Day Four: The Female Giant, Part Two

While I got a fire going and roasted the meat, the heat baked every last smear of mud on my body dry.

Rolling around in the mud pit all over again... A sigh slipped out of me despite myself, but what wouldn't I do to stay alive? Even if survival meant diving headfirst into a pit of shit!

...I'd just have to make sure it never came to that.

Anyway, with movements that knew the work by now, I gave myself another thorough roll in the mud, and then—

Huh?

Ah, crap! If I wanted to reach the place where I'd heard that roar, I had to cross the river! Swim, and all this mud would wash right off!

Goddamn it.

Sighing, I tucked the horn into my waistband, slung the sharpened wooden staff across my back, and started dog-paddling across. The current ran a little fast, and my weight kept dragging me under, but I made it after drifting about twenty meters downstream. Most of the mud had rinsed off mid-swim, so I scraped together another pit, rolled through it until I was coated again in short order, and set off toward the roar.

Wooden staff in my left hand. Horn awl in my right. Pathetic as it was, I was armed, and that put my mind a little at ease.

...Would I be better off gripping a single weapon in both hands?

I slid the horn into my belt and took the sharpened staff two-handed. That felt a little more solid. Picking my way forward, wary of everything around me, I found myself appreciating all over again how convenient the automapping of my Detection ability was.

I couldn't tell while I was walking, but a check of the map afterward showed me exactly how far I'd moved — the character and shape of the path, its rises and falls, even the objects and plants nearby. The cliff looked perfectly straight to the eye, yet after a long walk and a look at the map, its height was unmistakably sloped. Without automatic mapping, I never would have known. Keep following the cliff, in other words, and I might eventually be able to climb up.

Or maybe not.

Trees hid the distance, so watching my surroundings was a job for Detection. Eyes closing, eyes ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠opening, I walked toward the roar for about an hour. The farther I went, the stranger the feeling. Call it the sense of standing alone, the only thing still upright, in a world that had died completely.

Then, eighty meters ahead in the direction I was traveling, at the very edge of my detection range, I caught trees snapped and uprooted in every conceivable shape, and earth torn open.

Was this what a fight between Peak-Rank aberrants left behind...?

"Gulp."

I swallowed as I took in a stretch of ground wrecked as if dozens of cannons had gone off at once. There's a saying that curiosity killed the cat. Somehow it felt as if it had been coined for the man I was right now.

I was afraid, but the fact that I didn't want to run suggested it probably wasn't dangerous... Then again, maybe I was crawling into my own grave on nothing but a hunch I couldn't vouch for. My feelings were a mess in every direction, but my legs never stopped. They carried me toward the traces of the battle.

The closer I drew to the wreckage, the harder my heart pounded. Not from any stir of emotion, though.

"Phase Power?"

It was the Phase Power saturating the air in every direction.

"Unreal..."

The nearer I got, the more Detection told me the place was packed with dense Phase Power. Aberrants, I'd been told, scattered the Phase Power held in their bodies in ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠every direction when they died, and a Phase Stone was something that formed inside an aberrant's body. Phase Power itself came in two kinds — the natural kind, and the kind expelled from within an aberrant — and what filled the air now seemed to be the latter.

The kind that came out of a body was... how to put it? A little warm. Cozy, even. Natural Phase Power, if I compared the two, felt more like water. Walking through this was like wading in heavy water.

The Phase Power spread through the air seemed to miss the warmth of a living body. Slowly, it was coming into mine. I wasn't absorbing it. It entered on its own, as if drawn in. See that, and there was no doubt the female giant had died somewhere nearby.

When I'd first gained Detection and realized Phase Power existed in the atmosphere, I'd learned this world was half air and half Phase Power. Here, it was closer to three parts air and seven parts Phase Power. And the nearer I came to where the female giant lay dead, the thicker that concentration would grow. At the same time, for no reason I could name, I felt a pang of regret.

...No way. No. That's absurd. It couldn't be. I— I—!!

Was any pretty woman good enough? Aberrant or whatever else, so long as I registered a humanoid shape as a beautiful woman, was that all it took to be fine with it?!

I was in shock.

This wasn't something a normal person would think. Regretting that she was dead... No — never getting to see that beautiful body again was definitely a loss. But—

No! That's not it!!

Ugh. Even while I was spiraling, the naked body of the female giant I'd seen two days ago kept surfacing in my mind. Was that a man's instinct, or just mine...

Shock and horror.

Oh, and now that I thought about it, what a waste. If I'd seen her after I had Detection, I could have savored the sight anytime, vivid as a video.

...I didn't want to admit it, but it seemed I was a pervert for whom any woman would do.

B-but the female giant might have been on the large side, and she was an aberrant who used Phase Power — and still, for beauty, she was far and away the finest female body I'd ever seen! Of course, she was the first real woman I'd ever laid eyes on in the flesh... even so, the knowledge I'd devoured through photos and videos was something I wouldn't lose to anyone on!

Right! Where in the world was there a man who disliked a beautiful woman!!

Not that I understood why I was bragging and pleading like this. There was no one around to hear it.

Anyway, the first real body I'd seen had been different from video. Wildly different. I thought I'd even caught the scent of her skin, but she really had been beautiful. If not for the wounds on her body, she would have been an unqualified favorite — no question of taste. Naturally, her back came to mind, the way she'd looked drinking from the waterfall, and that... ahem. That.

...Ever since I'd gained Detection, it felt as if my talent for delusion had grown stronger, but that was probably just my imagination.

The revelation that I was a pervert had hit hard, but shock was shock, and I still had things to confirm. The female giant's corpse. The giant mole's carcass. By now I was less afraid of what lay ahead than of whatever the hell was wrong with my sexual preferences.

Sighing through one ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠thought after another, I covered another fifty meters, and a half-clearing opened before me, carpeted in shattered wood like some massive American logging site. In one corner of that ruined forest, Detection snagged on something blunt and thick, about the size of my torso.

Was that... a human arm?

I probed a little further. It was a person's arm, severed once near the wrist and again below the shoulder.

"..."

I opened my eyes toward the direction Detection had flagged. The ground was soaked through with blood, and the arm lay sprawled across it, drenched. Farther back, a human left hand hung caught in the crown of a distant tree. The sheer size of the arm and the hand made perspective feel as if it had simply stopped applying. Between the smell of blood and the Phase Power grown thicker still, it was somehow hard to breathe.

I consciously shut out the blood-reek that had begun to press in, closed my eyes again, widened my range, and moved slowly toward the arm.

"The size really is no joke."

I didn't know what to compare it to. The arm alone was as thick as I was tall, and a little over three meters long. When I reached it and stretched out a hand, I didn't feel anything unusual. The texture was just as I'd imagined — soft, and silky-smooth. Blood on my shoes bothered me a little, but I decided it didn't matter, put it out of my mind, opened my eyes, and looked around.

The aftermath of the fight stretched across hundreds of meters. Moving carefully and sweeping with Detection, I found round clearings scattered through it, as if several bottle gourds had been strung end to end. Less bottle gourds, really. More like a five-tiered snowman bent at sharp angles. In every clearing the trees looked as if an explosion had gone off at the center — uprooted entirely, shoved to the outer edge and toppled, or smashed to pieces.

The aftershock of the female giant's techniques? If it had been the roars, there should have been three clearings. There were five.

I kept closing my eyes and opening them, taking in the traces of the fight, drawing in Phase Power, and using Detection to check whether anything was closing in.

"Ah..."

Far off, the giant mole and the female giant came into sight with my own eyes, heaped together in a single mass. The instant I saw them I flinched, wondering if they were still alive, but there was none of the spark unique to living things. Dead, then. They were so enormous that even at what felt like two hundred meters, it was as if I were looking from twenty, and every detail stood out sharp. From my angle I was seeing the female giant's backside, so I'd need both corpses inside my detection range before I could make out the rest.

The mole lay flipped onto its back. The female giant sprawled prone across its belly, limp — and sure enough, her left arm was gone. Blood streamed from her vulva and her anus, running in thin lines down her groin. Her insides must have been ruined. Beyond that, she was split from the waist out to her right flank, intestines spilling through the gash. That looked fatal enough on its own, but the giant mole's left foreclaw had punched out through her back right where her heart ought to be. That, I figured, was what had actually killed her.

The rest of her body was hacked to pieces. At a glance, she looked like nothing so much as a woman murdered by a rapist-killer. Both corpses were drenched in blood, but most of it seemed to be hers. The giant's weapon was blunt-force, so the mole's bones were probably broken all over; from what I could see, every bone in its body had snapped and its organs had burst.

But to block Phase Power you had to meet it with Phase Power, and that mole was just a big animal. How had it fought the female giant at all? Three roars at close range should have turned its guts to paste rather than merely bursting them. Like the horned pup.

The Phase Power, thicker still, made my chest lurch. I pressed a hand to it, steadied myself, and closed in slowly. The moment both corpses entered my detection range, I felt an enormous mass of Phase Power clumped near the female giant's heart.

Could that be a Phase Stone? Looking again, the mole's foreleg almost seemed posed as if it had been trying to dig the stone out.

Where the giant mole's head should have been, there was only crushed flesh and shards of bone. The female giant's club was buried there in the shape of a downward strike; the club had smashed its skull and killed it. Its right foreleg had been reduced to a lump of meat. The cracked section of its spine had crumbled completely, its right hind leg was minced as well, and the whole body had been pounded until not a single bone remained intact.

How...

I could practically see the vicious streak in her — hitting a place, then hitting it again!

Whether from being hammered in the belly or not, its organs hadn't just torn. They'd burst. Looking at the two of them, they seemed to have given up on living and simply thrashed at each other, desperate only to kill. The mole's forepaw had five digits, but only four claws were buried in the female giant's chest. One had broken off. Judging by the length from tip to break, it would run about two meters.

"I should find that broken claw before I head back."

I muttered it while glancing down at the wooden staff, then finished scanning the female giant's body, starting from the head. The first thing I caught was a deep cut running from her left forehead, through the eye, all the way to the right side of her lips. The eye had burst, and the lens was sliding down her face. The pain of dying must have been considerable, and yet her face wasn't twisted. It was simply... peaceful. The face of someone who had confirmed the mole was dead. Like someone who had taken revenge on an enemy, seen that death, and had no regrets?

Detection analyzed and accepted information according to my own thinking, so my subjective gaze mixed in very, very strongly. I couldn't be sure the expression I'd read on her was accurate. I looked through her body again.

"Urgh..."

It was a wreck. The intestines were cut and torn, and her lungs, stomach, and heart had been hacked apart as well. A claw seemed to have stabbed through her lower abdomen and come out the other side; there were puncture marks on her vagina and her uterus. No wonder blood was pouring from her vulva.

"Haa..."

Did one-eyed giants live in family units too? If she'd had family, or children, I didn't think she would have lost her life like this...

Even in the middle of that thought, I caught myself fixating on the space between her thighs and started pounding my own head.

Agh! What the hell am I thinking!!

...S-still, if even a trace of childbirth remained, I could guess at the aberrant situation around here...

The conclusion of an inspection with a little selfishness mixed in was a simple one: I still had no idea. Thanks to my peculiar compulsive fantasizing, I'd rummaged through my father's medical texts and picked up a heap of useless trivia, but even that wasn't enough to tell. I'd read that a lot of sex, or pregnancy, darkened the vulva, the nipples, and the areolae through certain hormonal changes, but the female giant's parts and her nipples were an outrageous, vivid pink...

Maybe her entire family had been killed by that mole. That would explain why she'd beaten it to death even at the cost of her own life. I scanned and probed here and there besides that, but aside from the Phase Stone lodged in the shattered pieces of her heart, nothing stood out. Other than the stab wounds and cuts all over her, and her left breast being about half sliced away?

Anyway, I was stuck on how to get that Phase Stone out. Did I have to cut the body open and reach in myself? Fortunately she wasn't lying at an angle; she was prone on the giant mole's belly, so going in through the back didn't seem impossible. But the body looked exactly like a person's, and the thought of putting my hand inside made my skin crawl.

And to cut her open, I'd need something sharp... The giant mole's claws caught my eye. If I found the broken one, couldn't I use it to open her up?

"All right."

I'd learned roughly everything there was to learn, so it was time to find the mole's broken claw. I had no feel for where it had snapped off, but if I swept all five clearings with Detection, it ought to turn up. All the while, the surrounding Phase Power kept flowing into me without pause. Some of it settled inside; some circled through me once and slipped back out. The ratio looked to be about two to eight. Thanks to that, my Phase Power had climbed to 115 over four hours. I'd reached this dense pocket two hours ago, which meant I'd gained fifteen in just two hours.

If I held out here until the Phase Power fully dispersed and thinned back to an ordinary concentration, it might rise considerably... What if I spent about a day in this place?

Sixteen minutes of searching later, I found the snapped-off claw in the clearing where I ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠stood. It lay at the opposite end from the edge where the female giant and the giant mole had died. They must have fought something fierce.

The claw had broken into two pieces. The longer ran about 1.2 meters; the shorter, around sixty centimeters. The long piece was the tip. It wasn't shaped like an ordinary human nail — a solid triangular pyramid, curving slightly and sharpening toward the point. And the edge was no joke. Touch it carelessly and I'd cut myself. At its widest, the thing was about thirty centimeters across. I couldn't imagine gripping it in one hand, and even if I could, the edge would slice my fingers clean off.

Should I cut some wood from nearby, slice up the lining of my school uniform, and pad the flat faces? No. It would get too thick to hold. But... I had the small horn. If I used that to carve and hollow the wood, I could make a handle. Get the handle right, and I could turn this into a spear meant only for thrusting. It narrowed toward the point, so if I took three pieces of wood, cut them to fit each face in a lightning-bolt shape that kinked three times, grooved the ends, sliced cloth into long strips, and bound the whole thing tight, I could use it to stab.

Then Analysis flared, and the completeness of the model I'd pictured rose into my mind — the claw, and the way it would look once mounted.

Ooh!? It had a function like this, too? Good. That shape ought to work!

Hmm. Then let's see just how sharp this claw really is.

I picked up a short stick lying nearby and brought it down on the edge. With hardly any resistance at all, the stick sheared clean through with a soft snick!

"Whoa. This is no joke. Then again, it would have to be, to kill the female giant."

I turned my head and took in her corpse once more.

...In more ways than one, it wasn't a sight that did my mental health any favors.

Suddenly I wondered which was superior — the durability of the horn awl in my hand, or the sharpness of the giant mole's claw. I'd planned to shape the horn later anyway, so I took the chance to check. I set the awl against the claw's edge at an angle and applied a little force, and the horn began to grind away, bit by bit. But the mole claw was turning uneven too, which told me the awl's hardness was beyond anything I'd imagined.

"Holy fuck. So this is why they make weapons and armor out of aberrant byproducts."

Thinking back on how the horned pup had moved when the female giant's roar put it into shock and it thrashed, it hadn't been all that fast. Running the numbers through Detection, I expected its actual movement to be a little slower still. So if I ran into another one just like it, I was starting to feel confident I could fight. From when I'd torn into the meat and eaten it, I remembered the skull and the horn had been far harder than the bones of the body. Watch out for the horn, beat it from a distance with the wooden staff, and I figured I could take one down somehow.

I'd file that away for later.