Day Three: The Giant Mole and the Awakening (1)
Chirr. Chirr. Chet-chet-chet.
I watched, dazed, as the darkness around me slowly drew back and the world brightened by inches. Before I knew it everything was flooded with light, and the bright chatter of birdsong had started up.
"Nnngh..."
I hadn't been able to pass out cold the way I had that first night. Afraid an aberrant might show up, I'd spent the whole night dozing and jolting awake, and my head was stuffed with cotton. Something kept squirming around inside my skull, too, grating on my nerves.
That squirming something was, in fact, the real reason I couldn't sleep properly.
Eyes open, I saw nothing—it was pitch-dark—and heard nothing either. But close them for even a little while and I could feel something wriggling all around me. Sleep? As if.
After I'd startled awake about five times I got so irritated I forced both eyes wide and hunted for the slightest movement. As if anything was going to be visible.
By the end I'd even grown grateful for whatever was keeping me from sinking under. I was scared that if I slept too deeply, I wouldn't notice an aberrant appearing at all.
A flutter of wings.
A bird smaller than my palm—brown and blue and white and yellow, every color at once—alighted on the tip of the branch I was sitting on and cocked its head this way and that.
"...So there really are birds here."
Maybe that squirming something had been an insect. If birds lived here, there had to be insects for them to eat.
"But I didn't see a single fish in the river."
My vision in both eyes was about 1.8—well past twenty-twenty. Even so, when I'd looked down at the river from the tree yesterday, there hadn't been a single fish. I hadn't met a single animal, either.
Birds and insects meant an ecosystem could hold together, and yet there were this few animals. It was strange.
"Still, not seeing any aberrants is better."
...Ah. Was the lack of aberrants because of that giant woman?
A memory surfaced late: somewhere I'd read that most one-eyed giants ranked from upper-tier up to Peak-Rank. And the aberrant biology text had said that the higher an aberrant's tier, the more sharply it reacted to other aberrants nearby.
The cause, it turned out, was Phase Power. If another aberrant existed, it took that as an invasion of its territory and its means of staying alive, flew into an extreme rage, and tried to kill without a single question asked. Ability users took Phase Power into their bodies to grow their abilities, so I'd heard that an aberrant meeting one saw an enemy and attacked.
Was that why there were no animals, and no aberrants?
The higher an aberrant's tier, the less it ate, sustaining itself by absorbing Phase Power—but there was no way it ate nothing its whole life. So the giant woman had eaten the animals, which was why there were hardly any, and she'd beaten every aberrant to death while insisting this ground was hers. The only things that had survived in any ordinary way were birds like that one.
"...Wait."
All at once I remembered the giant woman leaving me behind and simply passing on.
Why? I'd entered the Phase World too. I was absorbing Phase Power, and my body's constitution was gradually changing—if she was a high-ranking aberrant, she should have noticed me.
...
I don't get it. I can't understand why. I don't even know what it was about...
...Ah. Turn my thoughts over a little and my head goes heavy again. My eyes hurt, too.
"This is annoying..."
I was rubbing my eyes with both hands when they flew open.
For an instant it struck me that the bird might be an aberrant as well, and a chill ran through one side of my chest—but I shook my head. If it really were one, it wouldn't be chirping loud enough for me to hear. It would already have rushed me and attacked. I absorbed Phase Power too, after all.
"Then what put those wounds on the giant woman's body?"
There had been a number of marks, as if something sharp had cut her and stabbed her. A bladed weapon? Or something with claws, or fangs?
My eyes went to the bone-dry mud caked all over me. Maybe she had smeared herself with mud to kill her own scent—to ambush the aberrant that had wounded her.
I rested a while, turning it over gently, and kept rubbing my stiff, stinging eyes. The fog in my head was clearing, and my thoughts were starting to pick up speed.
I undid the school-uniform jacket and the belt I'd knotted into a rope to anchor myself, put them back on, and kept thinking. If that giant woman really had coated herself in mud and gone to fight, the matter was probably already settled. Or they might still be at it.
But why go off covered in mud at all? The only thing that could fight a Peak-Rank aberrant was another Peak-Rank aberrant, and with Phase Power sensing in the picture, I couldn't begin to guess a reason for the mud no matter how I turned it.
Look at it another way—a woman particular about her looks... Ahem. She was a giant. Maybe she'd just given herself a mud mask.
The giant woman's smooth, translucent skin rose in my mind, and certain places flushed pink, and blood started gathering in one particular part of me.
This isn't my fault! At my age it's a perfectly natural phenomenon!
I sighed, eyed the leaves hanging in front of me, and started picking them off to eat. Moisture and fiber from these. Calories from the belt.
I undid it, tore off about a quarter, and chewed that down, and by the time I'd eaten seven or eight leaves the gloom was back.
I want fried chicken... Jajangmyeon, jjamppong, sweet-and-sour pork. Pizza, too... I want the meals Mom and my sister made.
Hiding up in a tree, crouched there looking pathetic, chewing leaves and a scrap of belt in place of breakfast—my situation felt so wretched my throat closed and tears tried to come. I held them back with everything I had.
You dumbass, don't cry! You're getting out of this alive! You're surviving this and going home, no matter what!!
Die here, and I'd be handing grief to my family—the ones staring at the water droplet that had appeared where I used to be, praying I'd come back safe. My sister might already be regretting that she hadn't treated me better, and that she'd hit me.
So I was going to survive. I had to.
But... I was a minor.
They said the Phase World survival curriculum had raised the odds two or three times over the early Singi era, and even so a minor's survival rate still didn't clear thirty percent—so mine was thirty percent. Looking at how wrong this situation already was, hadn't it crashed to something like three?
Aah, there I go getting depressed again! Just do the damn job!
I filled my belly with several more leaves, then, meaning to put on another mud pack today, scanned my surroundings and crept down out of the tree.
Watching everything, I walked with care and soon reached the riverbank.
The river ran about a hundred meters out from the cliff. At the start the gap between river and cliff hadn't even been ten, but the farther I traveled the wider it grew, until it had opened to a hundred. Keep yesterday's pace and by this time tomorrow the river would have drawn so far off that getting drinking water would mean a trek of over a kilometer. Learning I could take moisture from the leaves was a genuine mercy.
Would something show up nearby? I was afraid the giant might appear again for another mud pack—was the word mud mask?—a full-body one. Even so I steadied my pounding heart, worked the mud until it was right, and rolled in it so thoroughly a wild boar would have called me boss, slathering every inch of myself.
While I was putting it on I kept feeling something jab at the back of my skull, so I looked around... Nothing out of the ordinary.
Am I overreacting? ...No! I'm the weakest thing here. Being careful about every last detail can't hurt!
Even so, the unease wouldn't leave. I shoved my face into the mud and, rather than merely working it through my hair, scooped it up and dumped it over my head as if I were burying myself, then got out of there in a hurry.
My heart had started slamming. I clutched my chest with one hand, gripped the sharpened wooden staff that was supposed to keep me alive in the other, and ran for the cliff.
It was the instant my body vanished behind brush and trees.
Fsssssh. Rustle. Thump.
"...?!"
The sound of something forcing its way out of the undergrowth hit my ears, and I dropped flat on reflex, rolled, and hid behind a tree.
My coordination was dogshit, but that move just now had been genuinely nice!
Sniff. Snuffle. Hnnn—sniff.
It sounded like a barnyard pig rooting around.
I clutched my chest against the hammering, held my breath, and turned my head by the smallest degrees to look through a gap in the brush at the far side...
A mole?
But it was fucking enormous!! Since when were moles the size of a house?!
A body like a blunt log, covered in reddish-brown fluff, and stubby forepaws tipped with long, sharp claws—deeply threatening. A snout that jutted out, with a few whiskers that looked like steel needles. And incisors sticking past the lips. Get bitten by those and even steel would snap.
I'd never seen that thing, not even in the aberrant bestiary?!
Sniff? Sniff, sniff-sniff. Sniff-sniff-sniff!
The mole shifted this way and that, flaring the two holes at the tip of its snout—nostrils, surely—and started smelling like its life depended on it. Had its eyes half withered away, and its nose taken over?
Uh. No way that thing... it wasn't smelling me, was it...?
It looked Peak-Rank, so why was it smelling around at all? Obviously, the higher an aberrant climbed, the sharper its sense for Phase Power. There was no way it would hunt for something—for me—with its actual body like that.
The mole aberrant lifted its head, aimed its nostrils at the sky, and sniffed hard while twitching, and somehow it looked unsure of itself.
Did it catch movement by smell and by those whiskers? If I moved hard, the air would tremble and a signal would reach them... it wouldn't, right?
Fear had my heart pounding like it would burst, but to keep from being found I froze every movement, even stopped breathing, and watched what the thing was doing.
It stood about half as tall as the tree behind it, which put it at roughly five or six meters, and from the tip of its snout to the end of its stubby tail it looked ten to twelve meters long. The size of a two-story house.
Insane!
But that stuff on its back... wasn't that blood? The distance from where it stood to where I was hiding was considerable, and the fur was reddish-brown, so it was hard to tell. If it was blood, was it the giant woman's?
Damn it! What did that goddamned beast do to that beautiful body! Now that I thought about it, most of the traces on her had been cuts and punctures, hadn't they?! That mole bastard had definitely done it!!
And then, for an instant, I wondered whether I was even sane, worrying over the giant woman's safety. However pretty a woman she looked on the outside, she was a one-eyed aberrant...
Unable to find me, the mole soon gave up smelling, came to the water's edge, shoved its snout in, and started to drink.
The mud pack, it seemed, was why it couldn't find me.
I wanted to heave a great relieving sigh, but do that and I'd be found on the spot, so I held my breath desperately and watched in silence.
Glug. Glug-glug. Blub, blub-blub.
Please, I'm begging you, just drink the water and go. I'm begging, all right?
As if it hadn't heard a word of it, the mole bastard started doing exactly what I'd just done at the bank. It began to roll, smearing mud over its whole body.
Under that vicious strain my heart beat harder and harder. A headache was starting, too, and it didn't feel right. I eased a breath out and drew one back in, but the headache wouldn't quit.
My heart went on thumping, doing its best to announce that it existed—and I was feeling that existence more sharply than at any moment since I'd entered the Phase World—but right now I couldn't bear the motion of it.
I gave up even watching the mole, squeezed my eyes shut, and tried somehow to endure. It was agony.
Ugh...
I'd been holding my breath so long the blood started rushing to my head. Strangely, the headache eased then—but my brain began to throb. Right on the heels of the throbbing came an itch.
"—!!"
I clamped down desperately so I wouldn't make a sound, but the itch soon became ants crawling through the folds of my brain, and a horrific pain came surging in.
Bad enough that I wanted to shove my hands into my skull and wring my brain out...!
A moment later, with the feeling of something bursting inside my head, everything in front of my eyes went pure white.
...Huh. What?
I came back to myself, but strangely I could see nothing and hear nothing. I couldn't even feel my body. It was as if only my brain were adrift in an endless space of pure white.
Did I... die?
Why? Because of what??
No. Impossible. If I were dead, there's no way I could think this clearly!
My name! Mom and Dad's names! My sister's name! Where I live! The school I go to! I remember all of it!
Then what is this?
The fear kept growing. I didn't know the cause, and I didn't know the outcome, and the not-knowing was so frightening I couldn't stand it—terrifying enough to drive me mad.
In the absurdity of it, emotion after emotion whirled through my head until my chest clenched so tight I couldn't breathe, and my eyes burned as if the tears were about to break. But maybe because I had no body left to cry with, the feelings themselves seemed ready to burst out of me like a dam giving way...!