The aurora cast down a pale green glow that shone upon the man's dark complexion, creating a strange deep green hue that made it seem reptilian.
At last, he spoke. "We aren't Judges, so we can't confirm that he's one hundred percent human."
"Although you say that," Hosen said in an exaggerated drawl, his arms crossed, "Flatland 2's pollution level is only two stars."
The dark-skinned man went silent for some time again. Then he said, "The average time taken for mutation to occur in Flatland 2 is four hours. I'll agree after four hours have passed."
"Fine," Hosen said. "If he still hasn't mutated by the time we finish gathering up the loot, we'll take him."
The dark-skinned man finally nodded. Then the three of them looked at each other, seeming to have reached an agreement.
"I'm Vance," the tall man in the middle said by way of self-introduction as he turned towards An Zhe.
"Hello," An Zhe said.
Hosen, who made him feel slightly repulsed, said, "Hosen."
The last man, the one who had been called "scum", was silent for a while before spitting out, "Anthony."
An Zhe greeted him as well, then added, "Thank you."
"No need for thanks," Vance said with a smile. "We're all fellow humans. Plus we just lost a teammate, so we're short-handed."
With those words, he walked onto the nearby monster head and directed the others. "We're leaving as soon as we finish harvesting the carcass. Move quickly."
As he spoke, Vance took out a pair of gloves and a long dagger from his backpack and tossed them to An Zhe. "You go remove the legs."
An Zhe caught the items, obediently responded, and walked ten or so paces forward before stopping next to the monster's halved body, where he put the gloves on and began to examine it.
The arthropod’s body was enormous, and its carapace was mostly smooth save for some places where long spines or protruding bulges stuck out. He looked down at the monster's legs. There were six altogether—slender and long, divided into three segments, and densely covered with shiny black fuzz.
On the other side, Vance and Anthony were taking care of the monster's head. They removed the carapace, allowing the brain and other fluids to flow out, then scraped the interior clean. Hosen was standing guard at the periphery.
So An Zhe also pulled out his dagger and attentively dug at the monster's joints. After approximately five minutes, he broke one of the joints, separating one leg from the monster's thorax. It fell to the ground, and viscous white brain-like fluid slowly leaked out from the opening and seeped into the yellow sand.
He heard Hosen say in a mocking voice, "Darling, don't vomit from disgust."
An Zhe didn't react, choosing instead to quietly continue digging at the next joint.
Not only did he feel nothing regarding this monster, he even felt that it was much cleaner than those animals that lived in the "Abyss".
But Hosen seemed to have no plans of letting him off the hook. Footsteps sounded behind him as Hosen walked over and pressed down on An Zhe's shoulder with his right hand, fingers sliding over it. "How old are you, sweetheart?"
An Zhe heard a sort of greed in his tone—the greed of animals in the face of food. But based on his limited understanding, humans wouldn't eat their own kind.
He calmly replied, "Nineteen."
An Ze was nineteen this year. He had consumed An Ze's genes, so he was probably nineteen or so as well.
"But you look to be only seventeen," Hosen said in a sharp voice with a raspy undertone, his snickers muffled in his chest.
An Zhe frowned, unsure how to answer.
"Hosen." Right at that moment, Vance's voice came from nearby. "Focus on standing guard."
Hosen made a contemptuous noise, then squeezed his shoulder a bit more before leaving.
An Zhe once again realized that among humans, each individual may have different characteristics. For example, An Ze was different from the humans who dug out his spore, and Vance was different from Hosen. He felt very grateful to Vance for stepping in when he did.
He lowered his head and continued to dig at the joints, dividing each leg into three segments. After he finished, he neatly stacked them up. The thing's carapace had a metallic sheen and was hard as stone, so they made crisp clacking sounds when they were stacked together.
By the time he removed all six legs, Vance and Anthony had also finished taking apart the head and came over to his half of the body. Vance took a look at the neatly stacked legs on the ground and smiled. "You're pretty diligent."
Then he said to Hosen, "Drive the car over here."
Without saying anything, Hosen turned and walked away.
An Zhe stood to one side and watched Vance and Anthony get started on the monster's thorax.
He asked, "Do you need my help?"
Vance, holding a black pincer-like tool the length of a human's lower leg in his gloved hands, asked, "You haven't come out here much, have you?"
"... Mm-hm," An Zhe replied.
"Then you can just wait over on the side." Vance pried away the piece of armor at the junction between the monster's thorax and abdomen with the pliers. The edges of the armor were irregular, forming a sharp black spine where it met the other pieces of armor, flashing with a chilly gray luster. Vance said, "This thing has a lot of spines. It’s easy to get pricked if you don’t have any experience handling them. Flatland 2's pollution level isn't high, but it is still possible to get infected that way.”
An Zhe obediently took a few steps back and watched them circle around the carcass and dismantle it at various points. They lifted away one piece of black carapace after another, and white viscera and organs spilled all over the ground.
As he watched, a dull roar started up. An Zhe looked to his right and saw a rectangular black armored car driving in their direction, looking like a huge crustacean-class monster—An Zhe was very familiar with the sight of it, for the team An Ze used to be a part of had five such armored cars.
The car drew near, and Hosen jumped down from it. Without even lifting his head, Vance said, "First help him carry the goods onto the car."
An Zhe made a sound of acknowledgment and picked up the armor pieces from the ground, then carefully tied them with rope and handed them to Hosen, who put them in the armored car's storage space.
The enormous monster shrank as they took it apart, and the number of armor pieces An Zhe picked up increased.
Just as he was tying up a stack of armor pieces with rope, he abruptly stopped moving.
On the spiny black armor piece beneath his hand, a few tiny droplets of liquid were congealing at the tip of a spine, dark and very difficult to discover if one did not look carefully.
He looked at the splashes of viscera on the ground and confirmed that all of the monster's internal fluids were white, yellow, or clear.
Then what were these dark droplets? He recalled the blood that flowed out of An Ze's body before he died.
An Zhe looked at Vance and Anthony. The two of them were thoroughly engrossed in dismantling the carcass, their expressions calm and everything seeming normal. As a result, An Zhe could only act as if nothing had happened. He bowed his head once more and tied up the armor pieces.
A long time later, they finally finished dismantling the carcass, and the three men seemed to also be convinced that An Zhe wouldn't suddenly turn into some deadly monster.
Vance said, "Get in the car, we're going back to the base. An Zhe, you come too."
A single armored car could hold seven or eight people, and there was also a space where people could rest. It was divided into three simple compartments, but each one was very cramped and had a low ceiling, so humans had to hunch over in order to walk around inside.
An Zhe was assigned the outermost space, the car door to his right, and he lay down with his head pillowed on his backpack. Anthony went up to the front to drive, Vance was next door to him, and Hosen occupied the innermost space.