Episode 11: Day Three — The Giant Mole and Awakening (2)

A multitude of sounds bored straight into my ears, and pain tore through me as if my eardrums were about to split. At the same time, every movement within a sixty-meter radius began to drive itself into my brain. My throat locked tight. It was a mercy the scream never made it out.

I could perceive the giant mole rolling in the mud, the river flowing without end, the number and shape of every leaf trembling in the wind. Countless insects crawled across the ground while a few birds overhead cut beautiful arcs through the sky, and beneath the soil more insects were at work. Even the river I'd thought empty of fish gave up its secrets — unknown creatures creeping along the bed were shown to me, whole and intact, inside my head.

Sssssss— I dragged a breath in through my nose with everything I had.

When I came back to myself, I was streaming tears, snot, and drool. Cold sweat soaked me head to toe, and my underwear was a little damp — I'd pissed myself. The mud plastered thick over every inch of me kept the tears, the snot, the spit, and the piss in my shorts from showing, and from smelling like much of anything.

So I hadn't died. I'd only blacked out? The moment I remembered that fear from a minute ago — the terror that my mind was about to come apart — the tears came flooding back.

Ghk... ngh. I... I didn't die. I'm not dead...!!

Feeling my heart hammer against my ribs, I carefully opened my eyes — and mud rode the tears straight into them.

“...!! —!!”

It stung too badly to keep them open. My eyes felt gritty and raw, and I wanted nothing more than to rub at them, but I held back with everything I had and blinked, letting the tears flush the dirt, until the pain began, little by little, to fade.

I let a little breath out through my nose, drew it back in, and turned my attention again to what I'd felt when I first came to. This time the range had shrunk to twenty meters around me, and I felt it, literally, in naked detail. When I closed my eyes, the range of perception stretched back out to sixty.

What is this?

Innumerable movements inside that range began to play through my head like video, and yet not the slightest thought of pain or distress came with them.

Breathing carefully out through my nose — I had no idea how long I'd been unconscious — I found my focus drawn, without meaning to, toward the giant mole still holding its ground on the riverbank. The moment I did, the mole's form rendered itself in my mind like a 3D polygon model. Doing it that way, I understood how to use the ability.

The instant I thought I wanted to see deeper inside it, I felt power gather between my brain and the space between my brows. Then, as if an X-ray were being taken, the body turned transparent, and the inside of the giant mole lay bare. Or rather, was felt? If I had to choose a word, felt was the truer one — though seen wouldn't be wrong either.

Puffing breath out through my nose, I studied the giant mole's insides. On the outside it looked intact. Inside, the body was badly crushed, as if a blunt weapon had done the work. The bones of the left hind leg were shattered to fragments. The lumbar spine, two ribs on the right, and the skull were cracked, and half the claws on the right forepaw were broken. The claws that remained intact ran about three meters long, and the foreclaws read as viciously sharp.

The distance between the thing and me was about fifty-eight meters.

Length, and information about particular objects, entered my head on their own. Come to think of it, I'd known without being told that the ability I was using reached sixty meters, too. And the words Detection, Analysis, and Clairvoyance felt special.

Anyway, I kept my focus on the giant mole and kept running Detection, Analysis, and Clairvoyance over its body. It seemed to have been regenerating for some time — blood, and... blood? It didn't seem like blood. Whatever it was, some kind of nutrient was clinging to the cracked and broken bones, and I could feel the regeneration underway. But the most important thing — Phase Power — I couldn't feel at all.

How did I know? Because within a sixty-meter radius of me, I could feel something in the atmosphere, mixed into the air like water. The instant I perceived it, I understood by instinct that it was Phase Power. And that it was flowing inside my body as well.

...Ah. The moment I thought of my own body, the ability analyzed me in a flash.

More to the point, there wasn't so much as a speck of Phase Power inside that mole. This mole wasn't an Aberrant! It was just an ordinary animal... How had it grown this huge? And that unidentified liquid flowing through the giant mole, the stuff that wasn't blood — what the hell was it?

Phase Power was, quite literally, the energy of miracles. Whether or not you could use it was what divided people into ability users and those without, and the same held for animals. An animal that began taking Phase Power into its body and storing it was called an Aberrant. Once it became one, its body grew at a tremendous rate, and its biological capabilities transformed beyond imagination, like those of a Physical Reinforcement ability user. I'd read that in a book. Above all, they developed physical traits visibly different from the base animal, or turned into something else entirely — but that was a thought for later.

For now: once an ability user or an Aberrant began absorbing Phase Power and storing it, their ordinary rate of self-healing increased by as much as several hundred times. On top of that, Phase Power circulated through the body and showed a fierce resistance to anything harmful to the flesh, so if it was present inside you, damage from disease, poison, and artificial compounds dropped sharply.

And yet that mole, without even being an Aberrant, had grown nearly a hundred times larger than an ordinary one, and possessed strength and regenerative power to match. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠It was probably because of whatever that something was, flowing along with its blood... One more thing I didn't understand had just been added to the pile.

What I didn't understand, I didn't understand. What mattered in the situation I was in was that mole, so with the Detection ability...

Right. I should call it the Detection ability. And Analysis and Clairvoyance were abilities too. I ran Detection over the mole's body, and on a whim focused on its brain — small for its bulk, smaller than a human's — and faintly, I could feel its thoughts. It was in pain, but there was regret in it as well... Had it fought something? Was the opponent the female giant? Looking at those blunt-force injuries, that seemed right.

From the way the giant mole regretted it, they hadn't reached a conclusion. Beyond that I couldn't read a thing — whether because my ability fell short, I couldn't say. But to think that sensing a brain let me peek even at the emotions it was feeling right now.

Ah!

Now the puzzle clicked into place. Right. What the female giant had been wary of was definitely this giant mole. She had known it wasn't an Aberrant. That was why she'd known that if she hid the tremor of the air and sealed her scent with a mud pack, the mole would never sense her!

Its eyes were as good as degenerated. It had no sight at all. Instead it smelled with its nose and read tremors in the air with its whiskers, and that was how it grasped an enemy's approach. The female giant had aimed at exactly that — blocking her own scent with mud, and going for the ambush!

The moment my thoughts reached that far, a single vision began to play inside my head.

Judging by what the giant mole regretted, it seemed to think that if the fight had continued in that state, it would have won. A giant Aberrant would naturally possess bodily regeneration. A one-eyed giant of the Physical Reinforcement type, especially, would of course have outstanding regenerative power. Given time, the female giant would regrow her hand, and things would go back to the way they had been — both of them with their nerves drawn taut, each trying to kill the other. That, it seemed, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠was what the mole regretted.

I wondered whether the wounds on that beautiful body of hers would match the vision I'd just seen, then killed the curiosity at once. She was a High-Tier Variant, after all. There was no way I would ever get to confirm those wounds.

Slowly, my mind began to wake. The sensation of a mind waking made me flinch. The vision I'd just watched was probably the phenomenon they called Awakening Syndrome. It had felt like being drunk on some drug...

Anyway, the mud had erased my scent, and the trees and brush were hiding even my shape. If I breathed carefully and simply held still like this, that mole would never find me. Proof enough: it was tending its aching left foot with that long tongue — ugh, what kind of tongue stretches ten meters? — and pouring all its attention ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠into scooping up mud and slathering it thick over the wound.

But this Detection ability really was something. Focus a little, and I could see through the mole's muscle all the way to its internal organs, the shapes playing out vivid inside my head. Widen the focus, and its movements looked as real as sitting in a theater watching a 3D film. Watching it move like that, I could even read the play of muscle. Swell like this, and it moved the right foot. Contract like that, and it fidgeted the left forepaw.

I packed information into my head in a daze for a while, and then the mole, finished with whatever it had been doing, turned and vanished into the forest.

What I'd learned while sensing it planted a tremendous confidence in me. Detection, Analysis, and Clairvoyance! If I applied them, I was filling up with the certainty that even that bastard I'd met on my first day in the Phase World could be beaten to death without much trouble, so long as I had my sharpened wooden staff. It was the moment I understood why Survival Studies said never even think of tangling with an Aberrant until you'd obtained a special ability.

Riding the elation of having become something special, feeling a thrill of pure joy, I thought I wanted to track the mole a little further into the trees. But I had to stop. Get caught, and I'd die.

I pulled my focus back and scoured the sixty meters around me for anything that might be a threat. Aside from a bird the size of my fist, I couldn't see a single animal. No Aberrants, either. I was safe now.

“Phew.”

The moment safety occurred to me, I dragged up even the sigh buried deep in my chest and let it out. My chest eased, just a little, and my head seemed to clear. Opening my eyes, I frowned at the feeling of the Detection range shrinking — but eyesight still mattered. With my eyes closed, Detection covered a radius of sixty meters, while what I could see with my own eyes went well beyond that.

The range wasn't the direction I was looking. It was a sphere centered on me. And Detection wasn't all-powerful; it was short on color. Close my eyes, and it felt like a dark night — no, like black-and-white monochrome. Set beside the full color my eyes drank in, it came up short.

When I'd sensed my own body, clothes hadn't registered at all. The curves of me had been picked up in naked detail. Ordinary objects, it seemed, had no way to slip past my Detection, or to block it. And ordinary animals, unusual ones too, seemed utterly unable to notice it. The mole had no eyes and ought to have been keen in every other sense, and even it hadn't known I was seeing through its whole body and sensing it.

But what about a being that possessed Phase Power?

Anyway.

“...Heheheh.”

With that lecherous little laugh, my gift for delusion kicked into full drive. Blood rushed low through my body, and all at once a hard resolve — I would survive, and I would get back to reality, no matter what — and a wild courage welled up in me.

Wait for me, woman— no, reality!!

Eheheh.

It was my first ability, so figuring out how to use it, and how much Phase Power it consumed, came first. I worked Detection hard with my eyes closed, walking along the cliff, and three hours passed that way.

Moving while the ability was active, I realized this probably wasn't something I ought to simply name the Detection ability. The distance I'd traveled was being tracked, and so was the time that had passed since I came to — and above all, the ground I'd covered was being built into a three-dimensional map in my head, a solid image spanning as much as my Detection range. Ridiculously multifunctional.

Anyway, in three hours I'd walked 11,852 meters along the cliff. A little short of twelve kilometers, but that was an ordinary adult's pace. I wasn't exactly well-built, though. I shouldn't have been able to go that far... Probably, with the awakening, Phase Power had formed in my body and my physical ability had risen a little.

Survival Studies, which I'd read in eighth grade, said an ordinary person walks about four kilometers an hour. I'd gotten curious how far I — a man forged by walks I spent lost in my own head — could manage in an hour, and bought a pedometer to find out. That was two years ago, and back then I barely scraped 3.5 kilometers an hour. I'd been a little confident in my walking... A machine wasn't going to lie, so the confidence had simply been excessive. Disappointed, I'd tossed the thing into some corner of the house, and the next month I found my older sister using it just fine.

Anyway, I was pleased with the unexpected functions. The mapping function, especially, made me want to let out a cheer. Think about how wildly a game's difficulty splits depending on whether you have a map, and this ability was nothing short ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠of revolutionary! But right now I had to keep myself alive in the face of Aberrants, so it seemed like the sort of ability that was nice to have and fine to lack...

Well. If I survived this place, it would help enormously the next time I entered a Phase World. They said there were maze-like places out there, and it wasn't for nothing that navigation existed even in reality.

Looking at my own ability, a thought struck me. Maybe the reason Aberrants sensed other Aberrants, or ability users, was that they had some means of feeling Phase Power too. In Otherworld Biology, Aberrants were marked down as simply charging like mad the moment they spotted you. It was never written that they had such-and-such a Phase Power detection range, and therefore came running from a set distance.

And this was a thought I'd only had after gaining Detection, but wouldn't the great scholars and the scientists have considered that Aberrants might be able to sense Phase Power? They'd probably even run tests to confirm the range. If an ordinary guy like me had the thought after gaining an ability, the people who were supposed to be smart would have had it long ago.

But whether it was classified or what, not a word of it appeared in Otherworld Survival Studies or Otherworld Biology. Was I the only one who thought that if the textbooks at least wrote down which things sensed Phase Power, and from how far, kids' survival rates would shoot up?

...There isn't really a separate curriculum, or a separate set of books, for high-ranking officials and their children, is there? It was just an urban legend floating around among people, but once the suspicion took hold, I couldn't quite shake it off.

If that was the truth... then they were bastards. It would mean they were sitting on important information that would raise the odds of survival, and keeping it to themselves. It would amount to manipulating what went into the books so that the chance of an Anomalous Ability User emerging from among ordinary people stayed low. If that was real, even calling them bastards wouldn't be enough, would it?

By this point I was desperately curious how far an Aberrant's detection range actually reached. If I only knew the range, I could spot them first with Detection and either land the first blow or run. Then the chances of me ending up in danger would drop by a lot.

What I'd learned over three hours of walking was that Detection used so little Phase Power you could say it used none at all. Let me express the Phase Power currently in my body — as grasped by Detection — not as a percentage, but as a number, and call it 100.

For one thing, Detection kept working whether my eyes were open or closed, so in game terms it could be called a passive. Passive abilities usually don't spend a resource on their own, but with Detection, over the course of an hour, my Phase Power dipped by a tiny amount, recovered, dipped, and recovered, over and over without stopping. Which meant Detection wasn't a passive but an active, and the amount recovered was greater than the amount consumed.

Since the range changed depending on whether my eyes were open or shut, I'd thought the consumption would be higher with them closed. It was the same either way.

Anyway, the ability seemed to sit outside the ordinary categories. Was I lucky? Grinning at the thought that I'd somehow hit the jackpot, I called up Survival Studies and tried to remember what similar abilities there had been.

The ones that came to mind at once were Energy Sense and an Analysis ability. Energy Sense was described as an ability that analyzed objects entering a set range, and that range, at first, was written as roughly a ten-meter radius. Analysis was said to analyze everything that entered your field of view. Things outside it couldn't be analyzed, and even things inside it took some time, so you had to keep the target in sight the whole while.

And both were abilities that only activated if you spent Phase Power directly. Energy Sense and Analysis, in particular, consumed quite a lot, and couldn't be used for long. Above all, I figured neither could manage an analysis as varied as my Detection. At best you could check a target's Phase Power concentration, tell whether it was an Aberrant, and get a rough sense of its shape. That sort of thing.

But my Detection had six times the range of Energy Sense, was an instant cast, and was an Analysis capable of X-ray Clairvoyance — and its Phase Power consumption was as good as nothing. And it was always on... It was like someone had taken only the good points of Energy Sense and Analysis, added new functions, and upgraded the result.

“Eheheheh. Keheheh. Heeheehee.”

The more I thought about it, the more it felt like I'd hit the jackpot, and even while I grinned like a dumbass I didn't slack off on sensing my surroundings. How bitter would it be to get an ability like this and then die spacing out? I could swear this Detection was specialized for survival! An ability that drastically raised the odds of me living long enough to get back to reality!

My mood soared. It was a shame it wasn't a combat ability, but in a situation where absurd High-Tier Variants popped out of nowhere, and giant animals were trading blows with those Aberrants, maybe Detection was actually the better thing for staying alive.

I kept walking pressed tight to the cliff, scanning the top of it with Detection. The cliff ran a little under my range, about fifty-two meters. It rose and fell depending on the spot, but if I stuck to the wall, a little information from above came in as well.

“If I could just climb back up there, that would be really nice...”

A thought I'd had while sensing the area: the reason there were no animals on this side was probably the giant mole from earlier, more than the female giant. It wasn't even an Aberrant, so it would have needed food in bulk, and with a nose and whiskers like those, hunting animals wouldn't have been difficult. Aberrants got hunted by the female giant. Animals got hunted by the giant mole...

Looked like, until I got out of here, leaves and my belt were going to be my staple diet. Wander around carelessly looking for food, and I'd run into the giant mole and the female giant and set off on a one-way trip to the underworld. Of course... even if there were animals, I didn't think I could catch them. And if a fierce carnivore showed up on top of that, wouldn't that be even more dangerous...?

One good thing happened and my mood lifted, then a bad thought followed and it sank. My emotions were working overtime, up and down.

“Haaah.”

I kept picking leaves and eating them, and I carefully sensed the inside of my own body as well, but nothing was causing trouble in my stomach, and no bad elements were accumulating in me. Not to brag, but my guts aren't exactly sturdy. Eat something carelessly, or drink milk, and a full-blown catastrophe erupts in my stomach!

Anyway, the trees scattered in every direction, and the leaves those trees produced, were leaves optimized, quite literally, for fiber and hydration. How could a plant this convenient even exist? And how could an ability this convenient even exist!

In fact, the first time I'd sensed my own innards, the shapes were so grotesque, and watching the organs move turned my stomach so badly, that I'd nearly thrown up the leaves I'd eaten. But I'd felt nothing in particular before I sensed them, so I thought there might be information I was blocking without knowing it.

The human brain really was something. Information that threatened my mental health got collected, but not brought into awareness... You could say it was split into something like a deep consciousness and a surface consciousness. The sort of difference where, unless I deliberately thought about a thing and recognized it, the thought wouldn't surface.

You know how it is. Look at an ordinary campfire and people think it's warm, or that it must be hot, and they don't really think past that. Unless they're a strange sort of person. But think deeply, and you'd call up a great deal — the actions required to build the fire, the kinds of wood that make one, how to make it bigger, the fact that sticking your hand in would be a disaster. Right?

Anyway, when I called up the birds and the insides of trees I'd analyzed in passing as a test, and the insects under the ground, there really were items in there fit to threaten my mental health. That was the point. A large intestine packed with shit, say. Or an insect's belly crammed with some wriggling, unknowable guts...

Blech.

I was walking along, occupied with those idle thoughts, when a four-legged animal suddenly crossed the edge of my Detection range. I flinched and clamped a hand around my sharpened wooden staff.

“An Aberrant?”

What was circulating so diligently through that small body was the same thing as the Phase Power inside me right now, wasn't it? Tension spiked all at once, and I seized the sharpened wooden staff — the one I'd been using as a walking stick — in both hands.

A real fight, out of nowhere...!