body has directly appeared in this physical world without any apparent issues.

‘…Could it be.’

Of course, having been an avid consumer of subculture during my human days, it’s not like I can’t guess why it remains intact despite manifesting its main body in the physical world.

Just as a demon might inhabit a machine or possess an empty shell—from dolls to corpses—it seems the Pyongyang Hive Mind somehow created that stone giant and then transferred its main body inside.

And examining that strange object under this assumption…

‘Wait… it can do this?’

After seeing through the design of the stone giant, I couldn’t help but admire its complex and precisely engineered structure.

I suspect it lifted and modified the entire ground near Pyongyang, but this went beyond that—it could rightfully be called a work of art.

It must have been severely lacking in energy, as it ground up all the biological facilities and monsters in Pyongyang to create biological facilities for manufacturing this giant, and those facilities probably produced the “parts” of the giant.

There were at least 80 massive biological cores—each as large as a city bus and producing unimaginable energy—like those possessed by True Dragons, embedded just in the torso alone.

The inside of what should be called its head was filled not with a brain but with something closer to a supercomputer made of protein and fat, and in the center of its face was embedded a huge, red, translucent jewel.

It was a psychic crystal—an ultra-rare material commonly used to relay and modulate psychic energy, and even store it (comparable to a mana stone in fantasy terms).

This psychic crystal was so enormous that I could say I’d never seen one this large even in the game, and its surface was densely engraved with all kinds of circuits.

It was designed to process massive amounts of psychic energy flowing into the crystal and emit it in the form of beams.

This was probably the stone giant’s basic attack.

‘The rock itself… nothing special.’

Unlike the various oversized organs in the stone giant, most of its body—exceeding 1km in height—was composed of ordinary soil and rock.

But when that ordinary rock forms a massive body over 1km tall, it can crush most monsters simply by its mass alone.

Its defensive power would be just that of a rock mass of the same size without force fields and psychic barriers, but with the addition of force field output and psychic barriers comparable to those protecting the White House, it’s a different story.

KWAAAAAAAAAANG───!!!!!

‘…It’s unscathed?’

South Korea must have noticed its existence, as they were frantically launching cruise missiles and ballistic missiles at the giant, but they couldn’t even scratch the psychic barrier, let alone hit the main body.

I know well the power of these missiles, filled with new explosives reverse-engineered from my suicide monsters’ biological explosive material, but…

‘…With this level of attack, it doesn’t even need to defend?’

The creature was ignoring the barrage of missiles with its barrier while slowly walking eastward toward my main base.

Due to its enormous size, its movements were quite slow, but with its massive stride and ability to ignore terrain, it would reach my base in about 8 hours.

WOOOOOONG───KUGUGUGUGUGUGUGUGUGU!!!!

And that’s assuming I use up all my monsters to somehow hinder its movement.

Obviously, I’m not going to sell my future just to buy time with no purpose for the future—I value my assets too much for that.

Therefore, I came to only one conclusion.

‘…I have to use it after all.’

Now is the time to use the anti-psychic bomb I’ve been saving.

※ ※ ※

The anti-psychic bomb.

Humans might be able to put it in a missile and fire it to the other side of the earth, but since there’s a risk that my base or its vicinity could be caught in it, I need to be extremely cautious about using it.

If my base gets caught in it by mistake, even I could lose everything I’ve built up so carefully.

‘I’m glad I modified it.’

If there’s one thing giving me hope right now, it’s that I’ve consistently modified the anti-psychic bomb and secured precision strike technology that’s dozens of times more advanced than humans’, at least in terms of range control.

This was possible solely because the anti-psychic bombs I created were actually modified monsters—in simple terms, my anti-psychic bombs can extremely narrow their range and inject anti-psychic waves only into the directly targeted object.

So to put it another way, if I can somehow get this bomb-monster, which resembles a pufferfish without fins, to penetrate that psychic barrier and touch the main body inside───

‘I guess if I drop several, one will get through somehow.’

The method I chose was to drop two bombs with a time interval between them.

If the explosion of the first anti-psychic bomb hits the psychic barrier and temporarily neutralizes it, the second bomb can directly hit the main body and shut it down completely.

Since that thing seems to trust its size and is taking all the human missiles head-on, I judged there was a good chance───

‘…I’m counting on you, Little Boy!’

Therefore, I bestowed the honor of naming the two anti-psychic bomb monsters that would carry out this glorious mission.

…Of course, what these two Little Boys, not integrated into the hive mind, would think of my reward is obvious.