EM CH4

Chapter 4: Equipping the Monstrosity Core: Goat Horns

“Ngh…” Yu An clutched his eye. Between the gaps of his fingers, the chaotic patterns on the surface of the Aberrant Core shifted and converged into the horizontal, rectangular pupil unique to a goat.

The screen of the Core Storage Analyzer altered as well. The goat icon shrank and moved to the left side, while a countdown appeared on the right, starting from ten minutes and ticking down second by second.

“Yu An, you formed a link with that core? Couldn’t you have asked me first… Urgh!” Zhao Ran was anxious to the extreme, his attention entirely fixated on Yu An. While he was speaking into the earpiece, the goat-headed man let out a resonant bleat and charged toward the source of the sound.

The most terrifying aspect of the goat-headed man was undoubtedly the pair of blade-like horns on its head. Sharp and gleaming, with just a slight upward flick, an opponent’s intestines would surely be pierced through, flesh and blood spilling everywhere.

Zhao Ran leaped upward, both hands seizing the steel pipes along the ceiling, swinging his entire body up. Light as a matador’s red cape, he easily evaded a violent charge from the goat-headed man.

This fellow was vastly stronger than the one killed outside the surveillance room door. An aura of danger swept rapidly through the entire corridor like turned-on gas.

“Damn sheep, messing up my important business…” Zhao Ran maintained a steady distance from it, observing its movements. He had killed eight hundred if not a thousand Aberrants with his bare hands, but this one was unusually sturdy.

Thoroughly enraged by being toyed with, the goat-headed Aberrant roared and pivoted back. Zhao Ran held his breath in the dark. Seizing the brief window where the monster lost its bearings, he bounded off the wall and flipped to hang from the front of the goat-headed man’s chest. Relying on a supple burst of force, his left hand drove forward; his fingertips pierced through the creature’s abdomen like knives. With a twist and an outward wrench of his wrist, he pulled an Aberrant Core straight out of the bloody flesh.

This core was cobalt blue, vivid and bright.

Yet the monster was astonishingly resilient, continuing to charge forward carrying Zhao Ran without a split-second pause. In a flash, its sharp horns dug deep into the wall. With a resounding thud, the wall plaster burst and rolled outward as smoke and debris scattered. Zhao Ran slammed violently into the surface, his back indenting a massive hollow in the wall.

There was more than one core in its body?

The hemostatic gauze on Zhao Ran’s flank was completely soaked through with fresh blood, bleeding through the fabric and dripping down the hem of his shirt. Unfortunately, this injury was too much in the way; any slight movement caused his limbs to temporarily lose their strength, or else why would he have wasted so much time on a mere sheep?

Although his guts hadn’t been gouged out by those horns, he was pinned firmly high up against the wall, his feet dangling in the air with nowhere to gain leverage.

He turned off the earpiece microphone, his fingers stroking the ridges of the goat horns, and asked in a low voice, “You didn’t cause trouble earlier, yet you chose today of all days… How should I deal with you?”

Zhao Ran parted his slender lips in a wide grin. Pain caused his eyes to become bloodshot, gradually burning with a scarlet sheen in the dim environment.

“Consider it your bad luck, little lamb. In your next life, don’t get in my way.”

The goat-headed man sank downward, looking as if something bizarre had latched onto its legs. It shook its heavy head to look down, but darkness enveloped the space below its waist.

Zhao Ran’s shoulders trembled as he couldn’t help laughing, but he was interrupted by a cool tone coming through the earpiece.

“Interviewer, move away from its head.”

“Hm?” Zhao Ran reined in his expression. Sensing the sound of wind from deep within the corridor, he immediately lifted his head and flattened his body against the wall, turning to look down the cavernous hallway.

Several ward doors had been pulverized by the goat-headed man, leaving behind collapsed ruins of walls, while iron bars outside the windows dismembered the moonlight into sharp, angular fragments.

A flash of cold glint spun out of the darkness. It was a forged-steel dagger, whirling straight toward the goat’s head.

Carrying a heavy, ferocious force, it struck the goat skull squarely at the temple. As if hit by the impact of a Magnum bullet, the goat-headed man was thrown back.

Losing the support of the horns, Zhao Ran, who had been pinned to the wall, dropped down. His toes tapped the ground as he skipped back two steps, looking back toward the direction the dagger had come from.

Within the shadowy corridor, the silhouette of a human figure emerged. Curved goat horns sprouted from his head, and embedded in his left socket was a pale blue goat eye that dragged an afterimage of blue light as he walked.

Yu An gradually peeled away from the abyss behind him and stepped into Zhao Ran’s line of sight.

After a painful process of adaptation, the goat eye could now turn as freely as a natural eye, though Yu An himself wasn’t entirely clear on what had happened.

Zhao Ran lightly hopped back to Yu An’s side, frowning as he pressed on his wound to dull the pain. When he pulled his hand away, his palm was covered in blood.

Paying it little mind, he grabbed Yu An by the collar, hauled him in close, and peered at him: “So dark, so close, and you dared throw a knife? What if you had hit me?”

Yu An looked down, picked at his fingertips, and answered honestly: “I wouldn’t pass the interview. Throwing a knife does carry risks. If it were a gun, I definitely wouldn’t have hit you, Interviewer.”

Wouldn’t pass the interview. Zhao Ran maintained his smile, completely fuming inside.

He glanced at the Core Storage Analyzer hooked at Yu An’s waist, which displayed remaining usage time: 07:56.

“Who taught you to pick up random things and shove them into your eye? Some college student you are.” Resigned, Zhao Ran gave him a push forward. “You have eight minutes left on that enhanced strength and agility buff. Don’t waste it.”

The goat-headed man’s toughness far exceeded Yu An’s imagination. Having been scorched by flames and with a knife lodged through its temple, it still hadn’t died on the spot. It simply stood up with the knife sticking out of its head, its two goat eyes swiveling uncoordinatedly in a deeply unsettling manner.

The charred fur clung in curls against its coarse, leathery hide. Its ossified skull rose high, nostrils spewing two plumes of hot air. The killing intent within it could no longer be contained and flared in every direction. Its iron hooves pawed at the floor before it charged madly at the two of them.

“Why back away? Show me what you’ve got.” Zhao Ran blocked Yu An’s retreat and switched on the buzzer on the Core Storage Analyzer. “Go on, wreck it.”

The buzzer emitted an ear-splitting beeping sound, instantly locking the goat-headed man’s target onto Yu An.

“…!” Yu An had to bite the bullet and step forward. To his astonishment, an unprecedented burst of speed exploded beneath his feet. With just a light leap, he launched into the air, his back grazing the ceiling as he flew past, his body supple and brimming with power like a mountain goat.

Zhao Ran moved to the wall while clutching his wound, but kept his eyes locked on the battle as he switched on the earpiece microphone.

“Don’t charge blindly. Half a meter to your left, there’s a heating pipe you can use as a foothold.”

“It’s approaching from your one o’clock, aiming for your feet. You have three seconds to circle behind it. Don’t be afraid, jump right over.”

Under the disruptive noise of the buzzer, the goat-headed man couldn’t tell who was truly orchestrating the battle.

Yu An crouched with his feet aligned on the heating pipe to maintain balance. He hesitated for a second, and precisely because of this momentary delay, he failed to follow Zhao Ran’s instruction in time. Sure enough, a massive hand matted with black hair swept out from the shadows.

Forced to dodge, he felt somewhat at a loss.

“Oh, don’t panic. The fault tolerance of the routes I give newbies is usually very high. Now grab the dagger in its head and pull it out.”

Yu An zeroed in on the position and leaped. His right hand firmly took hold of the dagger’s hilt. Kicking outward with his long legs, he used the counterforce to wrench the dagger free. The goat-headed man stumbled, but the force wasn’t enough to make it tumble backward.

“It’s about to strike at your weak left flank. Turn around. Right now, grab its horns.”

Taking advantage of the moment the monster surged forward, Yu An plunged the dagger into its thick back, treating it like an ice axe. Using that foothold, he flipped onto the goat-headed man’s back, gripping the horns tightly with both hands and doing everything he could to steer its direction.

Yu An panted heavily, his heart in his throat. He thought to himself that back in the nurses’ station, it hadn’t been this tough to fight. Could it be that an Aberrant’s strength grows as mutation time extends?

The goat-headed man shook its head wildly, throwing its massive bulk recklessly backward against the wall in an attempt to grind the human clinging to its back into paste.

Seeing that Yu An was about to take the brunt of the blow, Zhao Ran suddenly hooked his foot around the fire extinguisher in the fire corner and kicked it toward him.

Yu An’s adaptability exceeded expectations. In just a few minutes, he had formed a tacit understanding with Zhao Ran. Without needing any verbal explanation, he understood the intent: seizing the moment, he hurled the dagger with all his might. The dagger buzzed through the air as it whirled, driving deeply into the canister wall of the fire extinguisher.

The base ability of the Monstrosity Core: Goat Horns was “enhanced strength and agility.” The strength extended to weapons held in Yu An’s hands, making the impact delivered by the dagger no less powerful than a high-velocity bullet.

The tremendous blast rattled the skulls of every living creature present. White chemical powder from the extinguisher burst into the air, blanketing half the corridor in an instant.

Enveloped in the dense white fog, the goat-headed man completely lost its vision, while its hearing was thoroughly scrambled by the massive explosion, leaving its head buzzing and all five senses nullified.

Yu An swept through the air and mounted the goat-headed Aberrant’s head. Clamping his knees tightly around the hard skull, he snapped it viciously.

A series of bone-crunching sounds made one’s teeth ache. The goat-headed man’s massive form shuddered and collapsed like a skyscraper, crashing to the floor and fracturing the tiles into spiderweb cracks.

Yu An leaped down from behind the goat’s neck, kicked the still-spraying extinguisher into the ward, and covered his nose and mouth while waving away the surrounding dust.

“So choking.”

“Nicely done.” Zhao Ran brushed away the dust cloud before him. Once the smoke cleared, he walked up, crouched in front of the goat-headed Aberrant, and stroked its body carefully with his fingertips. Pinpointing the location, he drove his hand in cleanly, searching thoroughly through the flesh.

Yu An could only squat quietly to the side, watching and studying him.

Other than wearing a pair of thin deerskin gloves, his hands appeared unremarkable, yet they could easily pierce and slice through muscle tissue, sharper than a freshly honed blade. The surface of the gloves seemed coated with a special substance that let him effortlessly flick off bloodstains without retaining any grime.

Gutting a creature with his bare hands brought not the slightest disgust to his face; instead, he looked downright pleased, as if deriving physical comfort from it.

Yu An didn’t see anything wrong with that and squatted down beside him. Since the interviewer hadn’t given him any specific task, he might as well squat quietly nearby and slack off.

With nothing to do, he used the dagger to scrape a patch of hairless skin from the goat-headed Aberrant, then sliced off a piece of meat charred by the alcohol fire. Stabbing it on the tip of the knife, he sniffed it; it seemed to smell just like mutton.

He tentatively took a bite. Indeed, it tasted like roast whole mutton, just without any salt, though the skin was rather crispy. It seemed a mutated goat was still a goat at its core, with no fundamental difference.

It could walk upright and appeared to have developed mild intelligence, yet the flavor of its meat hadn’t changed. Could it still count as food? Yu An sank into philosophical contemplation.

While he was studying this, he suddenly felt a gaze land upon him. Yu An lifted his head to find the interviewer staring at him with a complex expression.

“Tsk, what are you even…”

Yu An licked his fingertips, stood up, and backed away a bit to avoid getting in his boss’s way. He stopped paying attention to what Zhao Ran was doing and touched his own head instead.

Two small goat horns poked out from between his hair, making Yu An feel a little awkward. He tried pulling up his hood to cover them, but the sharp tips pierced through the hood with a light touch, remaining exposed on the outside.

A bizarre sensation coursed through his body, leaving him brimming with vigor, as if plugged into a charger.

He tried taking a couple of strides, not expecting the speed of a hundred-meter champion to explode beneath his feet. He turned into a shadow flashing past the narrow corridor, but couldn’t brake in time. With a crash, he blasted right through the wall next to a ward door.

“…” Yu An dusted the dirt off himself, rubbed his forehead, cautiously glanced back at the human-shaped hole left in the brick wall, and shoved his hands into his pockets as he pushed the door open and walked out.

He touched his left eye. It didn’t hurt; in fact, there wasn’t much sensation at all. When he covered his right eye, his left eye could actually see through the Aberrant Core. A human’s field of vision is around 200 degrees, but this eyeball offered nearly 340 degrees, which seemed to be the visual field of a goat.

Rounding it off, that meant he hadn’t lost an eye at all, and had even made a massive profit of an extra 140 degrees of vision.

“Come over here, stop causing damage.” Zhao Ran finally dug out another Aberrant Core from behind the big fellow’s heart, raising both cores to display them to Yu An.

One was cobalt blue and the other purple. Zhao Ran rolled them in his grip like health baoding balls, dirty blood trickling along his gloves onto his snow-white arms.

“This goat had only just mutated and hadn’t adapted to its cores yet. Otherwise, how could a dual-core Aberrant be brought down so easily? Your luck isn’t bad.”

Zhao Ran placed the two newly harvested cores into the Core Storage Analyzer one by one. After scanning, it began reading the data.

The blue one was darker in shade than the one Yu An was currently using, and its data had changed accordingly.

Name: Monstrosity Core: Goat Horns

Origin: Goat-headed Man

Category: Common Species

Rank Assessment: Tier 2 Blue (Cobalt Blue)

Base Abilities: Significant Enhancement to Strength and Agility

Usage Restriction: Cumulative 30 minutes of use

Description: Even greater strength! Even greater miracles!

Resonance Condition: Unknown

For cores of the same color, a deeper hue signified greater rarity. Compared to the previous one that could only be used for ten minutes, this core could actually last half an hour.

But that wasn’t important; what mattered was the purple one.

After loading for a few seconds, the Core Storage Analyzer’s electronic voice read aloud:

Name: Functional Core: Satan’s Guidance

Origin: Goat-headed Man

Category: Common Species

Rank Assessment: Tier 2 Purple (Mineral Purple)

Base Abilities: Causes the target to lose all sense of direction

Usage Restriction: Cumulative 6 uses

Description: Let the Devil guide you to where your soul belongs.

Resonance Condition: Unknown

“Blue, purple, red, silver, gold. Among the five colors, the later they come, the rarer they are, and within the same color family, deeper tones are rarer. Rare cores are expensive beyond your imagination.” Zhao Ran explained the grading criteria for Aberrant Cores, shifted toward the wall, sighed deeply, and leaned back to rest.

He sat resting against the mottled wall with one leg bent. The corridor lights were dim, but his skin was luminescent white, like a night moth.

Yu An sat down alongside him, unsure what he had done wrong to make the interviewer so downhearted.

Zhao Ran kept his eyes closed for quite a while before gathering himself, deeply exasperated: “I really never imagined someone could be reckless enough to jam an Aberrant Core into their eye without even asking.”

“Is there a problem?”

“Humans who can use Aberrant Cores are called Vessels. Lucky people like that are few and far between, and a missing body part is only one necessary condition.” Zhao Ran let out a long sigh. “Every Vessel can only embed a single core into a missing spot. Once you shove it in, it grows into your body, belonging to you until the day you die.”

“That’s why anyone with a Vessel constitution chooses the lifelong core with supreme caution. Most Vessels pick a high-grade, long-lasting core to embed into themselves.”

“If you become my intern, I’d definitely use all my resources and connections to find you the highest-grade, most combat-ready core.” Zhao Ran spoke slowly, his eyelids reddening slightly, growing more despondent by the word. “Yet look at you, embedding a Tier 1 Blue without a second word. Heavens, I might as well drop dead.”

“It just grows into the body?” Yu An blinked. He raised his hand, pressed his eyelid, and popped the Aberrant Core right out of his left socket without much effort. “I took it out.”

Then he lined it up with his socket and shoved it back in: “I put it back in.”

“?” Zhao Ran’s mouth fell open, stunned.

Yu An looked back at him, wagging his little goat tail.