Day Four: The Female Giant, Part Two

Rustle. Rustle.

…….

Skitter, skitter. Wriggle, wriggle.

…….

Fwoooosh—

……Ah.

I'd just found the downside of my detection ability.

It never shut off. Every little motion reached me—insects shifting in the soil, dead leaves skating on the wind—and there was no sleeping through that.

Huh? Kkh—

"Gaaaaah!! M-my eyes! Eeeek!!"

I snapped awake and tried to fling my eyes open, only for something to cling thick across my eyeballs. The lids wouldn't lift. A vicious, blinding pain slammed into them.

I was already thrashing, both hands on their way to scrub at my eyes, when a line from survival class flashed through my head and stopped me cold. Thank god for that. If bleeding or inflammation inside the eye dried into a crust, you were supposed to rinse with saline and handle the aftermath carefully. Force the eye open without that, and you'd damage the eyeball itself—a killing blow to your sight.

My hands shook hard. I wanted nothing more than to rub my eyes raw, but I held back with everything I had. Tears poured down my face from the pain, just streaming...

"But why am I even like this..."

Right. The female giant and the giant mole. It all came back then. I'd vomited blood and thrashed at the female giant's scream, and in the end I'd blacked out. Three times her Fear had washed over me—it had felt like a scream, more than anything—and having taken the full brunt of that Fear with my whole body, I never wanted to go through it again.

More importantly.

"I... I survived..."

Joy and emptiness tangled together until I couldn't even name the feeling. I hadn't faced the thing head-on. I'd just rolled around puking blood because an Aberrant roared. I felt pathetic enough that disappointment started creeping in, but I talked myself down. It was a Peak-Rank Aberrant, and I was a fresh beginner. A total newbie. Of course I'd fold. When a dragon roars, the small fry panic and mill, and little animals like mice and rabbits simply drop dead. A Peak-Rank Aberrant having a roar like that wouldn't be strange at all.

Was this what they meant by a shrimp's back splitting in a fight between whales? Restless or not, I was conscious, so I turned my sight inward and checked my body first.

My brain looked no different from the first time I'd looked through it. Pass. My eyes were a little bloodshot, nothing serious, but I could feel dried blood scabbed between the eyeballs and the lids, so keeping them shut for now seemed wise. Airways were fine. Pass. I went over the rest of me and found nothing particularly wrong. Even the little guy I'd never once put to use was intact. I'd army-crawled a good thirty meters like a lunatic and figured my knees and elbows would be scraped raw, but the padded lining inside the clothes had kept me fine. I owed a thank-you to the adults who'd researched and made this uniform.

Last, I checked the clothes with my ability. The front of the uniform was hideously blotched with blood and stiffened solid.

"Is all of this my blood..."

Washing it was going to be a nightmare. And while I washed, something might come running at the smell. Still, I was glad my body was in one piece. There were faint traces of bleeding in my stomach, but it was fine now. I'd bled and trembled like I was about to die, and yet I'd recovered this far. Was it the Phase Power circulating through me? Didn't seem like it. I was a Special-class ability user, not a Physical Reinforcement one. ...Ah, whatever. Good is good.

Anyway, thanks to the detection ability, I could move just fine with my eyes closed. Very convenient. I tried to gauge how many hours had passed, but it seemed that when I was completely unconscious, the ability didn't activate either. I wasn't particularly hungry, so maybe not much time had gone by. I checked outside.

All clear.

Body fine, outside fine. I decided to crawl out. I inched my way through the crawl hole and, partway along, felt the horned puppy lying there, dead in a wretched state. Its muscles had stiffened rigid. Rigor mortis set in a few hours after death, didn't it? Could I eat this? It wasn't rotting, was it? The burrow was a little cool, and I couldn't feel any damp, so maybe a day would be all right. I hesitated over the corpse for a moment, then grabbed its hind legs and started crawling again. Absolutely not because I remembered my sister threatening me about what happened if you treated food carelessly.

"Huff. Huff."

Who knew crawling could be this hard. They say using muscles you don't normally use brings on incredible fatigue. An ordinary person almost never has reason to crawl dozens of meters. And yet when the female giant had roared, I'd been so far gone I'd scrambled like a cockroach on drugs. Remembering it felt like someone else's story, and a stupid little grin crept onto my face.

This was bad. Wasn't this an early symptom of losing my mind? Nearly dying, then waking up, grabbing a horned puppy's corpse, crawling like a cockroach, and grinning the whole time. Anyone who saw me would call me insane and drag me straight to a psych ward.

Ah—I could feel light ahead. Still daytime? The sunlight didn't seem that strong. Timing-wise, it felt like morning. Don't tell me I'd passed out and slept through the night again. A chill ran down my spine even as a sigh of relief escaped me. I'd brushed past danger once more. One slip and I would have been rolling around outside the burrow, vomiting blood, and blacked out right there. Of course, even the horned puppy—which I figured for Lowest Grade—had died, so most things, animals included, had probably dropped dead too. But there's always a what-if, isn't there?

As I neared the crawl hole's exit, the pointed wooden staff I'd flung aside entered my detection range. Ugh. I'd thrown away my only weapon and run. But something felt off. This wasn't ordinary sensation. I was feeling a wrongness through the detection ability itself. I stopped crawling and scanned the surroundings. Nothing looked particularly wrong.

"..."

I made it to the burrow mouth, pressed myself flat against the wall, and carefully swept the area. Nothing... right? I stepped outside with care, stood up with care, and stretched out my stiff body and limbs. My joints popped, and a pleasant looseness washed through me. Once I'd loosened up, I picked up the pointed wooden staff and scanned—

Huh? My detection range had grown. It used to be a radius of sixty meters, and now it was about eighty—a full third wider. On top of that, the image that had only registered in white and black had evolved into a feed mixed with very low-brightness RGB: red, green, and blue. The brightness was so low it was barely different from white or black, but still. Having even a little color was something.

And yet the wider the range, the thicker that sense of wrongness felt. What was it? And why had the range suddenly expanded? I wanted to judge the time by the sun, but I couldn't open my eyes, so that was impossible. Blood-soaked body and eyes first. At the far edge of the newly widened range, the forest ended. There'd be a river beyond that, right?

Eyes useless, I paid close attention to the detection ability as I walked toward the river—and happened on the source of that wrongness. Everything within my range was dead. Or dying. The plants, of course, and even the tiny bugs underground. All of it. I focused and scanned again, and sensed small birds, smaller than my fist, lying dead on the ground in little clusters. The female giant's roar came back to me, and a corner of my chest went cold. A roar that attacked every living thing? That was straight-up cheating.

What had happened to the female giant and the giant mole? From the booms and roars I'd heard before I lost consciousness, the two of them had definitely been fighting for their lives. I faced a bearing sixty degrees off the cliff, using where I stood as the vertex. "Faced" wasn't quite right. Sensed, more accurately. That was definitely the direction the sound had come from. I started walking again.

By the time I reached the riverbank, I hadn't found a single animal, let alone the horned puppy's family. Of course not. Any ordinary animal would have died to that roar, and any Aberrant tough enough to survive would have fled with its tail on fire. Thinking that one more roar would have killed me too sent a fresh chill up my spine. And I kept wondering about the female giant and the mole. I had a feeling I was going to have to go looking. This feeling was just like the throbbing at the base of my skull right before I'd met the giant mole. Don't tell me awakening the detection ability had given me a premonition ability too?

Heh. No way. Detection plus premonition? I'd be the strongest.

For real?

No, no. Enough getting ahead of myself. Eyes first.

I reached the river, waded in, washed my blood-caked face, and started rinsing the uniform in the current. I didn't forget to carefully massage around my eyes. I couldn't lift the lids to pick the scabs off, so I'd have to loosen them slowly like this. While I washed the blood-soaked shirt, I forced a yawn. It stirred my tear ducts, and tears spilled out. The clotted blood loosened with them and washed away in the water.

Aberrants and everything else were probably dead, so there was nothing to watch for. If something on the level of that female giant or the giant mole was still around, it'd chase me down and kill me no matter what I did, so there was no point being careful either. I finally managed to open my eyes and blink the stiffness away, and I could see blood-water and muddy water streaming downstream in ribbons with the current.

The shirt was still covered in blood. I scrubbed again, but the bright red stains wouldn't come out, and mud had blotched it here and there. The navy jacket at least didn't show it as badly, but the dress shirt was a wreck—red and yellowish-brown all jumbled together. A complete wreck. Without Mom's laundry skill, getting this out looked impossible. If she saw the bloodstains, wouldn't she faint?

Once no more blood-water or muddy water was coming off, I pressed my nose to the clothes and sniffed. No smell of blood. Either my nose had already adapted to it, or the smell had all washed out. Hmm. Abandoning the uniform was out of the question. Giving up my only armor over a blood smell? Ridiculous.

I finished washing the clothes as best I could and looked up. The sun was hung above the cliff, out of sight. It rose from beyond the cliff and set past the forest, and since it was still on the far side of the cliff, it had to be somewhere between morning and noon. Why did it feel like I woke every morning, aside from the awakening? Was there an alarm clock in my head?

After gauging the time, I found myself looking across the river without meaning to. The hunch was nagging me again to cross. Mmm. When my gut was talking this loud, not going would be the weird choice. Then the blood-soaked clothes were the problem. What was I supposed to do about those?

I was shaking clumps of dried mud out of my hair when an idea hit me, and I splashed my way to the bank at a run. Mud! There was mud! If I slathered on enough of it, wouldn't it mask the smell of blood? I splashed water around and scraped hard at the shore with the pointed wooden staff, and mud formed in no time. I rubbed the vest and shirt all over with it. The bloodstains vanished, and all that rose was the smell of mud. At this rate, even if some animal had survived, it wouldn't come running at my blood. Then I rolled around in the mud and started smearing it over my body too.

"At this rate I might actually develop a Mud-Smearing skill."

I turned and looked at the horned puppy's corpse sprawled on the bank. Before I left, I needed to deal with that too, but how, without a knife? Its guts had torn strand by strand into pulp, and blood was leaking steadily from its muzzle and its asshole. My face twisted.

Blood?

A bad feeling sent me hurrying back the way I'd come, and the trail of my movement stretched all the way to the end. Blood had dripped in dots and left a track. Dragging the thing out must have let it leak the whole way—a line of it ran into the hole, and where the horned puppy had been lying was a complete sea of blood.

"Aaagh."

I grabbed my hair and groaned. The burrow was pretty deep, and spending another night there wouldn't have been bad. If I wanted to use the place again later, I'd have to clean this trail up too, wouldn't I? Damn it.

I went back over the whole route, overturning the blood-spattered ground with the tip of the pointed wooden staff for a good two hours. Only after I'd finally erased every trace did I collapse, exhausted, under a tree by the river. And I got right back up and felt the horn of the puppy, which was still dribbling blood from its asshole and its muzzle.

Twenty centimeters long, cone-shaped, hard and solid. This ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠had to be the horned puppy's weapon. And true to an Aberrant's weapon, it was pretty damn tough. If I could tear it off cleanly, it'd make a decent weapon. Fix it to the end of a stick and I could use it as a spear. Or grind it down into a knife! Pleased with the sudden idea, I gripped the base of the horn with one hand and the puppy's head with the other, and carefully put my strength into snapping it—snapping—it—!!!

Khhhh—!!

"Fuck! It's ridiculously hard!!"

I'd put everything I had into it, and the thing didn't so much as wobble, let alone break. I yelled.

"Hoo... Right. I'm human. A human who knows how to use tools."

My head felt like it was going feral, but I snorted coolly anyway, swept my bangs back with my right hand, gathered several reasonably flat stones, set the horn on top of them, and fixed it higher than the puppy's skull. That's it! The lever principle! I lifted my right foot, aimed at the skull connected to the horn, and stomped down with everything I had.

CRACK!!

Oh yeah! It broke—, urk!!

It wasn't the horn that broke. The horned puppy's head had exploded. Pulped brain and eyeballs burst up and squished under my foot, and nausea surged, but I took a deep breath and steadied my pounding heart. Sights like this were going to keep coming, nonstop. I had to get used to them.

"..."

Even so, looking at the horned puppy in that wretched state, I felt a little sorry for it. No! In the Phase World, being weak is the crime! Feeling this way is a luxury! I shook my head, gripped the horn, shook off the brain matter stuck to the tip, peeled away the scalp, then picked up a rock and brought it down on the bit of skull still attached to the horn's base.

The bone was so hard that a half-hearted blow didn't even scratch it—the rock shattered instead. I swapped stones, ground, swapped again, struck, pounded for ages, and scraped it against the ground before I finally managed to pare down the skull stuck to the horn. Sweat pouring off me, a thought occurred, and I muttered it under my breath.

"If we'd fought, wouldn't I have lost?"

The horn and the skull were hard. Way too hard. I flipped the horn around and scraped the ground with it, and the earth ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠gouged out in chunks like I'd hit it with a pickaxe. I clicked my tongue, dug a hole, brought the corpse over, and used the horn to more or less scrape the head off, split the belly, and scoop out the guts. Having already seen brain and eyeballs burst out, I'd adapted somehow. Blood and organs flowing like mud only made me frown. No nausea. For someone who'd never killed so much as a tiny living thing, it was honestly a little surprising. They said becoming an ability user strengthened the body and the mind along with it. Was that why?

Thanks to digging an eighty-centimeter hole, dumping the head and scooping the guts in didn't even fill a fifth of it. Did I dig too deep? Well, at this depth the smell of blood shouldn't seep out and draw animals, or anything else. I gathered the surrounding dirt and covered it, and a small mound formed.

"..."

I stood on it, stamped the earth firm, piled the remaining dirt up again, then brought a rock and set it lightly on top.

"I'll put the crawl hole and the horn to good use."

If some Aberrant had eaten me, I wouldn't even have gotten a grave like this. The thought sank my mood for a moment, but I was the one who'd survived, so I congratulated myself on proving humanity's superiority.

By the time I finished, a good three hours had flown by and the sun was high overhead. I was hungry, and mentally worn out too, so lunch came first.

Lunch was horned puppy.

I washed the split-bellied, headless carcass in the river and used the horn to skin it. With the horn as an awl I stabbed at branches, snapped off ones still bearing several fresh leaves, plucked the leaves and ate them as I went, and gathered branches for firewood. But the trees were dead, so eating leaves was going to get hard from here on. I didn't know what kind of bad effect a dead tree might pass on. Securing drinking water mattered most, so I needed to get out of a forest full of dead trees as soon as I could. I'd think about that part later.

I gathered a bunch of reasonably thick branches, drove them in a straight line into the shallow part of the river, and stuck the roughly trimmed meat onto them. Bleeding it out. I was going to roast it, but I hadn't drained the horned puppy right after it died. More accurately, I hadn't been able to. Anyway, the book said roasting it like this would make both the smell and the taste the worst. It was late, but I'd try. Better than not trying at all, I guess.

Then I prepared to start a campfire. I considered that lighting a fire and roasting meat might spread a smell and draw animals, but I shook my head right away. Like I'd thought earlier, if any animal like that had been nearby, it would already be lying dead from the female giant's roar. The hide might come in handy too, so I scraped off all the fat stuck to it with a rough scrap of wood and hung it on a branch to dry. They said if you didn't tan it, it got incredibly stiff, but I had no idea how to tan anything. If I needed it later, I could find a stick and pound it soft or something. Stomach first.

Starting a campfire is simple enough once you make the tools from a few supplies. Even a fantasy-addled high schooler like me could get a flame going without much trouble in survival practicum. All you really need is a length of cloth. Rope works too. I tore a strip from the uniform's lining and twisted it tight, and that solved it. A reasonably long, springy branch... this would do. Maybe this for the bow. I picked it up, tied on the cord I'd made, and shaped it into a bow. Then I found a slightly thicker, reasonably straight stick, ground the end against a stone until just the tip was sharp as an awl, set that trimmed stick against the middle of the bowstring, and gave it one turn.

Fire-starting prep: done.

I found a reasonably dry scrap of wood, carved a notch in the center with the horn, and set it down. I swept the grass for bone-dry blades, bundled them so air could pass through, and set the bundle aside. Then I stood the stick connected to the bowstring upright in the notch I'd carved. In America they called this a bow drill, apparently. Because it looked like a bow? Lucky I'd practiced lighting a fire this way during survival class. There was also the brute-force method of rubbing it back and forth with both hands and using the friction from that spin to start a flame, but the school's survival instructor had taught us not to use it unless your palms were pretty thick. A beginner would just peel the skin off their hands.

Bleeding meat and dressing it—I'd learned all of that in survival practicum too, and I never thought it'd help this much. The class was impressive, come to think of it. Climbing trees, starting fires, dressing meat, even a rough method for making weapons—they'd taught all of it. I realized just how substantial those practicums had been. Substantial enough that the guys who'd half-assed them would ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠probably die nine times out of ten if they got forcibly summoned to the Phase World.

Anyway, I gripped a pebble with a slight hollow, pressed it down on top of the upright stick to hold it in place, took the bow in my free hand, and worked it back and forth.

Skrrt. Skrrt. Skrrt.

The stick tied to the bowstring spun fast, throwing off friction heat. I kept at it, and as the dry wood rubbed together it produced a powder charged with that heat. When enough had gathered, I scraped it onto the bundle of dry grass I'd prepared, then blew carefully—hoo, hoo—and yellowish smoke rose, and a small flame leapt up.

"Hot, hot!"

Had I put my face too close? I set the eager, burning bundle on the campfire spot, piled on bone-dry grass and leaves, and blew a little harder—hoo, hoo—and the fire climbed.

"To think I'd feel the payoff of taking survival practicum seriously, here of all places."

It had been the one thing I was actually good at in the yearly practicum. With a strange feeling, I fed in easily burning grass and thin stuff like dry bark, and once the fire was definitely going, I laid on dry branches I'd split thin with the horn and built it up. I brought the horned puppy meat, threaded it onto a decent skewer like a kebab, and started roasting it. Unexpectedly, there was no gamey stink—just the ordinary smell of meat cooking. Because it was an Aberrant? The bleeding had been late, and I had no spices. This was a surprise.

Whether it was survival class or otherworld biology, they'd said just light a fire and eat it, and if you absolutely couldn't start a fire, tearing into it raw was fine too. Get parasites, punch a hole in your stomach—whatever. As long as you made it back ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠alive, they could treat all of it, so if you could eat it, eat it and survive. But they never told us what the meat tasted like. So I hadn't expected much, and the smell was surprisingly inoffensive, and a little anticipation welled up.

I kept closing and opening my eyes, watching the surroundings with the detection ability, and went on roasting. But this detection ability was incredible. I could see perfectly which side of the meat was underdone and which was done! I put it to work and roasted diligently so the meat would cook properly, and when it was browned all the way through, I swallowed hard and took a bite.

Chew, chew.

"...Oh!"

Horned puppy is delicious!

Chewy, with a perfect bite, and just enough fat running through that it wasn't dry at all. Good enough to compare with the A+++ hanwoo—top-grade Korean beef—Mom used to grill? Insanely good. Was this what Aberrant meat tasted like? It looked like someone had stuck a horn on a cocker spaniel. Did this count as dog meat too? I wondered how the taste compared to ordinary dog. Even while thinking nonsense, I ate leaves and tore into the meat, filling my stomach in earnest.

I didn't know when I'd get meat like this again, so I savored it bite by bite—my ass. Anything could happen. Eat as fast as possible and wipe the traces. If I made it out of here, proper delicious food would be lying around everywhere. Like I'd sit here being miserable and precious about it! It might be my last supper, but...

Aagh! Burn to nothing, you stupid doom spiral!

In under ten minutes I'd eaten all the meat and examined what was left of the bones. I'd wondered if any of them looked usable, but I didn't know how to make a weapon from bone, so even if there was a good one I wouldn't know what to do with it. They hadn't taught that in survival practicum either. I just dug with the horn and buried the bones and the campfire leavings, the whole lot. I cleared the traces of the fire too, and even untied the cloth I'd used for the bow drill and took it back.

Stomach full. All right—time to cross the river!